If the frustrations of daily life are getting to be too much for you, don't keep your feelings bottled up--throw bottles! That's the philosophy behind New York City developer David Belt's newest project. "Glassphemy!" entails throwing used glass bottles in a 20-by-30-foot glass box in Brooklyn. Participants stand on one of two platforms in the box, hurling glass at the other end and watching it shatter, according to The New York Times:
""The bottles smash fantastically, artfully designed lights flash, and no one is harmed. “Recycling’s so boring,” Mr. Belt said. “We tried to make it a little bit more exciting. He added, “People just want to smash things.”"
The bottles are donated by local bars and provide more than a chance to get out some aggression; they also show the versatility of discarded glass. That's because instead of being thrown out, the glass fragments will be collected and recycled, taking into account suggestions submitted by readers to the DIY magazine, ReadyMade. One possible use is grinding the glass and using it as sand in the beer garden that will eventually make its home on Glassphemy!'s site.
"[Another possible recycling method entails a] DIY glass polisher out of a cement mixer that is ...

I really, really don’t like using epithets. The worst you’ll almost ever hear me say is that someone is a goofball or a knucklehead. But sometimes, just sometimes, I have to call ‘em like I see ‘em. And when someone like Glenn Beck puts themselves out in the public eye pushing complete and utterly hypocritical malarkey under the guise of them knowing what they’re talking about, well, sometimes you just have to use an epithet. And since he decided to call the rest of us idiots…

So, besides being racist, wrong on climate change, wrong about taxes, and really pretty much everything else between here and the edge of the Universe, I want to point out something else Beck did.

His book, the über-ironically titled Arguing With Idiots, has blurbs on the back. The publisher decided to go with some, ah, negative comments. Here is a picture of the back of the book:

See the blurb right above my thumb? It says, "Glenn Beck is an idiot." True enough, but it’s the attribution I’m unhappy with: they say it’s from Discover Magazine. But it’s not really: I said it. Right here, on this very blog.

When I wrote that, I was talking specifically about his making stuff up about global warming and the then-raging southern California wildfires. I was a bit concerned about litigation, but having the blurb used on his own book mollifies that quite a bit.

But anyway, I just wanted to clear the air here. Discover Magazine, as an institution, has no opinion on Beck, I’m quite sure. However, I’m not the magazine. And I certainly do have an opinion, and as I have made clear, I can back that opinion up with objective facts.

Others agree, obviously. For example, Apple recently pulled its ads with Fox News because of Beck. So did BMW, and many, many more. His appalling behavior is rapidly depleting the number of companies willing to do business with Fox. I applaud them.

So anyway, I’ll leave you with this video of the fantabulous Lewis Black, raking Beck over the coals. With his ravings, Beck has managed to somehow merge the laws of both Godwin and Poe into some sort of hellish mix of insanity. Black shows that sometimes, the best way to point that out is pure satirical mockery.

What is garbage to one is gold to another. The juicy new title by Blast Books, “Another Science Fiction” is proof. Incredibly, most of the images in this book came from discards from several libraries that were rescued by author and space history buff Megan Prelinger for her library in San Fransico, Prelinger Library. When Prelinger came across these images in magazines (like Aviation Week and Missiles and Rockets) that the Houston public library was throwing away, she was smitten. The book featuring these advertisements from the early space-race years followed.

Prelinger told me how she found featured artist Willi Baum: “He signed his paintings “W. Baum” and for three years I couldn’t find him because I didn’t know his first name. I finally found a reference to him in a commercial art annual from ‘62 that listed his full name. I then found that he lives just five miles away from me. I wrote to him, he wrote back the next day, and we became good friends. That’s quite a contrast to my searches for every other artist. Most were not contractually permitted to put signatures on paintings. So they have vanished from the record. Others were deceased.”

Cigarettes aren’t done causing damage when you put them out. Whether the tally of discarded butts worldwide is 4.5 trillion or 5.6 trillion, it represents an enormous amount of nicotine and heavy metals deposited in the environment. But what if the contents of your ashtray had a useful application? According to Chinese researchers, they might.

Seeking a use for all that junk, the scientists tested the chemicals in cigarette butts for their effects on a kind of steel used in oil and gas pipelines.

The results were pretty dramatic. In a near-boiling solution of 10 and 15 percent hydrochloric acid (HCl; same stuff as stomach acid), the cigarette-derived cocktail reduce corrosion by between 90 and 94 percent [Discovery News].

The researchers document their technique in the study in Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research. First, they had to soak cigarette butts they found on the side of the road in distilled water, with five butts to 100 milliliters (about 3.4 ounces) of water. That extract was then added to the HCL solution. If just five percent of the resulting solution consisted of that cigarette extract, those dramatic corrosion reductions began to appear.

If the researchers upped the strength of the acid, they needed to also increase the amount of added cigarette extract. For instance, with a 20 percent hydrochloric acid solution, the researchers needed to increase the butt leachate to 10 percent of the liquid to keep damage to the steel low: at less than 12 percent of the corrosion seen with the unamended acid solution [Science News].

Nine of the cigarette chemicals appeared to offer protective services for steel; interestingly, nicotine was the most important of the nine.

Don’t keep smoking for steel’s sake: The trillions of butts across the world represent more than enough for this use. But if you want to put your butts to good use, you can actually recycle them.

Related Content:
80beats: Study: “Third-Hand Smoke” Sticks Around & Produces New Carcinogens
80beats: Electronic Cigarettes Not a Safe Alternative to Conventional Cigs
80beats: In a Bad Economy, Recyclables Are Just Pieces of Junk
DISCOVER: Smoke Gets in Your Hair

Image: flickr / Nufkin

You may have heard that a major climate bill — the “American Power Act,” sponsored by John Kerry and Joe Lieberman — is trundling through Congress. Its prospects for passage are highly unclear; it’s a giant mess of a bill, which would have important consequences for any number of sectors in the economy, and the country’s attention is largely focused elsewhere at the moment. (A substantial fraction is focused on Justin Bieber, but I don’t really blame him.)

So what does the bill say? Here’s the very short version, from our sister blog 80 Beats:

The carbon emissions targets are: 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, and 83 percent below 2005 levels by 2050. That’s made to match the goals in the House bill that passed in 2009. In addition, the bill proposes putting a price on carbon.

Somewhat longer version from Think Progress here. Or of course you could just read the bill yourself (pdf). Only 987 pages! Most of which read like this:

23 ‘‘(B) WITHHOLDING ALLOWANCES.—
24 ‘‘(i) IN GENERAL.—Notwithstanding
25 subparagraph (A), subject to the condition
1 described in clause (ii), the Administrator
2 shall withhold from distribution under this
3 paragraph a quantity of emission allow-
4 ances equal to the lesser of—
5 ‘‘(I) 14.3 percent of the quantity
6 of emission allowances allocated under
7 section 781(a)(1) for the relevant vin-
8 tage year; and
9 ‘‘(II) 105 percent of the emission
10 allowances of the relevant vintage year
11 that the Administrator anticipates will
12 be distributed to merchant coal units
13 and long-term contract generators
14 under subsections (c) and (d).

There are good reasons why bills are written in turgid legal language; but it means that very few concerned citizens are going to be curling up with a good piece of legislation in the evening. That’s okay; we have multiple high-profile media outlets that are here to help us understand the complexities of these important changes to how our country does its business. I mean, right?

Sadly, no, as a wise person once said. CNN had a sit-down interview with Kerry and Lieberman last night, and here’s what we get:

Last night, John Kerry and Joe Lieberman appeared on John King’s CNN program to promote their climate bill, the American Power Act. The transcript is fairly lengthy, but at no point does King ask them to explain the provisions of their bill. Instead, he begins by asking whether they have 60 votes, tries to get them to explain why John McCain isn’t on the legislation, and then asks them to comment on the Sestak-Specter race in Pennsylvania. In fact, the clip the John King show posted online (which I embedded above) doesn’t even mention the climate bill.

Isn’t there room in the media landscape for just one TV news channel that would take seriously the responsibility of actually providing their viewers with useful information? It might be a small, niche market, but if the Golf Channel can thrive, surely it’s an experiment worth trying? I refuse to believe that providing useful information is of necessity such a tedious and boring activity that it can’t be made interesting, no matter how hard we try. We need to get Stephen Spielberg and Jay Rosen in a room together to figure out how to make a news channel that would honestly inform people in an entertaining way. Have them call me.

This is very cool: a live camera pointed at the Iceland volcano Eyjafjallajökull. I don’t think it’s embeddable, so just click that link and take a look. To add to the coolness factor, there is also a thermal camera pointed at it with the same field of view and scale, so you can compare what you’re seeing visually with what’s going on in the far infrared.

Here’s a still I grabbed last night; You can clearly see the ash plume through the cloud layers:

They provide a map of the camera location, but there’s no scale. I put it into Google maps, and it appears to be just a few kilometers from the volcano. That matches the rate the plume appears to change, too.

Take a look. It’s mesmerizing. And don’t forget that the NASA Earth Observatory is posting very high-resolution and beautiful images of the volcano quite often as well. Put that in your RSS feed reader! I check it every day; besides the volcano they frequently have incredible imagery of places I’ve never even heard of. It’s a big planet, with lots to see.

Yesterday Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman rolled out their new climate bill, the American Power Act. The 987-page piece of text was driven by what we’ve come to expect in climate legislation: Concrete targets for reducing carbon dioxide emissions a certain percentage by a certain year. But, an international group of economists and environmental scientists are saying, that approach is doomed to failure, and this is the time to change.

The Hartwell Paper, a product of 14 different authors working since February, came out this week to coincide with the release of the climate bill. The assessment is blunt: Reaching agreements like the Kyoto Protocols to reduce carbon emissions has been the primary means of addressing climate change since the mid-1980s, and it hasn’t worked. With the high-profile flop that was the 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen, the authors argue this is the chance to drive a new course on climate policy, one not singularly focused on CO2.

The Hartwell authors don’t downplay the importance of CO2 as a greenhouse gas; rather, they point to the silliness of being so fixated on that one compound; the Earth’s climate, after all, is a terribly complex system:

That is frustrating for politicians. So policy makers frequently respond to wicked problems by declaring ‘war’ on them, to beat them into submission and then move on. Indeed, almost any ‘declaration of war’ that is metaphorical rather than literal is a reliable sign that the subject in question is ‘wicked’. So, we have the war on cancer, the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on terror and now the war on climate change.

As we noted last week at the 25th anniversary of the ozone hole’s discovery, the ozone problem was one of those with a direct solution that governments could pursue in such a prompt, bludgeoning way. Climate change, not so much. And the paper authors also criticize the closed-off nature of choosing climate strategies that led to such focus on CO2:

A distinctive characteristic of the climate change debate has been of scientists claiming with the authority of their position that their results dictated particular policies; of policy makers claiming that their preferred choices were dictated by science, and both acting as if ‘science’ and ‘policy’ were simply and rigidly linked as if it were a matter of escaping from the path of an oncoming tornado.

So, then, if rigid carbon targets are not the way to address climate change, what would the Hartwell authors recommend?

Their oblique approach is to aim instead for a world with accessible, secure low cost energy for all. The hope, intuition or strategy at play here is that since fossil fuels cannot deliver such a world, its achievement will, in itself, bring about decarbonisation on a massive scale. Following a path stressing clean energy as a development issue provides a more pleasant journey to the same objective [The Economist].

Compared to what we’ve gotten used to in international agreements, it’s a backward approach: Forget about cutting carbon emissions to an arbitrary level by subsidizing cleaner energy technology that’s on the shelf now. Instead, wholeheartedly fund research and development to reach new energy sources capable of actually competing with fossil fuel in the marketplace, and cut carbon out of the economy that way. Meanwhile, go after the low-hanging fruit like slowing deforestation and cutting black carbon.

In short, it’s an energy policy first with climate benefits on the back end, instead of a huge worldwide climate policy.

They argue that there is something wrong with a world in which carbon-dioxide levels are kept to 450 parts per million (a trajectory widely deemed compatible with a 2 degree [Celsius] cap on warming) but at the same time more than a billion of the poorest people are left without electricity, as in one much discussed scenario from the International Energy Agency [The Economist].

The Hartwell Paper’s talk of elevating human dignity is all well and good, but what about the final question: Can we really afford to wait for the world that its authors want?

Though the paper is not explicit on this, to accept that decarbonisation will require as-yet unavailable technologies to achieve deep penetration around the world is to accept that carbon-dioxide levels will get a lot higher than current policies want them to. Which might seem a good enough reason to reject the whole idea. Except that the current policies have not, as yet, made a very great deal of difference [The Economist].

Related Content:
80beats: Skip the Political Babbling: Here Is What the Kerry-Lieberman Climate Bill Says
80beats: Why the Ozone Hole Prompted Global Action—And Why Climate Change Hasn’t
DISCOVER: It’s Getting Hot in Here: The Big Battle Over Climate Science, interviews with Judith Curry & Michael Mann
DISCOVER: The State of the Climate—And of Climate Science

Image: iStockphoto

Here’s a brilliant piece of science-writing satire from the Onion. I find it particularly funny because I’ve been writing a lot recently about the evolution of human uniqueness. It’s so easy to mix up “unique” with “totally awesome.” The conflation flatters my readers, and myself. That’s the sort of self-importance that great satire can deflate so quickly.

[Hat tip, Ed Yong]

This is a guest post by Darlene Cavalier, a writer and senior adviser at Discover Magazine. Darlene holds a Masters degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and is a former Philadelphia 76ers cheerleader. She founded ScienceCheerleader.com and cofounded ScienceForCitizens.net to make it possible for lay people to contribute to science. Prizes: This old idea is making a sweeping comeback and it is changing the way government, industry and foundations help revolutionize future discovery. It’s high time we offer prizes to motivate and galvanize the public to come up with creative, real-time solutions to major disasters, such as the BP oil spill. Approximately one-and-a-half weeks ago, I received an email from Andrew Revkin (who writes the DotEarth blog at The New York Times) in which he challenged researchers and others to think creatively about substantive approaches to stanching the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. "There's a lot of talk about sweeping Grand Engineering Challenges this year. But one is unfolding in real-time in the Gulf. Waiting months for a relief well seems pretty in the box,” he wrote in the email (reprinted with Revkin's permission), and reiterated in this blog post. While it’s true that BP is accepting public suggestions about ideas ...

I love illusions, and I love astronomy. So what could be better than combining the two?

If you’ve ever seen the Moon rising over the horizon, looking so fat and looming that you felt like you could fall right into it, then you’ve been a victim of the famous Moon Illusion. And it is an illusion, a pervasive and persuasive one.

So, how does this thing work? Ah, step right up.

One of my favorite brain-benders is the Ponzo Illusion. You’ve seen it: the simplest case is with two short horizontal lines, one above the other, between two slanting but near-vertical lines. The upper line looks longer than the lower line, even though they’re the same length.

The illusion works because our brains are a bit wonky. The slanted lines make us think that anything near the top is farther away; the lines force our brain to think those lines are parallel but receding in the distance (like railroad tracks). The two horizontal lines are physically the same length, but our brain thinks the upper one is farther away. If it’s farther away, then duh, our brain says to itself, it must be bigger than the lower one. So we perceive it that way.

While procrastinating on reddit, (you do look at reddit, don’t you, especially the science section?) I found this beautiful example of Ponzo:

Heehee! You’d swear up and down^* that the red vertical line on the right is much longer than the one on the left, wouldn’t you? It looks almost twice as long to me. It’s a very powerful perception.

But they’re not! I cut out the two red lines and put them side by side. They’re pretty much exactly the same length (well, they’re off by a bit due to resolution issues in the image, but not by nearly as much as your brain likes to think).

This example is a great one because it uses a real-life image. You can see the wall tiles getting smaller with distance, and the horizontal layout of them, complete with the lines between them, forces your brain to see the line on the right as farther away. Bang! Ponzo.

This illusion plays out all the time… including when the Moon is rising (you were wondering when I’d get back to that, weren’t you?). The Moon Illusion is in part due to this same effect, but weirdly, you also need to understand how we perceive the sky.

If I were to ask you what shape the sky is above your head, you’d probably answer "a hemisphere". But in fact, almost everyone perceives it as an inverted bowl, flattened at the top. Put it this way: if the sky were a hemisphere above you, you’d say the horizon was as far away as the zenith. But in fact most people perceive the horizon being farther away than the point straight over their heads; test after test has shown this. This isn’t too surprising; think of a cloudy day. The clouds over your head are maybe two or three kilometers above, but near the horizon they may be 100 kilometers away!

See where I’m going with this? When the Moon is on the horizon, your brain thinks it’s far away, much farther than when it’s overhead. So the Ponzo Illusion kicks in: your brain sees the Moon as being huge, and it looks like you could fall into it. The Illusion works for the Sun, too. In fact, years ago I saw Orion rising over a parking lot, and it looked like it was spread across half the sky. It’s an incredibly powerful illusion.

Oddly enough, when it’s on the horizon, the Moon actually is farther away than when it’s overhead. Not by much, really, just a few thousand kilometers (compared to the Moon’s overall distance of about 400,000 kilometers). Behold my Photoshop skillz:

The guy at the top of the Earth in the diagram sees the Moon on his horizon, and the guy on the side of the Earth sees it overhead. But you can tell the distances aren’t the same: the Moon is closer to the guy who sees it as overhead (by an amount roughly equal to the Earth’s radius). That’s no illusion! That’s science, baby.

So the Moon Illusion is just that. It’s not the air acting like a lens, or foreground objects making it look big by comparison. It’s just the way we see the shape of the sky together with the well-known Ponzo Illusion.

Hmmm, is there a metaphor I’m sniffing here? Science taking something we perceive as real, breaking it down, and showing it to be an interesting but decidedly unreal illusion? Well, that’s what science does! It helps us not only understand the world better, but it also makes the world cooler, too.

Moonrise image from Jorge-11’s Flickr photostream.

One of the notions implicit in most evolutionary models is that the tree of life has a common root. In other words all individuals of all species represent end points of lineages which ultimately coalesce back to the the original common ancestor. The first Earthling, so to speak. I say implicit because common ancestry isn’t necessary for evolution to be valid; after all, we presumably accept that evolutionary process is operative in an exobiological context, if such a context exists. Therefore it is possible that modern extant lineages are derived from separate independent antecedents. A “multiple garden” model. This has seemed less and less plausible as the molecular basis of biology has been elucidated; it looks like the basic toolkit is found all across the tree of life. But with a new found awareness of the power of processes such as horizontal gene transfer the open & shut case is faced with a new element of ambiguity. Or perhaps not?

Here’s a post from Wired, Life on Earth Arose Just Once:

The idea that life forms share a common ancestor is “a central pillar of evolutionary theory,” says Douglas Theobald, a biochemist at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. “But recently there has been some mumbling, especially from microbiologists, that it may not be so cut-and-dried.”

Because microorganisms of different species often swap genes, some scientists have proposed that multiple primordial life forms could have tossed their genetic material into life’s mix, creating a web, rather than a tree of life.

To determine which hypothesis is more likely correct, Theobald put various evolutionary ancestry models through rigorous statistical tests. The results, published in the May 13 Nature, come down overwhelmingly on the side of a single ancestor.

A universal common ancestor is at least 10^2,860 times more probable than having multiple ancestors, Theobald calculates.

The paper is now on the Nature website, A formal test of the theory of universal common ancestry. They looked specifically at 23 very conserved proteins across 12 taxa from the three domains of life (those being eukaryotes, prokaryotes, and the archaea). Here’s where the author explains the philosophy behind the statistical technique:

When choosing among several competing scientific models, two opposing factors must be taken into account: the goodness of fit and parsimony. The fit of a model to data can be improved arbitrarily by increasing the number of free parameters. On the other hand, simple hypotheses (those with as few ad hoc parameters as possible) are preferred. Model selection methods weigh these two factors statistically to find the hypothesis that is both the most accurate and the most precise.

The sorts of models compared is illustrated by figure 2. One the left you have the universal common descent model, and on the right the prokaryotes (bacteria) have an independent origin. The lines represent connections between the 23 conserved protein sequences, either through horizontal transfer or vertical transmission.

As noted in the Wired piece there’s no contest here. Universal common descent is strongly supported. I’ll let the author’s finish:

What property of the sequence data supports common ancestry so decisively? When two related taxa are separated into two trees, the strong correlations that exist between the sequences are no longer modelled, which results in a large decrease in the likelihood. Consequently, when comparing a common-ancestry model to a multiple-ancestry model, the large test scores are a direct measure of the increase in our ability to accurately predict the sequence of a genealogically related protein relative to an unrelated protein. The sequence correlations between a given clade of taxa and the rest of the tree would be eliminated if the columns in the sequence alignment for that clade were randomly shuffled. In such a case, these model-based selection tests should prefer the multiple-ancestry model. In fact, in actual tests with randomly shuffled data, the optimal estimate of the unified tree (for both maximum likelihood and Bayesian analyses) contains an extremely large internal branch separating the shuffled taxa from the rest. In all cases tried, with a wide variety of evolutionary models (from the simplest to the most parameter rich), the multiple-ancestry models for shuffled data sets are preferred by a large margin over common ancestry models (LLR on the order of a thousand), even with the large internal branches. Hence, the large test scores in favour of UCA models reflect the immense power of a tree structure, coupled with a gradual Markovian mechanism of residue substitution, to accurately and precisely explain the particular patterns of sequence correlations found among genealogically related biological macromolecules.

Citation: Theobald, Douglas L., A formal test of the theory of universal common ancestry, Nature, doi:10.1038/nature09014