Ah, not this one again. The folks at Iglu Cruises have put together a helpful infographic to explain various features of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill (via Deep Sea News). Here’s the bit where they compare the recent spill (which, by the way, is still ongoing at a fantastic rate) to previous oil spills. Click for full resolution.

Doesn’t make the current fiasco seem so bad, does it? That little blob on the left looks a lot smaller than the blob right next to it, representing Saddam Hussein’s dump of oil into the Persian Gulf during the first Gulf War. In fact, when you think about it, it looks a lot smaller. Which is weird, when you look at the numbers and see that the current spill is 38 million gallons (as of May 27), while the Iraqi spill was 520 million gallons, a factor of about 14 times bigger. The blob representing Iraq’s spill seems a lot more than 14 times the size of the blob for the current spill. You don’t think — no, they couldn’t have done that. Could they?

Yes, they did. When measure the diameter of the circle representing the Iraqi spill, I get about 360 pixels (in the high-res version), while the smaller spill is about 26 pixels — a factor of about 14 larger. But that’s the diameter, not the area. The area of a circle, as many of us learned when we were little, is proportional to the square of its radius: A = π r². The radius is just half the diameter, so the area is proportional to the diameter squared, not to the diameter. In other words, that big blob is about (14)² = 196 times the area of the little one, when it should be only 14 times bigger.

I remember reading on some other blog about this same mistake being made in a completely different context, but I have no recollection of where. (Update: it was at Good Math, Bad Math, sensibly enough.) Probably won’t be the last time.

For some endangered birds, captive breeding programmes are the only way to boost fading wild populations. But such programmes have a problem – they often rely on artificial insemination, which gets much poorer results than expected. Adeline Loyau and Frederic Lacroix from Morocco’s Emirates Center for Wildlife Propagation (ECWP) have found a way to help, by priming the females with pictures of sexy males strutting their stuff.

The duo worked with the Houbara bustard, a large bird that has been hunted extensively because its meat is prized as an aphrodisiac. It’s classified as a vulnerable species and the ECWP has set up a captive breeding programme to restore its numbers. Females are kept apart from the males and many never actually see one before being artificially fertilised. This is the only method that successfully breeds these birds in captivity, but it’s also associated with a 15% fall in hatching success. Loyau and Lacroix thought that the females themselves might be responsible for this deficit.

In the past, many researchers have shown that female birds can control the amount of energy they invest in the next generation. The female makes her decision after weighing up many factors such as the quality of her mate and the conditions of her environment. If she thinks she’s onto a genetic winner, and her chicks will be born into a world of riches, she would do well to give them a head-start. If her mate is a dud and food is scarce, it might be best to conserve energy and try again next season. Clearly, these decisions can dramatically affect the chicks’ chances of hatching and surviving.

To manipulate their decisions, Loyau and Lacroix placed the females in spectator aviaries that gave them a bird’s eye view of a displaying male. When a male Houbara bustard wants to woo a female, he runs around while erecting the feathers on his head and neck. It’s an honest sign of his quality, for weaker males simply can’t keep up the vigorous showmanship for long.

Loyau and Lacroix found that when females saw males that displayed more frequently, they were more likely to be successfully artificially fertilised and their eggs were more likely to hatch even though they laid the same number. When the females saw the seductive dance of a Casanova bustard, they added more testosterone into the yolk of their eggs, to the same extent that they would do in the wild. The dance of a dud male triggered no such investment. This hormonal trust fund gave the chicks a headstart in life. They produced more testosterone themselves, and they grew faster as a result.

By studying the birds that provided the sperm samples, Loyau and Lacroix found that the actual quality of the chicks’ fathers had no bearing on their odds of hatching or their growth rate. Those were purely down to mum’s influence, and she was in turn influenced by the quality of the male whose courtship she witnessed. In the wild, he would probably have been the one she eventually mated with but captivity allowed the researchers to tease apart her influence from that of her chicks’ biological father.

Loyau and Lacroix’s study has important implications for captive breeding programmes. These rely heavily on artificial insemination so that females can be mated with males who are specially selected to boost the genetic diversity of the next generation. This work shows that there’s more to doing this well than simply mixing sperm and eggs in a tube. Female animals often have a big say on the fate of their young and conservationists are need to understand their preferences and work with them in order to get the most out of their breeding programmes.

It’s possible that different versions of the same trick would work on other species. In Houbara bustards, courtship is a visual affair, but other birds woo each other with calls and songs – perhaps for them, a recording of a virtuoso singer would have the same effect on their breeding success.

Reference: Proc Roy Soc B http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2010.0473

Images from ECWP website

More on animal sex lives:

• Ballistic penises and corkscrew vaginas – the sexual battles of ducks
• Smell a lady, shrug off flu – how female odours give male mice an immune boost
• Pregnant male pipefish abort babies from unattractive females
• Crayfish females lure males with urine, but then play hard to get
• Tree frogs shake their bums to send threatening vibes

Evidence to Suggest that Copulatory Vocalizations in Women Are Not a Reflexive Consequence of Orgasm.

“The current studies were conducted in order to investigate the phenomenon of copulatory vocalizations and their relationship to orgasm in women. Data were collected from 71 sexually active heterosexual women (M age = 21.68 years +/- .52) recruited from the local community through opportunity sampling. The studies revealed that orgasm was most frequently reported by women following self-manipulation of the clitoris, manipulation by the partner, oral sex delivered to the woman by a man, and least frequently during vaginal penetration. More detailed examination of responses during intercourse revealed that, while female orgasms were most commonly experienced during foreplay, copulatory vocalizations were reported to be made most often before and simultaneously with male ejaculation. These data together clearly demonstrate a dissociation of the timing of women experiencing orgasm and making copulatory vocalizations and indicate that there is at least an element of these responses that are under conscious control, providing women with an opportunity to manipulate male behavior to their advantage.”

Image: flikr/oddsock

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I was interviewed by my friend, SETI- and astronomy enthusiast Lourdes Cahuich for the SETI.cl website. And, because the site is in Chile, it’s also en Español.

I talk a bit about how I got started in astronomy and outreach, why I love social networks, and why I’m so strongly anti-antivax.

Bonus: there’s an interview with an article about Frank Drake there too!

“It’s as if we’re fish who have suddenly discovered we’re in water,” said Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek about the Large Hadron Collider. “The LHC is the device for ruffling up the waters so that we can see waves.”

Wilczek took part in a panel discussion at a World Science Festival event on Saturday. The discussion revealed a bit more about how physicists will do the ruffling and what waves they expect to see. Besides once again allaying doomsday fears, the panel discussed each detector in the LHC and how it will help them find the “cosmic molasses” we’re swimming in–what gives everything in the universe mass.

Their prime suspect is, of course, the Higgs Boson–the last animal in the Standard Model theory’s particle zoo–but what happens if the LHC can’t find it?

“My experiment is looking at the primordial soup, and we know it exists,” said Jennifer Klay, who helped to develop the detector for ALICE. “We have more job security.” By soup, she means quark-gluon plasma, a liquid-like substance made from proton and neutron innards.

The three-story-tall ALICE detector will first look at a smash-up between lead nuclei. She explains that a nucleus behaves very much like a liquid drop: “We’re taking two liquid drops, colliding them at very high energies, and trying to boil them into a steam, essentially, of quarks and gluons.” She won’t see the quarks and gluons directly, but will watch the process as they “condense” into more familiar protons neutrons.

The ATLAS and CMS detectors will hunt for the Higgs. In the same way that physicists can’t see quarks, they won’t directly observe Higgs. Instead, they will use the seven-story-tall ATLAS to pick through the particle spray from protons’ collisions in an attempt to sieve out four familiar particles: two electrons and two “fat” electron cousins called muons. Monica Dunford, an experimental high-energy particle physicist who helped bring the ATLAS detector into operation, calls this “a double needle in the haystack.”

Wilczek believes that experimenters will see these four particles in two to five years after the LHC is running at full speed.

“The worst scenario to me, is that the LHC completes the Standard Model and doesn’t do anything more,” Wilczek said. “That would be horrible. We would learn something very profound, but we would also learn that Nature is a tease.”

Dunford agreed with Wilczek, but added that, given the $6 billion price tag on the first machine, the LHC better find something. “We can’t say, ‘Gosh, we didn’t find anything? How about 20 billion?”

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