Hey, remember Congressman Ralph Hall (R-TX) who inserted a totally non sequitur amendment into a science research and education funding bill in a blatant partisan ploy to derail the bill and make Democrats look bad? And remember how the Democrats tried to compromise, removing almost $40 billion of the funding from the bill, but Republicans still stonewalled?

After the Democrats managed to pass the bill despite this, guess what the honorable Ralph Hall had to say. Go on. Guess.

Did you guess this?

"I am disappointed that my Democratic colleagues resorted to using a procedural tactic to defeat Republican changes that would have saved over $40 billion and restored the original COMPETES priority of basic research," science committee ranking member Ralph Hall said in a press release after the vote.

Oh, Representative Hall. It wasn’t enough for you to accuse the Democrats of blatant and transparent partisan parliamentary tactics when they were responding to your very own blatant and transparent partisan parliamentary tactics, was it? So you went ahead and blamed them for not saving the $40 billion that they offered to cut to make you happy in the first place. Instead of taking that compromise, you slammed the door in their face.

Oh, that wacky, wacky Representative Hall. Hyperpartisan hypocritical hackery doesn’t look good on anyone, sir. I sometimes think the Emperor would be better off just coming out and saying he’s naked, rather than trying to sell us on his new clothes.

Here’s what’s new in the Gulf of Mexico:

1. Saw stuck.

When we left the BP oil spill yesterday, the “top kill” had failed and the “top cap” plan—cutting the pipe at a strategic location and then placing a containment dome on top—was commencing. But like every other BP attempt to stop the leak, the dome effort hit a snag.

The attempt bogged down overnight as a special diamond-wire saw snagged in the pipe. The work has stalled as BP tries two old logger tricks: changing the angle of the pipe to let the saw get through and, if that doesn’t work, bringing the saw to the surface to replace the blade [Christian Science Monitor].

What’s more, even if the saw gets free and BP successfully cuts the riser, the already-gushing flow of oil will increase by at least 20 percent between the time engineers finish the cut and the time they install the cap. Whether BP can install the cap, or instead a looser-fitting shell that would capture less of the oil, depends on how smoothly the company makes the final cut. Getting the saw stuck isn’t a good sign.

2. Criminal investigation.

The word is official now: Attorney General Eric Holder says the United States government will be opening a criminal investigation into the spill.

The attorney general said there was a range of possible violations under a number of statutes, including the Clean Water Act, the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 and the Endangered Species Act. He said charges could include everything ranging from “false statements” to “the way in which certain entities conducted themselves.” Mr. Holder said his department had instructed all relevant parties to preserve documents. “If we find evidence of illegal behavior we will be extremely forceful in our response,” he said, adding that “we have what we think is a sufficient basis for us to have begun a criminal investigation” [Wall Street Journal].

3. Dreaming of a crude Christmas?

Through all the failures by BP to plug the well, there’s always been the hope in the background that even if nothing works, the relief wells will be completed in August and finally put an end to this toxic mess. But like everything else happening at a depth of 5,000 feet, even this is no guarantee.

It took Mexico’s state-owned oil company, Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, nine months to plug its Ixtoc I well after an explosion and fire in 1979. The company’s first attempt with a relief well failed, so it had to drill a second. Eventually, more than 140 million gallons of crude spilled into the Gulf of Mexico — the biggest offshore oil spill on record [Bloomberg].

BP is drilling two wells simultaneously as an insurance policy. But energy expert Dan Pickering told Bloomberg that if something went wrong and delayed those operations, he could envisions a scenario in which oil still leaks at Christmastime. Of course, the actual worst-case would be if no one ever successfully stops the leak, in which case it could continue for more than a decade.

4. New wells will go on.

And yet, offshore drilling will continue. We need our gas, we need our plastic. The AP reports today that the federal government has approved the first new shallow water well since President Obama lifted the drilling ban there last week. The moratorium on deep water drilling continues.

Previous posts on the BP oil spill:
80beats: With “Top Kill” a Failure, BP Goes Back to the Containment Dome Plan
80beats: This Hurricane Season Looks Rough, And What If One Hits the Oil Spill?
80beats: We Did the Math: BP Oil Spill Is Now Worse Than the Exxon Valdez
80beats: “Top Kill” Operation Is Under Way in Attempt to Stop Gulf Oil Leak
80beats: Scientists Say Gulf Spill Is Way Worse Than Estimated. How’d We Get It So Wrong?

Image: BP

The nominations for this year’s 3 Quarks Daily Science prize are in and voting is now open. I’ve got quite a few entires in there, so a hearty thank you to everyone who nominated one.

The way it works now is that voting will continue for a week and the top 20 will go through to a semi-final, where the 3QD crew will select their top six. Richard Dawkins will pick the first, second and third prize winners.

Obviously, if you’d like to cast your votes for one of my entries, I’d really appreciate it. There are six to choose from and my personal favourite is the Japanese gut bacteria one, but it’s entirely your call.

Cheers,

Ed

Your brain is hungry. That big gray calculating machine in your head is an energy hog that needs lots of calories—more than the diet of fruits and plants that our distant hominin ancestors probably ate could provide. It’s a mystery, then, just how human ancestors like Homo erectus—who were around when our craniums started to expand in a hurry—ate enough to start growing big brains. But buried in Kenya, a two-million-year-old hint has emerged: Those hominins started eating seafood way back then, archaeologists say.

Near a place called Lake Turkana, archaeologists David Braun found two intriguing groups of items: The bones of fish, turtles, and even crocodiles with the scars of stone tools still showing, and stone fragments that Braun says come from the simple tools these hominins used to carve up the marine animals. He and his colleagues report the find of our ancestors’ ancient feast in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Today, their leftovers—in the form of hundreds of bones and several thousand stone tools—are the earliest “definitive evidence” of hominins butchering and eating aquatic animals, which are rich in fatty acids essential for growing bigger brains [ScienceNOW].

If the hominins of this time dined on the bounty of the sea, Braun says, they could have ingested the calories and fatty acids needed for accelerated brain growth without resorting to scavenging for animal remains, which would have brought our small ancestors in competition with large and fierce predators.

Braun thinks river and lake floodplains of the sort that preserved his fossils gave early hominids a low-risk hunting opportunity. “As lakes and rivers flooded and receded, animals could have been caught. The remains could be easily collected,” he said. Humanity’s ancestors “could have entered the higher trophic level without taking on the risks” [Wired.com].

If Braun is correct, then this was a stroke of good fortune in humanity’s history. The hominins who would have lived at that time and place didn’t have the cognitive wherewithal to get organized and hunt, but since floodwaters left fish at their feet, they didn’t need to.

And the Kenya site itself is remarkable in archaeological terms. From thousands of bones, the team was able to reconstruct at least 10 individual animals that the early humans killed and carved up at the site. Says Braun:

“At sites of this age we often consider ourselves lucky if we find any bone associated with stone tools, but here we found everything from small bird bones to hippopotamus leg bones” [Times of India].

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Cooking Ourselves
DISCOVER: What Does Science Say You Should Eat?
Gene Expression: Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, review
80beats: Homo Erectus Women Had Big-Brained Babies, New Fossil Suggests

Image: David Braun

We humans have been busy lately… there are a lot of spacecraft buzzing around the solar system. Sure, you’ve heard of Cassini, and the Mars probes, but there are two very interesting spacecraft making two very interesting encounters in the next few weeks.

1) On June 27, NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft — which sent a chunk of copper smashing into a comet back in 2005, and which has now been repurposed for planetary science — will swing by the Earth, using our planet’s gravity to change its direction and speed. DI will pass at a distance of just 37,000 km (23,000 miles)! That’s around the same height above the surface as geosynchronous (i.e. weather and communication) satellites. This maneuver will send the little spacecraft on its way to an encounter with the comet Hartley 2 in November.

2) The European Space Agency’s amazing Rosetta spacecraft will fly by the asteroid 21 Lutetia on July 10. The asteroid is about 95 km across (60 miles), and the flyby distance will be about 3200 km (2000 miles). That’s pretty close, certainly near enough to provide some nice images of the rock. In 2008, Rosetta passed the smaller asteroid 2867 Steins and returned nice images, and in 2009 swung by the Earth, sending back an image so heart-achingly beautiful I chose it as one of my Top Ten images of the year.

Rosetta’s primary mission is taking it to the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, where it will drop an actual honest-to-FSM lander on the comet’s surface! This is a tremendously exciting mission, and I can’t wait to see what new wonders it will send us.

Tip o’ the Whipple Shield to Emily Lakdawalla for the Rosetta news.

NPR’s Jon Hamilton has a nice piece on Einstein’s brain, and what might have made it special. The difference doesn’t seem to have to do with its neurons, but with the other cells of the brain, the glia. I wrote about the glia–what I called the dark matter of the brain–in this Discover column last fall.

The Center for Inquiry is a great organization — their mission is to “foster a secular society based on science, reason, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values,” which sounds like a good idea to me. They sponsor a number of activities including lectures, education, conferences, and research. I’ve given talks at the local branch, and it’s a great thrill to meet with such an engaged and enthusiastic audience.

And they’re in a bit of trouble. As a non-profit, they rely on donations, and their major donor seems to have mysteriously disappeared. About $800,000 of their annual operating budget is suddenly gone.

We’re not going to make up for that with a few appeals on the internet, but we can help them adapt during a tough time. Consider donating, even if it’s just a few bucks.

Photographer Kirk Crippens created this image of the speck of light that persists after the television is turned off. After a lot of trial and error, Crippens was able to catch the speck in the middle of the frame, at at magnification of about 5x, on an RCA solid-state black-and-white television.

When the TV is on, electrons firing at its phosphor-coated screen cause the screen to emit light, creating the image. Electromagnets guide the beam and direct it to scan repeatedly across the screen. When the set is shut down, the electromagnets deactivate and the remnant beam from the electron gun defaults momentarily to the center of the screen before dying out—but not always in the same spot, as Crippens discovered. The blue and yellow colors here result from electrons exciting the two types of phosphor common in older TVs.

Crippens: “This photo is part of the ‘Pre-Pixel’ portion of Pixel Nation—it is the stepping off point to pixelization. I show magnified photographs featuring a nixie tube, an oscilloscope screen, an amber computer monitor and then this black-and-white TV as ‘Pre-Pixels’ before moving into the depth and variety of pixels created through the years.”