The way I see it, every now and again you just need to look at a beautiful image of a spiral galaxy:

Oh yes, you want to click that image.

That’s NGC 6118 as seen by the European Southern Observatory’s 8-meter wide Very Large Telescope in this newly-released image. The VLT’s 500,000 square centimeters (78,000 square inches) of mirror really suck down the light, giving us a stunning near-true-color view of this spiral. Even from 80 million light years away we can trace the positions of pinkish star factories, the dark dust lanes, and see the reddish-yellow glow of old stars in the galactic hub.

I was drawn to how tightly wound the galaxy is, and how long the arms are. Starting at the nucleus you can trace the two major arms all the way around more than once. The galaxy is tilted severely, so it’s hard to say what’s going on at the lower right; does the arm split there? That sort of thing is called a "spur", and they can form as the gas in the galaxy interacts with the arms.

All the stars you see in the picture are in the foreground, in our galaxy. It’s like looking out a dirty window at a tree outside; the spots are close by, the tree much farther. But you can also see dozens of small galaxies, too, which are not small at all, but in reality other majestic and grand objects diminished by their even greater distance.

NGC 6118 is about 100,000 light years across, making it the same size as our own galaxy. And when I see something like this, I always ask myself the same thing I did when I was just a kid: is someone else out there looking back at us, and marveling at the beauty of the Milky Way?

Image credit: ESO

It’s not often that an English professor co-authors an article in Sky and Telescope, but it’s not everyday that astronomers set out to uncover a poet’s muse. Researchers believe they have found the astronomical inspiration for the “strange huge meteor procession” in the poem “Year of Meteors. (1859-60.)” published in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

The investigators have determined that Whitman was waxing poetic about a rare event called an Earth-grazing meteor procession. An Earth-grazing meteor never hits our planet; as its name implies, it just visits, slicing through our atmosphere on its path. On this voyage, pieces of the meteor crumble off and head generally in the same direction (the “procession”), burning as they go and making a show to awe and inspire.

Texas State physics professors Donald Olson and Russell Doescher, English professor Marilynn Olson, and student Ava Pope have discounted previous suspects for the poem’s inspiration: an 1833 Leonid meteor storm, the 1858 Leonids, and a fireball in 1859. The dates are wrong for the first two and the fireball happened during the day whereas Whitman described a night event.

Instead, they found the answer in another creative work, a Fredric Church painting “The Meteor of 1860” that looked like the scene Whitman’s poem portrays. With some more sleuthing, they discovered that the painting described a meteor procession that occurred on July, 20, 1860, and found reports from newspapers describing an event sounding very similar to Whitman’s poem and Church’s painting.

As reported in a Texas State University press release:

“From all the observations in towns up and down the Hudson River Valley, we’re able to determine the meteor’s appearance down to the hour and minute,” Olson said. “Church observed it at 9:49 p.m. when the meteor passed overhead, and Walt Whitman would’ve seen it at the same time, give or take one minute.”

This is not the first time Donald Olson has tracked down a piece art using astronomy. Using similar detective work he believes he has also tracked down astronomical underpinnings in the works of Ansel Adams and Edvard Munch.

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Image: Judith Filenbaum Hernstadt

The two-banded clownfish (Amphiprion bicinctus), photographed in the Red Sea, near Aqaba, Jordan

A federal judge overseeing a case in Tennessee has rejected the use of functional MRI brain scans as evidence of a person’s veracity in court proceedings. As DISCOVER noted before, the Tennessee case follows one in Brooklyn where the judge also said no under New York State law. Together, the two rulings mean it could be a long time before lawyers can admit brain scans as evidence of truth-telling in courts.

Lorne Semrau was seeking to include the results of scans as part of his defense in a Medicare and Medicaid fraud case being heard in a federal court in Tennessee. But while Judge Pham agreed that the technique had been subject to testing and peer review, it flunked on the other two points suggested by the Supreme Court to weigh cases like this one: the test of proven accuracy and general acceptance by scientists [ScienceNOW].

Proponents of fMRI lie detection claim that monitoring a suspect’s brain while he answers questions about his behavior and the allegations against him can reveal whether he’s answering honestly or lying. But while the utility of fMRI brain scans is accepted in many areas of brain research, most neuroscientists say their usefulness as lie detectors is still an open question.

Wide acceptance among scientists is also a part of the New York standard with which Judge Robert H. Miller rejected fMRI as evidence in the Brooklyn case. So while fMRI lie detection experiments continue to undergo peer review, the technique likely won’t become admissible evidence anywhere until the scientific community begins to accept that such scans really could identify honesty at a reasonable level of confidence.

Besides the so-called “Daubert” standard for admitting scientific evidence, Judge Pham also included in the Tennessee decision a more damning dismissal of the brain scans that the defense had tried to introduce to bolster its client’s credibility:

Rule 403 of the Federal Rules of Evidence provides for the exclusion of evidence “on Grounds of Prejudice, Confusion, or Waste of Time.” In applying rule 403 to this case, Pham compared Semrau’s situation to the case law surrounding polygraphs that are obtained by defendants unilaterally, saying they presented “similar issues.” In those cases, courts did not look kindly on tests performed solely to bolster the credibility of the witness without both prosecution and defense having been involved [Wired.com].

In addition, Cephos—the company that did the fMRI scans in both cases—did three scans in the Tennessee case and got one scan that disagreed with the other two. That didn’t exactly bolster the credibility of the evidence.

Judge’s Pham ruling isn’t binding on other cases; other judges will have the opportunity to consider fMRI as lawyers continue to try to introduce it. But with this stiff rejection at the federal level providing legal precedent to say “no,” it could be a while before any judge says “yes.”

However, even Pham says that day could come. He writes in his opinion:

“In the future, should fMRI-based lie detection undergo further testing, development, and peer review, improve upon standards controlling the technique’s operation, and gain acceptance by the scientific community for use in the real world, this methodology may be found to be admissible even if the error rate is not able to be quantified in a real world setting.”

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Image: flickr / zoom zoom

This is a guest post from Vanessa Woods, author of the new book, Bonobo Handshake. Vanessa is a Research Scientist in Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University and studies the cognition of chimpanzees and bonobos in Congo. In my new book Bonobo Handshake, I talk about a bonobo called Mimi who throws herself over the dead body of another bonobo. Lipopo was a seven year old bonobo who was new to the group. Mimi wasn't particularly fond of him, she just kindof ignored him most of the time. When Lipopo died, Mimi stood over the body and wouldn't let the keepers take him. The keepers turned up with long poles to take the body away, a scary sight for any bonobo - they are usually quite shy. But Mimi would not give up the body. She pushed at the poles and she held on to the body. She just kept grooming his face and trying to keep the flies away. It was as though she was mourning his death but still felt she had to protect him. The body was in a tight space, near the tunnel. She must have been afraid but she wouldn’t let him go. Then Crispin the vet turned up with the ...

I rather like this idea: the Climate Denial Crock of the Week, a video series debunking ridiculous (natch) claims by someone spinning the truth when it comes to climate change.

I don’t agree with everything therein; you can’t judge a site by its ads, for one thing. But he does a good dismantling of the claim that Phil Jones — a climatologist at the University of East Anglia, and a man who was at the center of the bogus "climategate" nonsense — says there’s been no warming since 1995. That claim is nothing less than an outright lie, a cherry-picked quotation taken out of context and basically the opposite of what Jones actually said.

This video is just one of many, and I’ll have to go through them all as I have time. Every time I post something on climate change, the noise machine swings into full mania, with comments that show beyond a doubt that a lot of people have no clue what they’re talking about, but still feel that scientists who have devoted their entire lives and careers to climatology are idiots. That is, sadly, the state of the "debate" today.