You wash your hands before supper, and you irradiate your mammoths before public display. French customs requires the latter, so researchers plan to hit the world’s oldest baby mammoth with three days worth of gamma rays.

In July 2009, a hunter found the mammoth, now known as Khoma, partially frozen in Siberia. Foxes had used the animal as a giant chew toy, and it was missing bits of its head and trunk. Still, at over 50,000 years old Khoma was a prize: the oldest known mammoth infant.

Here’s hoping those foxes didn’t get sick. Tests have revealed that really old microbes live inside the frozen corpse, and researchers say the mix may include the bacterium anthracis, which can lead to anthrax and black lung disease. Researchers want to irradiate the animal to kill off these microbes before giving the furry babe an autopsy and putting it up for display.

Laurent Cortella, a nuclear physician, told the AFP:

“Our baby, inside its box, will undergo three to four days of a continuous bombardment of 20,000 grays of gamma rays,” he said, grays being the unit that measures absorbed dosage…. “The slightest lethargic little germ from time immemorial hasn’t the least chance of resisting when you realise that one gamma ray of four grays kills a human.”

The lab has used the same technique on other old stuff, including one celebrity corpse: the 1,800-year-old mummy of Ramses II, who had a nasty fungal infection.

Related content:
80beats: Zed the Mammoth Unearthed From Under an L.A. Department Store
DISCOVER: 69. Frozen Baby Mammoth Unearthed
80beats: The Last Mammoths Made a Round Trip Across the Bering Land Bridge

Image: flickr / PhiveKali

Why is Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier losing so much ice into the sea? Because, researchers say, it has come unstuck at the bottom.

The Western Ice Sheet in Antarctica contains “enough water to raise global sea levels by several metres,” Christian Schoof writes in an accompanying commentary on the paper in Nature Geoscience, and so the high rate of ice loss in place like Pine Island is a worry. But the force of the atmosphere, even if you accounted for a warming Antarctica, doesn’t explain the melting rate. So the British Antarctic Survey team led by Adrian Jenkins ventured a guess that something else was going on under the ice, and sent a robot to investigate.

What the autonomous underwater bot found was pretty jarring.

In just a few decades — since the 1970s — the relatively warm deep ocean water flowing beneath the cold, buoyant glacier meltwater has encroached inland under the glacier some 30 km, or 18.6 miles, and the pace of the outflow of Pine Island Glacier continues to accelerate [Discovery News].

Underneath the glacier, the explorer’s acoustic instruments found a huge ridge that rises about 1,300 feet up from the rest of the seabed upon which the glacier rests. But the relatively warm ocean water has been cutting away the glacier’s underside. According to co-author Pierre Dutrieux, that ridge can help explain why ice loss accelerated so recently.

“Some decades ago, the glacier was sitting on this ridge and the friction of the ridge was restraining the flow of the glacier,” he explained. “When the glacier became detached from the ridge, the ice flow was able to accelerate significantly” [BBC News].

The team’s findings bring up the climate change question, but as with any single event, the dynamics are too complex to say “global warming caused this.” Jenkins addresses this problem in his statement on the find:

“The discovery of the ridge has raised new questions about whether the current loss of ice from Pine Island Glacier is caused by recent climate change or is a continuation of a longer-term process that began when the glacier disconnected from the ridge. We do not know what kick-started the initial retreat from the ridge, but we do know that it started some time prior to 1970. Since detailed observations of Pine Island Glacier only began in the 1990s, we now need to use other techniques such as ice core analysis and computer modelling to look much further into the glacier’s history in order to understand if what we see now is part of a long term trend of ice sheet contraction.”

Related Content:
DISCOVER: The Last Unexplored Place on Earth
DISCOVER: Science Is Best When Done Underwater–by Robots
80beats: An Iceberg the Size of Luxembourg Breaks Free from Antarctica
80beats: Climate Panel Admits Glacier Blunder, Scrambles To Save Face
80beats: Tiny Soot Particles May Be Melting Mighty Himalayan Glaciers

Image: British Antarctic Survey

Here’s an article from Canada on the debate about whether hybridization should be discouraged. I understand the impulse toward preserving nature as it is, but the drive for presumed purity seems almost fetishistic. Consider this sentence: ” Or could hybrids actually weaken genetically pure populations of disappearing wildlife?” What does “genetically pure” mean in a deep sense here? We know what it means instrumentally for the purposes of conservation genetics, but the way people talk about pristine lineages makes it seem an almost ethical concern.

When it comes to conservation and environmental policy you’re at the intersection of science, norms, and the messy world of human possibility. Perspective matters a lot in how you value or weight the parameters within your value system. To me the preservation of putatively pure lineages immemorial smacks a bit of pre-Darwinian biology, with its focus on systematic analysis of fixed and eternal kinds as well as a descriptive analysis of anatomy and physiology. At the other end is evolutionary biology which is a process, a phenomenon, understood as a flux of gene frequencies and morphs over time. It is by definition a refutation of a static conception of nature. Of course it takes time…but but not that much time. And then there’s the tendency to see humans as apart and beyond nature, exogenous to the system, destabilizing an eternal equilibrium. This is also arguably a false ideal, humans have been part of the ecosystem of every continent excepting Antarctica for at least 10,000 years, Australia for 50,000 years, Eurasia for a million years, and Africa somewhat longer. Modern H. sapiens sapiens has likely reshaped whole ecosystems through predation and fire even before agriculture and dense societies.

Let’s have a more nuanced and subtle conversion here, and put the focus on what our ultimate values are, or at least the ultimate values of the majority. As it is too often it seems to me that we’re not that far from “king’s wood” whereby we view nature as something to be isolated from the common man, who by his presence sullies and contaminates its purity. And now the fixation on distinct kinds and lineages seems to veer in a similar direction, albeit focusing on the purity of species and sub-species rather than nature as a whole.

Recently, I did a long post describing the substance of the Templeton Cambridge fellowship, and why it is valuable. Fortunately, that's not a tough argument to make. The fact is, journalism (and dialogue) about science and religion are pretty difficult to oppose. Case in point: Last week, here in D.C. (my old, new home), I attended an event at the American Association for the Advancement of Science to reintroduce its Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion (DoSER), which now has a new infusion of energy and a new director, Dr. Jennifer Wiseman, formerly of NASA and an astrophysicist with a special expertise in the study of exoplanets. Yes, that's right: America's leading scientific society has created a program to foster more dialogue between science and religion--and of course, considers that to be a very good thing. (Note: My understanding is that at present, significant funding of this initiative comes from Templeton.) AAAS CEO Alan Leshner has more to say about DoSER in a recent piece over at Huffington Post entitled, appropriately, "Science, Religion, and Civil Dialogue." As Leshner writes, the idea is to find new ways to bring science and religion into a humble, nonjudgmental dialogue, and break down the barriers between ...

Great beauty in art, it is sometimes thought, comes at the price of great strife. Massive forces, both internal and external, shape the flow of artistry. This metaphor applies equally well to galaxies as it does to humans.

Of course, when the Universe is your canvas, the scale’s a little bigger. Like with this dramatic Hubble view of the spiral galaxy M66:

[Oh yes, you most assuredly want to click that to see the galactic 3906 x 2702 pixel version.]

Mmmmm, pretty. Artistically, I like this shot in particular because of the angle and the way it’s framed; when I look at it I get the impression that it’s looming over me, and I perceive it to be sliding by. The sense of motion frozen in time is palpable.

But then the nerdy science part of my brain kicks in; numbers and physics fill in the back story of the artistry, making the picture even cooler than it looks. That galaxy is as big as the Milky Way: 100,000 light years across. It’s 35 million light years away — 350 quintillion kilometers, more than 200 quintillion miles. It’s also part of a trio of galaxies, the other two being M65 and NGC 3628 — the Leo Triplet. When I was younger, I used to observe them through my telescope in late spring when Leo the Lion was high in the sky to the southwest. They weren’t much more than smudges, but my already-getting-ready-to-be-a-scientist brain knew that I was seeing trillions of stars, dimmed by their unfathomable distance.

Those three galaxies are close enough together that the gravity of each affects the other two. See how the spiral arm at the bottom appears to be wider, messier, less organized than the one near the top of the picture? That’s no illusion. It’s thought that a recent pass by NGC 3628 may have bonked M66 pretty hard, disturbing it and messing around with its structure. The core of the galaxy — usually a smooth and symmetric blob — is all weird and misshapen. The pink glow in the image (emitted by hydrogen gas) is where stars are being born, and the deeper red is where they’re being cranked out en masse. Many times, when a galaxy passes near another one, the gas clouds get all riled up, collapsing to form lots of new stars.

That’s more obvious in the Spitzer Space Telescope image I’ve included here. Spitzer sees far-infrared light, which is emitted by warm gas and dust. You can see how wide and weird the lower spiral arm of M66 is, as if it’s been tugged and pulled, like a piece of taffy.

In this Spitzer image, gas and dust emission is also colored red, and starlight is blue (seen as a fuzzy glow since individual stars are not visible). You can see the stars are not distributed evenly: instead there’s more to the right; a good sign that another galaxy is affecting M66. Also, since red is gas and dust, that’s where stars are being actively born, and there’s a lot of that going on just outside the central region of the galaxy. That’s yet another sign that this galaxy was disturbed; the gravity of a passing galaxy can push the gas toward the center where it circles the core and forms stars.

And the clincher? In most galaxies, you see one star exploding at the end of its life every century or so. In the past 20 years, M66 has had three! Hot, massive stars don’t live long, only a few million years. So if a galaxy is making more stars than usual, you’ll see more supernovae than usual. Clearly, M66 has been pretty busy lately!

Maybe that’s why I love spiral galaxy pictures so much. They appeal to the parts of my brain evolved to appreciate artistry… and then the sciencey nodes kick in, adding a depth and dimension to the beauty. And art is always better when there’s a good story behind it.

Image credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration. Acknowledgment: Davide De Martin and Robert Gendler

Congratulations to my colleague across the sea, Ed Yong, for scoring first place in 3 Quark Daily’s science prize. Yours truly snagged second place for my post on the Neanderthal genome. And a toast of the morning coffee to Margaret Morgan for her post on the evolution of chloroplasts.

I see an interesting pattern here. My piece focused on signs of interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals. Ed wrote about gut bacteria picking up genes from marine bacteria as an adaptation for eating sushi. And Morgan wrote about how protozoans gobbled up photosynthetic bacteria and gave rise to plants and green slugs and other wonders. I wonder if the judge, Richard Dawkins, has horizontal gene transfer on his mind? From The Selfish Gene to The Slippery Gene?

I woke up this morning to various emails and tweets saying that I’ve just won the 3 Quarks Daily Science Prize for 2010. Monday mornings don’t usually start this promisingly!

For those who haven’t been following, this is the second of what will hopefully be a long-running competition, focusing on science writing on blogs. The winning entry was this post on the gut bacteria of Japanese people, which have borrowed sushi-digesting genes from their oceanic relatives.

It goes without saying that I’ve very grateful to all the readers who nominated posts and voted for them and to the editors of 3 Quarks Daily for organising the competition.

I’m feel very proud of this, especially because this year’s finalists included some of the finest science writers in the market and because it was judged by none other than Richard Dawkins. The latter is important, for The Selfish Gene was hugely influential to me, showing not only how incredible evolution is but how inspirational a piece of good science writing can be. Without it, I would probably be doing something else.

I also wanted to say something about writing competitions, from the perspective of someone who’s currently judging the ABSW ones, and has judged OpenLab entries in the past. These competitions, by their nature, are incredibly and necessarily subjective. There’s no SI unit for writing quality and no standard template for what the ideal, Platonic piece would look like. It’s relatively easy to sort pieces into rough categories of merit but when it comes to discerning between the top entrants at a finer level, personal opinion factors heavily into it. Which is a really roundabout way of saying that getting into the top stratum is a massive honour and I wholeheartedly congratulate all the semi-finalists and finalists for their tremendous work.

And finally, it’s worth mentioning again (given recent accusations that bloggers have the luxury of time – ha!) that most of us write our blogs in our spare moments, often getting nothing in return save a sense of satisfaction and the odd comment or so. These efforts are worth recognising and I thank the editors of 3 Quarks Daily for doing so.