Recently, I was performing the mundane task of taking out the trash.

I went from room to room, collecting the detritus of the week. I then spent a few minutes scooping out and changing the cat litter, and, sighing, finally tied up the bag and hauled it out to the bins around the side of the house.

As I lugged the hefty bin out to the curb in the darkness, I did what I do, what I always do, when I go outside: I looked up.

I was greeted instantly with an astonishing sight: the reddish, glowing dot of Mars bumped right up against Regulus, the brightest star in Leo. The two were paired less than a degree between each other, low over the western horizon.

It was beautiful. Mars was the slightly brighter of the pair, and even in the mildly light-polluted and sparsely clouded night sky of Boulder I could see the color difference between the planet, some 240 million kilometers away, and the star, 3 million times farther distant yet.

I let my gaze drift a bit over and saw Saturn looming near Leo’s other end. Venus, I knew, was already behind the mountains, but I could see the Big Dipper standing on its bowl to the northwest. Following the arc of the dipper’s handle, I was led to mighty Arcturus, an orange giant nearing the end of its life, and a harbinger of things to come for our own star. Turning, was that Vega I saw dancing in between my neighbor’s tree branches? Why yes, yes it was. Summer’s coming, Vega is telling me.

My trash-hauling chore was forgotten. I suddenly had a flashback, visceral and total, of being a teenager. Standing at the end of my family’s driveway, I watched the sky. Every clear night you’d find me out there. I spent hundreds of hours, thousands, either gazing with my eye to the telescope or simply with my chin tipped up, the Universe unfolded above me. I would always have to pause when a car drove by, and while my absorption with the task didn’t allow it to occur to me then, I now wonder how many of those people saw me and thought to themselves that I was wasting my time.

But as I stand outside my house as an adult, gaping up at the sky, I am familiar there. The stars are my friends… no, that’s hopelessly anthropomorphic and somewhat twee. But they are like slipping your feet into well-worn slippers, like the first bite of a recipe you’ve perfected by countless trial-and-error meals, like holding a book whose spine has been softened through years of reading and re-reading.

I’m comfortable with the sky. I’m at home there. When I stand in my yard and look up, my heart sings and my mind reaches out. My weekly chore was interrupted, delayed, but it didn’t matter.

I don’t know what your own passion is. But I will say this, and you hear me well: no time is wasted spent under the stars. And no time is wasted spent doing what you love.

Picture credit: Il conte di Luna’s Flickr photostream, used under the Creative Commons license.

Seventy-five million years ago, mammals couldn’t compare to the big boy reptiles ruling the earth. Still, that didn’t stop one spunky, prehistoric squirrel-like creature. He wasn’t hungry for meat, but he needed his minerals. He eyed a dino bone, the equivalent of modern-day vitamin shop, and wrapped his teeth around it, his very own corn-on-the-cob-osaurus.

Yesterday, researchers published a paper in Palentology on these exploits. They claim to have found the oldest known mammal bite marks.

The researchers found the bones bites in two Canadian, Late Cretaceous-period dinosaur bone collections–and also on additional bones during fieldwork in Alberta. They suspect the marks were made by multituberculates, extinct rodent-like creatures, and they first found them on the femur bone of Champsosaurus, a swamp-dweller that looked a bit like an crocodile.

The researchers say that the form of the bite marks indicate that they were made by opposing pairs of teeth, a tell-tale sign of mammal chompers (think rats). And the fact that they came from paired upper and lower incisors points to multituberculates. Though these early mammals didn’t have the bite power that modern day rodents developed, their marks look similar.

Nicholas Longrich, lead author on the paper, says in a Yale press release:

“The marks stood out for me because I remember seeing the gnaw marks on the antlers of a deer my father brought home when I was young,” he said. “So when I saw it in the fossils, it was something I paid attention to.”

Related content:
Discoblog: Egad! Oldest Spider Web Dates Back to Dinosaur Era
Discoblog: Will Jurassic Park Ever Really Come True?
80beats: New Analysis Reveals Color of Dinosaur Feathers for the First Time
80beats: The Ur-Sneaker: 5500-Year-Old Shoe Found in Armenian Cave

Image: Nicholas Longrich/Yale University

Water, water (or ice) everywhere—that’s the refrain this year. This week we covered the study declaring that the moon was home to perhaps 100 times more water than previously thought, and it was just two months ago that sky-watchers spotted the first frosty asteroid out in the Asteroid Belt. Now, in a study in Nature, a team of astronomers says they’ve found another icy surprise in our solar system: a bright shiny object way out in the Kuiper Belt.

The Kuiper Belt is that mess of objects orbiting the sun out beyond Neptune, but not as far as the Oort Cloud (once-proud Pluto is a Kuiper Belt object). There are plenty of icy bodies out there, including Pluto. But what doesn’t make sense about this one, KBO 55636, is how it stayed so pristine after a billion years of floating alone. MIT’s James Elliot, who led the study, says the object’s albedo, or reflectivity, is striking:

“That turned out to be very high, almost 90 percent… That’s consistent with it having a very highly reflective surface like water ice.” The finding was surprising because such old, distant bodies tend to have weathered, dull surfaces. “Objects orbiting that far out in space get generally darkened by accumulating dust… We don’t have an explanation for how it could stay so pristine” [Space.com].

To study the object, Elliot’s team relied on a method called stellar occultation—when an object passes in front of a star and obscures its light. It’s something like the way exoplanet hunters find new worlds by employing the transit method: watching a star dim as its planets pass in front of it. In this case, Elliot knew about KBO 55636 already. He’d been tracking it for years, waiting for it to make this pass so his team could figure out its true size (89 miles across) and brightness.

He wasn’t expecting the tiny rock to be a shiny enigma.

Bigger objects, such as Pluto or Saturn’s moon Enceladus, are able to brighten their surfaces with a fresh supply of ice from processes such as cryovolcanism which sees ice – not lava – spew from the interior of the objects. This explanation did not really apply to the KBO due to its tiny size and the time it had spent floating in space, said the professor [BBC News].

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Beyond the Nine Planets
DISCOVER: Pluto Explored, on the New Horizons mission
80beats: Moon May Have 100 Times More Water Than We Thought. How’d We Miss It?
80beats: Frost-Covered Asteroid Suggests Extraterrestrial Origin for Earth’s Oceans

Image: NASA

In my latest column for Discover, I take a look at epigenetics and the brain. Along with the genetic circuitry in the DNA of our brain cells, we also have an additional layer of molecules that can switch genes on and off. A lot of this so-called epigenome gets locked into place when our brains are first developing, but it still remains malleable throughout our lives. Our environment can rework our epigenome, and some studies suggest that this reworking may produce long-term changes in personality. Even mental conditions like depression may be partly epigenetic. And if we can figure out how conditions like depression alter the epigenome, we may be able to re-alter it to counter those disorders.

For some reason, epigenetics is getting burdened with a lot of sensationalist quasi-mysticism these days. Epigenetics does not overturn everything we ever knew about everything. But it’s possible for something to be woo-free and cool at the same time, as I hope my column makes clear. Check it out.

[Image: U.S. Army Center of Military History]

I love big, splashy spiral galaxies. They are such eye candy, and of course their breadth and scale are magnificent. Sweeping, curved arms of stars and gas a hundred thousand light years long…

One of my favorites is NGC 253, a nearly edge-on spiral that lies roughly 11 million light years away in the constellation of Sculptor. I’ve seen it many, many times, but I was honestly surprised when a new image was released by the European Southern Observatory. I’ve never seen it like this:

Wow! Click to galactinate.

As you can see, it’s tilted pretty severely to our line of sight. You can clearly see the spiral arms, and the dust lanes wrapping around the galactic center. I was amazed to see the dust appears to be thicker on the top half than on the bottom. I was even more amazed to clearly see the bar — the elongated rectangular region in the center of the galaxy! That’s almost completely undetectable in a visible light image of the galaxy:

That’s how I’m used to seeing it: loaded with dust that hides the shape of the galaxy itself. The top image, taken by the new VISTA 4.1 meter telescope, is in the infrared, which cuts through most of the dust and shows cooler, redder stars. The bar in the center of the galaxy is formed due to the way the gravity of all the stars of the galaxy shapes the way they orbit the center. In our solar system, the Sun outmasses everything else, and dominates the gravity of the system. This makes the system fairly simple. But in a galaxy the mass is spread out, and bizarre effects can occur as the combined mass of the stars affects the overall galaxy. Spiral arms are one outcome of this, and bars are another.

One way to form such a bar is to have a big galaxy collide and merge with another galaxy. Interestingly, NGC 253 is a starburst galaxy, which means it’s making new stars at a prodigious rate. This can also happen when two galaxies merge, and their gas clouds collide. On top of that, other studies looking at the velocities of stars and gas in the galaxy also indicate a merger. It seems pretty clear NGC 253 had a very violent event happen to it in the recent past. I suspect this may explain the thicker dust on one side than the other too. It could be the remnants of the smaller galaxy, or perhaps the collision triggered huge amounts of star formation along one arm — dust is created when young, massive stars die. Perhaps I’m way off here, but so many odd things happening in one galaxy with one clear explanation for so many of them makes me suspicious.

But the most important thing to me is that here we have a galaxy I thought I was at least passingly familiar with, and it turns out to have some major features about which I hadn’t a clue. I suppose I could be embarrassed by that, but instead, quite honestly, it makes me glad! I don’t think familiarity breeds contempt, necessarily, but it does tend to dull the sense of wonder. And here I get to re-kick start that wonder. It’s not often anyone gets a chance to do that.

ESO/J. Emerson/VISTA. Acknowledgment: Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit

Two years ago I noted that George Orwell had started a blog. Or, rather, Orwell’s diaries began to be posted, day by day, online. I liked the idea at first, but after a while I drifted away. The initial entries came from a relatively quiet time in Orwell’s life, dealing with stuff like how many eggs he got from his chickens on a given day.

But there’s nothing like a war to make life all too interesting:

It is impossible even yet to decide what to do in the case of German conquest of England. The one thing I will not do is to clear out, at any rate not further than Ireland, supposing that to be feasible. If the fleet is intact and it appears that the war is to be continued from America and the Dominions, then one must remain alive if possible, if necessary in the concentration camp. If the U.S.A is going to submit to conquest as well, there is nothing for it but to die fighting, but one must above all die fighting and have the satisfaction of killing somebody else first.

[Image: Wikipedia]