Position of New Horizons on the date and time indicated. Credit: New Horizons website.

The New Horizons spacecraft is well on its way to “it’s not a planet”, Pluto.  The spacecraft is about half way there, so far the flight time has been 1629 days (depending on when you read this) with about 1739 left to go before operations begin.

It turns out a course correction was needed if the planned arrival 7,767 miles above Pluto at 07:49 am July 14, 2015 was going to happen as planned.

The course correction involved sending commands to traverse the more than 1.49 billion miles to the spacecraft – yeah 1.49 billion miles, it takes about 2.25 hours for the radio signals to make the trip one way traveling at the speed of light.  The commands were instructions for a 35.6 second thruster firing that increased the speed of New Horizons by just 1-mph.  The reason for the increase in speed is completely amazing:  it seems a tiny amount of force is created by thermal photons from the radioisotope thermoelectric generator power source, get this, reflecting off the backside of the spacecraft’s high-gain antenna and this force needs to be counter acted.  Pretty cool eh?

The commands were sent and the burn accomplished. . . onward to Pluto we go.

Visit the New Horizons website to learn more about the mission including the current position.

Sure, the planet’s increasing carbon dioxide levels are making the oceans more acidic, but what does that really mean for sea life? We’ve already heard that the ocean’s changing chemistry is damaging corals and interfering with mussels, but that’s just the beginning. It turns out things could get seriously weird.

In a paper published this week in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers led by Philip L. Munday of James Cook University have given us a concrete example: the increased CO2-levels make some fish purposely swim towards predators.

As part of his experiment, Munday used a Y-shaped maze to force baby clownfish to choose between two paths. One path reeked of rock cod, a natural predator; the other had no danger scents. Munday’s team compared the choices of fish raised in water of varying carbon dioxide concentrations, from today’s levels of 390 parts per million up to future expected levels of 850 ppm.

Those clownfish raised in today’s CO2 concentrations behaved as you might expect: ninety percent of the time, they avoided the rock cod stink and, after little more than a week of training, they always chose the safe path. But at 700 ppm, something alarming happened. The fish headed straight for the predator’s smell 74 to 88 percent of the time. At 850 ppm, after about eight days, every single fish chose the path to death.

The scientists speculate that the acidic waters damage the fishes’ sense of smell, which along with avoiding predators, they must use to find family and home:

“They can’t distinguish between their own parents and other fish, and they become attracted to substances they previously avoided. It means the larvae will have less opportunity to find the right habitat, which could be devastating for their populations,” said Kjell Døving, a co-author from the University of Oslo. [Guardian]

For all the details, check out Ed Yong’s post in Not Exactly Rocket Science.

Related content:
80beats: No More Speculation: Scientists Prove Ocean Acidification is Already Underway
80beats: Ocean Acidification: Worse Than the Big Problem We Thought It Was
80beats: Ocean Acidification Could Leave Clown Fish (Like Nemo) Lost at Sea
80beats: A Glimpse Into a Future With Acidic Oceans
80beats: In a More Acidic Ocean, Coral Reef “Skeletons” May Crumble

Image: flickr / Sean McGrath

It feels good to win. And it feels even better to win at home.

For a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Matthew Fuxjager and his colleagues investigated the winner effect, wherein animals (and perhaps humans) build up testosterone in advance of a confrontation, and the fight’s winner maintains that elevated level. By studying male mice fighting one another, Fuxjager was able to see what happens in the brains of winners. Not only did victorious mice experience the “winner effect,” but those who won at home—in their own cages—saw the most activity, and wanted to keep on fighting.

To get these results, Fuxjager’s team essentially created a tournament of mouse fights.

One challenge they faced was ensuring the right mice won the right fights. They got around this by borrowing a trick from seedy boxing promoters the world over, pairing the favored mouse with a weaker, less sexually experienced opponent who could not hope to spring an upset. Once a mouse had notched three consecutive victories, they studied its brains for any chemical changes [io9].

In the brains of winning mice, they saw an uptick in the hormonal expression in regions that govern aggression. And in the brains of mice who won at “home,” they saw something else.

In addition, “home-win” mice showed increased androgen sensitivity in regions that mediate motivation and reward. These mice also won more subsequent fights compared to mice who’d only come out in away fights [New Scientist].

While the winner effect might help mice defend their territory in the wild, it’s not always good—especially when it comes to humans. When DISCOVER spoke to John Coates about the neuroscience of the financial collapse, he suggested that the effect could have something to do with the high-risk behavior of Wall Street traders. Once testosterone levels reach the point where performance peaks, any continued increase starts to override our judgment—and those sub-prime mortgage bundles begin to look more and more tempting.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Could “Hormonal Diversity” Help Prevent Another Meltdown?
80beats: Does Testosterone Make Trusting Women More Skeptical?
80beats: Does Testosterone Cause Greedy Behavior? Or Do We Just Think It Does?
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Testosterone-Fueled Traders Make Higher Profits

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Funny, that seems like an obscure title, but in fact it’s accurate. Cectic is a skeptical web comic. Pareidolia is the human predilection to see faces in random patterns. Recently, Cectic did a comic on pareidolia:

Click it to see the rest (somewhat marginally NSFW and bound to offend some folks). It’s a pretty handy checklist, in fact, for those disposed to thinking that the face they see is anything more than a stain, wood grain, or hair pattern.

One of the structural difficulties with any systematic study of civilizations is that the sample size of the category is rather small, as is clear in the few attempts to examine their progression (see Arnold Toynbee). Additionally, there’s always the problem with how one generates a typology for something as fluid as civilization. Where does antiquity end, and the medieval period begin? One can get a rough sense of the discontinuities impressionistically. Consider the appearance of the Column of Phocas, erected in 608 AD. It may be correct that chronologically the Byzantine state and society on the eve of the expansion of Islam in the early 7th century was closer to the era of Charlemagne than Constantine, but many would argue that it was basically a Late Antique society more than an Early Medieval one. Certainly the Byzantines of that age would have agreed with that assessment (though one has to be careful about taking people at their word, the last Byzantines before the Ottoman conquest in 1453 famously still referred to themselves as Romans).

But such typologies remain a matter of art, and are subject to great dispute. Any inferences one generates or generalities one perceives will be subject to the reality that the individuals engaging in the act have a strong impact on the size and distribution of the sample (this is obviously true in ecology or empirical social sciences, but the methods here are generally more explicit and easy to critique). With all that said I think at the boundary condition we can agree upon some civilizational distinctions if such typologies have any meaning or utility. The world of the ancient Near East was on a deep level culturally alien to our own, and the period between 1200 and 800 spans a extremely sharp rupture between what came before, and what came after.

Its alien aspect is one reason that I am fascinated by the ancient Near East. Egypt as a civilization and society exhibited intelligible continuity within itself for nearly 2,000 years between the Old Kingdom and the first centuries of the first millennium before Christ, up to the conquest by the Assyrians (I suspect intelligible continuity precedes the Old Kingdom, but written sources become rather sparse before that). Obviously aspects of ancient Egypt persisted for centuries after its operational demise, as made clear by artifacts such as the Rosetta Stone which date to the kingdom of the Ptolemies. The pagan Egyptian temple of Philae was active down to the 6th century A.D., but with its closing by Justinian the last deep cultural connection to the world of the Pharaohs was lost (the Coptic language is derived from ancient Egyptian, but the Copts were unable to tell Europeans how to read the hieroglyphs because they did not know). The world of the ancient Fertile Crescent is in many ways even more distant in memory from ours than that of Egypt. Egypt in its declining phase was a stronger active influence on the Greeks. Rather, it is through the Hebrew Bible that we can glean fragments of the shape of the ancient Bronze Age societies of Mesopotamia and Syria, in particular in Genesis. And just as a shadow of Egypt persisted down to the Roman conquest and beyond, so the civilization of Babylon and Assyria was absorbed in part by their Persian conquerors. But note that the Epic of Gilgamesh, which has within it a variant of the famous Biblical flood story, was not rediscovered until the 19th century, despite its enduring fame over the 2,000 years of Mesopotamian civilization between Sumer and the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Without the translation efforts of modern archaeologists and philologists Mesopotamian culture would be an empire of artifacts, rather one which illuminates our minds with the imaginings of the past.

The ancient Near Eastern cultural complex extended beyond Egypt and the Fertile Crescent. It encompassed Anatolia, and even the Aegean, into what we today call Greece. But I contend that despite the differences of language a modern person might have more in common with a citizen of 4th century Athens, than a citizen of 4th century Athens would have with a subject of the wanax of 12th century Athens. Some of this is a function of the reality that the modern mentality is to a large extent an outgrowth of that of the Ionian Greeks and their intellectuals heirs. Similarly, the Chinese civilization also took its present shape during this period. Hindu civilization in a non-mythic dimension goes back no further than the first millennium. In the Greek and Indian cases there is a great deal of archaeological evidence for complex literate societies during the Bronze Age. In the Aegean case the script of the last of the successive societies, the Mycenaean, has been deciphered. They spoke Greek and worshiped the same gods as the Classical Greeks. Much of the background material in the Iliad and the Odyssey clearly references the Mycenaean period (though the narrative core is perhaps reflective of the Dark Ages before the rise of Classical Greece). But Classical Greece was built anew, on a different cultural foundation from that the Mycenaeans. The kings of Bronze Age Greece were part of the “brotherhood of kings.” The city-states of Classical Greece were distinct from the despotisms of Asia. The Classical Greeks had forgotten their history aside from legends. The Bronze Age walls of cities such as Tyrins were presumed to have been constructed by giants (“cyclopean”)!

I have alluded to the fact that the enormous proportion of ancient Classical works we have today can be attributed to intense phases of translation and transcription during the Carolingian Renaissance, the Abbassid House of Wisdom, and the efforts of Byzantine men of letters such as Constantine Porphyrogennetos. The reason for these efforts was that in part these ancient literary works were the products of natural predecessor civilizations, to whom the medieval West, Byzantium, and Islam, owed a great deal. The memory of Plato and Aristotle, Caesar and Darius, persisted down to their day. The classical education of early modern Europeans built upon the toil of the medieval period. The Renaissance would not have been able to revive anything if no works of the ancients were copied down and transmitted down to future generations.

In sharp contrast the details of our knowledge of the Bronze Age world are due to the work of modern archaeologists and philologists. Aside from a few references in the Bible to an offshoot kingdom, the Hittite Empire had been totally forgotten! Dead cuneiform, once deciphered, brought back a world which had lain dormant for thousands of years. There are many elements of these lost civilizations which we comprehend only in spare fragments. For example in the fourth millennium BC it seems from the archaeological record that Mesopotamian merchants had colonies which replicated their culture in toto in Anatolia, while Mesopotamian influences through diffusion are indisputable in pre-Dynastic Egypt. In the 3rd millennium this cultural hegemony waned, and Egypt seems to have sealed itself off from outside influence until the 2nd millennium, while the Mesopotamian stamp on Anatolian society diminishes. But without full-blown writing we can only conjecture as to the dynamics of this period of the expansion of Mesopotamian civilization. By the time the light of text illuminates the world Mesopotamian culture had retreated in its complete form to Sumer and Akkad.

But there is still much we know now. The robusticity of baked cuneiform means that the destruction of ancient palace complexes is a boon to modern archaeologists and historians. Though Egyptians used papyrus, they also stamped their monuments with hieroglyphs, and critically the correspondence with foreign nations was generally done in Akkadian cuneiform. This last is critical for the narrative in Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East. From the introduction:

The diplomatic system developed in the ancient Near East was forgotten for millennia; there’s no collection of marble busts of ancient kings in the entrance hall to the United Nations in honor of their contribution to the history of humanking, no requirement that children study the ancient peace treaties as founding documents, the way they might study the Magna Carta or the United States Constitution. There’s a good reason for this: We can find no direct link between the ancient practice of diplomacy and that used today.

But it is edifying, even inspiring, to know that right from the earliest centuries of civilization, ancient kings and statesmen of distinct and different lands were oftne willing, even eager, to find alternatives to war and see one another as brothers rather than enemies.

Economists might term this a separate “natural experiment,” distinct from the Westphalian model. More colloquially one might consider the Near Eastern diplomatic system as a “first draft.” Because of the sharp differences between that world, and our epoch, similarities are particularly telling as to the deep cognitive biases which drive our cultural forms. In Brotherhood of Kings the author traces the evolution of the art of ancient diplomacy from the cities of third millennium Mesopotamia and Syria, down to the climax of the tradition during period of the Amarna letters, in the 14th century BC.

First, kinship matters. This is almost a trivial assertion, but the ubiquity of kin terminology in political orders despite the lack of blood ties reinforces the importance of abstracting the genealogical relationship to a grander scale. The Chinese Emperor was the Son of Heaven, and the father to his people. Similarly, the President of the United States of America was the “Great White Father” to Native tribes in the 19th century. Sometimes the kinship was not fictive, but literal. In the 19th century continental Europe was generally at peace, at least in relation to previous eras. Some attribute this to the fact that European states were generally monarchies, and the monarchs were all members of an extended family. Similarly, by the 14th century relations between Egypt, Mitanni (Syria and northern Mesopotamia) and Babylonia were generally peaceful, and cemented by exchanges of royal women as brides in the polygynous households of the monarchs. The existence of a Minoan palace in northern Egypt is evidence in the author’s eye to princesses from the island of Crete in the household of the Pharaoh. A wedding was a marker of a cultural exchange.

Sometimes the analogies to later epochs are striking. After the famous king Tutankhamen died, his young wife wrote a letter to the king of the Hittites:

“My husband has died and I have no son. They say about you that you have many sons. You might give me one of your sons to become my husband. I would not wish to take one of my subjects as a husband… I am afraid.”

The king, a powerful warlord by the name of Suppiluliuma, eventually sent his son Zannanza, who seems to have died. There is a strong suspicion by the nature of Suppiluliuma’s angry subsequent correspondence that foul play was involved, and that Zannanza was undone by a reaction in the court of Egypt to the arrival of a foreign prince. The outcome of this personal and political tragedy was war, as Suppiluliuma used this event as a casus belli for an invasion which rolled back Egypt’s dominion in the Levant and expanded the Hittite Empire. The connection between the personal and political, and the necessity for noble women to seek outside aid, reminds me greatly of the period before the Gothic Wars, with Tutankhamen’s wife being in a similar position as Amalasuntha.

But this episode was peculiar in another way: the Pharaohs of Egypt never gave their daughters out to foreign powers, rather, they received the daughters of the other kings. This is explained in Brotherhood of Kings in two ways. The more prosaic one is that while the non-Egyptian kings generally viewed the potentate receiving the daughter as inferior, because now he would be the son-in-law (extending the kinship analogy), the Pharaohs perceived that they were superior because they were receiving gifts from non-Egyptian kings. This is a classic “win-win” scenario. Even if the monarchs in question understood the cultural disjunction, these movement of women from the Fertile Crescent to Egypt was in part motivated by signalling status to their own circle of nobles, who may not have been as conscious of these cross-cultural distinctions.

More importantly I suspect, Egypt was richer and more powerful than any of the other kingdoms during this period. It is indicative to me that the instance where the Egyptian widow seeks a foreign prince it is from the Hittites, as this nation was waxing, and was arguably as resource rich as Egypt in many ways, not to mention militarily successful. The correspondence in the Egyptian archives show that the kings of Mitanni and Babylonia persistently bleat for gold, gold, gold. Egypt was rich in gold, and they were not. These kings frankly state that so long as they receive gold they will return to Egypt whatever the Pharaoh would like to maintain the balance of payments. The supply of gold was inelastic to the demand because of its scarcity. In contrast the monarchs of Mitanni or Babylonia could increase the production or procurement of textiles and other fine manufactures and imports. One of the most bizarre facts about the reign of Akhenaten is that he apparently promised the king of the Mitanni a set of gold statues, which he never delivered. Nearly every piece of correspondence from the Mitanni king during Akhenaten’s two decades of power includes a reference to the missing gold statues!

It seems clear that one of the goals of the ancient diplomatic system was to substitute gift giving for war. Plunder and piracy were a major revenue source for elites, especially in an age where commerce and trade did not exhibit the efficiencies we take for granted later (recall that there was no standard coinage). But this was risky, and entailed expending resources and time. Part of the rationale for conquest was clearly to secure resources which were scarce or nonexistent in one’s own domains. The giving of gifts between monarchs, whether equals (”Great Kings”) or between a hegemon and his vassals, was a way in which scarce goods could flow between territories. If gold and other luxury goods were to travel between states there would obviously be a necessary premium on security. Certain fixed costs would be entailed, and one would probably want a reasonable economy of scale to maximize efficiency. The despots of this ancient world were in the best position to provide these services. The luxury goods would eventually “trickle down” to the sub-elites after the initial exchange in subsequent gift giving.

But these abstractions, the aggregate flow of goods and services (in the latter case, specialists such as doctors and diviners), had to be made concrete in the concepts that these people understood. Contracts and treaties were witnessed by the gods, and the gods served as guarantors of the fidelity of the parties involved to their oaths. Oath-breaking was serious enough that Suppiluliuma’s own son attributed some of his father’s misfortunes to oath-breaking early in his tenure during his usurpation of the throne. These gods were classical polytheistic entities, but the various nations operated in the same supernatural framework, as these were henotheistic societies. Religious concepts had not become so elaborated or philosophical that the oaths would have encountered difficulty because of incommensurability of terminology. And these contracts and treaties were made between fictive, and sometimes real, kin. On occasion the blood ties mattered, as when an Assyrian monarch intervened to kill the usurper who had killed his own grandson, the king of Babylon. Just as these blood bonds could motivate violence and intervention, so no doubt they engendered more amity than would otherwise have been the case. The royal women who moved between capitals served as the critical glue, and it seems that they brought entourages on the order of hundreds. Young princes of mixed parentage would then have grown up in a relatively cosmopolitan world, and been less conditioned to view outsiders as aliens.

So there is much that is familiar in this ancient world, even down to a transnational elite which may share more in common in values and culture with each other than with the populations which they rule. But there are differences. I alluded above to an analogy with 19th century Europe. Despite the differences in national history and religion, the Christian kings of Europe in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars forged a common sense of purpose and mutual understanding. This was made concrete by an acceleration of the pattern of intermarriage, or the placement of branches of the European ruling caste as heads of state of new nations (e.g., Greece). This stability was shattered with the maturity of mass populist nationalism in the 19th century, and basically killed during World War I. But it was constrained to Europe and European descended societies. The Ottoman state and the Empire of Japan were on the fringes, in large part because of deep civilizational differences. In enlightened circles works such as Clash of Civilizations are in bad odor. Though most would balk at accepting an argument with the punch of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, a milder variant was common in the 1990s.

As we enter the teens of the 21st century I think the idea of a world civilization, with a common cultural currency which might serve as a means of exchange for deep diplomatic understandings, is fading somewhat. The world of the ancient Near East did not include Shang China, and during its more antique phase it did not include the society of the Indus Valley (which was integrated in terms of trade and commerce, but not politics, with Mesopotamia). It was a small world where ties bound through fictive kinship made sense, as kinship terms in their atoms are human universals. The rhetoric of universal brotherhood persists down to this day, glossed up with a scientific patina through reflexive references to Lewontin’s Fallacy. But the rise of China and Russia should give us pause in assuming a deep common cultural foundation which can serve as a universal glue. Russia is a petro-state in demographic decline, so it is less interesting. Rather, China is reasserting its traditional position as the preeminent civilization in the world, and it is doing so without being Westernized in a way we would recognize. The political liberalization of the world’s most dynamic capitalist Communist state is always over the horizon. Just as the roots of the modern West go back to the eastern Mediterranean in the early first millennium BC, so China’s cultural roots extend back to the same period. China is obviously a synthesis of its own indigenous traditions, and modern Western culture, in particular science & technology. But I am not convinced that there is a true “brotherhood” between the president of China, and Western powers, and that is not a cheery prospect.

Image Credit: Wikimedia

If you think the stars of Pixar’s Finding Nemo had it rough, spare a thought for the plight of real clownfish. These popular fish may struggle to survive in oceans that are becoming enriched with carbon dioxide. High levels of CO₂ dissolved in the water can muddle a clownfish’s sense of smell, preventing it from detecting both shelter and threats.

Philip Munday from James Cook University has shown that at levels of carbon dioxide within what’s predicted for the end of the century, a clownfish’s ability to sense predators is completely shot. Some larvae become literally attracted to the smell of danger and start showing risky behaviour. It’s not surprise that they die 5-9 times more frequently at the mouths of predators.

The conditions that Munday simulated in his experiment aren’t too far away. Thanks to the carbon dioxide that human activities produce, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are predicted to reach 500 parts per million (ppm) by the middle of this century, and between 730-1020 by its end. Much of this gas dissolves in the oceans, making them more acidic. In the past two centuries, the pH value of the world’s oceans has fallen 100 times faster than any time in the past 650,000 years.

The actual fall in pH values seems quite small – just 0.3-0.4 units, barely visible on a litmus test. But this tiny difference can have a big impact on marine life. It depletes the water of ions that corals and shellfish need to build their shells and reefs. But Munday has shown that fish suffer too. Last year, he showed that when carbon dioxide levels in the water go up, baby clownfish lose their ability to find their way home. Contrary to Finding Nemo, young reef fish grow up in the open ocean, far away from their birthplace. They rely on their sense of smell to swim home, but with that sense baffled by CO₂, they could end up anywhere.

Now, Munday has shown that even if they pass this trial, they still face a higher risk of blindly stumbling into a predator. He reared orange clownfish in water with carbon dioxide at 390 ppm (today’s level) or 550, 700 and 850 ppm (predicted levels in the future). He placed the babies in a straight arm of a Y-shaped tube, with the smell of a predator (a rock cod) wafting down one arm, and the smell of fresh danger-free water coming down the other.

In today’s water, clownfish larvae strongly avoided the smell of the predator. They swam down the dangerous fork just 10% of the time early on in life, and avoiding it completely after 8 days. At 550 ppm of carbon dioxide, they responded in the same way. But at 700 ppm, only half of the larvae stuck to their cautious streak. The others developed a fatal attraction for the predator’s scent, pursuing it around 74-88% of the time. At 850 ppm, things were even worse. The young fish avoided the predator’s smell for just one day, but were strongly drawn to it from then on. After 8 days, every single fish swam towards the dangerous aroma.

Munday showed that another common reef-dweller – Ward’s damselfish – was similarly affected. He caught wild larvae and put them through the same test. They behaved normally until they were kept in water with 700 ppm of carbon dioxide when half of the fish became attracted to predator smells, or 850 ppm when almost all of them became confused.

This confusion proved to be a fatal one. After four days of testing, Munday placed the larvae back into natural enclosed reefs. Compared to fish that were kept in normal water, those that spent time in the CO₂-swamped surroundings were bolder, more active and strayed further away from the reef. And they paid the price for their risky business. Within 30 hours, larvae that were kept in 700 ppm were 5 times more likely to be killed by predators and those kept in 850 ppm were 9 times more likely.

It’s not clear why the young fish are so dramatically affected. It’s possible that CO₂ is part of the chemical profile of a predator’s smell, so higher levels mask the presence of a threat. However, the fact that the fish showed riskier behaviour, and switched from avoiding to preferring the predator smells, tells us something deeper is going on. Munday suggests that the higher CO₂ levels could affect the fishes’ neurons in a way that affects many different abilities – perceiving threats, activity, smell and more.

It’s a mystery for future research. For now, the big question is whether reef fish can adapt to their changing environment. Munday thinks that levels of 700 ppm are close to the threshold that clownfish could adapt to. At those levels, only half of the larvae lived dangerously, which suggests that some individuals have a genetic advantage that keeps their heads straight when carbon dioxide reaches these heights. They are the ones who will prosper in an acidifying ocean.

But at 850 ppm, every single fish was affected. If current trends continue, carbon dioxide concentrations could well reach these levels by 2100 and if that happens, Munday writes, “There seems to be little scope for adaptation… with serious, irreversible consequences for marine biodiversity.”

Reference: PNAS http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1004519107

More on ocean acidification:

• Losing Nemo – acid oceans prevent baby clownfish from finding home
• Corals survive acid oceans by switching to soft-bodied mode
• Climate change squeezes jumbo squid out of oxygen

If the citation link isn’t working, read why here

We’re copying DISCOVER’s other bloggers and calling out to commenters. Here we give you, Discoblog readers, a chance to speak your minds.

Ed Yong on Note Exactly Rocket Science, Carl Zimmer on The Loom, Razib Khan on Gene Expression, Daniel Holz at Cosmic Variance, and Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum on The Intersection want to know who you are, what your background is and what you do…

If you want to shout back with more about you and how you found our little piece of the interwebs, that’s great. Or, feel free to answer to any of these questions:

1) What animal would you never want to be?

2) You can have one superpower, but is has to be based on an iPhone app. What would you choose and why?

3) Name one science acronym that you find questionable.

4) You discover a subatomic particle, new species, or near earth object. You have to name it after a science fiction character or living scientist. What did you find and what did you name it?

Also feel free to just tell us how we’re doing, topics you’re most interested in, or favorite stories from Discoblog past.

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Image: flickr/a2gemma

If you ever read Skepchick, you already know of Surly Amy: skeptic, artist, photographer, and all around cool chick. I’m glad to have her as a friend.

She also creates wonderful critical thinking jewelry she calls Surlyramics. These are ceramic necklaces and other accouterments with skeptical, scientific, and critical thinking phrases and drawings on them. They’re very cool, and wildly popular at meetings I’ve been to.

She and I have teamed up to create a limited edition Surlyramics Bad Astronomy pendant necklace. Each one is hand-formed and painted, and only 200 will be made. Once they’re gone, they’re gone.

The reason we’re doing this is that when you order a Bad Astronomy Surly necklace for $20, half of that will be donated to the American Cancer Society. Our goal is to raise $2000 in honor of my friend Jeff Medkeff, an astronomer and really nice guy — he’s the one who named an asteroid after me, as well as others for other skeptics and scientists. Jeff succumbed to cancer in 2008, and this is our way of letting people know about the good work he did and that his legacy lives on.

We’re trying to raise as much money as we can so that we can announce the total at Dragon*Con in Atlanta this year, which is September 2. These necklaces are honestly really cool — Mrs. BA loves hers — and when you buy one you’re doing a Good Thing. Also, if your order totals more than $50 you get free shipping. Details on how to order are at her site; click a pendant to find out more.

[Note: Amy is making them as this gets posted; if the site says sold out don't fret! She'll be making more and getting them online after TAM 8 finishes on July 12.]

So show off your love of astronomy (bad or otherwise), look cool doing it, and know that you’re helping medical researchers fight cancer. Thanks.

Don’t be fooled by those sinister fangs: For saber-toothed cats, much of the killing power was concentrated in the front limbs.

The long canine teeth that gave the extinct cat its name are an unmistakable feature, protruding from the snarling faces of models in natural history museums everywhere. But while those fangs were deadly, their great length also made them delicate and liable to break if the cat’s prey jostled and writhed in an attempt to escape. Researcher Julie Meachen-Samuels had an idea how such a precarious killing device could have evolved: The cats had incredibly strong front limbs to hold down prey while they used their saber teeth to cut them up.

For a study that appears in the journal PLoS One, the team x-rayed the bones of many saber-toothed cats (Smilodon fatalis), and compared them to a variety of modern-day cats. According to Meachen-Samuels:

Species with longer limbs generally had stronger bones. However, while saber-tooth leg bones fell within the normal range, their arm bones were exceptionally thick for their length. Not only that, their arms also had thicker cortical bone — the dense outer layer that makes bones strong and stiff. “When I looked at Smilodon, I knew they were thicker on the outside than other cats, but I was really shocked at how much thicker they were on the inside as well” [LiveScience].

Previous research showed that the cats would’ve had relatively weak bites, ruling out the kind of aggressive biting and thrashing that animators and filmmakers might image. And determining the thickness and strength of these arm bones reinforces the theory that the saber-toothed preators attacked in a different way than modern cats.

The strong forelimb–sharp tooth combination was perfect for pouncing on prey, pinning it down and quickly gouging its throat. Sabertooths were thus probably good at hunting large animals like bison and camels [Science News].

However, the researchers say, the cats may have been too well adjusted to their killing method. When those large animals died out during the last ice age, the saber-toothed cats’ specialized equipment could have made them unfit to adapt to new prey and doomed them to extinction.

Related Content:
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Saber-Toothed Cats Had Weak Bites
Not Exactly Rocket Science: 2.1 Billion Year Old Fossils, And Arm Wrestling a Saber-Tooth Cat
DISCOVER: Saber-Tooth Tales
DISCOVER: A New Saber-Toothed Cat

Image: Wikimedia Commons / Dantheman

Looking for a midnight snack, you open a Tupperware container. Inside you find not your dinner leftovers, but a nasty cockroach. You stick your hand in.

Welcome to augmented reality psychology. The cockroach in the Tupperware is only in your mind–or your virtual reality goggles–and is part of an exposure therapy technique meant to treat those with extreme phobias.

Though traditional exposure therapy might require a person afraid of elevators to ride one repeatedly, or demand that a person afraid of cockroaches meet one face to bug-eyed face, the mere prospect of such experiences is enough to drive some patients out of therapy.

But perhaps, as described in a small study in Behavior Therapy, an augmented reality cockroach can provide all of the benefits without the ick.

Technology Review blogger Christopher Mims describes the setup, in which virtual cockroaches are inserted into video images of the real world.

“Combined with a camera on the front of the headset, the system allows researchers to show wearers both the real world and realistic cockroaches. The paper reports that the roaches could skitter, wave their antenna, and even change size from small and medium to hideously large.”

In the study, six women underwent a three-hour exposure session with the faux roaches. The hand in the Tupperware scene was a final test, which the study participants passed. Follow up tests over the next year showed that they continued to stay strong against virtual creepy crawlers.

Commenters on the Tech Review blog are already calling for non therapeutic uses, i.e. video-gaming: Duck Hunt meet bug squash.

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Image: flickr / Steve Snodgrass

Shortly after moving, I met a new neighbor on my street. He loves astrophysics and we have similar tastes in books and music. His name isn't Phil, but for the purpose of this post, that's what I'll call him. I like Phil a lot. He's smart and witty with a healthy dose of skepticism. We run into each other often--in part because we both walk our dogs regularly, but also because he's hard to miss: Phil nearly always wears one of those black t-shirts with a large red A across the front to express "where his allegiances lie" (his words). He has three of them that he rotates through each week to avoid doing laundry. They all look just the same. Early on, Phil wanted to know whether I was an atheist too since I'm in science. I explained that I don't like labels because they mainly serve to divide people one way or another. And then we get war, bigotry, genocide, and so on. I told him how I like the way Vonnegut described Humanism and try to behave decently and fairly while here on Earth. "Kurt's up in heaven now," I added. He got the joke. Yesterday I asked why the ...

In April, I noted with sadness the passing of the artist (and friend) John Schoenherr. (His New York Times obituary appeared a few days later.) His son, the artist Ian Schoenherr, has been sifting through his mountain of paintings and other effects, and yesterday he launched a blog to publish interesting things as he comes across them.

It’s a wonderful way to celebrate a wonderful life full of bears, geese, astronauts, and, of course, giant alien sandworms. So check it out!

In a column in the latest edition of Nature, Daniel Sarewitz, co-director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University, takes on the National Academy’s Science Entertainment Exchange (SEE). SEE seeks to enrich and improve the quality of science and the depiction of scientists in movies and TV. (Full disclosure: I sometimes consult for science fiction movies and TV shows through the Exchange.)

Sarewitz takes aim at the SEE’s interest in less stereotyped depictions of scientists by asserting those stereotypes are correct: “as biologist E. O. Wilson … has explained, scientists must work 80 hours a week if they hope to do important research. That doesn’t leave much time for developing social skills or shopping for nice clothes.” This is going to come as a shock to many top scientists I know, who manage to have a social life and dress fashionably all while working significantly less than 80 hours a week. His vision of the socially isolated and perennially unkempt scientist is out of touch, despite what he saw in Back to the Future a quarter-century ago.

Sarewitz believes that scientists are different from cops and morticians because we are “part of an enterprise that is continually transforming society, nature and even humanity in ways that everyone can experience but no one can truly understand.” Because of this fact, Sarewitz says “there’s a naivety bordering on the oblivious in the academy’s efforts to render science and scientists more familiar and palatable through mass entertainment.”

On several levels, this is a bizarre claim. I’ll focus on the most relevant point, which is that the SEE is not about sugar-coating the ultimately inexplicable work (!) of scientists to transform humanity. SEE is enabling story-makers to get to know real working scientists so that their dramatic depictions don’t just trade in stereotypes, but make contact with reality–in some ways more familiar and palatable, in others less so. That means richer characters that have more depth–just as a novelist who goes to the trouble of doing background research on what life as a journalist is like can write about a journalist character with more depth.

Finally, Sarewitz suggests that the aims of the SEE are at odds with the creation of good drama. That to make scientists more realistic and improve the quality of science in movies would sanitize great drama into insipid pedantry. This is the one part of the commentary which might resonate, if only it were true.

Scientists who work with SEE and the creatives that SEE connects them to come together in a collaborative spirit to enrich depictions of science and scientists. They are not there to consult on how a good drama should be constructed–which, as Sarewitz correctly points out, often includes elements of mystery, ambiguity, open-ended questions, and depictions of the kinds of hubris and will to power that affects us all, including scientists. As a consultant for a sci-fi show that is all about the hubris and will to power of scientists who develop robots (the Cylons) that try to annihilate humanity (a prequel to Battlestar Galactica called Caprica), I can make strong assurances on that score. As it should, the job of crafting a good story remains in the hands of the folks who are talented at it, while we stick with what we do well. Entertainment and science are two different worlds, and Sarewitz exhibits a naivety bordering on the oblivious to suggest that the people participating in the meeting of these two worlds aren’t acutely aware of what they bring to the table.

It’s unfortunate that Nature, one of the most widely read periodicals in science, has given Sarewitz a forum for these poorly considered remarks. No approach to improving science literacy in our society is without faults, and we should embrace critical examination of which approaches are the most effective. His piece fails to do so, instead giving voice to his own preconceptions and naivety about the process.

It will take more than a little sun to get one of the world’s biggest solar power plants up and running: it will also require 1,600 workers to build it and a lot of cash. On Saturday, President Obama announced that the U.S. Department of Energy will use last year’s stimulus bill to issue $1.85 billion in loan guarantees to two solar power companies, one of which plans to build one of the planet’s largest solar power plant in Arizona.

Solana, the big solar power plant planned by Abengoa Solar Inc., will cover an area of around 1,900 acres near Gila Bend, Arizona. As detailed in a White House press release, the company claims that the plant will be one of the first in the United States able to store its own power. According to the release, it will also be able to generate 280 megawatts of power—enough energy to run more than 70,000 homes–and will prevent the emission of 475,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year. After construction, the plant will support 85 some permanent jobs, the company claims.

“After years of watching companies build things and create jobs overseas, it’s good news that we’ve attracted a company to our shores to build a plant and create jobs right here in America,” Obama said of Abengoa. . . . “What’s more, over 70 per cent of the components and products used in construction will be manufactured in the USA, boosting jobs and communities in states up and down the supply chain. Once completed, this plant will be the first large-scale solar plant in the US to actually store the energy it generates for later use—even at night.” [Consumer Energy Report]

The other company, Abound Solar Manufacturing, will get $400 million to build two solar-panel manufacturing plants, one in an empty Chrysler supplier factory in Tipton, Indiana. The company estimates that building the two plants will require 2,000 workers and operating them will create 1,500 permanent positions; the company also says it will be first to use a new solar panel technology commercially.

Abound Solar Manufacturing, will manufacture state-of-the-art thin film solar panels, the first time anywhere that such technology has been used commercially. [BBC]

Obama’s focus on the amount of jobs created by each plant comes on the tail of an announcement from the U.S. Labor Department:

Obama coupled his announcement with an acknowledgment that efforts to recover from the recession are slow a day after the Labor Department reported that private hiring in June rose by 83,000. “It’s going to take months, even years, to dig our way out and it’s going to require an all-hands-on-deck effort,” he said. [The Independent]

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