It was three years ago to the day that I wondered out loud whether scientists wore tattoos of their science. The result was a resounding yes, and that yes turned into the Science Tattoo Emporium. And today, I’m pleased to announce, the emporium is going to turn into a book.

The book, tentatively entitled Science Ink, will be published next year by Sterling. The images will be accompanied by some of my own reflections on the tattoos, in which I will unpack the inside jokes and strange histories of the science behind the pictures.

The ultimate purpose of the book, like the Emporium, will be to illustrate the passion that science can inspire. To that end, I also plan to donate a portion of the proceeds from the book to DonorsChoose, a great organization that funds science projects in the classroom.

If you have a tattoo that you’d like me to consider for inclusion for the book, please get in touch. I’ll send you the paperwork and instructions for submission of a book-ready image. I will also be getting directly in touch with people whose tattoos I have already posted here and which I’d like to include in Science Ink. We will need the image and the paperwork back by October 1, 2010.

(P.S.: And for those of you who hate tattoos, no matter how scientifically inspired, stay tuned. I’ll have news of a tattoo-free book in the not-too-distant future.)

Wet. Dry. Wet. Dry. You’d think the moon were a vacuum cleaner infomercial.

A series of studies in the last few years has raised our hopes that the moon is not completely dry—researchers have said that it’s still drier than the driest places on Earth, but some small amount of water ice is there. Then, this afternoon, along comes another study to reassert that the interior of the moon is drier than bone-dry.

For his paper in Science, Zachary Sharp peered into the lunar samples brought back to Earth by the Apollo missions. Where previous studies of those Apollo rocks suggested water ice was locked inside the minerals, Sharp’s assessment focuses on the chlorine in the sample because it could tell him about the moon’s history.

Most scientists think the moon was born when a huge object roaming the inner solar system — something about the size of Mars — smashed into the embryonic Earth. Debris from the collision coalesced to form the moon. As it cooled, an ocean of magma covering its surface began to crystallize. Sharp and his colleagues studied what happened to two isotopes of the element chlorine during that process [Science News].

The two isotopes are chlorine-35 and chlorine-37. What matters is the ratio between them. Here on Earth it’s pretty constant, varying by just about a tenth of a percent. On the moon, Sharp found, the ratio varies wildly—by as much as 25 times the variation seen on Earth.

Chlorine loves to bind to hydrogen, and because of this, you’d expect the chlorine isotope ratios to be pretty constant across the moon if it had been wet way back when.

“Knowing the chlorine content, we can back-calculate the amount of hydrogen,” Sharp said. “We found that the hydrogen content had to be really low, so essentially the moon was extremely dry relative to Earth” [Space.com].

So how do we get these conflicting studies about water on the moon? Sharp argues that they may not truly conflict. His study is about the history of moon—he says that the chlorine study shows it didn’t retain water after it formed. The water that other studies found on the surface may have gotten there through comets impacts. He says:

“There are two types of water on the moon.” The type most people hear about is the stuff hidden in dark craters near the lunar poles, which probably came from comet collisions. “That is completely different from what we’re talking about” [Discovery News].

Related Content:
80beats: Moon May Have 100 Times More Water Than We Thought. How’d We Miss It?
80beats: Tons of Water Ice at the Moon’s North Pole Could Sustain a Lunar Base
DISCOVER: The Moon: Cold, Wet, and Breathing
DISCOVER: Where Did the Moon Come From?

Image: NASA

Not Exactly Pocket Science is a set of shorter write-ups on new stories with links to more detailed takes. It is meant to complement the usual fare of detailed pieces that are typical for this blog.

Spongebob’s genome reveals the secrets of building an animal

Sponges are animals but, outside of children’s cartoons, they’re about as different from humans as you can imagine. These immobile creatures lie on the very earliest branch on the animal family tree. They have no tissues or organs – their bodies are made of just two layers of cells, twisted and folded into simple shapes. But despite this simplicity, the first complete sponge genome tells us a lot about what it takes to build an animal.

The genome was sequenced from an Australian species called Amphimedon queenslandica by a large team of scientists led by Mansi Strivastava from the University of California, Berkeley. It tells us that sponges share a ‘genetic toolkit’ with humans and all other animals. This includes 4,670 families of genes that are universal to all animals, 1,286 of which separate us from our closest single-celled relatives, the choanoflagellates. Within these families lie the keys to a multicellular existence.

This shared toolkit controls all the fundamental processes that allow individual cells to cooperate as part of a single creature, including how to divide, die, grow together, stick to one another, send signals to one another, take up different functions, and tell the difference between each other and outsiders. They also include many genes that are implicated in cancer, a disease where individual cells go rogue and multiply out of control at the expense of the collective. The presence of cancer-related genes in the sponge genome tells us that as long as cells have been cooperating within a single body, they have needed to guard against the threat of cancer.

Srivastava estimates that the foundations of multicellular life were laid between 600 and 800 million years ago. More than a quarter of the big genetic changes that separate humans from the single-celled choanoflagellates took place during this window, before sponges split off from the ancestors of all other animals. The last common ancestor of all animals emerged during this period and it was a creature of remarkable complexity – a multicellular species that could sense, react to and exploit its environment.

Read more from Adam Mann at Nature, Bob Holmes at New Scientist and an earlier post from me on how sponges provide clues to origin of nervous system

Reference: Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature09201; Image by Adamska et al

Holy extinction, Batman! One of America’s most common bats could be wiped out in 16 years by new disease

The little brown bat is one of the most common bats in North America but in 16 years, people on the East Coast will be lucky to see any. The bat is being massacred and the culprit is a new disease known as white-nose syndrome caused by the ominously named fungus Geomyces destructans. The fungus grows on the wings, ears and muzzles of hibernating bats, rousing them too early from their deep sleep, sapping their fat reserves and causing strange behaviour.

White-nose syndrome was first identified in a New York cave in February 2006, but it spreads fast. In the last four years, it has covered over 1200 km and contaminated wintering roosts throughout the north-eastern US and its neighbouring Canadian provinces. In infected areas, the fungus is slaughtering bats at a rate of around 45% a year. Cave floors are littered with carcasses.

Five years ago, the little brown bat was thriving, thanks to the installation of bat boxes, conservation efforts and a reduction in pesticide use. The eastern seaboard alone was home to 6.5 million of them. But all of that good is being undone by a single disease. Using a mathematical model, Winifred Frick from Boston University calculated a 99% chance that the species will become locally extinct within 16 years. Even if the current death rate slows to just 5% a year – a highly optimistic target– the population will still collapse to around 65,000 individuals. These last survivors would be just 1% of the previous total, with a 60% chance of dying off by the end of the century. At this stage, the question isn’t if the little brown bat will go locally extinct, but when.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. White-nose syndrome is spreading across North American and at least six other bat species are affected. These animals eat such a large volume of insects that their disappearance would have severe economic and ecological consequences. There’s a desperate need for more research to understand the disease, to keep a track of it, to find ways of fighting it, and to ensure that something like it doesn’t happen again. Frick thinks that white-nose syndrome spread so quickly with such devastating results that it must have been introduced from another part of the world, hitting species whose immune systems were totally unprepared for it. This problem of “pathogen pollution” is a neglected issue in conservation – perhaps the demise of the little brown bat will provide the impetus to take it seriously.

Read more from Brandon Keim at Wired and more from me on bats and how wind turbines burst their lungs

Reference: Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1188594

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

I’m a Craig Ferguson man, truth be told, but I have to give Jimmy Fallon major props for devoting major time to Milky J this week.

C’mon, you remember Milky J: he’s the Hubble Gotchu guy. He was on Fallon’s show again this week, but this time got some bad news: Hubble will be replaced with the bigger James Webb Space Telescope.

What ensued was simply made of win:

Ha! That was awesome! All those people in the video are actual NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center employees (or contractors; hard to tell). NASA can’t buy this kind of publicity, but here it is, handed to them for free. And I love it! It’s funny and cool, sarcastic yet has this terrific undertone of sincerity. And Holy Haleakala, the science is accurate^*! I loved the part where the team shouts JWST specs at him.

And it doesn’t hurt that one of the pictures Milky J holds up at the beginning is of Supernova 1987A, which was the topic of my PhD research. Still, Hubble being replaced isn’t a bad thing; JWST will still return amazing images, and also be more sensitive than Hubble to boot. Hubble may gotchu, but JWST will hold you tight.

You can also read some cute behind the scenes notes on two blogs: Geeked on Goddard, and NASA Blueshift.

Does attractiveness in men provide clues to semen quality?

“The psychological mechanisms underlying attractiveness judgements in humans are thought to be evolved adaptations for finding a high quality mate. The phenotype-linked fertility hypothesis proposes that females obtain reliable information on male fertility from male expression of sexual traits. A previous study of Spanish men reported that facial attractiveness was positively associated with semen quality. We aimed to determine whether this effect was widespread by examining a large sample of Australian men. We also extended our study to determine whether cues to semen quality are provided by components of attractiveness: masculinity, averageness and symmetry. Each male participant was photographed and provided a semen sample that was analyzed for sperm morphology, motility and concentration. Two independent sets of women rated the male photographs for attractiveness, and three further sets of 12 women rated the photographs for masculinity, symmetry or averageness. We found no significant correlations between semen quality parameters and attractiveness or attractive traits. Although male physical attractiveness may signal aspects of mate quality, our results suggest that phenotype-linked cues to male fertility may not be general across human populations.”

Photo: flickr/Retinafunk

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: OMG! ur cell phone is mkng u impotent.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Pepsi is not a good method of birth control
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: [Insert oral sex joke here].

WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

I notice that Roger L. Simon has an uninformed post up, The Party of the Rich, where he says:

Back when I was a kid, we used to assume the Republicans were the party of the rich. It was a given — all those plutocrats with chauffeurs shuttling them between the penthouse in Sutton Place and the weekend manse in Southampton.

Of course that was pretty idiotic then (a Kennedy was in the White House), but it’s outright moronic now.

There are some isolated data that the super-rich may now be more favorable to Democrats than Republicans, but by and large the classes with capital remain Republican. I looked at the American National Election Studies data set for 2008. Since minorities voted overwhelmingly for Obama I limited the sample to whites. Then I broke it down by income and looked at who they voted for and which party they identified with. The data seem to indicate that Roger L. Simon should not be throwing around terms like “moronic,” as he lives in quite the glass house.

I assume at this point my liberal readers may wonder if there is a vast conservative media conspiracy to create a false model of reality. Perhaps. But I think there’s a less complicated answer: liberal social and economic elites are culturally much more prominent on a day to day level than conservative social and economic elites. By the former I mean the entertainment and media industries. So wealthy liberals may be outnumbered, but they can project their voices and attain greater visibility more easily because they have more friendly operators of the cultural megaphones. In contrast, socially liberal but broadly politically conservative plutocrats such as David Koch generally allow more folksy types such as Dick Armey to speak for them in public.

Also, there’s a weird dichotomy on the Right when it comes to their self-image, and the esteem which the rich and the not-so-rich are held. I attended a Cato Institute event in the early 2000s, and among economic conservatives there was a worry that the public did not understand the critical role that the “producers” played in our society. And yet by contrast there is also an element of the Right which has internalized an almost Marxist frame whereby the economic elites, the holders of capital, are delegitimized as sources of authority. Ergo, the social conservative folksy face of the American Right which takes pride in its petit-bourgeois base.

Note: My own personal sympathies lean with the Right. But I am also extremely turned off by the faux and authentic populism which is currently ascendant. A genuine conservatism accepts hierarchy, distinction of role, a certain authority given to elites and specialists. I understand why cultural conservatives feel that the elites and specialists (technocrats) can not be trusted, but it seems to have gone too far in rejecting the very concept and idea of elites and technical knowledge, welcoming a radical and revolutionary flattening of social orders.

Variables:

Row – v085195 v083097
Column – v083249(r:1-9″-$20 K”;10-14″$20-$40 K”;15-17″$40-$60 K”;18-20″$60-$100 K”;21-*”$100 K+”)
Select – v081102(1)