A few days ago I posted a video by José Francisco Salgado showing the sky over telescopes in Chile.

He’s just put up another one, this time showing the motion of the sky over several observatories: "Sidereal Motion".

Sidereal motion is literally the movement of the stars; the apparent rising and setting caused by the rotation of the Earth. You don’t notice it second-by-second as you watch the sky, but over minutes and hours the inevitability of our planet’s angular momentum makes itself known.

José also has breathtaking images of observatories as well as a website linking to his work. He has an artist’s eye for the heavens, and his creations are truly lovely.

Related posts:

- Happy new year again!
- Amazing wide-angle time lapse night sky video
- Tahoe galaxy
- Awesome timelapse video: Rapture

Credit: Dragon Horse

The Pith: Brazil is often portrayed as the second largest black nation in the world, after Nigeria. But it turns out that the majority of the ancestors for non-white Brazilians are European.

One of the more popular sources of search engine traffic to this website has to do with the population genomics of Latin America. For example, my post showing that Argentina is not quite as European a country as it likes to consider itself is regularly cited in online arguments (people of various “persuasions” are invested in the racial status of the Argentine people). But last week in PLoS ONE a paper looking at the patterns of ancestry in the Brazilian population came to a somewhat inverse conclusion as to the self-conception or perception of the preponderant racial identity of that nation. Let me quote from the conclusion of the paper:

Among the actions of the State in the sphere of race relations are initiatives aimed at strengthening racial identity, especially “Black identity” encompassing the sum of those self-categorized as Brown or Black in the censuses and government surveys. The argument that ...

The Economist reports from this year’s AAAS meeting about a fascinating lecture delivered by the historian of science Lawrence Principe about his quest to figure out the real history of alchemy. Principe has done some impressive work to brush away the Whig history of modern chemistry and understand alchemy on its own terms.

Alchemy is saddled with such a bad reputation that many people don’t appreciate how it played an important role in the birth of modern sciences, such as biochemistry and neurology.

Here’s part of a blog post I wrote in 2006 on this surprising link:

Jan Baptist van Helmont, a sixteenth-century Belgian alchemist, carried out a classic experiment on biological growth. He put a five pound willow sapling in a tube of 200 pounds of earth. For five years he gave the tree nothing but water, and then weighed both tree and earth. The tree had grown to 169 pounds, while the earth had lost a few ounces. “Hence one hundred and sixty-four pounds of wood, bark, and roots have come up from water alone,” he announced. Van Helmont believed that the willow was nothing more than transmuted ...

Since his move to Wired I swear that Dr. Daniel MacArthur has gotten a bit more pugnacious. In any case, today he has a post up which smacks-down the A.M.A.’s attempt to expand the long arm of its regulatory capture:

The American Medical Association has written a letter to the US Food and Drug Administration as part of the lead-up to the FDA’s meeting on direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing next month. The tone is predictable: the medical establishment is outraged by the idea of people having access to their own genetic information without the supervision of its members, and they want the FDA to stop it….

Over the past six months I’ve gotten really into analyzing genotypes of friends & family. Sometimes I talk about this excitedly, and people worry about the “risks.” When I ask what risks they’re worried about, usually people offer the vague and content-free fear of “what you could find out.” First, if you have family information, that’s usually much more powerful than the “disease risk” estimates that these firms are giving you. In 99% of the cases, if that’s your primary concern it’s not worth the money. Second, if you’re terrified about what ancestry inference ...

The effects of binge drinking on college students’ next-day academic test-taking performance and mood state.

“AIM: To assess the effects of binge drinking on students’ next-day academic test-taking performance. DESIGN: A placebo-controlled cross-over design with randomly assigned order of conditions. Participants were randomized to either alcoholic beverage [mean = 0.12 g% breath alcohol concentration (BrAC)] or placebo on the first night and then received the other beverage a week later. The next day, participants were assessed on test-taking, neurocognitive performance and mood state. PARTICIPANTS: A total of 196 college students (>or=21 years) recruited from greater Boston. SETTING: The trial was conducted at the General Clinical Research Center at the Boston Medical Center. MEASUREMENTS: The Graduate Record Examinations(c) (GREs) and a quiz on a lecture presented the previous day measured test-taking performance; the Neurobehavioral Evaluation System (NES3) and the Psychomotor Vigilance Test (PVT) measured neurocognitive performance; and the Profile of Mood States (POMS) measured mood. FINDINGS: Test-taking performance was not affected on the morning after alcohol administration, but mood state and attention/reaction-time were affected. CONCLUSION: Drinking to a level of 0.12 g% BrAC does not affect next-day test-taking performance, but does affect some ...

One of the major issues in our world today is that we’re a people of specialties. This means that we don’t have basic interpretative frameworks in which to place novel facts. Because of the abstruse and formal nature of the discipline, this is probably starkest in the domain of science, but it is not restricted to only science. Consider geography. In many ways this is “low hanging” cognitive fruit in the shallow part of the learning curve which mostly consists of assembly of facts, but because of the shifts in emphases in American education geography has tended to get short shrift. This means that whenever there’s a foreign policy crisis middle-brow journals of record such as The New York Times have to commission pieces about nations such as Libya which read like a “first book” for six year olds on that nation (and on political weblogs commenters proudly brandish their “first book” level of knowledge).

But a bigger general issue seems to be in relation to climate. “Climate Change” is in the news constantly, but the average person on the street seems to have zero historical perspective on events such as the Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age, ...

We know the Bering land bridge that appeared between Alaska and Russia at least 14,000 years ago would have allowed ancient people to cross over into America. But what were those people like? Scant evidence has turned up to reveal their lifestyle, but in the journal Science this week archaeologists report a new find—one that’s simultaneously insightful and a portrait of sadness. Ben Potter and colleagues found an 11,500-year-old house that was apparently the scene of the loss of a child, as the fire pit shows the skeletal remains of a person about three years of age.

The bones are the oldest human remains yet discovered in northern North America, and provide a remarkable glimpse into the lives of the earliest North American settlers…. Older human remains and temporary hunting camps and work sites have been found, but longer-term habitations are rare. Yet the child’s young age – it was about 3 years old – and the type of food remains found at the new site, suggest it was the summer home for a group that comprised at least women and young children. [New Scientist]

The place ...

Last year, Google raised the ire of many when it confessed that its city-mapping Street View vehicles unintentionally gathered unencrypted Wi-Fi data as they rolled past people’s abodes. To fix its image and to fend off lawsuits, the company soon tightened its privacy policies and ensured that its Street View cars stopped collecting that information. But the controversies just won’t stop. Google is now trying to convince privacy-conscious Swiss officials to drop the country’s tight Street View restrictions, while security-conscious Israeli officials are concerned that the technology will help terrorists.

Twenty-seven countries have been partially mapped via Street View, a Google product that provides 360-degree panoramic views from ground level. The company creates these images by sending groups of camera-studded vehicles to various parts of the world to snap pictures as they drive.

Although Switzerland is home to one of Google’s largest offices outside the United States, the country has strict privacy laws that have prevented Google from loading new Street View images of Switzerland for the past year. On Thursday, Google petitioned a Swiss court to lift this ban. The search engine company told Switzerland’s Federal Administrative ...

First there was RoboCup, in which teams of robots kicked soccer balls around indoor fields. And now, as I write these words, five robots are competing in Robo Mara Full, the world’s first marathon for our plastic and metallic friends.

This video shows the competitors in a practice run:

Funded by the city government of Osaka, Japan, and organized by the robotics company Vstone, the race began on Thursday. These robots aren’t exactly speed demons–the winner is expected to finish sometime on Sunday. The race is taking place on an indoor track at Osaka’s Asia-Pacific trade center, a business complex in Osaka. Tto complete the 26.2-mile marathon, the robots will have to make it around the track 422 times.

The competition is a cross between a traditional, human-run marathon and a NASCAR race: The robots must complete the marathon without the help of humans, but the teams are allowed to switch out their robots’ batteries and to make repairs. If you think it’s not fair that the engineers get to repair their robots during the marathon, keep in mind that the time taken for these repairs counts in the racing time.

To warm up for the big race on Thursday, ...

Even with 15 percent of their hearts removed, newborn mice possess the extraordinary ability to mend themselves, researchers report today in the journal Science. It’s the first time that mammals outside of the womb have shown the regenerative ability to repair the heart.

Only newborn mice could regenerate part of their hearts, and they lost this ability after about a week after birth. Still, the results were quite impressive: Olson’s team removed 15 percent of the heart one day after birth, and when the researchers checked up three weeks later, the whole heart was repaired in 99 percent of the mice. Until now, scientists had seen fish and amphibians regenerate heart tissue as adults, but only embryonic mammals had been spotted doing the same.

“When a person has a heart attack and heart muscle cells are lost, the heart loses pump function, causing heart failure and eventual death,” said Eric Olson, a molecular biologist at Southwestern Medical Centre in Dallas, Texas. “Now that we know that the mammalian heart indeed possesses the potential to regenerate, ...

Meet our newest potential weapon against malaria – a fungus loaded with a chemical found in scorpion venom. Metarhizium anisopliae is a parasitic fungus that infects a wide variety of insects, including the mosquitoes that spread malaria. Their spores germinate upon contact and the fungus invades the insect’s body, slowly killing it. Now, Weiguo Fang from the University of Maryland has modified the fungus to target the malaria parasites lurking inside the mosquitoes.

Fang loaded the fungus with two chemicals that attack the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum. The first is a protein called SM1 that prevents the parasites from attaching to the mosquito’s salivary glands. By blocking Plasmodium‘s path, SM1 stops the parasite from travelling down the mosquito’s mouthparts into the people it bites. The second chemical is scorpine – a toxic protein wielded by the emperor scorpion, which kills both bacteria and Plasmodium. This double whammy of biological weapons slashed the number of parasites in mosquito saliva by 98%.

Fang’s group is one of many who are trying to exploit fungi in the battle against malaria. These efforts are sorely needed. For decades, insecticides have been the mainstays of malaria control but mosquitoes have increasingly evolved to resist them. With few new chemicals on the horizon, biological weapons like fungi could be a decent replacement.

Fungal spores can be sprayed on surfaces, cloth and nets, where they can stay for months. Mosquitoes don’t need to ingest the spores to become infected. All it takes is a touch for the spores to germinate and penetrate the insect. In 2005, a British duo – Matt Thomas and Andrew Read – managed to kill more than 90% of malarial mosquitoes by spraying the fungi on surfaces. They reduced the number of insects that could transmit the disease by 80 times.

Later, Willem Takken from Wageningen University found that the fungi can also kill insecticide-resistant mosquitoes. They even make the insects vulnerable to insecticides once again. And just last week, Takken’s group used the fungal spores to kill mosquito larvae, which swim at the surface of stagnant water. They used a synthetic oil to spread the spores over the water. Compared to untreated spores, these oily ones halved the proportion of larvae that turned into adults.

So if natural fungi are so potent, why bother tweaking them? It’s all in the timing. The fungi need around two weeks to finish off a mosquito. It takes that long for malaria parasites to mature and enter the insect’s salivary glands, where they can move to another host. If the mosquitoes are infected with fungi soon after they pick up Plasmodium, they’ll die before they can pass them on. If they’re infected any later, they could still spread malaria before dying.

It’s possible to alter the fungus so it kills mosquitoes more quickly but this approach has its own problems. At the moment, the fungus only kills old mosquitoes, so it doesn’t really affect their chances of producing young. As a result, there’s little pressure on them to evolve resistance. That could change if the fungus starts killing mosquitoes earlier.

What you really want is a fungus that kills mosquitoes as slowly as the natural versions, but that stops them from passing on the malaria parasite in the meantime. That’s exactly what Fang created. He genetically engineered strains of the fungus to carry either SM1 (short for “salivary and midgut peptide 1”), scorpine, or a fusion of the two. He got the best results by pairing the fusion protein with pure scorpine. The latter killed the parasites outright, and the former prevented the few survivors from reaching the salivary glands.

The fungi slashed the insect’s ability to spread Plasmodium by five times, even if their malaria infections were very advanced. They successfully prevented the parasites from spreading while the host slowly died. But Takken isn’t convinced that this “interesting strategy” will do much good. “[It] would only be advantageous if one wants an immediate transmission-blocking effect. In practice, that will rarely be necessary,” he says. It might help against viral infections like yellow fever, which are also carried by mosquitoes but which spread more quickly than malaria.

Nor are the modified fungi without risks. M.anisopliae is fairly indiscriminate and can infect a variety of insects. In some ways, that’s promising because it could also be used to control tsetse flies, which spread sleeping sickness, and other species of mosquito that carry dengue fever and filariasis. On the other hand, the fungus could kill beneficial insects too. Fang thinks it should be possible to restrict the fungus to certain insect species by loading them with targeted antibodies.

Takken is also concerned about using a genetically engineered fungus. “I believe that it’s too early for such strategies as long as we have good methods for fungal mosquito control that do not require engineered fungal strains.” Read, now at Pennsylvania State University, has similar concerns. “We have so far barely scratched the surface of what is possible with natural fungal variation,” he says.

However, Read thinks that the modified fungus has potential. “The approach is very practical: fungal biopesticides are already produced and used in Africa for locust control,” he says. “Will the public be OK with having a GM product sprayed in their houses?” he asks. “My own view on this is that they should be. Up against malaria, hypothetical concerns about GM pale.”

Read says that the biggest hurdle is a lack of interest from funders, who are focused on chemical insecticides. “It remains to be seen whether they can be persuaded to take biologics seriously. Perhaps this paper will help, although great ideas and great data, and even papers in Science, have not so far proved sufficient.”

Reference: Fang, Vega-Rodriguez, Ghosh, Jacobs-Lorena, Kang & St Leger. 2011. Development of Transgenic Fungi That Kill Human Malaria Parasites in Mosquitoes. Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1199115

Image from Rob Graham and Jon Darbro

More on malaria:

• Size matters for mosquitoes but medium-sized males do better
• Genetically-modified mosquitoes fight malaria by outcompeting normal ones
• One parasite to rule them all – Wolbachia protects against mosquito-borne diseases
• Beer makes humans more attractive to malarial mosquitoes
• One jump from gorillas to humans – the origin of malaria

Two bits of anti-medicine news, both from the United States northwest, and both dealing with difficult situations:

1) In Oregon, lawmakers are making it harder for people to use religion as an excuse to avoid medical treatment. The Followers of Christ, a fringe Christian group, advocates faith healing and not standard medicine, and as a result several children in that group have died in recent years. Because of this, a bill has been introduced into the Oregon state legislature to remove religious belief as a defense against homicide. If convicted, a parent whose child has died because they used faith healing instead of real medicine will be charged with homicide and have a mandatory sentence.

Stories like this always leave me conflicted. As a parent myself I always want the best possible medical treatment for my child, and I don’t want other groups interfering with that decision. However, the State has a right to protect the best interests of that child in case the parent cannot. Decades worth of evidence has shown that faith healing does not work, and in many cases the children in the Followers of Christ church had easily treatable illnesses and needn’t ...

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In 1996, a loggerhead turtle called Adelita swam across 9,000 miles from Mexico to Japan, crossing the entire Pacific on her way. Wallace J. Nichols tracked this epic journey with a satellite tag. But Adelita herself had no such technology at her disposal. How did she steer a route across two oceans to find her destination?

Nathan Putman has the answer. By testing hatchling turtles in a special tank, he has found that they can use the Earth’s magnetic field as their own Global Positioning System (GPS). By sensing the field, they can work out both their latitude and longitude and head in the right direction.

Putman works in the lab of Ken Lohmann, who has been studying the magnetic abilities of loggerheads for over 20 years. In his lab at the University of North Carolina, he places hatchlings in a large water tank surrounded by a large grid of electromagnetic coils. In 1991, he found that the babies started swimming in the opposite direction if he used the coils to reverse the direction of the magnetic field around them. They could use the field as a compass to get their bearing.

Later, Lohmann showed that they can also use the magnetic field to work out their position. For them, this is literally a matter of life or death. Hatchlings born off the coast of Florida spend their early lives in the North Atlantic gyre, a warm current that circles between North America and Africa. If they’re swept towards the cold waters outside the gyre, they die. Their magnetic sense keeps them safe.

Using his coil-surrounded tank, Lohmann could mimic the magnetic field at different parts of the Earth’s surface. If he simulated the field at the northern edge of the gyre, the hatchlings swam southwards. If he simulated the field at the gyre’s southern edge, the turtles swam west-northwest. These experiments showed that the turtles can use their magnetic sense to work out their latitude – their position on a north-south axis. Now, Putman has shown that they can also determine their longitude – their position on an east-west axis.

He tweaked his magnetic tanks to simulate the fields in two positions with the same latitude at opposite ends of the Atlantic. If the field simulated the west Atlantic near Puerto Rico, the turtles swam northeast. If the field matched that on the east Atlantic near the Cape Verde Islands, the turtles swam southwest. In the wild, both headings would keep them within the safe, warm embrace of the North Atlantic gyre.

Before now, we knew that that several animal migrants, from loggerheads to reed warblers to sparrows had some way of working out longitude, but no one knew how. By keeping the turtles in the same conditions, with only the magnetic fields around them changing, Putman clearly showed that they can use these fields to find their way. In the wild, they might well also use other landmarks like the position of the sea, sun and stars.

Human sailors also worked out how to measure longitude, as described in Dava Sobel’s bestselling book. They relied on an accurate clock created by the Englishman John Harrison, which allowed them to compare the time of day at a given location with that at a distant place. Every hour of difference represented fifteen degrees of longitude.

But we know that turtles don’t use a similar time-based method because Putman didn’t test them under different conditions of light or dark. His hatchlings had no way of telling what time it was. Indeed, to use a time-based map in the wild, the turtles would need to have an internal clock that stayed set at Florida time for their entire 3-15 year migration.

Instead, Putman thinks that the turtles work out their position using two features of the Earth’s magnetic field that change over its surface. They can sense the field’s inclination, or the angle at which it dips towards the surface. At the poles, this angle is roughly 90 degrees and at the equator, it’s roughly zero degrees. They can also sense its intensity, which is strongest near the poles and weakest near the Equator. Different parts of the world have unique combinations of these two variables. Neither corresponds directly to either latitude or longitude, but together, they provide a “magnetic signature” that tells the turtle where it is.

Scientists often talk about a magnetic “map”, but the animals aren’t necessarily using any sort of mental chart. As with all research in magnetic senses, it’s very hard to work out what the animal is actually sensing or thinking. But that can be a bonus. “It might be good because I don’t have any preconceived notions about how animals like turtles use magnetic information,” says Putman.” I can let the turtles tell me what they can respond to without imposing any personal expectations on them!”

We do, however, know that they have their super-sense from birth. Putman’s turtles had never been in the ocean before and their magnetic sense doesn’t depend on experience. Indeed, Lohmann’s previous experiments showed that even newly hatched loggerheads can react correctly to different magnetic fields.

These studies weren’t easy. Putman says, “The loggerheads we use are a threatened species, so we have to be extra careful with all of them. We use newly hatched turtles for these studies, so we work with them and release them at night. We try to design really short experiments and house them for no more than a couple of hours before letting them go. [It] makes for rushed data collection!”

For Lohmann, these tribulations are worth it. After spending graduate school on spiny lobsters and sea slugs (two animals that also have magnetic senses), he had an opportunity to study young loggerheads. “I thought it was worth a try to see if turtles could detect magnetic fields. I figured that after the two-year project was over, I would get back to the invertebrates,” says Lohmann. “That was 23 years ago, and I’m still studying turtles. Each time we think we have it all figured out, the turtles show us that we have missed something important.”

Reference: Putman, Endres, Lohmann & Lohmann. 2011. Longitude Perception and Bicoordinate Magnetic Maps in Sea Turtles. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2011.01.057

More on magnetic senses:

• Foxes use the Earth’s magnetic field as a targeting system
• How birds see magnetic fields – an interview with Thorsten Ritz
• How birds see magnetic fields – an interview with Klaus Schulten
• Robins can literally see magnetic fields, but only if their vision is sharp

One day you might not have to ask someone to lend a helping hand–because you’ll have a third arm of your own. At least, that’s a possible application of a mental trick scientists performed on 154 healthy volunteers: These men and women were made to feel as if they had three arms.

To pull off this ruse, the researchers placed a prosthetic arm next to a volunteer’s two real arms, and they touched the subject’s right hand and the rubber hand in exactly the same place at the same time. Because the taps were synchronized, the volunteer’s brain was tricked into feeling them both. According to Science Daily:

“What happens then is that a conflict arises in the brain concerning which of the right hands belongs to the participant’s body,” says Arvid Guterstam, one of the scientists behind the study. “What one could expect is that only one of the hands is experienced as one’s own, presumably the real arm. But what we found, surprisingly, is that the brain solves this conflict by accepting both right hands as part of ...

Scientific American has a good rundown of a debate that occurred over climate change, denial, and scientific literacy at the recent AAAS meeting. Essentially, panelists were trying to cope with multi-causal nature of the climate misinformation problem–is it politics, institutionalized denialism, media irresponsibility, scientific illiteracy, poor science education, poor science communication, or what? Here’s an excerpt from the SciAm piece:

Poll after poll, and even late night TV talk shows, seem to revel in Americans’ ignorance of basic scientific facts, including the fundamentals of physics and biology.

Is this “science information deficit model” then the reason for our failure to accept climate change? Naomi Oreskes, a University of California, San Diego, science historian rejected that hypothesis during one of the sessions on denialism. “It’s quite clear there are many highly educated people who do not accept global warming,” she said. Still, scientists “must communicate climate science as clearly and effectively and robustly as we can,” she added.

The current political and cultural context drive the nation’s denialism around climate change, evolution and vaccines, said Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, during a session. Education and scientific literacy and general intelligence levels are not causing the problem.

Meanwhile, most Americans in fact are ignorant of the facts of climate science and even “confuse climate change with the ozone hole,” Schmidt remarked. The processes around the latter’s disappearance are related to global warming but “how is that a basis for having any sensible conversation?” he asked.

Do you see how many factors are rolling around here? And elsewhere in the article, the role of the media is dragged in, as is the role of poor science communication by scientists.

My answer to this problem–and of course, the answer provided in Unscientific America–is that all of the causes listed above, and listed in the SciAm article, are indeed operating to varying degrees. And for precisely that reason, it’s very important not to fall into the trap of thinking that education and greater literacy are some kind of solution on their own.

After all, this is a highly politicized subject–and that politicization will override calm reasoning no matter how much people do or don’t know about the topic.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work to improve science education, or increase science literacy, because these are valuable for many reasons. We just shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking such steps will solve our problems.

Sandfish lizards jostle back and forth, bending their bodies into a slithery S-curve to swim through the sands of the Sahara. Like scorpions and several other native desert species, they long ago mastered the difficult art of moving through the myriad grains of a sandy expanse to escape predators or the blistering African sun. And now physicists are close to cracking their secrets.

Daniel Goldman’s team has been trying to figure out just how the sandfish lizards do it for years now; in 2009 they built a robot to simulate the creature’s slithering motion. This time, for a study in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, the scientists tried to model the physics of an animal knocking around so many grains of sand and see how the lizards burrow with such efficiency.

The team found sine-wave-like movement allows the lizard, and their robot, to push forward in sand, but creating computer models for the experiments proved problematic. Simulating all of the tiny sand grains required a lot of money to purchase time on powerful computers. So, the team performed the same experiments using 3-millimeter-wide glass beads instead of sand. “We wanted something ...

Behold the Japanese white-eye, considered an invasive species in its new home in Hawaii. Yet the bird does something that conservation biologists might considered useful for sustaining ecosystems: it spreads the seeds of native Hawaiian plants. Get rid of the Japanese white-eye, and you get rid of its service.

In Yale Environment 360 this morning, I take a look at a controversial proposal that’s making its way into the peer-reviewed biology literature: some introduced species are actually beneficial. I wrote about the complicated relationship between non-native species and biodiversity a couple years ago in the New York Times. In my new article, I focus on two new papers (here and here) in which scientists are advancing these ideas further. Reconsidering exotic species is just one part of a bigger vision they’re offering: in a human-dominated world, we will often have to give up the idea of restoring ecosystems to a pre-human state; instead, we should focus on ensuring the ecosystems are as resilient as possible, because they’re going to be facing even tougher times in years to come.

As one of the scientists say, the idea is now edgy, ...

I’m sometimes asked what’s the one thing I wish people would understand better about the Universe. My answer is always the same: scale. We humans have a miserable sense of just how big space is, and I’ve spent a lot of time over the years working out ways to express it better.

Most people don’t really grasp just how far away the Moon is, and it’s the closest astronomical object in the sky! So I’m glad this video came out, and is actually getting spread around the web a bit:

When I see something like this, my first reaction is: I’d better check that math. So, first question: is the basketball/tennis ball size ratio the same as for the Earth/Moon? IN other words, if the Earth is a basketball, does a tennis ball get the size of the Moon right?

The Earth is 12,740 km (7900 miles) across, and the Moon 3474 km (2150 miles) in diameter, for a ratio of 3.7.

A standard NBA basketball is 24 cm (9.4 inches) in diameter, and a tennis ball 6.7 cm (2.6 inches), for a ratio of 3.6. Pretty good! I’ll have to remember that; it’s pretty useful.

So how far away ...

In response to my post yesterday, a reader and Facebook friend pointed me to at least one clear example of a conservative intellectual arguing that a desire to preserve “cultural continuity” does predispose those on his side of the spectrum negatively towards some aspects of science. Here’s Yuval Levin, author of the book Imagining the Future: Science and American Democracy:

Q: Your new book is all about science and ideology. How would you describe the differences in how the left and the right look at science?

Levin: The book is about what we can learn about our politics from the science debate. Science is a useful clarifying lense to look at our politics because it brings to the surface things that are often implicit and under the surface. And some of them really point to deep differences between the right and the left, especially in terms of how we look at the future. The right tends to think of the future in terms of generations and maintaining continuity, and the left tends to think of the future in terms of innovations.

Q: Jerry Coyne said in our interview that the right is more hostile than the left to scientific thinking because the right is more religious. Would you consider that an oversimplification?

Levin: I think so, but it’s not simply wrong. There’s another level beneath it. I don’t think it’s being religious that explains why the right thinks a certain way about science. I think it’s an attitude the right has toward cultural continuity. That makes a big difference. It’s also why the right tends to be more open toward religion. On those issues where the right has a problem with science, it usually arises when science poses some kind of threat to what conservatives see as the imperative of cultural continuity, whether it’s at the juncture of generations or around society’s ability to present a picture of its own past, an argument about morals and values.

So it’s easy to see why a hard-line scientific worldview that doesn’t allow other kinds of questions to be asked and answered would strike the right as a problem. I don’t think religion is necessarily the reason for this.

So this is pretty interesting. We have at least one conservative intellectual going along with the view that it is the dynamism of science, its constant generation of new innovation and possibilities, that sits better with the left than the right–because the left is out there reveling in the shock of the new, while the right (these are generalizations, of course) looks aghast at what will happen to old systems and ways of doing things. Moreover, we have a close connection being drawn between the desire to preserve “cultural continuity” and the power of religiosity on the right.

But of course, this does not work very well to explain all those secular, technophile libertarians who think we ought to be living on Mars by now.

[Incidentally, Levin also says something pretty unbelievable in this interview: With regard to the Bush administration and climate science, he remarks, "I never saw anything that struck me as a deliberate effort to keep information from the public." Did he read the newspapers?]