Yesterday, the Universe just got a little bit more accessible: about 57% of the WISE mission’s infrared data of the sky has been released and can be searched online. Instructions on how to tap into that archive are available as well.

WISE mapped the entire sky in the infrared and found a treasure trove of fantastic objects (see Related Posts at the bottom of this post). As part of the news of this data release, NASA put up an image I hadn’t seen before, and it’s really amazing: the Lambda Orionis Nebula:

[Click to ennebulanate, but do it with care: the high-res version is a whopping 15,800 by 14,700 pixels and weighs in at 25 MB!]

It may look entirely alien, but you’ve probably seen this part of the sky before. See that blue star in the lower left? That’s Betelgeuse! Marking Orion’s shoulder, Betelgeuse is a red supergiant, destined one day to go supernova. It looks blue in this image because WISE sees in the infrared, and uses false colors. What’s colored blue in the image is actually light at a wavelength ...

This is a datum which you can dine out on, The Bias You Didn’t Expect:

It turns out that legal realism is totally wrong. It’s not what the judge had for breakfast. It’s how recently the judge had breakfast. A a new study (media coverage) on Israeli judges shows that, when making parole decisions, they grant about 65% after meal breaks, and almost all the way down to 0% right before breaks and at the end of the day (i.e. as far from the last break as possible). There’s a relatively linear decline between the two points.

“The present study assessed the effect of negative information on perception of attractiveness of smiling and nonsmiling targets by undergraduate men and women. Analysis indicated that smiling faces were rated more attractive than nonsmiling faces, consistent with previous research. There was a significant interaction of participants’ sex and target description, in which women rated smiling faces less attractive after exposure to negative information about the target, but men rated smiling faces more attractive after exposure to negative information. Results are discussed in terms of an affective model of perception of people.”

Bonus excerpt from the text:

“The six negative descriptions for each target consisted of one of the following statements: “Convicted of insider trading on the stock market,” “Commits adultery on a regular basis,” “Alcoholic with anger management issues,” “Addicted to child’s Ritalin medication,” “Addicted to gambling after cashing paycheck,” and “Convicted of petty theft of expensive jewelry.”…

When a negative social or individual stigma was present, women evaluated the targets as less attractive, regardless of facial expression. To a certain extent, this corroborated with the research of Ferree and Smith (1979) and Kowner (1998), but it is only applicable to women. ...

Several people have emailed/tweeted at me about the new paper in Science, Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa:

Human genetic and phenotypic diversity declines with distance from Africa, as predicted by a serial founder effect in which successive population bottlenecks during range expansion progressively reduce diversity, underpinning support for an African origin of modern humans. Recent work suggests that a similar founder effect may operate on human culture and language. Here I show that the number of phonemes used in a global sample of 504 languages is also clinal and fits a serial founder–effect model of expansion from an inferred origin in Africa. This result, which is not explained by more recent demographic history, local language diversity, or statistical non-independence within language families, points to parallel mechanisms shaping genetic and linguistic diversity and supports an African origin of modern human languages.

Though there are major differences between biological evolution, constrained by relatively regular forms of inheritance, and cultural evolution, which is much more potentially protean, I think that there is great potential for unity of model and process. That is why I read A Replicated Typo (and presumably why several of the contributors ...

The asteroid 2011 GP59 is a small rock with an orbit that takes it from just inside the orbit of Venus to just outside that of the Earth. On April 15th at around 19:00 UTC, it’ll cruise by us at a distance of about 533,000 kilometers (330,000 miles) — farther away than the Moon. This asteroid poses no threat to us, but because it does get relatively close, amateur astronomers have been able to capture it in their telescopes.

In fact, Nick James of Chelmsford, Essex, England, took a series of images on April 11, 2011 and made this video:

You may have to watch it more than once; the asteroid starts in the center of the frame and moves to the lower right. The stars appear to move as the telescope tracks the asteroid, so it can be tricky.

See how the asteroid appears to wink on and off? It’s spinning as it orbits the Sun, and must have an elongated shape. When we see the side of it we see a bigger area, which means it reflects more light and it looks brighter. When the narrow part is pointed toward us the area ...

Rock of Gibraltar

In The Humans Who Went Extinct the author makes much of the fact that Neandertals obviously lacked skill at crossing the water, insofar as their range was constricted by barriers to their south in Iberia. This sort of issue is kind of confusing to me, insofar as it seems probable that very ancient humans did make water crossings of a more arduous nature in Southeast Asia, if the Hobbits finds are valid.

I don’t really know what to think about the general issue of water crossings, but it does seem that the short distance between North Africa and Iberia has had a big impact. Bodies of water tend to serve as a major check on conventional gene flow between adjacent populations, because they limit “casual encounters.” An analogy can be made with the inbreeding coefficients in the mountainous regions of southern Italy. They were rather high until modern transportation made travel between isolated regions much easier, because the typical peasant simply wasn’t likely to venture far, or have a social network which would span valleys (rather, often the minimal transit avenues tended to lead back to ...

Snowball the dancing, Backstreet Boys-loving cockatoo is more than a web meme: he is a scientific conundrum. Bobbing in time to music is a shockingly rare behavior, and even monkeys, capable of learning very complex tasks, find it impossible to get down to the beat even after more than a year of training. It’s marvelous evolutionary serendipity that humans dance, thinks neurobiologist Aniruddh Patel, who has found that our hearing system and motor control are intimately linked. In DISCOVER’s 2011 special issue on the brain, Patel discusses his idea that that animals needed a vocal-learning brain in order to get their groove on:

The implication is that dogs and cats can never do it, horses and chimps can never do it, but maybe other vocal-learning species can do it. I proposed that idea, but it was purely hypothetical until a few years after, when along came Snowball [in 2007].

But more importantly (drumroll), he issues a challenge:

If your pet really does have rhythm, he wants to know about it. “If someone has a dog that can dance to the beat, it will totally refute my hypothesis,” he says, “and that’s progress in ...

You know, over the past couple of years I’ve compared Saturn’s moon Mimas to the Death Star, an egg, Pac Man, and even now Rick Astley. But while I was prepping the image for that last one yesterday, it suddenly hit me that yet another comparison was in order.

I’ll just leave it here without comment…

… except to say that finding an image of Kenny from the side was almost impossible. At least one where he was still alive.

Today, I’m in Orono, Maine, for the National Science Foundation’s “Science: Becoming the Messenger” workshop. I’m demonstrating blogging before the group in plenary session, and as at the last workshop, we’re live blogging a crowd-sourced limerick about the subject of science communication. I gave them the first line–”There once was a workshop in Maine”–and this is what they came up with:

There once was a workshop in Maine:
The message delivered was plain.
If you want to inform ‘em
And you don’t want to bore ‘em
Use the triangle and get the right frame.

As dramatic fossils go, it’s hard to beat the Mongolian fighting dinosaurs – a Velociraptor and a Protoceratops locked in mortal combat. The Protoceratops, an early horned dinosaur, has the raptor’s arm in its mouth, and the raptor appears to be kicking its prey in the neck. The two combatants were killed in this pose, around 75 million years ago. And according to a new study, they probably met and died sometime around dawn or dusk.

Most dinosaur reconstructions portray the animals walking about in bright sunlight but of course, we know that living animals are active at all times of the day. The diurnal ones prefer the daylight hours, while nocturnal species haunt the night. Crepuscular animals favour twilight hours, while cathemeral ones are active in short bursts throughout the day.

It’s easy enough to work out which group a living animal falls into, but the task becomes far more difficult if the animal in question is extinct. With the exception of tracks, burrows or other trace fossils, behaviour doesn’t fossilise easily. But Lars Schmitz and Ryosuke Motani have developed a clever way of working out when ...

Last weekend I was in NYC attending the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism, aka NECSS. It was a lot of fun, as I kinda figured it would be. Skeptic conferences usually are! And of course it was a chance to catch up with a lot of old friends.

Attendees are writing their opinions of the meeting all over the place (like here, here, and here for starters). I’ll spare you the recap, which would boil down to how awesome my talk was, and cut to the chase which is to thank Michael Feldman from the New York City Skeptics, and all the folks from the New England Skeptical Society for inviting me and throwing such a fab conference.

I’d be remiss, though, if I didn’t include this little bit of funnery. Skeptical singer songwriter and BA friend George Hrab was at NECSS. On Geo’s last album, "Trebuchet", he wrote a tune called "Death from the Skies" — based on the brilliant book of the same name. He plays the funky beat, and I read statistics of getting killed by various astronomical events. We performed this song ...

Here in the Era of (Attempted) Dark Matter Detection, new results just keep coming in. Some are tantalizing, some simply deflating. Count this one in the latter camp.

The XENON100 experiment is a detector underneath the Gran Sasso mountain in Italy (NYT article). It’s a very promising experiment, and they’ve just released results from their most recent run. Unlike some other recent announcement, this one is pretty straightforward: they don’t see anything.

Here we see the usual 2-dimensional dark matter parameter space: mass of the particle is along the horizontal axis, while its cross-section with ordinary matter is along the vertical axis. Anything above the blue lines is now excluded. This improves upon previous experimental limits, and calls into question the possible claimed detections from DAMA and CoGeNT. (You can try to invent models that fit these experiments while not giving any signal at XENON, but only at the cost of invoking theoretical imagination.) See Résonaances or Tommaso Dorigo for more details.

No need to hit the panic button yet — there’s plenty of parameter space yet to be explored. That grey blob in the bottom right is a set of predictions from a restricted class of supersymmetric models (taking into account recent LHC limits). So it’s not like we’re finished yet. But it is too bad. This run of XENON had a realistic shot of actually finding the dark matter. It could be harder to detect than we had hoped, or it could very well be something with an extremely small cross-section, like an axion. The universe decides what’s out there, we just have to dig in and look for it.

As a fish swims over the ocean floor, it’s being watched by hundreds of rocks. The rocks are actually the eyes of a chiton, an armoured relative of snails and other molluscs. Perhaps uniquely among living animals, it sees the world through lenses of limestone, and its eyes literally erode as it gets older.

Chitons are protected by a shell consisting of eight plates. The plates are dotted with hundreds of small eyes called ocelli. Each one contains a layer of pigment, a retina and a lens. People have known about the ocelli for years, but no one knew what they were made from or how much the chitons could actually see with them.

Daniel Speiser from the University of California, Santa Barbara has solved the mystery by studying the charmingly named West Indian fuzzy chiton. It all started with a surprising bath. Speiser had removed the lenses from a chiton and dipped them in a mildly acidic liquid, which was meant to clean them. Instead, it quickly dissolved them!

The vast majority of animal lenses are made of proteins, which should be unharmed by weak acid. The chiton lenses were ...

I’ll be speaking tomorrow at SUNY Plattsburgh on the occasion of the publication of the new edition of Parasite Rex. I’ll be talking about the many ways in which parasites have infiltrated my mind since the book first came out a decade ago. I hope some Loominaries will be able to attend, and be infiltrated as well.

Where: SUNY Plattburgh, Plattsburgh NY. Room 206, Yokum Hall. (Directions and campus map)

When: Friday, April 15, 12:15 pm.

More details here.

What’s the News: Geologists have known for years that tectonic plates affect climate patterns. Now they say that the opposite is also true, finding that intensifying climate events can move tectonic plates. Using models based on known monsoonal and plate movement patterns, geologists say that the Indian Plate has accelerated by about 20% over the past 10 million years. “The significance of this finding lies in recognising for the first time that long-term climate changes have the potential to act as a force and influence the motion of tectonic plates,” Australian National University researcher Giampiero Iaffaldano told COSMOS.

How the Heck:

The researchers plugged information from research on monsoonal patterns and the Indian Plate’s movement into a model, which indicated that the monsoonal erosion that has battered the eastern Himalaya Mountains for the past 10 million years erodes enough material to account for the plate’s counter-clockwise rotation. By gradually shaving off rocks from the eastern flank and decreasing crustal thickness, the monsoonal rains essentially lighten the load on the ...

An interview with me is running on the latest episode of “Consilience,” a podcast on science and skepticism out of South Africa. The conversation, which takes up the second half of the podcast, covers lots of ground. We talked about my new book, A Planet of Viruses, the secret weapons whales use for fighting cancer, and the enduring, tiresome mistake people make of thinking of bloggers as angry children. Check it out.

Perusing Google Earth’s quilt of aerial images is good for hours of stalkerish fun (Find your house! Find your ex’s house!). But every now and then, Google’s geo toy can also bend the fabric of reality—literally:

Something’s wrong with this picture…

Get ready for a bumpy ride!

Artist and programmer Clement Valla has discovered 60 strange, beautiful scenes where Google Earth’s mapping has gone awry, as you may have seen in a post on Boing Boing. So what’s really happening in these pictures? Here’s Valla’s explanation:

The images are the result of mapping a 2-dimensional image onto a 3-dimensional surface. Basically, the satellite images are flat representations in which you only see the topmost object—in this case you see the bridge, and not the landmass or water below the bridge. However, the 3D models in Google Earth contain only the information for the terrain–the landmass or the bottom of the ocean.

When the flat image is projected onto this 3-dimensional surface, the bridges are projected down onto the terrain below the bridge. In other words, the bridge appears to follow the terrain that it actually goes over.

The view is further complicated ...

What’s the News: Japan raised its assessment of the severely damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to Level 7, “Major Accident,” the highest ranking on the International Atomic Energy Agency’s International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale. The explosion at Chernobyl in 1986 is the only other nuclear accident to be ranked at Level 7. Both accidents were extremely severe, the two largest nuclear power accidents ever—but there are some big, important differences between them.

What’s Similar:

A Level 7 accident is a “major release of radioactive material with widespread health and environmental effects requiring implementation of planned and extended countermeasures,” according to the IAEA. Both plants clearly meet these criteria: Fukushima will require an extensive clean-up effort, and the international community is still working to make the area near Chernobyl safe.
The situation at Fukushima also qualifies as Level 7 by the numbers. Japanese officials estimate the reactors have released between 370,000 and ...

At the end of May, 2010, the European Space Agency’s orbiting Herschel telescope was pointed toward a dark cloud in space over 2500 light years away. What it saw may solve a bit of a scientific mystery… and is also truly beautiful:

[Click to ennebulanate.]

This object is called IC5146, and consists of the Cocoon nebula on the left, and two long streamers of gas extending to the right. Herschel is very sensitive to cold dust in the very far infrared; in this image blue shows gas and dust emitting at a wavelength of 70 microns (the reddest color the human eye can see is roughly 0.7 microns), green is 250 microns, and red 500 microns — that’s over 700 times the longest wavelength light the eye can detect.

The Cocoon nebula is a well-known gas cloud being lit up by a massive, hot star in its center. In the visible light image inset here — grab the stunning high-res version to compare to the Herschel shot — the dust is dark, since it absorbs the kind ...

Heads up, this article has *spoilers* about the movie Hanna.

Joe Wright’s new film, Hanna, staring Saoirse Ronan is being hailed as the anti-Sucker Punch for its portrayal of a rich, rounded, and compelling female lead. Hanna is a young woman in her late teens (her age is indeterminate) who can beat you up, break your neck, and shoot you down six ways from Sunday. Why is she able to do that? Well, that right there is an interesting question. You see, Hanna was genetically engineered to have “high intelligence, muscle mass, and no pity.” But here’s the rub: she was also raised to be a trained assassin.

So who is to credit (or perhaps, to blame) for Hanna’s ability to crush faces with naught but her hands and an emotionless grimace? Is it her genes or her training?

The film ostensibly portrays Hanna as a naive heroine striving against her draconian and demonic “mother” figure, Marissa Wiegler, with the help of her noble father, Erik Heller. But I submit that is not the case: I believe the “teaching” and “nurture” Heller gives to Hanna makes him as much a monster ...