The public is invited to vote for its favorite original song to wake up the crew of STS-134 during their up coming mission.

There’s  been over 1,350 songs submitted by songwriters and performers from around the world.

A song contest was held from August 20, 2010 to January 31, 2011 and the submissions were winnowed down to the final ten and the winners were notified on February 18th.

Here they are:

• “Boogie Woogie Shuttle,” by Ryan McCullough (Savannah, Ga.)
• “Dreams You Give,” by Brian Plunkett (Halfway, Mo.)
• “Endeavour, It’s a Brand New Day,” by Susan Rose Simonetti (Cocoa Beach, Fla.)
• “I Need My Space,” by Stan Clardy (Statesville, N.C.)
• “I Want to Be an Astronaut,” by Michael J. Kunes (Phoenix)
• “Just Another Day in Space,” by Kurt Lanham (Jacksonville, Fla.)
• “Rocket Scientist,” by Tray Eppes (Cullen, Va.)
• “Spacing Out,” by Jeremy Parsons (Nashville, Tenn.)
• “Sunrise Number 1,” by Jorge Otero (Ovideo, Spain)
• “The Countdown Blues (Hymn for Tim),” by Sharon Riddell (Nashville, Tenn.)

The TWO songs with the most votes from the public will be the first two original songs to be played as wake up music for a shuttle crew.

So let’s get over to NASA’s Space Rock and vote.

Also NASA is running a Face in Space opportunity, want to find out more?  Visit the Face in Space site.

The image comes from the Extras and Originality portion of a AMC Pacer page.

Scary part is I remember both! 

A HiRISE image of Santa Maria crater and the rover Opportunity. Click for larger (~247 k). Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona

The crater you see in the image is Santa Maria on Mars.  The image was taken by the High Resolution Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on March 9, 2011.

If you look at about 4:00 you will see the arrow pointing to the Mars Rover Opportunity, click the image if you are having trouble seeing it.

This image has been cropped, to see the full versions and caption – click here.

The caption title is Opportunity is Still Smiling, the same cannot be said for the Rover Spirit.  It doesn’t look good folks, Spirit has been quiet for over a year and not only that, most heaters were turned off over the Martian winter subjecting the electronics to the most extreme cold thus far in the mission.

In the past few weeks Spirit went through the period where its location received the maximum amount of sunlight, it was hoped there might be some communication.  Nothing.  The peak sunlight occurred on March 10 and on March 15 mission managers sent commands for Spirit to use UHF relays and a back up transmitter to communicate with the orbiting spacecraft.

“The commands we are sending starting this week should work in a multiple-fault scenario where Spirit’s main transmitter is no longer working and the mission clock has lost track of time or drifted significantly,” said JPL’s John Callas, project manager for Spirit and Opportunity.

If nothing is heard in the next month or few months the mission will switch to a single rover mission.

An image from Messenger's Wide Angle Camera. Click for larger. Image Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

Here’s one of a couple new images out from the Messenger spacecraft.  You know yesterday I said “First Messenger Image” that is from orbit naturally.  I know at least one of you were probably thinking “it’s not really the first one” and I’ve not looked at the comments yet as I’ve been away most of the day.

Anyway, boy this is pretty fun stuff, being at Mercury.  Power is coming from solar panels and the light ought to be plentiful!!  I believe the sunlight should be about eleven-times brighter than it is here. There is a sunshade that is supposed to keep the spacecraft at about “room temperature” in the midst of 840^oF (450^oC) temperatures.  Here is a little about the spacecraft and instruments.

Check out this image and the other new images here.

About the image and the camera from the Messenger site:

MESSENGER’s Wide-Angle Camera

The wide-angle camera (WAC) is not a typical color camera. It can image in 11 colors, ranging from 430 to 1020 nm wavelength (visible through near-infrared). It does this with a filter wheel: the 11 narrow-band filters (plus one clear filter) are mounted onto a wheel that can be rotated to allow the camera to capture an image through each filter. In this image the 1000 nm, 750 nm, and 430 nm filters are displayed in red, green, and blue, respectively. Several craters appear to have excavated compositionally distinct low-reflectance (brown-blue in this color scheme) material, and the bright rays of Hokusai crater to the north cross the image. During MESSENGER’s orbital operations, we will typically use just eight of the WAC’s filters. This decision was made to reduce the amount of data that must be stored on the spacecraft’s solid-state recorder before the information can be downlinked. It’s also quicker than cycling through all 11 filters – the spacecraft is moving rapidly over the surface, and there isn’t much time to image the same spot on the surface 11 times over before moving to the next area of interest. The sets of color images will help us learn about the variation in composition from place to place on the planet. For example, some minerals such as olivine and pyroxene often absorb more light at longer wavelengths than at shorter ones, so we’ll be looking for their signatures in the reflectance spectra derived from each eight-color set. WAC images will be used in coordination with the Mercury Atmospheric and Surface Composition Spectrometer (MASCS), a hyperspectral instrument that provides reflectance information at many more wavelengths, but only for one spot on the surface at a time.

Date acquired: March 29, 2011

First image returned from the Messenger at Mercury. Click for larger. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

Just look at that!  The first image of Mercury is just amazing. We will have to wait a little for the rest, probably tomorrow.  That big crater in the upper right is called Debussy, if you look west of there you will see a smaller crater with two dark rays.

Clicking the image will get you a larger version.  If you want the full sized version with a description you just need to go to the Messenger site – worth your while too.

Tomorrow!  Tomorrow NASA will release the first images from MESSENGER’s orbit insertion.  I’ll certainly be watching for them.  Here’s the NASA news notice:

NASA will release the first orbital image of Mercury’s surface, including previously unseen terrain, on Tuesday afternoon, March 29. Several other images will be available Wednesday, March 30 in conjunction with a media teleconference at 2 p.m. EDT to discuss these initial orbital images taken from the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury.

NASA’s MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging, or MESSENGER, entered orbit March 17 after completing more than a dozen laps within the inner solar system during the past 6.6 years.

Media teleconference participants are:
– Sean Solomon, MESSENGER principal investigator, Carnegie Institution of Washington
– Eric Finnegan, MESSENGER mission systems engineer, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel. Md.

To participate in the teleconference, reporters must contact Dwayne Brown at dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov or 202-358-1726 for dial-in instructions.

During the teleconference, MESSENGER information and images will be available at http://www.nasa.gov/messenger.

Audio of the teleconference will be streamed live on NASA’s website at: http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio.

In yesterday’s post on African genetics I tried to work with a large set of populations, but narrowed SNPs down to ~40,000. Today I thought I’d go another route, focus on having a thicker market set, but with fewer populations. So I did a bunch of runs with 400,000 SNPs. Here’s K = 8. Please note, I did some “trial” runs and pulled out people with obvious admixture which was recent or an outlier within their population. (e.g., Mozabites with a lot of Sub-Saharan African or San which obviously had European ancestry).

Notice that there are three non-Sub-Saharan modal components. South of the Sahara the European one is absent. But here’s the weird thing. Below are MDS representations of genetic distance between the ancestral groups inferred above:

Now without Eurasians + North Africans:

All of these “ancestral” groups are abstractions. More plainly, they’re fake but useful (physicists would say “toy models,” economists “stylized facts”). But the Nilotic one seems kind of crazy here. It told the program to go look ...

1) First, a post from the past: Lydians & Etruscans.

2) Weird search query of the week: “girls from which country are the most attractive?+iran”

3) Comment of the week, in response to “Who thinks the sun goes around the earth?”:

This question was paired with another asking how long it took for the Earth to orbit the Sun: a day, a week, a month or a year. About half of the population got both questions right.

4) And finally, your weekly fluff fix:

When it comes to redemption stories, gaming consoles aren’t usually the first items to come to mind (or even on the list). But the Xbox 360 has made a surprising comeback in Japan after last month’s tsunami swept over 5,000 consoles out to sea: One company has deployed Xbox’s hand-held controllers to help maneuver robots at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

Meet the Talon robots, which were sent to Japan by a Virginia-based tech company called QinetiQ North America. With Xbox pad in hand, Fukushima workers can now remotely drive these robust bots around the plant, where it would be far too dangerous for human workers to go. Without putting themselves in danger, operators can peer into the darkest parts of the plant using Talon’s night-vision cameras. They can also gauge the temperature and air quality around the plant, as well as identify over 7,500 hazardous substances using the robots’ chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive (CBRNE) detection kits (as long as they’re within the robot’s over-3,000-foot operating range).

It may seem odd to use Xbox 360 pads for such important ...

What’s the News: Bats are an economic boon worth approximately $23 billion per year, and possibly up to $54 billion, to U.S. agriculture, a study in today’s issue of Science estimates. Their voracious appetite for insects—a colony of 150 brown bats eats about 1.3 million pesky, crop-chomping bugs each year—means that bats function as effective, and free, natural pesticides.

How the Heck:

A previous study found that bats saved farmers an average of $74 an acre in pesticides (ranging from $12 to $174 an acre), across eight cotton-growing counties in southeastern Texas.
Using that figure as a jumping-off point, the researchers extrapolated how much the disappearance of bats across the nation would cost per year. They came up with the yearly cost of $3.7 billion to $54 billion, putting their own estimate at $22.9 billion.
That estimate, they point out, just includes money saved purchasing pesticides; it doesn’t take into account secondary costs, like the impact of pesticides on the environment.

What’s the Context:

Unfortunately, bats are dying at an alarming rate. The mysterious, as-yet-incurable white-nose syndrome has killed over a million bats in the U.S. and Canada since 2006.
Nor is white-nose syndrome ...

Every year, the James Randi Educational Foundation picks the people or organizations who have done the most to promote antireality nonsense and get the public to believe in provably untrue silliness. This dubious honor is called the Pigasus Award after Randi’s official mascot, the flying pig, as in "XXX will be true when pigs fly" — values of XXX include homeopathy, faith healing, dowsing, etc. The awards are appropriately given out every April 1.

This year’s crop has just been announced. I was not surprised to see Richard Hoover listed there for his extremely shaky announcement of life in a meteorite. Hoover published his claims in the Journal of Cosmology, and while I was pretty clear in my posts about the extremely shaky nature of this journal, the JREF simply calls them "crackpot". Heh.

I do have a quibble with the awards this year though. Our old friend Andrew Wakefield — the defrocked, debunked, and discredited founder of the modern antivax movement — was given the "Refusal to Face Reality Award" for his ongoing (and wrong) claims that vaccines cause ...

The effect of spinach on penile tumescence

“Spinach has long been praised for its many beneficial nutrients. Although not as iron-rich as originally reported (a fallacy that has become entrenched in popular culture), recent evidence suggests that the consumption of spinach may increase flow to blood-rich areas, including penile tissue. (more…)

I don’t do practical jokes much anymore — let’s just say that when I was younger, it would frequently happen that this sort of thing got escalated quickly into territory that put large swaths of the population at risk of life and limb — and I almost never do them on the blog.

Almost.

This post on Blastr yesterday reminded me of the one time I did, though. It came to me in a flash, pretty much all at once, due to the setting I was in at the time. I took the shots, set everything up, and then sprung it on my readers two years ago on this very day.

Of course, you know going in it’s a joke, but I still think it’s funny. And since I’m lazy, I’ll simply point you to the post: Spirit sees phenomenal Martian vista.

Enjoy. And, of course, April Fools!

From CNN Money:

Overall unemployment has also dropped by a percentage point over the last 4 months, and is now at 8.8 %.

If this continues, “are you better off than you were 4 years ago?” could be quite the campaign slogan….for different reasons, though, than in 1980.

In a week of ridiculously gorgeous astronomy pictures hitting the ‘net, I keep thinking they can’t get cooler… and then this happens: a seriously cool picture of the Sun from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory!

Yegads! [Click to solareclipsenate.]

Given that SDO orbits the Earth and sees the Sun from space, why is the bottom half of the Sun gone in this picture? It’s because we’re seeing a solar eclipse which is actually more like a lunar eclipse except the Moon is not involved.

Hmm, yeah, maybe I’d better explain.

SDO circles the Earth in an inclined orbit*. If the orbit were directly above the Earth’s equator, the Earth would block the Sun once per day, and that’s not so cool for a satellite designed to continuously observe our nearest star! So the orbit was inclined a bit, giving SDO an unobstructed view of the Sun… kinda. The orbit of SDO is inclined to maximize the viewing time for the Sun and to maintain a continuous downlink for its very large data stream (it sends about 15 megabytes of data to Earth every second!). Because of the ...

Some song-lovers may say that music’s in their genes. One young British boffin goes a step further by putting music in his jeans: he wears the world’s first pants-borne, playable electronic drum kit, complete with eight different drum sounds. And just so those pants aren’t lonely, another group of engineers has figured out a way to print sensors onto plastic, possibly making way for commercialized yoga mat drums (did somebody order that?) and more drums made out of things that aren’t drums.

The bloke inside the drummable jeans is Aseem Mishra, a 17-year-old British student who nabbed this year’s Young Engineer Of Great Britain award. His invention allows people to perform drum solos on their legs (video) by tapping eight paper-thin sensors sewn into the back of the fabric. The prototype must be plugged into a loudspeaker-toting backpack to make noise; Mishra says future models won’t be tied down like that.

Why would anyone create such a thing? As he told BBC News, he’s always thought that lugging his drum kit around for his band’s gigs were a hassle. “I think at the time I might have been tapping on my legs,” he explains, “and I thought, ...

Oh that’s where he is…

This astonishing find is proof, if more proof were needed, that stripey shirts and glasses did not evolve on Earth. They came from space.

(Happy April 1st. I was originally going to do a much longer version of this, but as the month drew on, it became quickly clear that nothing I would write could rival the reality.)

Update: After this post a researcher who is planning on publishing work on the genetic structure of Great Britain and Ireland and who has a very large N forwarded me a PCA which he gave me permission to repost. I’ve uploaded it here.

As you might infer from the post below I’ve started to get interested in African population structure. It’s not just me. Readers regularly query me about the relationship of various groups, such as the Nilotic peoples who reside amongst the Bantu in northeast Africa. Additionally, there is a consistent problem with 23andMe generating weird results for people of African ancestry, usually those with East African ancestry.

But to figure out the nature of African variation in more detail we also need to give some thought to outgroups. My initial assumption was that using Tuscans would be sufficient, but several people pointed out that many Mediterranean groups have trace African admixture. Probably not enough to matter, but why take the risk? So how about looking to Northern Europe? The Utah Whites and Orcadians jump out as plausible alternatives, but there was a third which I thought I’d try out: the Irish.

Last fall my friend Paul bought a bunch ...

I am in absolutely no position to judge the technical execution of this work, but a group has posted a possible solution to the “Pioneer Anomaly” on the Physics/Astronomy ArXiV server (http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/1103.5222).

For those who haven’t been following along at home, there appear to be subtle unexpected Sun-ward accelerations (i.e. higher than expected decelerations) seen in the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft while leaving the Solar System. Sean posted an earlier discussion of the anomaly and a possible reported solution that does not involve modifying gravity. However, this latest paper is by a different group, and posits that reflections within the spacecraft are enough to explain the discrepancies. There’s a nicer write-up than this one at the Technology Review Physics ArXiV blog.

FYI, it was posted a few days ago, and is not an April Fool’s posting.

Also FYI, my kids just got passports, and did you know that there’s an image of Pioneer 10 on the inside back cover? Beamjockey did some nice sleuthing a few years back and dug up the source image!

Yesterday Sean wrote (yet another) comprehensive insightful post, this one about what’s involved in getting tenure at a “major research university”. There is a tremendous amount of good advice in that post, and in the comments.

However.

I have to point out that the advice is very heavily weighted not towards “tenure at a major research university” but instead towards “tenure at one of the top 10 schools in the US”. As evidence, here is a plot of the latest NRC rankings (red) and US News rankings (blue) of physics departments (shamelessly lifted from here — thanks HappyQuark!). I have helpfully circled in green the departments where Sean has been on the faculty:

Now, this is not saying that much of Sean’s advice isn’t generally applicable, but one should recognize that the vast majority of people who may be seeking tenure advice are not going to be at institutions with tenure criteria as strict as the ones Sean is considering. There are scads of fantastic scientists doing interesting work at places that aren’t in the top 5 of the NRC rankings, and probabilistically speaking, you’re more likely to be working towards tenure at one of those. While MIT may have a <50% tenure rate, the odds are far better at many institutions.

Personally, I found Sean’s advice really really dispiriting, and it probably would have freaked me out to read it as a postdoc. And yet, I find myself with “tenure at a major research university” without ever having lost sleep to fears about achieving seemingly impossible standards. I worked steadily, but not insanely. I had a couple of kids. I “dabbled” in other research areas, some of which turned into major research areas down the road. And it worked out (although, it likely wouldn’t have “worked out” if I was at Chicago or Caltech).

I think if one wants to make a more general statement about “how to achieve tenure”, I think the key is to show that you’ve got “traction”. Look at recently tenured (<10 years) people in your particular department at your particular university, and evaluate what they tend to do well (say, undergraduate teaching if you’re at Swarthmore, or running giant experiments if you’re at Harvard). Then, demonstrate that you’ve got traction that is pulling you in that direction.

For example, if all the tenured faculty have research grants and students, and you don’t, then you’ll appear to be spinning your wheels. Instead, if you have a grant or two, and are showing increasing success with your proposals, the tenure committee can believe that you’re evolving into what the department expects of its tenured faculty. For most universities, you don’t always need to be completely at your destination, but you need to show that you’re actually traveling down the proper path at a decent clip. The closer you are to the destination, the better your chances, and the more competitive the tenure process, the closer you’d better be. (Sean’s point about “firing on fear” is basically saying that a tenure denial is based on their fears that you will not wind up getting to where they need/want you to be.)

The final point I’d like to make is my concern that Sean’s fairly conservative prescription eliminates the real “upside potential” of taking risks. A colleague and I have had many discussions about the fact that, because we were more than willing to leave academia, we were more willing to take risks. These risks paid off in more interesting research than the path we were headed down as young postdocs. (The one caveat is paying attention to timescale though — trying to establish a new field of research won’t be a good bet if it takes 10 years to pull off.)

In summary, while Sean’s suggestions are excellent rules for guaranteeing tenure in a physics department at any university in the US (especially that one about being a productive genius!), you can still likely achieve tenure with a less terrifying set of recommendations.

Cartoon music in a candy store: a field experiment.

“An experiment on consumers’ behavior was carried out in a new field context. According to a random assignment, 60 customers from ages 12 to 14 years who entered a candy store were exposed to Top Forty music which was usually played in this store, music from cartoons (Captain Flame, Candy, Olive & Tom, etc.), or no music. Analysis showed that customers spent significantly more time in the store when cartoon music was played, but the two styles of music were not related to the amount of money spent.”

Photo: flickr/pawpaw67

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