Egyptian cobra by Michael Ransburg

Top twelve picks

This, my friends, is how it’s done. Carl Zimmer on “The Human Lake“. If you read one post this month…

Inspired. Craig McClain draws parallels between a 1st century Germanic chieftain and a baby coral

I loved the Bronx Zoo Cobra story. It was a wonderful break from a month of depressing news. I loved this line: “The case of the missing [cobra] has yielded much interest… What It has not yielded is the snake.” I loved the @Bronxzooscobra Twitter feed, and the @Bronxcobrawife one too. I loved the exclusive interview in the NYT.

An amazing story that starts with an egg sandwich, continues with a weird bag of blue powder, and ends with mass radiation poisoning. By Sally Adee

A touching look at the people on Fukushima’s frontline. “My town is gone… My parents are still missing… I still have to work…”

Mark Peplow of Nature News visits Chernobyl. What lessons does it hold for Fukushima?

Unbeleafable! Scientists create artificial leaf, 10x more efficient than the real deal.

Bugs vs drugs: Maryn McKenna, writing about ...

Fiordland National Park in New Zealand, the location of the study

What’s the News: Researchers have mapped out the detailed geological history of a 300-square-mile chunk of New Zealand, from 2.5 million years ago to the present day. The study showed how glaciers carved out the area’s distinctive valleys using a little-known technique called thermochronometry, which involves shooting proton beams onto rocks and making note of what happens—along with some impressive analytical skills.

How the Heck: Thermochronometry, as the name implies, is a way to measure both temperature and time. The general principle is that the deeper something is below the Earth’s surface, the warmer it is; thus, tracking a rock’s temperature over millions of years reveals how deep the rock was as it cooled.

This study used a particular version of the method called helium-4/helium-3 thermochronometry, first developed by a member of the research team in 2005. This technique lets you track the time and temperature for apatite, a mineral found in rocks like granite that solidify from liquid magma far beneath the surface. Two chemical elements in apatite—uranium and thorium—are radioactive. As they decay over millions of years, ...

Donald Trump isn’t stupid. And Donald Trump is a birther–at least of the “I have doubts” variety. Writes David Wiegel at Slate:

Trump—whose campaign may qualify as a massive, “I’m Still Here” publicity stunt—is responsible for the sudden acceptability of the question. On The View, he reminded viewers that he went to “the best schools,” so he knew that documents are forged all the time, and he didn’t trust what he’d heard about Obama. Even after Tuesday, when he finally released a scan of his 1946 birth certificate to ABC News, that claim hung in the air. It echoed what some birthers still say; it gave them wider uncritical media exposure than they’d gotten since Lou Dobbs left CNN.

One reason Trump has been able to do this is that two schools of birtherism have developed since 2008, and one of them has become a surprisingly comfortable place for conservatives to lounge. There have always been Orthodox Birthers. They start with the belief that Obama cannot be eligible for the presidency. They trust evidence they find online—an erroneous report about “Obama’s grandmother” saying he was born in Kenya, for example—which stays online forever, just like amateur diagnostic reports of how crashing planes couldn’t possibly have brought down the Twin Towers. If that evidence is challenged, they look to theories about what the founders thought “natural born citizenship” meant. Phil Berg, the attorney who filed the first birther lawsuits and who held a “March on Washington” in 2010, says Obama lost his citizenship because a school form from Indonesia calls him Indonesian. Another theory says Obama can’t be president because his father was Kenyan and that made his son a British citizen by default. (This theory would disqualify Trump, whose mother was Scottish.)

What Trump is embracing, and Corsi is selling, is Reform Birtherism. It’s deductive. “There’s something on that birth certificate that he doesn’t like,” said Trump last week. “I don’t know what is on the document,” said Corsi in 2009. The truth is unknowable, because Obama is hiding something about his birth documents.

I think it may be too rational to judge the two forms of birtherism as truly distinct. At bottom, both “start with a belief” and then come up with arguments to make the belief sound most plausible. From the outside, a new set of arguments may look like goalpost shifting–but to birthers, it will seem like nothing of the kind. Those new arguments will just further reinforce their preconceptions.

If anything, what I suspect is happening here is that smarter birthers like Trump–those more conversant with the respectable boundaries of mainstream political discourse–will tend to make more sophisticated arguments, and make them more convincingly. With birtherism–as is often the case–the more sophisticated arguments tend to be doubt mongering arguments.

But it’s still a belief system, just one with smoother, slicker advocates–not unlike the transition from young-Earth creationism to intelligent design.

A long time ago, something really, really, really BIG hit the Moon. Hard. The explosion was huge beyond human grasp, and when it was all done, the hole it left on the Moon was 900 km (600 miles) across!

Behold, Mare Orientale:

This image was taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s Wide Angle Camera, and shows the entire basin. It’s located just over the edge of the Moon as seen from Earth, so we can only get hints of it when we look from home. LRO can see it in all its neck-hair-raising glory.

See all those radial features emanating outward from it? Those are crater chains: secondary impact events as huge chunks of debris hundreds of meters or even kilometers across were thrown hundreds of kilometers away by the force of the impact!

Yegads. You can see these better in an interactive pan-and-scan image that allows you to zoom in to scales of 100 meters per pixel. It’s incredible.

But looking at the central part itself, I got a funny familiar feeling. I read reddit, after all. Was the Moon… trolling us?