2011MD trajectory. Credit: NASA

We will be visited by a small asteroid on June 27th at 09:30 EDT (13:30 UT).  The asteroid between five and 20 meters in diameter will pass just 7,500 miles from the Earth!!  This is close enough for the asteroid to be seen with a modest-sized telescope during the day.

More from JPL.

JPL Small-Body Database Browser

Earth’s Busy Neighborhood

The first six mirrors undergo through cryotesting. Credit: NASA

Yes that is a gold surface, not as much as you might think as it is exceedingly thin (read below). This is a milestone of sorts so hopefully everything goes well.

Here’s the press release from NASA:

Engineers and technicians guide six James Webb Space Telescope’s mirror segments off the rails after completing final cryogenic testing this week at Marshall. (NASA/Emmett Given)

The first six of 18 segments that will form NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s primary mirror for space observations completed final cryogenic testing this week. The ten week test series included two tests cycles where the mirrors were chilled down to -379 degrees Fahrenheit, then back to ambient temperature to ensure the mirrors respond as expected to the extreme temperatures of space.

A second set of six mirror assemblies will arrive at Marshall in late July to begin testing, and the final set of six will arrive in the fall.

The X-ray and Cryogenic Facility at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. provides the space-like environment to help engineers measure how well the telescope will image infrared sources once in orbit.

Each mirror segment measures approximately 4.3 feet (1.3 meters) in diameter to form the 21.3 foot (6.5 meters), hexagonal telescope mirror assembly critical for infrared observations. Each of the 18 hexagonal-shaped mirror assemblies weighs approximately 88 pounds (40 kilograms). The mirrors are made of a light and strong metal called beryllium, and coated with a microscopically thin coat of gold to enabling the mirror to efficiently collect infrared light.

Engineers ready the crane to lift one James Webb Space Telescope’s mirror segment off the stand after completing final cryogenic testing this week at Marshall. (NASA/Emmett Given)

The telescope is a combined project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. Northrop Grumman is the prime contractor under NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo., is responsible for mirror development. L-3- Tinsley Laboratories Inc. in Richmond, Calif. is responsible for mirror grinding and polishing.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ice Hunters wants you.  Aw go on, give it a try.

Summer solsctice at Stonehenge. Photograph: Warren Allott/AFP/Getty Images via Datablog (linked below)

The summer solstice is upon us.  I saw this photo and thought what a great and very appropriate way to celebrate the day.  What could be better than celebrating at Stonehenge?  So this gets added to my list of fun things to do.

When does summer begin?  At 13:16 ET and if I do things right this should post at that very time.  Humor me ok?

I’ve been spreading my own brand of humor pretty much all over the state:  “Yep, all the days get shorter from here on out.”  The memory of the horrible weather of this past winter is still fresh enough in the minds of most people around here to elicit groans almost universally HAHAHAHA!

Check out DATABLOG.

Discovered in 1980, and named for Helene of Troy, Cassini took this image of Saturn’s tiny Ice Queen two days ago:

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

Here’s the NASA blurb to go along with its image of this exquisite, minuscule moonlet – and don’t forget to check out the enlargement:

Cassini Captures Ice Queen Helene

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft successfully completed its second-closest encounter with Saturn’s icy moon Helene on June 18, 2011, beaming down raw images of the small moon. At closest approach, Cassini flew within 4,330 miles (6,968 kilometers) of Helene’s surface. It was the second closest approach to Helene of the entire mission.

Here are a few more NASA images of Helene.  It’s hard to believe little Helene wasn’t molded from modeling clay in a studio, crammed full of an astonishing variety of features for its size, then painted to perfection:

NASA/Cassini 013111

NASA/Cassini 030311

NASA/Cassini 030311 Helene shown against Saturn

Click here to view the embedded video.

Source

“Many chronic injuries related to athletic bicycling are now recognised: cyclist’s nipples,1 neuropathic syndromes,2 and skin problems caused by the saddle. We have seen a new clinical problem in female high level cycling competitors: bicyclist’s vulva. Six women, aged 21-38 years, had a unilateral chronic swelling of the labium majus after a few years of intensive bicycling (an average of 462.5 km per week). All six had typical unilateral lymphoedema (five on the right side, one on the left) which was more severe after more intense and longer training. The position of the bicycle saddle, the type of shorts worn, and the women’s perineal hygiene were optimum. There was no family history of lymphoedema in any of the women, nor any common factor that might explain the lymphoedema.”

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Photo: flickr/ richardmasoner

Thanks to Therese M. for today’s ROFL!

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Science proves women who wax have better sex.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Scientific analysis of Playboy centerfolds reveals Barbie-like vulvas.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Where the sun does not shine: Is sunshine protective against melanoma of the vulva?

WTF ...

What’s the News: Dinosaur metabolism is one of the biggest mysteries in paleontology. Ever since the giant creatures were first unearthed, scientists have been wondering whether dinosaurs drew their heat from the environment, like the cold-blooded modern reptiles they resemble, or whether they generated heat themselves, like warm-blooded mammals.

Using a geoscience technique to see at what temperature dinosaur tooth enamel formed, scientists have found that at least two large dinosaurs, Brachiosaurus and Camarasaurus, had body temperatures similar to our own. While this study on its own doesn’t explain where the heat came from, it does add to paleontologists’ toolboxes a new, reliable way to probe temperature, which will lead to better inputs into the computational models that may eventually answer the question of whether dinosaurs were warm- or cold-blooded.

How the Heck:

The technique the scientists used revolves around the tendency of certain isotopes of carbon and oxygen to clump together when a mineral forms. These isotopes, carbon 13 and oxygen 18, bond to each other more when the temperature is cooler, a handy relationship that geophysicists have been using to study Earth’s past climate in the geological record.
In this paper, the team applied ...

Back in April, I reported that SETI’s Allen Telescope Array — a 42-dish setup in northern California that scans the skies, listening for signals from potential alien intelligences — had to be shut down due to lack of funds.

This bad news resulted in something of a public outcry, and a grassroots organization sprung up to try to help rectify the situation. They started the website SETIstars, where people can donate to restart the ATA. They have the relatively modest goal of reaching $200,000 in donations, which is enough to get the array restarted; SETI can then leverage on this to try to get more funding flowing (the array takes about $2.5M a year to run). You can learn more about this on their info page.

As I write this they’ve raised over $20,000, 13% of the goal, with just over a month to go. If you support them, please go take a look and do what you can.

Related posts:

- E. T. call waiting
- The cost of SETI: infographic

What’s the News: Starting in September 2012, the FDA will require every pack of cigarettes sold in the US to be emblazoned with a large, text-and-image health warning, similar to the labels already seen in Canada, the United Kingdom, Brazil, and several other countries. The FDA unveiled the nine label designs earlier this week; several are quite graphic, including photos of cancerous lungs and lips and a man exhaling smoke through his tracheotomy hole.

These graphic images, however, may not be an effective way to get smokers to quit, or deter new smokers from starting. Several neuroscience and psychology studies show that these fear tactics have little effect—and may at times do more harm than good.

What’s the Research:

In a 2006 study, smokers looked at cigarette warning labels from various countries as they lay in an MRI scanner, which measures blood flow in the brain. Brain regions associated with fear and alarm stayed relatively quiet. But the nucleus accumbens—an area associated with cravings, and a key player in the body’s reward system—showed lots of activation. These warning labels weren’t scaring smokers, the results suggest; the images were, strangely enough, ...

It’s very common to see familiar things in random patterns. We see faces in clouds, Jesus in a tortilla, and smiley faces everywhere. It’s so ubiquitous there’s a term for it: pareidolia.

So when I saw on reddit that people were talking about seeing an epic dragon fight in the Orion Nebula, I smiled. But then I saw the image, and that smile turned to pure amazement. Why? Because here’s the image:

[Click to ensmaugenate.]

Do you see the dragon on the left, wings outstretched, breathing fire, blasting it at the man on the right? He has a face, and I see his shoulder, back, and outstretched arm as well, as if he’s battling the dragon.

Let me be clear: this picture is real! Well, the dragon and face aren’t real — they’re more pareidolia — but the images in the nebula are actually there. You might see them more easily in this contrast-enhanced version, too.

Let me explain…

OK, first: this really is the Orion Nebula. It was taken by Hubble in 2006, and

In my last post about the Kahan et al paper, I gave you the headline finding–scientific literacy and numeracy, if anything, seems to worsen climate denial, especially among those already opposed to climate action (hierarchical-individualists/conservatives).

But there’s another intriguing finding in the study. In fact, I would go so far as to call it an anomaly in need of explanation.

You see, it turns out that the pattern on nuclear power is different than the pattern on climate change in the study (see Figure 4). On nuclear power, the egalitarian-communitarians (liberals) generally start out thinking it’s more risky, and the hierarchical-individualists (conservatives) generally start out thinking it’s more safe–when you ask them the question posed in the study anyway (“How much risk do you believe nuclear power poses to human health, safety, or prosperity?”).

The starting positions are just what you would expect: egalitarian-communitarians (liberals) are suspicious of unregulated industry and worried about harm to, basically, everybody, especially the weakest in society. So when they hear about corporations doing risky things (like, say, nuclear power) they get their buttons pushed. The hierarchical-individualists (conservatives) are the opposite–individualists in particular celebrate private industry and the free market, so you would expect them to support nuclear power.

However, unlike in the case of conservatives and climate change, with increasing scientific literacy and numeracy, egalitarian-communitarians (liberals) *do not* move further in the direction where you would presume their initial biases would take them–i.e., towards perceiving more risk. Instead, with more education and numeracy, both groups grow less convinced that nuclear power is risky.

The end result is that they still end up becoming more polarized, because the hierarchical-individualists (conservatives) move farther in the direction of their initial convictions, while the egalitarian-communitarians (liberals) move less far in the direction that is counter to their initial convictions. Still, directionally, the movement is the opposite of the movement you see on climate change.

Now, I have my theories to explain this…but I want to hear what others think is going on, behind the data. Go to the study and check out Figure 4.

I will add that this is not the first time Kahan et al have found something like this. In their prior study “Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus,” they found similar polarization over climate change across the two cultural groups. But when they tested whether the groups agreed that according to “most” scientific experts, the deep geological sequestration of nuclear waste was safe (e.g., the Yucca Mountain issue), they found considerably less cultural polarization than over climate change:

Being simultaneously hierarchical and individualistic predicts a 12.6 percentage-point increase (± 9.2) in the likelihood of perceiving “most expert scientists agree” that “[r]adioactive wastes from nuclear power can be safely disposed of in deep underground storage facilities,” and a 14.8 percentage-point decrease (± 9.2) in the likelihood of perceiving that “most disagree.” The difference in the predicted likelihood of perceiving that scientists are “divided” is not statistically (or practically) significant. Although clearly less dramatic in magnitude than the differences observed for perceptions of scientific opinion on climate change and concealed carry laws, the effects of cultural out-looks on perceptions of scientific opinion for nuclear waste disposal evidence a practically meaningful level of disagreement and conform to the hypothesized impact of holding either hierarchic and individua-listic or egalitarian and communitarian worldviews.

So either the nuclear issue is different somehow, or the groups are different somehow…or both.

Flapping while running up a ramp takes far
less energy than flight at the same angle.

What’s the News: How did birds get their wings? And how did they start using them to fly? These questions have bedeviled evolutionary biologists for more than a century, and with flight’s origins long buried, a lot of careful measurements of how modern birds work combined with clever guesswork has resulted in several fiercely differing theories. The two major camps have proto-birds either dropping from trees or running along the ground before finally taking to the air.

A new study lends credence to the idea that flapping wings while running could have been involved by showing that it requires much less energy than flying while still helping birds get over obstacles. This suggests that it could have been an easy way for proto-birds to start going through the motions.

How the Heck:

The researchers had noticed that young birds running up ramps and other obstacles flap their wings strongly, gaining speed and balance. The team wondered how much energy the process took: as the behavior gets birds over obstacles as effectively as actual flight, if it took less investment of energy, ...

Now that Twitter and Facebook have been invented, I don’t usually put up blog posts that simply link to someone else’s posts. (Although I wonder if that policy is a mistake.) But this morning I put up a link to a post at Jerry Coyne’s blog, and it was almost immediately deleted from Facebook. (The Twitter entry was fine, of course.) I wouldn’t even have known, except that someone commented that it had been “flagged as inappropriate by Facebook users.”

Of course, Facebook being Facebook, I have no idea whether this is a nefarious conspiracy or simple incompetence. Probably both. In any event, you should go check out the post, which comments on this YouTube video.

It’s a compilation of the answers given by contestants in the Miss USA contest to a simple question: “Should evolution be taught in schools?” Miss California, Alyssa Campanella, who eventually won the contest, gave a strong pro-science answer that will bring a smile to your face. At least, if you are finished crying and throwing objects at your computer monitor after seeing some of the other answers. Due to the vagaries of alphabetical order, Miss Alabama comes first, and it’s not pretty.

For the most part, the contestants are interested in being good politicians and keeping everybody happy, not in staking out courageous stances in the science/religion debates. But that’s exactly what’s so depressing: here we are, in the most advanced country in the world (albeit in its waning years), and it’s considered controversial whether we should teach science to our children. The question wasn’t even “should we teach creationism,” which is actually a harder issue (although still very easy). It was just whether we should teach straightforward science at all. Very sad indeed.

Once again, Dan Kahan and his colleagues at Yale are out with a paper that dramatically challenges–using scientific data–much of what we would like to believe about the relationship between knowing more about science, and accepting science on contested issues. The paper is entitled “The Tragedy of the Risk-Perception Commons: Cultural Conflict, Rationality Conflict, and Climate Change.”

The brilliant maneuver in this study is to do a survey that not only measures whether people accept climate science, but correlates that with their scores on standard scientific literacy questions and tests of numeracy–the ability to think mathematically. Here’s the abstract:

The conventional explanation for controversy over climate change emphasizes impediments to public understanding: limited popular knowledge of science, the inability of ordinary citizens to assess technical information, and the resulting widespread use of unreliable cognitive heuristics to assess risk. A large survey of U.S. adults (N = 1540) found little support for this account. On the whole, the most scientifically literate and numerate subjects were slightly less likely, not more, to see climate change as a serious threat than the least scientifically literate and numerate ones. More importantly, greater scientific literacy and numeracy were associated with greater cultural polarization: respondents predisposed by their values to dismiss climate change evidence became more dismissive, and those predisposed by their values to credit such evidence more concerned, as science literacy and numeracy increased. We suggest that this evidence reflects a conflict between two levels of rationality: the individual level, which is characterized by citizens’ effective use of their knowledge and reasoning capacities to form risk perceptions that express their cultural commitments; and the collective level, which is characterized by citizens’ failure to converge on the best available scientific evidence on how to promote their common welfare. Dispelling this “tragedy of the risk-perception commons,” we argue, should be understood as the central aim of the science of science communication.

I plan to blog about several aspects of this paper, as its findings are so central to everything I’m trying to get across these days. For now, I’m just flagging it. I think it is an absolute must read.

The largest structures in the Universe are superclusters: not just clusters of galaxies, but clusters of clusters. They can stretch for millions of light years and be composed of thousands of galaxies.

Abell 2744, at a distance from Earth of about 3.5 billion light years, is one such megastructure (if you want to sound fancy, astronomers call it "large-scale structure"). Astronomers have been studying Abell 2744 with an arsenal of telescopes, and have discovered that it’s actually the result of the ongoing collision of four galaxies clusters. If you’ve ever wondered what 400 trillion solar masses of material slamming into each other looks like, well, it’s more than a bit of a mess:

[Click to enclusternate.]

Yeah, like I said, it’s a mess.

First off, this picture is a combination of observations from Hubble (in visible light, colored blue, green, and red), the Very Large Telescope (also blue, green, and red), and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory (X-rays, colored pinkish). In visible light you can see literally hundreds of galaxies, probably more, dotting the supercluster. The pink glow is from very hot gas between galaxies; it started its life ...

What’s the News: While you may be able to hide your age with makeup and plastic surgery, don’t think that your deception is foolproof. Researchers have now developed a technique to ascertain your age to within five years using only your saliva. The new method, published in the journal PLoS One, could someday be used by forensic experts to pinpoint the age of crime suspects.

How the Heck:

The researchers began by taking saliva samples from 34 pairs of identical, male twins between the ages of 21 and 55 years old. Eric Vilain, the lead researcher and director of the Center for Society and Genetics at UCLA, was originally interested in studying sexual orientation differences in identical twins. He wanted to see if environmental influences?diet, stress, exposure to toxins, etc.?caused any epigenetic changes that could contribute to the twins’ sexuality differences.
Vilain and his team focused their attention on methylation, a ...

In preparing for my recent Point of Inquiry podcast with Rick Perlstein, I knew my guest would debunk right wing historical narratives of the sort that we’ve recently heard so much of, and do so with gusto. I screen guests at least that well.

But I didn’t know he was going to offer a thesis so in line with the one that I’ve been pushing myself lately–that when it comes to history, liberals are wedded to an Enlightenment tradition that creates its own biases and myopias. Here’s Perlstein:

Liberalism is rooted in this notion of the Enlightenment, the idea that we can use our reason, and we can use empiricism, and we can sort out facts, and using something like the scientific method—although history is not like nuclear physics—to arrive at consensus views of the truth that have a much more solid standing, epistemologically, than what the right wing view of the truth is: which is much more mythic, which is much more based on tribal identification, which is much more based on intuition and tradition. And there’s always been history writing in that mode too. But within the academy, and within the canons of expertise, and within the canons of professionalism, that kind of history has been superseded by a much more empirical, Enlightenment-based history.

As I’m no historian, I’m not exactly sure what the key turning points were–I mean, you could argue that mythic and triumphalist history goes all the way back to Homer. I’m sure much has been written on this, and I bet there’s a canonical work of historiography on this very topic.

In any case, as Perlstein goes on to argue, Enlightenment history has the virtue of being rigorous and accurate–like science does–but all the rigor, and all the details, can get in the way of telling an inspiring and motivating story. Therefore, you sort of have to grudgingly admire the effectiveness of conservative history–at least conservatives know that part of history is about telling a good story, mythic or otherwise.

For more on Perlstein’s thoughts, listen here.