Click here to view the embedded video.

This is the last one folks. Make room in the back seat, here we come!

Source

1) Post from the past: From each according to their nature, to each according to their nature.

2) Weird search query of the week: “incest blogs.”

3) Comment of the week, in response to “Scientific American blogs!”:

What’s there to compete for? Do blogging and ads pay much? I mean, besides prestige, attracting smart readership, thought-worthy comments, and possible collaborations? I guess, I kinda answered my own question.

4) And finally, your weekly fluff fix:

The Pith: Afro-Indians are mostly African, with a substantial Indian minority ancestry. The latter is disproportionately female mediated. It also seems that that ancestry is more northwest Indian, and that natural selection has been operating upon them outside of the African environment.

Along the western coast of South Asia, from Makran in southwest Pakistan, down to the Konkan coast of southwest Iindia, there are isolated communities of Afro-Indians. They are called Siddis or Habshi. Their African origin is clear in their physical appearance, as well as aspects of their folk customs which tie them back to Sub-Saharan African. Nevertheless, they have assimilated to many Indian cultural traits. They generally speak the local language, and practice Islam, Hinduism, or Roman Catholic Christianity (in that order in proportion).

How and why did the Siddis arrive in India? The earliest date for their arrival almost certainly must be bounded by the period when Indo-Islamic polities rose to prominence in the early second millennium. The cosmopolitan melange of the armies of the Muslim warlords included diverse groups of Africans, some of whom took power, and established their own self-conscious Afro-Indian dynasties, set apart from the Turkish, Afghan, ...

The relative health benefits of different sexual activities.

“Although many studies examine purported risks associated with sexual activities, few examine potential physical and mental health benefits, and even fewer incorporate the scientifically essential differentiation of specific sexual behaviors. This review provides an overview of studies examining potential health benefits of various sexual activities, with a focus on the effects of different sexual activities. Findings on the associations between distinct sexual activities and various indices of psychological and physical function. A wide range of better psychological and physiological health indices are associated specifically with penile-vaginal intercourse. Other sexual activities have weaker, no, or (in the cases of masturbation and anal intercourse) inverse associations with health indices. Condom use appears to impair some benefits of penile-vaginal intercourse. Only a few of the research designs allow for causal inferences. The health benefits associated with specifically penile-vaginal intercourse should inform a new evidence-based approach to sexual medicine, sex education, and a broad range of medical and psychological consultations.”

hoto: flickr/ Luke Wisley

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Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: What can 2,914 Australian twins tell us about ...

This is a guest post by Jamie L. Vernon, Ph.D., a research scientist and policy wonk, who encourages the scientific community to get engaged in the policy-making process

While many of us were howling about global warming over the last decade, Earth’s surface temperature actually failed to significantly increase. Yes, I said it. Global surface temperature showed little warming between 1998 and 2008. But, don’t go and broadcast the demise of the global warming movement quite yet. The reasons for the cooling trend are not encouraging. In fact, they are quite threatening. And, if environmentalists have their way (and I think they should), global warming will reemerge and may do so at an alarming rate.

A team of researchers led by Harvard professor James Stock have determined that gases resulting from human activities in conjunction with natural variables can explain the “1999-2008 hiatus in warming.” Using published statistical models, they were able to demonstrate that a rapid increase in coal consumption in Asia likely generates sufficient sulfur emissions to reduce global surface temperatures. They write,

We find that this hiatus in warming coincides with a period of little increase in the sum of anthropogenic and natural forcings. Declining solar insolation as part of a normal eleven-year cycle, and a cyclical change from an El Nino to a La Nina dominate our measure of anthropogenic effects because rapid growth in short-lived sulfur emissions partially offsets rising greenhouse gas concentrations.

In other words, despite the influence of other natural variables, sulfur dioxide is the major driver of recent temperature fluctuations. Sulfur dioxide is a natural by-product of burning coal. Accumulation of sulfur dioxide aerosols in the atmosphere reflects the sun’s rays leading to a cooling effect on global surface temperatures. Because emissions from human activities greatly exceed natural production, increased dependence upon coal-based energy production can lead to sulfur dioxide-driven cooling effects that counteract the warming caused by increasing carbon dioxide.

The authors cite China’s growing dependence on coal as an energy source to explain the increase in sulfur emissions. From 2003 to 2007, Chinese coal consumption more than doubled. Prior to that, it took 22 years for China to double its coal usage. Whereas global coal consumption increased by 27% from 1980 to 2002, the recent Chinese growth rate which occurs over a 4 year period (5 times the previous rate) represents 77% of the 26% rise in global coal consumption.

So why not rely on sulfur dioxide as a geoengineering tactic for regulating global warming?

The sulfur dioxide produced by these coal-fired power plants is a pollutant that contributes to the production of acid rain. Forests, crops, buildings, aquatic life and human health are all negatively impacted by acid rain. In 1963, motivated by the environmental movement, the U.S. Congress passed the Clean Air Act (CAA), which established standards for regulating pollutants such as sulfur dioxide. However, it took until 1990 for Congress to strengthen CAA enough to force the coal industry to significantly cut or trap sulfur emissions. This legislation successfully decreased sulfur dioxide emissions by 40% from 1990 levels. As a result, the reduction of sulfur dioxide emissions dramatically reduced the cooling effects associated with these gases. Thus, removing sulfur dioxide to protect crops, forests, wildlife and human health resulted in the warming trend observed between 1990 and 2002.

Given the negative effects of sulfur dioxide on the environment and human health, we should expect Chinese environmentalists to act to reduce these pollutants. Indeed, China has already made some moves in this direction. Subsequent temperature increases will very likely be more dramatic than those observed during the 1990’s, because the global community has done little to reduce the warming effects that will occur due to continual accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

For those who would like to use this as evidence against global warming, I invite you to closely examine the following graph from the paper described herein. You’ll notice that the window of time during which this temperature stabilization was observed occurs at the high end of a 100 year warming trend. The temporary cooling does not suggest that warming observed since 1910 has been reversed or that we shouldn’t expect additional warming in the future.

Follow Jamie Vernon on Twitter or read occasional posts at his personal blog, “American SciCo.”

Fenugreek seeds

The European Food Safety Authority has released a scientific report on the deadly E. coli outbreak that has sickened more than 3,500 people and killed at least 44 in the last seven weeks, and the news is grim: the apparent source of the contamination, a shipment of fenugreek seeds from Egypt, has been scattered all across the continent, making recall tricky and new outbreaks likely until the seed packets reach their expiration date in three years. Maryn McKenna of Superbug expertly breaks down the report in all its chilling detail:

The seeds took a tortuous path. That initial shipment — which was immense, 15,000 kg (33,000 lbs) — was containerized at the port of Damietta in Egypt, shipped by boat to Antwerp in Belgium, went by barge to Rotterdam in the Netherlands where it passed customs, and then was trucked to Germany. There, an importer broke up the shipment:

10,500 kg to a single German distributor;
3,550 kg to nine other German companies;
375 kg to a Spanish company;
250 kg to an Austrian distributor that sold the entire lot to a single Austrian company;
and 400 kg to a company in England.

When ...

A patient with tracheal cancer was given a new trachea grown entirely in a lab from his own stem cells using a synthetic scaffold. The cancer has been diagnosed as terminal, but thanks to the surgery, the man is likely to be discharged in a few days. As Gautam Naik at the Wall Street Journal reports:

“It’s yet another demonstration that what was once considered hype [in the field of tissue engineering] is becoming a life-changing moment for patients,” said Alan Russell, director of the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Pittsburgh, who wasn’t involved in the latest operation. . .

With the patient on the surgery table, Dr. [Paolo] Macchiarini and colleagues then added chemicals to the stem cells, persuading them to differentiate into tissue—such as bony cells—that make up the windpipe.

About 48 hours after the transplant, imaging and other studies showed appropriate cells in the process of populating the artificial windpipe, which had begun to function like a natural one. There was no rejection by the patient’s immune system, because the cells used to seed the artificial windpipe came from the patient’s own body.

Dr. Russell of the McGowan Institute sounded a note of caution about using this technique to ...

Thanks to everyone who has been taking my extra books off my hands in advance of a summer of house-gutting. If you’ve been holding out, or if you’ve been thinking about getting another book, your moment has come. Apparently, some brain-infecting parasite has taken such a grievous toll on my Economic Cortex that I now find myself offering you this final, ridiculous sale to end all sales. All the remaining autographed hardback books in my Amazon store are now ten dollars. All autographed paperback books are five dollars.

Let me break it down for you. Click on the links below to order your copies:

Parasite Rex, US hardback (1 left): $10 Sold out!

Parasite Rex, US paperback (3 left): $5 Sold out!

Parasite Rex, UK paperback (15 6 left): $5

Microcosm, US paperback (8 left): $5 Sold out!

Evolution: The Triumph of An Idea, UK paperback (the 2003 Arrow edition, no illustrations, 3 copies left): $5 Sold out!

Soul Made Flesh US paperback (1 left): $5Sold out!

Soul Made Flesh UK hardback (11 7 left): $10

Soul Made Flesh UK paperback (11 10 left): $5

Smithsonian Intimate Guide to ...

Spotted hyenas are sometimes portrayed as cowardly scavengers, always laughing, always up to some kind of mischief. If you’ve ever seen Disney’s The Lion King, then you may already have that image in your head. Here in the non-Disney universe, spotted hyenas are actually fascinating creatures. For example, they hang out in matriarchal “clans,” and the females, with their aggressive behavior and pseudo-penises (large clitorises), are very difficult to tell apart from the males. But it turns out that spotted hyenas may be even stranger than we initially thought: they may use bacteria to help communicate with one another, suggests Michigan State University zoologist Kay E. Holekamp in a recent, amusing New York Times blog post.

Unlike many other carnivorous species, spotted hyenas do not mark their territory by lifting their legs and peeing. Instead, the animals produce a yellowish paste in their scent glands located above their anuses. The paste accumulates in adjacent pouches, which the hyenas then rub on grass stalks. In previous research, Holekamp and her students learned that the paste odor provides a wealth of information to roaming hyenas, such as the sex of the paste owner, ...

What’s the News: One of biologists’ favorite fantasies is a doctor who can fit inside a cell. This tiny physician, likely a device built from DNA, would make diagnoses by sensing molecules floating around the body that are signatures of certain diseases and would then release the appropriate drug.

While that vision is still a long way off, scientists have taken a significant step in that direction with a system that detects problems at several levels of cells’ machinery.

What’s the Context:

Disease are frequently the result of malfunctioning proteins, which zip around taking care of the daily business of the body. Proteins are made using our DNA as templates; as described by the Central Dogma of biology, first DNA is transcribed into an mRNA molecule, which is then translated by cellular machinery into the protein. One way to tell whether a protein is abnormal is by checking the mRNA molecule for errors.
The researchers’ first “biocomputer,” which they developed seven years ago, did just that. It consisted of a strand of DNA and a DNA-snipping enzyme. The DNA was designed to bind to mRNAs of specific proteins known to be involved in ...

At 11:29 Eastern (US) time, the Space Shuttle Atlantis roared into space for the last time.

I have mixed feelings about the Shuttle, NASA, and our future in space — you can read about that here — but it doesn’t change the fact that watching a Shuttle shed the bonds of Earth and leap into space is still a magnificent thing to do.

This may be the last launch of the Shuttle, but it is not the final step for mankind. Private industry is there, other nations are still launching, and I have hope that through hard work America will once again lead the way to the final frontier. And it won’t just be into orbit, which is, after all, still bound to Earth. It will be beyond, back to the Moon, on to Mars, on to near-Earth asteroids, and eventually into deep space. It may take decades, even centuries, but the human-populated solar system I dreamed and read about, the one I still imagine, will come to life some day.

We just have to choose to make it happen.

Per ardua, ad astra.

Image credit: Robert Scoble.

Researchers sifted through a whole lot of AT&T mobile phone data to find out who’s talking to who—or, really, where’s talking to where. The Connected States of America, as the project is called, has produced some amazing maps showing clusters of communication, from the surprising—neighboring states like Oklahoma and Arkansas pair off, chatting mostly with each other—to the expected: the flood of continent-spanning calls between New York and San Francisco.

[MIT Senseable City Lab, via GigaOM and Gizmodo]

Today in New York and Los Angeles, “The Ledge” premieres–see here for our Point of Inquiry episode–a landmark, by any reasonable estimation, in the cinematic depiction of atheism. Tell me another movie that has top tier Hollywood stars in it (Liv Tyler, Terence Howard), that has been nominated for best drama at Sundance, and that actually advances the case that atheists are ethical, good, and even heroic people?

When Mel Gibson made The Passion of the Christ, evangelicals rallied around the film dramatically and made it a huge success. Seriously, the film grossed over $ 600 million!

You might think atheists would see their chance to do the same…but then, atheists are not like Christians, in many, many ways. Psychologically–this is my opinion, but actually grounded in a lot of data–they are highly individualistic, not followers, not into heeding any authority, marching to their own drum. That is, of course, what makes them atheists and what makes them reject the dogmas of religion. And it is also what makes them regularly criticize their own.

You see this in the blog comments on The Ledge wherever you go–a lot of negativism directed towards the film. I know that those who comment on blogs are only a small proportion of those who read them, but–if you want to have an effect through popular culture, this does not bode particularly well.

The film may cascade to prominence anyway–Bill Donohue’s Catholic League has been baited into attacking it, which is great PR for the film, and it does after all feature a star studded cast. But this weekend is crucial–the opening in New York and LA has to be strong in order to spread to more theaters. Will atheists come out, in these two cities that are absolutely full of them?

Let’s hope so–you can find a theater here. And for those who aren’t based in our two bi-coastal megacities, you can still stream the movie via Sundance.

Meantime, here is a clip of the central “debate over God” scene:

While the astronomy community reels from the potential loss of the James Webb Space Telescope (see Julianne and Risa’s posts), it is appropriate that we also mark the passing of the Space Shuttle program. All being well, in about 15 minutes the last space shuttle will rocket into space (live video).

The space shuttle program was essential to the launch, and perhaps even more importantly, the multiple repairs of the Hubble Space Telescope. And it is the inevitable loss of the Hubble, and the absence of a worthy successor in space, that is leaving the astronomy community despondent.

These are difficult financial times. Brutal decisions need to be made. It is certainly conceivable that the United States (and the world) simply can no longer afford to finish off the James Webb Space Telescope. However, it is worth noting that this telescope in many ways symbolizes the best aspects of humanity: our thirst for knowledge, our desire for exploration, and our quest to find our place in the Universe. There is a reason that the Hubble space telescope captures the imagination of both practicing scientists and the general public. We cannot help but be moved and fascinated by images of the cosmos. Have we truly come to a point where we abandon this most noble and inspirational of pursuits?

Today, weather permitting, the last space shuttle will launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Watch the launch live here at NASA TV.

For live tweets, follow @NASAKennedy and the journalists on the ground: Alan Boyle (@b0yle), Dave Mosher (@DaveMosher), and Xeni Jardin (@xenijardin) are a good start, and for from-a-distance commentary, follow Phil Plait at @badastronomer.

Lucas Brouwers, one of the new bloggers at Scientific American’s snazzy new blog network, takes a look at an intriguing paper (free pdf). The authors of the paper in examined many different strains of E. coli and come to a remarkable conclusion: they’ve been splitting apart so far that they may soon no longer be a single species. Check it out. (And, if you have a lot of time to spare, check out the rest of Scientific American’s fine line-up of bloggers.)

I’m very pleased to find out that Symphony of Science has put out a new video: Children of Africa:

Lovely, as always. Nice to see such wonderful speakers for science in this work, doing what they do best: inspiring us to explore more, think more, and be better humans.

Related posts:

- New Symphony of Science: Wave of Reason (the one I’m in)
- Symphony of Science Movement 4
- The Unbroken Thread
- The Case for Mars

The Pith: The primary reason for the pervasiveness of sex among complex organisms is to maintain genomic integrity, not to increase genetic variation..

I just read a very strange article in the journal Evolution, Sex reduces genetic variation. In it the authors argue that contrary to conventional wisdom and evolutionary orthodoxy the rationale for the prevalence of sex amongst eukaryotic organisms is not maintenance of genetic variation, but rather a constraint upon genetic variation! This is a very peculiar view, and as someone not immersed in the literature on sex totally surprising to me.

The standard model is simple: sex allows organisms to swap genetic material and generate new combinations. This is at a particular premium for large, complex, and slow-breeding lineages, as is the norm amongst eukaryotes. In contrast, bacteria and their ilk have huge population sizes to draw from, and are quite literally protean in their ability to shift strategies to climb whatever adaptive landscape nature throws at them. Carl has a nice review of a paper in Science which reported just this finding in keeping with expectation. Increase the pathogen pressure, and eukaryotes which exchange genes marginalize those which do not because ...

Can we talk to robots? Ten-month-old infants expected interactive humanoid robots to be talked to by persons.

“As technology advances, many human-like robots are being developed. Although these humanoid robots should be classified as objects, they share many properties with human beings. This raises the question of how infants classify them. Based on the looking-time paradigm… we investigated whether 10-month-old infants expected people to talk to a humanoid robot. In a familiarization period, each infant observed an actor and an interactive robot behaving like a human, a non-interactive robot remaining stationary, and a non-interactive robot behaving like a human. In subsequent test trials, the infants were shown another actor talking to the robot and to the actor. We found that infants who had previously observed the interactive robot showed no difference in looking-time between the two types of test events. Infants in the other conditions, however, looked longer at the test event where the second experimenter talked to the robot rather than where the second experimenter talked to the person. These results suggest that infants interpret the interactive robot as a communicative agent and the non-interactive robot as an object. Our ...

As many of you know when you have two adjacent demes, breeding populations, they often rapidly equilibrate in gene frequencies if they were originally distinct. There are plenty of good concrete examples of this. The Hui of China are Muslims who speak local Chinese dialects. The most probable root of this community goes back to the enormous population of Central Asia Muslims brought by the Mongol Yuan dynasty that ruled ruled China for over a century from the late 1200s to 1300s. Genetic studies of this group that I’ve seen indicate that a high bound estimate for West Eurasian ancestry is ~10%. The other ~90% is interchangeable with the Han Chinese. So let’s assume that the Hui are ~10% West Asian. If you assume that in the year 1400 the Hui were “pure,” you have 24 generations (25 years per generation). The original population of “Central Asian Muslims” were heterogeneous, including Iranians and Turks. But let’s take it granted that they were 50% East Eurasian and 50% West Eurasian in ancestry at the time of their arrival. What would the intermarriage rate per generation have to be so ...