The news these days is grim for the science-minded. The governor of Texas, who’d also like to be your president, says that Texas schools teach creationism. (They don’t, although Perry–who appointed a creationist to chair the State Board of Education–may wish otherwise.) Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson spoke passionately on HBO about the country’s retreat from dreams.

So I found some small comfort in an email I got from Patrick House, a Stanford graduate student, about my recent post on the cunning ways of the parasite Toxoplasma–Toxo to its friends and admirers.

I’m the first author on the new Toxo paper. I wanted to send you an email that hopefully cheers your day — I’m getting a Ph.D. now in Neuroscience at Stanford, working exclusively on Toxo — and I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you.

I did my undergrad work in Philosophy (with some neuroscience thrown in) and was perpetually fascinated by Toxo ever since your Discover article on Parasites a decade ago led me tangentially to it and then — of course — Parasite Rex. I met with Robert, spoke to him about ...

To say I am not a fan of Rick Perry, Republican Presidential candidate, is to seriously underestimate my antipathy toward him. He is anti-science in almost every sense of the word, and his stance on nearly every issue on which I’ve heard him speak is the exact opposite of where I stand.

But then something like this comes along, and shows just how far outside of reality he is. In this video, a little boy asks him how old the Earth is, and Perry then gives an astonishing answer:

After equivocating about the age of the Earth, Perry — a man who, if elected President, will swear to uphold the U. S. Constitution — says, "In Texas we teach both creationism and evolution in our public schools."

This is a jaw-dropping assertion. I find it difficult to interpret this as other than him saying he supports blatantly violating the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution by teaching religion in public schools. Gawker does take a different tack saying, " Texas does not, in fact, teach creationism, or anything like it." But even if that’s true, it means Perry is — ...

What’s the News: For all the testing we do, drugs are still mysterious things—they can activate pathways we never connected with them or twiddle the dials in some far-off part of the body. To see if drugs already FDA-approved for certain diseases could be used to treat other conditions, scientists lined up two online databases and discovered two drugs that, when tested in mice, worked against diseases they’d never been meant for, suggesting that mining of such information could be a fertile strategy for finding new treatments.

How the Heck:

The two databases the team used were collections of information about how genes were activated or deactivated in human cells both when drugs were taken (the Connectivity Map) and when certain diseases were present (Gene Expression Omnibus).
The researchers fed the data into software that connected a disease with a high level of activity from one gene with a drug that tamped that gene’s activity down. In this way, they identified candidates for follow up in the lab: epilepsy drug topiramate was paired with inflammatory bowel disease, and heartburn drug cimetidine with a kind of lung cancer.
The team treated mouse models of these ...

Check. This. Out: a perfectly-formed collapse pit on Mars that leads to an underground cavern!

Amazing! [Click to barsoomenate.]

This was taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in July 2011. See the hole in the bottom? You can tell from the lighting that this is an underground opening to a cavern — a skylight. Quite a few of these have been found on Mars, actually. We see them on Earth and even on the Moon. Given the angle of the shadows, the vertical distance from the bottom of the pit to the floor of the cavern is about 20 meters (65 feet). Watch your step!

Here’s how we think skylights like this form. In the distant past, Mars was geologically active. Rivers of lava ran across the surface. If the surface of the lava hardens it can form a roof, allowing the lava underneath to continue flowing; these are called lava tubes and there are bazillions of them in Hawaii, for example. Eventually, the source of the lava chokes off and the lava flows away, leaving the empty tube underground. If the roof is thin in ...

This is a brief guest post by Jamie Vernon.

In a stunning exchange with a young boy, a video posted by ABC News reveals Republican Presidential candidate Rick Perry confirming what many scientists and science educators have suspected for years. According to the Governor, “In Texas, we teach both creationism and evolution.”

So, there it is. Texas encourages teaching of creationism in public schools.

Perry has consistently appointed creationist leaders to the Texas Board of Education over the years. Each of them has denied their intent to allow teaching of creationism in science classrooms in Texas schools. At the same time, the Texas Board of Education has made repeated attempts to weaken science standards to make way for anti-evolution curricula.

I think we’ll be hearing from the Governor on this matter. The backtracking will be a sight to see.

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

Elkhorn coral infected with white pox.

What’s the News: Over the past decade, diseases, pollution, and warming waters have put coral populations across the globe in a dramatic decline. In an extreme case, the population of elkhorn coral, considered one of the most important reef-building corals in the Caribbean, has decreased by 90–95 percent since 1980, partly due to a disease called white pox.

Now, scientists have traced this lethal disease back to humans. Human feces, which seep into the Florida Keys and the Caribbean from leaky septic tanks, transmit a white pox-causing bacterium to elkhorn coral, researchers report in the journal PLoS ONE. “It is the first time ever that a human disease has been shown to kill an invertebrate,” ecologist James Porter told Livescience. “This is unusual because we humans usually get disease from wildlife, and this is the other way around.”

What’s the Context:

Serratia marcescens is a bacterium found in the intestines of humans and many other animals. Resistant to many types of antibiotics, S. marcescens is known to cause respiratory problems and urinary tract infections in people.
The bacteria can also infect coral—in 2002, Porter and his colleagues learned ...

Earlier today I posted about a ginormous blob of gas 80% of the way across the Universe that’s emitting polarized light, and how that’s a dead giveaway it has galaxies embedded inside it. The fact that the light was polarized helped solved a ten-year-old mystery about what’s lighting it and other cosmic blobs like it.

Now, that’s great for something that’s 100 sextillion kilometers away, but what about here on Earth? Well, it turns out polarization works down here, too. It can make rainbows disappear!

[Set the resolution to 720p or 1080p to see it best.]

Here’s how this works. First, to quote my post from this morning:

Imagine two people standing on opposite sides of a tall picket fence. There are spaces between the pickets, maybe 5 cm wide and two meters tall. One person has a sheet of plywood to hand through to the person on the other side. If they hold the plywood horizontally, it can’t get through. Duh. But if they rotate the sheet so that it’s vertical, it passes between the fence pickets easily.

Polarized sunglasses are like that picket fence. They’re coated with a very thin sheet of molecules that naturally align ...

Here’s the fact checker:

Despite our repeated requests, neither spokesman [for Perry] provided any evidence to back up Perry’s claim that “a substantial number of scientists … have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects” — perhaps because that particular scandal appears to be a figment of Perry’s imagination.

Perry appears to be referring to hundreds of e-mails that were stolen from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain and then disseminated on the Internet in 2009. One e-mail made references to adding a “trick” in the data, leading climate change skeptics to claim the data was manipulated.

But, although Perry claimed the scientists “were found to be manipulating this data,” five investigations have since been conducted into the allegations — and each one exonerated the half-dozen or so scientists involved.

So, in contrast to Perry’s statement, there have not been a “substantial number” of scientists who manipulated data. Instead, there were a handful — who were falsely accused.

And so Perry gets four Pinocchios. But don’t expect Perry–or his supporters–to admit that they’re wrong or change their views!

That would be so…scientific.

One of the basic principles of modern science is that the physics we understand here, on Earth, work everywhere. This turns out to be a pretty good assumption, because we see it coming true time and again. That knowledge can then be used to figure out things that are happening at very large distances — even well across the Universe.

With that in mind, I present to you LAB-1: a glowing glob of gas as seen by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope:

[Click to, um, englobenate.]

This, however, is no ordinary Space Blob: it’s located at the staggering distance of 11.5 billion light years from Earth! Not very many objects have been seen farther away than this, and it’s one of the single biggest discrete structures seen this far away. It’s about 300,000 light years across — three quintillion kilometers, or three times the diameter of our own galaxy. That’s pretty flipping big.

And although it’s faint to our telescopes, at that distance it must actually be tremendously luminous for us to see it at all. Something is making it glow fiercely, but what? One hint is in the ...

Back in the 1990s there was a lot of controversy around the Human Genome Diversity Project. In fact there were whole books devoted to the sociology of the project. Though on some of the details critics of the project may have had a point, their overall aim of stalling scientific inquiry in this area failed in totality. A few years ago a team out of the University of Chicago even produced a web browser so you can explore the data yourself. To my knowledge this hasn’t resulted in massive genocidal action against indigenous peoples; the human race doesn’t seem to need any scientific backing for that, alas.

But, if I was a Lefty the-man-is-racist type I think I might assert that the chips which were used to generate the 600,000 markers for the HGDP public data set are racist! I’m not one of those types, so what I really am concerned about is ascertainment bias. From what I have heard many of the SNP chips floating around today are looking for variants found in Europeans most often. That’s because so many study populations in medical genetics are of European descent. This is not a total deal ...

Above is the distribution of self-reported I.Q.s of the readers of this weblog according to the 2011 survey. I point this out because my friend Steve Hsu will be giving a talk at Google later today. Here are the details:

I’ll be giving a talk at Google tomorrow (Thursday August 18) at 5 pm. The slides are here. The video will probably be available on Google’s TechTalk channel on YouTube.

The Cognitive Genomics Lab at BGI is using this talk to kick off the drive for US participants in our intelligence GWAS. More information at http://www.cog-genomics.org, including automatic qualifying standards for the study, which are set just above +3 SD. Participants will receive free genotyping and help with interpreting the results. (The functional part of the site should be live after August 18.)

Title: Genetics and Intelligence

Abstract: How do genes affect cognitive ability? I begin with a brief review of psychometric measurements of intelligence, introducing the idea of a “general factor” or IQ score. The main results concern the stability, validity (predictive power), and heritability of adult IQ. Next, I discuss ...

It’s time to revisit that grand old parasite, the brain-infecting Toxoplasma. The more we learn about it, the more marvelously creepy it gets.

Toxoplasma is a single-celled relative of the parasites that cause malaria. It poses a serious risk to people with compromised immune systems (for example, people with AIDS) and fetuses (which is why pregnant women need to avoid getting Toxoplasma infections). If you’ve got a healthy immune system, it doesn’t cause any immediate harm. (Ed Yong has explained why a purported link to brain cancer is very weak.) All told, perhaps a quarter or a third of all people on Earth carry thousands of Toxoplasma cysts in their heads. Most never become aware of their living cargo.

The Toxoplasma life cycle normally takes the parasite from cats to the prey of cats and back again. In the guts of cats, the parasites have sex and produce egg-like offspring which are shed with cat droppings. They can survive in soil for weeks or months. Rats and other mammals ingest the eggs, which produce cysts mainly in the brain. When the cats eat infected prey, they get infected.

For a little over ten years, scientists have been ...

“It has been presumed that religiosity has an influence on mating behavior, but here we experimentally investigate the possibility that mating behavior might also influence religiosity.

In Experiment 1, people reported higher religiosity after looking at mating pools consisting of attractive people of their own sex compared to attractive opposite sex targets. Experiment 2 replicated the effect with an added control group, and suggested that both men and women become more religious when seeing same sex competitors. We discuss several possible explanations for these effects. Most broadly, the findings contribute to an emerging literature on how cultural phenomena such as religiosity respond to ecological cues in potentially functional ways.”

Photo: flickr/21TonGiant

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WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

Incredibly, it looks like the long, long story of David Mabus may be drawing to a close.

He is notorious in the skeptic community: for years he has posted comments, emailed, and tweeted anti-skeptic and anti-atheist diatribes, mostly incoherent. I would commonly see many spam tweets from him filling my feed, sometimes over a dozen a day. It was very irritating, but that was all.

However, more recently his spam escalated into death threats. I’ve received them myself. When I got them I contacted the local sheriff’s office, but since Mabus (a pseudonym) lives in Canada, I couldn’t make much progress. The same was true for many other skeptics as well.

But then things changed… and I’ll let you read Tim Farley’s post about how it all came about. Tim gives an astonishingly detailed and thorough account of what happened. There are copious links and images there to give you the entire story. But the bottom line is that the Montreal Police just today announced they had made an arrest in the case, and Tim has confirmed the arrest was of Mabus himself.

I don’t have much to add to what Tim wrote, except this: I don’t want to see Mabus tossed ...

MABEL here is a fast lady. At 6.8 miles per hour, she’s the quickest human-like runner in the robot world. She is also the owner of some of the freakiest knees, right up there with Dr. Seuss’s ominous pale green pants and the spider-like prancings of BigDog, the defense robot you hope you never meet coming through the woods at night.

Running robots could transport baggage and participate in rescue operations where rugged terrain makes wheeled vehicles useless, which is why DARPA funds projects like the quadruped BigDog, which is already fairly well developed and has a top speed of about 5 mph. MABEL is a biped bot, which means she’s probably less stable than a quadruped, but more able to potentially stand in for humans in activities like climbing stairs (and certainly a more useful instance of human biomimicry than some robots we could name). Watching her strut her stuff around a little indoor track in the video above, you’ll notice the springing motion of her legs, which is very similar to a human running–both spend about 40% of their time in the air, according to her builders, a team of roboticists at University of ...

Coming on strong as a candidate, with everybody talking about him, Rick Perry immediately attacks global warming and says it’s all a plot for scientists to get ‘da bucks. It’s like, a welfare program, but for scientists. Here are some quotes:

Fielding audience questions after brief remarks that dwelled largely on fiscal and economic issues, Perry encountered one skeptic who said he was quoting from Perry’s 2010 book, Fed Up!: Our Fight to Save America From Washington, then asked whether misgivings about climate science fueled distrust of federal research in general.

“I do believe that the issue of global warming has been politicized,” Perry answered. “I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. I think we’re seeing it almost weekly or even daily, scientists who are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change. Yes, our climates change. They’ve been changing ever since the earth was formed.”

More here.

Hey Rick Perry–when and how do you think the Earth was formed? What was the “climate” like then? I’d love to hear his answer to that one.

Now, is it surprising to find a GOP candidate denying human caused global warming? Heck no–this is a litmus test issue in the party.

But it is surprising to find how exercised Perry seems to be about it. He isn’t just toeing some line. He actually seems to be engaged with the topic–which is what’s most worrisome.

What’s the News: Biologists have discovered an eel so bizarre that they didn’t initially know if it was an eel or some other kind of fish. The strange creature, dubbed Protoanguilla palau after a researcher found it in an undersea cavern off the coast of Palau, has very few of the anatomic features of modern eels, but displays many hallmarks of primitive eels from the Mesozoic era. It appears that the eel’s last common ancestor with any other living creature existed 200 million years ago, the researchers report in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

How the Heck:

Last year, Jiro Sakaue of the Southern Marine Laboratory of Palau came across the unique eel while diving in a deep fringing-reef cave near Palau. He brought the find to his colleagues to investigate.
Sakaue and his team began by analyzing the physical features of eight of the eel specimens. The researchers compared the creatures’ anatomic characteristics to those of modern eels—which includes over 800 species grouped into 19 families—and to ancient eel fossils.
The new species, the scientists found, showed traits present only in the fossils of the earliest eels, dating back to 100 million years ago. ...

[UPDATE, 22:00 Mountain US Time, Aug 17: Well, that was easy! I just checked, and the book has blown through it's goal! BABloggees rock. Thanks! But this doesn't mean you still can't donate if you want to.]

I have a few picture books of astronomy on my shelf, and I always wonder how the publishers are able to print such magnificent quality books and make money. Some of the books are pretty pricey, as you might expect — a hundred pages of glossy full-color pictures ain’t cheap! — so it seems like it would be hard to do this without a major publisher backing you.

Of course, that was before the intertubez. My friend, astronomer and artist Dan Durda, let me know about a gorgeous book called The Beauty of Space. He sent me some promo material, and it truly is a very cool book. It’s about the history of space art, and includes astonishing and spectacular artwork from some of the best people making it (including Dan).

A book like this might be hard to publish on its own, so the editor, Jon Ramer, has made it ...