The Rover Opportunity shows us that science can be beautiful.

NASA - Rover Opportunity's panoramic view of the Endeavour Crater - there's a great enlargement of this one, too

Click here to view the embedded video.

Love that title, so I “borrowed” it from the Dawn website. This video was made by putting a series of still images from the Dawn spacecraft’s framing camera. The images were taken on July 24, 2011 from a distance of 3,200 miles / 5,200 km.

We are looking at a full rotation of the asteroid which takes about 5 hours to occur.  Those “groove-like” features running in the direction of the rotation are very interesting, hopefully we will hear more about the from the Dawn team.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

As always you can get the very latest on the Dawn website.

When we think about dwarf planets, the first one that comes to mind is Pluto.  Following that, we think about Makemake, Eris, Haumea, and Ceres.  We get this mental image of Pluto, followed by a cluster of little planets out in the Kuiper Belt.  That mental diagram is wrong for many reasons, but it’s mostly wrong because of Ceres.  Ceres is not in a cluster out in the Kuiper Belt; it’s in our own back yard.

From NASA, comparison of the Earth, Moon, and Ceres

Ceres, the largest object within the Asteroid Belt, is the only dwarf planet in the inner solar system.  Discovered by Giuseppe Piazzi on January 1st, 1801, Piazzi thought at first that he had found a comet.  After watching it for a while, Piazzi announced his discovery January 24th.  He did note that the “comet” was moving in such a slow and uniform manner that it might be something more interesting.  Indeed it was.

Ceres is named for the Roman goddess of the harvest, and was called “Hera” for a while in Germany, and “Demeter” in Greece.  Its astronomical symbol is the sickle – that looks like the universal symbol for “female” with a chunk missing from it in the 6:00 to 9:00 position.  Remember, the astronomical symbol for Venus is the female symbol.

NASA/ESA HST, images of Ceres - nature of the white spot unknown

For a long time Ceres was listed as a planet, along with 2 Pallas, 3 Juno, and 4 Vesta.  Its final designation, that of a dwarf planet, came about in 2006.  The largest object in the Asteroid Belt, Ceres is responsible for a full third of its mass.  Mostly spherical, its surface is probably a mixture of water ices and gooey carbonates and clays.

Modern observation has shown that Ceres appears to have differentiated into a rocky core with an icy mantle.  There may even be a sub-surface ocean of liquid water.  The Dawn space probe will visit Ceres in 2015.  That should prove exciting, so mark it on your calendars; only four more years to go!  It’s been estimated that Ceres contains more fresh frozen water than what we find on Earth.

NASA/ESA, A. Field - possible layers of Ceres

There has been some talk that Ceres may have captured biologically active ejecta from the young Earth, and with a warm, sub-surface (possibly salty) ocean, it could have been colonized.  While all discoveries of possible sub-surface liquid water leads to talk of extra-terrestrial life, Ceres is definitely in a better position to study than, say, Europa.

Ceres is certainly an interesting object to study.  With exceptional viewing conditions, a very sharp-sighted person can see Ceres (very dimly), but it mostly requires some sort of viewing aid.  Ceres will next be at perihelion December 18, 2012, so get those binoculars ready.

NASA/ESA HST enhanced (to show detail) image of Ceres

Here’s a brief note to commemorate the fact that Not Exactly Rocket Science is five years old today! Once again, thanks to my wife, my science writer colleagues and all of you for giving me the motivation and support to carry on writing.

And by coincidence, I’m flying off to Peru for my first field-reporting assignment. More on that later.

E

(Image from camflam)

It’s booze week on NCBI ROFL! All this week we’ll be featuring articles about ethanol, ethyl alcohol, and even CH3CH2OH. Enjoy!

An explanation for enhanced perceptions of attractiveness after alcohol consumption.

“Acute alcohol consumption increases ratings of attractiveness to faces. This may help to explain increased frequencies of sexual encounters during periods of alcohol intoxication. At least in part, such increased attraction may be the result of alcohol consumption decreasing ability to detect bilateral asymmetry, presumably because of the reductions in the levels of visual function. We tested the hypotheses that acute alcohol consumption decreases ability to detect asymmetry in faces and reduces preference for symmetrical faces over asymmetrical faces. Twenty images of a pair of faces and then 20 images of a single face were displayed on a computer, one at a time. Participants were instructed to state which face of each of the face pairs displayed was most attractive and then whether the single face being displayed was symmetrical or not. Data were collected near campus bars at Roehampton University. Sixty-four self-selecting students who undertook the study were classified as either sober (control) or intoxicated with ...

Among gamers, Deus Ex is something of a legendary fusion of disparate gaming styles. Among science fiction buffs, Deus Ex is lauded for managing to take two awesome genres, William Gibson-esque cyberpunk and Robert Anton Wilson-level conspiracy theories, and jam them together into an immanentizing of the eschaton unlike anything you’ve seen since Doktor Sleepless. And among transhumanists, Deus Ex brought up every issue of humanity’s fusion with technology one could imagine. It is a rich video game.

So when Square Enix decided to pick up the reins from Eidos and create a new installment in the series, Deus Ex: Human Revolution (DX:HR), I was quite excited. The first indication DX:HR was not going to be a crummy exploitation of the original’s success (see: Deus Ex 2: Invisible War), was the teaser trailer, shown above. Normally, a teaser trailer is just music and a slow build to a logo or single image that lets you know the game is coming out. Instead, the development team decided to demonstrate that it was taking the philosophy of the game seriously.

What philosophy? you might ask. Why transhumanism, of course. Nick Bostrom, chair of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, centers the birth of transhumanism in the ...

What’s the News: Using data from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, astronomers from Princeton University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have discovered the darkest known planet. The exoplanet, called TrES-2b, is located about 750 light-years away from Earth and reflects less than 1 percent of the incident light from its parent star, making it blacker than the blackest piece of coal. The discovery was published recently in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (pdf).

What’s the Context:

For astronomers, albedo—the percentage of light that is reflected off an object’s surface—is a very useful concept that allows them to infer much about an object’s properties. For example, by comparing the albedo of an asteroid with the albedos of known materials here on Earth, astronomers can figure out how much of the body’s surface is covered with ice, dust, or metallic compounds. Albedo can also help pinpoint the temperature of a solar body.
For ...

Compare the extremely detailed history of baseball cards and the somewhat skeletal entry on interior decorating on Wikipedia, the Font of All Knowledge, and you’ll get a sense of what a recent paper by computer scientists concluded: Wikipedia’s primarily a creation of man, not of woman.

After a NYTimes trend piece anecdotally discussed the disparity in January, citing Wikipedia’s male-heavy geek culture roots as the source, this intrepid bunch decided to actually do the numbers, pulling the data on editors’ gender from their profile information. And indeed, of the editors who joined in 2009 and disclosed gender, only about 16% were female, and they made only 9% of the cohort’s edits. Looking at signups over time, the researchers also saw that Wikipedia’s gender gap isn’t closing, in contrast to many social media sites, where women are now more likely to participate than men. This may be because Wikipedia looks like a slightly chilly place for new female users: self-identified women were more likely to get their early edits reverted than men were.

It’s neat that we now have real numbers in the discussion of Wikipedia’s gender politics. But there are few problems with a ...

What with all the fun excitement blasting away from the Sun the past few days, now is a good time to point you toward this excellent guide to solar flares and their classification, presented by the good folks at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center:

Now I don’t have to always define what this all means every time the Sun flips its lid over the next couple of years. I like it when my tax money makes my life easier.

Tip o’ the lead apron to Scott Wiessenger.

Related posts:

- Another big solar flare
- Sun blows out another big one; expect aurorae tonight!
- The Sun lets out a brief flare
- Incredible solar flare video

In the justice system, a confession is often treated as proof of guilt—and yet, a surprising number of people confess to crimes they didn’t commit. In its latest issue, the Economist reviews recent research showing just how frequently innocent people ‘fess up, and what factors lead them to do it.

When an experimenter falsely accused subjects of crashing a computer, 25% of them confessed even though they’d done nothing wrong, one study found. If the accusation was corroborated by a (lying) eyewitness, that number jumped to 80%. In another study, participants falsely accused of cheating on a task were told that authority figures were processing evidence that could prove their guilt—in this case, a tape. Half the people confessed, even though they must have known the tape recorded their actual, innocent behavior. This is particularly worrying because police often use this same tactic when waiting to get DNA or fingerprint results.

While the situations—research subject vs. crime suspect—are of course quite different, the parallels are enough to give one pause.

Read the full story at the Economist.

Image courtesy of Pearson Scott Foresman / Wikimedia Commons

Scientists have now sequenced the genome of the Atlantic cod, revealing something unusual: the cod is missing an important component of the adaptive immune system found in almost all jawed vertebrates. In particular, when the researchers compared the cod’s genome to that of the stickleback (a closely related fish that has already been sequenced), they saw that the Atlantic cod does not have genes that code for the proteins MHC II, CD4, and invariant chain, all of which work together to help the body recognize and fight off invading bacteria and parasites.

But the missing genes is not a death sentence for the cod. To make up for the lack of MHC II, the cod has ten times more genes for MHC I—another component of the immune system—than other vertebrates. The researchers think that MHC I system may be picking up some of the functions of MHC II, according to ScienceNOW. The researchers also noticed that cod have an increased amount of Toll-like receptors, which are part of the innate immune system.

The find could lead to improved vaccines for farmed cod, and it may have important consequences ...

It is very easy to find the world’s most extensive marketplace – just find your nearest forest, field or garden, and look underground.

The planet’s land plants are engaged in an ancient alliance with the so-called “AM fungi” that grow into their roots. One plant might be colonised by many fungi, and a single fungus could connect up to many plants. The fungi harvest nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen from the soil and channel them to their hosts. In return, the plants provide the fungi with the sugars and carbohydrates they need to grow.

This symbiotic partnership covers the planet in green. It’s common to 80 percent of land plants, and is credited with driving the evolution of this group some 470 million years ago. Now, Toby Kiers from Vrije University in Amsterdam has found that plants and fungi have maintained their grand alliance by setting up a strong market economy.

All natural coalitions are vulnerable to cheats. Any individual could withhold nutrients from one or more of its partners, benefiting from their contribution while giving nothing back. But Kiers found that at least one plant – barrel clover – can ...

I’ve been accused of having a big head (which is literally true; finding hats that fit properly can be difficult), but even I wouldn’t have any trouble squeezing the 13 trillion kilometer (8 trillion mile) wide Necklace Nebula around my noggin:

[Click to enlarynxate.]

This Hubble image shows the so-called planetary nebula, which is the product of a dying star. Deep in the center of the ring are actually two stars circling each other. As one started to die, it puffed up, literally engulfing the other star. This spun up the larger star, and the centripetal force flung off material in a huge disk well over a light years across. As the star lost its outer layers, the much hotter inner core was exposed, flooding the gas with ultraviolet light, causing it to glow like a neon sign.

Or, more accurately, a hydrogen/oxygen/nitrogen sign, the gases highlighted in this image (shown as green, blue, and red, respectively). See the knots of pink emission in the ring? As the gas was expelled, the speed of the wind increased with time while the density decreased. This faster wind caught up with and slammed ...

Earlier this year, Hugo Mercier and his colleague Dan Sperber (of the Jean Nicod Institute in France) came out with one of the more intriguing evolutionary psychology ideas in quite some time. They argued, in a paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, that the human capacity for reasoning evolved not so much to get at truth, as to facilitate argumentation:

Reasoning is generally seen as a means to improve knowledge and make better decisions. However, much evidence shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests that the function of reasoning should be rethought. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given the exceptional dependence of humans on communication and their vulnerability to misinformation. A wide range of evidence in the psychology of reasoning and decision making can be reinterpreted and better
explained in the light of this hypothesis. Poor performance in standard reasoning tasks is explained by the lack of argumentative context. When the same problems are placed in a proper argumentative setting, people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views. This explains the notorious con?rmation bias. This bias is apparent not only when people are actually arguing, but also when they are reasoning proactively from the perspective of having to defend their opinions. Reasoning so motivated can distort evaluations and attitudes and allow erroneous beliefs to persist. Proactively used reasoning also favors decisions that are easy to justify but not necessarily better. In all these instances traditionally described as failures or ?aws, reasoning does exactly what can be expected of an argumentative device: Look for arguments that support a given conclusion, and, ceteris paribus, favor conclusions for which arguments can be found.

Mercier blogs for Psychology Today and is a postdoc at U. Penn. I’ll be interviewing him at 11 for a show that airs Monday. If you have any thoughts, or anything you’d like to hear asked, post them here.

I’ve just learned that all three episodes of my TV show, "Phil Plait’s Bad Universe", will air in the UK on DiscoveryUK from August 15th through the 17th. The air times vary, so check the link to find out when it’s playing.

Sky TV has clips online to give you a taste of the three episodes: Asteroid Apocalypse , Alien Attack, and Death Stars. If you sense a theme, well, read the title of the show again.

Hope you like ‘em!

And by the way, the DVD set is available on the Discovery Channel store and at other online venues like Amazon.

Related posts:

- Mashup of DEATH
- I think the Moon watched Bad Universe

1) Post from the past: Dwarfism and cell division.

2) Weird search query of the week: “is it legal to marry your third cousin.”

3) Comment of the week, in response to Pleasure through signalling:

Once at a farmer’s market I bought a couple little things that looked like habaneros. The guy who sold them to me looked at me like I was insane which I should have taken as a clue.

I chopped them up and through them in a salsa and the effect was –it wasn’t like a normal spiciness in any way. It was more like nerve gas. I was overcome with a sort of intense nausea and vertigo and violent ‘steaming’ sensation through my whole body. It was like I could feel areas of the surface of my skin violently spewing out some kind of gas like out of a steam vent.

Also it was really spicy and fried every part of my GI tract during it’s ten minute journey. (like Charlie Sheen on a bender in my bowels).

Anyone else ever run into this weird pepper?

4) And finally, your weekly fluff fix:

It’s booze week on NCBI ROFL! All this week we’ll be featuring articles about ethanol, ethyl alcohol, and even CH3CH2OH. Enjoy!

Invocations and intoxication: does prayer decrease alcohol consumption?

“Four methodologically diverse studies (N = 1,758) show that prayer frequency and alcohol consumption are negatively related. In Study 1 (n = 824), we used a cross-sectional design and found that higher prayer frequency was related to lower alcohol consumption and problematic drinking behavior. Study 2 (n = 702) used a longitudinal design and found that more frequent prayer at Time 1 predicted less alcohol consumption and problematic drinking behavior at Time 2, and this relationship held when controlling for baseline levels of drinking and prayer. In Study 3 (n = 117), we used an experimental design to test for a causal relationship between prayer frequency and alcohol consumption. Participants assigned to pray every day (either an undirected prayer or a prayer for a relationship partner) for 4 weeks drank about half as much alcohol at the conclusion of the study as control participants. Study 4 (n = 115) replicated the findings of Study 3, as prayer again reduced drinking by about half. ...

By Jon Winsor

Rick Perry, who is supposed to announce his presidential candidacy this weekend, is presently only two points behind Mitt Romney, according to a recent CNN poll. So where does he stand on science?

Rick Perry joins Bachmann in advocating for intelligent design, recently commenting:

“There are clear indications from our people who have amazing intellectual capability that this didn’t happen by accident and a creator put this in place,” Perry said.

“Now, what was his time frame and how did he create the earth that we know? I’m not going to tell you that I’ve got the answers to that,” Perry said. “I believe that we were created by this all-powerful supreme being and how we got to today versus what we look like thousands of years ago, I think there’s enough holes in the theory of evolution to, you know, say there are some holes in that theory.”

“Teaching the controversy“– the Discovery Institute would love that. Perry is also solidly in the climate change denialist camp, saying back in 2007 (when many of his fellow GOP governors were acknowledging the scientific consensus):

“Virtually every day another scientist leaves the global warming bandwagon. … But you won’t read about that in the press because they have already invested in one side of the story. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be good stewards of our environment. We should. I am just saying when politics hijack science, it quells true scientific debate and can have dire consequences for our future.”

…Asked for elaboration on the scientists who Perry said are abandoning the “global warming bandwagon,” his office listed two dozen recent articles, almost none about scientists. They range from calls for Gore to lose his Academy Award to a posting from the Tehran Times (“Iran’s leading international daily”) stating that Gore doesn’t deserve the Nobel Peace Prize because as a senator he voted to authorize the first Gulf War.

TalkingPointsMemo DC did an informal poll at the recent Heartland Institute International Convention on Climate Change and found Perry to be a strong presidential favorite among conference goers (with Michele Bachmann running second).

Like Bachmann, Perry bills himself as a libertarian. But curiously similar to Bachmann, Perry’s libertarianism is imbued with a certain strong, but decidedly idiosyncratic claim to moral authority. Perry doesn’t have the homeschooling activism in his background as Bachmann does, but he certainly has some interesting religious autodidacts enrolled in his cause. And Perry’s 2010 book Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America From Washington makes a passionate case for states rights (two of Bachmann’s intellectual mentors were states rights advocates). Lately, Perry has been trying to reconcile his states rights libertarianism with a nation-wide social conservatism, but he’s been a staunch enough states rights advocate to have flirted with the concept of secessionism in 2009:

Gov. Rick Perry on Thursday stuck by his earlier statement that Texas can secede from the United States — a far-reaching, legally questionable prospect that nevertheless drew Perry a fresh favorable mention by Rush Limbaugh, one of the nation’s leading conservative voices…

According to The Associated Press, Perry suggested in response to a reporter’s question that Texans might at some point get so fed up with Democratic-led actions in Washington that they would want to secede.

“There’s a lot of different scenarios,” Perry said. “We’ve got a great union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that? But Texas is a very unique place, and we’re a pretty independent lot to boot.”

On Thursday, Perry called potential secession a “side issue of Texas history. … We are very proud of our Texas history; people discuss and debate the issues of can we break ourselves into five states, can we secede, a lot of interesting things that I’m sure Oklahoma and Pennsylvania would love to be able to say about their states, but the fact is, they can’t because they’re not Texas.”

A Perry spokeswoman said Perry believes Texas could secede if it wanted.

The story’s reporter contacted a Texas law professor for comment:

Sanford Levinson, a professor at the School of Law at the University of Texas at Austin, said that between the Texas Constitution, the U.S. Constitution and the 1845 Joint Resolution Annexing Texas to the United States, there is no explicit right for the state to return to its days as a republic.

“We actually fought a war over this issue, and there is no possibility whatsoever that the United States or any court would recognize a ‘right’ to secede,” Levinson said in an e-mail.

Here’s a tip for the Perry camp: Maybe Perry could find a legal scholar at Discovery or Heartland to argue that Texas could secede?

What’s the News: Keeping track of what’s happening inside the body often requires a great deal of equipment outside it: Just think of the tangle of sensors in any hospital room. Now, though, engineers have developed an ultra-thin electrical circuit that can be pasted onto the skin just like a temporary tattoo. Once it’s served its purpose, you can simply peel it off. These patches could be provide a simpler, less restrictive way to monitor a patient’s vital signs, or even let wearers command a computer with speech or other slight movements.

How the Heck:

The researchers designed the circuit to match the mechanical properties of skin, meaning it can stretch, scrunch, and bend just like skin does. That’s no easy task, given that electronics aren’t usually elastic.
To do this, the researchers bent the circuit’s wires into a squiggly shape (see the photo above) that can expand and shrink along with the skin. They also shrank various circuit components to the minute size of the natural bumps and grooves of human skin. Since they wanted to prove that the circuit could have a range of applications, the team included all sorts of different components, ...