We’ve now come to the end of the Space Shuttle … Era? … Generation? … Interlude? … Epoch?  Well, anyway, we’re at the end of the program.  The final mission, STS-135, landed safely July 21, 2011.  Many of us are saddened to see the end of the program; some fearing it to be the harbinger of the end of manned space exploration.

First rattle out of the box - Columbia on the launch pad NASA image, STS-1

The Space Shuttle Program encompassed 30 years (1981 – 2011) of testing and low-orbit missions.  Conception and design of the orbiter began in the 70s, but NASA was working on the concept by at least 1958, before the Apollo Program.  The first orbiter, Enterprise, was never meant to fly in space.  It was used for gliding and landing tests, and flew three missions (in 1977).  The first true spacecraft was Columbia, and her maiden flight was April 12, 1981.

NASA image - Space Shuttle vs Soyuz TM, to scale

The shuttles usually ended each mission by landing at Kennedy Space Center.  Although there were many locations world-wide large enough for the shuttle, if it wasn’t landed at Kennedy a special Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (also known as a “big honking airplane”) would have to piggy-back the shuttle back to the Space Center.

NASA - Orbiter mount on SCA... just in case those technicians forget

Two shuttles, Challenger and Columbia, were lost – taking 14 lives – during the program’s 30-year history.

NASA - Atlantis docked to Mir Space Station

NASA was left with three space-worthy shuttles at the end of the program.  Like the thoroughbreds they are, the shuttles will be honorably retired.  Twenty museums requested the honor of displaying one of the crafts.  Each museum selected will be responsible for the estimated $28.8 million cost of preparing the shuttles for display.

Atlantis will go to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor’s Complex, near Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Discovery is to be displayed at the Udvar-Hazy Center of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, near Washington D.C.

Endeavour will go to the California Science Center, Los Angeles, California.

Enterprise ( the shuttle never flown in space), currently at the Smithsonian, will be moved to the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum in New York City.

Here’s a link that shows you the flight deck of the decommissioned Discovery.  Rob found this and sent it to me.

NASA - Space Shuttle Program Commemorative Patch

NOTE:  Be sure to click on the first image.  I got a great enlargement of that one.

Saturn from Cassini. Click for larger. Image credit(s): NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

YAY!!  The Cassini Scientist for a Day Essay Contest for 2011 is on!

If you are a US student in grades 5 to 12 or a teacher or a parent I encourage you to participate in one way or another.  I especially would encourage the young ladies to participate.  I keep hearing how girls don’t do as well in science as boys and I firmly believe that is a load of …. well you get the idea

Don’t let that “Essay” part scare you off, it’s only 500 words about on of three interesting imaging targets: Saturn or the moons Hyperion, Rhea & Titan.  A mere 500 words should be pretty easy actually especially since you don’t have to do it on your own, you can work in groups of up to four.

Easy breezy right?  Sure it is.  Winners get to participate in a teleconference with Cassini Scientists and engineers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and EVERYBODY receives a certificate of participation.  Hey talk about an easy “A” at the school science fair!!

I am here to help in any way I can too.

You have plenty of time but I’d not drag my feet too much the contest deadline is noon (Pacific Time) on October 26, 2011.  Don’t worry I’ll repeat this post a few times before now and then to remind you.  Yes I know most students are on vacation still, but think of this as a fun personal project you can use to your advantage once school does begin.

To find out more visit the Cassini Scientist for a Day website and you can send inquiries about the contest to: scientistforaday@jpl.nasa.gov.

Look at this from NASA:

Image: NASA/Lockheed Martin

Here’s what NASA has to say on it:

Another Take on Supersonic

Our ability to fly at supersonic speeds over land in civil aircraft depends on our ability to reduce the level of sonic booms. NASA has been exploring a variety of options for quieting the boom, starting with design concepts and moving through wind tunnel tests to flight tests of new technologies. This rendering of a possible future civil supersonic transport shows a vehicle that is shaped to reduce the sonic shockwave signature and also to reduce drag.

Now, what do you think about supersonic civil aircraft?  I don’t think sonic booms should be such a big issue.  I grew up hearing them, and I’m just fine.  (twitch, twitch)

Full frame of Vesta. Click for larger. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

Good picture isn’t it?  Good?  Incredible is a better adjective.  If you want to REALLY be wowed, check out the images on the Dawn webpage.

Here’s NASA’s description of the image:

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft obtained this image of the giant asteroid Vesta with its framing camera on July 24, 2011. It was taken from a distance of about 3,200 miles (5,200 kilometers). Dawn entered orbit around Vesta on July 15, and will spend a year orbiting the body. After that, the next stop on its itinerary will be an encounter with the dwarf planet Ceres.

The Dawn mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. It is a project of the Discovery Program, managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, Va., designed and built the Dawn spacecraft.

The framing cameras have been developed and built under the leadership of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, with significant contributions by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) Institute of Planetary Research, Berlin, and in coordination with the Institute of Computer and Communication Network Engineering, Braunschweig, Germany. The framing camera project is funded by NASA, the Max Planck Society and DLR. More information about Dawn is online at http://www.nasa.gov/dawn .

Wow. I wanted to pass this NASA news on to you, because WOW.  About 2/3 of your body is composed of oxygen, by the way.)

WASHINGTON — The Herschel Space Observatory’s large telescope and state-of-the-art infrared detectors have provided the first confirmed finding of oxygen molecules in space. The molecules were discovered in the Orion star-forming complex.

Individual atoms of oxygen are common in space, particularly around massive stars. But, molecular oxygen, which makes up about 20 percent of the air we breathe, has eluded astronomers until now.

“Oxygen gas was discovered in the 1770s, but it’s taken us more than 230 years to finally say with certainty that this very simple molecule exists in space,” said Paul Goldsmith, NASA’s Herschel project scientist at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif.

Goldsmith is lead author of a recent paper describing the findings in the Astrophysical Journal. Herschel is a European Space Agency-led mission with important NASA contributions.

Astronomers searched for the elusive molecules in space for decades using balloons, as well as ground- and space-based telescopes. The Swedish Odin telescope spotted the molecule in 2007, but the sighting could not be confirmed.

Goldsmith and his colleagues propose that oxygen is locked up in water ice that coats tiny dust grains. They think the oxygen detected by Herschel in the Orion nebula was formed after starlight warmed the icy grains, releasing water, which was converted into oxygen molecules.

“This explains where some of the oxygen might be hiding,” said Goldsmith. “But we didn’t find large amounts of it, and still don’t understand what is so special about the spots where we find it. The universe still holds many secrets.”

The researchers plan to continue their hunt for oxygen molecules in other star-forming regions.

“Oxygen is the third most common element in the universe and its molecular form must be abundant in space,” said Bill Danchi, Herschel program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Herschel is proving a powerful tool to probe this unsolved mystery. The observatory gives astronomers an innovative tool to look at a whole new set of wavelengths where the tell-tale signature of oxygen may be hiding.”

Herschel is a European Space Agency cornerstone mission, with science instruments provided by consortia of European institutes. NASA’s Herschel Project Office is based at JPL, which contributed mission-enabling technology for two of Herschel’s three science instruments.

The NASA Herschel Science Center, part of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, supports the U.S. astronomical community. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

I few years ago I complained that no one was using the General Social Survey web interface for blogging, a practice which probably can be traced back to the Inductivist (yes, social scientists use the GSS constantly, but they use it to publish papers, not blog posts). Kevin Drum noted my lament in late 2008 and promised that he’d revisit the GSS in the future. He hasn’t. That’s fine, there are 1 million things I mean to do which I don’t manage to get to. But still, it’s kind of depressing to me the amount of opinion people can express which they don’t bother to follow up on by using a web interface to a rich data source which requires no more than 1997 era browser skills.

There’s a lot you can do with the GSS interface, but I thought it might be useful to do something very simple so that people can see how easy it really is. Since most of the people I follow on twitter lean Left I see a lot of political chatter which is concerning to that segment of the population. ...

Early in his career the famed evolutionary biologist William D. Hamilton had a strong interest in eugenics. In his autobiographical collection of papers Hamilton admits that he suspects these tendencies were the reason for the suspicion he aroused in some of the more senior scientists in Britain after World War II. But Hamilton later also admits that his earlier enthusiasms for social engineering through selection for “good traits” may have been wrong-headed, insofar as the selection pressures of evolution are protean, and what may be adaptive perfection in one age may be doom in another (or, in the world of international migration, you can substitute place for time). This does not mean that Hamilton abandoned his worry about increased “genetic load” in the human population (deleterious mutations accumulating in the human gene pool because the “unfit” now live and breed thanks to modern medicine). It is simply that such ideas and concerns can’t be easily reduced into simple formulas and maxims, because evolutionary processes can vary in their implications over time and place.

I thought of these issues when stumbling upon this curious comment over at Genetic Future in regards to preimplantation genetic diagnosis:

Genetic selection will ...

The outcome of the seminal fluid parameters collected via coitus interruptus versus masturbation.

“A one year study was carried out to determine the outcome of the seminal fluid parameters collected via masturbation and coitus interruptus in 151 patients who were undergoing intrauterine insemination (IUI) and patients who came for seminal analysis. There were no statistically significant differences in terms of volume, concentration, progressive motility and normal morphology from specimens collected via coitus interruptus compared to specimens collected via masturbation. Pregnancy outcomes were also comparable.”

Photo: flickr/ Watson House

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Problems with condoms may be reduced for men taking ample time to apply them.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Why you should always put bull semen in your carry-on (but don’t worry about the embryos).
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: [Insert turkey baster joke here.]

WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

1) Post from the past: Genetics is One: Mendelism and quantitative traits

2) Weird search query of the week: “brad pitt look alike.”

3) Please note that I don’t endorse the views of the “comment of the week”! Comment of the week, in response to “1 in 3 Iranian men ‘gay’?”:

I think you are a bunch of idiots trying to judge everything with your nonsensical mindset.

I am a man and have fucked boys in Iran when I was at high school. They were supposedly gay and we used to call them sissy boys. So, will that make me gay? No! I did that because girls were not accessible. Also at a younger age `fucking somebody’ meant `proving your superiority’. Even now, I would happily fuck you mf* to show who has the upper hand!

But this sort of affairs would mostly happen between bullies and sissies. The rest 90% of children were immune of such activities. Those of us who did such things a couple of times also gave up doing so as we became more mature. I think you are out of your mind if you think 30% of men are ...

Over at Genetic Future Dr. Daniel MacArthur has a measured response to a Nature commentary by David Goldstein, Growth of genome screening needs debate. As Dr. MacArthur notes an excessive portion of Goldstein’s piece is taken up with inferences derived from assuming that the model of rare variants causing most diseases is correct, when that is an issue currently in scientific contention (and this is a debate where Goldstein is a primary player on one side). But the last two paragraphs of the piece is where the real action is, no matter the details of genetic architecture of diseases:

One potential problem with this is that numerous genetic risk factors will have diverse and unexpected effects — sometimes causing disease, sometimes being harmless and sometimes perhaps being associated with behaviours or characteristics that society deems positive. Even for simpler Mendelian diseases, up to 30% of the mutations originally termed pathogenic have turned out to be apparently harmless…Wholesale elimination of variants associated with disease could end up influencing unexpected traits — increasing the vulnerability of populations to infectious diseases, for instance, or depleting people’s creativity.

There are no clear-cut answers to the questions of what should be screened ...

This is a guest post from Darlene Cavalier, founder of Science Cheerleader and Science For Citizens and contributing editor at Discover Magazine.
If it’s sunny wherever you are today between 4:00 and 7:00 pm local time, contribute to science by taking a photo of a blank white piece of outside in the sun (try to avoid cloud cover). Your photo will be used in an informal study to measure how much of the sun’s energy is reflected back into the skies from the Earth — our planet’s “albedo.” It’s one way scientists can monitor how much energy – and heat – is being absorbed by our planet.

Here is what you need to do to participate in this citizen science project on ScienceForCitizens.net (a partner of Discover Magazine , NBC Learn, and the National Science Foundation’s Changing Planet series):

Today, (August 5, 2011) take a photo between 4:00 pm and 7:00 pm local time. Put a white piece of paper on a flat surface. The white paper should fill 1/4 to 1/2 of the total view. Do not cast a shadow on the image. Snap a digital photo. No flash.

Simply upload your photo here, and include your location (either city/state or latitude/longitude) and description of the background surface (grass, sand, etc).

Albedo is measured by comparing the response of the white card to the response of the ground surface. Data points will be depicted on a map later. We’ll let you know when the results are ready!

There will be more opportunities to contribute to albedo measurements in the future.Sign up to be notified about the next study!

Carl Sagan revolutionized popular astronomy with his book and TV show "Cosmos", which had an audience of hundreds of millions of people. We’ve learned a lot about our Universe since then, and we’re overdue for a modern version of Sagan’s show. So I’m pleased to find out that Neil Tyson will be hosting a revamped and updated version of "Cosmos"!

He’s working with Ann Druyan (Sagan’s widow and herself a science popularizer), Steve Soter (who also worked on the original show), and Seth MacFarlane, creator of "Family Guy". I know, that may sound weird, but MacFarlane is a big science fan, a friend of Neil’s, and commonly puts a lot of science into his shows.

The new show is being created by National Geographic and Fox, and will air on the latter in prime time. To circumvent the expected comments on this, note that Fox News is separate from Fox TV, so the irony is there but perhaps not as strong as you might think.

I’m looking forward to this new show. "Cosmos" had a profound effect on hundreds of millions of people, but times have changed. I’ll be curious ...

If you’re turning green, it’s not the scenery’s fault.

As you may or may not know, Switzerland, land of chocolate, cheese, and cuckoo clocks, is also the land of trains. More than 1,800 miles of track crisscross the quaint alpine utopia, carrying 347 million passengers per year and maintaining the punctuality of a Stepford wife. That’s some serious trainage.

Some of those trains, unfortunately, are making people trainsick. And the Schweizerische Bundesbahnen, the Swiss train authorities, just wouldn’t stand for that. They asked some scientists to get to the bottom of it.

The problem trains are a class of vehicles that tilt by 8 degrees as they go around curves, preserving their speed by compensating for centripetal force. Something about those tilts was putting passengers off-kilter, so a team of Swiss and American neurologists attached accelerometers and gyroscopes to a test train and to the heads of passengers, whom, one hopes, were compensated for consenting to their unusual headgear.

A tilting train in action.

Usually, the tilt starts with the first train car that hits the curve, then propagates through the later cars. It’s also rather slow, so passengers’ heads get tipped ...

Riding on a plume of fire from its Atlas V rocket, the NASA mission Juno launched at 16:25 UT (12:25 Eastern US time) on its way to Jupiter.

Juno will take 5 years to get to Jupiter, taking the 3 billion kilometer scenic route. In October 2013 it will actually pass the Earth once again, using the gravity of Earth and its motion around the Sun to steal a tiny bit of our energy and propel it to the outer solar system. From here, it will take a wide elliptical path to the giant planet, which orbits the Sun 5 times farther out than the Earth does. That’s why it takes so long.

Once there, it will orbit Jupiter for about an Earth year (how cool and science fictiony is it be able to say that?), taking its measure of Jupiter’s atmosphere, composition, surrounding environment, and magnetic field. It’s equipped with microwave, ultraviolet, infrared, and visible light detectors (which means very high-resolution pictures!) as well as other instruments to try to understand this enormous planet.

Interestingly, Juno is using solar panels for power; sunlight is only 4% as strong at Jupiter ...

What’s the News: Whether genes can be property is an ongoing controversy in the world of biotechnology, and last week saw the latest court battle in that war: Upon appeal, a suit brought by the ACLU charging that genes aren’t products of human ingenuity and thus cannot be patented was settled largely in favor of Myriad Genetics, the biotech company that has patents on two BRCA genes. The genes are linked to hereditary breast and ovarian cancer, and plaintiffs charged that Myriad’s exclusive test for the genes kept patients from getting second opinions.

A detailed description of the court’s reasoning can be found over at Ars Technica. But for those of you who are thinking, what? someone else can own my genes?, chew on this: About 20% of human genes are patented or have patents associated with them, according to a comprehensive analysis. Here’s why.

What Are the Rules for Patenting Genes?

The general description of what’s patentable lays out a few guidelines: (1) It’s got to be useful. (2) It’s got to have something new about it that’s not already known by experts in its field. (3) It can’t be ...

When I published Tuesday’s much discussed DeSmogBlog post on conservative white men and climate change denial, I had no idea I would need to defend the basic idea that there is such a thing as “social dominance orientation” (which I only discussed for one paragraph of a much longer post). I figured readers would take it for granted that this is a serious scientific concept, so I just linked to the Wikipedia page. I mean, it’s not like somebody just conjured up social dominance orientation during a walk by the seaside one day. A psychometric scale was developed and validated to measure this attribute or characteristic, which varies within the human population. See here for the published research on this.

Nor did I think that it would be surprising to observe that, if there is dominance behavior in males, a little hormone called testosterone might be involved. I have not done much reporting on testosterone, but here is a recent review paper that more than covers it. The conclusion:

Testosterone has been the focus of intensive research for decades. Whereas early studies pointed towards a role in physical aggression, recent evidence suggests that this simple view needs to be refined. In particular, it appears that testosterone promotes status-seeking and social dominance motives, and thus plays an important role in social status hierarchies. (Note, however, that most of these recent studies were conducted on Western student populations; it remains to be tested whether these findings generalize to other populations.) Most recently, several studies in humans have begun to test the causality of the link between social, emotional and economic interaction behavior through acute testosterone administration. These studies have confirmed that an account of testosterone as a simple mediator of aggression falls short of the truth; instead, testosterone appears to have a more subtle and complex role in driving behaviors that tend to increase an individual’s motivation and ability to acquire and defend social status. The exact mechanisms by which testosterone has these effects remain elusive; however, recent research has suggested four plausible channels, namely threat vigilance, reward processing, fear reduction and stress resilience. The task of future studies will be to delineate the role of testosterone in social interaction more precisely and to test which of these candidate channels accounts for most of the observed behavioral variance.

So the bit about dominance actually seems to be the most established part of the testosterone story.

Why point all this out?

Because Wesley Smith–who I’ve met on several occasions, and found to be a nice guy–has misinterpreted my DeSmogBlog post. He seems to think that I blamed the conservative white male effect on social dominance orientation via testosterone. No: that would be silly. I merely raised SDO as one possible explanation among many other related contenders–the others being identity protective cognition, system justification, selective exposure to self-affirming information streams, in-group affirmation, and so on.

Look, here’s the story. We have conservative white men denying global warming at much higher frequencies than other segments of the population. Given that the science of climate is very well established–as is the human fingerprint on the global warming trend–this phenomenon cries out for an explanation. Why is this one group so inclined to fly in the face of scientific consensus?

A lot of explanations have now been suggested, and some will presumably be put to the test, in standard scientific fashion. Should SDO be included among such tests? That’s not my call; I will only note that published research already links it to maleness, conservatism, and anti-environmental attitudes.

For much more on SDO, I recommend reading Robert Altemeyer’s The Authoritarians.