Rise of the Planet of the Apes may have just unseated Captain America: The First Avenger as my favorite pro-enhancement film. Andy Serkis and John Lithgow render the sapient mind a character and drama unto itself – growing, evolving, and dying before our eyes. As a summer blockbuster, the film offers gorillas smashing helicopters, orangutan sign language humor, and a one-two punch apocalyptic virus to sate any palate slavering for action. As a meditation on enhancement, we’re treated with a film that has the brass to own up to the real villain of Frankenstein: the horrified masses and absentee father-scientist. Rise of the Planet of the Apes calls out a fear that sits at the heart of humanity: what if our offspring is more intelligent for us and because we cannot properly care for it, judges us to be lacking?

In the film, we see over and over that it is not Caesar’s enhancement that causes problems. In fact, Caesar’s enhancement makes him the most moral and wisest person on the screen. The failure of those around him – from the cruel ape sanctuary caretakers to Caesar’s own father figure, Will Rodman ...

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On August 4 at about 04:00 UT, the Sun let loose with another big flare, this one ranking as an M 9.5 or so on the standard flare classification, bigger than the one earlier this week. It also triggered a coronal mass ejection, which means we may get some effects here on Earth.

First, the way-cool video:

[Set the resolution to 720p or 1080p for the best view. Note: In the video title I said this happened on August 3. It did, in my time zone! It was August 4th in Universal Time, however. Sorry about any confusion.]

This is in the far ultraviolet, where energetic events like these show up well. The bright regions are actually sunspots, which are dark to our eye but are pretty glowy in the UV. At 03:57 UT the magnetic field lines in the spot reconnected, starting a cascade that released all the energy they contained. This caused the flare that’s fairly obvious in the video. But you can also see material blasting away from the area, some falling back down. Finally, there are wispy tendrils of material arcing up that fade away.

What you don’t really see here ...

“328 college students in midwest and west coast regions read one of five news stories (four airplane crash and one irrelevant) or none. They estimated the likelihood of their victimization in an airplane crash and indicated the maximum amount of time that they would be willing to spend driving in lieu of flying. Analysis showed those who read one of the airplane crash stories reported higher perceived risk of victimization than did those who read the irrelevant story or none. Reading airplane crash news was not related to the number of hours reported for driving instead of flying.”

Photo: flickr/J.C.Photos

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WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

The future of manned spaceflight, it’s not. We hope.

Ever since the Space Shuttle took its last flight earlier this summer, the US has had no real plan for getting humans back up in space in the near future. Meanwhile, NASA is sending three LEGO figurines to Jupiter tomorrow, as part of a sponsorship deal with LEGO “to inspire children to explore science, technology, engineering and mathematics.” Because flying little aluminum Jupiter, Juno, and Galileo more than 1,700 million miles is a great way to demonstrate to future scientists the importance of funding!

The figurines of the god, goddess, and seventeenth-century astronomer aren’t part of any of the scientific experiments also making the journey on NASA’s Juno probe. But, the press release is quick to note, “Of course, the miniature Galileo has his telescope with him on the journey.” Too bad he has no eyes.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/KSC

For male Houbara bustards, extravagant sexual displays come with a price: rapid sexual aging. By studying over 1,700 North African Houbara bustards, researchers in France have learned that the birds, by age six, already begin producing smaller ejaculates with a large number of dead and abnormal sperm. The more showy the bustard, the quicker he burns himself out. As lead researcher Brian Preston said in a prepared statement:

This is the bird equivalent of the posers who strut their stuff in bars and nightclubs every weekend. If the bustard is anything to go by, these same guys will be reaching for their toupees sooner than they’d like.

[Read more about these peculiar birds and see a video of one of their seductive dances at the BBC.]

Image courtesy of Frank. Vassen / Flickr

Is there any limit to the cool things you can do with Microsoft’s Kinect? Just last month we told you about students in Switzerland that used the device to create a gesture-controlled quadrocopter; now, students in California are looking to employ the Kinect in archaeological digs in Jordan.

Excavation is painstaking work, requiring careful cataloging of every artifact and the exact locations where they were found. To simplify this tedious process, researchers at the University of California, San Diego have modified a Kinect to do all the work for them. The new system, called ArKinect (archaeology + Kinect, if you didn’t catch that), extracts information from the Kinect’s streaming data feed of visible and infrared light.

The archaeologists will the use the system to quickly make accurate 3D scans of both the entire dig site and anything they pull up from the ground. The idea is to then plug the data into their 360-degree virtual reality environment called StarCAVE, which would allow the archeologists to interact with the virtual objects. “We can then use the 3D model, walk around it, we can move it around, we can look at it from all ...

For the past few years, tantalizing evidence has been found that Mars — thought to be long dead, dry, and lifeless — may have pockets of water just beneath the surface. To be clear, we know there’s water on Mars, in the form of ice. We see ice in the polar caps, and we’ve seen it revealed under the surface by small meteorite impacts.

The question is, is there liquid water?

New images by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter bring us a step closer to answering that question. A series of pictures of the 300 km (180 mile) wide Newton crater taken over the course of several years show dark deposits on the crater wall which change predictably with the seasons, clearly affiliated with some sort of material flowing downslope:

[Click to barsoomenate.]

The picture above shows Newton’s crater wall. It’s pretty steep, with about a 35° slope, and the dark deposits are labeled. This crater is located in the southern mid-latitudes of Mars, and this part of the crater faces north. That’s critical! Since it faces toward the equator, that means it’s facing the Sun in the summer, and so these deposits appear when ...

Each fluid reveals a different letter.

What’s the News: Scientists have developed a chip that can instantaneously identify fluids applied to it, just from their unique surface tension. In a handheld device, it could help toxic site remediators figure out what that ominous clear liquid is. And there’s a bonus for the kids-in-the-treehouse user demographic: different secret messages can appear on the chip depending on what fluid is applied.

What’s the Context:

Materials scientists—who, put simply, study stuff—have long been interested in how fluid moves through the tiny myriad holes of substances like coral, or bone.
By building coral-like structures out of glass in the lab and then treating them with various chemicals, they can make it impossible for some fluids to seep into the maze of holes, while others glide right in. A substance’s ability to absorb fluids is called “wettability,” and it’s the subject of much research, as you can imagine—it’s the reason your raincoat stays dry and your sponge sops up spilled juice.
A fluid’s ability to seep through holes is dependent on its own physics, as well as the wettability of the substance. Molasses, for instance, is too thick to creep into holes ...

Current drugs for conditions from depression to Parkinson’s work by changing levels of chemicals in the brain—an imprecise method that can have a wide range of unintended effects. But a new study suggests it could be possible to make drugs that work by turning off genes instead, getting at, for instance, a specific receptor in a particular part of the brain.

The researchers attached an anti-depressant, setraline, to a bit of what’s called small interfering RNA. They found that when mice were given the combo nasally, it shut off a particular serotonin receptor thought to be involved in depression in just the region of the brain they were aiming for, and nowhere else. On his blog, Neuroskeptic points out that it’s not clear when, or if, the drug will be ready for humans—but wow, is that an exciting idea:

The mind boggles at the potential. If you could selectively alter the gene expression of selective neurons, you could do things to the brain that are currently impossible. Existing drugs hit the whole brain, yet there are many reasons why you’d prefer to only affect certain areas. And editing gene expression would allow ...

What’s the News: Trouble sticking to your diet? It may not be entirely your fault. Scientists, reporting in the journal Cell Metabolism, have now learned that when you starve yourself of calories, your brain cells also starve, causing your neurons to begin eating parts of themselves for energy. The self-cannibalism, in turn, cranks up hunger signals. This mouse study may lead to better treatments for human obesity and diabetes.

What’s the Context:

Autophagy, which literally means “self-eating,” is a common process in the body where cells form internal sacs of digestive enzymes to break down and recycle used parts. Cells will ramp up the process when they are starved of nutrients and need a boost of energy. In 2008, researchers found that a certain protein can induce autophagy in ovarian cancer cells, essentially causing the cancer to cannibalize itself.
While the self-eating process occurs throughout the body, scientists previously believed that autophagy in brain ...

Hard on the heels of my post on Abell 39 last week comes another nebula that forms perhaps an even more perfect circle: PN G75.5+1.7, aka the Soap Bubble Nebula:

[Click to ennebulenate.]

That’s really cool. As I pointed out in the earlier post, these are called planetary nebulae, and are the results of the dying stars blowing off winds of gas. They are very rarely circular, instead coming in all kinds of fantastic shapes. It’s thought that you might not get a PN unless the star is binary or swells up to eat its planets as it dies; when that happens the star can get spun up and eject the gas more easily.

It’s not really a circle, of course: it’s a sphere, or more properly a spherical shell. It really is like a soap bubble! The bright edge is due to an effect called limb brightening, which I explained in that earlier post.

This isn’t really well understood, but to get one this symmetric the star must be a loner, and spherical ones are pretty rare. The Soap Bubble is extremely round, maybe even more than Abell 39, so that in ...

The New York Times is reporting on the first documented case of fracking directly–rather than indirectly–leading to groundwater contamination.

The report is not recent — it was published in 1987, and the contamination was discovered in 1984. Drilling technology and safeguards in well design have improved significantly since then. Nevertheless, the report does contradict what has emerged as a kind of mantra in the industry and in the government.

The report concluded that hydraulic fracturing fluids or gel used by the Kaiser Exploration and Mining Company contaminated a well roughly 600 feet away on the property of James Parsons in Jackson County, W.Va., referring to it as “Mr. Parson’s water well.”

“When fracturing the Kaiser gas well on Mr. James Parson’s property, fractures were created allowing migration of fracture fluid from the gas well to Mr. Parson’s water well,” according to the agency’s summary of the case. “This fracture fluid, along with natural gas was present in Mr. Parson’s water, rendering it unusable.”

Asked about the cause of the incident, Mr. Wohlschlegel emphasized that the important factor was that the driller and the regulator had not known about the nearby aquifer. But in comments submitted to the E.P.A. at the time about the report, the petroleum institute acknowledged that this was indeed a case of drinking water contamination from fracking.

“The damage here,” the institute wrote, referring to Mr. Parsons’ contaminated water well, “results from an accident or malfunction of the fracturing process.”

Later on the Times suggests that the mechanism by which contamination occurred may have involved fracture communication with an abandoned well shaft in the area–allowing fluids to travel upwards into drinking water.

How big a deal is this? Well, it is an older case, with older technology, which may limit its relevance. Still, industry is not going to be able to say any longer that fracking has never led to groundwater contamination–a very favorite talking point.

Carl pointed me to this really strange interview in New Scientist, Susan Greenfield: Living online is changing our brains. If you removed it from the New Scientist website and put it on the The Onion it wouldn’t really need much editing. Some of the things Susan Greenfield says make you scratch your head. First paragraph:

You think that digital technology is having an impact on our brains. How do you respond to those who say there’s no evidence for this?

When people say there is no evidence, you can turn that back and say, what kind of evidence would you imagine there would be? Are we going to have to wait for 20 years and see that people are different from previous generations? Sometimes you can’t just go into a lab and get the evidence overnight. I think there are enough pointers that we should be talking about this rather than stressing about not being able to replicate things in a lab instantly.

Happy-slapping? Seriously? That was so mid-2000s. It’s going to be really hard to escape the oncoming rush of the “wall of information” in the near future. If it drives our world insane, there are always the residents ...

I was alerted to Samuel’s Arbesman’s new paper, The Life-Spans of Empires, by the fact that he pointed to his research on his weblog. Interestingly I’m not the only one who was interested, as after I pointed to it on my link round up a few people asked if they could get a copy of the paper (yes, I almost always send papers if I have access). Luckily it’s a nicely elegant piece of work, basically quantifying what we’ve already probably known qualitatively. There isn’t that great of a value-add to quantification as such, but with a mathematical understanding of a topic one can engage in an algebra of mental manipulations so as to construct models with which one can project other facts. Quantitative information is often an excellent way to generate “free information” from theoretical models. The figure above is the primary result of the paper. Basically Arbesman took a data set which was laying around which measured the lengths of various empires (N = 41), and showed that the rise and fall of these political entities tends to follow an exponential distribution: e??t . ...

In my DeSmog post that is getting a lot of traction right now, I talk about conservative white males’ “smart idiocy” when it comes to thinking they’re equipped to overturn modern climate science. Now, I learn that xkcd beat me to the punch with respect to this particular type of hubris:

Um, yeah. That says it all. Dudes, I know you want to argue and everything, but Einstein still wins.

And so do the climate scientists.

The spitting behavior of two species of spitting cobras.
“Spitting cobras defend themselves by spitting their venom in the face of a harasser. Although it is common belief that spitting cobras direct their venom at the eyes of an aggressor, this has never been investigated. Here, we show that the spitting act of cobras (Naja nigricollis and N. pallida) can readily be triggered by a moving human face or by a moving real size photo of a human face. In contrast, a stationary human face (real or photo) or a moving or stationary human hand does not trigger the spitting act. If threatened, spitting cobras aim their venom, ejected either in two distinct jets (N. pallida) or in a fine spray (N. nigricollis), either between the eyes or at one eye. In both cobra species investigated, the width and height of the area hit by the venom was independent of eye distance (test range 5.5 cm and 11 cm). During the spitting act the cobras performed fast undulating head movements that lead to a larger distribution of their venom. This behavior increases the probability that at least one eye of ...

Culture of Science. The peripatetic Sheril Kirshenbaum’s new weblog. Though I think she’s going to stay put for a while now.

The Life-Spans of Empires. I’ll be talking about this paper soon.

Academics ‘Guest Authoring’ Ghostwritten Medical Journal Articles Should Be Charged With Fraud, Legal Experts Argue. Crankery in the area of medicine flourishes in part due to natural cognitive biases, but also because there are many cases of crookedness and manufactured science.

First Large Study to Find HIV Epidemic Among Gays in the Middle East. Seems to be following the Western model.

Are Pet Owners Healthier and Happier? Maybe Not… Would that it were true.

Is Our Universe Inside a Bubble? First Observational Test of the ‘Multiverse’. I’m too ignorant to comment.

Copy Number Variation in Familial Parkinson Disease. More than SNPs.

Drunken Ben Bernanke Tells Everyone At Neighborhood Bar How Screwed U.S. Economy Really Is.

Germany Investigating Facebook Tagging Feature. Unless there’s a “Bulterian Jihad” the transparent society is inevitable.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes: Animal Enhancement as a Tool of Liberation. Remember the Uplift Universe?

Are Smart People Getting Smarter?. Alas, I don’t see it in the comments of this weblog ...

For large swathes of the brain, the neurons we’re born with are the ones we’re stuck with. But a few small areas, such as the hippocampus, create new neurons throughout our lives, through a process known as neurogenesis. This production line may be important for learning and memory. But it has particularly piqued the interest of scientists because of the seductive but controversial idea that it could protect against depression, anxiety and other mood disorders.

Now, by studying mice, Jason Snyder from the National Institute of Mental Health has found some of the strongest evidence yet for a connection between neurogenesis and depression (or, at least, mouse behaviours that resemble depression). He found that the new neurons help to buffer the brains of mice against stress. Without them, the rodents become more susceptible to stress hormones and they behave in unusual ways that are reminiscent of depressive symptoms in humans.

Snyder brought the hippocampus’s production line to a screeching halt by targeting the cells that produce new neurons. He loaded these cells with a protein that sensitises them to a drug called valganciclovir, but only when they’re multiplying. With a ...

Left: normal rat disc. Right: engineered disc.

What’s the News: Researchers at Cornell University have now bio-engineered synthetic spinal discs and implanted them in rats. The implants provide as much spinal cushioning as authentic discs do, and improve with age by growing new cells and binding to nearby vertebrae, according to the study recently published in the journal PNAS. The research could someday help people with chronic lower back and neck pain from conditions like degenerative disc disease.

What’s the Context:

In your spine, intervertebral discs provide cushioning between individual vertebrae. But when those discs start to tear or rupture from age or injuries, it can put you in a lot of pain, often requiring medications and physical therapy. In more extreme cases, surgeons sometimes remove the diseased disc(s) and fuse the remaining vertebrae together; this severely hampers back flexibility.
In the past few years, surgeons have also started offering intervertebral disc arthroplasty, which ...