When Pooping Babies Become More Appealing: The Effects of Nonconscious Goal Pursuit on Experienced Emotions.

“In this report, we argue that the intensity of the emotions people experience is partly determined by the goals they nonconsciously pursue, and that this effect is functional in nature: Emotions are modulated in ways that may increase the probability of goal achievement. To test this hypothesis, we primed female participants with a motherhood goal and then measured their level of disgust in response to mildly disgusting pictures. Priming led to a reduction of disgust in response to goal-relevant stimuli (e.g., pictures of babies with runny noses) but not goal-irrelevant stimuli. This effect was moderated by the women’s probability of conception, a proxy of their ability to pursue the motherhood goal.”
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Photo: Flickr/nateOne

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Get this baby out of me!
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: When life gives babies lemons, they make cute faces.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Finally, science brings you…the baby poop predictor (with alarm)!

WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

Here in Boulder we get magnificent sunsets, especially in the summer when the clouds interplay with the mountains to the west. But I have never seen anything like this: the shadow of Washington state’s Mt. Rainier cast along the clouds at sunrise:

Holy (yes, in this case appropriately) Haleakala! [Click to cascadenate.]

That’s amazing. Mt. Rainier is a volcano, climbing to a height of over 14,000 feet (4300 meters). There are no other mountains anywhere near that height nearby, so it’s really prominent in the landscape (by comparison, there are several fourteeners, as they’re called, in the Rockies, so they don’t stick out as much though they’re still breathtaking). The rising Sun catches the peak, and the shadow is cast on the underside of the cloud layer. The dramatic sunrise colors really make this an incredibly beautiful shot.

The KOMO news site has lots more pictures of this, too. Go take a look!

And remember, when you’re outside, it always pays to look around you for a moment. You never know what incredible vista nature may have in store for you.

Tip o’ the snow cap (har har) to John Baxter.

Following the guest post from Tom Banks on challenges to eternal inflation, we’re happy to post a follow-up to this discussion by Don Page. Don was a graduate student of Stephen Hawking’s, and is now a professor at the University of Alberta. We have even collaborated in the past, but don’t hold that against him.

Don’s reply focuses less on details of eternal inflation and more on the general issue of how we should think about quantum gravity in a cosmological context, especially when it comes to counting the number of states. Don is (as he mentions below) an Evangelical Christian, but by no means a Young Earth Creationist!

Same rules apply as before: this is a technical discussion, which you are welcome to skip if it’s not your cup of tea.

———————-

I tend to agree with Tom’s point that “it is extremely plausible, given the Bekenstein Hawking entropy formula for black holes, that the quantum theory of a space-time , which is dS in both the remote past and remote future, has a finite dimensional Hilbert space,” at least for four-dimensional spacetimes (excluding issues raised by Raphael Bousso, Oliver DeWolfe, and Robert Myers for higher dimensions in Unbounded entropy in space-times with positive cosmological constant) if the cosmological constant has a fixed finite value, or if there are a finite number of possible values that are all positive. The “conceptual error … that de Sitter (dS) space is a system with an ever increasing number of quantum degrees of freedom” seems to me to arise from considering perturbations of de Sitter when it is large (on a large compact Cauchy surface) that would evolve to a big bang or big crunch when the Cauchy surface gets small and hence would prevent the spacetime from having both a remote past and a remote future. As Tom nicely puts it, “In the remote past or future we can look at small amplitude wave packets. However, as we approach the neck of dS space, the wave packets are pushed together. If we put too much information into the space in the remote past, then the packets will collide and form a black hole whose horizon is larger than the neck. The actual solution is singular and does not resemble dS space in the future.”

So it seems to me that, for fixed positive cosmological constant, we can have an arbitrarily large number of quantum states if we allow big bangs or big crunches, but if we restrict to nonsingular spacetimes that expand forever in both the past and future, then the number of states may be limited by the value of the cosmological constant.

This reminds me of the 1995 paper by Gary Horowitz and Robert Myers, The value of singularities, which argued that the timelike naked singularity of the negative-mass Schwarzschild solution is important to be excluded in order to eliminate such states which would lead to energy unbounded below and instabilities from the presumably possible production (conserving energy) of arbitrarily many possible combinations of positive and negative energy. Perhaps in a similar way, big bang and big crunch singularities are important to be excluded, as they also would seem to allow infinitely many states with positive cosmological constant.

Now presumably we would want quantum gravity states to include the formation and evaporation of black holes (or of what phenomenologically appear similar to black holes, whether or not they actually have the causal structure of classical black holes), which in a classical approximation have singularities inside them, so presumably such `singularities’ should be allowed, even if timelike naked singularities and, I would suggest, big bang and big crunch singularities should be excluded. Perhaps one can postulate that one should restrict to states of immortal de Sitter spacetime, which has no timelike naked singularities anywhere, and which is asymptotically a single region in the very distant past that is locally de Sitter (though globally it can be highly distorted) and which is also asymptotically a single region in the very distant future that is likewise locally de Sitter, without any big crunch or big bang singularities in between, or between more than one asymptotic region (as one would expect to get from perturbations of the Nariai metric that lead to asymptotic de Sitter regions separated by big bang and big crunch singularities). Such singularities might be considered mortal wounds for de Sitter, allowing an infinite number of states to fester up from such wounds, killing the hope for a finite number of states and for unitarity. On the other hand, a localized black hole that forms within de Sitter could be considered a wound that is not mortal and which can be healed by Hawking evaporation without going outside the assumed finite number of quantum states for immortal de Sitter with a strictly positive cosmological constant. I have considered such a possibility in my paper No-Bang Quantum State of the Cosmos.

On the other hand, even if we find such a restriction for positive cosmological constant to a finite set of states, the number of such states for the observed tiny value of the cosmological constant seems so huge that it would seem surprising to me if most of them can explain our observations, so I now am skeptical of the maximally mixed state I proposed in No-Bang Quantum State of the Cosmos and now tend to prefer a pure state like what I proposed in Symmetric-Bounce Quantum State of the Universe. When coupled with a solution to the measure problem, such as what I proposed in Agnesi Weighting for the Measure Problem of Cosmology, this pure state seems to be consistent with all our observations, though of course these are highly preliminary proposals and are not yet fully precisely specified, nor are they nearly so simple and esthetically pleasing as I would hope for in a final complete theory of the universe. We would like a simple quantum state for the universe and simple rules for extracting the probabilities of observations from it. (In The Born Rule Dies and in related papers, I showed that the Born rule, interpreted mathematically in the form that probabilities of observations are expectation values of projection operators, does not work in a universe large enough for multiple copies of an observation, but the probabilities still could be expectation values of other quantum operators, though it is so far unknown what they should be; this knowledge would be a solution of the measure problem if the quantum state were also known.)

Some people seem to prefer the simple state that is the maximally mixed state out of a finite-dimensional Hilbert space, but if this does not explain our observations, I see no objection to postulating that the state is some other simple state, perhaps (but not necessarily) a pure state. By Occam’s razor, we scientists tend to ascribe higher prior probabilities to simpler theories, so we would tend to prefer a simpler quantum state, but I don’t think we should take so narrow a view that such a simple state has to be a thermal state, or a maximally mixed state.

Now even if the quantum state of the universe is chosen (perhaps as a simple mixed state, perhaps as a simple pure state) from a finite set of states, or even if it is a particular pure state, I’m agnostic as to whether or not this could be a state with eternal inflation. Eternal inflation may lead to a huge universe in which there are an arbitrarily large number of nearby states, but those may be states with mortal perturbations (evolving forward and/or backward in time to mortal singularities in a classical description) that would be excluded from the allowed states. So I don’t see that there is any problem with having disallowed states that at some time look nearby to the allowed states. Our universe looks very much as if it could have had a big bang in its past (which would allow an infinite number of states), and presumably a generic quasiclassical perturbation of the present state would evolve back to such a mortal singularity, but the actual state of our universe might have been one of the very large but finite number of states that did not have such a mortal singularity but instead had a bounce. If it did have a bounce, the size at the bounce seems that it might have been much smaller than the throat of de Sitter with the observed value of the cosmological constant, which suggests to me that the quantum state is much more restricted than just the restriction to the large but finite number of states that have bounces rather than mortal singularities.

The question seems to be open, even if the state is immortal de Sitter (by which I mean having a positive cosmological constant but no mortal singularities, not that it is metrically de Sitter or even close to de Sitter), whether this state consists of a superposition of quasiclassical spacetimes with most of them with significant amplitudes having a huge or infinite number of bubbles that keep forming and branching off (and presumably attaching on as well). Even from the considerations of Tom Banks and of my discussion above, I don’t see any obvious reason why it might not. One could presumably have a single simple pure state such that, if it were decomposed into quasiclassical components, would have components that are individually very complex, rather as the binary representation of the Bible, or of the Library of Congress, or of the eprint arXiv, or the entire Internet, or of all the words that have ever been written on earth, is each a very large and presumably very complex integer but is just one component of the set of all integers, which is a simple whole, of which almost all of the separate parts are individually much more complex.

I would guess that presumably at least some quasiclassical components of any simple quantum state that could describe our universe would be very complex and perhaps have a huge number of bubble or pocket subuniverses that could be described as having eternal inflation. Perhaps a more relevant question is whether the probabilities of our observations are given by something like a path integral that is dominated by such eternal inflating spacetimes, or whether the path integral (or whatever procedure gives the quantum probabilities) is dominated by simpler spacetimes, such as ones with only one region and a single bounce. For thermodynamic reasons I presently have some slight personal inclination toward the latter view, that for the dominant contribution it is sufficient to consider only one bounce in the past, at roughly five trillion days ago (an easily memorized value for the age of the universe that fits to four digits the middle of the range of the current measurements of 13.69(13) Gyr), rather than an infinite sequence of bubble formations in my past. Though I am not a Young Earth Creationist as some of my fellow Evangelical Christians are, perhaps I am still a Young Universe Creationist (for thermodynamic reasons rather than for theological reasons, since I personally do not see any theological reason that God could not have created an infinite eternally inflating universe) in the sense that I suspect that most of the quantum amplitude for our observations can be ascribed to quasiclassical universes (or spacetimes in a path integral) that each had its smallest spatial size (say in a foliation of Cauchy surfaces that are closed hypersurfaces of constant extrinsic curvature, to exclude nearly null hypersurfaces of arbitrarily tiny three-volume) not much more than about five trillion days ago. But so far as I can see, this question of whether or not eternally inflating spacetimes are important for the quantum probabilities of our observations is very much an open question, even if the set of quantum states is restricted to be finite or to be a single pure state.

Hopefully this guy has the “I’m Getting Arrested” app.

Plan on going to #OccupyWallStreet and getting arrested? There’s an app for that! A Brooklyn programmer (abhorred by getting so much coverage in the “lame-stream” press, no doubt) has made a free android app that allows would-be arrestees to alert their friends. Beforehand, you can program in a message and recipients, who you can alert upon pushing a single button. The app is appropriately called “I’m Getting Arrested.”

Once you’re in jail, you may need help calming down (if you manage to smuggle in your phone). Look no farther than MyCalmBeat, a smartphone app that measures your heart rate and helps you establish an optimal breathing rate, or “resonant frequency.” It works by calculating the breathing rate at which your heart rate has the highest variability, which is correlated with how relaxed you feel. Stressed people, the app’s programmers say, have relatively constant rates of heart rate, which makes stress worse.

Now all we’re missing is an app that redistributes wealth and does our job for us.

Image: WarmSleepy / Flickr

A study published this week in the journal Pediatrics found a link between levels of bisphenol-A in pregnant moms and behavioral problems such as anxiety and hyperactivity in their daughters at age 3. No such effects were seen in boys. BPA has estrogen-like activity and can lead to developmental and behavioral problems in animals—but whether or not it does the same in humans, and at what dosages, is a subject of considerable debate. This study won’t settle the debate but highlights the need to answer some basic questions about BPA that remain surprisingly unclear.

What’s the Context:

• Bisphenol-A is used in many types of plastics like polycarbonate, linings of metal cans, and in receipts (even some labeled “BPA-free”). It shows up in the urine of the vast majority of Americans.
• Since BPA mimics estrogen in the body, it may effect mental and sexual development, especially if it is present very early in life. For this reason it has been explicitly banned from being used in baby bottles in several European countries, and BPA manufacturers say they don’t sell the chemical to makers of baby bottles.
• Animal studies show fetal or early-life exposure to the chemical can interfere with mental development and behavior, like hyperactivity and impaired sociality.

How the Heck:

• 244 pregnant women from Cincinnati, Ohio, had levels of BPA in the urine tested at weeks 16 and 26 of pregnancy, and again within 24 hours of giving birth. BPA levels were also tested in the urine of their children at ages 1, 2, and 3.
• Behavioral problems were measured by two surveys filled out by parents when the children were 3 years old. The tests sought to identify problems in executive function, depression, anxiety, and attentional deficits.
• Levels of BPA in the children were not linked to behavioral problems. However, the average level of BPA found in the urine at weeks 16 and 26 did appear related to behavioral issues in the girls (but not boys), namely increased levels of depression, anxiety, and hyperactivity.
• Researchers don’t know why BPA may impact girls more than boys. They speculate that it may disrupt early neural processes that give rise to behavioral differences between males and females, like aggression and anxiety.

Not So Fast:

• Critics of this study rightly point out that BPA is quickly metabolized in the body; a 2002 study found its half-life to be about 6 hours. However, a more recent study found that BPA may be metabolized more slowly and that there are significant non-food sources of the contaminant.
• Another study found that people who ate food with high levels of BPA showed very low levels of it in their blood.
• It remains unclear exactly how much BPA is absorbed into the bloodstream and how BPA may accumulate in fat stores within the body.
• Given this uncertainty, measuring urine levels of BPA only twice during pregnancy may not be a good indicator of a fetus’ total BPA exposure. It would be better to measure blood levels of the chemical more often and earlier in the pregnancy.

The Future Holds:

• Despite the uncertainties in this study, it may make sense for pregnant women to try to limit BPA exposure during pregnancy, especially early on—this can be done by avoiding packaged foods and eating fresh fruits and vegetables, etc.—which is healthy anyway.
• The FDA says it’s still “looking into” the health effects of BPA, although it remains legal in almost all food containers.
• There’s enough evidence to curtail our use of BPA, at least in products aimed at pregnant women and infants. This is, of course, easier said than done, considering how cheap, useful, and ubiquitous the chemical is.

Reference: Joe M. Braun, Amy E. Kalkbrenner, Antonia M. Calafat, Kimberly Yolton, Xiaoyun Ye, Kim N. Dietrich, Bruce P. Lanphear. Impact of Early Life Bisphenol A Exposure on Behavior and Executive Function in Children. Pediatrics, Published online Oct. 24, 2011. DOI: 10.1542/peds.2011-1335

Image: katerha / Flickr

“Curiosity is inherited with mankind. Frequently we want to know something only because it needs to be kept secret.” Astute psychology on the part of this secret society scribe.

With the most powerful computers ever known <insert maniacal laugh>, you’d think that modern codebreakers would have utterly smashed our forefathers’ puny ciphers. Well…no. There are quite a number of antique documents that remain mysterious, despite cryptologists’ best efforts. Code breaking still relies on good guesses and flashes of insight more than brute force.

But brute force and clever statistical analyses can help you unravel whether that guess was right in the blink of an eye, and that’s what let University of Southern California computer scientists and their collaborators unravel the text of a slender brocade-bound manuscript that had kept its secrets since the 18th century. The first words they deciphered? “Ceremonies of Initiation.”

Starting out, the team had no idea what language the enciphered text was. The carefully inscribed gobbledegook included Greek and Roman letters and abstract symbols, and for a long time the team worked on just the Roman letters, but that yielded nothing. As their analysis found that German was, by a hair, the most likely of the 80 languages they’d tested—the team’s primary focus, not incidentally, is automated translation—they tried to see whether the abstract symbols could be standing in for German letters. This gave them their first successes, and in short order they had most of the text deciphered, revealing it to be the rules and rituals of a German secret society of the mid-1700s. A German secret society of the mid-1700s with some very weird fixations.

Potential inductees must attempt to read a blank sheet of paper, and when they fail, they will have hair from their eyebrows plucked by the master of ceremonies. Members must cover their eyes with aprons or their hands during certain ceremonies. The group describes themselves as freemasons, and the rituals make use of mallets, compasses, epees, and other paraphernalia (and lots and lots of candles). A black carpet inscribed with occult signs is spread on the floor during rituals. You know, the whole DaVinci Code drill–except for real. Read the whole thing for yourself here.

Secret societies were all the rage in Europe in the 1700s, but by their own design we have very little information about their political machinations. So while the aprons, eyes, and etc. are titillating, what’s likely to interest historians most is a passage discussing the rights of man. “This opens up a window for people who study the history of ideas and the history of secret societies,” one of the USC computer scientists said in a release. “Historians believe that secret societies have had a role in revolutions, but all that is yet to be worked out, and a big part of the reason is because so many documents are enciphered.”

And there are plenty more unbroken codes out there to be attacked. The team hopes to tackle the Voynich Manuscript (aptly called “the white whale of the code-breaking world” by the NYTimes), the Zodiac killer‘s encrypted messages, and the Kryptos code on a sculpture on the CIA’s grounds—just for starters. Breaking ciphers, apparently, is a good way to procrastinate on developing sophisticated machine translation.

Image courtesy of University of Southern California and Uppsala University

Slashdot is a news aggregator site where contributors submit interesting stories about science, tech, and assorted geekery. It’s one of the oldest and biggest social network sites on teh tubez^*, and still one of the best. I go there every day to see what’s buzzing. My own humble (ha!) site is linked from there every now and again as well, and I’m always happy when it is.

Every week or so, Slashdot does an interview with someone online. They open up questions, collect a few, and send them to the interviewee to answer via email. So guess who they just asked to participate?

That’s right! Rory Calhoun! No wait, it was me! They’ve opened up a page where you can leave a question. You don’t have to register to ask a question, but if you like fresh techy news, you should sign up anyway. Feel free to ask anything, though bear in mind I’ll be writing out the answer, so something like "Why is the Universe expanding?" might be more text than I’m willing to write and you’re willing to read.

But, to save you time, here are some answers so you don’t have to ask basic questions:

1) Yes, I’m married.

2) I worked on Hubble for ten years, but now I write about it.

3) No.

4) When I write about not wearing pants most of the time, I’m not kidding.

5) 13.73 +/- .12 billion years.

6) It’s a tough choice, but I’d have to say either Wil Wheaton or George Hrab.

So there you go. I hope that helps. Head on over to Slashdot, see what others have asked, and then leave your own question! And my sincere thanks to Slashdot for asking me to be a part of this. It’s an honor.

I’ll add that questions left in the comments on this very post won’t be part of the Q&A; you have to go to Slashdot and write it there. Thanks!

^* In fact, in the olden days of the web, when a site got linked by Slashdot it frequently overloaded the server, jamming it and making site loading very slow. This became known as "getting slashdotted" and it happened to me a few times way back when, before the Hive Overmind Discover Magazine started hosting my blog on a beefy server that can handle the load better.

We’re in western America in the late Jurassic period, and a herd of Camarasaurus dinosaurs is on the move. It’s the dry season and the giants are running out of water. Fortunately, they know exactly where to find a drink: a range of volcanic highlands to the west. To quench their titanic thirst, they must head for the hills. Now, 150 million years later, Henry Fricke from Colorado College had discovered a way of reconstructing their migration.

Vast migrations are a common feature among modern animals, and it’s reasonable to think that some dinosaurs undertook similar treks. But how do you work out the routes of long-extinct animals, when you only know about the spot where they died? The answer, as with many aspects of dinosaur life, is to look at their skeletons. As well as revealing the shape and size of these beasts, dinosaur fossils can also hold a record of their travel plans.

Reptiles replace their teeth throughout their lives and the dinosaurs would have been no different. Whenever they drank, they incorporated oxygen atoms from the water into the enamel of their growing teeth. Different bodies of water contain different mixes of oxygen isotopes, and the dinosaurs’ enamel records a history of these blends. They were what they drank.

It’s easy enough to measure the levels of oxygen isotopes in dinosaur teeth, but you need something to compare that against. How could anyone possibly discern the levels of such isotopes in bodies of water that existed millions of years ago? Local rocks provide the answer. The oxygen also fuelled the growth of minerals like calcium carbonate (limestone), which preserve these ancient atoms just as dinosaur teeth do. If dinosaur enamel contains a different blend of oxygen to the surrounding carbonates, the place where the animal drank must be somewhere different from the place where it died.

Palaeontologists have used oxygen isotopes to infer all manner of dinosaur traits, from the fish-eating habits of spinosaurs to the hot body temperatures of sauropods to the chilly conditions endured by Chinese dinosaurs. These atoms have acted as menus and thermometers. Now, Fricke has turned them into maps.

He studied thirty-two Camarasaurus teeth collected from two sites in the Morrison basin, a stretch of Jurassic rocks in the western United States that’s rife with the remains of giant sauropod dinosaurs. Compared to the surrounding sediments, the Camarasaurus teeth had far less of the heavier oxygen-18 isotope, relative to the lighter oxygen-16. In fact, they had the lowest ratios of oxygen-18 to oxygen-16 ever recorded in the basin.

This implies that the animals must have drunk at higher ground. As air rises, it cools and condenses. Water molecules start to rain out, and those contain heavier oxygen-18 atoms go first. As a result, mountain water is low in oxygen-18 and rich in oxygen-16. The camarasaurs’ teeth betray the fact that they spent at least part of the year in a highland getaway, before returning the basin where they eventually died.

The most obvious high terrain lies in the volcanic mountains to the west. If that’s where they went, the Camarasaurus must have migrated around 300 kilometres in each direction. That’s further than, say, an elephant but less than today’s champion land traveller –the caribou, which migrates over 5,000 kilometres a year.

Fricke thinks that the camarasaurs’ voyage was a seasonal one, rather than a one-off trip. When he took slices through individual teeth, going from the oldest enamel at the tip to the youngest at the root, he found a dip in the ratio of oxygen-18 to oxygen-16. This suggests that as the tooth was created, the animal moved from the basin into the highland regions, probably over the course of 4-5 months. It must have made the return journey shortly before it died.

Other scientists have suggested that the Morrison sauropods travelled over long distances to find the food and water they needed to survive through hard dry seasons, in the way that elephants today. Fricke’s study supports that idea. It involves a lot of assumptions, including about how oxygen isotopes are reflected in the dinosaur enamel, how this changed with temperature, and how hot the Morrison basin was at the time. But even so, Fricke says, “We tried to be as conservative as possible in our assumptions.  I’m as confident [in our conclusions] as I can be given the inherent difficulties of studying strange dead things!”

Mathew Wedel, a sauropod specialist, is intrigued by Fricke’s study, but he thinks it’s a small step away from being convincing. “The obvious thing to do would be to compare the oxygen isotope signals in the Camarasaurus teeth with those from animals with similar tooth formation, which could not possibly have made the same migration: crocodilians.” Fortunately, Dinosaur National Monument is full of the skeletons of ancient crocodiles.

Wedel adds, “Data from very small dinosaurs, like Fruitadens or the various small theropods of the Morrison, would be even better because they were biologically more similar to sauropods.  It’s straightforward work, so hopefully it will be done, and soon.”

Fricke says that while his research strongly supports the idea that Camarasaurus undertook long seasonal migrations, “it does not, however, imply that they must have done so.” To do that, he’ll have to look at other populations of Camarasaurus, and sauropods from different parts of the world. That should tell him if long migrations were a common feature in the lives of these ancient giants, or something specific to the harsh conditions of the Morrison basin.

These studies, which are underway, might even provide clues about why these dinosaurs evolved into the largest land animals the world has ever seen. Fricke says, “If large dinosaurs such as Camarasaurus migrated, but smaller coexisting dinosaurs did not, then it could be possible to argue that migration and the evolution of super-large body sizes went hand in hand.”

Reference: Fricke, Hencecroth & Hoerner. 2011. Lowland–upland migration of sauropod dinosaurs during the Late Jurassic epoch. Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature10570

Image: by Dmitry Bogdanov

• Snails cross continents by flying inside birds
• Across an ocean, round a continent – the epic 10,000km voyage of a humpback whale
• Chasing daylight – tiny trackers reveal the incredible flight plans of the Arctic tern
• Light-detecting backpacks record the complete migration routes of songbirds

Just chillin’…before tearing off at incredible speed.

What’s black, spherical, and can run you down at 40 mph? Japan’s mini Death Star, of course.

The hovering drone was demonstrated at a tech expo in Japan recently, zipping around like a hummingbird and showing off its stability, which is maintained by three gyroscopes. Even if it hits a wall or is whacked by a bystander, the thing hardly pauses.

The drone’s possible uses include reconnaissance and rescue, the presenter for the Defense Ministry remarked. The whole thing weighs just 350 grams and was built from commercially available parts at a cost of about $1400.

You heard me—commercially available parts. So what are you waiting for?

[via PopSci]

The Orion Nebula is perhaps the most famous gas cloud in the sky. And no wonder: it’s easily visible to the unaided eye, it looks fuzzy and diffuse even in binoculars, in small telescopes its shape can be discerned, and in long time exposures its beauty is devastating. The delicate wisps and tendrils, the bold colors, the odd shape… it’s got it all.

I’ve seen hundreds of pictures of it, and there’s almost always something new to see. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen a shot of it quite like this:

Isn’t that incredible? It was taken by Jesus Vargas (Astrogades) and Maritxu Poyal [click to ennebulenate]. Amazingly, it was taken with a telescope that had a lens only 10.6 cm (4") across! But the nebula is so bright that it doesn’t take a big ‘scope to get great images of it (though, to be fair, Takahashi makes very high quality ‘scopes).

What I like about this image is how obviously it shows that the nebula is actually a giant cavity in space. The actual cloud is far larger than what you see here, very dense and dark. But many stars are forming in the heart of the Orion Nebula, and a handful of them are massive and hot. Their ultraviolet radiation has flooded the interior of the cloud, eating away at it, carving out a huge divot light years across, and lighting it up. What you’re seeing here is more tenuous gas filling that cavity.

I love that. When I was younger I thought the nebula was just this diffuse puffery floating out in space, but reality is — as usual — more interesting, more profound, and more awesome than what we might first think. Images like this really drive that home.

Vargas and Poyal have several other images of this magnificent gas cloud, including this slightly wider field-of-view, one with different color filters, and one with a much wider field-of-View. These are all magnificent, and well worth your time looking at.

I’ve written about this nebula many times, as you might expect. Check out the Related posts links below for lots more info on this fantastic object.

Image credit: Jesus Vargas and Maritxu Poyal, used by permission.

Crater Lake, Oregon, is an ancient volcano caldera that is filled with water. If you’ve never been there, words really cannot convey the magnificence of the view. I was there in 2006, and was so struck by the awesome beauty of the place that I did what I could to relay how I felt at the time.

So I was thrilled when I found out that photographer Ben Canales had also visited Crater Lake, and made this lovely (and far too short!) time lapse video of it:

See what I mean? I want more! But did you see, in the first few seconds of the video, the dark band across the horizon? That’s called the Belt of Venus, and is actually the shadow of the Earth on the sky! I see it all the time, and it’s easy to get good pictures of it, too!

My only regret about visiting Crater Lake was not being able to see the stars that night, but it looks like Ben made the most of his experience there. Sometime, I’ll have to go back, and spend the night. It looks cold, but wonderful.

Credit: Ben Canales on Google+.

So there’s a slick new webzine coming out, Evolution: this view of life. It’s another one of David Sloan Wilson’s projects. I don’t agree a lot with the specifics of David’s theories, but I admire his ambition. James Winters pointed me to the fact that they’re trying to raise money for this webzine via KickStarter. Their goal is $5,000. Having run much more bare bones websites for years this seems like a really modest amount in relation to their aims. I admire David’s attempts in this area enough that I gave some money. He tries a lot of things, many of which don’t succeed, but that’s science….

I dislike cluttering this site with administrative notes, but I want to put this post up as a reference for the future. It’s not really aimed at regular readers/commenters, who know the explicit and implicit norms.

1) If you use quotation marks, make sure that you’re actually quoting something your interlocutor said, rather than adding them for effect (yes, believe it or not, people have quoted me, where the “quotes” were actually their own interpretation of what I intended)

2) It is generally not best to paraphrase someone else’s argument in your own words as a prologue to your own comment. Just quote the appropriate sections of text in your reply if you want it to frame your response. If you are engaging in paraphrasing to distill the argument of your interlocutor down to a pith, understand that subconscious tendencies are such that you’ll reshape that argument to better suit your response. In other words, you’re probably arguing with your own conception of their argument, not their argument as such. More maliciously some people just paraphrase because it makes setting up a straw man so much easier. That’s not nice. I have wasted a fair amount of time rereading posts to try and figure out how commenters came to a particular perception of my argument. I don’t take kindly to people telling me what I obviously really think, when I point out that their perception was wrong.

3) From that you can gather that inferring “between the lines” isn’t appropriate in most cases. It is part of normal human cognition, and you can’t help it to some extent. But being too liberal about the practice means that you’ll just distort the argument of the other person, who then has to waste their time correcting your misunderstandings. This gums up the exchanges because people have only a finite amount of time. Read as plainly as possible.

4) There’s no presumption here of symmetry. If the host asks you a direct question, answer and don’t evade. If the host tells you to drop a topic, don’t make the case for why you shouldn’t drop the topic. Wasting time trying to argue these issues is a banning offense.

5) I’m busy, and getting busier. I don’t respond well to people wasting my time. Some of the other commenters are busy too. It’s important to make exchanges “count.” Excessive posturing, and an obvious fixation on “winning” arguments with clever ripostes, are bannable offensives.

I’m not taking comments on this post, because as I said this post is more a placeholder so I don’t have to have the same stale argument over & over.

Note: See this companion post.

Dienekes has a long post, the pith of which is expressed in the following:

If I had to guess, I would propose that most extant Europeans will be discovered to be a 2-way West Asian/Ancestral European mix, just as most South Asians are a simple West Asian/Ancestral South Indian mix. In both cases, the indigenous component is no longer in existence and the South Asian/Atlantic_Baltic components that emerge in ADMIXTURE analyses represent a composite of the aboriginal component with the introduced West Asian one. And, like in India, some populations will be discovered to be “off-cline” by admixture with different elements: in Europe these will be Paleo-Mediterraneans like the Iceman, an element maximally preserved in modern Sardinians, as well as the East Eurasian-influenced populations at the North-Eastern side of the continent.

This does not seem to be totally implausible on the face of it. But it seems likely that any “West Asian” component is going to be much closer genetically to an “Ancestral European” mix than they were to “Ancestral South Indians,” because the two former elements are probably part of a broader West Eurasian diversification which post-dates the separation of those groups from Southern and Eastern Eurasians. In other words, pulling out the distinct elements in Europeans is likely a more difficult task because the constituents of the mixture resemble each other quite a bit when compared to “Ancestral North Indians” vs. “Ancestral South Indians.”

The bigger issue which this highlights though is that the reality that many of these clustering methods are temporally sensitive. Given enough time a “hybrid” population is no longer a hybrid, but rather a new distinctive population which itself can be a “parent.” Recombination breaks apart the long range genetic physical associations which are the hallmarks of distinctive admixed ancestry on the genomic scale. That is why clustering methods easily generate a pure “South Asian” component. After at least ~3-4,000 years of continuous admixture the synthesis is now far less coarse, and the elements much more de facto miscible. And yet via other clustering techniques, such as principle components analysis, you get different results. The peculiar position of the “South Asian” individuals between Europeans and East Asians in direct proportion to their caste and regional origins becomes highly indicative of some sort of admixture event in different proportions as a function of geography and social context. The technique in Reconstructing Indian population history allowed for a resolution of this paradox by sifting through the variation and extracting out the ancestral components. The recent papers which came out on Australian Aboriginal genetics do something similar, in terms of making sense of somewhat puzzling results which are found when generating inferences from aggregate genomic variation.

Imagine how much more difficult the task would have been if the ancestral components were much closer! I suspect that’s what’s going on in Europe. I’m not privy to any big secrets, but I have heard of whispers of research groups using Sardinians as a “pure” outgroup to model the changing demographics of Europe since the arrival of agriculture. What David Reich stated at the conference was not particularly surprising to me in light of that possibility. Sardinia regularly pops out as a weird outlier in many analyses. One simple possibility here is that that’s simply a function of the fact that it’s an island, and therefore has diverged from mainland populations due to isolation from conventional village-to-village mate exchange. Another possibility, mooted by Dienekes, is that it may be a repository of European genetic variation from earlier periods, relatively unaffected by later perturbations due to demographic changes. The main reason that I can give some credit to Dienekes’ thesis has less to do with Sardinians than Basques. The French Basques in the HGDP are less atypical than the Sardinians, but in some runs they do lack a component which is most obviously classed as “West Asian,” and which other French have. In Dienekes’ own runs with a diverse array of Iberian populations this same distinction emerges.

All of this reminds us that clustering methods give us great insights into how populations are related to each other, but they don’t tell us about the details of how that relatedness came to be. It makes a great difference if an element is the outcome of relatively recent (>10,000 years) hybridization events, as opposed to having deeper roots. For example, admixture between Polynesians and Melanesians brings together two components, whatever their own prior origins, diverged on the order of 50,000 years before the present. And yet if the two groups mentioned earlier are correct than the Melanesian component itself must be decomposed into two fractions, one of which is much closer to the Polynesians than the other, our understanding of the past changes.

As I implied earlier today I think the era of wild hypothesis generation in the area of the settling of Europe over the last 10,000 years is coming to the end. The combination of more powerful analytic techniques and the emergence of ancient DNA samples with which to calibrate, peg, and check, inferences from those techniques, will probably clarify our understanding of the past to a great extent.

Image credit: yomi955

Over the past six months we’ve seen the “Libyan revolution” stall and then succeed. There’s no doubt that the late Libyan dictator was a marginally sane megalomaniac. That being said, he’d been on better behavior over the past 10 years, dismantling his nuclear program for example. I can see the logic in wanting to overthrow him though, there’s a lot of built up historical memory in relation to the various terrorist groups he’s funded in Europe, as well as actions like bombing of Pan Am 103. But is anyone really surprised when things like this occur:

It was just a passing reference to marriage in a leader’s soberly delivered speech, but all week it has unsettled women here as well as allies abroad.

In announcing the success of the Libyan revolution and calling for a new, more pious nation, the head of the interim government, Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, also seemed to clear the way for unrestricted polygamy in a Muslim country where it has been limited and rare for decades.

It looked like a sizable step backward for women at a moment when much here — institutions, laws, social relations — is still in play after the end of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s 42 years of authoritarian rule.

In his speech, Mr. Abdel-Jalil declared that a Qaddafi-era law that placed restrictions on multiple marriages, which is a tenet of Islamic law, or Shariah, would be done away with. The law, which stated that a first wife had to give permission before others were added, for instance, had kept polygamy rare here.

“This law is contrary to Shariah and must be stopped,” Mr. Abdel-Jalil told the crowd, vowing that the new government would adhere more faithfully to Shariah. The next day he reiterated the point to reporters at a news conference: “Shariah allows polygamy,” he said. Mr. Abdel-Jalil is known for his piety.

The Libyan nation is a pretty religious one. Even the women who oppose polygamy out of straightforward self-interest admit its religious validity: ‘Rehab Zehany, 20, who said Mr. Abdel-Jalil was merely following the dictates of the Koran, added, when asked if she would accept her husband taking a second wife: “Of course not! I would kill him!”’ As I’ve asserted many times: attitudes considered extreme or benighted in the West are relatively widespread in much of the Islamic world. When you democratically empower people who have these attitudes, you’re going to get some sloppy regress back to positions that in the West might be considered backward. Some Americans do garnish their arguments about public policy with references to the Bible, but they’re in a minority. Not so in many of these Middle Eastern Muslim nations.

Consider Tunisia, where relatively milquetoast Islamists just came to power. Tunisia Liberals See a Vote for Change, Not Religion:

The message to Islamists, he added, was: “ ‘We are for Islam to be the religion of the state, but you must be very cautious. We are not going to give up our fight for civil freedoms.’ I am profoundly convinced that we can promote human rights and women’s rights, etc., without fighting against Islamists.”

Observe that self-described liberals in Tunisia want Islam to be the religion of the state! Having a state religion isn’t necessarily incompatible with democratic liberalism (e.g., Norway). But in general in most societies which are democratically liberal the secularists are not proponents of an established state religion. I am moderately optimistic that Tunisia can make a transition toward a pluralistic democracy, because it doesn’t seem that the religious conservatives are the overwhelming majority, and so could not impose their vision without major backlash and possible revolt from the more liberal segment of society. This may not be the case in far less developed nations, such as Egypt.

As far as Libya goes, it might be best to avert our eyes. Liberal internationalists and neoconservatives don’t seem to have learned anything from the past 10 years of American foreign policy intervention in their hearts. They see only the immediate justice that they can mete out before their face, and don’t think about medium to long term consequences. They saw the revolution in Libya as a clean abstraction. But the past 6 months have seen something of a ‘race war’, as anti-Qaddafi forces turn against black Libyans and Sub-Saharan Africans who were favored by the old regime. The future may see the rise of a conservative illiberal democracy. That’s not the end of the world by any means, but people should have had their eyes open to the range of possibilities beforehand.

I recently inquired if anyone was sequencing Cheddar Man. In case you don’t know, this individual died ~9,000 years ago in Britain, but the remains were well preserved enough that mtDNA was retrieved from him. He was of haplogroup U5, which is still present in the local region. Cheddar Man is also particularly interesting because he is definitely a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer, predating the Neolithic in Britain by thousands of years.

It turns out that no one is looking at Cheddar Man now. But that’s probably because money and time are finite. I was told that there are plenty of other specimens which would also probably be good candidates for sequencing in the Museum’s collection (this doesn’t seem to be a case where curators are being stingy and overprotecting of their specimens). That’s not too surprising. We’ll probably answer a lot of questions about the roles of demographic diffusion vs. cultural diffusion when it comes to agriculture soon enough (as in, over the next 10 years as techniques for getting signal out of old degraded and contaminated samples get better).

Okay, the riddle about what happened to Marian has been solved!  No, I haven’t been abducted and sold for spare parts.  Thanks for all the emails, guys.  I just have a mother in very poor condition, in the hospital, and I’ve been camped out there for the past three days.

Don’t worry, riddlers.   I’ll come up with something extra special for you.

Thanks again for all the emails.  I think I have about 200.  You guys are great.

Some people might consider this a sin, but hey: I’m no angle.

This comic is from Luke Surl, who has some pretty funny geek comics on his site.

… and if you don’t get it, this might help. Or you could try searching on it; secant you shall find.

Tip o’ the sunscreen lid to Neil Tyson, whom I hear is really into astronomy.

Top picks

A fantastic post on the dogged passion of scientists: Internet Porn Fills Gap in Spider Taxonomy, by Meera Lee Sethi

Threefold variation in UK bowel cancer death rates! Wait, that’s less than what you expect from chance, by Ben Goldacre

A lovely piece on the mind of the octopus and what it’s like to study them

Turn the lights off and your speakers up. Ready? Now watch this video of Earth from the International Space Station

This is wonderful. Two scientists – SciCurious and Kate Clancy – critique a paper on their blogs and the author responds on her own blog. Technical but civil comments ensue. Great.

Human population growth: more “bacterial than primate”, by Elizabeth Kolbert.

Why biology is in dire need of some viral marketing (and why the creationists are winning at SEO), by Kevin Zelnio.

An important piece on views of evolution in the Muslim world & why young-earth creationism is absent

Brutally scathing report says polio eradication isn’t going to happen any time soon. By Maryn McKenna

Love the tyrant, not the hype: A must-read post by Tom Holtz on the real reasons why T. rex is so damn interesting.

“You don’t want to be the science writer who asks a famous astronomer ‘so are u telling me there’s a telescope in space?” Cassie Willyard on why science writers need to ask dumb questions.

A beautiful creative combo of science & cathartic writing: “Time+brain chemistry heal all wounds” by Christie Wilcox.

Carl Zimmer asks about the biggest cell. A great conversation ensues.

Great feature on sequencing the Black Death genome, by Ewen Callaway

Very good piece by Erika Check Hayden on why sequencing Steve Jobs’ genome couldn’t save his life, and the limits of modern genetics.

The book marketplace is more about “selling objects… than propelling the arguments they contain.” Excellent analysis by Megan Garber

Virtual wolf pack show that ambush is possible without planning or cooperation

6 guys in a capsule – great Wired piece on a 520-experiment in isolation, that simulates a trip to Mars

Dolphin Curiosity: Knowledge for Knowledge’s Sake. I love Paul Norris’ blog on animal intelligence.

Educate a woman, educate a nation: why women’s education is key to slowing population growth. Really important concept.

Bacteria threaten cave art – but some scientists disagree with “keep cave closed” tactic. Cool story by Carmen Drahl.

An excellent deep-digging feature on the mislabeling of fish from the Boston Globe.

News/science/writing

Looming gaps in satellite coverage could create an important gap in climate data

Killer whales in captivity are NOT a 13th Amendment problem

Killer Whales Migrate Thousands of Miles to…Exfoliate?

 Cookie-Cutter Cat Not As Cute The Name Sounds

The neuroscience of ‘pissing yourself with fear’

$10m prize for sequencing 100 centenarian genomes in 30 days. Well, they should be easy to catch…

First patient receives novel gene therapy for type of blindness. Good luck to him!

Mass Species Loss Stunts Evolution for Millions of Years

Was Archaeopteryx an early bird? The debate about this iconic fossil critter continues. Brian Switek gets the nuance in the debate, unlike most journalists who opted for a simple turn-around narrative.

Declan Butler dissects the malaria vaccine announcement from last week. It’s still important, but how important?

The Royal Society has made all journal articles over 70-years-old free-to-access

The arsenic debate that matters: conflicting studies fuel arsenic debate

Swans and stem cells: winners of this year’s Imagine Science Film Festival

Cognitive Chaos May Fuel Marijuana’s Side Effects

21% of “high impact biomedical journal” studies have honorary/ghost authors

The UK’s National Cancer Director orders an independent review of breast cancer screening programme. Good. Necessary.

Does Time Exist? The definitive debate. Check out comment 20 for a clear lay explanation!

Universal HPV vaccination for boys recommended by CDC advisory panel.

This is big, important and potentially worrying. Non-invasive fetal genetic screening debuts.

Tasmanian Devils Might Survive Cancer Scourge

Two parasites, one host in a new blog called Nothing in Biology Makes Sense

One of the 7 billion humans has just brought the number of Javan rhinos down to 50

The Iceman genome cometh

Argument over RNA editing study deepens

Before flight, did dinosaurs use flap-assisted incline running? Great videos on the evolution of flight, via Carl Zimmer.

This might be the earliest Western childbirth image (and it was found by a blind student)

The Empire of Death, The World’s Monuments to Human Skeletons

“I wanna be like you-oo-oo.” Orangutans develop different cultures like humans.

People are better at golf if they’re told that their club belonged to a pro

Peer review is f***ed up – let’s fix it

Why Do We Keep Going Back to Jurassic Park? Other than the fact that Hammond keeps on sending us.

EyeTracker – tech that allows paralysed ALS patients to draw with their eyes

“An ignorance about genetics so profound that I may lose hope in humanity”: Emily Willingham on the Huffington Post’s shocking science section.

“Naming gives us the illusion that nature is fixed, but it is as fluid as the language used to describe it”

“We knew our predictions were little better than guesses, but we continued to act as if each prediction was valid.” Don’t Blink! The Hazards of Confidence

People with strong involuntary digust reactions are more likely to be conservative, oppose gay marriage.

Sail-backed crocodiles & the rise of the ruling reptiles

Crabitats! Project Shellter aims to build 3D-printed homes for hermit crabs

‘Sex and the Scanner’:  why MRI scanners don’t make for good sexy TV.

The first episode of Frozen Planet was incredible. Surfing penguins, the world’s most incompetent sea-lion, killer whales attacking seals with waves, and this epic wolf hunt.

How to get a job in Antarctica

How big was world’s population when you were born?

Heh/wow/huh

Study Finds Every Style Of Parenting Produces Disturbed, Miserable Adults

The beards! Oh god the beards! How the Joy of Sex was illustrated

Do NOT attempt to answer this question. Mind splode.

Man chases crab, crab gets hilariously awesome revenge on man

A strategic plan, to be stapled to the heads of all strategy consultants.

Dinosaurigami: how the hell did he do a Kentrosaurus???

“Responses of unwitting participants to balls unexpectedly thrown by an experimenter or propelled by a hidden cannon…”

Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing. At the end, Nick Fury recruits them all.

“The dictator was dragged from a big pipe and then some stuff happened”

HuffNo Tumblr

Being alive linked to autism

Kangaroo vs Emu: FIGHT!

The planet’s version of farting in the bath: an underwater volcano spews exotic lava

Confused grasshopper is confused

Journalism/society/internet

Open Lab 2011: Blogging Comes of Age. (I’m helping to judge and I quite agree. A particularly good batch this year).

Good round-up from Nieman Lab about getting tablet news to pay.

I’ve been playing around with ifttt.com – an essential tool for journalists and other heavy web users.

A great dissection of why Amy Harmon’s autism story in the NYT is so good – I love the description of writers leaving “gold coins” for readers.

Was It A Cat I Saw? Interview with, and essay by, palindrome king Barry Duncan. His record? 800 words

Someone hacked Israel’s biometric database in 2006. Now 9 million people’s personal info is on the loose.

A great piece on how Anonymous, the new Shakespeare movie, relates to science denialism

“Intelligent Rival Imitator of Siri.” Android has a Siri, called Iris.

Why architects suffer from myopia, and some buildings look really weird

Three psychiatrists urge DC Comics to stop misrepresenting the mentally ill.

Cyborg no more! The BBC moves to human-edited Twitter feeds

The @Guardiantagbot will answer your queries to discover your weaknesses. Er, I mean, help you find content.

Brian Cox is wrong: blogging your research is not a recipe for

It’s time to admit that journalists are human beings, and they have opinions:

The European Geosciences Union is offering fellowships of 5,000 euros for journos to report on geosciences research. Disclaimer: I’m judging

What are the best “dumb” interview Qs that sci journos ask? Loads of great answers, plus some from me. Also: how to cover conferences.

How much energy does the entire internet consume?

Recently, a man called the Hertsfordshire (UK) police to report flashing lights in the sky… and, well, listen for yourself:

Heh. Well, I’m actually glad he called back to admit his mistake!

You might think this is really unusual, but this call doesn’t surprise me at all. Take a look at the links in the Related Posts section below; people have reported Jupiter and balloons as UFOs, and the Moon has made an appearance once or twice as well. Even dust motes on old photographic plates have spurred warnings of a menace from space…

Tip o’ the tin foil beanie to Nancy Atkinson.