Orionids radiant. You will see Orion to your southwest at about 5 am. Click to go to the image source: meteorshowersonline.com for more info.

One of the best meteor showers of the year is about to occur, the Orionids.  The Orionids are so named because it appears they are coming from the constellation Orion.  They indeed do appear to come from general direction of Orion and they really are dust particles that have come off from Halley’s Comet.

The dust particles may be only the size of a grain of sand but they do make for a great show most years.  The moon is going to mess things up a little this year but it’s still worth a look if you have clear skies.  I don’t think the moon will make conditions quite as bad as they were for the Perseids or as bad as they will be for the Leonids next month, but it will keep a damper on things.

The best time to see the show is before 5am either of the weekend days, Orion will be about to your south west so look south.  I’ll be out there you just know that.  I also found the tripod for my little camera so I might fiddle around with that some too!

Colliding galaxies known as Arp 148. Click for larger. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration, and A. Evans (University of Virginia, Charlottesville/NRAO/Stony Brook University)

I like the peculiar galaxies listed in Arp’s catalog. We always hear the chances of stellar collisions are remote, but sometimes I have a hard time believing it. This particular example looks like the proverbial bullet popping the balloon, it looks like the pinkish colored galaxy has come through the other one, ripping a hole in it. I get a different feeling from the press release below.

You can get a larger version here (goes off site)

The NASA press release:

This interacting pair of galaxies is included in Arp’s catalog of peculiar galaxies as number 148. Arp 148 is the staggering aftermath of an encounter between two galaxies, resulting in a ring-shaped galaxy and a long-tailed companion. The collision between the two parent galaxies produced a shockwave effect that first drew matter into the center and then caused it to propagate outwards in a ring. The elongated companion perpendicular to the ring suggests that Arp 148 is a unique snapshot of an ongoing collision. Infrared observations reveal a strong obscuration region that appears as a dark dust lane across the nucleus in optical light. Arp 148 is nicknamed Mayall’s object and is located in the constellation of Ursa Major, the Great Bear, approximately 500 million light-years away.

This image is part of a large collection of 59 images of merging galaxies taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and released on April 24, 2008, the observatory’s 18th anniversary.

Artist concept of ROSAT. Credit: NASA/JPL

No sooner than we made it past the UARS satellite re-entry, we have another satellite about make an uncontrolled re-entry and pieces of it will make it to the ground.

The satellite is the ROSAT, you might recall a picture I posted last week released from Chandra X-ray Telescope which was a collaborative effort involving ROSAT.  ROSAT is a 2.4 ton satellite about the size of a car and while some of it will burn up, about 1.6 tons worth of it consisting of around 30 pieces will not and end up on the ground.

Where will they end up?  Again no one knows but your odds of being hit are better than they were in the UARS re-entry, this time around being 1:2000.  Don’t worry about those numbers too much, if all the people in the world were lined up along the flight path then yeah, 1:2000 but in reality the odds are much slimmer than that.  Not saying it won’t happen mind you, but I’m not going to move into a cave.

The big question for me will be whether or not they (they being NASA and other space agencies) can do a better job of narrowing down impact time and location than they did with UARS, which IMHO wasn’t all that good and I’m not pointing a finger,  I hope they have better luck.

So when?  Again nobody knows,  I’ve heard everything from this coming weekend to Halloween; again,  it’s a pretty difficult task to predict exactly and its not like they aren’t trying.

If you would like to see if there are any visible passes coming your way you can go to Spaceweather.com and if you would like to see where ROSAT is N2YO.com has a nice live tracker.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here’s a talk by Brian Green.  How our understanding of the universe from Einstein’s notions has evolved.

Got a few minutes?  Have a look, it’s quite interesting.

Source

I mean to say!  Get a look at this:

NASA - The Orion Nebula, as seen through the Spitzer Space Telescope

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here’s a newly released  preview of a new documentary: Our Last Transit of Venus

I can’t wait to see the whole thing!

Source

He loves me, he loves me not . . . “: uncertainty can increase romantic attraction.

“This research qualifies a social psychological truism: that people like others who like them (the reciprocity principle). College women viewed the Facebook profiles of four male students who had previously seen their profiles. They were told that the men (a) liked them a lot, (b) liked them only an average amount, or (c) liked them either a lot or an average amount (uncertain condition). Comparison of the first two conditions yielded results consistent with the reciprocity principle. Participants were more attracted to men who liked them a lot than to men who liked them an average amount. Results for the uncertain condition, however, were consistent with research on the pleasures of uncertainty. Participants in the uncertain condition were most attracted to the men-even more attracted than were participants who were told that the men liked them a lot. Uncertain participants reported thinking about the men the most, and this increased their attraction toward the men.”

Photo: flickr/paulswansen

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Great sexpectations.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Can differing levels of sexual experience doom your relationship?
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Proven tips for making your partner jealous.

WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

Even when you’re trying to eat healthy foods, it can be hard to know what to buy: Few us have the time to decipher the nutrition facts on every item we’re considering at the grocery store, and the dizzying number of health claims plastered on labels make the task, if anything, more confusing. The Institute of Medicine offered a possible solution in a report released yesterday: put a simple, standardized rating—zero to three stars or checkmarks—on every food package.

The system is designed to be similar to the Energy Star ratings, which let consumers pick out an energy-efficient appliance without wading through complicated specs. Instead of energy consumption, however, these food stars would track levels of three often over-consumed nutrients: saturated and trans fats, added sugar, and sodium. A food will get one star for each of these nutrients it contains in a healthy (i.e., moderate to miniscule) amount. Foods that are off the charts in at least one category—say, candy or butter—automatically get zero stars. Posted on the front of each package, this rating would let consumers assess a food’s healthfulness at a glance, the report says. It’s up to the FDA to decide whether these ratings should be required, and to hammer out the details.

We’re all for making things easy on people trying to eat right, and an easy-to-understand labeling system is a positive step. But a healthy diet isn’t like an electricity bill; it’s not as simple as using less salt or sugar as though you were cutting down on your kilowatt hours. In addition to picking healthy foods, people also have to know where those foods fit into balanced diet—something the new rating system doesn’t reflect. Plus, it disregards other important factors in a food’s nutritional value, such as whether it’s made with whole grains or what additional vitamins and nutrients it contains.

Image courtesy of Eurofruit / Flickr

What’s the News: Recurring nightmares can cast a pall over anyone’s waking life, and for soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder, they can also contribute to panic attacks, flashbacks, and violent behavior. Can soothing, dream-like experiences in a virtual world, entered immediately after a nightmare runs its course, tame those bad dreams? It seems like a kind of real-life inception, but it’s not as far fetched as you’d think: the Army is investigating just such a treatment, Dawn Lim at Wired’s Danger Room reports.

How the Heck:

• The idea builds on existing treatments used for PTSD, including image rehearsal therapy, in which therapists work with patients to identify triggers and devise ways to defuse them, and biofeedback, in which patients watch real-time data on their stress levels on a computer screen and observe how different relaxation techniques help bring the levels to normal.
• In the proposed treatment, a soldier waking up from a PTSD nightmare can put on 3D vision goggles and enter an animated world populated with comforting sights. The world will be one he’s built himself in visits to his clinic, where, using biofeedback to track his response, he has trained himself to relax when he sees these images.
• The world accessible through the goggles, army researchers hope, will help him calm down after a frightening dream, giving him a weapon against an otherwise overwhelming foe. Over time, this trained relaxation may help the nightmares lessen in intensity and frequency.

What’s the Context:

• Virtual reality treatments for PSTD have been used in the past, most notably ones in which the traumatic scene is recreated, in order to desensitize patients to it. But the process is itself stressful, and soldiers may drop out of the treatment.

The Future Holds: Experiments on the way to developing such a treatment, which the Army calls “power dreaming,” are planned at Naval Hospital Bremerton, in Washington. Last week, the Army awarded about half a million dollars to a contractor to aid in its development, and Danger Room reports that the research project should get under way next year.

[via Danger Room]

Image courtesy of whatleydude / flickr

He may be smiling, but it’s no laughing matter: he’s got the man-flu the game is on.

Either British women are, uh, kind of slow, or English guys are more persuasive than we realized. According to Reuters, a survey found that one in five British ladies believe that “man-flu” is real, a condition which leaves afflicted gentlemen laid up  on the couch watching sports. If I had known this could work, I would have caught this fictional bug long ago. This silly survey of 2,000 British adults found that many believed in a surprising amount of myths and old wive’s tales—although perhaps the “man-flu” would be better describes as an “old husband’s tale.”

The survey also found that almost half of the people agreed that men exaggerate their symptoms to get attention. Apparently, though, this doesn’t apply to imaginary diseases, in which they prefer to bask in the curative radiation of sports television.

One in 10 Brits supposedly believe that eating more carrots can improve your night vision. This myth allegedly comes from World War II British propaganda that said as much to explain the increased numbers of German fighters being shot down. The borderline-plausible explanation was meant to prevent the Nazis from finding out about their new radar technology, which was the real secret to the British successes.

According to “study leader” Mike Smith, a “large majority” of the population also believes that your eyes can become square-shaped from watching too much television. Really, English people? I’m going to guess that most Brits don’t actually believe this, since that’s not the only eyebrow-raising tidbit. Apparently the survey was “specially commissioned to mark the release of Hollywood thriller ‘Contagion.’” Multiple searches for more about Mike Smith or the survey turned up nothing, nor did a Twitter message or an email to the Reuters editor.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t have fun with this story, or slide a little science your way while I’m at it. The most common misconception, prescribed to by 37 percent of the population, is that we lose most heat through our heads. While that isn’t true, it isn’t that far off. According to University of Thessaly researcher Andreas Flouris (interviewed for an unrelated story several months ago), people in the cold lose about one-third of their body heat through the head. And covering up any body part is not equally as effective as covering the head, as the Reuters story incorrectly states. Blood flow to extremities becomes limited during cold exposure via vasoconstriction, in order to keep the vital organs and brain warm. Obviously blood flow to the head/brain cannot be limited, since it, uh, is kind of important. Come on, Reuters. Use your head!

But maybe I’m just taking this too seriously. As one of the Reuters commenters pointed out, 50 percent of people do have below average intelligence.

[Via Reuters]

Image: Furryscaly / Flickr

We’re getting close to the publication of Science Ink (official date, November 1), and some very fun things are approaching. The wonderful National Public Radio show Studio 360, hosted by Kurt Anderson, decided to talk to some of the scientists featured in the book–about their science, about their tattoos, and about the nature of openness. [...]

Some men just want to watch the world burn. Count me as one of them, at least when it comes to this video from NASA showing fires taking place the world over. Seventy percent of the world’s blazes take place in Africa—apparently making it the “fire continent,” according to the  narrator. Perhaps surprisingly, especially given recent wildfires in the American West and Southwest, only 2 percent of the globes conflagrations take place in North America. NASA used two satellites, Terra and Aqua, to visualize patterns of vegetation, snow/ice cover, and fires worldwide from July 2002 to July 2011.

[Via NASA]

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been participating in a science blogger challenge with Donors Choose, to raise as much money as we can to go to classrooms that need science equipment.

The challenge ends Saturday at midnight Eastern US time. I just got a note from the folks at Donors Choose saying that from now until then, every dollar donated will be matched by their Board of Directors! This is a great chance to double the amount of money given to children who need to learn science in school. Once all the donations are in, the folks at Donors Choose will take the total amount and divide it by the number of people who donated. You will then receive a gift code via email that will allow you to give that amount to the classroom of your choice. So if the total is $15,000, and 150 people donated, then everyone gets a $100 gift code to donate, no matter how much you personally gave.

If you want more info you can read my original post about the challenge, or just go to the Donors Choose page I’ve set up.

The sidebar of my blog (over on the right) has a widget that says how much we’ve raised here at Bad Astronomy so far (nearly $4000 as I write this, much more than last year [UPDATE (18:30 Mountain time) Holy mackerel! Since I posted this, we're over $5k! Thanks everyone!]). To everyone who has donated and to everyone who will: my very large thanks. And I’m an astronomer, so "very large" to me is vast indeed. And for the kids who get to benefit from it, it’s even bigger.

My inaugural column for Discover discussed the lighting-rod topic of the inflationary multiverse. But there’s only so much you can cover in 1500 words, and there are a number of foundational issues regarding inflation that are keeping cosmologists up at night these days. We have a guest post or two coming up that will highlight some of these issues, so I thought it would be useful to lay a little groundwork. (Post title paraphrased from Andrei Linde.)

This summer I helped organize a conference at the Perimeter Institute on Challenges for Early Universe Cosmology. The talks are online here — have a look, there are a number of really good ones, by the established giants of the field as well as by hungry young up-and-comers. There was also one by me, which starts out okay but got a little rushed at the end.

What kinds of challenges for early universe cosmology are we talking about? Paul Steinhardt pointed out an interesting sociological fact: twenty years ago, you had a coterie of theoretical early-universe cosmologists who had come from a particle/field-theory background, almost all of whom thought that the inflationary universe scenario was the right answer to our problems. (For an intro to inflation, see this paper by Alan Guth, or lecture 5 here.) Meanwhile, you had a bunch of working observational astrophysicists, who didn’t see any evidence for a flat universe (as inflation predicts) and weren’t sure there were any other observational predictions, and were consequently extremely skeptical. Nowadays, on the other hand, cosmologists who work closely with data (collecting it or analyzing it) tend to take for granted that inflation is right, and talk about constraining its parameters to ever-higher precision. Among the more abstract theorists, however, doubt has begun to creep in. Inflation, for all its virtues, has some skeletons in the closet. Either we have to exterminate the skeletons, or get a new closet.

Inflation is a simple idea: imagine that the universe begins in a tiny patch of space dominated by the potential energy of some scalar field, a kind of super-dense dark energy. This causes that patch to expand at a terrifically accelerated rate, smoothing out the density and diluting away any unwanted relics. Eventually the scalar field decays into ordinary matter and radiation, reheating the universe into a conventional Big Bang state, after which things proceed as normal.

Note that the entire point of inflation is to make the initial conditions of our observable universe seem more “natural.” Inflation is a process, not a law of nature. If you don’t care about naturalness, and are willing to say “things just happened that way,” there is absolutely no reason to ever think about inflation. So the success or failure of inflation as a scenario depends on how natural it really is.

This raises a problem, as Roger Penrose has been arguing for years, with people like me occasionally backing him up. Although inflation does seem to create a universe like ours, it needs to start in a very particular kind of state. If the laws of physics are “unitary” (reversible, preserving information over time), then the number of states that would begin to inflate is actually much smaller than the number of states that just look like the hot Big Bang in the first place. So inflation seems to replace a fine-tuning of initial conditions with an even greater fine-tuning.

One possible response to this is to admit that inflation by itself is not the final answer, and we need a theory of why inflation started. Here, it is crucial to note that in conventional non-inflationary cosmology, our current observable universe was about a centimeter across at the Planck time. That’s a huge size by particle physics standards. In inflation, by contrast, the whole universe could have fit into a Planck volume, 10^-33 centimeters across, much tinier indeed. So for some people (like me), the benefit of inflation isn’t that it’s more “natural,” it’s that it presents an easier target for a true theory of initial conditions, even if we don’t have such a theory yet.

But there’s another possible response, which is to appeal to eternal inflation. The point here is that most — “essentially all” — models of inflation lead to the prediction that inflation never completely ends. The vicissitudes of quantum fluctuations imply that even inflation doesn’t smooth out everything perfectly. As a result, inflation will end in some places, but in other places it keeps going. Where it keeps going, space expands at a fantastic rate. In some parts of that region, inflation eventually ends, but in others it keeps going. And that process continues forever, with some part of the universe perpetually undergoing inflation. That’s how the multiverse gets off the ground — we’re left with a chaotic jumble consisting of numerous “pocket universes” separated by regions of inflating spacetime.

It’s therefore possible to respond to the “inflation requires even more finely-tuned initial conditions than the ordinary Big Bang” critique by saying “sure, but once it starts, it creates an infinite number of smooth `universes,’ so as long as it starts at least once we win.” A small number (the probability of inflation starting somewhere) times infinity (the number of universes you make each time it starts) is still infinity.

But if eternal inflation offers solutions, it also presents problems, which might be worse than the original disease. These problems are at the heart of the worries that Steinhardt mentioned. Let me just mention three of them.

The one I fret about the most is the “unitarity” or “Liouville” problem. This is essentially Penrose’s original critique, updated to eternal inflation. Liouville’s Theorem in classical mechanics states that if you take a certain number of states and evolve them forward in time, you will end up with precisely the same number of states you started with; states aren’t created or destroyed. So imagine that there is some number of states which qualify as “initial conditions for inflation.” Then eternal inflation says we can evolve them forward and get a collection of universes that grows with time. The problem is that, as this collection grows, there is an increasing number of states that look identical to them, but which didn’t begin with a single tiny inflating patch at all. (Just like an ice cube in a glass of water will evolve to a glass of cooler water, but most glasses of cool water didn’t start with an ice cube in them.) So while it might be true that you can generate an infinite number of universes, at the same time the fraction of such states that actually began in a single inflating patch goes to zero just as quickly. It is far from clear that this picture actually increases the probability that a universe like ours started from inflation.

There is an obvious way out of this challenge, which is to say that all of these “numbers of states” are simply infinite, and this purported calculation just divides infinity by infinity and gets nonsense. And that’s very plausibly true! But if you reject the argument that universes beginning with inflation are an infinitesimally small fraction of all the universes, you are not allowed to accept the argument that there’s some small probability inflation starts and once it does it makes an infinite number of universes. All you can really do is say “we can’t calculate anything.” Which is fine, but we are left without a firm reason for believing that inflation actually solves the naturalness problems it was intended to solve.

A second problem, much more celebrated in the recent cosmological literature and closely related to the first, is known as the measure problem. (Not to be confused with the “measurement problem” in quantum mechanics, which is completely different.) The measure problem isn’t about the probability that inflation starts; it assumes so, and tries to calculate probabilities within the infinite ensemble of universes that eternal inflation creates. The problem is that we would like to calculate probabilities by simply counting the fraction of things that have a certain property — but here we aren’t sure what the “things” are that we should be counting, and even worse we don’t know how to calculate the fraction. Say there are an infinite number of universes in which George W. Bush became President in 2000, and also an infinite number in which Al Gore became President in 2000. To calculate the fraction N(Bush)/N(Gore), we need to have a measure — a way of taming those infinities. Usually this is done by “regularization.” We start with a small piece of universe where all the numbers are finite, calculate the fraction, and then let our piece get bigger, and calculate the limit that our fraction approaches. The problem is that the answer seems to depend very sensitively on how we do that procedure, and we don’t really have any justification at all for preferring one procedure over another. Therefore, in the context of eternal inflation, it’s very hard to predict anything at all.

This quick summary is somewhat unfair, as a number of smart people have tried very hard to propose well-defined measures and use them to calculate within eternal inflation. It may be that one of these measures is simply correct, and there’s actually no problem. Or it may be that the measure problem is a hint that eternal inflation just isn’t on the right track.

The final problem is what we might call the holography/complementarity problem. As I explained a while ago, thinking about black hole entropy has led physicists to propose something called “horizon complementarity” — the idea that one observer can’t sensibly talk about things that are happening outside their horizon. When applied to cosmology, this means we should think locally: talk about one or another pocket universe, but not all of them at the same time. In a very real sense, the implication of complementarity is that things outside our horizon aren’t actually real — all that exists, from our point of view, are degrees of freedom inside the horizon, and on the horizon itself.

If something like that is remotely true, the conventional story of eternal inflation is dramatically off track. There isn’t really an infinite ensemble of pocket universes — or at least, not from the point of view of any single observer, which is all that matters. This helps with the measure problem, obviously, since we don’t have to take fractions over infinitely big ensembles. But one would be right to worry that it brings us back to where we started, wondering why inflation really helps us solve naturalness problems at all.

Personally I suspect (i.e. would happily bet at even money, if there were some way to actually settle the bet) that inflation will turn out to be “right,” in the sense that it will be an ingredient in the final story. But these concerns should help drive home how far away we are from actually telling that story in a complete and compelling way. That should hardly come as a surprise, given the remoteness from our view of the events we’re trying to describe. But the combination of logical consistency and known physics is extremely powerful, and I think there’s a good chance that we’re making legitimate progress toward understanding the origin of the universe.

Nematode worms live longer if their grandparents had particular genes.
But they don’t need to receive the genes themselves to feel the effects.

What’s the News: Scientists have discovered that worms who’ve been given mutated genes that let them live longer pass on their longevity to their descendants—even when the descendants don’t receive the genes. How does it work?

How the Heck:

• The team had previously found that disabling a set of three proteins, called the H3K4me3 complex, would cause worms to live longer—usually for about 27 days rather than 20 days, an increase of 35%.
• This complex manages the packing of DNA, which is important in the expression of genes. (If DNA is loosely packed, it’s easy for the cell’s machinery to read it and make the proteins the genetic code specifies. But if DNA is tightly packed, it won’t be read out.) When the complex is disabled, some genes are trapped in the tightly packed state. The team thinks that genes related to aging are among those taken out of commission.
• When worms carrying a malfunctioning complex bred with normal worms, their descendants had the normal, functioning DNA-packing proteins, yet somehow lived as long as their long-lived parents. The trend continued for three generations before petering out.
• Looking closer, the team found a possible reason for why long life continued. The changes that complex makes to the packing of DNA are usually reset with each generation, but for some reason, they hadn’t been wiped in the descendants—possibly because the protein that performs that service was itself trapped.

What’s the Context:

• These alterations in DNA packing that get passed down fall under the heading of epigenetics—heritable changes that occur not because of actual changes in the DNA, but because of some other factor that changes how genes are expressed.
• This isn’t the first time biologists have found that parents can pass on epigenetically altered traits to their offspring—others include fur color in mice and flower symmetry in plants—but this is the first time they’ve seen it for a complex trait like longevity.

The Future Holds:

• The fact that the change peters out after a few generations leads researchers to question whether such a trait would come into play in natural selection, long term. But one could imagine that certain traits, even if short-lived, would be very useful in dealing with stressors likely to span several generations, like drought and famine.
• Could this kind of effect on longevity occur in humans? We do have that same complex; it’s possible that defects in it could be related to longevity in us as well. As to whether the epigenetic changes in your grandparents can affect you, that’s a question ripe for future research. But here’s some food for thought: We already know that a pregnant woman’s environment can affect her children’s epigenetic traits—read up on the Dutch Hunger Winter study here.

Reference: Greer et al. Transgenerational epigenetic inheritance of longevity in Caenorhabditis elegans. Nature (2011) doi:10.1038/nature10572

Image courtesy of Goldstein lab / Wikimedia Commons

Before I say anything else in this post, I will start off right away and say that the results I’ll be discussing here have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. Because of that, the results need to be taken with a grain of salt. However, due to the nature of the study’s foundation and funders, which I will get to in a moment, the results are most definitely news-worthy.

The study is called the Berkeley Earth Project (BEP), and what they found was stated simply and beautifully in their own two-page summary:

Global warming is real, according to a major study released today. Despite issues raised by climate change skeptics, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study finds reliable evidence of a rise in the average world land temperature of approximately 1° C since the mid-1950s.

Wow. Of course, I would change one word in there. Can you guess what it is? The answer is below.

Big deal

Now, we’ve known this for a while. Study after study has shown that the Earth is warming, that the past decade has been the hottest on record, and that the rise in temperature has been about a degree. So what’s the big deal here?

The big deal is that this was an independent team of researchers who conducted the study (including, interestingly, Saul Perlmutter, who just won the Nobel Prize for co-discovering the acceleration of the expansion of the Universe, and knows a thing or two about data analysis), and whose funding was overwhelmingly donated by the private sector and not from any government. The study was initiated by Berkeley physicist Richard Muller, who was concerned that government researchers weren’t being as open as possible with their methods. He gathered together a team of scientists, and they used data from 39,000 temperature stations around the world, far more than the previous studies. They have put all their data and methodology online for anyone to investigate.

And if you’re wondering who these private groups were, they’re listed on the BEP website. The largest single donor? Why, it’s the Koch brothers, über-conservatives who have pumped millions of dollars into climate change denial. I find that… interesting.

Anyone claiming that climate scientists are alarmists only trying to protect their grant money will have to think about that one for a while.

You’re getting warmer

So what did the scientists working on BEP find? Well, first, and perhaps most importantly, their results agree in large part with what has been found by other groups: temperatures over land are rising, and that rise took a sudden leap up a few decades ago:

This plot shows what’s called the temperature anomaly, the change in temperature from some average value. In this case, they took the values from 1950 to 1980 and used that as a baseline — this is pretty standard practice in climate studies. Four different studies are plotted, including the BEP results in black. As you can see, all of them show a big rise, and the BEP results agree closely with (or are even greater than) the results from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Scientists at NASA/GISS were attacked heavily during "climategate" for (at best) being misleading with their results. As you can see, that turned out to be wrong all along. As we knew all along, in fact.

There were other very interesting results as well. For example, a favorite target for attack were the temperature readings from many of the monitoring stations around the country; the claim was that they suffer from urban heat effect, that is, they are near cities and therefore would be anomalously warm. The new study shows this is not a factor in the average land temperature rise; while some stations do appear warmer from this, they represent a tiny fraction of the total number of monitoring stations.

Not only that, stations that were ranked as "poor" in a survey done by Anthony Watts wound up showing the same warming results as those he marked as "OK". What BEP found is that if you take enough data, the warming trends show up even if an individual result may be low quality.

The BEP reports are fascinating reading, and I whole-heartedly suggest you take a look. That’s why they’ve been made public. Again, I’ll note that these have not been peer-reviewed, so it’ll be interesting to see the reactions to the public data and methods. But given the scientists involved, and Muller’s own admission that he didn’t like the way the previous science had been done and so he wanted to go over all this himself, I suspect this report will withstand the scrutiny.

Facing the facts

In the report summary, BEP Executive Director Elizabeth Muller says she hopes the results "will help cool the debate over global warming by addressing many of the valid concerns of the skeptics in a clear and rigorous way."

I strongly suspect they won’t. I do like her use of the word "valid"; so many of the attacks we’ve seen have not been so. There have been legitimate doubts raised scientifically, of course, about various factors that go into the results we’ve seen over the years. It looks like BEP now has those covered.

Still, her thoughts are mirrored by Bob Ward, the policy and communications director for the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment, who said:

So-called ‘sceptics’ should now drop their thoroughly discredited claims that the increase in global average temperature could be attributed to the impact of growing cities. [...] It is now time for an apology from all those, including US presidential hopeful Rick Perry, who have made false claims that the evidence for global warming has been faked by climate scientists.

This, of course, will never happen.

That’s because of that one word I said I would change in the report’s summary paragraph. That word is "skeptic", and in far too many cases it should be changed to "denier".

That includes a lot of other government officials who seem to overwhelmingly have an "R" listed as their party affiliation.

Eternal vigilance

I know this new study won’t sway climate change deniers. It can’t, because nothing can. The reason for that is simple: This isn’t about the science. If it were, the conversation would have been over years ago. Instead, it goes on, because it’s about ideology, not facts.

It’s nice to see the previous scientific studies bolstered by this independent one, and there’s more good news in that the American public now seems to understand that global warming is indeed real. And it was nice to see BEP lead scientist Richard Muller saying, at the bottom of a BBC article on this, that these results support the idea that it’s humans causing the rise in temperatures.

But, as I have been saying all along, there will never be a "crossing the finish line" moment. Whether it’s the Moon Hoax, or vaccines causing autism, or psychics talking to the dead, or climate change denial, this will be a continuing fight. It’s tiring, I know. But we should remember the words of Andrew Jackson:

"… Eternal vigilance by the people is the price of liberty, and that you must pay the price if you wish to secure the blessing."

Tip o’ the thermometer to Doug Troy, and the many others who alerted me to this, and Maurice Clark for the link to the survey about American attitudes toward global warming.

Alcohol selectively impairs negative self-relevant associations in young drinkers.

“The stress-dampening effects of alcohol have been attributed to ‘appraisal disruption’- decreased ability of stimuli to evoke threatening associations in memory. Appraisal disruption could apply to oneself as well as situational stimuli. This question was investigated in undergraduate drinkers (n = 90/Gender) with low or high anxiety sensitivity (AS; n = 90/AS Group), a trait linked with hyper-vigilance to threat. Subjects received alcohol (0.7 g/kg males; 0.63 g/kg females), placebo or soft drink and performed a speech about their appearance. Sequence of drink administration and speech advisory (threat) was manipulated between subjects: Threat before Drink, Threat after Drink, No-Threat Control. The Implicit Association Test measured self-relevant associations based upon time to classify positive and negative attribute words (e.g. Cute, Ugly) paired with self-relevant or non-self-relevant object words (e.g. Me, Them). Alcohol selectively slowed negative self-relevant decisions, regardless of other factors. Relative fluency of negative versus positive decisions (D) correlated inversely with state anxiety and systolic blood pressure immediately before speech performance, and correlated directly with severity of alcohol problems. These findings are consistent with the Appraisal Disruption hypothesis. Preferential impairment of negative self-relevant associations may decrease perceived vulnerability under alcohol and increase risk for alcohol problems in young drinkers.”

Photo: flickr/TheeErin

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Dear Lord, please give me a drink.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: The Big, the Bad, and the Boozed-Up.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: What? I can’t get drunk from soaking my feet in vodka?

WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

So, it’s an annual tradition here at Cosmic Variance to participate in the Science Blogger’s Donor’s Choose event.

Donor’s Choose is an awesome non-profit that allows public school teachers to post their needs for educational materials for their students, and allows donors to choose which projects get funding. This year, like the last three years, science bloggers are participating

A list of projects we suggest is here:

Cosmic Variance Donor’s Choose Page

I’ve chosen a list of physics and astronomy focused projects in low income school districts –
chip in a few bucks (you can donate as little as $5 or as much as you like!), and make a difference inspiring the next generation of scientists!

Last year 26 of you donated more than $3500, which directly impacted 1,485 students (super impressively, the year before we managed to raise $12,000!) This is our 4th year of participating, but I was woefully slow putting this post up and getting the ball starting. I hope you dear readers will pick up the slack anyways, and give generously to these awesome projects. Luckily, between now and midnight on Saturday, there is a special bonus: the Donor’s Choose Board of Directors is matching all donations with a gift card that you can use to support any project of your choosing, so your money will go double in the next few days. Let’s see if we can beat last year’s numbers in the next 3 days, and help some students get the tools they need to learn science!

In July 2011, at the JREF’s TAM 9 meeting in Las Vegas, I moderated a panel discussing the future of space exploration. On that panel were some familiar faces: Bill Nye (the Science Guy), astronomers Neil Tyson and Pamela Gay, and theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss. All of us have, ah, some experience talking to the public about matters spacey, so I knew it would be a fun panel to moderate.

I had no idea. The video of the panel has been made available by the JREF, so you can see it for yourself! I’ve embedded it below. It’s an hour long, but I think you’ll find it absolutely worth your time to watch all the way through. A lot of people came up to me afterwards and said it was the best panel at the meeting, and one of the best we’ve ever had at TAM! As a participant, modesty forbids me from saying more, but then, who am I to disagree?

It was a rollicking discussion, and very interesting. Neil was in rare form, and I think my favorite moment was when Pamela was making a point, and Neil jumped in to give an opinion… and Pamela held up a finger and "shusshed" him! It was extremely funny, especially when Neil got this, "OK, fine, you got me" expression on his face. After the panel, Neil was signing books, and I got Pamela to sit down next to him and recreate the moment:

Someone else was able to capture it during the actual moment on the panel, too.

I do want to comment on one thing. At about 44:00 minutes in, during a discussion about dark energy and the James Webb Space Telescope — which in July was already in trouble — I said that JWST would help characterize dark energy, allowing us understand it better. Lawrence then said that this wasn’t true, and that we need to be careful about overhyping the capability of JWST. I was about to reply to him when Neil jumped in, and I decided to let Lawrence’s comment go; as moderator I didn’t want to derail the flow of the conversation, and at the time thought it better to let things move on.

However, I disagree somewhat with what Lawrence said. Extremely distant supernovae are what were used to discover dark energy in the first place, and JWST will be able to to get better observations of them than we could previously. I think part of Lawrence’s point was that our observations have already nailed down some of the characteristics of dark energy pretty well, and the way JWST will work won’t add much to what we already know. I suspect that’s mostly true, but then when it comes to really distant supernovae our observations get a bit shaky. The better we nail them down, the more we can say about them, and JWST would be able provide cleaner data from those distant exploding stars.

I did say that JWST "would go a long way" in helping us understand dark energy, and looking back on that I probably should’ve phrased this as it simply being able to help us. Although it is a very powerful observatory, JWST isn’t optimized for that sort of thing, so it probably wouldn’t be able to do as much to increase our knowledge of dark energy as much as, say, Hubble did. I would add though that whenever we increase our capability to observe in a new way, we learn new things. This point was made both by Lawrence and Neil a moment later; but we should be careful before the fact not to rely on a telescope showing us something we didn’t know. It’ll happen in some ways but not others, and we can’t know until we build the thing and find out! So in that way, I agree with both Neil and Lawrence.

[UPDATE: Hmm, perhaps I wrote too soon. Adam Riess, who just won the Nobel prize for his part in the discovery of dark energy, gave a talk recently where discusses how JWST can help characterize dark energy. The important part starts about 29 minutes in, and is a bit technical. Thanks to Jason Kalirai for the tip!]

I actually enjoyed this discussion for another reason: I like it when people can disagree on big issues and do so intelligently and with evidence to back up their claims. There were some points being made by panelists that I agreed with, and some I didn’t. But I found myself thinking about space exploration in different ways, seeing other perspectives. That always gives insight into an issue, and whether you ultimately agree with the point or not, you’ll wind up thinking better about it.

I’d argue that’s one of the major benefits of skepticism.

Image credits: me; Jamie Bernstein.

To round off my brief stint at the Guardian, here’s a piece about a mastodon specimen with what looks like a spear-tip stuck in its rib. This specimen, the so-called “Manis mastodon” has been a source of controversy for several decades. Is that fragment man-made or simply one of the animal’s own bone splinters? Does it imply that humans hunted large mammals hundreds of years earlier than expected, or not?

Having re-analysed the rib in an “industrial-grade” CT scanner, Michael Waters thinks it’s definitely a man-made projectile. He even extracted DNA from the rib and the fragment and found that both belonged to mastodons. So these early hunters were killing mastodons and turning them into weapons for killing more mastodons. How poetically gittish.

Anyway, read the piece for more about why this matters. In the meantime, I want to draw your attention to this delicious tete-a-tete at the end between Waters and Gary Haynes, who doesn’t buy the interpretation. Note, in particular, the very last bit from Waters, which made my jaw drop.

But despite Waters’ efforts, the fragment in the Manis mastodon’s rib is still stoking debate. “It’s not definitely proven that it is a projectile point,” says Prof Gary Haynes from the University of Nevada, Reno. “Elephants today push each other all the time and break each other’s rib so it could be a bone splinter that the animal just rolled on.”

Waters does not credit this alternative hypothesis. “Ludicrous what-if stories are being made up to explain something people don’t want to believe,” he says. “We took the specimen to a bone pathologist, showed him the CT scans, and asked if there was any way it could be an internal injury. He said absolutely not.”

Waters adds, “If you break a bone, a splinter isn’t going to magically rotate its way through a muscle and inject itself into your rib bone. Something needed to come at this thing with a lot of force to get it into the rib.”

The spear-thrower must have had a powerful arm, for the fragment would have punctured through hair, skin and up to 30 centimetres of mastodon muscle. “A bone projectile point is a really lethal weapon,” says Waters. “It’s sharpened to a needle point and little greater than the diameter of a pencil. It’s like a bullet. It’s designed to get deep into the elephant and hit a vital organ.” He adds, “I’ve seen these thrown through old cars.”