Folks, the Open Laboratory – a yearly anthology of the best of the science blogging world – is closing for submissions on Monday. If any of you wanted to nominate any of my posts for the anthology, I’d be very grateful. Here’s the submission form, and the full list of posts to jog your memory.

Via Universe Today (and Fraser Cain’s Google+ stream) I saw this astonishing video of the aurora borealis as seen from Finnish Lapland.

[Make sure you set it to HD and make it full screen.]

Wow! That’s amazing. Did you catch the Andromeda Galaxy making an appearance at 1:25 in, at the middle left of the screen? Maybe you missed it because of THE GINORMOUSLY BRIGHT AND GORGEOUS AURORAE.

Maybe.

As a travel ad, this works pretty well (it was made by Flatlight Films, a Finnish company). Living in Boulder, I’m used to the cold, but we always seem to just miss being far enough north to see the light show. And we still have a couple of years before we even reach the peak of solar activity, so there’ll be plenty of chances to catch more.

[P.S. If you're on G+, follow Fraser. He's good people.]

Dienekes has already commented on this, but I thought I would go over Ewen Callaway’s piece, Aboriginal genome analysis comes to grips with ethics. It’s not surprising that this was written. Even if you take Keith Windschuttle’s position when it comes to Aboriginal-European contact you can’t escape the reality that Aboriginals did not fare so well in the interaction. In fact, they don’t fare so well today in Australia. The life expectancy gap between Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals in Australia is most conservatively estimated at 10 years (do remember that the majority of indigenous Australians are mixed-race). In the racialized physical anthropology of the early 20th amongst the colored peoples Aboriginals occupied the lowest circle of hell. Because of the robustness of their physiques it was argued they were the most primitive exemplar of humanity. Perhaps relic H. erectus.

Here are some interesting sections of Callaway’s article:

…Researchers who work with Aboriginal Australians are now expected to obtain consent not only from the individuals concerned, but also from local and sometimes state-wide groups representing Aboriginal communities across Australia.

A Danish bioethical review board did not believe it was necessary to review the project because it viewed the hair as an archaeological specimen and not a biological one, Willerslev says. However, after his team sequenced the genome, an Australian colleague put Willerslev in touch with the Goldfields Land and Sea Council, a body based in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, that represents the 5,000 or so Aboriginal Australians living in the region where Haddon collected the hair sample. In June, Willerslev flew to the region to describe his project to the organization’s board and to seek its approval. He says that if the board had rejected his proposal, he would have ended the project and left the genome unpublished.

Stepping away from the specific issue of Australian Aboriginals, the case of the “ownership” of genetic information is peculiar. As a “thought experiment” I have addressed the issue of whether identical twins have “rights” to each others’ genomes. For example, if one identical twin put their genotype into the public domain, would the other be within their rights to object? For that matter, people who put their genotypes in the public domain are partially exposing their whole families. Do they have to go ask for permission? Obviously I don’t think so. I didn’t ask my siblings or my parents.

So the issue of group veto or endorsement of the genotyping of individuals, living or deceased, is not a general consideration. It’s a matter of politics and sociology in very specific circumstances. In particular those groups which are labelled “indigenous” in Western societies, and so given particular distinction as the “first people.” Ultimately it reduces down to power politics. Consider for example what the Cherokee nation recently did to its black members. Just because people are indigenous, or there is a tribal council instead of a town council, does not exempt them from the common venalities of political leadership classes. Though there has been a history of “body snatching” by Western scholars in the Americas and Australia, the current respect and considerations given ancient materials which might have DNA has more to do with the possibility that those results might refute the standing of a given group as autochthons. As a practical matter DNA results probably won’t change a thing, but there is always a risk that it might introduce an element of doubt as to the legitimacy of the privileges and rights conferred on those who trace their lineages from the first settlers of a given locale.

More broadly, there is a whole world of “activists” who are themselves not indigenous who have a vested interest in ginning up controversy, and demanding that all the ethical issues be examined from every which angle (they are of course the best judges as to which issues must be tackled before science proceeds). I’ve addressed this before. In short they’re basically academic demagogues. What I’m talking about was on display during the Darkness in El Dorado controversy. Unlike indigenous people themselves these activists will always move on to a new cause to stoke the fires of their righteous indignation. In the 1990s this set was outraged over the Human Genome Diversity Project, but today that enterprise is a great success accessible to all. Did disaster and darkness ensue? Of course not. And the original critics are now fixated upon more profitable targets.

Going back to the issue about Aboriginal genetics, and the genetics of indigenous people more generally, it is in the medium run irrelevant what institutions decide. By institutions, I mean tribes, governments, NGOs, and even academics. If a scientific group avoids human genetic research for political reasons, the probability is that another group at some point in the future will take the project. And when it comes to human genetics the typing and analysis is cheap and easy enough that motivated amateurs can do it themselves. There are certainly enough white Australians with some Aboriginal ancestry that a synthetic genome could probably be reconstructed just from them at some point. Perhaps less ethically if someone wanted to they could probably obtain genetic material by surreptitious means.

Which brings me back to the question of Australian Aboriginals. One of the primary fears, implicit or explicit, about doing biological work on this group is that scientists might report results which would have a chance of dehumanizing them. Dehumanization, broadly construed, is not a problem necessarily. As I’ve noted people found that Europeans had a few percent Neandertal quite funny last year because Europeans haven’t been victims of dehumanization for the past few centuries (read the accounts of Muslim or Chinese observers from before 1800, and you do see clear dehumanization of Europeans in their perceptions). In contrast, Australian Aboriginals have been dehumanized. So how does the result that they might be ~5% admixed with a very distant human lineage change our perceptions? I don’t think it changes much at all. The problem is that people, wrongly I believe, perceive that political and social views have some deep metaphysical basis when they often do not. Scientific racism in the 19th and early 20th century did leverage science, but the racialized sentiments ascendant in the age of white supremacy were first and foremost about values. In the 16th century the partisans of the views of Bartolomé de las Casas succeeded in convincing the Iberian monarchies that the indigenous people of the New World deserved protection from predatory European settlers. But the reality is that the de jure status was flagrantly violated for centuries de facto. In the ideal the Amerindians of the New World were granted the protection of the Spanish monarchy as Christians, but in practice they were treated in a beastly manner by the American Spaniards and their Creole descendants.

Quibbling about the rights and responsibilities of scientists in a given field is not always unimportant or futile. But in the area where genetics and ethnology intersect too often people overestimate the power of genetics to totally reshape how we view ourselves, and how we view other human beings. The reality is that we are what we are, before and after we find out what we are in a more scientific and abstruse fashion. How we behave toward other human beings is less a matter of good science and more good character.

[Note: I'm anticipating some, um, interesting comments to this post. So, before you leave one, please read this post on my political thinking, and this one on political posts in general.]

I write quite a bit about how rabidly antiscience the political right in the US has become. From the attacks on science by the Bush Administration (and Newt Gingrich before that) to the political litmus test of needing to denounce evolution and global warming if you’re a candidate, the Republican party has planted its flag firmly in the ground of nonsense. At the bottom of this article is a section called Related Posts that has links to just a handful of the copious examples of this outrageous behavior.

They have also become masters at spinning this, going on the attack against science they don’t like and using the media to sow doubt. One of the most aggravating of these tactics is the one of false equivalency. For example, in a post I might lambaste yet another Republican candidate saying creationism should be taught in schools, and someone in the comments will say, "Well, people on the left are antiscience as well!"

This is a common claim, but at best it’s a gross mischaracterization of what’s going on, and in reality it’s beside the point. Sure, some people on the left have issues (mostly anti-corporate or alt-med stuff like being against GMO, vaccines, and so on), but those are not the main planks of the left. And those issues are a drop in the bucket compared to what’s going on in the right. To say you think evolution might be true is political suicide if you’re a Republican candidate right now. It’s that simple, and that bad. I think that, like on the left, the majority of voters on the right are not antiscience, but if you look to the leaders in Congress, in State legislatures, and at the Presidential candidates, that’s all you see.

And that’s why you need to read an article by my friend Chris Mooney, "Unequivocal: Today’s Right is Overwhelmingly More Anti-Science Than Today’s Left". He lays out just how big this problem is, why the right has gone this way, and why they have solidarity among their candidates.

The chief reason the political right is anti-science is because it contains the Christian Right (and Tea Party, which is kind of the same thing). There is no force in American politics generating anywhere near so much unreality, in science or in other spheres, as this one. It is not just evolution, or the age of the Earth… When it comes to science, it is also anything having anything to do with abortion, reproductive health, and sexuality. Moreover, we are talking here about the willful advancement of dangerous falsehoods, and the clinging to them in the face of all evidence and refutation—because this is about unwavering certainty, and ultimately, about faith.

This is one of the most important political articles I’ve read in quite some time. Chris lays out the political reality of antireality in a stark way. The article is frustrating and infuriating, because it shows just how the right’s leaders have lost their grip on reality, and is a grim reminder of just how important the elections next year are.

To be clear: I am not saying that anyone who calls themself a Republican is antiscience. I am saying the leaders of the party and their mouthpieces are, and Chris does a good job of showing that this is now the mainstream thrust of the party. If you are a conservative person who is pro-science, it is up to you to talk to your leaders about this issue. The GOP used to be pro-science, but was hijacked by the antiscience fringe many years ago. I can talk about this all I want and try to raise awareness, but your voices must be heard. Speak up.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says at least 13 people have died as a result of a listeria outbreak linked to Colorado cantaloupes, making it the deadliest American case of food-borne illness in more than a decade, according to the Associated Press. The death toll could soon reach 16, health officials say, as investigators look into additional deaths in New Mexico, Kansas, and Wyoming. The CDC announced yesterday that 72 people in 18 states had been infected by several strains of Listeria monocytogenes. The bacterium has been traced to “Rocky Ford Cantaloupes” grown by Jensen Farms in Granada, Colo.

The specific source of the outbreak has not yet been identified, but the bacterium is widespread in soil and animal waste and is quite hardy, capable of growing even in refrigerated conditions. Listeria kills about 25 percent of those infected [PDF], making it the deadliest common food-borne illness—E. coli, second in this category, only kills less than one percent of those effected. That said, healthy adults are unlikely to become ill; listeria primarily affects people with compromised immune systems, the elderly, pregnant moms, and their unborn babies. If you are in one of these categories, it’s probably best to avoid muskmelon for a little while. Listeria has a long incubation period, sometimes up to four weeks, so expect the death toll to rise (since the recall was only issued two weeks ago).

Image: News21-usa / Flickr

What’s the news:  In a study published last week, researchers showed they could reconstruct video clips by watching viewers’ brain activity. The video of the study’s results, below, is pretty amazing, showing the original clips and their reconstructions side by side. How does it work, and does it mean mind-reading is on its way in?

How to Read Movies From the Brain, in 4 Easy Steps:

1) Build the Translator. The researchers first had three people watch hours of movie trailers, tracking bloodflow in their brains—which is linked to what the neurons are up to, as active neurons use more oxygen from the bloodstream—with an fMRI scan. (All three subjects were part of the research team; over the course of the study, they had to be in the scanner for a looong time.) The team focused on brain activity in a portion of each person’s visual cortex, compiling information about how 4,000 different spots in the the visual cortex responded to various simple features of a movie clip. “For each point in the brain we measured, we built a dictionary that told us what oriented lines and motions and textures in the original image actually caused brain activity,” says Jack Gallant, the UC Berkeley neuroscientist who led the study. “That dictionary allows us to translate between things that happen in the world and things that happen in each of the points of the brain we measure.”

2) Test the Translator. The study participants watched yet more video clips, and the team double checked that their dictionary—a statistics-based computer model—worked for the new clips, too.

3) Add More Words to the Dictionary. The researchers wanted a larger database of clips-to-brain-activity translation, so they collected 18 million seconds of video from randomly selected YouTube clips. They then ran the movies through the computer model, generating likely brain activation responses for each second of video.

4) Translate! Initially, the “dictionary” was an encoding model, translating from a movie clip into brain activity. From there, it was a theoretically simple—through practically laborious—endeavor to make a decoding model, based on Bayesian probability, to translate brain activity into a clip. (Think turning an English-French dictionary into a French-English one; you have all the information you need, but there’s a lot of reshuffling to do.) Each subject then watched a new set of second-long video clips they’d never before seen. The computer model selected the 100 clips (from that 18 million seconds of YouTube) that would produce brain activity most similar to the second-long clip the subject had just seen. It then averaged the clips together, hence the blurry quality of the videos. (You can see a video showing all three reconstructions, one made from the brain activity of each subject, here.) If the team had been after clarity, rather than proof of concept, they could’ve made the images at least somewhat crisper, Gallant says, by putting programming muscle into it. They could have set it up so that if 90 of the 100 most similar clips had faces, for instance, it would match up the eyes, nose, and mouth of each face before averaging the videos, leading to a clearer picture.

What’s the Context:

• This isn’t the first time researchers have looked inside the brain to see what someone else is seeing. A number of scientists, including Gallant, have been working on “neural decoding” (i.e., mind-reading) techniques like this one for over a decade. They’re slowly getting better at decoding what we’ve seen, advancing from distinguishing between types of images (face vs. landscape, for instance) to reconstructing still images to reconstructing moving video clips.
• Decoding what someone sees is different from decoding what they’re thinking. The researchers were just looking at low-level visual processing (what lines, textures, and movements people saw), not higher-level thought like what the clips reminded them of, whether they recognized the actors, or whether they wanted to see the movies they watched trailers for. Those are far more complicated questions to tease out, and can’t be tracked feature-by-feature as easily as visual processing.
• fMRI has a built-in time lag; the level of oxygen in the blood doesn’t change unti about 4 seconds after neuron activity, since blood flow is a slow process compared to neurons’ electrical firing. By building specific lag times into their model—not just what part of a clip an area responded to, but how long after the clip the response occurred—the researchers could track brain activity in much closer to real time.

The Future Holds: How Close Are We to Reading Images From Everyone’s Brain?

• Such brain-decoding technologies may ultimately be helpful for communicating with people who can’t otherwise communicate, due to locked-in syndrome or a similar condition. “I think that’s all possible in the future,” Gallant says, “but who knows when the future’s going to be, right?” Such advances could easily be decades away because of the complex, very specific nature of these models.
• The brain has between 200 and 500 of functional areas in total, Gallant says, about 75 of which are related to vision—and to translate what’s happening in a new area, you’d need a new dictionary. It’s not just a matter of the time and effort involved in making new models, either; we need to understand the brain better first. Scientists know a lot more about how basic visual processing works than higher-level functions like emotion or memory.

Reference: Shinji Nishimoto, An T. Vu, Thomas Naselaris, Yuval Benjamini, Bin Yu, and Jack L. Gallant. “Reconstructing Visual Experiences from Brain Activity Evoked by Natural Movies.”

This is pretty neat: an Apollo enthusiast who goes by the handle GoneToPlaid has created a video comparing the Apollo 11 footage of its descent to the Moon with images from Google Moon:

That’s very cool. You can see the same features in the Apollo 11 film footage and in the newer view from Google Moon, which uses images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter as well as Japan’s Kaguya mission. The lighting was different so sometimes it makes features hard to spot in both — direct sunlight changes shadows, and also creates a spotlight effect which can hide craters and such — but you can see how well everything lines up. GoneToPlaid provides a link to the KMZ files you can use for Google Moon to check this out for yourself as well.

This won’t convince people who think NASA faked the landings, of course, nor do I really care. What I do care about is how this brings home what the astronauts did all those decades ago. Going to the Moon was hard; it’s another world, with all the dangers and unknowns and difficult terrains that made it necessary to explore it before we went, and to do so once again in preparation for going back. Hopefully sometime soon.

Tip o’ the spacesuit visor to Scott Hall. Image credit: NASA.

The MESSENGER spacecraft, orbiting Mercury for nearly a year now, took this pretty nifty shot of the tiniest planet’s south polar region, showing deep, dark craters in the Goethe basin:

This region is about 300 km (180 miles) from the true south pole of the planet. On Earth that might be a cold spot, but on Mercury, cold spots are hard to come by.

… however, see how dark those craters are? Since they’re near the pole, the Sun never gets far above the horizon for them, and the crater floors are shrouded in perpetual darkness. That does make them cold! Well below the freezing point of water, it’s thought. Interestingly, radar observations of Mercury have indicated something in the crater floors is highly reflective, and water ice fits that bill. It’s not at all confirmed, but it’s entirely possible Mercury — a planet hot enough in the open Sun where zinc can exist as liquid lakes on the surface — might have frozen lakes of ice locked in crater bottoms near its poles!

While gazing idly at this picture, another thought popped into my head. Mercury is small, and has lower gravity than the Earth. The impact speed of an asteroid depends partly on the gravity of a planet, since the asteroid will accelerate as it falls to the surface. Earth has more gravity, so you might expect impact speeds to be higher here than on Mercury. The impact speed of an object falling to Earth owuld be 11 km/sec, but only 4.3 km/sec for Mercury.

However, that’s not the entire case. Remember, everything is in motion in our solar system. Mercury orbits nearer the Sun, so it moves a lot faster in its orbit than Earth does; about 48 km/sec as opposed to Earth’s 30 km/sec. So in reality the impact speeds of objects can be much higher on Mercury: 48 km/ sec + 4.3 km/sec = 52 km/sec, compared to 30 km/sec + 11 km/sec = 41 km/sec for Earth.

Moreover, the energy released on impact — which is what carves out the crater and causes widespread devastation — increases as the impact velocity squared. So for a given size/mass of an impactor, hitting Mercury yields an explosion 1.6 times greater than it would on Earth!

That’s on average; the direction the asteroid comes in makes a difference (it might "catch up" with a planet, making a slower impact speed, versus coming in from head on and doubling (or more) the speed), but still, it’s interesting to me. I guess real estate agents are right: it’s not the size that matters, it’s the location.

Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

When rats were injected with a chemical similar to marijuana’s main ingredient, THC, shortly after a undergoing a severely stressful event, they showed a significant reduction in symptoms like those seen in people with post-traumatic stress disorder. The study tested a synthetic cannabinoid called WIN 55,212-2, which was injected directly into the animals’ amygdala, a brain region involved in the regulation of emotions like fear and anxiety. Timing was important. Rats given the drug two and 24 hours after the stressor—being forced to swim for 15 minutes—appeared less “traumatized” when tested a week later, compared with those given the drug 48 hours later or given no drug at all. While the study adds to the already large and complex pile of evidence that the cannabinoid system has a vital role in regulating emotions like anxiety, it’s far from proving that cannabinoids will be useful for treating PTSD in humans.

Unfortunately, virtually every story covering the study got it wrong by suggesting just that (e.g., “Marijuana blocks post-traumatic stress?” “Marijuana blocks PTSD symptoms in rats.”). And many, if not most stories, confused the synthetic THC mimic studied with THC or marijuana itself. While WIN 55,212-2 binds to the same receptor as THC, CB1, it has a very different structure. This study adds to some previous ones suggesting that cannabinoids may help treat PTSD (as could other controlled substances like ecstasy, or MDMA), but there are still a lot of hurdles to cross before concluding this will lead to effective PTSD treatment.

Reference: Eti Ganon-Elazar, Irit Akirav. Cannabinoids Prevent the Development of Behavioral and Endocrine Alterations in a Rat Model of Intense Stress. Neuropsychopharmacology, 2011; DOI: 10.1038/npp.2011.204

Image: cheesechoker / Flickr

The post below is probably going to elicit a lot of comments. Some of it will repeat chestnuts of historical wisdom which illustrate the ignorance of the typical modern. For example, it is false that the lower classes always have more children than the upper classes. In general it is the reverse, because the lower orders are more squeezed on the Malthusian margins (this explains how downward social mobility worked in early modern Europe; the less successful children of the elites drifted down to replace the masses who were not replacing themselves).

In any case, Angela M. Cable asks:

Has it not occurred to anyone that perhaps the more educated a woman is, the less she *wants* children. How do we know these women are not child-free as opposed to child-less?

If I was Angela I would go look for the literature on this. I’m not one to ask questions imperiously without taking the time out to actually do some legwork. But I’m a peculiar beast. Let’s satisfy Ms. Cable’s curiosity, which probably remains unsated by any compulsion to find out the truth of the matter. The General Social Survey has a variable which asks the ideal number of children an individual would like to have. Let’s replicate the analysis with that variable, and look at the difference between ideal and realized number of children.

Some of the difference has to be the fact that more educated women have children later. So they’ll get closer to their “goal.” But I don’t think all of it is due to that. Interestingly the variation in the ideal number of children is smaller than that of the realized number of children. That suggests that the gap between educated and uneducated isn’t simply an ideological preference chasm.

Update: The Slate piece is not accurately representing the original research:

Lerner’s article is spreading misinformation. What the Guttmacher Institute study shows is not that the educated are having fewer children vis a vis the uneducated, but that there is a growing gap in family planning: the children of the uneducated are increasingly unplanned.

Knocked Up and Knocked Down: Why America’s widening fertility class divide is a problem:

You hear about the “haves” versus the “have-nots,” but not so much about the “have-one-or-nones” versus the “have-a-fews.” This, though, is how you might characterize the stark and growing fertility class divide in the United States. Two new studies bring the contrasting reproductive profiles of rich and poor women into sharp relief. One, from the Guttmacher Institute, shows that the rates of unplanned pregnancies and births among poor women now dwarf the fertility rates of wealthier women, and finds that the gap between the two groups has widened significantly over the past five years. The other, by the Center for Work-Life Policy, documents rates of childlessness among corporate professional women that are higher than the childlessness rates of some European countries experiencing fertility crises.

Childlessness has increased across most demographic groups but is still highest among professionals. Indeed, according to an analysis of census data conducted by the Pew Research Center, about one quarter of all women with bachelor’s degrees and higher in the United States wind up childless. (As Pew notes, for women with higher degrees, that number is actually slightly lower than it was in the early 1990s—but it is still very high.) By comparison, in England, which has one of the highest percentages of women without children in the world, 22 percent of all women are childless. According to the new Center for Work-Life Policy study, 43 percent of the women in their sample of corporate professionals between the ages of 33 and 46 were childless. The rate of childlessness among the Asian American professional women in the study was a staggering 53 percent.

At the same time, the numbers of both unplanned pregnancies and births among poor women have climbed steadily in recent years. About half of all pregnancies in this country are unplanned, with poor women now five times more likely than higher-income women to have an unplanned pregnancy, and six times more likely to have an unplanned birth, according to the Guttmacher Institute’s recent analysis of government data.

It being Slate, the author does not broach what I like to term the “Idiocracy hypothesis”. I invite you to make some observations at a Walmart Supercenter as you stand behind the pregnant 16 year old holding her adorable chubby infant, and then deny the possibility of this outcome. But you don’t need to “go there.” If you have a strong environmental leaning you can still admit that the cultural traits of the middle class may be heritable through acquisition in childhood, while the dysfunctional tendencies of the underclass can also be perpetuated by modeling the behavior of parents and peers. The skewed parental origins of the next generation, and the inferred long term divergence in reproductive output, are issues of some consequence for the broader social order. Systems which shift out of equilibrium may eventually reach a new “stable state,” and one not to our liking.

In any case, here is some General Social Survey data on the mean number of children by age cohort broken down by education for women surveyed after the year 2000. Basically you’re looking at the number of children that women born in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, had by the 2000s.

Solutions? One quick one made by Randall Parker is to allow for easier acceleration of education of the academically gifted. Many school districts seem to discourage skipping grades from what I have seen for practical social reasons. But currently women with professional aspirations have a difficult time having children during their peak fertility years because of the necessary demands on their time of university and graduate or professional school. It is of course true that putting 14 year old teens in classes with 18 year old young adults is going to cause problems, but if a woman can make it out of medical school and into her residency around 22, rather than 26, it is going to be a huge difference in terms of options in their early 30s (beyond the peak fertility years, but not very much).

NASA has released the final update on the UARS bird that burned up in re-entry last week: it came down in the Pacific, west of the US.

The Earth’s atmosphere is not a lid over us, but gets thinner with height, so it’s hard to define exactly what it means to say that the satellite burned up at such-and-such a spot. However, at 04:01 UTC on September 24th, the satellite’s motion became dominated by the Earth’s atmosphere, and for all intents and purposes that can be called the point where it came back in… or at least, where it started. The forward motion of the satellite took the pieces along a track 500 – 1300 km (300 to 800 miles) long, which is still safely out in the ocean.

Thus ends the UARS tale.

… but we’re not quite done yet. The venerable German astronomical satellite ROSAT is due to come back down in about a month or so. Smaller than UARS — a little over 2 tons, as opposed to over 6 — ROSAT will probably have more pieces survive the ride down because its mirrors had to be shielded from heat to operate. That means the odds of it hitting someone will be slightly higher than from UARS, about 1 in 2000. Bear in mind that’s still really small odds! The chance of a specific individual getting hit are still something like only 1 in 14 trillion.

ROSAT is an X-ray satellite, designed to study high-energy radiation from astronomical sources. Years ago, I looked briefly at ROSAT data of a supernova remnant while putting together an educational activity about exploding stars. I don’t feel the same connection to the satellite as I do to, say, Hubble, but still, it’s a little sad to see it come down. However, it did provide years of outstanding service to the astronomical community, and gathered a vast amount of data about the high-energy Universe around us.

Image credits: NASA; German Aerospace Center (DLR)

Graham Gaunt is a photographer who sent me this time lapse video he made of the skies over Cornwall, UK. It’s not remarkable so much for the photography — which is quite lovely — but because in the extreme southwest UK summer nights, according to Graham, tend to be cloudy.

I like the shots of the stars through the clouds; the difference in relative motion is somehow both eerie and soothing. The familiar sight of Orion, the Pleiades, Taurus, and Sirius coming in at about 1:20 is quite nice.

The thing is… "Wagging Pole"? I asked Graham what it means. At about a minute in, keep your eyes on the third power line pole down the road. It moves, wagging around! He said it was in a loose hole, but when he first saw it it freaked him out a little, so he decided to give it title billing.

A new paper in The American Journal of Physical Anthropology surveys the variation of genes across latitudes and longitudes. The authors found that both latitude and longitude were significant in the Americas, while only latitude was significant in Eurasia. They used microsatellites, which is fine by me. The main issue which they acknowledge is that their sampling of populations is rather sparse in certain areas. Let me jump to their conclusion:

Our results suggest a reduced speed for gene flow in the Americas since its initial peopling that, even after accounting for lower levels of genetic diversity in Native American populations, has led to more genetic differentiation in the Americas than that observed between Eurasian populations. Not only is the level of genetic differentiation greater between Native American populations, but it is greater per kilometer of latitudinal distance than genetic differentiation between Eurasian populations per kilometer of longitudinal distance. If a lack of gene flow between populations is an indication of little cultural interaction (i.e., assuming that technologies travel by demic diffusion), then a lower latitudinal rate of gene flow suggested for Native American populations may partly explain the relatively slower diffusion of crops and technologies through the Americas, when compared with the corresponding diffusion in Eurasia. Thus, our result that genetic differentiation increases more rapidly with latitudinal distance between Native American populations than with longitudinal distance between Eurasian populations supports the hypothesis of a primary influence for continental axes of orientation on the diffusion of technology in Eurasia and the Americas (Fig. 1).

In some ways this paper is extending and testing the argument in Guns, Germs, and Steel. Here is my primary concern: agriculture may have radically reshaped the genetic variation patterns in Eurasia over the last 10,000 years. This is especially obviously true in Southeast Asia. The variation that we see in the New World among indigenous people may then be a snapshot of a region where mass population replacements had just not gotten as advanced in the Old World. It seems that gene flow and cultural exchange would have a much more explosive connection than is implied in the model of demic diffusion used to generate many of the statistics in the above paper.

Rasmus Nielsen has a long response below to the issue of the getting some sort of consent from Aboriginals in the local region in regards to a specimen from a deceased individual. He has a full entry on this at the new weblog of his research group.

As an aside, let me say that it is heartening to see such an eminent young scientist put up an initial post where he forthrightly states that “We will use this space to spread our opinions about the state of affairs in evolutionary genomics. If you disagree with us – leave a comment.” This makes me less skeptical of the medium term future which Joe Pickrell outlined last summer in relation to peer review. More specifically in this case it would be interesting to see what exchanges, disagreements, and agreements, the authors of the Science Aboriginal genomics paper had with the authors of the broader Denisovan admixture paper in The American Journal of Human Genetics. My friends at IB surely know if there was any such exchange, but it feels kind of lame asking people for possible personal communication constantly.

Going back to Nielsen’s post he contends that it would be the “nice thing” for him to do to consult his sibling if he was going to disclose genetic information which might have broader impact upon him (in this case, the potential presence of a gene predisposing someone to Alzheimer’s). I think that’s key: I don’t have much of an issue with scientists who follow their conscience, and try to be decent human beings. Scientists are people too; not just analytic computation machines. The problem is when a legal framework emerges which regulates what science is, and isn’t, done. Obviously at the boundary I totally agree with the idea that science has some ethical constraints. We wouldn’t want a thousand Mengele’s to bloom. But I think the legal threshold should be set rather high. If governmental bodies begin to regulate the bounds of scientific inquiry at a fine-grained level that’s a pretty strong incentive for aspiring Leon Kass’ to take over such agencies.

From the 1956 movie The Conqueror:

1) Weird search query of the week: “choropleth of jehovah witness population.”

2 Your weekly fluff fix:

There was some speculation last week about which nation would have everyone sequenced first. We now have a contender, the Faroe Islands, a self-governing Danish dependency (they’re not part of the E.U.) is going to try and sequence most of the population of ~50,000 over the next five years:

Around 100 people who are likely to be chosen at random will be sequenced this year. The project will then be extended to 1,000 people, followed by the whole population, with the aim of sequencing everybody within five years.

The full project, which is expected to cost around 257 million Danish kroner ($47 million), involves scientists from Baylor University, Texas and from the UK’s University of Oxford.

That comes to $940 per person over the five years. I assume that they have some reasonable estimates of the real decline in genome sequencing costs over the next five years. And remember, just because they’re the first out of the gates in aim does not mean that they’ll be first to the finish line. There are small Gulf Arab nations, like Qatar, which have more money to throw at such projects, and because of high inbreeding coefficients more practical medical rationales for a database of whole genome sequences (e.g., select the niece or nephew you want to have your child marry by the lowest shared number of deleterious mutations).

(via Dan MacArthur)

In light of growing health care costs and the demographic reality of an aging profession stories like this one in The New York Times are both depressing and hopeful. Calling the Nurse ‘Doctor,’ a Title Physicians Oppose:

But while all physician organizations support the idea of teamwork, not all physicians are willing to surrender the traditional understanding that they should be the ones to lead the team. Their training is so extensive, physicians argue, that they alone should diagnose illnesses. Nurses respond that they are perfectly capable of recognizing a vast majority of patient problems, and they have the studies to prove it. The battle over the title “doctor” is in many ways a proxy for this larger struggle.

…

Six to eight years of collegiate and graduate education generally earn pharmacists, physical therapists and nurses the right to call themselves “doctors,” compared with nearly twice that many years of training for most physicians. For decades, a bachelor’s degree was all that was required to become a pharmacist. That changed in 2004 when a doctorate replaced the bachelor’s degree as the minimum needed to practice. Physical therapists once needed only bachelor’s degrees, too, but the profession will require doctorates of all students by 2015 — the same year that nursing leaders intend to require doctorates of all those becoming nurse practitioners.

…

Nursing is filled with multiple specialties requiring varying levels of education, from a high school equivalency degree for nursing assistants to a master’s degree for nurse practitioners. Those wishing to become nurse anesthetists will soon be required to earn doctorates, but otherwise there are presently no practical or clinical differences between nurses who earn master’s degrees and those who get doctorates.

I applaud the wider distribution of medical services outside of the licensing monopoly of M.D.s. As an empirical matter I think there was a practical reason for the professionalization of medicine in the 20th century and the emergence of degree holding as necessary. To be frank about it for most of human history doctors were frauds or butchers. Modern medicine in the 20th century was a major revolution in that sense (though doctors are only part of it, the rise of an effective pharmaceutical industry is probably just as important if not more so). But the arrow of history does not always move in one direction, and we live in an “information age.” Doctors are human, and therefore fallible. They need the aid of both their patients and various other medical professionals to optimize health outcomes. The paternalistic model is just not viable in the long run, especially as the median educational qualifications of their patients keeps rising.

But notice that in this case we’re seeing greater and greater credentialism in fields which were traditionally perceived to be auxiliary to medical doctors. This is not a good sign. Instead of challenging the unquestioned prominence of medical doctors in domains where nurses are sufficient and more cost effective, the nursing profession is “fighting fire with fire.” This is not going to end well. Having to pile on education removes productive years in the work force. This is justifiable when education results in gains in productivity, but just as in education, I suspect that all the extra years for physical therapists and nurses is not doing anything but signalling, and further tightening up labor supply as the number of patients keeps on increasing because of the aging of the population.

David Dobbs points me to a story in Popular Science which tracks the controversy around the “arsenic life” hypothesis, and its effects on Felisa Wolfe-Simon. Back in the days before the internet you’d read the story as an outsider and get a particular take. A long narrative by its nature primes us in a certain direction through the framing of the major points. But the internet does exist. So Carl Zimmer put up a blog post highlighting a chronology which undercuts one of the implications of the Popular Science piece, or at least one of the talking points of Felisa Wolfe-Simon. This elicited a response from the author of the piece, which Carl posted. Even if you’re not deep into the weeds of the “arsenic life” controversy (I’m not) it is still fascinating to see how a conversation which might have been hidden in the back channels is now relatively transparent. Science itself it is the conversation that tells the true tale. A conventional general interest reader might stop at the Popular Science piece, but those outside of science but more deeply curious are going to now be privy to the continuous conversation.