Alan Friedman is an "amateur" astronomer who takes astonishing images of the Sun. You may remember his picture of our star that was so cool I chose it as one of my Top 14 Pictures of 2010.

He’s still snapping away, and on August 17th took this lovely picture of a prominence erupting from the Sun’s surface:

[Click to enfilamentate.]

Isn’t that gorgeous? A prominence is a towering arc of material lifted off the Sun’s surface by intense magnetic fields. To give you an idea of how strong the magnetic forces are, a prominence can have a mass upwards of a hundred billion tons, and be cranked up thousands of kilometers off the Sun’s surface… despite the crushing gravity of nearly 30 times that of Earth’s!

And some people call the Sun "average". Ha!

Alan takes these images with a pretty nice ‘scope equipped with a filter that blocks all the light from the Sun except for a narrow slice of color preferentially emitted by warm hydrogen. He then inverts the image of the solar disk (but not anything on the limb or outside ...

Charles C. Mann is the author of several books, including 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus and 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Much of his work has been involved in publicizing the ecological factors which shape the course of human history. You can read a lengthy review of 1493 over at Chad Orzel’s blog. Needless to say, I highly recommend it (I read it on the Kindle edition, and it was interesting to see which passages other people had highlighted).

1 – I notice that there is a second edition of your book, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, out. Are there any major revisions?

Yes and no. When I went back and looked at the book, its basic thrust still seemed solid (at least to me). Although people had made various critiques of the book, I hadn’t seen any that challenged its underlying premises. So in that way the book is little changed.

That doesn’t mean that I was wholly satisfied, though. I ended up rewriting or revamping about a fifth of the book. Most of it ...

“Analysis of the behavioral traits of 56 breeds of dog produced three factors with some similarities to the popular five-factor model of human personality: (a) reactivity–surgency, (b) aggression–disagreeableness, and (c) trainability–openness. Canine and human personality similarities are argued to have their origin in biogenetic factors stemming from common evolutionary sources and from canine breeding for human compatibility and assistance with human tasks. Each of the three canine factors was shown to have a highly visible morphological indicator between breeds of dog. Reactivity–surgency was related to overall size, aggression–disagreeableness was related to having pointed ears, and trainability–openness was related to the ponderal index [Ed. note: this is similar to body-mass index].”

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Photo: flickr/matt512

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: How the hell does one end up as a doggy breath odor judge?
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Human left-sided cradling preferences for dogs.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Behavioural responses of dogs to asymmetrical tail wagging of a robotic dog replica.

WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

By Jon Winsor

One recent discussion on this blog has been whether the tea party is libertarian or authoritarian. Rick Perry, the tea party’s candidate of choice, has been billing himself as a states rights-inflected libertarian, as his recent book Fed Up! attests. (See the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus for some highlights here.)

But columnists have been pointing out that the ostensibly libertarian Fed Up is of fairly recent vintage. The older Perry had quite a different political brand: that of a crusading culture warrior. Dana Milbank writes,

Yes, Perry is passionately anti-government, or at least anti-this-government. But the man who suddenly tops the Republican presidential polls is no libertarian.

For an eyeful of the full Perry, crack his 2008 book, On My Honor… [One quote:] “The radical homosexual movement seeks societal normalization of their sexual activity. .?.?. They must respect the right of millions in society to refuse to normalize their behavior…”

In a series of hoary bromides, the supposedly libertarian Perry condemns the “litigious advocates of licentious behavior” (that’s the ACLU) and informs us that “Sometimes the rules must protect society at large at the expense of individual expression when that expression is deemed harmful to others and society at large…”

Among the things Perry “deems” harmful: universities (students “have been taught that corporations are evil, religion is the opiate of the masses, and morality is relative”); human rights commissions (“often nothing more than a front for attacking institutions that teach traditional values”); and evolution (he says “the weight of evidence” supports intelligent design)…

Though he speaks now as a small-government conservative, Perry argues in his book: “We are close to a tipping point in American society. If you believe there is right and wrong, that there are acceptable standards of behavior . . . then you have a stake in this war. If the attackers win many more victories… the culture war may be lost before we know it. If that happens, we will find ourselves living in a world where moral relativism reigns and individualism runs amok. Now is the time to enlist in this effort, to stand up and be counted.” [My emphasis]

This is the rhetoric of a values-imposing crusader, not a libertarian. According to New Republic reporter Eliza Gray, this crusading style is not only rhetorical, but part of his governing style as well. This past May, Perry signed a law requiring women to get sonograms prior to having an abortion. Gray writes:

[The] fervor of the governor’s pro-life stance was expressed most succinctly not in his public remarks after the law’s passage, but in the extraordinary legislative maneuvering he used to enact it: By declaring passage of the law an “emergency”, Perry pushed it ahead of other pieces of legislation scheduled to be discussed by the Texas House of Representatives, and forced debates over real emergencies—like the jobs crisis, the state budget deficit, and out of control wild fires—to wait.

Personally invasive culture war issues are an “emergency,” while the economy, wild fires, and a budget deficit take a back seat? That’s probably not a moral vision shared by most people nationally, and it doesn’t sound like it comes from much of a concern for individual liberty.

It’s time for August’s Science Writer Tip-Jar picks. For those new to this, here’s the low-down:

Throughout the blogosphere, people produce fantastic writing for free. That’s great, but I believe that good writers should get paid for good work. To set an example, I choose ten pieces every month that were written for free and I donate £3 to the author. There are no formal criteria other than I found them unusually interesting, enjoyable and/or important.

I also encourage readers to support these writers through two buttons on the sidebar. Any donations via “Support Science Writers” are evenly distributed to chosen ten at the end of the month. Donations via the “Support NERS” button go to me; I match a third of the total figure and send that to the chosen writers too.

So without further ado, and in no particular order, here are the picks:

Jennifer Ouellette for her joyous paean to yodelling, featuring the Sound of Music, Tibetan monks, the Pavarotti robot, and the “yodellumpet”.
John Wilkins for his response to the species-counting study that made the headlines: “It’s hardly an objective fact about the world. We may as well ...

Dear Readers: We’ve been at a record high level of sustained traffic here over the past five months, thanks to the contributions of Jon and Jamie and, I think, our increasing political topicality. I’m now going to take the long weekend off to work on the new book project, but when I return, I’ll have an announcement about another new development for the Intersection.

I hope everyone has a great Labor Day weekend….

Reel ‘er in!

We all know that asteroids close to the Earth are Bad News. (Although not as bad as many would have you think.) But what if we could catch one? Bring it home? Put it in Earth orbit? Maybe mine it for some valuable minerals; do a little science; potentially, I don’t know, back a new currency? Sure, say some Chinese scientists in a paper on the ArXiv. We should go for it!

In fact, there’s a snazzy little number approaching the Earth right now, they write. It’s about 30 feet wide. Should be pretty easy to hook in, using one of a variety of techniques outlined in the paper, which include “conventional explosive, kinetic impactor and nuclear explosive,” as well as “Enhanced Yarkovsky effect, focused solar, gravity tractor, mass driver, pulsed laser and space tug.” The nuclear route may not be advisable, they opine: “Because the nuclear explosion can release a very large amount of energy, the result may be a fragmentation of the target NEO.” Better to go with the kinetic imapactor, they decide. A little tap to the ol’ asteroid, and it will accelerate just enough to get stuck ...

SXSW (or South by Southwest if you want to make it easier to say out loud) is a major geekapalooza held every year in Austin, Texas. There’s music, film, and lots and lots of tech nerdery. I’ve wanted to go for a long time.

Now’s my chance, but I need your help! I was contacted by Stephanie Smith at JPL who is proposing a panel called "2012: You Bet Your Asteroid the World Won’t End", featuring JPL’s Veronica MacGregor, near-Earth asteroid expert, Don Yeomans, and me. The panel would be about end-of-the-world scenarios, something about which I have plenty of fun things to say.

The thing is, the panels have to be voted on, and that’s where you come in. All you have to do is go to the SXSW panel picker, register (that only takes a sec), and then you can vote for what is undoubtedly the best panel out of the 3285 listed.

If you do, I will love you forever and send you a unicorn*. But please hurry — voting closes at noon Central (US) time on Friday, September 2. Thanks!

It is easy enough to make software do what you want it to. You could tell your email client to recognise and immediately delete any unwanted messages – say, any from your mother-in-law that contain the word “visit”, but not the word “cake”. Now, Zhen Xie from Harvard University and MIT has found a way of filtering undesirable human cells – in this case, a specific type of cancer cell – with similar ease.

Xie has developed a genetic “logic circuit” that prompts cells to kill themselves if the levels of five molecules match those of a cancer cell. Yaakov Benenson, who led the study, says, “In the long term, the circuits’ role is to act like miniature surgeons that can identify and destroy cancer cells.” That is a very long way off, but the study is a promising step in the right direction.

Xie worked with HeLa cells, a common line of cervical cancer cells taken from a tobacco farmer called Henrietta Lacks in 1951. Since then, they have become one of the most important tools in modern medicine. Xie identified five small molecules called microRNAs that act ...

The practice of rush-shipping organs for transplants on ice is fertile ground for slapstick comedy. It’s almost too easy—think of five things that could go wrong! Go!

So next time you have a heart that needs transporting, you might consider joining a clinical study currently underway with this little gadget: a cozy box on wheels that recreates the heart’s natural environment, complete with donated blood and tubes to pump that blood through. The study, which is funded and designed by TransMedics, the company that makes the box, is investigating whether keeping the heart going means it can be transported farther and increase the success of transplants by giving doctors more time to test for immune factors that could cause a rejection. The current system, of course, involves shutting the heart down, partaking in crazed race-against-time hijinks, and then jump-starting it once it’s in the recipient’s chest. The whole process can take no more than six hours, chest to chest, or the heart fails.

How long could a heart survive in a box? Perhaps…forever? That’s an iiiinteresting question…for another, madder group of scientists. In the meantime, if you’re anything like us, reading this has given you an urge to revisit this ...

“Time” is the most used noun in the English language, yet it remains a mystery. We’ve just completed an amazingly intense and rewarding multidisciplinary conference on the nature of time, and my brain is swimming with ideas and new questions. Rather than trying a summary (the talks will be online soon), here’s my stab at a top ten list partly inspired by our discussions: the things everyone should know about time. [Update: all of these are things I think are true, after quite a bit of deliberation. Not everyone agrees, although of course they should.]

1. Time exists. Might as well get this common question out of the way. Of course time exists — otherwise how would we set our alarm clocks? Time organizes the universe into an ordered series of moments, and thank goodness; what a mess it would be if reality were complete different from moment to moment. The real question is whether or not time is fundamental, or perhaps emergent. We used to think that “temperature” was a basic category of nature, but now we know it emerges from the motion of atoms. When it comes to whether time is fundamental, the answer is: nobody knows. My bet is “yes,” but we’ll need to understand quantum gravity much better before we can say for sure.

2. The past and future are equally real. This isn’t completely accepted, but it should be. Intuitively we think that the “now” is real, while the past is fixed and in the books, and the future hasn’t yet occurred. But physics teaches us something remarkable: every event in the past and future is implicit in the current moment. This is hard to see in our everyday lives, since we’re nowhere close to knowing everything about the universe at any moment, nor will we ever be — but the equations don’t lie. As Einstein put it, “It appears therefore more natural to think of physical reality as a four dimensional existence, instead of, as hitherto, the evolution of a three dimensional existence.”

3. Everyone experiences time differently. This is true at the level of both physics and biology. Within physics, we used to have Sir Isaac Newton’s view of time, which was universal and shared by everyone. But then Einstein came along and explained that how much time elapses for a person depends on how they travel through space (especially near the speed of light) as well as the gravitational field (especially if its near a black hole). From a biological or psychological perspective, the time measured by atomic clocks isn’t as important as the time measured by our internal rhythms and the accumulation of memories. That happens differently depending on who we are and what we are experiencing; there’s a real sense in which time moves more quickly when we’re older.

4. You live in the past. About 80 milliseconds in the past, to be precise. Use one hand to touch your nose, and the other to touch one of your feet, at exactly the same time. You will experience them as simultaneous acts. But that’s mysterious — clearly it takes more time for the signal to travel up your nerves from your feet to your brain than from your nose. The reconciliation is simple: our conscious experience takes time to assemble, and your brain waits for all the relevant input before it experiences the “now.” Experiments have shown that the lag between things happening and us experiencing them is about 80 milliseconds. (Via conference participant David Eagleman.)

5. Your memory isn’t as good as you think. When you remember an event in the past, your brain uses a very similar technique to imagining the future. The process is less like “replaying a video” than “putting on a play from a script.” If the script is wrong for whatever reason, you can have a false memory that is just as vivid as a true one. Eyewitness testimony, it turns out, is one of the least reliable forms of evidence allowed into courtrooms. (Via conference participants Kathleen McDermott and Henry Roediger.)

6. Consciousness depends on manipulating time. Many cognitive abilities are important for consciousness, and we don’t yet have a complete picture. But it’s clear that the ability to manipulate time and possibility is a crucial feature. In contrast to aquatic life, land-based animals, whose vision-based sensory field extends for hundreds of meters, have time to contemplate a variety of actions and pick the best one. The origin of grammar allowed us to talk about such hypothetical futures with each other. Consciousness wouldn’t be possible without the ability to imagine other times. (Via conference participant Malcolm MacIver.)

7. Disorder increases as time passes. At the heart of every difference between the past and future — memory, aging, causality, free will — is the fact that the universe is evolving from order to disorder. Entropy is increasing, as we physicists say. There are more ways to be disorderly (high entropy) than orderly (low entropy), so the increase of entropy seems natural. But to explain the lower entropy of past times we need to go all the way back to the Big Bang. We still haven’t answered the hard questions: why was entropy low near the Big Bang, and how does increasing entropy account for memory and causality and all the rest? (We heard great talks by David Albert and David Wallace, among others.)

8. Complexity comes and goes. Other than creationists, most people have no trouble appreciating the difference between “orderly” (low entropy) and “complex.” Entropy increases, but complexity is ephemeral; it increases and decreases in complex ways, unsurprisingly enough. Part of the “job” of complex structures is to increase entropy, e.g. in the origin of life. But we’re far from having a complete understanding of this crucial phenomenon. (Talks by Mike Russell, Richard Lenski, Raissa D’Souza.)

9. Aging can be reversed. We all grow old, part of the general trend toward growing disorder. But it’s only the universe as a whole that must increase in entropy, not every individual piece of it. (Otherwise it would be impossible to build a refrigerator.) Reversing the arrow of time for living organisms is a technological challenge, not a physical impossibility. And we’re making progress on a few fronts: stem cells, yeast, and even (with caveats) mice and human muscle tissue. As one biologist told me: “You and I won’t live forever. But as for our grandkids, I’m not placing any bets.”

10. A lifespan is a billion heartbeats. Complex organisms die. Sad though it is in individual cases, it’s a necessary part of the bigger picture; life pushes out the old to make way for the new. Remarkably, there exist simple scaling laws relating animal metabolism to body mass. Larger animals live longer; but they also metabolize slower, as manifested in slower heart rates. These effects cancel out, so that animals from shrews to blue whales have lifespans with just about equal number of heartbeats — about one and a half billion, if you simply must be precise. In that very real sense, all animal species experience “the same amount of time.” At least, until we master #9 and become immortal. (Amazing talk by Geoffrey West.)

Progress is not guaranteed. Be it moral, technological, scientific, or social, there is no reason to assume human civilization marches forever forward in step with time. Understood this way, we can realize that progress is a choice and something we as a species will to happen through the concatenation of our decisions.

Or we can fail to choose, fail to act, and yet, that failure is itself a choice and an action from which consequences follow. There is a reason From Chance to Choice is one of the most essential texts on the bioethics of enhancement – it implies that our continued evolution will hinge upon our decision as to whether or not we want the ability to choose our evolutionary path. We must choose to have a choice.

To be specific, our current generation faces the very real possibility of being asked to decide if human enhancement via technological augmentation and genetic engineering is something we want to pursue. A question already moving beyond the abstract realm of bioethics and making its way into popular culture. Deus Ex: Human Revolution (hereafter DX:HR), prequel to the cyberpunk video game masterpiece Deus Ex, asks the ...

The hidden sexuality of the yawn and the future of chasmology.

“Chasmology is the scientific study of yawning. Though its official history started only recently, its unofficial history stretches back to antiquity. This chapter outlines the history and current state of chasmology, through textual research and analysis, and offers a vision of its future. Particular emphasis is placed upon the author’s favorite theory: the hidden sexuality of the human yawn. The ‘First Law of Chasmology’ states that a yawn occurs: (1) if the yawner cannot do what he would like to do, or (2) if the yawner must do something that he would rather not do. The ‘Second Law of Chasmology’, which is a special instance of the more general First Law, states that the yawn has an erotic and even a sexual aspect. A critical mass of proof for the validity of this Second Law is derived from various sciences and disciplines, ranging from theology and (the history of) art to ethology and pharmacology. The process of evidencing the Second Law has also established chasmology as an emerging science, i.e. a science that uses the data and information ...

A few days ago, the web was abuzz with something that looked like a very large meteor burning up over Peru. Here’s video from ITN news:

You can find similar videos on Youtube. However, is it actually a meteor?

Cutting to the chase, I don’t think so. I don’t have a lot of solid evidence either way, but all signs point that way. Here are my thoughts:

1) Meteors tend to move more quickly. They usually burn up around 100 km (60 miles) up, roughly, and are moving at a minimum of 11 km/sec (7 miles/sec) — Earth’s gravity pulls them in to at least this speed. If you’ve ever seen a meteor you know they zip across the sky in at most a few seconds.

2) The two trains (the technical term for what most people would call the tail or trail) are very odd — you can see them in the frame grab here. I’ve never seen a meteoroid (the actual solid bit moving through our atmosphere) produce more than one train. I don’t think this is an optical effect due to the camera but actually two distinct trains.

3) The ...

While the object in Peruvian skies may not have been a meteor, this thing certainly was:

That was a fireball — an extremely bright meteor — that blew in over Atlanta, Georgia on August 28. The video is from the webcam at the Tellus Museum of Science in Georgia, part of the All Sky Fireball Network (I wrote about them recently when this same camera caught the space station passing overhead, in fact). The other streak you can see moving is an internal reflection in the camera, I believe, which shows you just how bright this fireball was.

Since there are four cameras in the network, they could triangulate on the meteor, getting its height off the ground. Coupled with its apparent speed, that tells them it was screaming in at more than 83,000 kph (52,000 mph)! Given how bright it was, I suspect it was probably about the size of a grapefruit or so. Funny how something that small can make such a bright streak, but then speed is the key here. The brightness of a meteor depends on how much energy it can deposit in the atmosphere, and that is determined largely ...

I was asked by the person who provided me the Tutsi genotype for detailed results. Of course I would do so! So I uploaded the raw csv files to Google Docs. The format and explanation isn’t totally clear, though if you follow my posts you’ll get it. This is for people who want more than pretty visualizations. But it did make me consider: I do many ADMIXTURE and EIGENSOFT runs, and you only see a small minority. This isn’t optimal for readers who want to dig deeper, but it also results in possible unconscious bias. So I’m going to try and do something different: I will post the raw results (at least in csv format) of all runs. But I obviously don’t want to cluster this weblog with updates, so you have to do one of two things to get notifications:

1) Follow me on twitter

2) Add me on Google+

At some point I might just start throwing stuff into a public folder, but that’s often so user unfriendly that only those “in the know” can decrypt what is what. My aim here is to resolve some confusions by posting all the results that I get to see. ...

One of the things I really hate are unqualified linear projections. They’re so useless most of the time. A science fiction magazine will give you more insight about the future than the United Nations population projection for the year 2100. This is just as much of an issue when it comes to American Census demographic projections. As I’ve noted before population projections of the coming non-Hispanic white minority 2040 to 2050 are sensitive to the assumptions behind the basic parameters. The logic of the projection is crystal clear and airtight, but just because a certain set of assumptions holds today, does not mean that those assumptions will hold indefinitely (though the Census projections are much more plausible than the United Nations projections because two generations are so much more strongly impacted by by the inertia of current conditions that four generations). In the 18th and 19th century white Americans, and especially the Anglo-Saxon founding stock, were a highly fertile folk. They took over the American Southwest and the Northwest in large part due to their demographic assault. In New England the 30,000 of 1650 became the 700,000 in 1790 in large part due to fertility rates on the order of ...

Sort of and possible. I’ve been talking about this for years, and Greg Cochran points me to an abstract at the human genetics conference referenced earlier. Novel coding variation at TYRP1 explains a large proportion of variance in the hair colour of Solomon Islanders:

The Solomon archipelago comprises over 1,000 islands located east of Papua New Guinea and has a population noted for wide variation in hair pigmentation. 1200 samples were collected from 16 centres and hair colour measured in donors by spectrophotometer. Analysis of 589,241 single nucleotide polymorphisms across a subset of 42 dark haired and 43 blond haired individuals revealed a signal for pigmentation driven by 27 markers on 9p23 at the TYRP1 gene (rs13289810…). There were no systematic differences in ancestry between dark and blond haired participants indicating that this variation is unlikely to be due to recent introgression from other populations. Sequencing of TRYP1 showed complete conservation of this locus bar nucleotide 5,888(NG_011750), which was homozygous C in dark haired individuals and T in blonds. The resulting CGC->TGC missense mutation changes the 93 amino acid in exon 2 from an Arginine to a Cystine. Genotyping of TYRP1(93C/T) in all samples and analysis showed that in ...

Two stories just came out that I would love to spend time writing up in full, but I’m trying to get a million things done before I leave for Dragon*Con in the morning, so I’ll be brief:

1) Astronomers using the Chandra X-ray Observatory have discovered a binary black hole: two ginormous beasts orbiting each other about 500 light years apart in the center of the gorgeous spiral galaxy NGC 3393. Each has a mass of at least one million times that of the Sun. While binary black holes in the centers of galaxies have been spotted before, this is the closest one found: a "mere" 160 million light years away!

2) A newly-discovered planet (PDF) orbiting a star just 36 light years away appears to be at just the right distance to potentially have liquid water on its surface. The planet, HD85512b, orbits a star somewhat smaller and cooler than the Sun, but close enough to it that it actually gets more heat on average than Earth does. The planet is hefty, 3.6 times the mass of the Earth, but the size is not known (you ...

On the left: A mouse embryo preserved in para-formaldehyde. On the right: A mouse embryo soaked in Scale for two weeks.

What’s the News: The trouble with brains, organs, and tissues in general, from a biologist’s perspective, is that they scatter light like nobody’s business. Shine a light into there to start snapping pictures of cells with your microscope, and bam, all those proteins and macromolecules bounce it around and turn everything to static before you’ve gotten more than a millimeter below the surface. Scientists at RIKEN in Japan, however, have just published a special recipe for a substance that makes tissue as transparent as Jell-O, making unprecedentedly deep imaging possible.

How the Heck:

Substances to make tissue more transparent are called clearing agents, and the ones we have now have varying degrees of penetration—in other words, they don’t always take you as deep as you’d like. To boot, they sometimes mess with the fluorescent tags that biologists splice into certain tissues to light up a particular set of blood vessels or neurons, for example.
This recipe clears out tissue so well that the only limitation on how deep you can see is the power of ...