I’m still scratching my head over the rather atrocious Brian Palmer piece in Slate, Double Inanity: Twin studies are pretty much useless. It’s of a quality which would make it appropriate for WorldNetDaily. Here are the responses of Jason Collins, Daniel MacArthur, and Alex Tabarrok. The comments at Slate were rather scathing too. I observed over at Genomes Unzipped that many of the assertions in the piece were in the “not even wrong/what does that even mean?” class. Palmer is apparently a freelancer at Slate, and they’re doing a bunch of stories on twins this week. I wonder if they just sent him the assignment with instructions on the slant, and he took it a little too far. Even if it was a polemic it was a shoddy and embarrassing one. My main concern is that many people perceive Slate to be an organ which publishes “smart” and well researched pieces, and they’ll take Palmer’s screed at face value.

The scientific problems with the article are legion. But still: how does something like this get published in a relatively high-end publication? Brian Palmer has editors presumably. If the copy was an undergraduate paper the prose would be ...

Someone on twitter was curious about GOP attitudes toward astrology. I left the party breakdown out of the previous post because ideology accounts for most party differences. In other words, conservatives are more skeptical of astrology than liberals, and Republicans more than Democrats, but the second result just seems to emerge from the Republican’s greater conservatism.

Astrology very scientific
Astrology somewhat scientific
Astrology not scientific

Strong Democrat
6
31
63

Democrat
7
30
63

Lean Democrat
4
28
67

Independent
7
37
57

Lean Republican
3
26
71

Republican
4
21
75

Strong Republican
4
20
76

Why are independents so gullible? It probably has to do with their lower average intelligence (this goes for moderates too). So I simply limited the sample to those with at least bachelor’s degrees to control for intelligence:

Limited to those with college degrees or more

Astrology very scientific
Astrology somewhat scientific
Astrology not scientific

Strong Democrat
3
21
76

Democrat
4
17
79

Lean Democrat
2
21
78

Independent
4
22
75

Lean Republican
1
9
90

Republican
0
11
88

Strong Republican
1
10
89

The distinctiveness of independents diminishes somewhat, but Democrats with college degrees or more remain more gullible than Republicans with the same (the difference remains if you control for sex by the way).

The first hurricane of the 2011 season hits the U.S. east coast, as seen by a NASA Earth-observing satellite:

[Click to encoriolenate, or grab the nearly one-to-one sized 6000x7000 pixel version.]

This image was taken on August 26, 2011 at 16:30 UTC. For more images and video of Irene, keep an eye on the NASA GSFC Flickr page and follow them on Twitter.

Image credit: NASA/GSFC/Jeff Schmaltz/MODIS Land Rapid Response Team

Related posts:

- Putting the eye in Irene
- Come on, Irene
- Attack of the Cyclones
- Hurricane double whammy

What’s the News: Researchers have now found a well-preserved fossil of the earliest known member of the animal group that encompasses today’s placental mammals, which includes humans. The shrew-like creature, named Juramaia sinensis, or “Jurassic mother from China,” dates back to 160 million years ago, 35 million years earlier than the oldest mammal fossil previously discovered. The Nature study gives some tangible support to genetic evidence suggesting that the two main types of mammals split well before the previous oldest mammal fossils.

How the Heck:

Zhe-Xi Luo, a paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, and his colleagues analyzed the Juramaia fossil, which was unearthed in China’s northeast Liaoning Province, a hotspot for paleontology. The fossil consisted of an incomplete skull, a partial skeleton, a full set of teeth, and impressions of residual soft tissues like hair.
After comparing the fossil’s features with those of other ancient mammals, the ...

Artist’s concept of the pulsar and its planet. The system could fit into our Sun, represented by the yellow surface.

What’s the News: An international team of astronomers has found an exotic planet possibly made of diamond, located about 4,000 light-years away from Earth. The researchers believe that the unusual planet was once a sun-like star, transformed into its current state by its hungry stellar companion, a millisecond pulsar.

How the Heck:

When a massive star dies in a supernova, it sometimes collapses into a pulsar, a highly compacted stellar corpse that emits periodic beams of electromagnetic radiation from its poles. If a pulsar is part of a binary system, it can feed on its nearby stellar friend and speed up its spin to hundreds of rotations per second, effectively becoming a millisecond pulsar. (About 30% of millisecond pulsars found are solitary—astronomers don’t know how they formed.)
Astronomers detected the pulsar, known as PSR J1719-1438, during a large ...

The Eastern Seaboard is warily watching the progress of Hurricane Irene, wondering what course the storm will take and just how ferocious it will be. Predicting the path of a hurricane still involves some guesswork—but thanks to rapidly improving computer models and data-gathering abilities, Tekla Perry reports in IEEE Spectrum, scientists are able to make more accurate forecasts farther in advance than they were even five or ten years ago. In fact, the predicted track of a hurricane over the next 48 hours today is as accurate as a prediction for the next 24 hours was 10 years ago—a day that can make a big difference for people deciding whether to evacuate and how to prepare before the storm. Boosts in computing power mean scientists can run more, faster, and more detailed simulations of the storm, and technologies like Dopper radar provide detailed data on wind speed, air pressure, and temperature as storms progress.

Irene has been a relatively easy storm to predict so far, Frank D. Marks Jr., a NOAA hurricane researcher, told Spectrum, but that doesn’t mean scientists are able to tell residents of any particular city exactly ...

I’ve said it before: Saturn’s moon Hyperion is seriously freaky. New images from the Cassini spacecraft flyby of the tiny moon don’t change my mind one bit:

[Click to enchronosenate.]

What a weird place! Hyperion is a lumpy chunk of ice only about 270 km (170 miles) across on average, but yesterday (August 25, 2011) Cassini passed about 25,000 km away from it, so it got a lot of high-resolution shots.

As you can see, it’s saturated with craters. But they look funny! The overwhelming impression I get is that Hyperion is made of resilient foam, like a packing peanut. I’m also fascinated by the ginormous crater that dominates this face of the moon. If Hyperion were made of stiff rock, an impact that size would’ve shattered it like a bullet hitting a pebble. But if the composition of the moon is able to compress and compact — like foam, or something with lots of pockets of empty space inside it — the impact would do pretty much what we see here. Lots of asteroids appear to be "rubble piles" — chunks of material held together by their own ...

WHAT? Noooooooo!

If you haven’t heard about the corkscrew kookiness that is duck genitalia by now, you need to check that stuff out ASAP.

Ducks’ twisting vaginas and telescoping penises are well-known part of an evolutionary arms race between the sexes that’s been going on for millennia, with each side trying to exert control over which males’ sperm fertilize the female’s eggs—a battle that, especially in birds, is fierce, occasionally violent, and weird as all-get-out. The most recently discovered example of what biologists deem “sexual conflict,” a little behavior hens have developed called sperm ejection, upholds that fine tradition.

Hens, like many female birds, don’t always have a lot of control over who mates with them. Roosters tend to resort to “sexual coercion,” aka rape, and so a female might have any number of sexual partners that she didn’t get to choose. What’s a hen to do? Well, according to a new study in The American Naturalist, evolve a method for getting rid of sperm from males she didn’t particularly like, thus making sure her offspring are of the best quality.

Scientists had already noticed that hens tended to squirt out semen after some acts ...

Greetings from Norway, where we’re about to embark on what is surely the most logistically elaborate conference I’ve ever attended. Setting Time Aright starts here in Norway, where we hop on a boat and cross the North Sea to Copenhagen. The get-together is sponsored by the Foundational Questions Institute, although it came together in an unusual way; I was part of a group that was organizing a conference, and we applied to FQXi for funding, at which point they mentioned they were planning almost exactly the same conference at the same time. So we joined forces, and here we are. Unity ’11!

The topic, if you haven’t guessed, is time. That’s a big subject, one that can hardly be done justice by sprawling books with hundreds of (admittedly quite charming) footnotes. You can see why the conference has to spread over two countries. We’re trying an experiment in interdisciplinarity: while the conference is a serious event meant for researchers, we have a wide variety of specialties represented, including biologists, computer scientists, philosophers, and neuroscientists, as well as the inevitable physicists and cosmologists. (There is also a public event, for those of you who find yourselves in Copenhagen next week.) I can’t wait to hear some of these talks, it should be a blast.

My job is to open the conference with an introductory talk that hits on some of the big questions. Here are the slides, at least as they are right now; last-minute editing is always a possibility. I think I put enough in there to provoke almost everyone at the conference one way or another.

Over the past 10 years at least, sea levels have been rising relatively steadily. This is mostly due to melting glaciers and ice sheets, and is a natural — if detrimental — consequence of global warming. The rate of ocean level rise has been a little over 3 millimeters per year (about 1/8th of an inch per year)… until last year. The rate of increase suddenly reversed itself in 2010, and the sea levels actually dropped a bit, by about 6 mm. What happened?

La Niña happened. Equatorial ocean temperatures fluctuate on a cycle; when they are warmer it’s called an El Niño, and when they’re cooler it’s La Niña. As you might expect, this affects how water evaporates off the ocean surface, and therefore rainfall across the world as well. Right now we’re in a La Niña, characterized by drought conditions in the southern US (like in Texas), and heavier than usual rainfall in Australia, northern South America, and other locations:

That map is from the NASA/German Aerospace Center’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites, which map where water is on the Earth and how ...

In late March of 2011, an extraordinary event occurred: a black hole in a distant galaxy tore apart and ate a whole star (I wrote about this twice at the time; here’s the original post, and a followup article including a Hubble image of the event).

Now, there’s more info: the black hole, lying at the center of a galaxy nearly 4 billion light years away, has about 8 million times the mass of the Sun. When it tore the star apart, about half the mass of the star swirled around the black hole, forming twin beams of matter and energy that blasted outward at a large fraction of the speed of light. The folks at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center made a great animation to show this:

The star was ripped apart by tides. The thing about black holes is, they’re small: this one was probably about 15 million kilometers across. A typical star is about a million km across (the Sun is 1.4 million kilometers in diameter, for comparison). This means the star could get really close to the black hole, and that’s why it was doomed. The force of ...

A new report is out from the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, on vaccine safety. In the voluminous report, the committee of course does not find that every vaccine is perfectly safe for all time–there are certainly some risks. But it once again rejects the claim that the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine causes autism–the evidence, the committee said, was more than adequate to reject this causal assertion.

You can read the report for free here. The New York Times report, titled “Vaccine Cleared Again as Autism Culprit,” is here.

Please note: Anti-vaxxers will not change their minds based on this major scientific consensus report. They will argue back and challenge its conclusions.

So it goes.

1) Post from the past: Men at work: hoes, ploughs, and steel.

2) Weird search query of the week: “neanderthal human hybrid.” Do they have someone in mind?

3) Comment of the week, in response to Twin studies are not useless:

Brian Palmer’s identical twin … is a moron.

4) And finally, your weekly fluff fix:

Over at Culture of Science Sheril Kirshenbaum posts a figure from the NSF displaying what proportion of those without high school educations and those with college educations accept the scientific status of astrology. It’s pretty clear to me that this is the ASTROSCI variable from the General Social Survey. It asks:

Would you say that astrology is very scientific, sort of scientific, or not at all scientific?

It’s also nice that this question was only asked in the latter half of the 2000s. So it’s timely in terms of demographic breakdowns. Speaking of which, here are a whole host of classes and their attitudes toward astrology’s scientific status:

Very scientific
Sort of scientific
Not at all scientific

Male
5
26
69

Female
5
30
65

Age 18-34
8
34
58

Age 35-64
4
26
70

Age 65-
4
24
72

White
4
25
72

Black
11
38
51

Hispanic
8
40
51

Extreme liberal
7
31
62

Liberal
5
30
65

Slightly iberal
4
28
68

Moderate
5
34
61

Slightly conservative
5
25
70

Conservative
6
19
75

Extreme conservative
6
18
76

No high school diploma
9
41
50

High school diploma
7
32
62

Junior college
4
28
68

Bachelor
2
17
80

Graduate degree
1
13
85

Atheist and agnostic
6
23
71

Higher power
4
28
68

Believes in god sometimes
7
24
70

Believe in god, but with doubts
4
27
69

Know god exists
6
30
65

Protestant
5
27
68

Catholic
5
31
64

Jewish
6
16
78

No religion
7
28
65

Bible word of god
6
31
64

Bible inspired word of god
5
28
67

Bible book of fables
6
25
70

Human beings developed from animals
6
28
66

Human beings don’t develop from animals
5
26
69

But what about intelligence? To look at that I used the WORDSUM variable, which is a 10-question vocabulary test which has a 0.70 correlation with IQ. Below are the attitudes toward astrology by WORDSUM score (0 = 0 ...

Images are starting to come in already of the new supernova in the nearby spiral galaxy M 101. Here’s a color image of the exploding star from the Faulkes North telescope on — wait for it — Haleakala:

[Click to embiggen.]

That’s color and very pretty, but I think this one is more impressive, showing the supernova gaining in brightness by a factor of six in a single day:

[Again, click to endeflagrate.]

That’s taken by the Palomar 48 inch telescope in California. The images show M 101 on August 22, 23, and 24. You can see (or not see in this case) how it wasn’t there on the first night, shows up on the second, and is now much brighter. It will get brighter yet, and may get into range of visibility using good binoculars! Certainly even a small telescope will be able to see this supernova once it reaches maximum brightness, which won’t happen for at least a week, if not more.

Right now, the Moon is a waning crescent, so it won’t be a problem for 10 ...

The class human or H. sapiens refers to a set of individuals. On the grand scale it’s really not all that clear and distinct. When do “archaic” humans become “modern” humans? Taking into account human variation, what is a “human universal”? A set of organisms are given a name which denotes the reality that they may share common ancestry, and interact behaviorally, and are potential mates. But many of these phenomenon are fuzzy on the margins. Many of the same issues which emerge in the “species concept” debates are rather general up and down the scales of natural complexity. A similar problem crops up when we conflate the history of genes with the history of populations. Such a conflation has value and utility to a first approximation. The story of mitochondrial Eve was actually the history of one particular locus, the mitochondrial genome. But it did tell us quite a bit about the history of the human species, even if in hindsight it looks as if some scientists overinterpreted those findings. One of the major issues I’ve noticed over the past year, with the heightened likelihood of ...

The Pith: Evolution is a sloppy artist. Upon the focal zone of creative energy adaptation can sculpt with precision, but on the margins of the genetic landscape frightening phenomena may erupt due to inattention. In other words, there are often downsides to adaptation.

A few weeks ago I reviewed a paper which suggests that Crohn’s disease may be a side effect of a selective sweep. The sweep itself was possibly driven by adaptation to nutrient deficiencies incurred by European farmers switching to a grain based diet. The reason for this is a contingent genomic reality: the positively selected genetic variant was flanked by a Crohn’s disease risk allele. The increment of fitness gain of the former happens to have been greater than the decrement entailed by the latter, resulting in the simultaneous increase in the frequency of both the fit and unfit variants. You can’t always have one without the other.

But that’s just focusing on one gene, though the authors did indicate that this may be a genome-wide feature. A new paper in PLoS Genetics argues that that is the case, at least to some extent. Evidence for Hitchhiking of Deleterious Mutations within the Human Genome:

Deleterious mutations reduce ...

The conductivity of neonatal piglet skulls.

“We report the first measured values of conductivities for neonatal mammalian skull samples. We measured the average radial (normal to the skull surface) conductivity of fresh neonatal piglet skull samples at 1 kHz and found it to be around 30 mS m(-1) at ambient room temperatures of about 23 °C. Measurements were made on samples of either frontal or parietal cranial bone, using a saline-filled cell technique. The conductivity value we observed was approximately twice the values reported for adult skulls (Oostendorp et al 2000 IEEE Trans. Biomed. Eng. 47 1487-92) using a similar technique, but at a frequency of around 5 Hz. Further, we found that the conductivity of skull fragments increased linearly with thickness. We found evidence that this was related to differences in composition between the frontal and parietal bone samples tested, which we believe is because frontal bones contained a larger fraction of higher conductivity cancellous bone material.”

Photo: Will’s Skull Page

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Pigs learn what a mirror image represents and use it to obtain information.
Discoblog:

Starting Friday, my TV show "Bad Universe" will air on Discovery Channel Latinoamérica, which I think covers Central and South America. Check your local listings. The name has been translated to "Mitos Del Universo", which of course means "universal mites"; a clear reference to the second episode "Alien Attack"… which itself was translated to "¡Ataque extraterrestre!" But then, my Spanish isn’t very good.

I hope they got Antonio Banderas to dub my voice, though. That would be muy bonito.

Tip o’ the asteroide to eltiocesar.

Attention all astronomers! There is a new Type Ia supernova that has been seen in the nearby spiral galaxy M101, and it’s very young — currently only about a day old! This is very exciting news; getting as much data on this event as possible is critical.

Most likely professional astronomers are already aware of the supernova, since observations have already been taken by Swift (no X-rays have yet been seen, but it’s early yet) and Hubble observations have been scheduled. Still, I would urge amateur astronomers to take careful observations of the galaxy.

[As an aside, I'll note that this supernova won't get bright enough to see naked eye and poses no threat at all to us here on Earth. It may be visible in decent-sized telescopes, though, and as you'll see this may be a very important event in the annals of astronomy.]

[UPDATE: Joseph Brimacombe took a very nice shot of the new supernova using a 20" telescope in New Mexico. Thanks to Surak who left a comment below about this.]

So why is this a big ...