It is very easy to find the world’s most extensive marketplace – just find your nearest forest, field or garden, and look underground.

The planet’s land plants are engaged in an ancient alliance with the so-called “AM fungi” that grow into their roots. One plant might be colonised by many fungi, and a single fungus could connect up to many plants. The fungi harvest nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen from the soil and channel them to their hosts. In return, the plants provide the fungi with the sugars and carbohydrates they need to grow.

This symbiotic partnership covers the planet in green. It’s common to 80 percent of land plants, and is credited with driving the evolution of this group some 470 million years ago. Now, Toby Kiers from Vrije University in Amsterdam has found that plants and fungi have maintained their grand alliance by setting up a strong market economy.

All natural coalitions are vulnerable to cheats. Any individual could withhold nutrients from one or more of its partners, benefiting from their contribution while giving nothing back. But Kiers found that at least one plant – barrel clover – can ...

Scientists have now sequenced the genome of the Atlantic cod, revealing something unusual: the cod is missing an important component of the adaptive immune system found in almost all jawed vertebrates. In particular, when the researchers compared the cod’s genome to that of the stickleback (a closely related fish that has already been sequenced), they saw that the Atlantic cod does not have genes that code for the proteins MHC II, CD4, and invariant chain, all of which work together to help the body recognize and fight off invading bacteria and parasites.

But the missing genes is not a death sentence for the cod. To make up for the lack of MHC II, the cod has ten times more genes for MHC I—another component of the immune system—than other vertebrates. The researchers think that MHC I system may be picking up some of the functions of MHC II, according to ScienceNOW. The researchers also noticed that cod have an increased amount of Toll-like receptors, which are part of the innate immune system.

The find could lead to improved vaccines for farmed cod, and it may have important consequences ...

Earlier this year, Hugo Mercier and his colleague Dan Sperber (of the Jean Nicod Institute in France) came out with one of the more intriguing evolutionary psychology ideas in quite some time. They argued, in a paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, that the human capacity for reasoning evolved not so much to get at truth, as to facilitate argumentation:

Reasoning is generally seen as a means to improve knowledge and make better decisions. However, much evidence shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests that the function of reasoning should be rethought. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given the exceptional dependence of humans on communication and their vulnerability to misinformation. A wide range of evidence in the psychology of reasoning and decision making can be reinterpreted and better
explained in the light of this hypothesis. Poor performance in standard reasoning tasks is explained by the lack of argumentative context. When the same problems are placed in a proper argumentative setting, people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views. This explains the notorious con?rmation bias. This bias is apparent not only when people are actually arguing, but also when they are reasoning proactively from the perspective of having to defend their opinions. Reasoning so motivated can distort evaluations and attitudes and allow erroneous beliefs to persist. Proactively used reasoning also favors decisions that are easy to justify but not necessarily better. In all these instances traditionally described as failures or ?aws, reasoning does exactly what can be expected of an argumentative device: Look for arguments that support a given conclusion, and, ceteris paribus, favor conclusions for which arguments can be found.

Mercier blogs for Psychology Today and is a postdoc at U. Penn. I’ll be interviewing him at 11 for a show that airs Monday. If you have any thoughts, or anything you’d like to hear asked, post them here.

I’ve been accused of having a big head (which is literally true; finding hats that fit properly can be difficult), but even I wouldn’t have any trouble squeezing the 13 trillion kilometer (8 trillion mile) wide Necklace Nebula around my noggin:

[Click to enlarynxate.]

This Hubble image shows the so-called planetary nebula, which is the product of a dying star. Deep in the center of the ring are actually two stars circling each other. As one started to die, it puffed up, literally engulfing the other star. This spun up the larger star, and the centripetal force flung off material in a huge disk well over a light years across. As the star lost its outer layers, the much hotter inner core was exposed, flooding the gas with ultraviolet light, causing it to glow like a neon sign.

Or, more accurately, a hydrogen/oxygen/nitrogen sign, the gases highlighted in this image (shown as green, blue, and red, respectively). See the knots of pink emission in the ring? As the gas was expelled, the speed of the wind increased with time while the density decreased. This faster wind caught up with and slammed ...

I’ve just learned that all three episodes of my TV show, "Phil Plait’s Bad Universe", will air in the UK on DiscoveryUK from August 15th through the 17th. The air times vary, so check the link to find out when it’s playing.

Sky TV has clips online to give you a taste of the three episodes: Asteroid Apocalypse , Alien Attack, and Death Stars. If you sense a theme, well, read the title of the show again.

Hope you like ‘em!

And by the way, the DVD set is available on the Discovery Channel store and at other online venues like Amazon.

Related posts:

- Mashup of DEATH
- I think the Moon watched Bad Universe

1) Post from the past: Dwarfism and cell division.

2) Weird search query of the week: “is it legal to marry your third cousin.”

3) Comment of the week, in response to Pleasure through signalling:

Once at a farmer’s market I bought a couple little things that looked like habaneros. The guy who sold them to me looked at me like I was insane which I should have taken as a clue.

I chopped them up and through them in a salsa and the effect was –it wasn’t like a normal spiciness in any way. It was more like nerve gas. I was overcome with a sort of intense nausea and vertigo and violent ‘steaming’ sensation through my whole body. It was like I could feel areas of the surface of my skin violently spewing out some kind of gas like out of a steam vent.

Also it was really spicy and fried every part of my GI tract during it’s ten minute journey. (like Charlie Sheen on a bender in my bowels).

Anyone else ever run into this weird pepper?

4) And finally, your weekly fluff fix:

By Jon Winsor

Rick Perry, who is supposed to announce his presidential candidacy this weekend, is presently only two points behind Mitt Romney, according to a recent CNN poll. So where does he stand on science?

Rick Perry joins Bachmann in advocating for intelligent design, recently commenting:

“There are clear indications from our people who have amazing intellectual capability that this didn’t happen by accident and a creator put this in place,” Perry said.

“Now, what was his time frame and how did he create the earth that we know? I’m not going to tell you that I’ve got the answers to that,” Perry said. “I believe that we were created by this all-powerful supreme being and how we got to today versus what we look like thousands of years ago, I think there’s enough holes in the theory of evolution to, you know, say there are some holes in that theory.”

“Teaching the controversy“– the Discovery Institute would love that. Perry is also solidly in the climate change denialist camp, saying back in 2007 (when many of his fellow GOP governors were acknowledging the scientific consensus):

“Virtually every day another scientist leaves the global warming bandwagon. … But you won’t read about that in the press because they have already invested in one side of the story. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be good stewards of our environment. We should. I am just saying when politics hijack science, it quells true scientific debate and can have dire consequences for our future.”

…Asked for elaboration on the scientists who Perry said are abandoning the “global warming bandwagon,” his office listed two dozen recent articles, almost none about scientists. They range from calls for Gore to lose his Academy Award to a posting from the Tehran Times (“Iran’s leading international daily”) stating that Gore doesn’t deserve the Nobel Peace Prize because as a senator he voted to authorize the first Gulf War.

TalkingPointsMemo DC did an informal poll at the recent Heartland Institute International Convention on Climate Change and found Perry to be a strong presidential favorite among conference goers (with Michele Bachmann running second).

Like Bachmann, Perry bills himself as a libertarian. But curiously similar to Bachmann, Perry’s libertarianism is imbued with a certain strong, but decidedly idiosyncratic claim to moral authority. Perry doesn’t have the homeschooling activism in his background as Bachmann does, but he certainly has some interesting religious autodidacts enrolled in his cause. And Perry’s 2010 book Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America From Washington makes a passionate case for states rights (two of Bachmann’s intellectual mentors were states rights advocates). Lately, Perry has been trying to reconcile his states rights libertarianism with a nation-wide social conservatism, but he’s been a staunch enough states rights advocate to have flirted with the concept of secessionism in 2009:

Gov. Rick Perry on Thursday stuck by his earlier statement that Texas can secede from the United States — a far-reaching, legally questionable prospect that nevertheless drew Perry a fresh favorable mention by Rush Limbaugh, one of the nation’s leading conservative voices…

According to The Associated Press, Perry suggested in response to a reporter’s question that Texans might at some point get so fed up with Democratic-led actions in Washington that they would want to secede.

“There’s a lot of different scenarios,” Perry said. “We’ve got a great union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that? But Texas is a very unique place, and we’re a pretty independent lot to boot.”

On Thursday, Perry called potential secession a “side issue of Texas history. … We are very proud of our Texas history; people discuss and debate the issues of can we break ourselves into five states, can we secede, a lot of interesting things that I’m sure Oklahoma and Pennsylvania would love to be able to say about their states, but the fact is, they can’t because they’re not Texas.”

A Perry spokeswoman said Perry believes Texas could secede if it wanted.

The story’s reporter contacted a Texas law professor for comment:

Sanford Levinson, a professor at the School of Law at the University of Texas at Austin, said that between the Texas Constitution, the U.S. Constitution and the 1845 Joint Resolution Annexing Texas to the United States, there is no explicit right for the state to return to its days as a republic.

“We actually fought a war over this issue, and there is no possibility whatsoever that the United States or any court would recognize a ‘right’ to secede,” Levinson said in an e-mail.

Here’s a tip for the Perry camp: Maybe Perry could find a legal scholar at Discovery or Heartland to argue that Texas could secede?

It’s booze week on NCBI ROFL! All this week we’ll be featuring articles about ethanol, ethyl alcohol, and even CH3CH2OH. Enjoy!

Invocations and intoxication: does prayer decrease alcohol consumption?

“Four methodologically diverse studies (N = 1,758) show that prayer frequency and alcohol consumption are negatively related. In Study 1 (n = 824), we used a cross-sectional design and found that higher prayer frequency was related to lower alcohol consumption and problematic drinking behavior. Study 2 (n = 702) used a longitudinal design and found that more frequent prayer at Time 1 predicted less alcohol consumption and problematic drinking behavior at Time 2, and this relationship held when controlling for baseline levels of drinking and prayer. In Study 3 (n = 117), we used an experimental design to test for a causal relationship between prayer frequency and alcohol consumption. Participants assigned to pray every day (either an undirected prayer or a prayer for a relationship partner) for 4 weeks drank about half as much alcohol at the conclusion of the study as control participants. Study 4 (n = 115) replicated the findings of Study 3, as prayer again reduced drinking by about half. ...

I’ve got a story out in Nature News about an “electronic skin” that can monitor a person’s heartbeat, brain activity, muscle contractions and more, without the need for bulky conventional electronics. It’s no thicker than a human hair and can be applied as easily as a temporary tattoo. It sticks without the need for any glue, and can flex and stretch without breaking.

It’s an amazing piece of technology. Go to Nature to read the full story. Meanwhile, I’m posting the full (lightly edited) transcript of my chat with John Rogers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who led the development of the electronic skin. He said a lot of interesting stuff that didn’t make it into the final piece and really gets across the many potential applications of the device.

Why did you try and design an electronic skin?

It’s a natural progression of the flexible electronics that we’ve been working on for years. The origins of our work date back 15 years almost. We previously looked at cardiac devices and brain imaging devices that mount on the internal tissues of the body. I’m a material scientist ...

What’s the News: Keeping track of what’s happening inside the body often requires a great deal of equipment outside it: Just think of the tangle of sensors in any hospital room. Now, though, engineers have developed an ultra-thin electrical circuit that can be pasted onto the skin just like a temporary tattoo. Once it’s served its purpose, you can simply peel it off. These patches could be provide a simpler, less restrictive way to monitor a patient’s vital signs, or even let wearers command a computer with speech or other slight movements.

How the Heck:

The researchers designed the circuit to match the mechanical properties of skin, meaning it can stretch, scrunch, and bend just like skin does. That’s no easy task, given that electronics aren’t usually elastic.
To do this, the researchers bent the circuit’s wires into a squiggly shape (see the photo above) that can expand and shrink along with the skin. They also shrank various circuit components to the minute size of the natural bumps and grooves of human skin. Since they wanted to prove that the circuit could have a range of applications, the team included all sorts of different components, ...

Here’s something you don’t see every day.. or will ever again: two Space Shuttle Orbiters, nose to nose:

[Click to enspaceplanate.]

The two Orbiters, Discovery and Endeavour, are seen here outside the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Both are being cleaned up and prepped to be shipped (or, more properly, flown) to museums; Discovery to the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, and Endeavour to the California Science Center in Los Angeles.

[UPDATE: Here's a shot of the two Orbiters seen from the air!

Very, very cool.]

I expect at some point I’ll pay these ladies a visit. Discovery and I have a connection — it took a camera I worked on up to Hubble back in 1997 — and it’ll be interesting, if also a touch melancholy, to see them up close.

Image credit: NASA

Related posts:

- Where the Shuttles will come to rest
- Deconstructing Discovery
- The fiery descent of Atlantis… in 3D!
- Atlantis, one last time in the Sun

There is much dissecting of the New Yorker profile of Michele Bachmann, and much amazement that, hey, she digs conservative Christian thinkers who come from a different galaxy than secular liberals. So here’s the L.A. Times blog Culture Monster, discussing two of Bachmann’s intellectual influences, Nancy Pearcey and Francis Schaeffer:

Pearcey’s book lauds Schaeffer’s empathy for artists who are “caught in the trap of false and harmful worldviews” — specifically, those that have trickled down from wicked Renaissance humanism. “As the medieval period merged into the Renaissance (beginning roughly in the 1300s),” she wrote, “a drumbeat began to sound for the complete emancipation of reason from revelation — a crescendo that burst into full force in the Enlightenment (beginning in the 1700s).”

Darn that Enlightenment! Next thing you know it will be birthing truly dangerous ideas, like secular democracy.

I used to write commentary like this. I don’t any more.

The reason is that I’m no longer at all surprised to hear that the Enlightenment is what actually divides us. This reality is written all over every single aspect of American politics, after all.

If you are someone who craves “total truth” (the title of Pearcey’s book), and wants uncertainty completely vanquished, you aren’t going to opt for fricken modern science, after all. Religion is going to be a heck of a lot more consoling, and especially its most fundamentalist versions.

What we have to recognize is, despite Enlightenment achievements in knowledge and in politics, people didn’t change. They’re still the same as they always were. The irony is how the people who grok Enlightenment still manage to remain so un-Enlightened about the people who don’t.

Left: the silk mesh 1 day after being seeded with fibroblast cells. Right: 4 days after seeding.

What’s the News: People have long known that spider silk has many practical uses, even in the medical field; Ancient Greeks, for example, employed the strong, flexible fiber as bandages. But the clinical uses of spider silk may stretch beyond that: scientists may someday be able to use the silk to help create artificial skin, according to new research out of the Hannover Medical School in Germany. In the study, published recently in the journal PLoS One, researchers successfully grew tissue-like skin on a mesh frame of silk harvested from golden silk orb-weaver spiders.

What’s the Context:

Adult skin is made up of two tissue layers: the epidermis and dermis. The epidermis is the outermost layer of the skin, which provides a sort of barrier against the environment. Below this is the dermis, a layer of tissue that provides strength, nourishment, and resilience to the epidermis.
Effective artificial skin (for patients that need skin grafts, ...

In 1987, Charles Bonner discovered the fossilised bones of a large sea reptile on his family ranch. It was a flipper-limbed plesiosaur, probably Polycotylus, and one of many such fossils recovered from Logan County in Kansas. But this specimen was special – there was a smaller one inside it. This plesiosaur was pregnant.

The Bonners donated the find to the Natural History Museum of LA County, where it languished for years. No one had the resources to prepare and study it until Luis Chiappe decided to include the specimen in the new exhibit halls he was preparing. He brought in Robin O’Keefe from Marshall University to analyse the historic find.

The mass of small bones inside the adult is haphazardly arranged, but O’Keefe and Chiappe think that it was clearly a foetus. The skeleton shows signs of incomplete growth, as it includes the distinctive forearm bone of Polycotylus. It shows no signs of having been chewed or exposed to stomach acid, so it wasn’t a youngster that the adult had cannibalised.

O’Keefe and Chiappe’s discovery suggests that this reptile gave birth to live young. This isn’t that surprising. Most modern ...

Modified immune cells decimated chronic lymphocytic leukemia, scientists found.

What’s the News: Striking results in a very small study have got the web a-buzz about a new cancer treatment: With three leukemia patients at the ends of their ropes, scientists modified some of their immune cells with a gene that enabled them to hunt down cancer cells. Remarkably, the treatment wiped out more than two pounds of tumor tissue in each patient, and the three have now been in remission for a year.

But what weight does such a small study carry, what about the side effects, and what do these results mean for people with other cancers?

How the Heck:

First, the team removed immune cells called T cells from each of the patients, who had chronic lymphocytic leukemia, a cancer affecting blood cells called B cells.
They had a lab-built virus insert a gene for a protein that would recognize a specific tag appearing only on the surface of B cells, as well as genes for two other proteins involved in the process, into the T cells. (This kind of treatment, called gene therapy, has been of interest in treating cancer ...

450 million light years away are two interacting galaxies. Both spirals, they are caught in each other’s gravitational claws. Already distorted and bound, eventually, to merge into one larger galaxy in a few million years, the view we have of them from Earth is both amazing and lovely… and hey: they’re punctuating their own predicament!

[Click to exclamatenate.]

Looking a lot like an exclamation point, the two galaxies together are called Arp 302 (or VV 340). This image is a combination of pictures from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory (purple) and Hubble (red, green, and blue). The bottom galaxy is a face-on spiral, while the upper one is seen more edge-on, giving the pair their typographical appearance.

They’re pretty nifty even if it weren’t for the funny coincidence of shape. The upper galaxy has a supermassive black hole in its core that’s actively feeding, but is obscured by thick layers of dust — the abundance of dust is clear in the upper picture, where in optical light it blocks the brighter material behind it (and the warped appearance ...

Click here to view gallery

The Moon is putting a big wet blanket on this year’s Perseid meteor shower, making it hard to see them.

But that’s OK: if you can’t see them, why not listen to them?

Sounds weird, but thanks to SpaceWeatherRadio, now you can! You’re not really hearing sound, of course: meteors burn up in our atmosphere at a height of 100 km or so, too high to directly carry sound waves. But the Air Force has a radar surveillance facility in Texas that beams radio waves into the sky. When a bit of cosmic fluff streaks through our sky, the ionized trail it leaves reflects the radio waves, producing an echo. This radio wave is then translated into sound, so you can effectively hear a meteor! Here’s an example of a Geminid meteor; it sounds like it could’ve been pulled right off the soundtrack for "Forbidden Planet". There’s also more info on how this works on the NASA science page.

If you want to listen live, here you go. I had it going for a while and heard several faint but ...

A new paper in Molecular Psychiatry has been reported on extensively in the media, and readers have mentioned it several times in the comments. I read it. It’s titled Genome-wide association studies establish that human intelligence is highly heritable and polygenic. But the fact is that I read this paper last year. Back then it was titled Common SNPs explain a large proportion of the heritability for human height. I kid, but you get the picture. The new paper establishes for intelligence what we already suspected: most of the genetic variation in this heritable trait is accounted for by numerous genes of small effect. You inherit variants of these numerous genes from your two parents, and your own trait value is to a large extent a combination of the parental values. The issue is not if intelligence is heritable, but the extent of that heritability.

The standard way to estimate human heritability was to track similarities across individuals with varying degrees of relatedness. For example, compare identical twin correlations on a trait with fraternal twin correlations. The main objection to these methods is that one could argue ...

You’ve wondered I’m sure. I have. Why are restaurant websites so horrifically bad?:

…The rest of the Web long ago did away with auto-playing music, Flash buttons and menus, and elaborate intro pages, but restaurant sites seem stuck in 1999. The problem is getting worse in the age of the mobile Web—Flash doesn’t work on Apple’s devices, and while some of these sites do load on non-Apple smartphones, they take forever to do so, and their finicky

…

I did get a plausible-sounding explanation of the design process from Tom Bohan, who heads up Menupages, the fantastic site that lists menus of restaurants in several large cities. “Say you’re a designer and you’ve got to demo a site you’ve spent two months creating,” Bohan explains. “Your client is someone in their 50s who runs a restaurant but is not very in tune with technology. What’s going to impress them more: Something with music and moving images, something that looks very fancy to someone who doesn’t know about optimizing the Web for consumer use, or if you show them a bare-bones site that just lists all the information? I bet it would be the former—they would think it’s great and money well spent.”

Not ...