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

The Big, the Bad, and the Boozed-Up: Weight Moderates the Effect of Alcohol on Aggression.

“Most people avoid the “big, drunk guy” in bars because they don’t want to get assaulted. Is this stereotype supported by empirical evidence? Unfortunately, no scientific work has investigated this topic. Based on the recalibrational theory of anger and embodied cognition theory, we predicted that heavier men would behave the most aggressively when intoxicated. In two independent experiments (Ns= 553 and 327, respectively), participants consumed either alcohol or placebo beverages and then completed an aggression task in which they could administer painful electric shocks to a fictitious opponent. Both experiments showed that weight interacted with alcohol and gender to predict the highest amount of aggression among intoxicated heavy men. The results suggest that an embodied cognition approach is useful in understanding intoxicated aggression. Apparently there is a kernel of truth in the stereotype of the “big, drunk, aggressive guy.”"

Photo: flickr/ peretzp

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What’s the News: A blood test can reliably tell a mother-to-be whether to expect a boy or girl as early as seven weeks into pregnancy, according to a new analysis published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The test can distinguish the sex of a fetus up to three months earlier than an ultrasound can, and doesn’t carry the slight risk of miscarriage that accompanies invasive tests such as amniocentesis.

How the Heck:

The test works by detecting tiny bits of fetal DNA floating through an expectant mom’s bloodstream. In particular, the test looks for little fragments of a Y chromosome, which only males have. Some Y chromosome DNA in the blood sample means it’s a boy; none means it’s a girl.
Of course, this method isn’t perfect. The test could fail to recognize a minute amount of male DNA in a sample, or mistakenly detect a bit of a Y chromosome where there isn’t. So, the researchers set out to determine just how accurate this test was. They analyzed all the data from 57 previous studies of the technique, looking at a combined total of more ...

What’s the News: In the squid world, the body size of male spear squid determines the mating strategies they use. Small male squid, which have no chance of physically competing with their larger rivals, must try to get with the females of the species on the sly. Now, researchers in Tokyo have learned that this difference in mating behavior has resulted in the evolution of divergent sperm types, though perhaps not in the way you’d think: diminutive male squid actually produce larger sperm than big male squid.

What’s the Context:

Male spear squid, also known as Bleeker’s squid, are either large “consorts,” or small “sneakers.” During mating, consorts will try to court a female by flashing vibrant colors across their bodies; if successful, a consort will place a packet of sperm, called a spermatophore, into the female’s oviduct, a tube that leads to her ovaries. As you’d expect from his title, the consort male will then guard his ...

Eyes, sperm, you name it: these days, chances are someone’s cooking it up on a little slab of agar and gearing up to graft/sew/implant it in anything that comes near. Today’s body part is the anal sphincter, that handy little ring of muscle that maintains the separation between your insides and your outsides. Researchers grew them from cells, implanted them in mice, and compared the new sphincters’ function with the animals’, ah, native orifices. And apparently, they were quite satisfactory.

You young whippersnappers out there might not realize it, of course. But malfunctioning sphincters are a big, messy problem as you get older, and a lot of people suffering from fecal incontinence (including women recovering from births, which can put everything down there out of whack) could benefit from this research. Right now, Depends or surgery with high rates of complication are what people with damaged sphincters have to choose from, and the possibility of replacing the muscle is intriguing.

The major step forward made here is that these sphincters, which were grown in a circular mold from human muscle biopsy cells and mouse nerve cells, could, by virtue of those nerve ...

Via Alan Boyle’s Cosmic Log blog, I am very pleased to find out that the mothballed SETI telescope array will soon be operating again!

As I reported here a few of months ago, the SETI Allen Telescope Array had to be shut down due to a lack of funds. It costs roughly $2.5M per year to keep it running, and the funding agencies were pulling back. The folks at SETI decided to create a public fund drive called SETIstars, hoping to raise the $200,000 needed to kickstart the project again.

As of a few days ago, that goal was reached! I was happy to see that people such as Jodie Foster (who played SETI astronomer Ellie Arroway in the movie "Contact") and science fiction author Larry Niven were among people who had contributed, as well as Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders.

The $200k donated is enough to get things started again, but not enough to continue operations, so it looks like there will be more fund (and awareness) raising soon by SETI. I think this is a pretty interesting endeavor; SETI has long been a political and ...

I was on travel yesterday and didn’t get a chance to link to the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal web comic, leading to approximately a metric ton of emails and notes on Twitter telling me about it. I know, the sample I have extracted below doesn’t give you a hint why people would be telling me about this particular strip, but click it to get the whole picture.

OK, spoilers below the fold! Don’t read until you’ve looked at the comic!

Yes, that’s me, and yes, that’s Neil Tyson. Normally, I’d be concerned (if not outright repulsed) by being involved in the life cycle of a parasitic organism, but since (SMBC artist) Zach’s wife, Kelly, studies those things, I have to face the fact that he does this out of love. Also, the cercariae in Zach’s brain make him create comics that he knows will get put into my blog, so who’s the parasite and who’s the host now, huh?

[NB: Zach is now selling his SMBC book. You may also recognize his fashion model at the bottom of that page. Time to update my resumé!]

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My latest DeSmog piece is about the classroom climate for climate science teaching–and how poisonous it is getting. It starts like this:

A few months back, those who care about accurate climate science and energy education in high school classes registered a minor victory. Under fire from outlets like The New York Times, the education publishing behemoth Scholastic (of Clifford the Big Red Dog and Harry Potter fame) pulled an energy curriculum sponsored by the American Coal Foundation, which gave a nice PR sheen to coal without bothering to cover, uh, the whole environmental angle. The curriculum had reportedly already been mailed to 66,000 classrooms by the time it got yanked.

When it comes to undermining accurate and responsible climate and energy education at the high school level, Scholastic may have been the most prominent transgressor. But precisely because it is a massive and respected educational publisher, and actually careswhat The New York Times thinks, it was also the most moderate and easy to reason with.

Although it’s hard to find online now, I’ve reviewed the offending coal curriculum, entitled “The United States of Energy.” In my view, it didn’t even contain any obvious falsehoods—except for errors of omission. It was more a case of subtle greenwashing.

What’s currently seeping into classrooms across the country is far, far worse—more ideological, and more difficult to stop. We’re talking about outright climate denial being fed to students—and accurate climate science teaching being attacked by aggressive Tea Party-style ideologues.

You can read on here….

By Jon Winsor

A couple weeks ago, when Chris described the Tea Party as authoritarian, I had to stop and think–how could that be? The Tea Party bills itself as libertarian. How could it be simultaneously authoritarian? How would that work?

Ryan Lizza’s great profile of Michele Bachmann in The New Yorker shows us. I’d encourage people to read the whole thing, but a couple key paragraphs jumped out at me. The first is Lizza’s description of Bachmann’s religious influences: theologian Francis Schaeffer (a very important theologian for modern evangelical activism), and a leading proponent of Schaffer’s, Nancy Pearcey:

[Pearcey taught] readers how to implement Schaeffer’s idea that a Biblical world view should suffuse every aspect of one’s life. She tells her readers to be extremely cautious with ideas from non-Christians. There may “be occasions when Christians are mistaken on some point while nonbelievers get it right,” she writes in “Total Truth.” “Nevertheless, the overall systems of thought constructed by nonbelievers will be false—for if the system is not built on Biblical truth, then it will be built on some other ultimate principle. Even individual truths will be seen through the distorting lens of a false world view.

Is the Bible a clearly discernible “system” that competes with all other systems? There are many ways to interpret the Bible, so who gets to say when the Bible and a “system” conflicts? The implication is that some people are continually right in some sense, and others are continually wrong, regardless of the demonstrable cases where the “right” people might be in error.

A second paragraph that jumped out at me has to do with the beginning of Bachmann’s political career:

Bachmann was getting interested in politics just as her party was getting interested in people like her. In the late nineteen-nineties, she began travelling throughout Minnesota, delivering lectures in churches, and writing pamphlets, on the perils of a federal education law known as School to Work, which supported vocational training, and a Minnesota education law known as Profile of Learning, which set state education standards. In one pamphlet, she wrote that federal education law “embraces a socialist, globalist worldview; loyalty to all government and not America.” In another, she warned of a “new restructuring of American society,” beginning with “workforce boards” that would tell every student the specific career options he or she could pursue, turning children into “human resources for a centrally planned economy.”

David Frum comments on this phase of Bachmann’s development:

This kind of talk would sound paranoid to most of us. It emerges from a religious philosophy that rejects the federal government as an alien instrument of destruction, ripping apart a Christian society. Bachmann’s religiously grounded rejection of the American state finds a hearing with many more conventional conservatives radicalized by today’s hard economic times.

When Bachmann is asked what principle motivates her, her answer is ”liberty”. But Lizza notes dryly, ”It is a peculiarity of the current political moment that a politician with a history of pushing sectarian religious beliefs in government has become a hero to a libertarian movement.”

Thinking over the above, it’s helpful to distinguish two strands of American libertarianism. The first is the kind we think of with Ron Paul or Reason magazine. This view believes in the power of a free individual’s reason to improve life, and it is plausibly anti-authoritarian (although arguably, it has its own authorities and ways of being absolute). The second libertarianism has to do with freedom from the federal government. This is not necessarily because you dislike authority. You might just view the federal government as a rival authority to the authority you want. With this second kind of libertarianism, “states rights” comes to mind, and also the religious homeschool movement.

Michele Bachmann has this second view in spades. Not only is she a staunch disciple of Schaeffer and Pearcey, but also John Eidsmoe (who told an interviewer “it was the state [of Alabama's] ‘constitutional right to secede,’ and that ‘Jefferson Davis and John C. Calhoun understood the Constitution better than did Abraham Lincoln…’”), and also J. Steven Wilkins (“the leading proponent of the theory that the South was an orthodox Christian nation unjustly attacked by the godless North”), and David A. Noebel (a homeschooling activist and “longtime John Birch society member whose pamphlets include… ‘Communism, Hypnotism, and the Beatles.’”)

So while the first type of libertarianism at least has a classical liberal’s respect for reason and shared facts, Bachmann’s style of libertarianism seems much more Manichean, and paradoxically authoritarian (where a particular “moral” authority is very strong. Maybe calling it libertarianism is a stretch). If we’re going to talk to a Michele Bachmann about just about any national policy, particularly science-related policy, right out of the gate reason and shared facts are going to have a hard time.

The March 2011 earthquake and subsequent tsunami off the coast of Japan did unimaginable damage. The tsunami was several meters high, marching a long way inland, and wiped out entire towns.

It also swept out to sea, expanding across the planet. By the time it hit the Antarctic ice shelf — 13,000 km away, taking less than a day — it was well under a meter high. But water is dense (a cubic meter weighs a ton!) and that much of it hitting the ice can cause it to flex and break.

And that’s precisely what happened:

[Click to antarcticenate.]

That’s the Sulzberger ice shelf on the coast of Antarctica and the Ross Sea. A few days before this image was taken those gigantic blocks of ice were still part of the shelf (though cracks were already present), and in fact the big one had been part of the shelf for over four decades at least. The pounding wave of the tsunami broke up the shelf, sending those blocks into the sea.

Mind you, that big rectangular block of ice is about 11 km (6.6 miles) across — about the size of ...

UPDATE:  Solved by Patrick at 12:07 CDT

It has finally (finally) been raining some in Central Texas.  Don’t know yet if it’ll be enough to end the drought, but it sure is nice.

So anyway, I’m feeling frisky this morning — how about you?  Are you ready to tackle this week’s riddle?  We’re still knocking about in the real world, and today’s challenge should keep you occupied for two or three minutes of your real day. Ready?

Goddess Astraea - possibly the work of August P. Gaudens, 1886

It may not be there.  It probably IS there, but it may not be.

This is a very recently discovery.

That said, we’ve been looking for this for a very long time.

bird's-eye view

Once we found it, it changed the way we think about ourselves.

This is us, and then some.

Today’s subject has something specific in common with the Moon.

(...pretty...)

If this is Goldilocks, then where are the three bears?

It has plenty of company in its own neighborhood.

The Terminator has received some bad press lately; here, however, the terminator is exactly what you want to see.

That wraps up another exciting, fun-filled two minutes of your day.  I’ll be in the comment section, so pop in and keep me company.  Better get your guess in early; I doubt this one stays open for long.

Well, it seemed like a good idea...

Read here:

Standard & Poor’s director said for the first time Thursday that one reason the United States lost its triple-A credit rating was that several lawmakers expressed skepticism about the serious consequences of a credit default — a position put forth by some Republicans.

Without specifically mentioning Republicans, S&P senior director Joydeep Mukherji said the stability and effectiveness of American political institutions were undermined by the fact that “people in the political arena were even talking about a potential default,” Mukherji said.

“That a country even has such voices, albeit a minority, is something notable,” he added. “This kind of rhetoric is not common amongst AAA sovereigns.”

I’ve been critical of S&P’s reasoning. The ratings agency itself has a lot to answer for and doesn’t strike me as very credible. But honestly, this more forthcoming political rationale for a downgrade makes a lot more sense than anything else I’ve heard.

I used to think global warming denial was the most alarming example of motivated reasoning in our politics. But maybe not. Denying what can at least be made to appear a longer term threat is one thing. Denying the idea that a credit default would be immediately devastating, or arguing that it would be manageable or even desirable, strikes me as an even more extreme concoction and rationalization.

I’m also still waiting for the Onion headline: “S&P Downgrades Earth; Cites Unbalanced Carbon Budget.”

Top picks

Spoiler warning: spoilers don’t spoil experiences, by Jonah Lehrer

Should you have the right to be “forgotten” online? In Europe, lawsuits & talk of regulations

The science of yodelling. Pure joy by Jennifer Ouellette. I’d quote a bit, but it’s just golden throughout.

Why do people confess to crimes they haven’t committed. A must-read trio of articles

Five things you really don’t want hacked. A great piece by Veronique Greenwood

Placebo brain surgery – it’s not exactly brain surgery, but is it necessary? A great piece by Anna Katsnelson.

Susan Greenfield has been at it again, suggesting links between the internet and autism. Martin Robbins looks at what she said versus what she says she said Carl Zimmer starts a meme. And the Neuroskeptic proves that Susan Greenfield causes autism

How do you do a clinical trial of scorpion antivenom? With great, great difficulty

Bradley Voytek on “the craziest, most unethical study I’ve ever seen”

Xu Xing has discovered around 30 dinosaur species but hadn’t even heard of dinos when he was assigned to the palaeontology department.

What field do blind mathematicians tend to work in? Geometry.

Sharp Alexis Madrigal analysis on why Facebook and ...

Hey, I haven’t posted a fun pareidolia (patterns that look like faces or figures) news article in a while, and this is a good one: a man in Finland found this interesting image on his wall:

[Here's the Google translation into English.]

Of course, the article claims it looks like the Virgin Mary.

Now look: I know that the standard depiction of Mary is usually with her head bent, covered in a cowl, with a robe of some sort. That kind of figure lends itself to pareidolia — it’s an easy shape to make, from oil stains to

We’ve now come to the end of the Space Shuttle … Era? … Generation? … Interlude? … Epoch?  Well, anyway, we’re at the end of the program.  The final mission, STS-135, landed safely July 21, 2011.  Many of us are saddened to see the end of the program; some fearing it to be the harbinger of the end of manned space exploration.

First rattle out of the box - Columbia on the launch pad NASA image, STS-1

The Space Shuttle Program encompassed 30 years (1981 – 2011) of testing and low-orbit missions.  Conception and design of the orbiter began in the 70s, but NASA was working on the concept by at least 1958, before the Apollo Program.  The first orbiter, Enterprise, was never meant to fly in space.  It was used for gliding and landing tests, and flew three missions (in 1977).  The first true spacecraft was Columbia, and her maiden flight was April 12, 1981.

NASA image - Space Shuttle vs Soyuz TM, to scale

The shuttles usually ended each mission by landing at Kennedy Space Center.  Although there were many locations world-wide large enough for the shuttle, if it wasn’t landed at Kennedy a special Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (also known as a “big honking airplane”) would have to piggy-back the shuttle back to the Space Center.

NASA - Orbiter mount on SCA... just in case those technicians forget

Two shuttles, Challenger and Columbia, were lost – taking 14 lives – during the program’s 30-year history.

NASA - Atlantis docked to Mir Space Station

NASA was left with three space-worthy shuttles at the end of the program.  Like the thoroughbreds they are, the shuttles will be honorably retired.  Twenty museums requested the honor of displaying one of the crafts.  Each museum selected will be responsible for the estimated $28.8 million cost of preparing the shuttles for display.

Atlantis will go to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor’s Complex, near Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Discovery is to be displayed at the Udvar-Hazy Center of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, near Washington D.C.

Endeavour will go to the California Science Center, Los Angeles, California.

Enterprise ( the shuttle never flown in space), currently at the Smithsonian, will be moved to the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum in New York City.

Here’s a link that shows you the flight deck of the decommissioned Discovery.  Rob found this and sent it to me.

NASA - Space Shuttle Program Commemorative Patch

NOTE:  Be sure to click on the first image.  I got a great enlargement of that one.

Saturn from Cassini. Click for larger. Image credit(s): NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

YAY!!  The Cassini Scientist for a Day Essay Contest for 2011 is on!

If you are a US student in grades 5 to 12 or a teacher or a parent I encourage you to participate in one way or another.  I especially would encourage the young ladies to participate.  I keep hearing how girls don’t do as well in science as boys and I firmly believe that is a load of …. well you get the idea

Don’t let that “Essay” part scare you off, it’s only 500 words about on of three interesting imaging targets: Saturn or the moons Hyperion, Rhea & Titan.  A mere 500 words should be pretty easy actually especially since you don’t have to do it on your own, you can work in groups of up to four.

Easy breezy right?  Sure it is.  Winners get to participate in a teleconference with Cassini Scientists and engineers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and EVERYBODY receives a certificate of participation.  Hey talk about an easy “A” at the school science fair!!

I am here to help in any way I can too.

You have plenty of time but I’d not drag my feet too much the contest deadline is noon (Pacific Time) on October 26, 2011.  Don’t worry I’ll repeat this post a few times before now and then to remind you.  Yes I know most students are on vacation still, but think of this as a fun personal project you can use to your advantage once school does begin.

To find out more visit the Cassini Scientist for a Day website and you can send inquiries about the contest to: scientistforaday@jpl.nasa.gov.

Full frame of Vesta. Click for larger. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

Good picture isn’t it?  Good?  Incredible is a better adjective.  If you want to REALLY be wowed, check out the images on the Dawn webpage.

Here’s NASA’s description of the image:

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft obtained this image of the giant asteroid Vesta with its framing camera on July 24, 2011. It was taken from a distance of about 3,200 miles (5,200 kilometers). Dawn entered orbit around Vesta on July 15, and will spend a year orbiting the body. After that, the next stop on its itinerary will be an encounter with the dwarf planet Ceres.

The Dawn mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. It is a project of the Discovery Program, managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, Va., designed and built the Dawn spacecraft.

The framing cameras have been developed and built under the leadership of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, with significant contributions by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) Institute of Planetary Research, Berlin, and in coordination with the Institute of Computer and Communication Network Engineering, Braunschweig, Germany. The framing camera project is funded by NASA, the Max Planck Society and DLR. More information about Dawn is online at http://www.nasa.gov/dawn .

Look at this from NASA:

Image: NASA/Lockheed Martin

Here’s what NASA has to say on it:

Another Take on Supersonic

Our ability to fly at supersonic speeds over land in civil aircraft depends on our ability to reduce the level of sonic booms. NASA has been exploring a variety of options for quieting the boom, starting with design concepts and moving through wind tunnel tests to flight tests of new technologies. This rendering of a possible future civil supersonic transport shows a vehicle that is shaped to reduce the sonic shockwave signature and also to reduce drag.

Now, what do you think about supersonic civil aircraft?  I don’t think sonic booms should be such a big issue.  I grew up hearing them, and I’m just fine.  (twitch, twitch)

Wow. I wanted to pass this NASA news on to you, because WOW.  About 2/3 of your body is composed of oxygen, by the way.)

WASHINGTON — The Herschel Space Observatory’s large telescope and state-of-the-art infrared detectors have provided the first confirmed finding of oxygen molecules in space. The molecules were discovered in the Orion star-forming complex.

Individual atoms of oxygen are common in space, particularly around massive stars. But, molecular oxygen, which makes up about 20 percent of the air we breathe, has eluded astronomers until now.

“Oxygen gas was discovered in the 1770s, but it’s taken us more than 230 years to finally say with certainty that this very simple molecule exists in space,” said Paul Goldsmith, NASA’s Herschel project scientist at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif.

Goldsmith is lead author of a recent paper describing the findings in the Astrophysical Journal. Herschel is a European Space Agency-led mission with important NASA contributions.

Astronomers searched for the elusive molecules in space for decades using balloons, as well as ground- and space-based telescopes. The Swedish Odin telescope spotted the molecule in 2007, but the sighting could not be confirmed.

Goldsmith and his colleagues propose that oxygen is locked up in water ice that coats tiny dust grains. They think the oxygen detected by Herschel in the Orion nebula was formed after starlight warmed the icy grains, releasing water, which was converted into oxygen molecules.

“This explains where some of the oxygen might be hiding,” said Goldsmith. “But we didn’t find large amounts of it, and still don’t understand what is so special about the spots where we find it. The universe still holds many secrets.”

The researchers plan to continue their hunt for oxygen molecules in other star-forming regions.

“Oxygen is the third most common element in the universe and its molecular form must be abundant in space,” said Bill Danchi, Herschel program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Herschel is proving a powerful tool to probe this unsolved mystery. The observatory gives astronomers an innovative tool to look at a whole new set of wavelengths where the tell-tale signature of oxygen may be hiding.”

Herschel is a European Space Agency cornerstone mission, with science instruments provided by consortia of European institutes. NASA’s Herschel Project Office is based at JPL, which contributed mission-enabling technology for two of Herschel’s three science instruments.

The NASA Herschel Science Center, part of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, supports the U.S. astronomical community. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

I few years ago I complained that no one was using the General Social Survey web interface for blogging, a practice which probably can be traced back to the Inductivist (yes, social scientists use the GSS constantly, but they use it to publish papers, not blog posts). Kevin Drum noted my lament in late 2008 and promised that he’d revisit the GSS in the future. He hasn’t. That’s fine, there are 1 million things I mean to do which I don’t manage to get to. But still, it’s kind of depressing to me the amount of opinion people can express which they don’t bother to follow up on by using a web interface to a rich data source which requires no more than 1997 era browser skills.

There’s a lot you can do with the GSS interface, but I thought it might be useful to do something very simple so that people can see how easy it really is. Since most of the people I follow on twitter lean Left I see a lot of political chatter which is concerning to that segment of the population. ...

Early in his career the famed evolutionary biologist William D. Hamilton had a strong interest in eugenics. In his autobiographical collection of papers Hamilton admits that he suspects these tendencies were the reason for the suspicion he aroused in some of the more senior scientists in Britain after World War II. But Hamilton later also admits that his earlier enthusiasms for social engineering through selection for “good traits” may have been wrong-headed, insofar as the selection pressures of evolution are protean, and what may be adaptive perfection in one age may be doom in another (or, in the world of international migration, you can substitute place for time). This does not mean that Hamilton abandoned his worry about increased “genetic load” in the human population (deleterious mutations accumulating in the human gene pool because the “unfit” now live and breed thanks to modern medicine). It is simply that such ideas and concerns can’t be easily reduced into simple formulas and maxims, because evolutionary processes can vary in their implications over time and place.

I thought of these issues when stumbling upon this curious comment over at Genetic Future in regards to preimplantation genetic diagnosis:

Genetic selection will ...