“Each year, millions of people travel aboard airplanes and cruise ships. A significant portion of the newer larger airplanes (the Boeing 767 and the Aerobus) and cruise ships now have vacuum toilet systems. There have been no reports in the medical literature on the frequency of injuries associated with the use of these toilets, but serious injury, including soft tissue trauma and organ evisceration, may be associated with the use of such devices.) The investigators report a case of significant perineal injury accompanied by hypotension associated with the use of a vacuum toilet on an airplane.

A 37-year-old white female was using a vacuum toilet on board an airplane. The toilet seat was upright. The woman was sitting directly on the commode. After flushing while still seated, she experienced pain in the perineal area. She was unable to remove herself from the toilet because of the created suction and she required assistance from the flight attendants. The patient experienced vaginal bleeding, and bright red blood was noted in the toilet. Paramedics were called when the plane landed. There was no diversion of the aircraft…

…Two risk factors for vacuum toilet injury can ...

When you build and launch a high-resolution solar observatory that stares at the Sun 24 hours a day, you’re bound to catch some pretty cool stuff. As proof, check out this video of a stunning prominence erupting from the Sun’s surface on July 12, 2011, as seen by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory:

[Make sure you set the resolution to at least 720p.]

That’s really graceful, especially considering that tower reached the staggering height of about 150,000 km (90,000 miles) above the Sun in just a few minutes!

The gas on the Sun is ionized, which means it’s had one or more electrons ripped away from its atoms. Technically called a plasma, this makes it sensitive to the Sun’s strong magnetic forces. That becomes really obvious after it starts to collapse; it doesn’t follow a ballistic trajectory like you’d expect (the path a ball thrown up in the air would follow), but instead flows along the Sun’s magnetic field lines. This video is in the ultraviolet, where such a plasma glows brightly.

For a moment there, just at its peak, it coincidentally looks like a classic angel with wings spread. Of course, once the angel dissolves it forms more of ...

I would like to throw out the word that I am looking for a person with Malagasy ancestry for the African Ancestry Project. To my knowledge there are no thick marker autosomal analyses of the Malagasy people. After my recent exploration of Southeast Asian genetics I think even one individual would be highly informative.

As usual I would guarantee that these data are entirely private, and I do not share it with anyone. But in this case I would like to make an exception and stipulate that Joseph K. Pickrell, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, would also be very interested in access to a Malagasy genotype for the purposes of research. Since this is an undersampled population the marginal returns to a Malagasy genotype would be enormous for science, a public good rather than just a private gain.

Also, I am still looking for a Tutsi genotype so that I can ascertain the origin of this population.

Please contact me at africanancestryproject -at- gmail -dot- com.

Francais:
Je recherche une personne d’origine malgache dans le cadre du projet “l’African Ancestry Project”.

A ma connaissance, il n’existe à ce jour aucune analyse des marqueurs autosomiques du peuple malgache. ...

The marsh-loving song sparrow uses its beak to stay cool.

What’s the News: Scientists have long known that the size and shape of a bird’s beak is largely dependent on its diet. A hummingbird’s long, thin beak, for example, allows it to reach deep down into a tubular flower to get nectar. But in a new study in the journal Ecography, scientists have found that birds in warm climates have evolved beaks larger than their cooler-climate counterparts as a means of staying cool (birds, like most animals, don’t sweat). The new study adds weight to past research suggesting the same thing.

What’s the Context:

Allen’s Rule, a scientific theory coined by zoologist Joel Asaph Allen in 1887, states that warm-blooded animals will have longer appendages in hotter climates than those living in colder climates. The greater surface area allows the animals to give off more heat and keep cool.
A study last year showed that the rule may apply to birds’ beaks, too. ...

Lots of commentary below on my post about extramarital sex. I guess that’s fine, but I’m really not too interested your theories, I can do basic logic after introspection too. In fact, I can go down the street and ask a random person and I’m sure they could offer up after the fact rationales for the results I reported (people are always interested in sex and sharp about models to explain it). Instead, here’s the variable you need to use in the GSS: XMARSEX. I assume forms and graphical user interfaces worthy of 1997 are not too intimidating to readers of this weblog even if they perplex Matt Yglesias?

In any case, here’s some more results. First, I wanted to double check that there was in fact decreased tolerance of extramarital sex over the years. Let’s break it down by sex:

Some of you were curious about the demographic correlates of this behavior. Please note that all the following charts are limited to the year 2000 and later. The sample sizes for XMARSEX were rather large, so I saw no ...

Pollination is the process whereby plants turn animals into sex toys. With nutritious nectar, striking flowers (and the odd bit of deceit), they lure in animal carriers that can transport their pollen to another flower. These partnerships have painted the world in a resplendent palette of flowery hues. But pollination can create other feasts for the senses that are oblivious to us visually focused humans.

The Cuban rainforest vine Marcgravia evenia is pollinated by bats, which find their way around with sonar rather than sight. They make high-pitched clicks and time the returning echoes to “see” the world in rebounding sound. And M.evenia exploits that super-sense with a leaf that doubles as a sonar dish. It reflects the bats’ calls into strong, distinctive echoes, creating a sonic beacon that stands out among the general clatter of the forest.

The vine also has a ring of red and white flowers, sitting over a cup full of nectar. But above the flowers, it has one or two dish-shaped leaves that are twisted upwards, so the concave side faces out towards approaching pollinators. In cross-section, they could form the cap of ...

It’s been a while, and I’ve been meaning to provide an update on our little charity suggestion bleg. If you’ll recall, I wanted to take my ill-gotten gains from the 3 Quarks Daily Prize and send them to a worthy charity, but rather than just defaulting to my usual favorites I sought from new wisdom from the collective intelligence out there.

The bad news — in some sense — is that there are far too many truly worthy causes. Apparently we have a way to go before achieving a utopian condition throughout all the countries of Earth. Who knew?

Nevertheless I was happy to learn about GiveWell, an organization whose purpose it to figure out what kinds of charitable donations actually have the greatest impact. (It was advocated by Ian, Edgar, and Rationalist.) It’s obvious that different types of giving can have disparate impacts, but it’s very hard to figure out what approach is most effective, and having an organization dedicated to doing the hard work of figuring that out is invaluable.

Just to get an idea of what we’re talking about: to rate the relative effectiveness of different programs, GiveWell uses a metric called Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALY). It’s a well-known (in these circles) number, also used by the World Health Organization and others. The idea is to make some attempt — as hard as this may be from a rigorous philosophical perspective — to boil different kinds of good deeds to a single number. Maybe you actually increase someone’s lifespan, or maybe you prevent blindness — DALY boils it all down to one quantity.

And what you then find is — an extraordinary range of different values for different forms of charity. At the extreme end, consider supporting improved water sanitation to prevent diarrhea, which certainly sounds like a good idea to me. That gets you $4,185/DALY, so it takes about four grand to do the equivalent of giving someone an extra year of life. Compare this to deworming programs, which come in at $3/DALY. In this metric, in other words, deworming is about a thousand times more cost-effective than water sanitation. Obviously this is a crude measure, but it gives some idea of the range of possible outcomes.

When it comes to messy human problems, I don’t actually valorize “metrics” and “data” above all else; sometimes things work but it’s hard to quantify how much good they are actually doing. Nevertheless, in a situation of relative ignorance it’s really wonderful to have an organization trying to work out these numbers the best they can. My favorite part of the GiveWell website was the page labeled Shortcomings — not other people’s shortcomings, but their own shortcomings. They want to be as upfront and transparent as possible about their mistakes, and strive to do better. Yay!

After all that, I didn’t actually give the donation to GiveWell itself. Rather, I just followed their advice and gave to their highest-ranked charity: Village Reach, an organization that works to improve access to healthcare in remote and underserved areas in Africa and elsewhere. (Immunization programs, in general, are extremely cost-effective ways of improving health in poor communities.) It’s a relatively new, still quite small program, but with impressive effectiveness. I was very happy to donate, and certainly will continue to do so.

Which doesn’t mean that there still aren’t many other great choices. Thanks to everyone for chipping in with suggestions.

Early Earth’s chemical seas are presumed to have given rise to the first life, but how could anything so complex have come from such a disorganized stew of molecules? That’s the question Gerald Joyce of the Scripps Research Institute is exploring with his swarms of self-replicating RNA, which can evolve over time. Along with Steve Benner, Craig Venter, Jack Szostak, and others, he is on the road to creating life in the lab, thus giving us insight into both our origins and what, exactly, “life” is. As Dennis Overbye writes in a look at the field in the New York Times:

The possibilities of a second example of life are as deep as the imagination. It could be based on DNA that uses a different genetic code, with perhaps more or fewer than four letters; it could be based on some complex molecule other than DNA, or more than the 20 amino acids from which our own proteins are made, or even some kind of chemistry based on something other than carbon and the other elements that we take for granted, like phosphorous or iron. Others wonder whether chemistry ...

Researchers at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks have discovered a way to induce hibernation in arctic ground squirrels—by administering a substance that stimulates the brain receptors of adenosine, a molecule involved in slowing nerve cell activity. Induced hibernation could someday be used to preserve the brain functions of human stroke victims, though that’s still a ways off as the current technique only works on the arctic ground squirrels during hibernation season.

[Read more at the Australian and ScienceDaily]

Image: Flickr/Threat to Democracy

Clarification: This show does not air until Monday. I was getting reader suggestions for interview questions. We pre-record the show, usually the week before it airs. Stand by for the link…

In about three and a half hours, I interview David Frum of FrumForum.com and Kenneth Silber, a frequent contributor on science over there. The topic of the show is conservatism, science, and reality–and I’ve gotten two conservatives, albeit pretty much the opposite of Tea Partiers, to talk about it.

It is my perception that across a wide array of issues–from health care to, uh, light bulb policy–the U.S. political right today just views the world differently, and has a different set of facts (which, I’m afraid, tend to be wrong). I want Frum, and Silber, to tell me to what extent I’m right, and to what extent I’m wrong–and also to show me where the liberal blind spots are.

But of course, you may also have questions for them–so suggest away. They’ll be considered if posted in the next three hours or so….

By the way, here is a piece by Silber, entitled “How I Joined the Vast RINO Conspiracy.” And here is Frum’s classic article taking on Rush Limbaugh.

A pair of astronomers monitoring an all-sky camera got a surprise (PDF) when they checked data from last February: a half dozen meteors all seemed to come from the same spot in the sky, indicating they all had a common origin. After doing some calculations, they found that they probably come from a parent comet with an orbit that’s at least 53 years long. Moreover, the orbit of this comet crosses that of the Earth, meaning we may have a close encounter with this object sometime in the future.

And because I can sense the oncoming panic on the web over this news, let me break it down for you. I’ll give you the science (which is cool), how we know this unseen comet may be potentially, um, interesting, then the reason you don’t need to run around in circles screaming (spoiler: it’s rude to others nearby, but also unnecessary).

But just to be up front: should you panic? Nope. We know there are objects out there that could hit us in the future sometime. This comet is in many ways just another one. As I’ll point out below, we pass ...

I’ve posted twice now about the psychology underlying the debt ceiling negotiations, and the insoluble problem that occurs when one side is inclined to think in black and white, and one side is not. We rarely admit that we have a divide over nuance and compromise at the heart of our politics, and yet the evidence supporting this idea is strong, and the problem seems to be getting worse.

Now comes the Wall Street Journal, of all places, reaffirming this assessment in a fascinating, albeit seemingly unconscious way:

The idea seems to be that if the House GOP refuses to raise the debt ceiling, a default crisis or gradual government shutdown will ensue, and the public will turn en masse against . . . Barack Obama. The Republican House that failed to raise the debt ceiling would somehow escape all blame. Then Democrats would have no choice but to pass a balanced-budget amendment and reform entitlements, and the tea-party Hobbits could return to Middle Earth having defeated Mordor.

This is the kind of crack political thinking that turned Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell into GOP Senate nominees. The reality is that the debt limit will be raised one way or another, and the only issue now is with how much fiscal reform and what political fallout.

First just a technical matter: Mordor is part of Middle Earth. The Journal means “return to the Shire.” C’mon, don’t conservatives know this stuff?

More broadly, is not the Journal, itself a conservative outlet, affirming with this analogy the idea that the Tea Party sees the world in black and white, good and evil? And that this is um, kind of an inadequate way of looking at things?

I myself, though, am inclined to use a Star Wars analogy.

In the immortal words of Obi Wan Kenobi: ”Only a Sith deals in absolutes.”

Click here to view gallery

Today was the first day–and may not be the last–that the markets got measurably riled by the debt ceiling battle. Traders finally let fear get the better of them and dumped stocks (and much else). Lots of people have been saying this was going to happen; and it’s only a small slice of what could happen, since there was nothing to spook the markets today other than continuing Washington gridlock. It is not like a default has come yet, or a credit downgrade. Then, we could see a mega selloff akin to the collapse of 2008.

Why do we know that the debt ceiling impasse is starting to stoke fear? Simple: We have a measurement of it. Here’s CNN Money:

One sign of the increasing worries among investors is the VIX (VIX), also known as Wall Street’s “fear gauge,” which jumped by more than 13% on Wednesday alone. The index is up nearly 20% in the past five days.

So traders have been inching towards being afraid, and today they finally gave in and ran.

Which gets me to what I don’t understand about right wing debt ceiling denial: It’s one thing to claim that President Obama and Treasury Secretary Geithner are bluffing, and the government will still be able to pay its bills after August 2. I don’t believe that, but I can see how Tea Partiers could believe it.

But even then, I don’t see how you could believe that the stock market, or the economy, will somehow survive this brinksmanship. Markets aren’t rational–they often run on rumor, and they often run on fear. In other words, it doesn’t matter whether or not you believe what Obama says. It matters what the market will do if you force the issue. And now, the market is doing it.

But of course, there will be another rationalization available to debt ceiling deniers. When the market crashes even further, and their own constituents are further damaged, they will be able to content themselves by saying, “It’s Obama’s fault.”

Representatives of Szechuan and Shangdong cuisine

The Pith: The Han Chinese are genetically diverse, due to geographic scale of range, hybridization with other populations, and possibly local adaptation.

In the USA we often speak of “Chinese food.” This is rather peculiar because there isn’t any generic “Chinese cuisine.” Rather, there are regional cuisines, which share a broad family similarity. Similarly, American “Mexican food” and “Indian food” also have no true equivalent in Mexico or India (naturally the novel American culinary concoctions often exhibit biases in the regions from which they sample due to our preferences and connections; non-vegetarian Punjabi elements dominate over Udupi, while much authentic Mexican American food has a bias toward the northern states of that nation). But to a first approximation there is some sense in speaking of a general class of cuisine which exhibits a lot of internal structure and variation, so long as one understands that there is an important finer grain of categorization.

Some of the same applies to genetic categorizations. Consider two of the populations in the original HapMap, the Yoruba from Nigeria, and the Chinese from Beijing. There are ~30 million ...

Facial Expressions of Emotion: Are Angry Faces Detected More Efficiently?

“The rapid detection of facial expressions of anger or threat has obvious adaptive value. In this study, we examined the efficiency of facial processing by means of a visual search task. Participants searched displays of schematic faces and were required to determine whether the faces displayed were all the same or whether one was different. Four main results were found: (1) When displays contained the same faces, people were slower in detecting the absence of a discrepant face when the faces displayed angry (or sad/angry) rather than happy expressions. (2) When displays contained a discrepant face people were faster in detecting this when the discrepant face displayed an angry rather than a happy expression. (3) Neither of these patterns for same and different displays was apparent when face displays were inverted, or when just the mouth was presented in isolation. (4) The search slopes for angry targets were significantly lower than for happy targets. These results suggest that detection of angry facial expressions is fast and efficient, although does not “pop-out” in the traditional sense.”

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Are Empowered Women Driving Reduced Tolerance Of Extramarital Affairs?:

My girlfriend’s theory about this, which makes sense to me, is that as women’s labor market opportunities have improved their dependency on husbands for economic security has declined and, in turn, their willingness to put up with misbehavior has gone down. Looking at a gender breakdown of responses might shed some light on this, but I can’t figure out how to work the General Social Survey website.

He’s talking about a chart which shows decline in tolerance of extramarital sex by education:

I just replicated but broke it down by male and female:

A few weeks back I wrote about the remarkable milestones passed by the Tevatron and LHC, and prognosticated that if there was ever a time when new discoveries could come out rapidly, this was it, especially for the LHC experiments analyzing a data sample 30 times larger than the previous one.

The result? Nature is being coy – in basically every new particle search for new particles and phenomena conducted by the CMS and ATLAS experiments at the LHC, we see naught but eerie agreement with the predictions for ordinary standard model background.

A huge raft of results has been presented at two large international conferences: the annual European Physical Society meeting on high energy physics in Grenoble, France, and the Particles and Nuclei International Conference (PANIC11) at MIT in Cambridge, MA. I presented the CMS results on the searches for the Higgs boson at the latter on Tuesday…more on that below.

There is a trove of material available online for these two conferences and at the ATLAS and CMS public physics result web sites. Let’s just look at a couple examples, though.

The theme of the PANIC conference was the centennial of Rutherford’s discovery of the nucleus, and what better way to celebrate it than to essentially perform his experiment with a million times more energy, and peer inside quarks to see if…well, to see if there is an inside, to see if they have substructure. Naturally, to do the experiment we smash quarks together and see if we see any hint that there is something smaller inside, which would manifest itself as an excess of particle jets coming out sideways to the beam, much as Rutherford’s students Geiger and Marsden saw alpha particles deflected from their gold foil at angles far too large to explain.

But in the first graph here all we see is a smooth spectrum, agreeing exceedingly well with the predictions, extending out to huge energies…no bumps, no excess in the tails, and no excess of jets coming out sideways. In one fell swoop we’ve extended the limit on the size of quarks down by a factor of three or four. As far as we can tell, quarks are pointlike. It’s the subject of the first paper from CMS using 1 fb-1.

Another huge effort went into searching for evidence that there may be supersymmetric partners for the known fermions and bosons – a search that has been underway for the past three decades. If supersymmetry is present in nature it would help solve a theoretical riddle as to why the calculated mass of the much-touted Higgs boson can remain stable in the face of enormous quantum mechanical correction factors. Supersymmertry would provide a mechanism to largely cancel these corrections.

Supersymmetry could show up in a variety of ways at the Tevatron and LHC, but with three and a half times more energy than the Tevatron, the LHC has a huge advantage in this search, and already with last year’s sample of data the LHC experiments blew past all of the Tevatron exclusion limits.

And now with thirty times more data, in search channel after search channel, the story from CMS and ATLAS is the same: no hint of supersymmetry is evident anywhere. You shouldn‘t take this statement to mean that supersymmetry cannot exist. All we can say at this point is that if it does exist, in a generic, simple version of supersymmetry called mSUGRA, the masses of the partners of the quarks appear to be very heavy, over 1 TeV. The heavier they are, the less effective their power is to cancel the Higgs boson corrections. And theorists are very inventive, and are thinking about supersymmetry models that might not show up so easily in our experiments [see the comment below by Matt Strassler].

And what of the Higgs boson? Here, I must say, the story is becoming very interesting. The LHC experiments have a big advantage over the Tevatron, and the bottom line is that for high mass Higgs bosons, in the mass range above 150 GeV or so, the LHC has totally eclipsed the Tevatron, basically ruling out a Higgs boson with mass anywhere from about 150 GeV to 450 GeV. This is directly a result of the huge increase in the size of the data sample, and combining a half dozen search channels. Both CMS and ATLAS obtain similar results in this mass range, and despite a slight excess around 230 GeV in the ATLAS experiment, I think I can say with confidence that the Higgs boson will not be discovered in that regime.

But I personally never thought that this was likely. The sum total of the world’s data on precise measurements of the W and Z boson masses and properties, and the mass of the top quark, when taken together, tend to suggest a very light Higgs boson, much nearer 100 GeV. In fact the best predicted value for the Higgs boson mass is a good deal less than 80 GeV, but the LEP 2 experiments excluded a standard model Higgs boson with mass less than 114.4 GeV. This defines the low end of the present search window, which now extends to 150 GeV or so, and the precision data favor the low end of this range.

In a nutshell, what is happening is that the Tevatron experiments are bringing down a curtain on the Higgs boson, but the curtain is lower on the low mass end. The LHC is bringing down the curtain, too, but from the high mass end. So the two machines are in a race to achieve sensitivity to a standard model Higgs boson in the low mass range near 120 GeV.

The Tevatron experiments will collect their last data in two months, but the LHC experiments will keep collecting data, probably quadrupling the present sample by the end of the year. So time is a factor here as well, and the Tevatron experiments now truly have one last chance to cover the interesting low mass range.

But what to we mean by “cover” the range? If there is simply no Higgs boson to be discovered, then my prediction is that the Tevatron experiments can exclude it with 95% confidence up to a mass of around 120 GeV with the final data sample. If the Higgs boson truly is in that mass range, however, the experiments should not be able to exclude it!

The LHC will continue to press on, the experimenters will continue to improve and refine the analyses, and by he end of the year, I predict, if all goes well at the LHC we will either exclude the Higgs’ existence all the way down to the Tevatron limit or begin to see an excess.

In fact, the LHC data from both CMS and ATLAS are showing an excess in a broad range at low masses. Now this could be a systematic underestimate of the backgrounds, a statistical fluctuation in the observed spectra, or it might, just might be due to the presence of a low mass Higgs boson. It is not surprisin g that the excess is n a broad mass range, because one of the most sensitive channels, in which the Higgs decays to WW, has little or no mass resolution. This excess is why the press has recently picked up on this excitement – it’s quite in line with what one would expect to see if there is a Higgs boson signal just beginning to show itself.

To truly discover the Higgs boson will take a LOT more data, which we will get from the LHC in 2012. Now, we usually reserve the word “discover” for the situation where we have a “5 sigma” excess, by which we mean that there is less than one chance in over 3 million that a statistical fluctuation of the background alone could give us what we observe, or more. This is a stringent criterion, and not at all easy to establish, taking into account all the various experimental uncertainties.

If the Higgs boson mass is near 120 GeV, can we get a 5 sigma discovery by the end of 2012? It may take combining the data from the LHC experiments with the data from the Tevatron, a radical concept at present I have to say, but technically possible.

So despite the coyness of Mother Nature as to the nature of any new physics beyond the standard model, it’s nevertheless a very exciting time in the field, and who knows: maybe if we hold our mouths just right, cock our heads and squint just so, we might soon see something we hadn’t quite thought of before.

Before LED light is shined on it, the injected gel is still fluid and
can fill up any gaps of spaces under the skin.

What’s the News: Scientists have developed a gel that could be used to rebuild the faces of crash victims. Activated by light, it solves several of the problems inherent in the usual methods.

What’s the Context:

Dealing with damaged soft tissue is often more complex than dealing with damaged bone and skin. The shape of someone’s face is dependent on the fat, muscle, and other tissue below the surface, and doctors trying to restore someone’s facial structure must contend with scar tissue, swelling, and loss of movement.
Current methods include injecting hyaluronic acid (HA), a naturally occurring molecule that helps thicken the gel that surrounds cells in the body, or synthetic materials, but both of these have their issues: HA injections don’t last, and synthetic materials can cause inflammation. Grafting soft tissue from other parts of the body is also an option, but that can cause scar tissue to form where it was removed and at the graft site.
Additionally, it’s not possible to control the shape of the synthetic materials after they’re ...

As we get older, our memories start to fail us. The symptoms of this decline are clear, from losing track of house keys to getting easily muddled and confused. Many of these problems stem from a failure of working memory – the ability to hold pieces of information in mind, block out distractions and stay focused on our goals. Now, a team of American scientists has discovered one of the reasons behind this decline, and a way of potentially reversing it.

Our working memory depends on an area known as the prefrontal cortex or PFC, right at the front of the brain. The PFC contains a network of nerve cells called pyramidal neurons that are all connected to one another and constantly keep each other buzzing and excited – like a neural version of Twitter. This mutual stimulation is the key to our working memory. As we age, the buzz of the pyramidal neurons gets weaker, and information falls more readily from our mental grasp.

But this decline isn’t the fault of the neurons themselves. By studying monkeys, Min Wang from the Yale University School of Medicine has found ...