I am having lunch and watching the NASA TV coverage of the docking of Atlantis with the ISS.  The docking has happened and now we are waiting for the hatches to open, really one is open already and the main hatch is still closed at the moment.

Will we even have a “NASA” much longer?  The future of NASA is partly with the Orion spacecraft, check out the video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

LOL, I’m watching one of the ISS crew, he’s seemingly pointing right at me and saying “hurry up and finish the post”, not really,  but it did look like it.

So, we have this new idea the Orion but will it ever come to pass?  Oh you don’t see how it couldn’t?  If the successor to the Hubble, the James Webb Telescope, is on the chopping block at this stage in its development and make no mistake it is in jeopardy of being cut this year, the Orion probably isn’t that far behind.

I still say spending less than a dime on a US tax dollar towards the sciences (of which spaceflight is a part) like we do (~ 0.86 %) is a pretty good deal.

Oh well, sour grapes I guess.  If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say the door is closing on NASA.

Be sure to check out the Space shuttle Tribute put together by Vizme, it’s rather good; AND lest you say my cup is half empty today, the hatches between the shuttle and the ISS are both open!  Other than a problem with a general purpose computer due a minor switch issue things have been going great on the still young mission.

Video source

by Jon Winsor

Conventional incandescent light bulbs are tremendously inefficient. Only about 10% of the energy used to power the light bulb actually goes to producing light, and the remaining 90% is emitted as heat. And it’s easy to see why. An incandescent bulb filament relies on the fact that it’s a poor conductor of electricity. It’s essentially the same concept used by inexpensive space heaters. So doubtless, the technology could be improved—the same way that many appliances have been improved by efficiency standards over the years.

At least that was the way Fred Upton (R – MI) was thinking when he helped craft a provision of the Energy Independence and Security Act (ESIA), which was signed into law by George W. Bush in 2007—with support from manufacturers, who have since invested millions in retooling their factories. The provision didn’t choose “winners and losers” as far as light bulb technology goes. Incandescent bulbs were fine, as long as they met the standard. Under the law, as the Christian Science Monitor reported,

…general-purpose light bulbs must become about 30 percent more energy efficient. Different bulb classes face different deadlines, all between 2012 and 2014. The old Edison bulb gets killed on January 1, 2012. But more-efficient incandescent bulbs, which use only 72 watts to give the same output as an old 100-watt Edison bulb, will still be sold.

While Edison bulbs today are about 30-50 cents apiece, updated versions cost $1.50. But the latter pay for themselves in energy savings in about six months.

These bulbs also last about 50% longer, and households were expected to save $100 to $200 per year under the new standards. Not to mention the power plants that wouldn’t need to be built, the gains in US energy independence, and the gains in US jobs (the Guardian reports that presently no US factory manufactures the old 100 watt light bulbs).

Enter Rush Limbaugh.

According to a number of sources, the genesis of the controversy was one Joe Barton coveting a committee chairmanship of Fred Upton. Sensing the opportunity for a tea party-style groundswell that he might ride to a committee chairmanship, Joe Barton made an appeal to the uniquely unreasoning and dialog-free medium called talk radio–which promptly turned the light bulb into a pet cause.

Now there could be a reasonable argument that talk radio might have made—that up front costs are something that consumers should choose to pay. Maybe consumers want to keep their $1 per bulb up front, instead of their $100-200 savings. That’s at least reasonable, although it makes you stop and go hmmm…

But that kind of nuance isn’t what talk radio is about. Says Rush Limbaugh, “Unless there’s a policy reversal, next year the 100-watt incandescent light bulb will be banned… Let there be incandescent light and freedom. That’s the American way.” Saying “ban” is entirely misleading, but it’s too much talk radio gold to pass up. “They’re coming for your lightbulbs, America, and you’ll be forced to fill your house with those weird, screwy things.” Now that’s exciting radio, exciting in the way that a Grover’s Mill, NJ farmer got excited during a 1938 broadcast of War of the Worlds.

The campaign has been very effective. Upton defended his decision for a time, but eventually bowed to pressure and disowned his own bill (he even took down his 2009 defense of ESIA from his website). In the end, Upton managed to keep his seat. But the talk-radio based campaign gained momentum (with help from a CEI “grassroots” group), and eventually garnered 233 votes for their measure in the house, and then today finally got a procedural voice vote to block enforcement of Upton’s original provision.

An interesting question is, without talk radio’s misleading “stop the ban” campaign, would this effort have even come close to getting 233 votes? What does this do to our politics if every time a politician has a whim like Barton’s, they could just get Rush to do a few segments and work up the Republican base in whatever way is needed, no matter how capricious that need might be?

My sample size for the reader survey is now ~200. I’m aiming for ~500. If you are a regular reader of this weblog, please consider filling out the survey. The software is telling me that the average reader is taking about ~10 minutes. All questions are optional, so you can quickly skip over confusing ones or those which you don’t want to divulge.

The results so far are here. At least for the questions which weren’t open ended. I added a lot of open ended numeric questions so that I could run some scatterplots and more natural statistics (i.e., I don’t have to convert categorical responses into numerics and so forth).

To give a taste for the kind of stuff I’m running on the nerd-heavy data set I thought I would explore how # of sexual partners relates to age and IQ. First, let me admit that I assume that the IQ distribution of the readership here is somewhat artificially shifted upward (to the right of the distribution). Those with higher IQs are more likely to know their IQs. And whether unconsciously or consciously individuals will almost certainly self-report results which are drawn from the higher range of their results ...

It’s CMAJ week on NCBI ROFL! All this week we’ll be featuring articles from the Canadian Medical Association Journal’s holiday issues. Enjoy!

“Background: Controversy remains about whether early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise (the Ben Franklin hypothesis), or healthy, wealthy and dead (the James Thurber hypothesis).

Methods: As part of the Determinants of Myocardial Infarction Onset Study, we determined through personal interviews the bedtimes and wake times of 949 men admitted to hospital with acute myocardial infarction. Participants reported their educational attainment and zip code of residence, from which local median income was estimated. We followed participants for mortality for a mean of 3.7 years. We defined early-to-bed and early-to-rise respectively as a bedtime before 11 pm and wake time before 6:30 am.

Results: Hours in bed were inversely associated with number of cups of coffee consumed (age-adjusted Spearman correlation coefficient r –0.07, p = 0.03). The mortality of early-to-bed, early-to-risers did not differ significantly from other groups. There was also no relation between bed habits and local income, nor with educational attainment.

Interpretation: Our results refute both the Franklin and Thurber hypotheses. Early to bed ...

Life at the top ain’t easy.

What’s the News: In the hardscrabble world of a baboon troop, being the alpha male has its perks: power, food, ample opportunities to woo the ladies. But all that status brings with it a great deal of stress, a new study shows, as the alpha male constantly scrambles to stay atop the social pyramid. The life of a second-in-command beta male—somewhat fewer perks but, the researchers found, a whole lot less stress—is starting to sound like the better deal.

How the Heck:

The researchers gathered samples of feces from 125 adult male baboons in Amboseli, Kenya, collecting more than 4,500 samples over nine years. They then measured the level of glucocorticoids—hormones that play a major role in the body’s stress response—in each sample to determine the baboons’ stress levels.
Alpha males’ stress levels, the samples showed, were high—as high as those of low-ranking males, who are constantly being bullied and deprived of access to food and mates. The alpha males do more than their share of fighting and mating, the scientists found; defending themselves and keeping others away from potential mates likely account for much of the added stress ...

Several people have pointed me to Mary Carmichael’s piece for Nature, Newborn screening: A spot of trouble. It’s free, but you have to register. The subheading is: “By raising hell about newborn blood-spot screening, Twila Brase could jeopardize public-health programmes and derail research. The problem is, she has a point.”

The broader issue is “genetic privacy,” and the nature of consent in our public health system. Here’s an interesting paragraph which gets to some of the things we’ve discussed here before:

Twila Brase was not always the kind of person who hands out politically charged propaganda in airports. On a first meeting at her modest office in a shopping plaza in St Paul, Minnesota, she seems more like the unassuming nurse she was back in 1995 — before she began her second life as a bioethical gadfly, and before she had started making YouTube videos that accuse her state of commandeering the DNA of children as “government property” through widespread newborn screening programmes. Her voice is quiet and level. It is difficult to write her off as a conspiracy theorist: she simply doesn’t sound like one, even when, 4.5 minutes into making the case against screening, she ...

1) Post from the past: Race: the current consensus.

2) Weird search query of the week: “i, for one, welcome our aquatic overlords reddit.”

3) Comment of the week, in response to “What one (or more) genomes can tell us”:

An important constraint on mutation rate shifts is that chimpanzees and humans are almost exactly equally diverged from Gorilla (and Orang-Utan). As the mutation rate varies with generation time, this suggests that the mean generation time of humans and chimps since the split can’t be hugely different, and strongly argues against major mutation rate changes in our ancestors of the last few million years.

4) And finally, your weekly fluff fix:

What’s the News: Several days ago, a tasty tidbit hit the science blogosphere: writing in a journal of the American Chemical Society, scientists reported the successful production of gelatin from human proteins.

Understandably, the verdict of the crowd was, “Groooooosss!” The details of the experiment were dutifully reported—the human gene for collagen, the protein in skin and bones that makes up gelatin, was inserted into a yeast, which then cranked it out, along with the help of certain enzymes—but its purpose was sometimes glossed over in favor of giant images of quivering dessert. Like the one above. Yum.

So why use human genes to make gelatin?

Scientists are not actually on a mission to (a) gross us out, or (b) make us into cannibals. Gelatin, summed up quickly, is usually made by boiling and chemically processing the bones, skin, and connective tissue of animals like cows and pigs to release collagen, a long molecule that, when further broken down by heat and mixed with water, will set into a gel at room temperature. This is where your jiggly dessert comes from (apologies if I’ve just turned you vegetarian, or at least non-gelat-tarian).

Unfortunately, this process yields ...

This is a pretty nifty illusion: as you look at a spot between two rapidly changing images of faces, your brain distorts the images, making them look really weird:

I could do without the title they chose for the video, but the paper on which it’s based is called "Flashed face distortion effect: Grotesque faces from relative spaces", which may not explain much, either. What it means, basically, is that as the faces flash, certain features get distorted by your brain, and the amount of distortion depends on how much that feature deviates from the rest in the set. In other words, someone with slightly larger eyes gets perceived by you as having huge eyes. Go ahead and pause the video and click through it; the faces are pretty much normal faces, so the distortion really is an illusion.

I think that’s pretty neat; I’m fascinated by how our brains perceive faces in particular, since people see them everywhere. I’d love to see some variations on this, like showing men’s faces, or a man on one side and a woman on the other. Would it work for animal faces too? Hmmm.

I’ll note that some people ...

Georgia Tech researcher Manos Tentzeris holding
up one of his inkjet-printed antennas.

What’s the News: With all of the electronics cluttering our daily lives, the air is abuzz with ambient electromagnetic energy from sources like cell phone networks, radio and television transmitters, and satellite communications systems. Now, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have devised a simple, cheap way to harness that wasted energy: capturing it with inkjet-printed antennas and storing it in batteries.

How the Heck:

Electrical engineer Manos Tentzeris and his team created an ink mixture containing nanoparticles of silver, which, as a conductor, is useful for building circuits. Using an inkjet printer, they printed radio frequency components and circuits onto paper and flexible plastic.
The printed antennas receive a wide range of frequencies—100 MHz to 60 GHz (that is, all the way from FM radio to radar). The researchers installed the antennas in miniature devices that collect the energy, convert it to DC power, and store it in ...

The life of the cottony cushion scale insect reads like something from the most ridiculous of tabloid newspapers. Dad leaves parasitic body parts in his own daughter, which produce sperm that fertilise her eggs. He is both father and grandfather to his own grandchildren.

On top of that, these insects are mostly hermaphrodites. With the exception of the odd pure male, almost every individual is both male and female. They reproduce by having sex with themselves, fertilising their own eggs with their own sperm. And this means that scale insects can be father, mother, grandfather and grandmother to all of their grandchildren. Good luck drawing that family tree.

Scale insects are small animals that suck on plant sap for a living. Encased in bizarre waxy shells, most people wouldn’t even recognise them as insects – the cottony cushion scale, for example, looks like a dollop of shaving foam. It and two of its close relatives are the only known hermaphrodites out of several millions of insect species.

In most hermaphroditic animals, an individual grows up and develops the organs that make both sperm and eggs. But that’s not the case for ...

What’s the News: A daily dose of anti-HIV drugs can significantly reduce the likelihood that straight men and women will contract HIV from an infected partner, according to two new clinical studies. These studies add strong evidence to earlier findings that taking HIV drugs can prevent healthy people from contracting the disease, and are the first to show that the drugs reliably lower transmission risk in heterosexuals.

How the Heck:

One study enrolled 4,758 straight couples in Kenya and Uganda, in which one partner—either male or female—had HIV and the other didn’t.
The uninfected partners were split into three even groups. Each group was given a different type of pill, which they were instructed to take daily: a pill containing the antiretroviral drug tenofovir; a pill with both tenofovir and another HIV drug, emtricitabine; or a placebo.
Over course of the three-year study, 47 participants taking the placebo contracted HIV, compared with 18 taking tenofovir and 13 taking the combination pill—meaning that the drug ...

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If anyone works at, or knows someone who works at, Genzyme Oncology in San Antonio, can you contact me? I have a few questions. Any of these methods will work:

Fig. 1: Traditional (left) and “cool” (right) placements of the stethoscope when not in use.

It’s CMAJ week on NCBI ROFL! All this week we’ll be featuring articles from the Canadian Medical Association Journal’s holiday issues. Enjoy!

“Objective: To determine whether the “cool” or circumcervical placement of the stethoscope when not in use is as efficacious as the traditional placement in terms of transfer time to the functional position.

Methods: Measurement of time taken by 100 health care professionals in each group to transfer stethoscope to functional position.

Results and interpretation: The cool group was much slower than the traditional group, despite their younger years. This wasted time could translate into a substantial financial burden on Canada’s health care system.”

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Doctors on display: the evolution of television’s doctors.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: For some reason, med students don’t want to show their genitals in class.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Self-surgery: not for the faint of heart.

WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

I’ve been taking surveys of the readership of this weblog since 2004. Here is my last one, from the summer of 2010. Before I moved to Discover I also did one in the winter of 2010. Here’s a reader survey from the winter of 2009. Another from 2005.

I set up a survey with a new service this time. I did integrate some of the suggestions of commenters as well. One difference between this survey and previous ones is that I have a lot more free-form text boxes with numeric answers. So you give your specific age or income, instead of selecting from a category. The survey shouldn’t take more than ~5 minutes, as many of the questions are yes/no, or very simple, such as your highest education attained.

I’ll post the first results within 24 hours, and probably post the raw files at some point in the near future if you want to crunch them yourself. I set it up so it goes from banal demographic questions in the beginning to more detailed and somewhat esoteric queries by the end. None of the questions are mandatory.

You can complete the survey at this link: http://questionpro.com/t/ACQlIZK0wT.

Update: ...

I usually do a reader survey once a year or so. I figure I should do one soon. Usually I ask standard demographic questions, etc. Since I’ve been at Discover for over a year I assume there’s been some change since I first arrived. I’ll open up the comment thread on this post for questions to ask. I’m going to “push” my survey on Facebook and Google+ and twitter too, so hopefully I can get the N in the ~500 range as a target (I’ve gotten that high before).

This is a guest blog post from Darlene Cavalier, founder of ScienceCheerleader.com and ScienceForCitizens.net

Last night, Laura Eilers, AKA Ms. Virginia, was crowned MS. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA! The Science Cheerleaders–current and former NFL and NBA cheerleaders pursuing science and engineering careers–are very fortunate to have Laura as our extremely talented choreographer and creative director.

In addition to being a former cheerleader for the St. Louis Rams, cheerleader and choreographer for the Kansas City Chiefs, and an NFL Hall of Fame Game Cheerleader, she’s also the creator of Going Pro Entertainment, LLC, a network of professional cheerleading and dance alumni.

In school, her favorite science projects included “creating an amoeba structure out of cookie cake and icing, researching anthropologist Dian Fossey and her work with gorillas, as well as engineering a balsa wood structure that could withstand heavy weights. My team and I tested the structure repeatedly and competed with other schools for the strongest balsa structure.”

And, yes, she “most definitely believes evolution should be taught to our children.”

Congratulations, Laura!

And now, I’d like to turn your attention to a recent blog post written by Joshua Rosenau at Thoughts from Kansas. Following up on all the chatter surrounding the Miss USA contestants’ answers to the question of whether evolution should be taught in schools, Josh writes:

I’m glad to see professional cheerleaders and pageant contestants stepping up and talking about science. It has to have been nerve-wracking for the Miss USA contestants to be asked about the question without time to prep, and I think the awkwardness and “ums” and “likes” and “you knows” in the transcript mostly just reflect how people actually talk, especially when we’re nervous. The substance of the Miss USA pageant answers wasn’t at all impressive, but the fact that the pageant thought Miss USA should be able to speak about science education is impressive.

Ms. Virginia, or “huge science geek” Miss California (now Miss USA), can go into rooms and connect with audiences that just don’t care to listen to anything said by me, or PZ Myers, or Richard Dawkins, or Eugenie Scott. So can a professional cheerleader. And if the goal is to make a more science literate society, it behooves us to make sure that women waving pom poms or wearing a sash with a state name on it are just as ready to talk about the joys of science as a doctor in a white coat or a geologist in dusty jeans.

And at the end of the day, I smile every time I see Cavalier play this video. Because why shouldn’t a little girl at a massive science festival want to be a doctor and a teacher and a cheerleader? How better to encourage all of her dreams than to chat with a former professional cheerleader who is now a doctor and cheers for science? Someone else might see that you can call yourself a science geek and a history geek and still be chosen Miss USA, and decide to take her schooling more seriously. And that’s for the best.

Read Josh’s full post here.

It couldn’t be easier to make sweeping edits on a computer document. If I were so inclined, I could find every instance of the word “genome” in this article and replace it with the word “cake”. Now, a team of scientists from Harvard Medical School and MIT have found a way to do similar trick with DNA. Geneticists have long been able to edit individual genes, but this group has developed a way of rewriting DNA en masse, turning the entire genome of a bacterium into an “editable and evolvable template”.

Their success was possible because the same genetic code underlies all life. The code is written in the four letters (nucleotides) that chain together to form DNA: A, C, G and T. Every set of three letters (or ‘codon’) corresponds to a different amino acid, the building blocks of proteins. For example, GCA codes for alanine; TGT means cysteine. The chain of letters is translated into a chain of amino acids until you get to a ‘stop codon’. These special triplets act as full stops that indicate when a protein is finished.

This code is virtually the same in every gene ...

What’s the News: Childhood obesity rates have escalated dramatically in recent years, in concert with nationwide explosion that has 34% of American adults falling into that category.

Now, scientists writing in the July 13 issue of the Journal of American Medical Association argue that much as feeding kids too little is considered child neglect, so should be feeding them too much. And if the former is grounds for removing them from their families, then the former may be as well.

As you can imagine, in the last 24 hours, numerous commentators have responded, and the ensuing debate touches on the causes of obesity and the difficulty of treating such a pervasive, devastating problem.

The Tinder:

17% of kids 2-19 are obese, according to the CDC. That’s triple the rate in 1980.
Ethnicity and socio-economic level are tied to risk of obesity: Low-income, black or Hispanic children have especially high rates.
Childhood obesity can affect kids for the rest of their lives—in addition to having trouble breathing, high blood pressure, depression, and liver disease as kids, they may develop type 2 diabetes and are more likely to be severely obese adults, which comes with its own cluster of related ills, ...