I’ve been playing around with Google+ a little today. Farhad Manjoo no like, More Like Google Minus:

… First, I don’t know whom the company thinks it’s kidding; Google+ is obviously a direct competitor to Facebook. Given the large overlap in functionality, I can’t imagine that many people will use Google+ and Facebook simultaneously. For most of us, it will be one or the other. Google+’s success, then, will rest in large part on Google’s ability to convince people to ditch Facebook for the new site. For that, Google+ will have to offer some compelling view of social networking that’s substantially different from what’s available on Facebook. And that’s where Google+ baffles me. What is so compelling about Google+ that I can’t currently get on Facebook or Twitter? Or Gmail, for that matter? At the moment, I can’t tell….

…

But circles are nothing new. Facebook has offered several ways to break your network into smaller chunks for many years now, and it has worked constantly to refine them. And you know what? Almost no one uses those features. Only 5 percent of Facebookers keep “Lists,” Facebook’s first attempt for people to categorize their friends. Recognizing that “Lists” weren’t great, last ...

What’s the News: To much fanfare, Google has released a preview version of Google+, their long-anticipated move into the social-networking space dominated in the U.S. by Facebook, whose meteoric growth challenges Google’s dominance over the Web itself. The new service lets users send messages and pictures to each other, like Facebook, but puts more emphasis on grouping and communicating with varying-sized audiences, as with email or in the real world of meatspace.

The two consensus early reactions (from the small group of people who have access) are that the service is mostly smooth and functional, a welcome change after Google’s social flops Buzz and Wave; and that it sure looks a heck of a lot like Facebook. Will that be enough to challenge Facebook, whose enormous base of users have uploaded much of their lives to one social network and may not want to invest time in another?

How It’s Like Facebook:

Profile pages that include info about you
A “Stream” of information incoming from contacts you choose, very much like Facebook’s News Feed
The homepages look very similar: top-level navigation tabs along the top, lower-level navigation menu on the left, Stream/News Feed down the ...

This is a guest post by Jamie L. Vernon, Ph.D., a research scientist and policy wonk, who encourages the scientific community to get engaged in the policy-making process

Few things bring me as much pleasure as delivering good news. Today, the science headlines include two stories that fit that bill.

Scientific American reports on a Stanford Poll that shows,

“Candidates of either party who take an environmental stance on climate can gain the votes of some citizens while not alienating others.”

According to researchers at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment, in the eyes of the American electorate, “there’s no heavy penalty or reward that will be attached to taking a position one way or another on the issue.” In fact, voters tend to favor political candidates who believe that humans have contributed to global warming and that the nation should move away from fossil fuels by investing in renewable sources of energy.

Global warming and the candidates’ reactions to it have already emerged as issues that will affect the 2012 Presidential Race. The fact that the public prefers candidates who embrace the science of anthropogenic global warming bodes well for political remedies as we go forward.

The second bit of good news that I’m pleased to deliver involves public opinion on embryonic stem cell research.

A study published in Nature Biotechnology this week has found that many Americans support the use of embryonic stem cell research for curing serious diseases. The researchers found that:

More than 70% of respondents support the use of therapeutic cloning and stem cells from in vitro fertilized embryos to cure cancer or treat heart attacks.

The study sheds light on how Americans make their decisions on this issue. Less than half (47%) of respondents support the same research for treating allergies. This suggests that the decision to support the use of embryonic stem cells is highly influenced by the potential benefits of the controversial research. Further, the respondents largely base the decision on their personal judgment rather than deferring to the will of authority establishments such as their Church or government ethics committees. Interestingly, though, more individuals (21%) did follow the will of their church than followed the recommendations of their medical doctors (15%) or the U.S. National Institutes of Health (13%).

Both studies offer insight into the current American psyche in regards to controversial scientific issues (perhaps things aren’t as bad as we thought) and will surely be the subject of future posts here at The Intersection.

Follow Jamie Vernon on Twitter or read occasional posts at his personal blog, “American SciCo.”

Stegoceras “Steel Skull” validum

It’s a question we’ve all asked ourselves, watching nature “red in tooth and claw”: Which animal, in all evolution’s bounty, would win in a head-butting fight?

We don’t have to wonder anymore. In a new study, researchers have rounded up the likely contenders for head-butting champ, living or dead, ranging from long-extinct domeheaded dinosaurs to modern-day musk oxen. Since some animals had an obvious advantage, what with being currently alive, the scientists settled for a virtual throwdown. They used CT scans to suss out the precise shape and size of each creature’s noggin, then relied on computer models to see how they’d hold up when the animals went head to head.

Two animals, giraffes and llamas, were knocked out of the competition right away—but they were never really in it. Both animals’ skulls would fracture in a truly aggressive tête-a-tête, the researchers said. Giraffes can, in fact, literally knock each other out if they accidentally butt heads; the stress is simply too much.

Frequent head-butters like the bighorn sheep and musk ox fared much better. The configuration of their skulls—tough outer shell, spongy covering protecting the brain—let them emerge ...

Circuits drawn with the pen make LEDs light up and give a 3D antenna its juice.

Gel pens, beloved by middle-school girls, are good for decorating cootie catchers, evading laboratory ink analysis, and not much else. But if you replace that metallic ink with real silver, you get something quite remarkable: a pen that can draw functioning circuits on paper.

Engineers at the University of Illinois have built such a device and used it to put together several clever electronic doodads. Silver is a conductor, so it ferries electrons from a power source, like a battery, to an outlet, like an LED light, even when it’s just a line on a piece of paper instead of a wire. Once the silver ink dries, it’s as good as wire or printed circuits at conducting electricity, and it survives all kinds of mangling—researchers had to bed the paper back and forth 6,000 times to get the ink to begin to crack and flake off, in fact—so it could be used in situations where flexibility is key. And, of course, just to make cool stuff.

The artifact in question.

To demonstrate their pen-and-paper ...

I’ve been meaning to write a review of Zach Weiner’s webcomic collection Save Yourself, Mammal! ever since I got it a couple of weeks ago, but seriously, if you’re a fan of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal then just go and buy the book, OK?

And if you’re not, buy one anyway. His comics are really funny. Bonus: it includes a snarky "choose your own adventure" series of tiny cartoons.

And hey – I’m saying all this even though there is not a single, solitary instance in the book of his using one of his cartoons featuring a beloved red-bearded balding astronomer. Not one. And yet, somehow, the comics manage to be awesome.

Full disclosure: I was going to give this book a positive review even before Zach offered to draw my new Twitter avatar, which is me as a baby, because the way he draws babies always makes me laugh. The shirt he gave me in the picture though was totally a bribe.

Have you bought the book yet? C’mon, ...

What’s the News: Due to a vicious disease, the population of the endangered Tasmanian devil has decreased by at least 70 percent since 1996. The cancer, devil facial tumor disease, spreads when an infected devil bites another, typically during feeding or mating. Because Tasmanian devils are so genetically similar, their bodies don’t recognize the intruding cancer cells as foreign.

But now, researchers have sequenced the genome of two devils and created a genetic test that could help breeders select genetically diverse mates. The test will help conservationists breed future generations of Tasmanian devils that are prepared for the cancer, as well as other types of diseases.

How the Heck:

Stephan Schuster of Pennsylvania State University and an international team of researchers began by sequencing and comparing the genome of two wild Tasmanian devils. Because the devils came from opposite ends of the island, they represented the maximum geographic spread of the species. One of the devils, Cedric, was resistant to two ...

What’s the News: In high school physics classes, students are often taught that static electricity develops when electrons detach from the surface of one object and jump to another, causing a difference in charge. Since opposite charges attract, the two objects are drawn to one another (like your hair to a balloon). But new research published in the journal Science shows that static electricity is caused by more than just the exchange of individual electrons, and instead involves the transfer of bigger (yet still tiny) clumps of material.

How the Heck:

Scientists conventionally believed that static electricity required friction between two different non-metals, which would tug at their electrons with different amounts of force. But last year, a group of researchers at Northwestern University found that two sheets of the same polymer, like Teflon, can generate static electricity, also called contact electrification (pdf). After the discovery, some of the researchers, including chemist Bartosz Grzybowski, wanted to understand how it all worked.
Grzybowski ...

Despite the fact that I conclusively refuted Politifact last week over the Fox News-Jon Stewart affair, the site does not seem intent on reversing itself and affirming reality. Facts, in this case, don’t seem to matter–not even to the fact checkers.

My latest DeSmog item is just to provide a summary of this state of affairs–because this is not the last we are going to hear of this matter, I’m quite confident. But there won’t really be anything more to say until there is more evidence, either in support of me or otherwise–or until there is another controversy about Fox and the misinformation believed by its viewers.

The item begins like this:

My two posts about Fox News and misinformation are probably the most popular items I’ve contributed here. They’ve been widely linked, Tweeted and Facebooked hundreds of times, and viewed well over ten thousand times. That’s because they perform a simple task that, at least as far as I had seen when I wrote the first one, hadn’t been done elsewhere: They list studies (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) showing that Fox News viewers are the most misinformed about an array of factual—but politicized—issues.

In these posts, I’ve tried to be as dispassionate as one can be on such a matter. I’ve repeatedly said that the studies don’t prove that Fox causes people to be misinformed; they just show a correlation, but the causal arrow could run in either direction (or both). I’ve also said that there may well be other studies out there than the 6 that I’ve found; and there may even be studies out there showing some cases where Fox News viewers are not the most misinformed. Indeed, I could design such a study myself–though it would have to be politically skewed by only asking about topics where liberals and Democrats are likely to be misinformed….

You can read on here.

Let’s remember why this matters–there are facts about the world, and ways of determining what they are, and these facts have significance and consequences. That’s why we have to hold the misinformers to account–and also, sadly, do the same for the fact-checkers.

I get email.

I get a lot of email. Most of it is from people who have questions about astronomy; they heard about some event coming up, or some doomsday scenario, or just were wondering about something and want an answer.

It’s hard to answer all the questions, but now I may not have to: I can send folks the Astronomy Stack Exchange, a user-driven Q&A site. It’s actually set up in a clever fashion, where people can vote up or down on specific answers.

This site is based on the Stack Exchange sites, which are becoming very popular. For example, there’s also a Skeptic Exchange, too! So if you have a question, you might want to check there first, and if it’s not there, you can always submit it.

Few things warm the heart of a scientist more readily than a query from a young, curious mind, eager to learn about our universe. Why, just now I received this inquiring email:

R xxxxxx xxxxxx@hotmail.com to me

Sean,

Neutrons have no chemical properties and reflect no light, but they do have mass and occupy space =matter, and clouds of them will never be visible in space!

I find it difficult to believe people who are supposed to be so smart are suck fucking retards!

Cheers Retard ,

Robert

For the curious:

• Lifetime of neutron
• Age of the Universe

Always happy to help a fellow seeker of knowledge.

Reading Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa. Rwanda looms large in the narrative. Out of curiosity I wanted to use Google Data Explorer to compare Rwanda to Burundi. The two nations are almost mirror images in various demographic statistics (e.g., ratio of Tutsi to Hutu, etc.), with the main difference between that Rwanda experienced a period of populist Hutu domination between the 1960s and the genocide.

UPDATE:  Solved by Alex at 12:06

Here we are, down to the wire on the last riddle before the bonus riddle.  Remember, it’s running Monday, July 4th.  Although I’m sure everybody knows the rules for the bonus riddle by now, I’ll run through them again in case you tuned in to the riddles recently.

• Tom and I will post the bonus riddle at noon CDT, July 4th.
• Guesses on the bonus riddle will be by email to Tom or Marian.
• You will have 24 hours to submit your guesses; from noon CDT Monday July 4th, until noon CDT Tuesday July 5th.
• You get three guesses.
• Comments will be closed on the bonus riddle until after the submission deadline.
• The winner will be the first person to submit the correct answer.  If nobody solves the riddle by noon CDT July 5th, it will be opened for everybody to give it a shot.
• Tom will have the final say in any controversy.

Today’s riddle is your last chance to get on the list for Monday’s bonus riddle, if you haven’t already done so.  Now, for the fun stuff.  Your answer is once again found in the real world.

Don't go for the obvious - that's too easy

Our ancestors probably noticed this.

They were certainly aware of it by 500 years ago.

It holds an important place in Australian Aboriginal astronomy.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Behold - this is one ugly bird.

If you visit Cancun in the late winter, you will see this.

Although thought of as fairly innocuous to most cultures, there is one which views this with fear.

Not prominent in SciFi, it does feature in one important work.

NASA image

Okay!  Nice and short today, but you guys are good.  I will say this;  pay attention to the image clues.  It seems some of us are ignoring the image clues in favor of the written clues.  I’m in the comments, as usual, and looking forward to your guesses.

By Jon Winsor

A theme we’ve been exploring at the Intersection is the Republican tendency to reject or disregard expertise, particularly scientific expertise, and also settled facts among experts on US history.

National Journal recently had an interesting and unsettling article on GOP freshmen in congress and their attitudes toward what experts have been telling them about the debt ceiling:

“This is probably the most whip-proof Congress we’ve seen in our lifetime,” said Mike Franc, a former aide to then-House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, who is vice president of government studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “They don’t defer to credentials and expertise very easily. You have to earn it big time with them. Whipping almost by its nature requires a certain amount of trust and deference that someone really knows what they’re doing and is part of a team, and in that way you’re dealing with a different kind of Republican Party.”

…[T]roubling to anyone fearing a U.S. default is the growing chorus of Republican lawmakers and leaders who openly and defiantly question whether the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling needs to be raised at all.

One of those debt ceiling skeptics is a Republican presidential candidate presently polling in second place in Iowa:

Newly declared GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., echoed a popular view among some Republican lawmakers on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday when she said that the August 2 deadline set by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is a lie.

Geithner holds no sway among House Republicans, whose contempt for the deadline only accelerated once Treasury, in May, moved the target date for default from July to August. That decision prompted a suspicion that the new early-August deadline is fully negotiable.

Ezra Klein has a rundown on what failure to raise the debt ceiling might look like. Josh Marshall discusses the polling numbers and the strange state of the debate around the issue, citing a Gallop poll that shows that 34% of the people polled don’t feel like they know enough about the issue to have an opinion. This actually seems sensible, considering that since 1962, the debt ceiling was raised 75 times without much fanfare–so the public hasn’t had to learn much about debt ceiling authorization. Let’s hope these people won’t need to learn…

Top picks

“If this were true adios theory.” Darwin’s margin scribbles show the evolution of a theory

Video games that use living microbes

It’s survival of the weakest when bacteria play rock-paper-scissors

Humans guided evolution of dog barks

The last Indian vultures, and the feral dogs that are replacing them

A fascinating piece about the real secrets behind Area 51 (no, really), involving stealth planes and a mystery illness

Thomas Knudsen carefully poisons a 3-week-old human embryo… in a computer.

What do you get when you put a terrorist inside of a brain scanner? We don’t know. Important piece by Virginia Hughes

“These critters are hell-for-leather, flat-out just gonna get there.” Wonderful David Quammen piece on animal migrations

The evolution machine: genetic engineering on fast-forward, a great story by Jo Marchant

Beetles with screws and nuts in their legs

News/science/writing

How airplanes punch spreading holes in clouds, cause snowfall

The value of simulations – why crew/pilot errors have become a minor cause of plane accidents

Bacteria in Carl Zimmer’s belly button was previously known mainly for being in Asian soil. What has he been putting in there?

Electrocuting women who look at photos of their partners… for SCIENCE

“Garcia inserted the compressed-air ...

A few years back, I was out with Mrs. BA and we happened to see some gargoyle statuettes. I was surprised to find out she liked them (surprising people are the best people to know). Over the years I’ve picked up a couple, and one in particular we hung up outside the front door.

We like it there, and we’re not the only ones. This young lady decided it would make a nice home:

She showed up last week, and within a few hours had built that nest. And she and her hubby — common house finches — didn’t waste any time, either, laying eggs within a day or so.

This picture, taken by my brother in law Chris, is already out of date; just yesterday we saw that two of the eggs had hatched. I’m not sure of the third egg’s status right now; at first she flew away every time we walked by (the gargoyle and nest are right next to our front door), but now she seems a lot more confident, and sticks around. We can’t see inside the nest now, but I expect we’ll be hearing from ...

The first six mirrors undergo through cryotesting. Credit: NASA

Yes that is a gold surface, not as much as you might think as it is exceedingly thin (read below). This is a milestone of sorts so hopefully everything goes well.

Here’s the press release from NASA:

Engineers and technicians guide six James Webb Space Telescope’s mirror segments off the rails after completing final cryogenic testing this week at Marshall. (NASA/Emmett Given)

The first six of 18 segments that will form NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s primary mirror for space observations completed final cryogenic testing this week. The ten week test series included two tests cycles where the mirrors were chilled down to -379 degrees Fahrenheit, then back to ambient temperature to ensure the mirrors respond as expected to the extreme temperatures of space.

A second set of six mirror assemblies will arrive at Marshall in late July to begin testing, and the final set of six will arrive in the fall.

The X-ray and Cryogenic Facility at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. provides the space-like environment to help engineers measure how well the telescope will image infrared sources once in orbit.

Each mirror segment measures approximately 4.3 feet (1.3 meters) in diameter to form the 21.3 foot (6.5 meters), hexagonal telescope mirror assembly critical for infrared observations. Each of the 18 hexagonal-shaped mirror assemblies weighs approximately 88 pounds (40 kilograms). The mirrors are made of a light and strong metal called beryllium, and coated with a microscopically thin coat of gold to enabling the mirror to efficiently collect infrared light.

Engineers ready the crane to lift one James Webb Space Telescope’s mirror segment off the stand after completing final cryogenic testing this week at Marshall. (NASA/Emmett Given)

The telescope is a combined project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. Northrop Grumman is the prime contractor under NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo., is responsible for mirror development. L-3- Tinsley Laboratories Inc. in Richmond, Calif. is responsible for mirror grinding and polishing.

2011MD trajectory. Credit: NASA

We will be visited by a small asteroid on June 27th at 09:30 EDT (13:30 UT).  The asteroid between five and 20 meters in diameter will pass just 7,500 miles from the Earth!!  This is close enough for the asteroid to be seen with a modest-sized telescope during the day.

More from JPL.

JPL Small-Body Database Browser

Earth’s Busy Neighborhood

Discovered in 1980, and named for Helene of Troy, Cassini took this image of Saturn’s tiny Ice Queen two days ago:

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

Here’s the NASA blurb to go along with its image of this exquisite, minuscule moonlet – and don’t forget to check out the enlargement:

Cassini Captures Ice Queen Helene

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft successfully completed its second-closest encounter with Saturn’s icy moon Helene on June 18, 2011, beaming down raw images of the small moon. At closest approach, Cassini flew within 4,330 miles (6,968 kilometers) of Helene’s surface. It was the second closest approach to Helene of the entire mission.

Here are a few more NASA images of Helene.  It’s hard to believe little Helene wasn’t molded from modeling clay in a studio, crammed full of an astonishing variety of features for its size, then painted to perfection:

NASA/Cassini 013111

NASA/Cassini 030311

NASA/Cassini 030311 Helene shown against Saturn

Summer solsctice at Stonehenge. Photograph: Warren Allott/AFP/Getty Images via Datablog (linked below)

The summer solstice is upon us.  I saw this photo and thought what a great and very appropriate way to celebrate the day.  What could be better than celebrating at Stonehenge?  So this gets added to my list of fun things to do.

When does summer begin?  At 13:16 ET and if I do things right this should post at that very time.  Humor me ok?

I’ve been spreading my own brand of humor pretty much all over the state:  “Yep, all the days get shorter from here on out.”  The memory of the horrible weather of this past winter is still fresh enough in the minds of most people around here to elicit groans almost universally HAHAHAHA!

Check out DATABLOG.