Top picks

I have only just discovered the Paleofuture blog. It chronicles past visions of the future like jetpack mailmen.

“Was this my destiny? Writing words in order to make gullible people be auto-forced to watch ads?” An AOL content slave speaks out. And this comment nearly killed me. “Wait, AOL still exist?”

Beautiful Proteins are beautiful proteins.

The animal that’s a sheet: a fantastic look at placozoans

“Do you worry that the research you do might be exploited in a way that harms people?” A great post on an important topic by two students embedded in a lab that tests how the human body crumples and explodes.

The names of 30 elements are an anagram for the names of 30 other elements & THE SUM OF THEIR ATOMIC NUMBERS IS THE SAME. Mind-blowing.

“A giraffe had to be trained to urinate in a cup, & Ferrero had [an] encounter with an uncooperative jaguar” The smell of a meat-eater.

A brain implant restores memories in rats by recording and playing them back. That. Is. Incredible.

Incredible! A camera that enables you to focus long after the picture is taken

I Resistant snakes eat poisonous newts; resistant caddisflies eat poisonous ...

The nerd echo chamber is reverberating this week with the furious debate over Charlie Stross’ doubts about the possibility of an artificial “human-level intelligence” explosion – also known as the Singularity. As currently defined, the Singularity will be an event in the future in which artificial intelligence reaches human level intelligence. At that point, the AI (i.e. AI n) will reflexively begin to improve itself and build AI’s more intelligent than itself (i.e. AI n+1) which will result in an exponential explosion of intelligence towards near deity levels of super-intelligent AI After reading over the debates, I’ve come to a conclusion that both sides miss a critical element of the Singularity discussion: the human beings. Putting people back into the picture allows for a vision of the Singularity that simultaneously addresses several philosophical quandaries. To get there, however, we must first re-trace the steps of the current debate.

I’ve already made my case for why I’m not too concerned, but it’s always fun to see what fantastic fulminations are being exchanged over our future AI overlords. Sparking the flames this time around is Charlie Stross, who ...

Emperor Kuzco?

[And hey, remember the turtle I videoed a couple of weeks ago doing a faceplant off a log? That was featured in Boulder's Daily Camera newspaper on Friday.]

Centaurus A from Hubble. Click for larger and see Hubblesite for more versions. Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration Acknowledgment: R. O'Connell (University of Virginia) and the WFC3 Scientific Oversight Committee

Nice!

When you visit Hubblesite (linked below) you may note under the “Fast Facts” tab they have the distance stated as 11 million light-years (3.4 parsecs);  they just forgot the “million” in the parsecs so it should be 3.4 million parsecs. Been there done that.

From Hubblesite:

JUNE 16, 2011: Resembling looming rain clouds on a stormy day, dark lanes of dust crisscross the giant elliptical galaxy Centaurus A. Hubble’s panchromatic vision, stretching from ultraviolet through near-infrared wavelengths, reveals the vibrant glow of young, blue star clusters and a glimpse into regions normally obscured by the dust. This image was taken in July 2010 with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3.

A look by Messenger at the crater called Verdi on Mercury. The crater is 90 miles (145 km) in diameter. Click for larger. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

The Messenger spacecraft has entered one of the “hot periods” in its mission.

Mercury is quite interesting for a number of reasons and one of them is that it has the most eccentric orbit of any in the solar system.  The distance between Mercury and the Sun varies from 43.7 million miles to 28.8 million miles over the 88 day orbit.  The closer Mercury is to the Sun it stands to reason the hotter the temperatures the planet and the orbiting spacecraft get.  Just to be clear, the distance the Earth varies in its orbit is not enough to make a difference in our temperatures and it is the tilt that is responsible for the seasons.

Anyways, Mercury and Messenger reached their closest point to the Sun just a few days ago.  Mercury does have a sunshade and the temperatures on that shade device are 350^oC or how about 660^oF!  The spacecraft spends about an hour on the sunlit side and then travels about the same time on the dark side of the planet where temps can plunge to ^-172^oC or ^-279^oF.  It is quite a feat to keep Messenger going.

Tomorrow hopefully we will get some early science data from Messenger at a news conference.  Fingers crossed.

Iran's Saffir rocket with a small satellite sits on the pad at an undisclosed location. Image: Iranian Defence Ministry (sic) via France 24

Iran announced they launched a satellite into orbit on Wednesday.  The Safir rocket was said to put a 15.3 kg (33 lb) satellite into a 260 km (161 mile) orbit.  The satellite is termed a remote sensing satellite although its actual function is undefined.

Iran also announced they will launch a monkey into orbit.  The monkey remains un-named.

Here’s the story from France 24:

AFP – Iran plans to send a live monkey into space in the summer, the country’s top space official said after the launch of the Rassad-1 satellite, state television reported on its website on Thursday.

“The Kavoshgar-5 rocket will be launched during the month of Mordad (July 23 to August 23) with a 285-kilogramme capsule carrying a monkey to an altitude of 120 kilometres (74 miles),” said Hamid Fazeli, head of Iran’s Space Organisation.

In February, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad unveiled a space capsule designed to carry a live monkey into space, along with four new prototypes of home-built satellites the country hopes to launch before March 2012.

At the time, Fazeli touted the launch of a large animal into space as the first step towards sending a man into space, which Tehran says is scheduled for 2020.

Iran sent small animals into space — a rat, turtles and worms — aboard its Kavoshgar-3 rocket in 2010.

Fazeli also announced plans for the launch in October of the Fajr reconnaissance satellite with “a life span of a year and a half, and to be placed at an altitude of 400 kilometres,” the website reported.

On Wednesday, the Islamic republic successfully put its Rassad-1 (Observation-1) satellite into orbit 260 kilometres above the Earth.

Rassad-1, which orbits the Earth 15 times every 24 hours and has a two-month life cycle, will be used to photograph the planet and transmit images, media reports said.

Originally scheduled to launch in August 2010, the satellite was built by Malek Ashtar University in Tehran, which is linked to Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards.

Iran, which first put a satellite into orbit in 2009, has outlined an ambitious space programme amid Western concerns.

Western powers fear that Iran’s space agenda might be linked to developing a ballistic missile capability that could deliver nuclear warheads.

Click here to view the embedded video.

. . . it sports a 268 megapixel camera!

Source

Thanks to Google teaming up with the MESSENGER scientists, we can now Google explore Mercury as we do Mars and the Moon.  As more information becomes available, the experience will become more and more like standing on the surface of Mercury.  The MESSENGER website gives this information:

Three Easy Steps to Explore Mercury in Google Earth

1. Download Google Earth
2. Click HERE to open the Mercury KMZ File in Google Earth
3. Explore!

Alternatively you can right-click HERE and choose “Save link as …” to download the file. Launch the Google Earth Application and Open the Mercury KMZ File in Google Earth

Some Useful Tips:

• Turn off all the layers related to Earth in the lower left corner
• Turn off the Atmosphere under the View menu at the top
• Under Places in the upper left corner, make sure the Mercury Dataset and the Featured Data are both selected
• Named craters and other features on Mercury are marked by a circular marker
• Featured MESSENGER images are marked by a small picture of the spacecraft
• Click on either named features or MESSENGER images for more information

Also in the news at the MESSENGER website:

Yesterday the MESSENGER spacecraft successfully completed the first of four “hot seasons” expected to occur during its one-year primary mission in orbit about Mercury. During these hot seasons, the Sun-facing side of the probe’s sunshade can reach temperatures as high as 350°C.

These hot conditions are the result of two concurrent circumstances, says MESSENGER Mission Systems Engineer Eric Finnegan, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. “Mercury is in an eccentric orbit, and its distance from the Sun varies over 88 days, from 43,689,229 miles to 28,816,300 miles,” he explains. “On May 13, Mercury began heading closer to the Sun in its orbit. The planet reached its closest distance from the Sun on June 12.”

The second contributor to this heat is the geometry of MESSENGER’s orbit relative to the hot dayside of Mercury. The spacecraft is in a highly eccentric orbit around the planet, approaching to within 310 miles of the surface every 12 hours.

“During this hot period, the closest point of approach of the spacecraft to Mercury’s surface occurs on the sunlit side of the planet, so for almost one hour per orbit the spacecraft must pass between the Sun on one side and the hot dayside surface of the planet on the other,” Finnegan says. “To add further extremes, this season is also when the spacecraft passes over the nightside of the planet at high elevations and experiences the longest solar eclipses of the mission. During this period, when eclipses last as long as 62 minutes per orbit, the solar arrays are not illuminated and the spacecraft must derive its power from its internal battery.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Oh my, I can’t wait until we get a better look now that I’ve seen this. NASA gives us a great explanation.

We always try to give credit where credit is due and in this case it’s on the video.

From NASA HQ:

This movie shows surface details beginning to resolve as NASA’s Dawn spacecraft closes in on the giant asteroid Vesta. The framing camera aboard NASA’s Dawn spacecraft obtained the images used for this animation on June 1, 2011, from a distance of about 300,000 miles (483,000 kilometers).

Vesta’s jagged shape, sculpted by eons of cosmic impacts in the main asteroid belt, is apparent. Variations in surface brightness and hints of surface features can be seen. Vesta’s south pole is to the lower right at about the 5 o’clock position.

Vesta is 330 miles (530 kilometers) in diameter and the second most massive object in the asteroid belt. It is also the only large asteroid with a basaltic surface formed due to volcanic processes early in the solar system’s history. Vesta is considered a protoplanet because it is a large body that almost formed into a planet.

The video presents 20 frames, looped five times, that span a 30-minute period. During that time, Vesta rotates about 30 degrees. The images included here are used by navigators to fine-tune Dawn’s trajectory during its approach to Vesta, with arrival expected on July 16, 2011.

The Dawn mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 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. The framing camera project is funded by NASA, the Max Planck Society and DLR. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena. More information about Dawn is online at http://www.nasa.gov/dawn and http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov.

A control system for a flexible spine belly-dancing humanoid.

“Recently, there has been a lot of interest in building anthropomorphic robots. Research on humanoid robotics has focused on the control of manipulators and walking machines. The contributions of the torso towards ordinary movements (such as walking, dancing, attracting mates, and maintaining balance) have been neglected by almost all humanoid robotic researchers. We believe that the next generation of humanoid robots will incorporate a flexible spine in the torso. To meet the challenge of controlling this kind of high-degree-of-freedom robot, a new control architecture is necessary. Inspired by the rhythmic movements commonly exhibited in lamprey locomotion as well as belly dancing, we designed a controller for a simulated belly-dancing robot using the lamprey central pattern generator. Experimental results show that the proposed lamprey central pattern generator module could potentially generate plausible output patterns, which could be used for all the possible spine motions with minimized control parameters. For instance, in the case of planar spine motions, only three input parameters are required. Using our controller, the simulated robot is able to perform complex torso movements commonly seen in belly dancing ...

Quite often rather amusing articles which operate in the malleable zone between genetics and nationalism pop into my RSS feed (thanks to google query alerts). But this piece from Spiegel Online article, Britain Is More Germanic than It Thinks, actually appeals to some legitimate research in making a tongue-in-cheek nationalistic argument that the affinity between the Germans and the English is stronger than the latter would wish to admit. The article starts out with the interesting nationalist back story:

Until now, the so-called Minimalists have set the tone in British archeology. They believe in what they call an “elite transfer”, in which a small caste of Germanic noble warriors, perhaps a few thousand, placed themselves at the top of society in a coup of sorts, and eventually even displaced the Celtic language with their own. Many contemporary Britons, not overly keen on having such a close kinship with the Continent, like this scenario.

Thomas Sheppard, a museum curator, discovered this sentiment almost a century ago. In 1919, officers asked for his assistance after they accidentally discovered the roughly 1,500-year-old grave of an Anglo-Saxon woman while digging trenches in eastern England.

Sheppard concluded that the woman’s bleached bones came from “conquerors from ...

I just finished reading a review of the literature since 1984 on the bioarchaeology of the transition to agriculture. Stature and robusticity during the agricultural transition: Evidence from the bioarchaeological record:

The population explosion that followed the Neolithic revolution was initially explained by improved health experiences for agriculturalists. However, empirical studies of societies shifting subsistence from foraging to primary food production have found evidence for deteriorating health from an increase in infectious and dental disease and a rise in nutritional deficiencies. In Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture (Cohen and Armelagos, 1984), this trend towards declining health was observed for 19 of 21 societies undergoing the agricultural transformation. The counterintuitive increase in nutritional diseases resulted from seasonal hunger, reliance on single crops deficient in essential nutrients, crop blights, social inequalities, and trade. In this study, we examined the evidence of stature reduction in studies since 1984 to evaluate if the trend towards decreased health after agricultural transitions remains. The trend towards a decrease in adult height and a general reduction of overall health during times of subsistence change remains valid, with the majority of studies finding stature to decline as the reliance on agriculture increased. The impact of agriculture, accompanied ...

1) Post from the past: The biological bases of behavioral variation.

2) Weird search query of the week: “clothedpornstars.” OK, so now I know what this is. But are there stars in this kink-genre?

3) Comment of the week, in response to “Does heritability of political orientation matter?”:

” This is why heritabilities of being conservative and liberal can remain the same over time and across cultures, even though conservative and liberal can mean very different things in different contexts.”
Possibly, but there’s a physiological basis underlying the liberal/conservative bias. The latter has been traced to differencies in dopamine neurotransmitter chemistry which are innate to the individual:

http://www.americanthinker.com//blog/2010/11/genetics_and_politics.html

This does not change with external circumstance. Accordingly, Liberals are feelings-driven and respond to political issues emotionally. They cherry-pick facts that support their pre-conceived conclusion. Conservatives are logic-driven, weigh all the facts and reason sequentially to a conclusion. Liberals cherish security; Conservatives cherish liberty. All else stems from those values.

4) And finally, your weekly fluff fix:

Batcopter flying in bat swarm (half-speed) from Kenn Sebesta on Vimeo.

When DIY robotics and the single-minded persistence of scientists intersect, you get things like the Batcopter. This four-propellered hovering boxspring was designed by Boston University researchers to infiltrate flocks of millions of bats as they bob and weave, recording data about how they manage to avoid colliding while simultaneously (we are confident) scaring the bejeezus out of them.

Built from chromed Home Depot towel racks, the first Batcopter was too heavy to fly correctly when the team got down to their research site in Texas, where millions of Brazilian free-tailed bats wing out each night.

But the local ammunition and hardware stores were happy to help.

The second Batcopter was rigged from carbon-fiber hunting arrows, packing foam, and twine, and the four props were surrounded with netting to keep the bats from getting sucked in. The real star of the flyer, the team says, was Open Pilot’s CopterControl, a self-stabilizing, easy-to-use control system for home-built unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV).

The team got some good recordings from one airborne camera and three on the ground before the Batcopter’s electronics started to burn out in the Texas heat. The craft took flight once more, to demonstrate its control mechanism for the camera, but took a fatal, spine-snapping dive when a ...

The concave-eared torrent frog.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could hear each other over the low-frequency roar of jetliners and subway trains? For some rodents, bats, and marine mammals, environmental noise doesn’t normally pose a problem, as they can communicate at ultrasonic frequencies (greater than 20 kHz, just above our maximum hearing range). There are also a couple of amphibians that exhibit this trait, but in an odd twist, researchers have now learned that female concave-eared torrent frogs are deaf to the ultrasonic components of the males’ calls.

The concave-eared frog is a tree-loving native of the Huangshan Mountains in China. In choosing this woodsy area, the nocturnal amphibians must put up with one minor annoyance: streams that produce constant ambient noise. In 2006, Jun-Xian Shen, a biophysicist at the Chinese Academy of Science in Beijing, and his research team discovered that the frogs get around this sonic clutter by adding ultrasonic frequencies to their normal calls (pdf). The frogs were the first non-mammalian vertebrate found to do this, and scientists have since learned that Borneo’s hole-in-the-head frogs (yes, that’s the actual name) also chirp in ultrasonic frequencies. After finding these ultrasonic noises, ...

What’s the News: As human societies adopted agriculture, their people became shorter and less healthy, according to a new review of studies focused on the health impacts of early farming. Societies around the world—in Britain and Bahrain, Thailand and Tennessee—experienced this trend regardless of when they started farming or what stapled crops they farmed, the researchers found.

This finding runs contrary to the idea that a stable source of food makes people grow bigger and healthier. The data suggest, in fact, that poor nutrition, increased disease, and other problems that plagued early farming peoples more than their hunter-gatherer predecessors outweighed any benefits from stability.

How the Heck:

The researchers dug through data from more than 20 studies that collected clues to stature and overall health—everything from dental cavities to bone strength—from ancient skeletons. These studies focused on a wide range of cultures in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas as they transitioned from foragers to farmers.
The team saw that across the board, people’s height decreased and health worsened as they traded hunting and gathering for the garden and the herd.
What accounts for the decline? While we tend to think that growing our food rather than ...

Mars Express is a European Space Agency probe that’s been orbiting the Red Planet since 2003, returning vast amount of data. Lately it’s been taking some amazing images and video of the tiny Martian moon Phobos, and the ESA just released this amazing footage of the lumpy potato moon passing by Jupiter as seen from the orbiting craft:

How cool is that? Engineers saw this viewing opportunity and actually changed the orbit of Mars Express to be able to see it. Phobos passed a mere 11,400 km (6800 miles) away when these shots were taken, but Jupiter was 530 million km (320 million miles) in the background. That’s why a moon only 27 km (16 miles) across can appear to dwarf a planet 140,000 km (86,000 miles) across! In the diagram here, the relative positions of all four players is shown; click to enbarsoomenate.

The animation consists of 104 frames taken over a period of just over one minute. It’s useful, too. By knowing the position of the spacecraft and Jupiter, the orbit of Phobos itself can be better determined. Phobos is weird: it orbits so close to Mars ...

What’s the News: You might think that identical twins have an advantage when it comes to crime—with the same DNA, who could tell them apart? But new research with a squad of scent-trained Czech police dogs reveals that even identical twins have their own individual smells, even if they live in the same house and eat the same food.

How the Heck:

Scent line-ups for identifying suspects are regularly used in the Czech Republic, Russia, Denmark, the Netherlands, and several other European countries. Trained dogs are provided with a scent from the scene of a crime and then sniff out the matching scent from sweat samples taken from suspects.
The researchers took sweat samples from two sets of identical twins and two sets of fraternal twins (whose status they verified with DNA testing), as well as plenty of samples from unrelated children. All the samples were taken in the same room and with the same scientist present, so background odors wold cancel out.
Then, 10 trained German Shepherds, police dogs used solely for identifying suspects by scent, were put through a total of 120 scent line-ups by police officers who had no knowledge of which pads were which. In every single trial, the dogs correctly identified the individuals they were seeking, even when an ...

Good news, everyone!

I’ve written a new article for Blastr, the news and opinion web portal for the SyFy channel. This one is "7 TV scientists that even real scientists approve of", and is essentially my Top 6 (with a tie for second place, bringing it to 7) favorite fictional scientists on TV. The picture here may be something of a spoiler for one of them. Whaaaa?

I originally wrote the article as my favorite astronomers on TV, but decided to expand it to all scientists. That didn’t change my list much; it just made it easier to include a couple of folks. The problem with a list like this is, first, keeping it short — there are a lot of potential candidates. I got around that by adding an Honorable Mention at the bottom of each section.

Also, it’s hard to remember everyone! For example, several commenters on the article point out I didn’t include Walter Bishop from Fringe, and I have to cop to that one. I really like Walter, and to be honest the reason I ...

Pain is a paradox. It feels like the most real, objective experience we can have, and yet it can be weirdly malleable. It’s better to think of pain, like memory or vision, not as a simple reflection of the world, but as a strategy we’ve evolved to stay alive. Thinking this way can help make sense of the awful experience of chronic pain, when this urgent signal refers to nothing except a brain caught in its own feedback loops. In my latest column for Discover, I take a look at the latest understanding of pain, and some promising research that uses these insights to search for a new, more rational pain-killer. Check it out.

[Image: Boy With A Rooster by Adriano Cecioni, 1868. Photo from Kate Eliot/Flickr via Creative Commons License]