Calamities of Nature is a webcomic that frequently has skeptical and scientifiic themes. A recent one deals with ghosts and the soul, and it hits on a message I’ve said many times: there’s no such thing as the supernatural. Either something is natural — that is, part of the Universe — or else it doesn’t exist.

If you posit some thing that has no perceivable or measurable effect, then it may as well not exist. And as soon as you claim it does have an effect — it can be seen, heard, recorded, felt — then it must be in some way testable, and therefore subject to science. You can’t claim ghosts are supernatural, beyond the realm of science, but also claim they show up on a freaking thermal camera!

Well, you can claim that, but you’d be wrong. So there you go.

[NOTE: In a funny coincidence, after I drafted this post but before I published it, my fellow Hive Overmind blogger Sean Carroll posted a link to this same cartoon using almost exactly the same post title! COINCIDENCE? Well, yeah, actually. Great minds and ...

This past week saw two big milestones for the two big operating high energy particle colliders in the world. At these machines, we measure the number of collisions with the rather arcane unit of “inverse barns”, which is essentially a measure of inverse cross sectional area. It’s just like if you are throwing darts at a dart board across the room with your eyes closed: the bigger the dart board, the more likely you are to hit it, and the more darts you throw, the more hits you get.

The term “barn” came from the early days of nuclear physics when Fermi quipped that a nucleus is “as big as a barn.” And so a new physics unit was born: one barn is 10^-28 m², about the size of a big nucleus. At the Tevatron at Fermilab, we’ve just crossed over 10.0 inverse femtobarns of integrated luminosity, after over ten years of operation in what we call Run 2 of the Tevatron. At the LHC at CERN, we just saw the integrated luminosity counter roll over to 1.000 inverse femtobarns. It’s kind of like the difference between your 10-year old car rolling over to 100,000 miles, and your new year-old car rolling over to 10,000 miles.

Our old car, the Tevatron, has taken us on quite a ride this past decade. I’ll push the analogy further, though, and say that it’s been like driving across the Great Plains. We kept hoping to see mountains, but it’s been flatland the whole way. Though we’ve looked very hard, we just have not turned up any sign of new physics at this incredible machine, despite the recent excitement. The present schedule is that the Tevatron will collide its last proton and antiproton at 2:00 pm on September 30 of this year. We’re tradin’ her in.

With our new car, the LHC, expect to see the mountains very soon, and in fact we reached this amount of data far sooner than I would have predicted at the beginning of the year. Last year, starting in March and eventually stopping in early November, the LHC delivered 0.04 inverse femtobarns, 25 times less than the sample we have now. But that was the first good chunk of physics data, and an army of data-hungry students, postdocs, lab scientists and professors analyzed it frantically over the winter, publishing a huge torrent of papers in the spring as the LHC really started to hit the gas. (Okay, perhaps the analogy is stretching to the breaking point here.)

So are the white things on the horizon we are starting to see the snow-capped peaks we have hoped for, or just clouds? We’ll soon know, and this is bound to be a summer to remember in the history of particle physics, unlike any time since the “November Revolution” of 1974, when the charm quark and the tau lepton made their appearance at the Stanford Linear Accelerator and Brookhaven National Lab.

After the November Revolution, with the third generation of quarks and leptons established, the Standard Model took solid form: there soon followed the discovery of the bottom quark at Fermilab in 1977, the gluon at DESY in Hamburg in 1979, and the W and Z bosons at CERN in 1982. The hunt for the top quark and the Higgs boson, and whatever might lie beyond, was on.

But it took another thirteen years to find the top quark, and in 1995, the CDF and D0 experiments did just that at the Tevatron. It was clear as a bell, and surprisingly massive, weighing in at nearly the mass of a gold atom at 175 GeV. With the precise measurements of the W and Z from CERN it soon became clear that the Higgs might just lie within reach of the Tevatron, which could discover it before the LHC could be completed. (The SSC had been cancelled in 1993 in a budget climate eerily like our own.)

And so Run 2 of the Tevatron began in 2001 after major upgrades to both experiments. Slow at first, the accelerator luminosity steadily increased, and the physics flowed, with better and better measurements of the top quark and W boson, and searches for the Higgs and a host of other hypothetical particles. Two years ago the Tevatron experiments finally reached the level where, combined, the data from CDF and D0 ruled out the HIggs boson if its mass were twice that of the W boson, 160 GeV. But no sign of any new particles.

The data from the LHC in 2010 was not sufficient to improve upon this Higgs search result. In a wide swath of other physics studies, however, the LHC is surpassing the Tevatron. Basically, the LHC should be viewed as a gluon collider: a gluon in one incoming proton collides with a gluon from another, producing whatever gluons produce when they do this, which is anything that is strongly interacting (that is, feels the strong nuclear force). Even with over a factor of a hundred less integrated luminosity, the LHC can do far more than the Tevatron due to the LHC’s higher energy. But at the LHC as well, last year, there was no sign of new physics.

In the coming weeks, though, with the huge new data set, the LHC will blow past the Tevatron in nearly every category except in the search for the low mass Higgs boson, where there truly still is a race. There are two big conferences coming up at the end of July, in Boston and Grenoble, France, at which we can expect the announcements of any discoveries made by the LHC experiments CMS and ATLAS…or by the Tevatron. Fasten your seat belts!

Tony Piro, the artist behind the webcomic Calamities of Nature, explains the relationship between science and the supernatural better than I ever could.

Click for the rest of the exciting story. Via Evolving Thoughts.

Top picks

“There is little validity to concerns that people who use social networks experience smaller social networks, less closeness, or are exposed to less diversity.” Pew kicks the echo-chamber meme in the groin with the steel-capped boot of data.

“Gathered inside a little-known research centre in southern Louisiana, the people who oversee chimpanzee research in the United States were preparing to battle for the survival of their enterprise.” Meanwhile, an editorial sums up the current debate

No heartbeat. No pulse. But very much alive. The artificial heart that doesn’t beat

“Something happened! Sehwag is out! We’re not sure why.” Two Americans who know nowt about cricket live-blog a full game. Pure genius.

Genome study solves twins’ mystery condition. Great piece by Erika Check Hayden

Liu Bolin, the camouflage man. These photos are just ridiculous. And continuing the theme, “Turning the human form into background noise” – awesome profile of a master of camouflage

“So do we over-vilify invasive species? No, we don’t.” An excellent riposte by Christie Wilcox

You may have heard about blind people who can use sonar like bats. But you’ve never read anything this good about it

“Again and again, [Stephen Jay] Gould ...

You can watch the full 7 minute segment here. It came out great. I’m trying to figure out how to embed it…ah ha!

Watch the full episode. See more Need To Know.

By Jon Winsor

One of the most surprising things about the Santorum interview on Limbaugh last week was how completely unsurprising it was. Here’s Santorum’s take on climate science:

There’s a variety of factors that contribute to the earth warming and cooling, and to me this is an opportunity for the left to create — it’s a beautifully concocted scheme because they know that the earth is gonna cool and warm. It’s been on a warming trend so they said, “Oh, let’s take advantage of that and say that we need the government to come in and regulate your life some more because it’s getting warmer,” just like they did in the seventies when it was getting cool, they needed the government to come in and regulate your life because it’s getting cooler. It’s just an excuse for more government control of your life…

Got that? Scientists (who we can assume are included under what Santorum means by “the left”) are secretly “concocting” the science, because they want government to “control your life.” Obviously, this is not much of a scientific argument. But it’s a very recognizable political argument, and the kind we hear repeatedly. And some of us may remember the early 80’s when it was a new argument, at least in the mass-circulated form that we we see it in today. I would argue that the person most responsible for putting that argument into circulation was Irving Kristol. In 1975, he wrote:

[The] “new class” consists of scientists, lawyers, city planners, social workers, educators, criminologists, sociologists, public health doctors, etc.-a substantial number of whom find their careers in the expanding public sector rather than the private. The public sector, indeed, is where they prefer to be. They are, as one says, “idealistic”-i.e., far less interested in individual financial rewards than in the corporate power of their class. Though they continue to speak the language of “Progressive-reform,” in actuality they are acting upon a hidden agenda: to propel the nation from that modified version of capitalism we call “the welfare state” toward an economic system so stringently regulated in detail as to fulfill many of the traditional anti-capitalist aspirations of the Left.

This is primarily an emotional argument–as has become more and more clear over the years. Not only does it have nothing to do with the merits of specific claims and arguments (especially the merits of climate science), but Irving Kristol and his left-leaning colleague Daniel Bell turned out to be quite wrong in their predictions about the counter culture and what would happen to the welfare state as baby boomers entered the professions.

But even though the predictions about the “new class” turned out wrong, as a set of ideas they’ve had a wildly successful career, and even continue to have success. The reasons why are many:

• Politically, this kind of argument can draw on the cultural resentments of everyone who isn’t an expert, and also draw on the strong force of US anti-intellectualism. As Amanda Marcotte put it a couple years ago, a politician (like Santorum) can use this style of argument to pick up “the spite vote.”
• They could trade on fears of the counterculture, which were strong back in 1975 when Kristol was making his case, but has lessened now that the counterculture sells everything from running sneakers to Cadillacs (although images of the counterculture still have power to motivate the GOP base when the culture wars are invoked).
• They built on the demonstrated success of Nixon’s strategy of stoking resentments: against intellectuals, the press, and all the snooty types who would oppose underdogs like Nixon (Americans love an underdog, which the conservative counterestablishment knows all too well).
• It rang alarm bells for the donor class for conservative institutions, urging them to respond to the new proliferation of experts and help create their own network of counter-expertise (a favorite subject of Chris’s lately).
• It piggybacked on previous conservative intellectuals’ work. See William F. Buckley on “the liberal establishment” and James Burnham on the “managerial elite.”
• It allowed Kristol’s cohort of conservative intellectuals to mine all the brilliant content of the anti-bohemian and anti-communist feuds among the New York intellectuals, so they could fight the intellectual skirmishes they needed to fight to get establishment respect. The work of Daniel Bell alone is rich enough to spend decades unpacking (even though, again, he got many of his predictions wrong).
• Most of all, Kristol’s formula of cultural class struggle against “elitist big government” made coordinated messaging easy. Even Sarah Palin can rail in favor of the “real Americans” and against the “elites.” And we can hear Kristol’s formula broadcast in stereo from Fox News, Wall Street Journal, Rush Limbaugh, the Washington Times, and the candidates themselves. (Everyone all together now: “John Kerry is a French elitist.” “Barack Obama is a socialist!” Or, “This climategate thing is BIG!!” If enough people say so at the same time, there must be something to it, right?)

Of course, these days there are almost no socialists left (except maybe Bernie Sanders), and the counterculture is starting to exist only late at night on Nickolodean. So the only people left to fight are the “intellectuals” (Irving Kristol’s “scientists, lawyers, city planners, social workers, educators… etc.”) This has become very worrying to smart conservatives such as David Frum and David Brooks because if conservatives oppose everyone that Kristol classified as “new class” intellectuals, they start to oppose expert competence itself.

But The Weekly Standard is having none of this:

Kristol would not brook being lectured to by thinkers feigning a concern for conservatism and shedding crocodile tears over its fall from a dignified version limited to quoting maxims from Edmund Burke. This group of salon intellectuals, still active today, would, in the name of “saving” conservatism, exclude from it people of faith because they are too religious, entrepreneurs because they wish to make too much money, and middle Americans because they are too patriotic. While Kristol acknowledged the dangers of populism, he also saw that it can be a “corrective to the defects . . . often arising from the intellectual influence . . . of our democratic elites.” Calling attention to a new fact of modern political life, he noted that the “people were conservative and the educated elites that governed them were ideological elites, always busy provoking disorder and discontent in the name of some utopian goal.”

Having policy informed by science–”utopian?” Is it something only “salon intellectuals” need to worry about? The Weekly Standard’s reviewer skates very fast over this territory because he’s on thin ice.

Last week, I showed you a turtle doing his thing while I was out biking — providing "his thing" means falling face-first off a log.

Not too long after that, a ways farther down the trail, I had an encounter with a much cuter critter.

That’s a prairie dog, and they’re very common around Boulder. They are about as adorable as you can imagine, even in the way they behave. They stand on their hind legs, chitter loudly, and run around like they’re starring in a Pixar cartoon.

On the other hand, they also are known to carry the plague. And by the plague, I mean the plague, Bubonic Plague. That’s one reason I try not to get too close to them. I watched "Holy Grail"; I know the score.

Colonies of them can have dozens of members, and watching them prance around and run from hole to hole is fun. Their noises are interesting; some folks think it may be a very rudimentary language. I remain agnostic on this, though of course skeptical, but they are a very gregarious and chatty animal.

And, of course, ...

Here, for your viewing pleasure (I hope), is my recent talk about time and viruses, at the Long Now Foundation. I turn up after a short video, and then after the lecture Stewart Brand and I have a fun conversation about how viruses will not infect you with superpowers.

The Wall Street Journal asked me to review another book. This time around it’s Virolution, by Frank Ryan. It’s about a lot of things that I’m pretty crazy about (like the viruses that make up a lot of our genome). But I wasn’t crazy about the book itself, I’m afraid. Still, the review was a good opportunity to talk about what our inner viruses may mean for our well-being. Check it out.

An enlarged image of comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko from the Rosetta spacecraft. More images linked below. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA)

The European Space Agency has a spacecraft enroute to meet a comet. The name of the comet is Churyumov-Gerasimenko (say that three times fast). Rosetta was launched in 2004 and won’t actually get to the comet in 2014.  ESA is getting ready to put the spacecraft in a hibernation for the last three years of the journey.

The picture above was a test of the on board system called OSIRIS, (short for Optical, Spectroscopic and Infrared Remote Imaging System) and at a distance of over 101 million miles (163 million km) taking a picture of an object that is only 2.5 miles (4 km) in diameter I’d say it works pretty well.

Check out the press release and more images.

SN 1987A. Click for larger. Credit: Pete Challis (CfA)

The supernova of 1987 (SN 1987A) in the Large Magellanic Cloud appears to be brightening. The press release (below) does mention that it may be only the sharper vision of Hubble and the relatively close proximity to the supernova that we see the brightening. So we don’t know how much brightening is occurring only that it is.

Still, it’s a great picture. The ring is about 6-trillion miles (~ 1 light-year)in diameter and you can see the remnants of the star that exploded inside the ring.

If you want to see a very large version of this image click the link below.

Here’s the press release from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

New Supernova Remnant Lights Up

Cambridge, MA – In 1987, light from an exploding star in a neighboring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud, reached Earth. Named Supernova 1987A, it was the closest supernova explosion witnessed in almost 400 years, allowing astronomers to study it in unprecedented detail as it evolves.

Today a team of astronomers announced that the supernova debris, which has faded over the years, is brightening. This shows that a different power source has begun to light the debris, and marks the transition from a supernova to a supernova remnant.

“Supernova 1987A has become the youngest supernova remnant visible to us,” said Robert Kirshner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).

Kirshner leads a long-term study of SN 1987A with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Since its launch in 1990, Hubble has provided a continuous record of the changes in SN 1987A.

As shown in the accompanying image, SN 1987A is surrounded by a ring of material that blew off the progenitor star thousands of years before it exploded. The ring is about one light-year (6 trillion miles) across. Inside that ring, the “guts” of the star are rushing outward in an expanding debris cloud.

Most of a supernova’s light comes from radioactive decay of elements created in the explosion. As a result, it fades over time. However, the debris from SN 1987A has begun to brighten, suggesting that a new power source is lighting it.

“It’s only possible to see this brightening because SN 1987A is so close and Hubble has such sharp vision,” Kirshner said.

A supernova remnant consists of material ejected from an exploding star, as well as the interstellar material it sweeps up. The debris of SN 1987A is beginning to impact the surrounding ring, creating powerful shock waves that generate X-rays observed with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. Those X-rays are illuminating the supernova debris and shock heating is making it glow. The same process powers well-known supernova remnants in our galaxy like Cassiopeia A.

Because it’s so young, the remnant of SN 1987A still shows the history of the last few thousand years of the star’s life recorded in the knots and whorls of gas. By studying it further, astronomers may decode that history.

“Young supernova remnants have personality,” Kirshner agreed.

Eventually, that history will be lost when the bulk of the expanding stellar debris hits the surrounding ring and shreds it. Until then, SN 1987A continues to offer an unprecedented opportunity to watch a cosmic object change over the course of a human lifetime. Few other objects in the sky evolve on such short time-scales.

This research appears in a paper in the June 9, 2011 issue of Nature. The first author is Josefin Larsson (University of Stockholm).

The Mars Rover Opportunity took this image of a small crater called Skylab. I wonder how they resisted the urge to go digging around, I don’t think I could.  The black looking rock at 2 o’clock looks pretty interesting too.

You can get full res images of this picture at the link below.

The NASA caption:

NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity used its navigation camera to take the exposures combined into this view of a wee crater, informally named “Skylab,” along the rover’s route. The component images were taken during the 2,594th Martian day, or sol, of the rover’s work on Mars (May 12, 2011), after Opportunity had driven 239 feet (72.7 meters) that sol.

This is a young crater about 30 feet (9 meters) in diameter. How young? The blocks of material ejected from the crater-digging impact sit on top of the sand ripples near the crater. This suggests, from the estimated age of the area’s sand ripples, that the crater was formed within the past 100,000 years. The dark sand inside the crater attests to the mobility of fine sand in the recent era in this Meridiani Planum region of Mars.

The view spans 216 degrees of the compass, from northwest on the right to south on the right. It is presented as a cylindrical projection.

Opportunity successfully completed its three-month prime mission on Mars in April 2004 and has continued in bonus extended missions since then. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover Project for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington.

STS-134 and the ISS. Click for larger. Image credit: Thierry Legault and Emmanuel Rietsch.

Check this out!

Have you ever tried to image the ISS?  I have on several occasions and I can tell you it is very difficult to say the least. Everything has to be just perfect, you need to know exactly where it will be at a certain time, point your instruments in that direction, the camera has to track perfectly and at the proper speed to keep the ISS in frame and IMHO the hardest part is to get a focused image.  Yeah the focus sounds like it would be the easiest part but in practice it usually turns out quite different.  Oh then there are exposure times and on it goes.

Thierry Legault and Emmanuel Rietsch: “Passage of the International Space Station and Endeavour, taken on May 29th 2011 at 3:55UT from the area of Pau, France, after installation of the AMS (Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer). The video is accelerated 2.5 times (acquisition at 10 fps, video at 25 fps). The altitude of the ISS is 360 km (200 miles), for a size of a hundred metres. The speed of ISS is 17,000 miles per hour and its angular speed at zenith is 1.3º per second.”

So hopefully you get a feeling for how difficult it was for Thierry Legault and Emmanuel Rietsch remarkable this image is and how even more remarkable the other photos, animations and even 3D images are.  Have a look.

System 94L - NASA Image

NASA Satellite Reveals a Huge “System 94L” Trying to Organize in the Caribbean A large area of low pressure has been lingering in the southern Caribbean since last week and is being monitored for tropical cyclone development. NASA’s Aqua satellite noticed that the showers and thunderstorms associated with the low cover a huge area and there are a lot of strong storms within it. Infrared imagery on June 5 at 18:11 UTC (2:11 p.m. EDT) from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument that flies aboard Aqua showed strong convection (rapidly rising air that form the thunderstorms that power a tropical cyclone) in various areas of the low pressure area called “System 94L.” Some of those thunderstorm cloud tops that stretch from Jamaica east to the area south of Puerto Rico are very high and very cold. The strongest cloud top temperatures are as cold as or colder than -63 Fahrenheit / -52 Celsius, which is an indicator of a lot of energy building those high thunderstorms. The AIRS imagery is about 1700 kilometers (1,056 miles) wide, and the showers and thunderstorms associated with System 94L fill up that track from west to east, making this a huge area of low pressure. Interestingly enough, the National Hurricane Center noted that today, June 6, the area of lowest pressure is located about 130 miles south of Grand Cayman, and separate from the strongest thunderstorms. The National Hurricane Center (NHC) noted that this system has a Medium chance of becoming the Atlantic Ocean season’s first tropical storm before the upper level winds start battering it. NHC is planning to send a hurricane hunter into the storm on Tuesday, June 7 to investigate. In the meantime, those strong thunderstorms on AIRS infrared imagery mean heavy rainfall for Haiti and Jamaica. For a look at the development of System 94L, check out NASA’s Hurricane page update on System 93L from last week, when both low pressure areas were in the Caribbean: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hurricanes/archives/2011/h2011_93L.html. Text Credit: Rob Gutro, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

1) Post from the past: What it means to be a Turk.

2) Weird search query of the week: “clothedporn.” 5 hits from this! Weird.

3) Comment of the week, in response to

Modular phenotypic plasticity: divergent responses of barnacle penis and feeding leg form to variation in density and wave-exposure.

“Traits can evolve both in response to direct selection and in response to indirect selection on other linked traits. Although the evolutionary significance of coupled traits (e.g., through shared components of developmental pathways, or through competition for shared developmental resources) is now well accepted, we know comparatively little about how developmental coupling may restrict the independent responses of two or more phenotypically plastic traits in response to conflicting environmental cues. Such studies are important because coupled development, if present, could act as an important limit to the evolution of functionally independent plasticity in multiple traits. I tested whether developmental coupling can restrict the direction of plastic responses by studying how penis form and leg form-both highly plastic traits of barnacles-varied in response to differences in conspecific density and water velocity. Penis length and leg length in Balanus glandula varied in parallel with variation in wave-exposure but varied in opposite directions with variation in conspecific density. This study represents one of the rare tests of developmental ...

In the post yesterday I reported what was generally known about the Horn of Africa, that its populations seem to lie between those of Sub-Saharan African and Eurasia genetically. This is totally reasonable as a function of geography, but there are also suggestions that this is not simply a function of isolation by distance (i.e., populations at position 0.5 on the interval 0.0 to 1.0 would presumably exhibit equal affinities in both directions due to gene flow). For example, you observe the almost total lack of “Bantu” genetic influence on the Semitic and Cushitic populations of the Horn of Africa, and the lack of Eurasian influence in groups to the south and west of the Horn except to some extent the Masai.

Tacking horizontally in terms of discipline, over the past few generations there has been a veritable cottage industry making the case for the recent origin of many ethno-linguistic populations through a process of cultural self-creation. Clearly there are many cases of this, some of them studied in depth by anthropologists (e.g., the shift from Dinka to Nuer identity). But there has been an unfortunate tendency to over-generalize ...

I’ve just been made aware of this intriguing study by Christopher P. Scheitle, in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. Looking at a survey of the religious and spiritual views of a very large sample of university students, Sheitle finds, surprisingly, that science-religion-conflict views (whether pro-science or pro-religion) are not predominant. Rather, they’re a minority (31 % overall), with science religion “independence” or “collaboration” views more prominent (69 % overall).

However, the conflict perspective was strongest in two areas. Among those studying natural sciences, engineering, or mathematics, the “conflict: I side with science” perspective was above 20 percent. Among those studying education, meanwhile, the “conflict: I side with religion” perspective was over 35 percent (!). Here is the conclusion of the study:

The predominant narrative surrounding the religion and science relationship has been driven by the assumption that these institutions are engaged in an unavoidable con?ict resulting from their contradictory claims to truth (Evans and Evans 2008). However, the analysis conducted above found that most undergraduates, regardless of their area of study or even their religiosity, do not hold a con?ict perspective. Furthermore, many more students move away from a con?ict perspective to an independence/collaboration perspective than vice versa. This ?nding might be especially surprising since many people, especially religious families, assume that higher education has a secularizing in?uence on students (Smith and Snell 2009:248), which might be expected to increase perceptions of a con?ict. Despite its seeming predominance, the con?ict model of understanding religion and science issues does not seem to have much support within the undergraduate population. Ecklund and Park (2009) made a similar conclusion in their analysis of the views of academic scientists.

Still, some of the patterns seen in the analysis above might be disconcerting for those looking to move beyond the public battles for power between religion and science. The ?nding that scientists and engineers are among the most likely to have a pro-science con?ict perspective could mean that some of the most in?uential voices in these public debates might be more likely to fuel the debates than attenuate them. Similarly, future educators are among the most likely to hold a pro-religion con?ict perspective. Given that classrooms and school boards have been one of the central forums for the struggle over religion and science, this does not bode well for a
reduction of those struggles.

Full study here. I am sometimes asked why there aren’t more young people who are interested in freethought, skepticism, and so forth–especially since millennials, we know, are highly secular. But insofar as the skeptic/freethinker/atheist movements are wedded to “conflict,” I think this study may suggest part of the answer.

What’s the News: Making loans to small business owners in developing countries has quite the positive reputation. It has given people in poverty, especially women, a chance to bootstrap themselves up the economic ladder despite having marginal or no credit history and little work experience, as people have used the tiny loans to start businesses, purchase herds of animals, or invest in improvements to their shops or inventory. The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the economists who developed the practice in the 1970s at Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank.

But does microcredit really pay off? In a study published today in Science, economists have taken a rigorous look at it and concluded that in many or its modern implementations, it’s not having the touted benefits.

What’s the Context:

The problem with studying the effects of microcredit is that there tend to be a lot of factors at play in addition to the money. Lenders might provide counseling to business owners—as part of a broader category of services called microfinance—or decide to give credit to only those they think most likely to succeed. This makes it hard to tell whether the money, all on its own, can have ...

I know this isn’t strictly astronomy, but it’s a lovely time lapse video of sunrises and sunsets in the arctic… and since the Earth is tilted, in the summer the Sun skims just below the horizon as it circles the sky. So hey, I guess it is astronomy related!

You can really see this effect well starting at 1:06 into the video; the Sun sets at a very low angle to the ground, and comes right back up. The sky never gets completely dark.

The video was shot by a man who calls himself Mr. TSO, and he has many other lovely videos on Vimeo. It’s Friday, so take some time and look. You’ll breathe just a little bit easier if you do.

Related posts:

- Gorgeous Milky Way Time Lapse
- Very Large Telescope, Very Stunning Time Lapse Video
- Incredibly, impossibly beautiful time lapse video
- Dust, from the desert below to the galaxy above
- Stunning winter sky timelapse video: Sub Zero
- OK, because I like y’all: bonus aurora timelapse video
- AWESOME timelapse video: Rapture