What’s the News: Scientists—and smokers—have long known that nicotine is an appetite suppressant, but just how it kept hunger at bay remained unclear. Now, researchers have uncovered the neural pathway by which nicotine reduces appetite, in a study published today in Science. This discovery could lead to new drugs that help people quit smoking or lose weight.

How the Heck:

The researchers first observed that mice given nicotine or the drug cytisine, which binds to some nicotinic receptors in the brain, ate less and had less body fat than mice not given either drug. When the researchers gave mice a chemical compound that blocked nicotine receptors, the appetite-suppressing effects of these drugs went away.
Since cytisine binds particularly well to a type of nicotinic receptor called ?3?4, the researchers figured that receptor might be the major player in decreasing appetite. Sure enough, when the researchers genetically knocked out that receptor in some mice, those mice were immune to the drugs’ appetite-reducing effects.
The researchers then looked at what parts of the brain had ?3?4 receptors, since different nicotinic receptors are present in different groups of neurons. These particular receptors show up in ...

What’s the News: The currency on the tech world’s lips these days isn’t the yen or the yuan. It’s Bitcoin, a digital form of money that’s totally anonymous and currently valued at many times the worth of the dollar and the Euro. How does it work, what can you buy with it, and why is it making people mad?

What’s the Context:

The first thing to consider is that currency is just the physical manifestation of a promise. Money issued by governments has value because governments say it does, and its value fluctuates according to people’s faith in the government. It used to be that money was worth something because of the agreed-upon value of its contents, like gold or silver, but modern currencies trade on trust rather than intrinsic value.
Digital currency can be made anonymous and independent of third parties like governments or banks. Its advocates, notably the hacker community, see this ...

Alliterative title stolen shamelessly from the lovely and understanding Jennifer Ouellette, who blogs background about the hunt for new particles at Discovery News.

So here we have science, marching on. Just last week we heard that CDF, one of the big experiments at the Tevatron at Fermilab, had collected more data relevant to a mysterious bump they had previously reported around 150 GeV in collisions that produced a W boson and two jets. The new data (7.3 inverse femtobarns, up from 4.3 fb^-1 previously) made the bump look even more prominent, rather than watching it regress back down to the mean. The discrepancy is now more than 4 sigma, giving license to get just a wee bit excited that new physics might be on the loose.

Now D0, the other big experiment at the Tevatron, is ready to weigh in — and the “D” stands for “damper,” it appears. Here’s a blog post at symmetry, a link to the technical paper, and a webcast for a talk that will happen this afternoon at 4:00pm Central Time. You knew that Jester would be on the case, and he is.

But this picture tells you all you need to know.

With 4.3 fb^-1 of data analyzed, the CDF bump should be just barely visible, as indicated by the dotted line labeled “Gaussian.” But there doesn’t seem to be anything there. And it’s not just you; the collaboration estimates that the probability that there is really a bump there is less than 10^-5. Not very encouraging, really.

But still — it does seem to be there in the CDF data. So what’s going on? At this point, it’s not clear. Both experiments are extremely mature and well-understood, and the collaborations are good at what they do, so it is likely to be something very subtle at work. It still could be new physics, that is somehow playing games with us, but certainly the prospects don’t look as good today as they did yesterday. Look like science is going to have to march on a bit more before everything is clear.

Not just the Russians: A biometric ATM in Korea

ATMs in Russia may soon be outfitted with intelligence services–style lie detection software, designed to help banks pick out consumer credit fraud—without bank employees actually having to go through the arduous business of talking to and evaluating potential cardholders.

People will be able to apply for credit cards by chatting with one of the new machines about their financial history. But these ATMs won’t just take your word for it: They come equipped with voice analysis software meant to pick out telltale signs of lying, made by a company that supplies nifty technologies to the Federal Security Service, a successor to the KGB. Even better, these new cash-and-credit dispensers are currently being developed by the country’s biggest bank, Sberbank—of which the Russian government is the majority shareholder.

To design these voice analysis programs, the company put to use hours and hour of interrogations recorded by the Russian police, in which the person being question was found to be lying. The stress of lying is thought to cause involuntary physiological changes that alter the patterns of a person’s voice. The software’s hard to fool, the company says, since, like a ...

Following on my last post, I want to do a show that really gets into the political left and its relationship with science. That relationship is not without its problems–GMOs, nuclear, vaccines–though I believe it is nothing like the current relationship with the political right.

But the question is, which guest would have the most insight into this question? I’ve already interviewed Yale’s Dan Kahan so he’s out, though obviously he has much insight.

I would welcome your suggestions. I’m very open to interviewing a conservative who has thought deeply on this question. In fact, that would be the ideal choice.

In the continuing quest to avoid packing boxes before our house gets ripped open for renovations this summer, allow me to offer you–for one week only!–another sale. I’ve got 33 autographed copies of the first US hardback edition of Evolution: The Triumph of An Idea, which are available for $20. (The cover price is $40, and this particular edition has been out of print for some time now.)

This book was a companion to a series that aired in 2001 on PBS. But it’s not a nonfiction novelization of the show. In fact, the show hadn’t even been shot when I started working on the book a year earlier. Instead, I wrote a stand-alone introduction to the history of evolutionary biology and to its many avenues, from sex to mass extinctions to the rise of our species. The publishers packed the large-format book with photographs and color artwork. “Zimmer writes in a gloriously clear and lively style,” wrote a reviewer for Scientific American. “His coverage is as thorough as it is graceful. This is as fine a book as one will find on the subject.”

If this sale is like ...

This is a guest post by Dr. Jeffrey H. Toney, an educator and scientist whose career has spanned academia and the pharmaceutical industry, and currently serves as the dean of the College of Natural, Applied and Health Sciences at Kean University. He blogs regularly at ScienceBlogs, NJ Voices, OpEdNews and The Huffington Post.

Sex sells…but can science? Grabbing a consumer’s attention using sex goes beyond branding. In fact:

…sex is an inherent, inseparable brand message. It is the message.

Scientific messages are becoming increasingly apparent in advertisements, whether as claims of health benefits (“clinically proven”) or trumpeting a “scientific breakthrough” displayed, inexplicably, by showing chemical structures or dramatic hi-tech animations. This is a curious schizophrenia. On the one hand, the public is often disinterested and skeptical of scientific claims, often confusing facts with opinions. Evolution and climate change are obvious examples.

Coverage of science in the news media has declined dramatically:

“For every five hours of cable news, less than a minute is devoted to science; 46 percent of Americans reject evolution and think the Earth is less than 10,000 years old; the number of newspapers with weekly science sections has shrunken by two-thirds over the past several decades.”

On the other hand, use of science within advertising somehow bestows upon the product a higher status, a gravitas, the excitement that this thing that the consumer must have is one of a kind, a rare breakthrough discovery. More perplexing is the way that science is presented in these ads – as something mysterious (chemical structures fly across the screen), as something utterly confusing to the non-scientist.

Consider the L’Oreal Paris Youth Code Collection. An article in The New York Times heralded that “L’Oreal Paris Cracks the Code”–presumably referring to genetic code. The commercial:

“Specially formulated with Biolysat, Adenosine and enhanced with peptides, the Youth Code GenActiv TECHNOLOGY™ targets the repair gene and enhances its ability to regenerate under stress.”

What is Biolysat? What is adenosine? A “repair gene”? {Most people know what a gene is, but what is it repairing?} What does it mean to “target” a gene? Doesn’t that sound dangerous?

It gets worse:

“Biolysat works to activate the expression of the repair gene while Adenosine, a molecule that is naturally found in skin cells’ DNA and acts as an anti-wrinkle ingredient, helps stimulate DNA and protein synthesis.”

What is “activate the expression of the repair gene”? “Stimulate DNA and protein synthesis? An astute non-scientist could interpret this as something harmful. After all, don’t cancer cells grow rapidly, making more DNA and more protein?

My focus here is not to debunk the scientific claims behind these statements. That would be relatively easy, requiring no more than a few hours exploring the scientific and medical literature coming from the Saint-Louis Hospital Skin Research Institute in Paris, the home base of these products. Instead, I wonder what led the marketers to decide to use such representation of science in their advertising. Certainly they did market research that supports the approach.

So how could the same public be attracted and engaged by science in advertising but remain skeptical and generally apathetic towards science? Exploring this requires a deep understanding of sociology, psychology and even neurology – just to get started. Like any worthwhile scientific research project, this opens up many more questions for exploration. I can’t wait.

In light of my last post I had to take note when Dienekes today pointed to this new paper in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Population history of the Red Sea—genetic exchanges between the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa signaled in the mitochondrial DNA HV1 haplogroup. The authors looked at the relationship of mitochondrial genomes, with a particular emphasis upon Yemen and the Horn of Africa. This sort of genetic data is useful because these mtDNA lineages are passed from mother to daughter to daughter to daughter, and so forth, and are not subject to the confounding effects of recombination. They present the opportunity to generate nice clear trees based on distinct mutational “steps” which define ancestral to descendant relationships. Additionally, using neutral assumptions mtDNA allows one to utilize molecular clock methods to infer the time until the last common ancestor of any two given lineages relatively easily. This is useful when you want to know when a mtDNA haplgroup underwent an expansion at some point in the past (and therefore presumably can serve as a maker for the people who carried those lineages and their past ...

There’s a grand irony about skepticism and alt-med groups that I suspect most people don’t know. Skeptics are commonly seen as curmudgeonly cynics, poopooing new ideas and excluding anyone not in their club. Alt-med people are seen as warm, open, willing to try new things, and welcoming anyone to their group.

But that’s not the way it really works. In fact, skeptical groups welcome people who believe in various things we don’t (we’ve had them come to various TAMs; the effort we make in outreach could be improved, of course, but we certainly don’t turn them away — an important point, as you’ll see in a moment), and alt-med groups… well, they talk a good game, but when it comes down to a skeptic actually showing up at their meetings, their actions speak much louder than words.

But don’t take my word for it. You can read all about what happened to my pal and active supporter of real medicine Jamie Bernstein when she attended the antivax Autism One convention. She wrote up her experience in two parts: the first on Skepchick, and the second

“The present study examines whether the use of humor in scientific article titles is associated with the number of citations an article receives. Four judges rated the degree of amusement and pleasantness of titles of articles published over 10 years (from 1985 to 1994) in two of the most prestigious journals in psychology, Psychological Bulletin and Psychological Review. We then examined the association between the levels of amusement and pleasantness and the article’s monthly citation average.

The results show that, while the pleasantness rating was weakly associated with the number of citations, articles with highly amusing titles (2 standard deviations above average) received fewer citations. The negative association between amusing titles and subsequent citations cannot be attributed to differences in the title length and pleasantness, number of authors, year of publication, and article type (regular article vs comment). These findings are discussed in the context of the importance of titles for signalling an article’s content.”

Bonus excerpt from the full text:
“Examples of Top Amusing titles that were also in the Top Pleasant titles group include: ‘Beware of a half-tailed test’, and ‘The unicorn, the normal curve, and other improbable creatures’. An example of ...

by Jon Winsor

No surprise, but Rick Santorum appeared on Rush Limbaugh today and made an effort to scoop up Mitt’s lost support:

The argument is a familiar kind, which I’ll have more to say about in the coming days:

“To me this is an opportunity for the left to create — it’s really 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.’”

“It’s just an excuse for more government control of your life…”

H/T: TPMDC

Iman, a Somali model

Since I started up the African Ancestry Project one of the primary sources of interest has been from individuals whose family hail for Northeast Africa. More specifically, the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia. The problem seems to be that 23andMe’s “ancestry painting” algorithm uses West African Yoruba as a reference population, and East Africans are often not well modeled as derivative of West Africans. So, for example, the Nubian individual who I’ve analyzed supposedly comes up to be well over 50% “European” in ancestry painting. Then again, I”m 55-60% “European” as well according that method! So we shouldn’t take these judgments to heart too much. Obviously something was off, and thanks to Genome Bloggers like Dienekes Pontikos we know what the problem was: the populations of the Horn of Africa have almost no distinctive “Bantu” element to connect them with West Africans like the Yoruba. Additionally, a closer inspection shows that the “Eurasian” component present in these populations is very specific as well, almost totally derived from Arabian-like sources. When breaking apart the West Eurasian populations it is no surprise ...

Just a quick heads-up: I’m going to be on the radio show Geeky Pleasures live Friday night, June 10, at 10:00 p.m. Eastern time (Saturday morning at 02:00 UTC). It’s hosted by Jules Sherred; she interviewed me a couple of years ago for her show, and I had fun, so why not do it again? If you can’t listen live you can send her questions at her Twitter account.

See you there!

How flipping nerdawesome is this? A lamp that lights up when the International Space Station is visible!

He has the plans online so you can build one and code it yourself. I bet a lot of teachers would love to get one of these in their classrooms!

… and I want one too. But I’d wind up soldering my hand to the desk. Sigh.

Tip o’ the LED to NASA’s Twitter feed.

The way bubbles are filled in encodes quite a bit of identifying information

What’s the News: Standardized tests aren’t as impersonal as you might think. Much as detectives analyze a note’s handwriting to pinpoint its author, scientists have developed a way to identify test-takers, voters, and so on just from the way they fill in bubbles.

How the Heck:

The researchers (from Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy) used a set of 92 surveys of 20 questions each to train and test their computer program.
After setting aside eight questions from each survey, they analyzed the remaining 12 to determine the distinctive characteristics of each individual’s bubbling style. Maybe they tend to fill bubbles with a squiggle, or a series of diagonal strokes that point to the right or left, but whatever their quirks, the program learned to identify individual test takers. Its specifications are quite detailed—it draws on 804 different features concerning color and shape of the mark.
To test its abilities, the team then sicced the program on the eight questions it hadn’t seen during its training. If the bubbles had been filled in with random patterns, it would have given the correct answer only one ...

I just got back from San Francisco, where I had the privilege to speak at the remarkable Long Now Foundation. Stewart Brand, the head of the foundation, invites people to talk to the group about topics that stretch our conception of time over long scales. So I spoke about viruses and time–how they exist at scales ranging from minutes to eons. The Long Now folks have just posted the audio, which I’ve embedded below. I’ve also embedded the slides for my talk, too.

If I can win the battle against an army of deadlines this week, I’ll try to write out the entire talk as I did with “The Human Lake.” But I’ve learned not to make hard promises.

Audio:

Slides:

Viral Time: Carl Zimmer's talk at the Long Now Foundation View more presentations from cwzimmer

From globalwarming.org, a climate “skeptic” site, I find this very interesting piece entitled the “Democrat War on Science,” by William Yeatman. It attempts to us some of my own themes from The Republican War on Science and flip them so that they cut against the Obama administration–e.g., it released reports that violated peer review standards, it suppressed agency scientist dissent, it put out bad information. Based on three alleged examples, one from each category, the piece concludes:

If there’s a “Republican war on science,” then there is also a “Democrat war on science.” In fact, science is politicized and manipulated by both political parties. It’s what politicians do in order to achieve political ends. To put it another way, if you think that American elected officials give priority to the purity of science over political ideology, and not vice-versa, then I’d like to introduce you to a wealthy Nigerian friend who needs help moving millions of dollars from his homeland and who promises a hefty percentage of his fortune for assisting him.

Honestly, it’s a noble attempt. However, to really make the argument stick, you would need the following: 1) more fully documented case studies; 2) more clearly valid case studies; 3) crassness–e.g., the administration is doing this stuff blatantly and not apologizing; 4) a strong explanatory framework–e.g., what is the ideology driving this?

I think that with the Obama administration, you will certainly find mistakes and things that probably shouldn’t have happened, but I seriously doubt you will satisfy all of these criteria.

Take the three examples used by Yeatman. There’s the old business about the Interior Department wrongly claiming, in a report, that a panel of peer reviewers had supported the controversial moratorium on gulf drilling. They didn’t. Details here. My conclusion about this incident: “while a mistake was certainly made (and critics of the drilling moratorium were quick to cry foul), the mistake does not appear to have been intentional, or particularly devious in nature. What’s more, as soon as it was exposed, the responsible parties owned up and apologized profusely.”

So it’s not nothing, but it’s not a “Democrat War on Science,” either.

Yeatman’s third example–the EPA allegedly vetoing a Clean Water Act permit based on “shoddy science” is not something I know anything about, so I won’t comment. However, his second example doesn’t really work either. This is the story of Alan Carlin, a climate “skeptic” and economist who prepared a report that challenged the scientific basis for the agency’s greenhouse gas endangerment finding. New York Times story here–which shows why I am skeptical of this case:

It is true that Dr. Carlin’s supervisor refused to accept his comments on a proposed E.P.A. finding, since adopted, that greenhouse gases endangered health and the environment, and that he did so in a dismissive way.

But the newly obtained documents show that Dr. Carlin’s highly skeptical views on global warming, which have been known for more than a decade within the small unit where he works, have been repeatedly challenged by scientists inside and outside the E.P.A.; that he holds a doctorate in economics, not in atmospheric science or climatology; that he has never been assigned to work on climate change; and that his comments on the endangerment finding were a product of rushed and at times shoddy scholarship, as he acknowledged Thursday in an interview.

Dr. Carlin remains on the job and free to talk to the news media, and since the furor his comments on the finding have been posted on the E.P.A.’s Web site. Further, his supervisor, Al McGartland, also a career employee of the agency, received a reprimand in July for the way he had handled Dr. Carlin.

I do not mean to exonerate the Obama administration of all wrongdoing. It has been inexplicably slow in generating scientific integrity guidelines and getting the government agencies to adopt them, and there are certainly cases of things that have gone wrong. See here for a Union of Concerned Scientists’ report on some of this.

Still, the whole “Obama War on Science” narrative really doesn’t fly. The president is obviously very pro-science, as is his administration–in very large part as a reaction to the last one. Moreover, I don’t really see a clear thread of ideological motive here.

If you want to know why Democrats and liberals (and environmentalists!) might sometimes distort science, the best answer is implied by Dan Kahan’s work–they will be most likely do so in cases where science conflicts with either their “egalitarian” or their “communitarian” values. I think this definitely does occur–but I don’t think it is sweeping, or mainstream in the party, for a diversity of reasons that include the fact that Democrats are generally very pro-science these days, which gives a countervailing motive.

One could generate a much larger discussion on this last point–but for now, I’ll just say to Yeatman: Nice try, but you really have your work cut out for you.

Rosetta is an amazing probe launched by the European Space Agency. In 2014 it will go into orbit around the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, and actually deploy a lander to sample the surface!

That rendezvous is still years away, but the target is now in sight: Rosetta has returned its first image of the comet.

Oh, very cool! The top image is the wide angle shot, showing a densely-populated star field toward the center of our galaxy; from Rosetta that’s the direction to the comet. The second image zooms in a bit, and you can see some distant stars and nebulosity. The bottom one has been processed to remove the stars, and the nucleus of Churyumov-Gerasimenko stands out.

Note that this image was taken when Rosetta was still 163 million kilometers (100 million miles) from the comet — that’s more than the distance from the Earth to the Sun! That’s why it took a total of 13 hours of exposure time to see the comet in these images; it’s still extremely faint from that great distance.

These pictures are important for several reasons: they test the cameras, a critical event for the upcoming encounter; they provide navigation cues, allowing ...

A little over 24 years ago, light from the closest supernova in four centuries reached Earth. It was the first such supernova seen in 1987, so it was officially dubbed Supernova 1987A, or SN87A for short.

It was full of surprises: the star that blew up (Sanduleak -69 202) was the first blue supergiant ever seen to explode — most such supernovae progenitors are red supergiants. The intense ultraviolet flash from the explosion lit up a gigantic pre-existing hourglass-shaped shell of gas surrounding the star; over five light years long, nothing quite like it had ever been seen before. The hourglass had a thick ring around its middle, which to this day is still something of a mystery.

The expanding debris from the explosion itself has been growing for more than two decades as well. Screaming out at thousands of kilometers per second, it’s been getting less dense as it grows larger, and has been fading as well.

However, that appears to be changing now. The debris is getting brighter once again… which actually has been expected. The gas in the hourglass nebula surrounding the ...

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