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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In the post below, Moderate marginal value to genomics, I left some things implicit. It turns out that this was an ill-considered decision. In reality my comments were simply more cryptic and opaque than implicit. This is pretty obvious because even those readers who are biologists didn’t seem to catch what I had assumed would be obvious in the thrust of my argument.

The point in the broadest sense is that DNA and genomics are not magical. Genetics existed before either of them. Understanding the physical basis of genetics has certainly been incredibly fruitful, and genomics has altered the playing field in many ways. But there was a broad understanding of genetics before DNA and genomics, both in a Mendelian sense and in the area of biometrics and quantitative genetics. In the earlier post I indicated that the tools for predictions of adult traits due to the effect of genes have been around for a long time: our family history. By this, I mean that a lot of traits of interest are substantially heritable. A great deal of the variation within the population can be explained by variation of genes in the population, as inferred by patterns of correlation ...

By Jon Winsor

Last week, we reported on Mitt Romney taking a “round-Earth position on climate change.” Not surprisingly, for certain people, Romney had done the unthinkable:

(Of course, Rush has opposed nominees who’ve won the nomination before–for instance, John McCain last year.)

Later, Romney’s questioner actually called in to Limbaugh’s show, and did an admirable job:

CALLER: …First of all, I wanted to specify the difference between policy and science… And I specifically quoted from a 2010 National Academy of Sciences report, and two quotes here. The first is, they concluded — and, by the way, the National Academy of Sciences, as you know, is considered the Supreme Court of science in this country. It was founded in 1863 by Abraham Lincoln, and it’s charged with giving the Congress unbiased scientific information. Now, their conclusion was, quote, “A strong, credible body of scientific evidence shows that climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems.”

RUSH: Then they’ve lost all credibility. It’s a bogus claim.

CALLER: Let me go on. They then went on to say, “Some scientific conclusions or theories have been so thoroughly examined and tested and supported by so many independent observations and results, that their likelihood of subsequently being found wrong is vanishingly small. This is the case for the conclusions that the Earth system is warming and that much of this warming is very likely due to human activities. And then I asked my question, so that’s the context of the question. Your response was that there was evidence even in the last year that established this whole premise of manmade global warming is a hoax.

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: I don’t know where you’re getting the hoax from, sir. I mean I’m looking at –

RUSH: It’s called the University of East Anglia in England and the Hadley Climate Center where they basically made it all up, pure and simple. It’s a hoax. There’s nothing true about it.

END TRANSCRIPT

That shouldn’t have been the end of the conversation. Every official inquiry that has been made into “Climategate” has exonerated the participants. But it’s Limbaugh’s mike, right? He can go to a commercial and end the conversation whenever he likes.

After the 2008 election, pollster Nate Silver reflected on a heated on-air conversation he had with a radio talk show host over what should have been a simple matter:

Almost uniquely to radio, most of the audience is not even paying attention to you, because most people listen to radio when they’re in the process of doing something else. (If they weren’t doing something else, they’d be watching TV). They are driving, mowing the lawn, washing the dishes — and you have to work really hard to sustain their attention. Hence what [David Foster] Wallace refers to as the importance of “stimulating” the listener, an art that Ziegler has mastered. Invariably, the times when Ziegler became really, really angry with me during the interview was when I was not permitting him to be stimulating, but instead asking him specific, banal questions that required specific, banal answers. Those questions would have made for terrible radio! And Ziegler had no idea how to answer them.

Rush Limbaugh is what he says he is, an entertainer. But he’s an entertainer that a lot of people listen to, especially people who go to Republican presidential primaries and vote—-for or against people like Mitt Romney. So the question becomes, basically, should people vote based on what Rush tells them as he tries to fill the airwaves with exciting content? Or, as the caller points out, should things be based on what dozens of worldwide scientific organizations have concluded, with no dissenters?

On the subject of entertainers as policymakers, David Frum put things in a thought-provoking way in an interview last year (he was talking about Fox, but I think what he was saying still applies here):

Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we’re discovering we work for Fox. And this balance here has been completely reversed. The thing that sustains a strong Fox network is the thing that undermines a strong Republican party.

Ice cream structural elements that affect melting rate and hardness.

“Statistical models were developed to reveal which structural elements of ice cream affect melting rate and hardness. Ice creams were frozen in a batch freezer with three types of sweetener, three levels of the emulsifier polysorbate 80, and two different draw temperatures to produce ice creams with a range of microstructures. Ice cream mixes were analyzed for viscosity, and finished ice creams were analyzed for air cell and ice crystal size, overrun, and fat destabilization. The ice phase volume of each ice cream were calculated based on the freezing point of the mix. Melting rate and hardness of each hardened ice cream was measured and correlated with the structural attributes by using analysis of variance and multiple linear regression. Fat destabilization, ice crystal size, and the consistency coefficient of the mix were found to affect the melting rate of ice cream, whereas hardness was influenced by ice phase volume, ice crystal size, overrun, fat destabilization, and the rheological properties of the mix.”

Photo: flickr/miss karen

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What’s the News: Infections that change an organism’s personality are a strange little corner of biology, with toxoplasmosis, which brainwashes mice and rats to have no fear of cats, topping the list. But scientists think that more pedestrian infections could play a role in shaping personality, especially when they happen early in life. Ducklings provide the latest data that this theory may have something to it.

How the Heck:

Ducks assess an object’s color when deciding whether it’s safe, showing a noted preference for green and a dislike of orange, which researchers think might indicate that insects of that color can be toxic.
To see whether they could get ducks to branch out, as well as be more active in unfamiliar environments, they first simulated a parasite infection by injecting ducklings at various stages of development with sheep red blood cells, which challenge the immune system in a similar way. (They didn’t infect them with real parasites because they wanted the same level of immune reaction in each duck, and it would require a much larger sample size to average out the varying effects that pathogens have on different individuals.)
Once those ducklings and their uninjected counterparts grew up, ...

Nature has a very interesting piece up right now, Don’t judge species on their origins, which addresses the periodic bouts of hysteria which are triggered by ‘invasive species.’ I’ve addressed before the issue of biological terminology of convenience being transformed into fundamental and principled Truths. The separation between ‘artificial’ and ‘natural’ selection, or more archaically the division between ‘humankind’ and the ‘natural world.’ There are important reasons why these terms emerged the way they did, but we shouldn’t confuse the terminology for the truth. This seems definitely a problem when we humans talk about ‘invasive’ and ‘non-native’ species, as well as whether population X is worth being protected because it is a ‘species’ according to a genetic definition, or whether it is too ‘genetically polluted.’ We are after all an invasive species ourself!

Since the piece is behind a paywall I’ll extract the most relevant paragraphs:

Today’s management approaches must recognize that the natural systems of the past are changing forever thanks to drivers such as climate change, nitrogen eutrophication, increased urbanization and other land-use changes. It is time for scientists, land managers and policy-makers to ditch this preoccupation with the native–alien dichotomy and embrace more dynamic and pragmatic approaches ...

How big a scifi dork are you? Probably not as much as Charmax76, who made this video called "Space Girl", from the song of the same name by The Imagined Village:

Wow. I like the song, but I love the graphics. I recognized something like 3/4 of those scenes, probably more. And I like the order she put them in: you see women in somewhat trivial roles at first, but as the video progresses they get tougher and tougher. Not always, but that’s the trend. That reflects TV and movies, I think, too. Again, not always, but women have much better roles in scifi than they did even 30 years ago. The way video ends is… well. It made me sad. Doctor Who fans know why.

Another very different but clever animation for this song is also online.

Tip o’ the spacesuit visor to Buzzfeed.

In the 1980s my family went and visited friends in Queens for a week in August. Down the street from the house there was a small shop with an arcade machine with Legendary Wings. Every day I’d start out with a fistful of quarters and pop them into the machine to get round after round. Eventually I purchased a version of the game for the original NES, and got so proficient at it that I could win basically on mental autopilot.

I thought of that when listening to a story on the radio about the decline of the home video gaming industry as a revenue generator. Here’s the relevant section of the transcript:

HENN: It’s in a state of flux. Sales and revenue for the big gaming consoles — like Nintendo and Xbox — actually fell last year something like 13 percent. It’s still a $10 billion industry, but that was a big drop.

VIGELAND: It is indeed. What’s going on?

HENN: Some of the smartest people in the industry say the price of what people are willing to pay for an hour of entertainment, for a video game, is dropping like a rock. Bing Gordon was the creative director for ...

On June 11, 2008 — three years ago today — NASA launched the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope into orbit:

Fermi — as it was renamed once it reached orbit, after the great Italian scientist Enrico Fermi — is designed to observe gamma rays, the highest energy flavor of light. Gamma rays are only emitted from the most violent events in the universe: black holes gobbling down matter, exploding stars, antimatter particles annihilating each other, and so on. Fermi surveys the sky day after day, returning gobs of data to waiting scientists.

I was involved with Fermi when it was still called GLAST. Long before launch, I signed on to do education and public outreach for GLAST at Sonoma State University. Along with our team, I wrote web pages and helped create educational activities — including classroom lessons, a card game, a paper model of GLAST, a planetarium show, a PBS NOVA episode… we even built a small observatory near the University to augment GLAST observations! You can find all this on the SSU Fermi website.

Fermi has been a very successful mission, and I’m proud ...

UPDATE:  Solved by Patrick at 12:10 CDT

Wow, I’m so behind in my posts, I think I’m about to catch back up with myself.  Pitiful… pitiful.  I haven’t forgotten, I’ve simply had no time.  Hopefully, things will “free up” later this coming week, and I’ll be able to relocate my rear end with both hands and a GPS.

I had fun with last Saturday’s SciFi riddle (although Rob hopped on it like a starving cheetah after a pot roast – solved it so fast my ears rang), so I thought I’d linger in the world of scientific speculation.  That’s right, sports fans; today’s riddle subject is SciFi, so if you’re ready… it’s ONE for the money, TWO for the show, THREE to get ready, and FOUR to GET YOUR GEEK ON!

Radioactive rain

This is a thing, sort of.

Then again, it’s a place.

Or maybe it’s more of a conspiracy.

Really, what IS it?

It’s a dystopia.

It’s a utopia.

It’s both; it’s neither.

But it’s so bright, you gotta’ wear shades.

This owes a lot to Plato, Descartes, and Zhuangzi.

It also gives a wink to a Star Trek (TOS) third season episode.

It’s the age-old battle of man against machine.

How’s that for a riddle?  You’ll notice a lack of many pictures on this one… let me know if the pictures really help you solve the riddle or not.

??Top picks

You must read David Dobbs’ incredible story about his mother’s lost love. It’s a masterclass in storytelling. Buy it for the Kindle, iPad or iPhone. It’s cheap; you can thank me later. Also, read his eulogy to his mum, a companion piece to the story.

Richard Fisher shows you what it’s like to defend a company from a concerted cyberattack. Great piece.

How I Failed, Failed, And Finally Succeeded At Learning How To Code. Great piece about teaching and failure.

Competition to choose common names for 10 new species. I name the wasp Bob.

From the Wellcome Blog: looking at an obscure branch of life to find out where we all came from

A cracking (“nuanced even!”) analysis of Twitter by Megan Garber. Is it text or oral?

How antibiotics may have triggered the E. Coli outbreak, but not how you might’ve thought. A great piece by Marian Turner about phages. Also read: The E. coli outbreak, what we know, and need to, by Maryn McKenna.

David Sloan Wilson turns from “arcane” evolution debates to helping a faltering city.

“Their stories reveal the tragedy of a terrible experiment on a very young boy which would haunt him ...

Steve Rogers, the man who would become Captain America, was not subjected to an accidental burst of gamma radiation or the bite of a radioactive spider. Instead, he willingly enlisted and subjected himself to an experimental process for the creation of super-soldiers. His superpowers were deliberate and intended. However, the circumstances of Captain America’s enlistment into the army are, at best, questionable. After my chat with Maggie Koerth-Baker on bloggingheads, I got thinking about how the super-solider experiment holds up under the scrutiny of medical ethics. I’m not so sure that Steve Rogers gave his consent to the experiment in an informed and uncoerced manner.

For any medical research to be considered ethical it must adhere to basic standards. A global standard for medical ethics is the Declaration of Helsinki. Devised and published by the World Medical Association in 1964, the Declaration of Helsinki is a guiding framework for all medical research involving human beings. It has been revised over the years to meet modern needs, with the most recent and 6th revision being published in 2008. There are three points of the Declaration that ...

I love biking, especially in Boulder. There are trails everywhere, and lots of fun wildlife. Whenever I’m out I see hawks, prairie dogs, red winged blackbirds, rabbits, and more. Sometimes even owls.

What I did not expect to see the other day, however, was a big ol’ turtle lumbering across the bike path! [Click the picture to testudinate.] For scale, I’d guess his (hers? Who can tell?) shell was about 30 cm across. He was trying to get to a creek off the path, I think, when I got this shot.

I switched to video on my camera, and happened to catch a moment that I’m sure would embarrass the turtle if it had access to YouTube:

Ha! Boom. Clearly, he shook it off and kept going. After I took this clip, he got a better look at how steep the creek bank was, changed his mind, and turned around. That process took several minutes; turtles are in no hurry.

As far as video quality goes, my apologies for a) the panting; I had just gotten off my bike to take the video so I ...

Cassini view of an ammonia cloud on Saturn. Click for larger. Credit: NASA/JPL/Univ. of Arizona

From JPL’ s Photojournal:

This false-color infrared image, obtained by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, shows clouds of large ammonia ice particles dredged up by a powerful storm in Saturn’s northern hemisphere. Large updrafts dragged ammonia gas upward more than 30 miles (50 kilometers) from below. The ammonia then condensed into large crystals in the frigid upper atmosphere. This storm is the most violent ever observed at Saturn by an orbiting spacecraft.

Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer obtained these images on Feb. 24, 2011. Scientists colorized the image by assigning red to brightness detected from the 4.08-micron wavelength, green to brightness from the 0.90-micron wavelength, and blue to brightness from the 2.73-micron wavelength. Large particles (red) reflect sunlight well at 4.08 microns. Particles at high altitude (green) reflect sunlight well at 0.9 microns. Particles comprised of ammonia — especially large ones — do not reflect 2.73-micron sunlight well, but instead absorb light at this wavelength.

The storm here shows up as yellow, demonstrating that it has a large signal in both red and green colors. This indicates the cloud has large particles and extends upward to relatively high altitude. In addition, the lack of blue in the feature indicates that the storm cloud has a substantial component of ammonia crystals. The head of the storm is particularly rich in such particles, as created by powerful updrafts of ammonia gas from depth in the throes of Saturn’s thunderstorm. The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency (ASI). NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The visual and infrared mapping spectrometer was built by JPL, with a major contribution by ASI. The visual and infrared mapping spectrometer science team is based at the University of Arizona, Tucson. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov or http://www.nasa.gov/cassini . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org . Full-Res: PIA14119 Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

A Midnight eclipse gives us cat's eyes. Click for larger. Credit: B.Art Braafhart via spaceweather.com

What a grand picture!  This is a solar eclipse of the midnight sun that occurred last night taken by B.Art Braafhart, Sallatunturi, Finnish Lapland, ca. 35km north of Arctic Circle.

No you read right and I’m not (too) crazy, the midnight solar eclipse.

First go to to Spaceweather.com where I got this image and see other pictures, plus you can figure out how the cat’s eyes happened.

Then you can go to NASA Science News to learn more about the eclipse (it’s also linked off the Spaceweather site).

Click here to view the embedded video.

Houston @ 1:24: “122-million miles flown during twenty five challenging spaceflights; your landing ends a vibrant legacy for this amazing vehicle that will long be remembered.”

Indeed.

Source

STS-134 Landing (Endeavour)

Current Status (1st opportunity @ KSC): GO

Deorbit Burn: 01:29 EST

Landing: 02:35 EST

NASA TV Stills reload page to refresh image Webcam Image courtesy: NASA/Kennedy Space Center

NOAA’s Forecast:

Tonight: Isolated showers after 2am. Partly cloudy, with a low around 71. East northeast wind between 5 and 15 mph, with gusts as high as 20 mph. Chance of precipitation is 20%..

To keep current with the news about the landing, I recommend you go to NASA-TV.

Image Credits: NASA / NOAA

This is the last mission for Endeavour and there is one more mission to go.  The last shuttle to be launched is Atlantis and it will begin the trip to the launch pad at 8pm tonight.  Yes we can continue down the path of being beholding to everybody else for our needs, at least in this particular case sooner or later private industry will be geared up and ready.  Interestingly enough, when private industry does finally get “there” the advances will boggle our minds.

It seems as if man has always looked to the skies, and not just for answers to its own inherent mystery, either.  We told stories about the pictures we seemed to see in the stars.  We believed that close study of the positions of the celestial bodies could predict future events.  The night sky showed the homes and areas of influence of a whole flock of deities.  The more we could see, the more intriguing became the sight.

On October 2, 1608, application was made for a patent for a device which allowed “for seeing things far away as if they were nearby“.  Before that there was a rich history of men using lenses, mirrors, even rock crystals to see things far away as if they were nearby.  Aristophanes mentions the use of a “burning glass” (convex glass – a magnifying lens) in his 424 BCE play “The Clouds”.

Emblemata of zinne-werck, Johan de Brune 1624

Telescopes advanced through the centuries (the original had about a 3X magnification), first by stacking lenses together to create more powerful magnification, or variations of the same general idea (as with aerial telescopes).  There were reflecting telescopes (using parabolic mirrors), achromatic refracting telescopes (using different types of lenses to form a refracting telescope with a twist), giant reflecting telescopes like the Leviathan of Parsonstown, and adaptive optics, like those used on the Gemini telescopes.  You remember us talking about adaptive optics, right?  That’s where your telescope is, essentially, wearing glasses.

Woodcut 140 ft Johann Hevelius telescope, ca 1673

The twentieth century, beginning about 1931, ushered in radio astronomy and radio telescopes.  Arecibo and the Very Large Array are radio telescopes.  In addition to radio astronomy, we’ve had advancements with the light spectrum telescopes; the infrared, far infrared, ultraviolet, X-ray, and gamma ray telescopes.  Out of advances in these modern telescopes comes the hulking astronomical interferometer, in which an array of telescopes thousands of kilometers distant takes the shape of a single parabolic lens.  The Fast Fourier Transform telescope is an interferometer.

In a class by themselves are the space telescopes like the Hubble and the soon-to-be-launched James Webb telescope.  Space telescopes (or observatories) have the advantage of not having to work around and with the distortions caused by Earth’s atmosphere.  In addition, space based astronomy has a much wider range of frequencies with which to work.  X-ray astronomy is nearly impossible from the Earth, while infrared and ultraviolet are significantly limited.

NASA STS-82, Hubble Space Telescope

We’ve come a long way from being gobsmacked by a 3X magnification.  As advances in telescope design and technique continue exponentially, there is no telling what (or who) we’ll see in the telescopes of the future.  Imagine if Galileo and Newton could have had access to modern telescopes.

Imagine what the Newtons of tomorrow will discover.