After the Columbia Orbiter tragedy, NASA changed the safety protocols for Shuttle missions to the International Space Station. When an Orbiter gets there, it performs a slow pitch so that astronauts on ISS can take a good look for any damage that might have occurred during takeoff. It’s a serious procedure, but during it they get really intense pictures of the Orbiter.

This dramatic shot [click to enspaceplanenate] was taken on May 18, 2011, shortly after Endeavour made its final rendezvous with ISS. It’s a view we don’t get when the Orbiters sit on the ground.

They also snapped this lovely shot of Endeavour’s wing shortly before docking. It’s an important picture — they are looking for potentially mission-threatening damage, after all! — but it’s also a beautiful one, well-lit, crafted, and executed. You should check out this picture, too, with the Orbiter’s payload bay doors open, and a tiny Moon in the background.

I may not be a 100% true fan of the Space Shuttle, but for many years it provided us with access to space. ...

What’s the News: In geologists’ traditional view of the middle of the Earth, the solid inner core is gradually growing as more of the liquid core freezes, as the planet continues its billions-of-years-long process of cooling off. But now scientists are suggesting that parts of the solid inner core get so hot that they turn liquid, and that this is all linked to what’s happening in the Earth’s crust—meaning that our the earthquakes, volcanoes, and plate tectonics that we see are connected to the very heart of the planet.

How the Heck:

Using computer models and seismology data, the researchers discovered that parts of the mantle can become hot enough that heat is forced back into the core, melting “a small fraction of the inner core’s surface.” They say it’s possible that around 1% of the inner core’s surface is melting, which is roughly 77,000 square miles.
Below the Pacific Ocean’s seismically active “Ring of Fire,” for example, heat is expelled from Earth’s ...

What’s the News: Virgin Galactic’s plans for taking tourists into space have inched closer to fulfillment: earlier this month, the company’s SpaceShipTwo successfully demonstrated the technique, called “feathering,” that will allow the ship to reenter Earth’s atmosphere. In this video, you can watch the ship, designed to behave like a badminton shuttlecock, tip and roll as the pilot flips the craft’s tail to a 65 degree angle, which will brake SpaceShipTwo while it’s still high in the atmosphere. This means the ship will descend slowly enough to keep from igniting as it reenters.

How the Heck:

Velocity is the main reason objects burn up when they enter the Earth’s atmosphere—the friction between a speeding meteor, say, and the gasses in the atmosphere is so great that the meteor ignites.
The Space Shuttle is covered with heat shields that absorb the heat generated by friction, but there are more elegant solutions for flights that don’t need to go into orbit, including feathering, which was first described in 1958. With this technique, part of the craft’s tail flips up to increase drag early in the process, so as it hurtles deeper into the atmosphere it doesn’t reach the velocities that result in ...

It was probably only a matter of time until another school district, somewhere in the U.S., decided to start trouble over the teaching of climate science–an issue that I believe is destined to become nearly as contested as the teaching of evolution. As it happens, the district is in California, the Los Alamitos Unified School District, where board members decided that “different views” on global warming must be included in an environmental science class.

The driving force behind the board’s position is reportedly a libertarian medical doctor and board member, one Jeffrey Barke. Here’s an interview with him, in which he comes off as pretty…fired up:

…anybody who challenges global warming comes under a firestorm of criticism and demagoguery from those who are true zealots. So it’s almost impossible for a scientist to come out with facts and evidence against global warming without being personally attacked and demagogued. Plimer and Lomborg are just two examples of very prominent, reputable scientists who are unfortunately just getting hammered by the media and quite personally at times. I’m not good at remembering names and details, but those two stand out because they are in the media and I’ve read some of their work. I read through the literature all the time – both from those on the right and the left – and, to me at least, it’s fairly clear that the science is not settled. And the fact that I’m being attacked personally for my beliefs is really kind of sad.

Not for your beliefs–for imposing them.

Based on the interview, Barke strikes me as an intelligent, well informed, and intellectually confident conservative–one who has made the mistake of thinking that his individual reading of some contrarian material is a sufficient basis not only for questioning mainstream science, but for altering public or educational policy on that basis:

I’m not motivated to question global warming because I’m a libertarian or conservative. I question it simply because I’ve read opinions. I’ve read science. It’s just my personal belief. I’m a medical doctor. I’m not an environmental scientist, but I’m smart enough to read articles and decipher opinions from fact.

It is a good thing Dr. Barke is so objective–unlike the rest of us.

What’s really interesting here is that if this were evolution, this school district could presumably be sued on First Amendment grounds. But it isn’t evolution, and last I checked, libertarianism does not qualify as a religion that cannot be imposed due to the separation of church and state. So what I’m wondering is, when a school district acts this way, what can one do?

Viruses that infect bacteria–known as bacteriophages–are the most abundant living things on Earth. (Yeah, that’s right. I called viruses living things. You gotta problem with that?) For nearly a century, doctors and scientists have dreamed of using them as medical weapons against the microbes that make us sick. Over at the University of Chicago Press’s blog, I discuss the enduring dream of phage therapy with MIT phage engineer Tim Lu, whom I profiled last year for Technology Review. This is my third UCP blog post to celebrate the publication of A Planet of Viruses; the next and last will appear next Friday.

On Wednesday I did a post that I knew would draw a lot of comment, listing five studies showing that people who watch Fox News are more likely to be misinformed about an array of issues–the Iraq War, global warming, health care, the Ground Zero mosque, and the 2010 election. This research was all out there in the ether; I just pulled it together.

To this synthesis, there were many replies–but none of the comments that I’ve seen have pointed out that my rundown of studies was incomplete in some way. I find this kind of surprising. One of the studies I cited was from 2003; all the rest were from the last year or so. It would be odd if nothing were lying in between.

This post, then, is just to ask again whether anyone has come across other research pertinent to this subject–Fox, and the facts. If so, post it in the comments.

I’ve been getting some email and other notes asking about the claims that on Saturday May 21 the Rapture will occur.

Well, what can I say? Harold Camping, the guy making these claims is, to be charitable, a kook. He claimed the Rapture would be in 1994, for one thing, then changed his mind. His claims are based on numerology. Other evangelicals are coming out against him. And so on and so forth.

We’ve seen such claims come and we’ve seen them go. The problem is, they never really leave, do they? A new one always comes along soon enough to take the place of the last one. And so many others are simply recycled (Velikovsky begat Sitchin begat Planet X, which has been subsumed by the Mayan 2012 folks).

Moreover, the most fervent believers in such doomsday prophecies, after the time comes and goes with nothing happening, usually wind up believing in it even more strongly. I saw it happen myself in 2003 when Planet X failed to show up and wipe us all out as predicted. A lot of ...

Hooray! I now have a Master of Arts degree from New York University. I even got to wear a bright purple robe with strange sleeves, was hooded, and topped it all off with a mortarboard that barely fit on my head.

My degree is from the John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Master’s Program in Humanities and Social Thought, which means I cobbled together a few disparate fields into my own academic Voltron of study. Critical theory, gender studies, and bioethics comprised the triumvirate of nerdiness out of which I forged my thesis, “Human Enhancement and Our Moral Responsibility to Future Generations.” My advisor was a tremendous resource, educator, and inspiration. Thanks, Greg!

Oh, and I competed in the northern hemisphere’s first ever Threesis competition. The goal: summarize your thesis in three minutes to a lay audience with nothing but a single static keynote slide for visual backup. Not easy, but quite fun.

I had the support of friends and family (my parents and partner in particular) throughout the process. They stood by me while I was pulling all-nighters, living in the library, and deliriously rambling on about Derek Parfit, Jurgen Habermas, and Julian Savulescu.

In true science nerd fashion, I ...

The Pith: Biological complexity may be a particular evolutionary path taken due to to random acts of nature, not because there is a selective advantage to complexity.

The title above basically describes the message of evolutionary biologist Mike Lynch from what I can gather. His basic argument is outlined in long form in The Origins of Genome Architecture, though the outline of the thesis is evident over 10 years back (see Preservation of Duplicate Genes by Complementary, Degenerative Mutations). Verbally I think the easiest way to explain Lynch’s framework is that in species with small effective population sizes the creativity of stochastic forces in generating non-adaptive structure and complexity tends to overwhelm the power of natural selection to prune this tendency toward baroque. I reviewed a paper last year which argued that Lynch’s observation of an inverse relation between effective population and genome size was an artifact, that once you controlled for phylogenetic history it disappeared. Suffice it to say this is an area of dispute and active research, so we shouldn’t take any individual’s word for it. This is science on the broadest canvas. Extraordinary general claims need to backed ...

You’re chatting to some friends at a party and they point out someone standing in a different part of the room. That person, they inform you, is a nasty piece of work. He cheats on his girlfriend. He picks fights with strangers. Once, he bit a puppy. You’d never seen him before but after this character assassination, you start noticing him everywhere – in other parties, on the street, on Facebook.

This sort of thing happens all the time. If we get information about people from third parties – gossip – we start paying more attention to those people. There’s a simple reason for this. Gossip, especially negative gossip, affects not only our judgment, but our vision too. It influences both what we think about someone and whether we see them in the first place.

Eric Anderson and Erika Siegel from Northeastern University studied the influence of gossip on our vision with a simple experiment, which plays off a well-known conflict between our eyes. When each eye sees a different image (say, if they stare down different tubes), those images compete with one another for dominance. This is called “binocular ...

Self-experimentation as a source of new ideas: ten examples about sleep, mood, health, and weight.

[Editor's note: this paper is by the author of the Shangri-La Diet]

“Little is known about how to generate plausible new scientific ideas. So it is noteworthy that 12 years of self-experimentation led to the discovery of several surprising cause-effect relationships and suggested a new theory of weight control, an unusually high rate of new ideas. The cause-effect relationships were: (1) Seeing faces in the morning on television decreased mood in the evening (> 10 hrs later) and improved mood the next day (> 24 hrs later), yet had no detectable effect before that (0-10 hrs later). The effect was strongest if the faces were life-sized and at a conversational distance. Travel across time zones reduced the effect for a few weeks. (2) Standing 8 hours per day reduced early awakening and made sleep more restorative, even though more standing was associated with less sleep. (3) Morning light (1 hr/day) reduced early awakening and made sleep more restorative. (4) Breakfast increased early awakening. (5) Standing and morning light together eliminated colds (upper respiratory tract infections) ...

Amazon: Kindle books outselling all print books. This is more something I’d put on pinboard, but this requires noting more prominently. The figure itself isn’t important, but it is a marker for a silent transition occurring as we shift mediums.

What’s the News: It turns out that humans aren’t too different from blue-footed boobies, at least when it comes to age and fertility. Researchers have recently discovered that the sperm of blue-footed boobies declines with age. And unlike humans, the blue feet of the boobies also fade with age, revealing that one reason why female boobies tend to mate with brighter-footed males is to ensure the robustness of the sperm and the health of their offspring. “The study provides us with a new way of looking at what lies behind sexual signals,” lead author Alberto Velando told TIME, “pointing to the importance of sexual selection in eliminating genetic mutations.”

How the Heck:

The researchers traveled to a breeding blue-footed booby colony in Isla Isabel, Mexico, in 2005, and after capturing over 40 males, massaged their cloacas to collect sperm and used spectrophotometers to measure the brightness of their feet.
Incorporating their information into a database with 20 years of data on the same colony, they discovered that the sperm of the more senescent males (over 10 years old) was more degenerated than the sperm ...

There’s a new story blowing up in the media about the origins of bipedalism through male-male competition. The hook is good enough that the headlines write themselves. For example, io9 has a sober and skeptical review of the paper, but the title is naturally going to be more excitement inducing: Did early humans start standing upright so they could beat each other up? And I’m not going to get into what British tabloids are saying about this. This is a sexy story, I can’t really blame anyone. The original research is in PLoS ONE, so read it yourself, The Advantage of Standing Up to Fight and the Evolution of Habitual Bipedalism in Hominins. The conclusion is short and sweet: These results indicate that bipedal posture does provide a performance advantage for striking with the forelimbs. The mating systems of great apes are characterized by intense male-male competition in which conflict is resolved through force or the threat of force. Great apes often fight from bipedal posture, striking with both the fore- and hindlimbs. These observations, plus the findings of this study, suggest that sexual selection contributed to ...

The GiveWell Blog has some suggestions for “Suggestions for the Social Sciences”. Here is the big one:

Our single biggest concern when examining research is publication bias, broadly construed. We wonder both (a) how many studies are done, but never published because people don’t find the results interesting or in line with what they had hoped; (b) for a given paper, how many different interpretations of the data were assembled before picking the ones that make it into the final version.

The best antidote we can think of is pre-registration of studies along the lines ofClinicalTrials.gov, a service of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. On that site, medical researchers announce their questions, hypotheses, and plans for collecting and analyzing data, and these are published before the data is collected and analyzed. If the results come out differently from what the researchers hope for, there’s then no way to hide this from a motivated investigator.

As the example of the NIH illustrates this is not just a social science problem, it is rife in any science which utilizes statistics. Statistical methods have become metrics to attain by any means necessary, when in reality they should be guidelines to get a ...

As I wrote on Monday, we’re boxing up books in preparation for some house renovations. You were kind enough to take 21 autographed paperback copies of At the Water’s Edge off our hands–in about three hours.

Well, we have even more books that we’d rather sell than pack.

Here’s our new deal: we’ve got 17 autographed copies of the American hardback edition of Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life. The hardback edition is out of print, but between now and next Thursday, you can buy them for the low, low price of ten dollars from my Amazon store. (Cue Crazy Eddie again!)

In Microcosm, I tilt at one of my favorite windmills: the definition of life. But rather than try to take on all of life on Earth, I chose one species–the one that we know best of all. That would be our gastrointestinal lodger, Escherichia coli, the little bug that helped build modern biology and launch the entire biotechnology industry. In my biography of this scrutinized germ, I explore the origin of life, our inner ecology, and the search for life on other planets. You ...

Within your body, a huge amount of information is copied over and over again, reliably and predictably. Your life depends on it. Typos occur, but they are quickly corrected. Edits are made, but sparingly. Or, at least, that’s what we thought.

It starts with DNA. This famous molecule is a chain of four ‘bases’, denoted by the letters A, C, G and T. These four letters, in various combinations, contain instructions for building thousands of proteins, a workforce of molecular machines that keep you alive and well. But first, DNA has to be copied (or “transcribed”) into a related molecule called RNA. It too is made of four bases: A, C and G reprise their roles, but U stands in for T. Each triplet of letters in RNA denotes a different amino acid, the building blocks of proteins. Small factories read along the RNA like a piece of tickertape, using it to string together amino acids in the right sequence.

So DNA leads to RNA leads to proteins – this is the grandiosely-named “central dogma of life”.

People often assume that this flow of information happens with exacting precision. Every stretch of RNA ...

I’m pleased to announce my next Point of Inquiry guest for the show airing Monday: Jonathan Kay, a journalist with Canada’s National Post and author of the new book Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America’s Growing Conspiracist Underground.

I’ve been beating up on Birthers a lot lately (everyone has), so this is a bit of “balancing.” Of course, Kay knows a lot about Birthers too.

We did the interview last night and I think people are going to like this one. Airs Monday. If you’re interested, check out the book in the meantime.

I also appeared recently with Kay on MSNBC.

Yesterday, I wrote about a new study that indicates that free-floating planets in the Milky Way may outnumber planets orbiting stars, and even be more numerous than stars themselves. It’s an amazing result! The most likely scenario is that these planets formed in solar systems similar to ours, but got ejected due to gravitational interactions with other planets in the system. These planets get literally tossed out into space, wandering the galaxy forever*.

This made me wonder: if these numbers are correct, how likely is it that such a rogue planet might actually be close by on a cosmic scale? And given the kind of topic I like to write about, are we in any danger from a close encounter with one of these galactic nomads?

These wandering planets are so dark and distant they are currently essentially impossible to detect using regular techniques, so we don’t know if any are in our galactic neighborhood or not. The only way to get a grip on how close one might be is to look at it in a statistical sense: on average in the galaxy, how many of these planets ...

While I was away, Jamie did a great post on the End Times Christian group who says the world will be over in two days. (Details here.)

They’re waiting for the “Rapture,” but like Jamie, I’m waiting for the rationalization.

Recall that these people are heavily invested, emotionally and also financially, in the world ending. Here’s NPR:

Camping’s predictions have inspired other groups to rally behind the May 21 date. People have quit their jobs and left their families to get the message out.

“Knowing the date of the end of the world changes all your future plans,” says 27-year-old Adrienne Martinez.

She thought she’d go to medical school, until she began tuning in to Family Radio. She and her husband, Joel, lived and worked in New York City. But a year ago, they decided they wanted to spend their remaining time on Earth with their infant daughter.

“My mentality was, why are we going to work for more money? It just seemed kind of greedy to me. And unnecessary,” she says.

And so, her husband adds, “God just made it possible — he opened doors. He allowed us to quit our jobs, and we just moved, and here we are.”

Now they are in Orlando, in a rented house, passing out tracts and reading the Bible. Their daughter is 2 years old, and their second child is due in June. Joel says they’re spending the last of their savings. They don’t see a need for one more dollar.

“You know, you think about retirement and stuff like that,” he says. “What’s the point of having some money just sitting there?”

“We budgeted everything so that, on May 21, we won’t have anything left,” Adrienne adds.

Sad, but we have seen this pattern before. And because these believers have sunk so much in, “cognitive dissonance” theory (or, motivated reasoning) predicts they will “double down” and come up with some new reason for why they weren’t wrong, and may grow more intense in their beliefs.

What will they say at that point? Hard to say exactly, but let’s consult NPR again:

“If I’m here on May 22, and I wake up, I’m going to be in hell,” says Brown. “And that’s where I don’t want to be. So there is going to be a May 22, and we don’t want to be here.”

Well, these believers surely will not decide on May 22 that they’re actually in hell. That would contradict their identities–and their emotions. They’ve told us as much themselves.

So whatever they come up with, it won’t be the conclusion that would seem to logically follow from what they believe now. This should be interesting.