With VizWiz, the blind can take a picture, ask a question, and get an answer back from a real person in seconds.

What’s the News: With the web as their eyes, the blind will able to read menus, identify canned foods, and tell whether that park has any free benches without having to walk over. That’s the vision of a team of computer scientists behind an iPhone app called VizWiz, which lets people take a photo of whatever’s perplexing them, record a question like “What denomination is this bill?” and send it off to real people online who’ll respond in a matter of seconds with “That’s a 20.”

How the Heck:

Blind people have workarounds for the kinds of tasks the sighted use their eyes for—folding dollar bills in certain shapes, keeping the cans of tomatoes separate from the cans of beans, and so on—but these measures often require the input of a sighted person at some point, and they’re not very efficient. An app like this would give the blind more independence.
Many simple tasks, like reading an address off a letter, are phenomenally difficult for computer intelligences. So the scientists are working with Amazon’s Mechanical ...

In a lab in MIT, a flatworm is dying. It’s a planarian – a simple animal that is normally very difficult to kill. Planarians are masters of regeneration; whole animals can be reborn from small clumps of tissue. If you cut one in half, it will simply grow into two planarians. But this animal has been bombarded with high doses of radiation that have wiped out its ability to regenerate. Slowly, its cells are bursting apart. With no new ones to replace them, the planarian has a few weeks to live.

But Daniel Wagner and Irving Wang are about to save it, in a fashion. They transplant one special cell from a donor planarian into the terminal individual’s tail. The cell starts to divide. It produces skin, guts, nerves, muscle, eyes and a mouth.

As the planarian dies from the head backwards, the transplanted cells spread from the tail upwards. At its worst, the animal is a stunted mass with no discernible head. But two weeks after the transplant, it has completely regenerated. A new planarian has risen, phoenix-like, from the ashes. Its entire body is now genetically identical to the ...

It’s said that all roads lead to Rome, but on May 11, the opposite was true as thousands of Romans fled the Eternal City for fear of a massive earthquake. The mass exodus was spurred by internet rumors that said an Italian pseudoscientist predicted a devastating quake on this date over thirty years ago. It goes without saying, but here’s why you probably shouldn’t trust the seismic predictions of someone who thought earthquakes were caused by planetary alignments:

Meet Raffaele Bendandi, a “scientist” who believed that aligned planets could change Earth’s gravitational force and trigger earthquakes. He’s thought to have correctly predicted a 1915 earthquake in Avezzano, Italy, but he didn’t become famous until he “correctly” predicted a January 4, 1923 earthquake in Le Marche. (He was actually two days off.) It was close enough for Benito Mussolini, though, who later granted Bendandi a knighthood.

While Bendandi might’ve gotten lucky a couple of times, it’s well established that planetary alignments don’t cause earthquakes. “The force from aligned planets is irrelevant compared to the tectonic forces of the Earth’s plates whose movements create ...

This is a guest post by Jamie L. Vernon, Ph.D., an HIV research scientist and aspiring policy wonk, who recently moved to D.C. to get a taste of the action

In Chris’ recent Mother Jones article, he wrote of a case study in “motivated reasoning.” The study involved a group of individuals called “The Seekers” whose members believed they were receiving an alien message that predicted the date that the end of the world would come: December 21, 1954. Leon Festinger, a social psychologist, identified the organization as a good candidate for a study of disconfirmation, the moment at which a strongly held belief is unequivocally refuted. Festinger wished to study the responses among the members of the group at the very moment when they were forced to acknowledge their mistake. To get the whole story, you can read Festinger’s book When Prophecy Fails.

Out of this research came the principles of cognitive dissonance. Today, we attempt to apply Festinger’s theory to various denialist movements and conspiracy theories, as I have discussed in previous posts. Occasionally, we are given the opportunity to reflect on behaviors that carry the hallmarks of cognitive dissonance but, as in the case of the “deathers,” not all the criteria are met for classical cognitive dissonance. For example, in order to truly exhibit traits of cognitive dissonance, the believer must be confronted with irrefutable evidence of disconfirmation. In the case of the deathers, birthers, climate denialists, vaxxers and a group I’m now calling the “frackers,” no evidence will be sufficient to meet the sceptics definition of iron clad proof of their wrongness. In each of these cases, the subscribers to these beliefs will seek and find ways to dismiss the evidence, by claiming forgeries and/or contesting the methods by which the evidence was collected, by questioning the motives of those who produce the data, etc. We’ve seen it all. Instead, the canonical disconfirmation event is represented by apocalyptic prophecies that fail to manifest, as with “the Seekers.”

Yesterday, it was brought to my attention by Sam Harris that a group of Christian activists have predicted that the world will end on May 21, 2011. Bonanza!

This is a ripe opportunity for those of us who are interested in the psychology of denial to collect data. Although I won’t be infiltrating the group, I will be watching from afar. I hope the media will provide ample follow-up. In my opinion, it is of equal importance in these cases to have a post-game as well as a pre-game show.

The group is a non-denominational Christian organization. They have erected billboards, handed out pamphlets and paid for ads on subway trains that claim “Judgment Day is coming.” Their leader is a not-so-youthful 89 year old radio host Harold Camping, who has a long history of doomsaying. In fact, Camping has once before been forced to face disconfirmation when his prediction that the end of days would come in 1994 (accompanied by a book of the same name) was proven false. In true cognitive dissonance form, Camping conveniently realized that he had overlooked the Book of Jeremiah. After recalculating, he concluded that May 21, 2011 was the actual date for the rapture. And, oh boy, what a day it will be. For a detailed account of what to expect, read the Slate.com article about the group.

Festinger’s theory predicts that, despite the warnings ahead of time, once the world is shown to still exist on May 22, we should expect Camping and his group to express increased fervor for their beliefs, likely accompanied by a new prediction.

My question is, “how do we intercede to relieve these individuals from being forced into a cognitive dissonant state of mind?”

Festinger says that the circling of wagons that occurs during the initial refutation of a strongly held belief provides support for those within the group to maintain their paradoxical beliefs. Together they develop a response to the disconfirmation and together they defend their position. He also argues that heckling and antagonism from the external community only serves to solidify their beliefs. In the case of Camping and his followers, perhaps family and friends could intervene by offering them support and protection (without judgment) if they choose to step away from the group.

Looking more broadly, with the climate debate in mind, it would be reasonable to consider that individuals in close proximity to those with denialist beliefs, particularly those who share similar values, should be more vocal about their position on the issue. This should not be done in an antagonistic way. Rather, by simply expressing the opinion that is counter to the denialists’ opinions, the group think mentality can be broken up. Try it when you go home for Thanksgiving or the 4th of July.

I believe this is what has happened with the “birthers” and “deathers” of late. Initially, they were looking to their community for support. As long as they received that support, they were very vocal about their opinions. Once those who supported their beliefs, albeit with less vehemence, were silenced (by the evidence), the denialist buzz was eventually silenced or at least quieted. Those who have a costly investment in their beliefs, however, will continue to hold them. They will likely seek out others who agree with them. However, once the masses have been disseminated, the volume is significantly lowered.

***One interesting aside is how the internet has changed the interpretation of Festinger’s principles. Whereas Festinger worked during a time without social media, the current environment does not reflect the community in which Festinger made his observations. Festinger concluded based on the lifestyles during the 50′s and 60′s that an individual’s beliefs were shaped by those who lived and worked in close proximity to the individual. Today, we know that is unlikely to be the case. We now have the internet to flatten and shorten the planet. We can create our own “proximal” communities that include individuals who agree with us. We can also block out those opinions that contradict our own.

I have ideas here, but I’ll pose this question to you.

How shall we proceed?

On May 7th, Robert Krulwich gave the commencement speech to Berkeley Journalism School’s Class of 2011. That’s Robert Krulwich, who hosts the singular radio show Radiolab, one of the most accomplished pieces of science broadcasting in any nation. Robert Krulwich, who won a Peabody Award for broadcast excellence a few months ago. Robert Krulwich, whose blog Krulwich Wonders should be on everyone’s reading list.

Robert emailed me a few days after the speech with the following:

“I wanted to let you know that after the meeting in North Carolina [Science Online 2011 - Ed], and after watching the little brigade of you and Carl and Brian and your sisteren and bretheren doing your up-from-the-streets form of journalism, I decided to turn you guys into a Important New Thing in The World. Over the weekend, I gave the commencement speech at Berkeley’s Journalism School and if you wade through the first two thirds, you become A Paradigm at the end. I don’t know if this is a gross over-Romanticization, but this is how it seems to me.”

I’ve always wanted to be a paradigm. I might get a T-shirt made.

Robert ...

One of my favorite types of object in the sky are planetary nebulae. These are typically compact, fantastically-shaped baubles caused the winds blown from stars as they die. One of the most complex and interesting is the famous Cat’s Eye nebula (NGC 6543, seen here). It’s easy to spot in a small telescope, and with large telescope an incredible amount of detail can be seen.

What most people don’t know is that there’s more to PNe (as we in the know call them) than the bright inner region. Many have giant outer halos, too! And the one surrounding the Cat’s Eye is fantastically complex and a treat for the eye and brain:

[Click to felinopticenate.]

That stunning image is from the 2.5 meter Isaac Newton Telescope on the island of La Palma in the Canaries. The halo around the bright inner region is actually huge expanding shell of material centered on the nebula’s central star. And I do mean huge; that halo is nearly 6 light years across — 60 trillion km, or almost 40 trillion miles!

When the star first started ...

In this lab image, the toadfish’s twin bladders
are visible in the middle of its body.

There’s nothing like a bizarre fish call to shake you out of your complacency about the universe. With that in mind, we bring you the bottom-feeding three-spined toadfish, which produces its foghorn hoots and guttural grunts by vibrating the muscles around its two swim bladders, the sacs of air that keep it afloat. And these aren’t just any hoots and grunts, a new study reveals—some of these cries have qualities that have been seen the animal kingdom over, from babies’ cries to frog calls to bird song, but never before seen in fish, though fish have been known to make an incredible array of sounds (really!).

These qualities, called nonlinearities, are harmonics and dissonances that are overlaid on the linear qualities—rising and falling pitch, for instance—of a call, like elaborate icing on an otherwise plain cake. Birds are the virtuosos of nonlinear calls, using their double-piped throats to create complex songs that no wimpy human larynx can replicate, but the cries of distressed human babies have nonlinearities, as do the calls of many

It is the annual Edge “question.” This year, “What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody’s Cognitive Toolkit”? It looks like Edge finally updated their design a touch! (happy Chad?) Nothing too fancy, which is probably a good thing. I haven’t read all the answers, but I would submit that everyone needs to digest John Ioannidis’ insight, Why Most Published Research Findings Are False:

There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false. The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance. Simulations show that for most study designs ...

Evolutionary Adaptations Can Be Reversed, but Rarely:

Physicists’ study of evolution in bacteria shows that adaptations can be undone, but rarely. Ever since Charles Darwin proposed his theory of evolution in 1859, scientists have wondered whether evolutionary adaptations can be reversed. Answering that question has proved difficult, partly due to conflicting evidence. In 2003, scientists showed that some species of insects have gained, lost and regained wings over millions of years. But a few years later, a different team found that a protein that helps control cells’ stress responses could not evolve back to its original form.

Here are the primary results:

They found that a very small percentage of evolutionary adaptations in a drug-resistance gene can be reversed, but only if the adaptations involve fewer than four discrete genetic mutations. The findings will appear in the May 13 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters. Lead authors of the paper are two MIT juniors, Longzhi Tan and Stephen Serene.

The paper is not online yet. I’ll definitely check it out when it comes out, at least if the math isn’t too difficult. The reason is that these sorts of models always rely on simplifying assumptions, and they may not have ...

Mock jurors’ perceptions of facial hair on criminal offenders.

“Two studies were conducted to measure whether mock jurors would stereotype criminal offenders as having facial hair. In Study 1, participants were asked which photograph belonged to a defendant in a rape case and which photograph belonged to a plaintiff in a head-injury case after they were “accidentally” dropped. The photographs were similar in appearance except one had facial hair. 78% of 63 participants (or 49) identified the photograph with facial hair as being involved in the rape case. In Study 2, 371 participants were asked to sketch the face of a criminal offender. 82% of the sketches (or 249) contained some form of facial hair. Results are consistent with the hypothesis that criminal defendants are perceived as having facial hair.”

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Photo: memebase.com

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Why Santa Claus shouldn’t work in a lab.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Science proves women who wax have better sex.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Hair today, gone tomorrow!

WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

Recently a friend got their 23andMe genotype results, and was wondering if there was something they could do for the “greater good.” I told him that he should throw his genotype out to the public domain and attach his name to it. For various reasons he declined to go that far, but he did consent to me to putting his genotype online without personal identifying information. I can tell you that he is a relatively young male of 100% (to his knowledge) Ashkenazi Jewish heritage.

You can get a zipped folder with the raw text file and a binary pedigree formatted file here. If you click the free download option after 30 seconds you’ll get the file within about 5 minutes on a broadband connection (that was my experience at least).

If anyone else wants to throw their genotype to the public domain with as much or as little information as you want just email me at contactgxnp -at- gmail -dot- com. Here’s a spreadsheet with other people who have put their gentoypes online. I want to put up a “roundup” post with a bunch of people who do just that in the near future.

Spiral galaxies are inherently interesting. Something about their beauty is so enticing… but when you look at them more carefully, the science and physics behind them is terrifically compelling. And when you use different eyes — say, radio telescopes — then you see something different entirely:

This shows two views of the lovely face-on spiral galaxy NGC 6946. On the left is a visible light image, and on the right is the radio view, taken by the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (taken over the course of 192 hours). Amazingly, these two images are to the same scale!

Spiral galaxies emit light across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, including visible and radio light, but what emits that light is different. Stars and warm gas emit visible light, but cold hydrogen glows at radio wavelengths. At a wavelength of 21 centimeters (about 8.5 inches, much, much longer wavelength than visible light, by a factor of tens of millions!) cold hydrogen can actually be quite bright, making it a perfect target for big radio telescopes.

In this image on the right I superposed both ...

It is known that Northern Europeans tend to be somewhat taller than Southern Europeans. This seems intuitively obvious if you spend a bit of time around representative populations. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest I’ve always been on the short side at 5 feet 8 inches, but when I was in Italy for 3 weeks one year back (between Milan and Rome, with disproportionate time spent in the Piedmont) I didn’t feel as small (I recall feeling similarly when I was in Cajun country in the early 2000s). Steve Hsu alerts me to the fact that Luke Jostins is back blogging at Genetic Inference, reporting from the Biology of Genomes meeting. Apparently Michael Turchin has found that:

1) Alleles known to be associated with greater height are found at higher frequencies in Northern Europeans

2) Alleles known to be associated with greater height also exhibit signatures of natural selection

He used the GIANT consortium data set. How big is it? 129 thousand individuals! Luke adds:

This is a textbook example of how an evolutionary study should be done; you show a phenotypic difference exists, that it is heritable, and that it is under selection. This opens the ...

Amusing. Some Fans in Canada See Vancouver as Foreign:

If you are American, you might think that the Vancouver Canucks are now Canada’s team because they are the last Canada-based club standing among the final four in the Stanley Cup playoffs. Well, think again.

“Dear rest of Canada — please get your own hockey team” was the headline to an opinion article last week in The Vancouver Sun, encapsulating the leave-us-alone attitude many Canucks fans are taking in the face of a roiling swelling of both affection and, more often, revulsion for their team across the country.

The columnist, Pete McMartin, cited the mounting evidence of recent days that Canadians had turned on the Canucks for having several top players who are American or Swedish, and playing in Vancouver, traditionally derided as a mild-weather Lotus Land by those from east of British Columbia.

He cited the hundreds of “virulently anti-Canuck” messages on a Calgary Web site posted during the Canucks-Predators series; an interview in an Edmonton paper with a Finnish hockey writer based in Vancouver who said: “How Canadian a city is Vancouver to start with? It never snows. It never freezes”; and various pronouncements from writers and bloggers across Canada disavowing any ...

I just got a request from someone how to do this. Honestly I really don’t know, I’m not a lawyer, and lawyers make the simple complex. Great if you’re an innocent guy accused of a dastardly crime, but not so great when you’re trying to do something simple with minimal hassle. So it’s really a question for everyone out there. I just went to the Creative Commons website and filled out a form and dumped their short legal statement. Is this kosher? Will a lawyer sue me for putting my genotype in the public domain? (I’m being facetious!) Comments welcome. A few people on twitter have thrown out the idea of having a full-service website which serves as a repository for genotypes which people want to put into the public domain.

What’s the News: Jupiter’s moon Io is more volcanically active than any other object in our solar system, releasing 30 times more heat than Earth through volcanism. It’s thought that Jupiter’s gravity pulls so hard on the moon and causes so much friction that the resulting thermal energy melts a huge amount of underground rock, feeding Io’s 400 active volcanoes.

For years, astronomers have debated whether Io’s spewing lava comes from isolated pockets of magma or a layer that spans the entire moon. Astronomers have now peered into Io’s interior for the first time, discovering that it has a global sea of magma roughly 30 miles thick. “It turns out Io was continually giving off a ‘sounding signal’ in Jupiter’s … magnetic field that matched what would be expected from molten or partially molten rocks deep beneath the surface,” lead researcher Krishan Khurana told Wired.

How the Heck:

As NASA’s Galileo spacecraft flew by Jupiter nearly a decade ago, it detected distortions in the planet’s magnetic field. “Just like the waves beamed from an airport metal detector bounce off ...

Mouse embyronic stem cells

What’s the News: Reprogrammed stem cells—cells taken from an adult and turned back into stem cells—can be rejected by the body, at least in mice, suggests a new Nature study. Donated tissues and organs are often attacked by a patient’s immune system, since reprogrammed stem cells can be made from a patient’s own skin, researchers had hoped these cells offered a way to avoid such rejection by letting patients, in essence, donate tissue to themselves. But the new finding may be a significant setback to what is a promising line of treatment.

How the Heck:

Researchers took embryonic stem cells and reprogrammed stem cells—called induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells—from two strains of mice. The mice in each strain were genetically identical to each other, so that mice within a strain would essentially recognize each other’s cells as their own.
As expected, mice rejected embryonic stem cells from the other strain, but not from their own strain. Embryonic stem cells from their own strain grew and formed teratomas, clumps of differentiating tissues that are a sign the stem cells are doing well and able to form various adult tissues.
When ...

UPDATE:  SOLVED by John at 12:12

Can you believe it?  May is already two weeks old.  I’m already looking forward to Autumn, my favorite time of year.  It’s about here that I start dreaming of cold, rainy days.  Do you remember the smell of burning leaves?  I associate that with Fall, although you never smell it anymore.  I guess it’s a sign of age, to look around and wonder, “what happened?”

Since I’m not getting any younger, I think I had better start today’s riddle… before I forget what it’s about!  You’re in reality today, but you know; reality can get pretty weird.

NASA/ESA Hubble Boomerang Nebula

You think of today’s answer as a “thing” of sorts, but it isn’t.  Not really.

It’s something of a concept.

It’s defined more by what isn’t there, than what is.

You could think of this as a destination, although it isn’t really a place.

States of Matter - old education model

We can see the goal, but we’ve never reached it.

This has an opposite.

We can’t get to that, either.

When you get really, REALLY close to this, something weird happens to matter.

We’ve been really, REALLY close.

This has made numerous appearances in SciFi, and can make for some graphically interesting special effects.

NASA/JPL Galileo - the lovely Europa

And there you have it.  Hopefully this will give you a moment’s thought.  I’m in the comments, as usual.

Awwwwwwww!

I love Pixar. Who doesn’t? The stories are magnificently crafted, the characters are rich, hilarious, and unique, and the images are lovingly rendered. Without fail, John Ratzenberger’s iconic voice makes a cameo in some boisterous character. Even if you haven’t seen every film they’ve made (I refuse to watch Cars or its preposterous sequel), there is a consistency and quality to Pixar’s productions that is hard to deny.

Popular culture is often dismissed as empty “popcorn” fare. Animated films find themselves doubly-dismissed as “for the kids” and therefore nothing to take too seriously. Pixar has shattered those expectations by producing commercially successful cinematic art about the fishes in our fish tanks and the bugs in our backyards. Pixar films contain a complex, nuanced, philosophical and political essence that, when viewed across the company’s complete corpus, begins to emerge with some clarity.

Buried within that constant and complex goodness is a hidden message.

Now, this is not your standard “Disney movies hide double-entendres and sex imagery in every film” hidden message. “So,” you ask, incredulous, “What could one of the most beloved and respected teams of filmmakers in our generation possibly be hiding from us?” Before you dismiss my ...

I’ve written about Astrobites before: it’s a collective blog by astronomy grad students explaining recent papers and research in the field.

Besides the science, they have a category in the blog called "Career navigation", which has advice on how to handle the practical aspects of a career in science and astronomy. All the entries are good, but I want to specifically point out this one by astronomer John Johnson, an exoplanet hunter at Caltech. I met John last year at a panel I hosted last year about the search for planets and life in space, and immediately liked him. He’s smart, funny, nice, and seemed like he had a pretty solid outlook on things.

The article he wrote for Astrobites is about how to retain your mental health while under the ridiculous amounts of stress induced by grad school. But some of what he says can be extrapolated to anything in life. For example,

For most of us, if we were to wake up five mornings in a row with excruciating pain in our right arm, we’d probably go see a doctor and ...