John at μcosmologist has created an interesting infographic depicting how much it would cost to run SETI from one year ($2.5 million) versus various other things we spend money on. In the graphic, each radio dish represents $2.5 million. Here’s a (small) piece of it:

[Click to enalienate.]

The whole thing is much larger, and you really need to see it. Especially the bit about how much people spend on Starbucks. Yegads.

John made this because of SETI having to mothball the Allen Telescope Array, and I strongly suspect because people were trying to say there are better things to spend money on. I’ll tell you, I think that argument is a crock. First off, it’s a false dichotomy; we can afford to do more than what we need to survive. And moreover, there is always something better to spend money on, yet we still seem to be able to justify (or rationalize) the way we spend the money we do.

In the United States alone we spend five times as much on tobacco products as we do on the entirety of NASA. How’s that for rationalization? And what we ...

If you’re like me you have friends and acquaintances who want to go to law school. I often respond sarcastically that “a mind is a terrible thing to waste.” There have long been “law school scam” blogs, but it seems that right now there’s a veritable bubble in media reports on exactly how law schools are screwing their students. Remember, law school debt is not dischargeable in bankruptcy.

First, an article in The New Republic, Served: How law schools completely misrepresent their job numbers:

When we take temporary employment into account, it appears that approximately 45 percent of 2010 graduates of this particular top-50 law school had real legal jobs nine months after graduation. And the overall number is likely lower, since it seems probable that the temporary employment figures for the graduates of almost any top 50 school would be better than the average outcome for the graduates of the 198 ABA-accredited law schools as a whole.

Even this grim figure, however, may be unduly optimistic. All these statistics are based on self-reporting, and neither law schools nor NALP audit the data they publish. In the course of my research, I audited a representative sample of individual graduate responses and ...

Due to a problem with an Auxiliary Power Unit, NASA scrubbed Friday’s launch of Endeavour. The next scheduled window is May 2 at 2:33 p.m. EDT (18:33 GMT).

You can keep up with the latest news at NASA’s Shuttle site, and watch the launch live on the SpaceVidCast Ustream channel.

Science fiction knows how to play around with sex and gender. The free-lovin’ of A Stranger in A Strange Land, Commander Shepard’s bisexual proclivities, and William T. Riker’s seemingly universal interspecies compatibility are constant sources of entertainment.

And the fun doesn’t stop with organic entities. Androids, cyborgs, and robots make gender all the stranger. Why is Data fully functional? Isn’t it curious that, of all the characters in Ghost in the Shell the two most heavily cyberized characters, Motoko and Batou, are hyper-feminine and hyper-masculine respectively? And, my favorite: as a robot Bender has no gender, so if Bender bends his gender, what gender does Bender bend?

Sci-fi sex is fun to talk about, of course, but how can all of that help us understand the actual future of humanity? Simply put: we imagine what we hope to see. So the question is: what is it we imagine and hope for? An utter free-for-all of alien-cyborg-A.I. bacchanalia? I don’t think so. Instead, sci-fi is teaching the diversity of our own human sexuality back to us.

Science fiction allows for universes in which we can more easily accept alien forms of gender expression and sexual desire. For example, Ruby ...

A few months ago I exchanged some emails with Milford H. Wolpoff and Chris Stringer. These are the two figures who have loomed large in paleoanthropology and the origins of modernity human for a generation, and they were keen in making sure that their perspectives were represented accurately in the media. To further that they sent me some documents which would lay out their perspective, in their own words, and away from the public glare (as in, they’re academic publications).

Here is Wolpoff’s 1984 manifesto of sorts of ‘Multi-regionalism.’ Much of the morphological material is totally opaque to me, but the basic evolutionary logic is rather clear. Stringer sent me two documents, a scientific paper and a more personal chapter of a book. These works predate recent developments, so they are of interest from a history of thought perspective.

I’m not one of the personalities at the heart of this debate obviously. There are hard feelings here. Wolpoff indicated to me that he still has issues with Stringer, despite reports that there was some sort of reconciliation. But one of the things that is really evident to me to reading through this material is ...

Over at the Less Wrong blog there is a post, So You’ve Changed Your Mind. This portion caught my attention:

So you’ve changed your mind. Given up your sacred belief, the one that defined so much of who you are for so long.

You are probably feeling pretty scared right now.

I reflected and realized that the various issues where I’ve held relatively strong opinions and then changed my mind were generally cases where I relied on received wisdom, looked more closely, and felt that there was some misrepresentation among the orthodox gatekeepers of wisdom. But there’s one “big” issue that I guess I have changed my mind: I used to view all utility calculations on the scale of the individual, and accepted that all entities above or below the scale of the individual were useful only as a means toward individual well being. I probably wouldn’t defend this position anymore, though I think it has a logical coherency and may still be viable in some places and times. I’m not a “communitarian” or anything like that, rather, I have an impulse to just disavow these sorts of formal constructions of how best to attain and maintain human happiness in a time and ...

Top thirteen picks

Euthanasia Coaster – how to design an actual killer coaster, by Jennifer Ouellette. Note, this post features Fabio vs a goose

Smash moons together rip Saturn’s rings off destroy universes yeeaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh

A neurologist finishes his last paper, on the disease that’s killing him.

Beautiful stuff about lyrebirds as historians, by Robert Kruylwich. Nature’s Living Tape Recorders May Be Telling Us Secrets. This is how it’s done, folks.

Inspired and appalled by this atrocity from Cell, I give you Not Exactly Royal Wedding Science. Now can we all please shut up about it? Except for Heather Pringle and John Rennie who have provided some wonderful tie-ins – one on inbreeding among bees and another involving axe murders and death pits

“One of the most important decisions a writer makes is one a reader never sees” – to do a story or not. I couldn’t agree more with Paul Raeburn that the New York Times’s profile of Andrew Wakefield (another one?) is a story that shouldn’t have been written.

Tiger Moms v Orchid Children. A post about nature of nurturance and resilience, by David Dobbs.

How sorting out hookworm infections boosted the economy of the southern ...

NewsBusters, the conservative media watchdog website (“Exposing & Combating Liberal Media Bias”), has slammed the recent MSNBC segment about birthers, conspiracy theories, and biases. Or as they put it:

MSNBC Panel Equates ‘Pathological’ Global Warming Skeptics to Birthers

Good grief. The other guest on the show, Jonathan Kay, did use the word “pathological”–to refer to conspiracy theory thinking, or conspiracism, not global warming skeptics. I did not use that word, and disagree with him about this. Here’s what I said on the air:

MOONEY: I would say that it is just an extreme version of something to which we are all susceptible. When people read my piece, they said this is kind of like arguing with my spouse. This is kind of like arguing with a member of my family who has different politics. They will never change their mind. They will never change their mind.

But here is Newsbusters again:

Throughout the segment, Hayes probed Kay and Mooney about how the minds of conspiracy theorists operate, not-so-subtly suggesting global warming skeptics have some sort of neurological disorder.

“Neurological disorder”? Come on. Just to show how badly this is being misinterpreted, let me note that in my Mother Jones piece I even question whether motivated reasoning can be called “irrational”:

A key question—and one that’s difficult to answer—is how “irrational” all this is. On the one hand, it doesn’t make sense to discard an entire belief system, built up over a lifetime, because of some new snippet of information. “It is quite possible to say, ‘I reached this pro-capital-punishment decision based on real information that I arrived at over my life,’” explains Stanford social psychologist Jon Krosnick. Indeed, there’s a sense in which science denial could be considered keenly “rational.” In certain conservative communities, explains Yale’s Kahan, “People who say, ‘I think there’s something to climate change,’ that’s going to mark them out as a certain kind of person, and their life is going to go less well.”

As you can see, Newsbusters is…missing some of the subtleties on this whole issue of biased reasoning.

What’s the News: Going undercover can require some sacrifices–burning off your fingerprints, for instance, a la Gattaca. It’s the same story with bacteria: they can slip below antibiotics’ radar without any mutations, but only using an elaborate system of self-sabotage. A new study reveals the workings of this biochemical disguise.

How the Heck:

When antibiotics are floating around, they activate a stress response in bacteria. Part of that response, the team found, is the actions of a toxin and its antidote. When the bacterium isn’t stressed, the antidote keeps the toxin in check. But when stress hits, the antidote is destroyed, allowing the toxin to ravage the inner workings of the bacterial cell. It shreds the bacterium’s mRNA, the DNA transcripts needed to build new proteins, and the cell goes into lockdown. Because it’s no longer showing signs of life, drugs pass over the dormant bacterium. When the antibiotic is gone, the bacterial stress response subsides, the toxin is reined back in, and the bacterium reawakens.

What’s the Context:

Toxin-antidote pairs have always been something of an enigma for biologists. Why, they wonder, would bacteria go around carrying the cellular equivalent of a loaded gun? This study ...

On April 27, 2011, huge storms spawned enormous tornadoes which swept across the southeastern U.S., doing severe damage and killing over 200 people. It was the worst natural disaster in the U.S. since Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The NASA/NOAA Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, or GOES, takes high-resolution images every few minutes. The animation below shows the southeast U.S. from GOES, and you can watch the storms erupt.

A warm, moist air mass from the south collided with a cold air mass over the States. This is how summer storms usually form, but this situation was amplified by the jet stream, which was blowing between them. This generated fierce local systems that spawned over 150 tornadoes in the course of a single day.

It’s unclear but unlikely this particular event was due to global warming, but many models indicate such storms will increase in number as the planet warms. Despite a lot of political noise, the overwhelming scientific consensus is that global warming is indeed real. We may see more storms like this in the future.

NOAA/NASA, GOES Project Science team. Original animation by Jesse Allen.

Related posts:

- Comic takedown of global warming denial
- ...

Source: Hubblesite.org

I am always amazed by the thought of distorting the whole “local” space-time geometry by a huge gravitational force in what we know as gravitational lensing.  I’ve often wondered if we will figure out how to reconstruct the distortion to get a real view of what is behind the body responsible for the lensing.

Ah well, at any rate Hubblesite of course has the whole story and more images.  The site features a zoomable version where you can check out some of the other galaxies.

From Hubblesite:

Astronomers have uncovered one of the youngest galaxies in the distant universe, with stars that formed 13.5 billion years ago, a mere 200 million years after the Big Bang. The finding addresses questions about when the first galaxies arose, and how the early universe evolved. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope was the first to spot the newfound galaxy. Detailed observations from the W.M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea in Hawaii revealed the observed light dates to when the universe was only 950 million years old; the universe formed about 13.7 billion years ago. Infrared data from both Hubble and NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope revealed the galaxy’s stars are quite mature, having formed when the universe was just a toddler at 200 million years old. The galaxy’s image is being magnified by the gravity of a massive cluster of galaxies (Abell 383) parked in front of it, making it appear 11 times brighter. This phenomenon is called gravitational lensing.

My new little gal. Photo: T. Mulligan

A little break from astronomy to introduce the newest member of my family:  Holly aka: Rebholzer Blood Sweat & Tears.

I’ve been patiently waiting for this puppy for a very long time, because after all,  not just any dog would do after losing my beloved Phoenix.  Holly finally came home yesterday.

Let’s see how well I puppy-proofed the house!!

YAY!  It’s time for another bonus riddle.  This time around, the prize will be First Contact:  Scientific Breakthroughs In The Hunt For Life Beyond The Earth by Marc Kaufman.  Tom just did a review of this book, and you can look it over here.  Published by Simon & Schuster, the 224-page hardback hit bookstores April 5th, 2011.

Simon & Schuster front book cover, "First Contact" by Marc Kaufman

Remember, the rules for a bonus riddle are different than the rules for the weekly riddle.  Take a moment to review them, and let me know if you have any questions:

• Tom and I will post the bonus riddle at noon CDT, May 2nd.  That’s Monday. You still have two more chances to solve a riddle to become eligible to participate (on Saturday, 04/23 and 04/30).
• Guesses on the bonus riddle will be by email to Tom or Marian.
• You will have 24 hours to submit your guesses; from noon CDT Monday May 2nd, until noon CDT Tuesday May 3rd.
• You get three guesses.
• Comments will be closed on the bonus riddle until after the submission deadline.
• The winner will be the first person to submit the correct answer.  If nobody solves the riddle by noon CDT May 3rd, it will be opened for everybody to give it a shot.
• Tom will have the final say in any controversy.

From noon Monday until noon Tuesday, only the people who have solved a weekly riddle during this cycle can participate.  You know who you are, but we’ll post your name anyway.  If you don’t see your name on the list, and think it should be, email me and let me double check.  On Tuesday we’ll update the riddle to either open it for guesses from everybody or to announce the winner.  To stress a few other points:

• We DO validate your submissions by comparison to previous comments or emails to us.
• We DO NOT give any feedback from your email guesses other than that they were received.
• Don’t wait to submit your first guess until you have three guesses ready; as soon as you’re ready with a guess, email it.

If you have any questions, now is the time to ask!

As of April 16th, the people eligible to submit guesses by email that first 24 hours are:  Roger, Bill, Jerry, Sean, Lee V, George, Suzanne, Rob, Dwight, John, Patrick, and Jeff.  There are only two more riddles until the next bonus riddle, so if your name is already on the list please wait and give someone else a chance to solve these next two riddles.  If you just want to play for your own entertainment and practice, you can email your guesses to me.  I’ll email back and give you hints and pick on you (the same way I usually do in the comments), then give you kudos for having solved it by letting everybody know in the comments, but the riddle will remain open and unsolved.

For those who haven’t done the time conversions yet, the riddle publishes on Central Daylight Time (CDT), which is currently UTC-6.

One last thing:  Nobody (and I do mean nobody) knows the answer to any of these riddles prior to publication except for Tom and me.  Not the weekly riddles; not the bonus riddles.

The Cassini-Huygens Saturn mission is an international effort to explore, primarily, the Saturnine system.  It consists of scientists from NASA, ESA, and ASI; contributions and assistance from 17 countries; providing jobs for more than 5,000 people in 33 states.  It cost about $3.26 billion (US), with the United States contributing about 80% of the necessary funding.  The individual “tax burden per person” in the US would have been about $9.00 total; or about 70 cents per person/per year since launch.  Just thought I’d mention that.

NASA/ESA/ESI/JPL Cassini assembly

On October 15, 1997, Cassini-Huygens was launched atop a Titan IV/B/Centaur rocket.  The spacecraft itself (minus rockets) consists of two main components; the orbiter (Cassini), and the lander (Huygens).  After a long interplanetary voyage, Cassini entered orbit around Saturn July 1st, 2004.  It is the 4th space probe to reach Saturn, and the first to orbit.  On December 25th the Huygens probe detached from the orbiter, en route to Saturn’s moon Titan, which it reached January 14th, 2005.  Huygens was the first landing ever made in the outer solar system.

The Cassini mission has been extended twice already, expected to continue operations until 2017.  It has seven main mission objectives:

1. Determine the three-dimensional structure and dynamic behavior of the rings of Saturn
2. Determine the composition of the satellite surfaces and the geological history of each object
3. Determine the nature and origin of the dark material on Iapetus’s leading hemisphere
4. Measure the three-dimensional structure and dynamic behavior of the magnetosphere
5. Study the dynamic behavior of Saturn’s atmosphere at cloud level
6. Study the time variability of Titan’s clouds and hazes
7. Characterize Titan’s surface on a regional scale

Cassini packs a dizzying array of instruments.  It is so well equipped, it’s one of the largest and most massive interplanetary craft ever built, weighing in at over 12,000 lbs at launch.  It’s currently powered by three radioisotope thermoelectric generators.  It’s too far from the sun for solar power at our current level of technology.

Cassini Saturn eclipse - enlarge this image and check in the ring system at about 10:00 (just outside the brightest section of the rings) -- that tiny blue speck is the Earth

When I first started writing this post, I had the bright idea of listing all the discoveries and cool science for which Cassini is responsible, but I quickly realized I don’t have the time to write another book just now.  It’s massive, kids.  Simply massive.  More information is coming in every day, and there is another Titan fly-by scheduled for very early TOMORROW!  You will definitely want to be on-hand for that one.

Take a few minutes to look over the Cassini Mission website for the cool science and gorgeous images.  You can sign up at the site for automatic email updates, too.

Saturn has always held our attention for its beauty and mystery at a distance.  Now, we find it’s even more beautiful and mysterious up close.  Not many things in life can make that claim.

The crucifixion and death of a man called Jesus

“In summary, I would suggest that Jesus was unable to carry his cross because of his cruel treatment and scourging. He then fell with the 100 pound crosspiece on his back and was unable to break the fall because his outstretched hands were tied to the crosspiece. This resulted in blunt chest trauma and a contused heart. On the cross the workload of the heart was greatly increased due to multiple factors, but primarily the increased effort necessary to breathe. This resulted in a rupture of the free wall of the heart, which caused Jesus to cry out in a loud voice and suddenly die. This cause of death is confirmed for us by the sword pierce to the side which resulted in the flow of blood and water. In effect, that was a brief and legitimate postmortem exam. JESUS WAS DEAD! THAT WAS FRIDAY! SUNDAY WAS COMING!”

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Thanks to Heather G. for today’s ROFL!

Photo: flickr/nikoretro

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1) First, a post from the past: South Indian Phylogeography.

2) Weird search query of the week: “star de hustler”

3) Comment of the week, in response to “Two opinions on D.T.C. personal genomic testing”:

I say go further. Ban all medical-related information from the internet (nobody knows what patients might be dangerously misunderstanding about their diseases) and refashion MDs as Rightful Medical Elders (or Gurus). Books for the specialists only please. An idea would be rewriting them all in some hard to learn obscure language for better protection of the innocent. Enough of this knowledge nonsense – everybody knows already knowledge is only there to be abused in ways harmful to poor defenseless intellect-deprived people, threatening the stability of society as a whole.

4) And finally, your weekly fluff fix:

The Wall Street Journal recently asked me to review a new book called First Contact: Scientific Breakthroughs in the Hunt for Life Beyond Earth. Astrobiology is a tricky subject to write about these days. It’s intensely exciting, despite the fact that its main object of study–life on other planets–has yet to be discovered.

I’ve given some thought to how we journalists should cover such a paradoxical science. We shouldn’t dismiss it outright, because astrobiologists have discovered fascinating things about life here on Earth, even if they have yet to find aliens. Yet we shouldn’t feel obligated to pump up every claim about the possibility of life elsewhere. We should be content to paint a portrait of the scientific process–including the intense debates–in all its gorey detail.

By this measure, I don’t think First Contact works. The author, Marc Kaufman, declares at the outset of the book that “before the end of this century, and perhaps much sooner than that, scientists will determine that life exists elsewhere in the universe.” Not whether life exists, mind you, but that it exists.

I don’t think he backed up that bold claim. Instead, he ...

No time to blog them now…I’ll get to it. But I really want to point you to two papers of interest in PLoS Genetics (all the good stuff lands on Friday!).

Adaptations to Climate-Mediated Selective Pressures in Humans:

Humans inhabit a remarkably diverse range of environments, and adaptation through natural selection has likely played a central role in the capacity to survive and thrive in extreme climates. Unlike numerous studies that used only population genetic data to search for evidence of selection, here we scan the human genome for selection signals by identifying the SNPs with the strongest correlations between allele frequencies and climate across 61 worldwide populations. We find a striking enrichment of genic and nonsynonymous SNPs relative to non-genic SNPs among those that are strongly correlated with these climate variables. Among the most extreme signals, several overlap with those from GWAS, including SNPs associated with pigmentation and autoimmune diseases. Further, we find an enrichment of strong signals in gene sets related to UV radiation, infection and immunity, and cancer. Our results imply that adaptations to climate shaped the spatial distribution of variation in humans.

Climate would be “Court Jester”, while immune/disease might be “Red Queen” (unless we’re talking relaxation of ...

The UC San Diego Brain Observatory would like your brain, please. Especially if you can provide a detailed life history—or, best-case scenario, have already had your biography written—and are just a little strange in the head. Can’t feel fear? Can’t form memories? Can’t smell? These are traits of the people the Observatory already has on its rosters (they have 20 brains and 7 still-living donors), but director Jacopo Annese of UCSD is looking to recruit 1,000 more prospective donors this year. Apparently one brain he’d love to get his custom-made brain-slicing machinery on is Donald Trump’s: The guy’s had an unusual life, he explains to Bloomberg News, and with more than 15 books and a reality show to his name, he is nothing if not well-documented.

The Observatory is the outfit that made news in 2009 when it added the brain of H.M., a famous amnesiac who could remember only the last 20 seconds, to its collection. (The slicing process, which took two days and was streamed live, was watched by 400,000 people.) Established to study how ephemeral characteristics like personality, memory, and emotion are reflected in the physical structure of the brain, ...