What’s the News: Researchers have found that whether people stick with advice they were given, even when their own experience contradicts it, is linked to their genes, according to a new study published online in the Journal of Neuroscience. These findings suggest a possible genetic component of confirmation bias, the tendency to focus on new information that agrees with what you already know, and ignore information that contradicts your views.

How the Heck:

The researchers gathered saliva samples from more than 70 participants. They then analyzed each person’s genotype, focusing on two genes that impact the activity of the neurotransmitter dopamine, known to play an important role in learning, in one of two regions of the brain: the prefrontal cortex or the striatum. The prefrontal cortex stores and processes explicit instructions (e.g., “Always wear sunscreen”), while the striatum helps us glean lessons from our experience (e.g., “When I forget my sunscreen, I often get burned”).
Each participant then played a game in which they would see two symbols (taken from the Japanese hiragana alphabet, unfamiliar to most English speakers) on a screen and have to choose the “correct” symbol; they’d then get feedback so they could learn to ...

Lydia Fairchild was confused. She had applied for state benefits to look after her three children, but according to DNA tests, she was not their mother. It was ridiculous – she knew full well that the children were hers, but she was being taken to court nonetheless.

This happened in 2002, but Fairchild’s case has striking parallels with one that cropped up just this year, involving a Mediterranean sponge called Scopalina lophyropoda. French scientists Andrea Blanquer and Maria-J Uriz found that around a quarter of the sponge’s larvae are genetically distinct from the parents that they come from. Somehow, they had inherited genes from a different source.

Sponges are about as far away from humans as you could imagine an animal being – their bodies are just two layers of cells, curved and folded into tubes and chambers. But even though their bodies are worlds apart, the mysteries of both Lydia Fairchild and S.lophyropoda had the same answer.

Both of them are chimeras, living things that are formed when two or more fertilised eggs fuse together. The chimeras of myth were monsters that combined parts of lion, snake and goat. Real ...

Selfish genes could help destroy mosquitoes’ ability to carry malaria.

What’s the News: Many scientists have played with the idea of creating a genetically modified mosquito that won’t transmit malaria, which kills about 850,000 people a year, and releasing it into the wild. But in the face of the millions of mosquitoes out there that do ferry malaria around, how would the trait spread fast enough to make a difference?

Now, scientists have developed a way to cause a “selfish” gene to spread to more than half of a mosquito population over just a few generations, suggesting a method to quickly and broadly disrupt genes required for carrying malaria.

What’s the Context:

One of the main ways scientists are hoping to spread malaria resistance is by harnessing the endless self-promotion of selfish genes, which make copies of themselves throughout a genome.
The team used a selfish gene that insinuates itself into the genome of all of a mosquito’s offspring, rather than the usual half; in essence, it makes sure it’s present on both chromosomes, not just one. This means it can spread especially quickly.
If it could take a gene bearing malaria resistance along with it, or, in its constant quest to insert ...

Swapping chromosomes among eggs could keep
embryos from inheriting genetic diseases.

What’s the News: Babies with three parents and fewer genetic diseases might soon be possible: A UK national health panel has found that techniques for swapping chromosomes between eggs so offspring don’t inherit disease-causing mutations from their mother’s mitochondria are not dangerous. The techniques, which have been tested in mice, monkeys, and human cells, still need to be studied more before making the transfer to the clinic, though, and as with all genetic engineering techniques, there’s a complex ethical maze ahead of researchers. 

What’s the Context:

In addition to the DNA you inherit from your mother and father’s egg and sperm, you also inherit a small amount of DNA that’s contained in the mitochondria of the egg. Mitochondria are cellular structures that produce energy for the cell, thought to be descended from bacteria that moved into cells millions of years ago, and have their own mini-genome. The mitochondria in sperm are destroyed during reproduction, so the only ones you inherit are your mother’s.
One child in 6,500 develops a disease linked to mutations in mitochondria, including type 2 diabetes, deafness, blindness, ...

It’s quite the irony. In his contrarian report entitled “Climate Shift”–a report Joe Romm and Robert Brulle have seriously challenged–Matthew Nisbet claims that falsely “balanced” coverage of climate change is no longer a problem. Huh. Then in chapter 4 of the report, Nisbet goes on to provide falsely “balanced” coverage of an issue I happen to know a lot about:

During the Bush administration, many scientists mobilized in response to what they perceived as attempts by the administration to control the public statements of government scientists and to interfere with the conclusions of government reports. This debate received heavy attention at science-related blogs, from science journalists and via several top-selling books.

Here Nisbet is referring to me–although not by name. But note the language: “many scientists mobilized in response to what they perceived as attempts by the administration to control the public statements….” Actually, all these things were extensively documented (see below). There is no “perceived”; these are facts. Why is Nisbet applying phony balance to them?

Nisbet then proceeds to discuss the alleged biases of scientists in classic balance-as-bias fashion:

Among AAAS members who had heard of the claims, ideology was strongly associated with evaluations of the allegations. On this matter, 57 percent of conservative AAAS members said the claims were true, compared with 87 percent of moderates and 97 percent of liberals. Those answering true were also asked whether the Bush administration engaged in greater levels of political interference than past administrations, with 68 percent of conservatives answering in the affirmative, compared with 88 percent of moderates and 96 percent of liberals.

Again, Nisbet seems highly uninterested in the truth of these allegations. That perceptions as to their veracity varies by politics isn’t surprising–far more surprising is that nearly 70 percent of conservative scientists thought the Bush administration set a new record for interferences with science. Go conservative scientists! After Kerry Emanuel’s recent showing before Congress, you guys are my heroes.

In any case, the allegations were true, and were proved to be true, repeatedly and in a multitude of ways. That includes journalistic investigations, by several great reporters at the New York Times and Washington Post. It includes multiple surveys of agency scientists by the Union of Concerned Scientists. Most of all, it includes several official agency Inspector General reports (links are to NASA and DOI)–none cited or mentioned by Nisbet. These aren’t “claims.”

Nisbet continues:

The difference in awareness and perception of political interference is likely reinforced by diverging patterns and attention to science-related blogs, outlets where the Bush allegations were frequently discussed and lamented. Among strong liberal members of AAAS, a combined 50 percent say they read science blogs often or occasionally, compared with 37 percent of conservative members.

These allegations weren’t confined to blogs. They were all over the national, mainstream media; some even predated the birth of science blogging as we now know it. They were covered repeatedly in the Washington Post and the New York Times over the entirety of the Bush administration. Sometimes these were cover stories; sometimes the allegations appeared in editorials and columns. They were also all over scientific publications like Science and Nature, and frequently editorialized about in these venues. This is “likely” a primary place where scientists as a group would have learned about them. Indeed, Nisbet is studying members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, publisher of Science, which every member receives, regardless of political views.

Another place scientists would have learned about the allegations is from…conversations with fellow scientists, who experienced these things firsthand, some of whom even became whistleblowers–like NOAA’s Tom Knutson, who even had the courage to testify before Congress about what had happened to him. “There have been instances where my ability to communicate with the national media has been hindered or interfered with….” But of course, that’s just his opinion, right?

The claim about blogs, then, is just…strange. The bigger point is that without any evaluation of the substance of what happened, Nisbet nevertheless seems confident enough to claim that scientists’ partisanship and liberal biases led them to believe…the truth. A truth that even most conservative scientists accepted, apparently. That’s the real revelation in the data–nearly, but not quite, obscured by false balance.

What’s the News: Researchers have developed the fastest yet self-healing polymer: The new class of materials dubbed “metallo-supramolecular polymers” heal after only one minute under UV light even when they’re repeatedly cut. This could eventually lead to self-repairing floor varnishes, automotive paints, and other applications. University of Illinois at Urbana researchers Nancy Sottos and Jeffrey Moore say these these healable polymers “offer an alternative to the damage-and-discard cycle” that is rampant in our consumer society, and could pave the way for products “that have much greater lifespans than currently available materials.” (You can see the process below in a press video from Case-Western Reserve University.)

How the Heck:

Unlike most polymers, which are composed of long molecular chains, metallo-supramolecular polymers are made of “short chains that are glued together with metal ions.”
Scratches break up the polymer chains of metallo-supramolecular polymers. By shining intense UV light on and near the scratch, the metal ions heat to over 220°C in 30 seconds, depolymerizing the material.
While still depolymerized, the unglued particles act like a liquid and flow together again, smoothing out scratches in the process.
And when the intense UV light is removed, the metal quickly cools, and the now-smooth surface solidifies ...

Last month, scientists using the GOCE spacecraft released a model of the Earth’s geoid: essentially, a shape telling you which way is down. If the Earth were a perfectly smooth sphere of constant density throughout, gravity would pull you straight down to the center (perpendicular to the surface). But if a dense hill were nearby, the gravity of that hill would change the direction of the force of gravity. The geoid maps that, and is very useful to understand things like ocean currents and such.

The resulting geoid resembles a bizarre, lumpy Earth. It was pretty neat, but now Nathanial Burton-Bradford has made it better: he took the data and made 3D anaglyphs!

This one shows the view over North and South America. It doesn’t look like much to the eye, but if you have red/green or red/blue 3D glasses, the 3D jumps right out at you. He has lots more of these from various angles over the Earth’s geoid model, and man are they weird. There’s something truly odd about seeing the Earth this way.

He has lots of other 3D images he’s made ...

Every academic who attends conferences knows that the best parts are not the formal presentations, but the informal interactions in between. Roughly speaking, the perfect conference would consist of about 10% talks and 90% coffee breaks; an explanation for why the ratio is reversed for almost every real conference is left as an exercise for the reader.

Yesterday’s talks here in Avignon constituted a great overview of issues in cosmological structure formation. But my favorite part was the conversation at our table at the conference banquet, fueled by a pretty darn good Côtes du Rhône. After a long day of hardcore data-driven science, our attention wandered to deep issues about fundamental physics: is the entire history of the universe determined by the exact physical state at any one moment in time?

The answer, by the way, is “yes.” At least I think so. This certainly would be the case is classical Newtonian physics, and it’s also the case in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is how we got onto the topic. In MWI, the entirety of dynamics is encapsulated in the Schrodinger equation, a first-order differential equation that uniquely determines the quantum state in the past and future from the state at the present time. If you believe that wave functions really collapse, determinism is obviously lost; prediction is necessarily probabilistic, and retrodiction is effectively impossible.

But there was a contingent of physicists at our table who were willing to believe in MWI, but nevertheless didn’t believe that the laws of microscopic quantum mechanics were sufficient to describe the evolution of the universe. They were taking an anti-reductionist line: complex systems like people and proteins and planets couldn’t be described simply by the Standard Model of particle physics applied to a large number of particles, but instead called for some sort of autonomous description appropriate at macroscopic scales.

No one denies that in practice we can never describe human beings as collections of electrons, protons, and neutrons obeying the Schrodinger equation. But many of us think that this is clearly an issue of practice vs. principle; the ability of our finite minds to collect the relevant data and solve the relevant equations shouldn’t be taken as evidence that the universe isn’t fully capable of doing so.

Yet, that is what they were arguing — that there was no useful sense in which something as complicated as a person could, even in principle, be described as a collection of elementary particles obeying the laws of microscopic physics. This is an extremely dramatic ontological claim, and I have almost no doubt whatsoever that it’s incorrect — but I have to admit that I can’t put my objections into a compact and persuasive form. I’m trying to rise above responding with a blank stare and “you can’t be serious.”

So, that’s a shortcoming on my part, and I need to clean up my act. Why shouldn’t we expect truly new laws of behavior at different scales? (Note: not just that we can’t derive the higher-level laws from the lower-level ones, but that the higher-level laws aren’t even necessarily consistent with the lower-level ones.) My best argument is simply that: (1) that’s an incredibly complicated and inelegant way to run a universe, and (2) there’s absolutely no evidence for it. (Either argument separately wouldn’t be that persuasive, but together they carry some weight.) Of course it’s difficult to describe people using Schrodinger’s equation, but that’s not evidence that our behavior is actually incompatible with a reductionist description. To believe otherwise you have to believe that somewhere along the progression from particles to atoms to molecules to proteins to cells to organisms, physical systems begin to violate the microscopic laws of physics. At what point is that supposed to happen? And what evidence is there supposed to be?

But I don’t think my incredulity will suffice to sway the opinion of anyone who is otherwise inclined, so I have to polish up the justification for my side of the argument. My banquet table was full of particle physicists and cosmologists — pretty much the most sympathetic audience for reductionism one can possibly imagine. If I can’t convince them, there’s not much hope for the rest of the world.

The PIXEL RR-1 lander is part of Project Morpheus and with a name like that, how could I NOT use it for the post title? 

Click here to view the embedded video.

and for a two-fer, I liked this video: SDO Year One

Click here to view the embedded video.

Source

My pal Jennifer Ouellette, who writes the delightful blog Cocktail Party Physics, was recently interviewed at Tech Republic. As usual, she’s fun to read.

On that page they embedded the video of Jennifer when she appeared on Craig Ferguson’s TV show, which I totally forgot to do when she was on! So here’s the video of her talking about her book The Calculus Diaries:

See? Told you she was cool.

Related posts:

- Diary of dangerous curves
- Significant praise
- Extermicraig!
- Your late night talk shows: giff dem to me

Image credit

Time has a worthwhile piece up, How to Save a Trillion Dollars. One thing the author brings up in relation to our exorbitant military spending is that in certain sectors the lead of the American armed forces technologically is such that we do not to need to significantly upgrade our matériel for a generation to maintain at least a marginal level of superiority. The F-35 is clearly superior to the F-16, but is it worth it to increase the gap between our air superiority and our nearest competitors at $125 million per unit cost? Not only that, but the American military clearly “sets the curve,” so that the more we invest in our own technological superiority, the more our rivals will have to invest so as to “catch up” and keep the gap relatively constant. The reality is that basically developed nations just need to be advanced enough that they can pummel the leaders of select lesser nations, such as Libya or Ivory Coast, and, have a military beefed up enough to be respectable in the eyes of their peers. An “arms ...

Two years ago Reconstructing Indian Genetic History reframed how we should view South Asian historical genomics. In short, Indians can be viewed as a hybrid between a West Eurasian group, “Ancestral North Indians” (ANI) and a very different group, “Ancestral South Indians” (ASI), which had distant connections to West and East Eurasians. At least to a first approximation. Last fall I posted on a new paper which surveyed the Austro-Asiatic speaking peoples of India, and concluded that they were exogenous to the subcontinent. This is an interesting point. Prehistoric treatments of South Asia often use linguistic terms to denote putative ancient populations. One model is that first it was the Munda, the most ancient Austro-Asiatics. Then the Dravidians. And finally the Indo-Aryans. These genetic data imply that the Munda arrived after the initial ANI-ASI synthesis. The Munda people of India can be thought of as ANI-ASI, with an overlay of East Eurasian ancestry.

Zack Ajmal’s K = 11 ADMIXTURE run has highlighted some further issues. He has a set of Austro-Asiatic samples, as well as a host of Indo-Aryan and Dravidian speaking populations. I now believe we can now further clarify and refine our model of the peopling ...

Simply beautiful. (Expand to full screen)

The Mountain from Terje Sorgjerd on Vimeo.

Top twelve picks

Adam Rutherford’s documentary The Gene Code was an utter triumph – complex and cutting-edge science rendered clear and compelling. Let’s pause for a second and note that the UK is a country where we talk about Archaea and recombination in detail on national TV. For this alone, Adam is my hero.

Eric Michael Johnson’s superb piece on chimps, bonobos, the Tempest and the “killer ape” concept is one of the highlights of the week. David Dobbs’s follow-up is well worth your time too.

Brian Switek is on incredible form this week with no fewer than four superb posts: on primate “grief”, on the evolution of mammal ear bones from reptile jaws (with the perfect headline), on the world’s oldest toothache, and on exhorting people to stop comparing every dino to T.rex. I have immortalised his sentiments in T-shirt form.

Chris Mooney writes about the science of science denial for Mother Jones.

Tigers Are Less Important Than Warblers. A wonderful, witty and compelling piece by Madhusudan Katti.

“Well-read isn’t a destination; there is nowhere to get to.” Linda Holmes urges you to embrace sweet surrender

This excellent piece looks like it’s about roller-derby, ...

What’s the News: If you were to bring a glass of water to Mars, the liquid would instantly boil because the Red Planet’s carbon dioxide atmosphere is so thin: The vapor pressure of the water easily surpasses the weak atmospheric pressure, sending water molecules flying off quickly into the atmosphere. However, ancient shorelines and river-like features indicate that Mars had a watery past, leading researchers to wonder what happened to Mars’ once-thicker atmosphere. Now, data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has uncovered a massive deposit of solid CO2 at the south pole that could double the planet’s atmospheric pressure if it were released as gas. “If you double the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, it’s quite possible that you could have liquid water,” planetary scientist Philip James of the Space Science Institute in Boulder told Scientific American. “People have suggested that this could happen, and now it looks like it could be possible.”

How the Heck:

As the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter flies past Mars’s south polar cap, it sent radar waves at the planet, which reflect off surfaces within the ice and travel back to the orbiter.
These reflected ...

With the new series of Doctor Who premiering today, why not poke a little fun?

It took me a second to recognize the voice as David Hyde Pierce, and the words are from "Treasure Planet", which I thought was actually quite an enjoyable movie.

But as an astronomer myself, I have to question the word "useless". Why, we have many uses! We help keep the coffee and polyester industries afloat, for one. And without us, people with no actual sense of humor wouldn’t be able to say "So, what’s your sign?" when they meet us, which, let me tell you, is awesomely hilarious every single time we hear it.

Anyway, if you’re expecting more out of me today, you don’t know me very well because I’ll be camped out in front of the TV waiting for the new series to premier.

Trust me. I am a doctor.

When I was going to school, way back in the dark ages, matter was easily defined;  it was something that had mass and occupied space.  It could be quantified.  Weighed.  Measured.  Touched (if there was enough of it, and it wasn’t too hot or cold).  It had volume.  It existed in three states until I got to college the first time, then the schools were talking plasma.  It could be changed, but it existed in the same amounts at all times.  We were pretty sure we had a handle on matter.

That old, familiar image of the atom. This one was hanging out in PhotoBucket.

We didn’t.  By the time I went through college the second time (yeah, yeah… I never figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up), I had to re-take all those old undergraduate science classes because it was a whole new world.  Matter is a lot stranger, more dynamic, than originally thought.

The states of matter, the very strangeness of matter itself, works itself into thought proofs dealing with the eventual end (or not) of the universe.  A very (very) simplistic overview of the universe is that space and time exploded into being about 13.75 billion years ago in an event known popularly as “The Big Bang”.  Since the Big Bang the universe has been expanding out in all directions, and while the rate of expansion has varied, the average has shown a fairly constant rate of increase.  Finally, that the universe will eventually end in either a “Big Crunch”, or a dismal “Big Chill”.

I like Douglas Adams’ (author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) hypothesis; the universe will eventually end in an event known as “The Gnab Gib”.  A “gnab gib” event is the opposite of a “big bang” event.  Of course.

Diagram of the ergosphere around a rotating black hole, where the influence on nearby matter is expressed. Image by Messer Woland, some rights reserved.

Anyway; matter.  A good example of how our perceptions of the universe have changed would be antimatter.  The ideal of “negative” matter has been kicked around since at least the 1880′s as a staple of the vortex theory of gravity.  This particular model needed a fourth dimension from which originated the negative matter.  Now we know that antimatter doesn’t originate in another dimension, but is a state of ordinary matter.

As we learn more about the universe around us, we realize that very little is “ordinary” or commonplace.  It seems as though the unusual is the “ordinary”.  We know that as the universe expands outward, the inflation is accelerating instead of slowing down, as we expected…

…you know what?  Very little is quite what we expected, when you get right down to it.  It seems we have set our expectations very low.  There is more to consider in the commonplace than first imagined.  One facet of the action of the universe, i.e. its accelerating expansion, presents us with enough mystery to keep us here for a week.  Consider that not only is the universe expanding along its “borders” (if it could be said to have such a thing), it is also expanding within itself.  Faster and faster.

Given another decade or so, what is currently science fiction may very well be commonplace.  The ideal is both frightening and exhilarating, just like everything else in the universe.

Gamma Ray Burst 110328A as seen from the Chandra X-ray telescope from 3.8 BILLION light years. Click for the Hubble version. Chandra credit: NASA/CXC/Warwick/A.Levan et al.Hubble credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Fruchter (STScI)

Click the image for the Hubble version.   I’ve put the Chandra description below.  You can see more at both the Chandra and Hubble sites.

From the Chandra site:

The center of this image contains an extraordinary gamma-ray burst (GRB) called GRB 110328A, observed with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. This Chandra observation confirms the association of GRB 110328A with the core of a distant galaxy and shows that it was an exceptionally long lived and luminous event compared to other GRBs.

The red cross (roll your mouse over the image above) shows the position of a faint galaxy – located about 3.8 billion light years from Earth – observed with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the Gemini-North telescope on the ground. Allowing for experimental errors, the position of the galaxy is indistinguishable from that of the X-ray source, showing that the source is located close to the middle of the galaxy. This is consistent with the idea, suggested by some astronomers, that a star was torn apart by a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. This idea differs from the usual interpretation for a GRB, involving the production of a jet when a black hole or neutron star forms after the collapse of a massive star or a merger between two neutron stars.

Remarkably, this “tidal disruption” event may have been caught in real time, rather than detected later from analyzing archival observations. However, this X-ray source is about a hundred times brighter than previously observed tidal disruptions. One possible explanation for this very bright radiation is that debris from the disrupted star fell towards the black hole in a disk and the swirling, magnetized matter generated intense electromagnetic fields that created a powerful jet of particles. If this jet is pointed toward Earth it would boost the observed brightness of the source. This scenario has already been suggested by observers to explain the bright and variable X-ray emission observed by NASA’s Swift telescope.

This observation was part of a so-called target of opportunity, or TOO, led by Andrew Levan from the University of Warwick in the UK. A TOO allows the telescope to react quickly to unpredictable cosmic events, within 24 hours in some situations. Chandra scientists and engineers can decide to alter the scheduled observations and instead point the telescope to another target if the circumstances warrant it. This process was put into place once the discovery of GRB 110328A with Swift was announced on March 28th, 2011. The Chandra team was able to reset the telescope’s schedule to observe GRB 110328A early in the morning of Monday, April 4th for a period of just over four hours.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The announcement has been made and not everybody is happy.

Personally I am very pleased to see Discovery going to the Smithsonian. I’m not sure I agree with some of the other choices. I can see why Florida gets a shuttle, no problem there, I mean after all.  I do find it pretty hard to believe Houston ends up with nothing.

Seems to me there were better choices than the other the ones that were made.  Apparently I am not alone – not saying I “totally” agree with the headline.  Not saying I totally disagree with it either.

Source

Author Marc Kaufman explores the journey scientists have taken in the search into life elsewhere in the cosmos. From deep inside gold mines in South Africa to the frozen climate of Antarctica and everywhere in between life on Earth exists.

Kaufman asks: “Doesn’t it seem unlikely that none – zero – of the trillions of planets now reasonably presumed to exist beyond our solar system have the ingredients and conditions needed to cobble together life, and the stability needed to allow life to evolve and grow more complex?”

You won’t see a movie made out of this book but it is a good read and will give you a nice overview of where the search for life and a good look at some of the challenges that search brings.  I rather enjoyed the book.

If you click the image you will go to an Amazon page where you can purchase the book if you are a mind to.  But wait, there’s more!  Sorry couldn’t resist, the review copy of the book will be the prize in the next bonus riddle so put those thinking caps on!

First Contact is a hardcover book, 224 pages and published by Simon and Schuster; First Edition April 5, 2011.

About the author Marc Kaufman