This is the generation we discovered that other stars have planets.  That planet systems are, in fact, common in the cosmos.  That’s been proven, it’s no longer a “theory”.  Now we’re on the hunt for Earth-like exoplanets, and of course, the discovery of life on another planet.  We’re all hoping to find Mr. Spock, but more than likely our first true discovery will be something like pond scum in our own solar system.  Yes, right here.

NASA artist rendering of Earth-like exoplanet

The Kepler Mission is specifically designed to search out Earth-like planets (along with studying the diversity of planetary systems as a whole).  We’re finding all kinds of interesting planets out there; fascinating systems, places we never expected to find planets.  Now, we’re finding planets in these places that may be able to support life as we know it.  The variety of planet types is staggering.  In our solar system alone we have rocky terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars), the gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune), then a handful of dwarf planets, or “plutoids”… in honor of Pluto.  We also are finding extremely interesting moons which may support life (Europa and Titan, for example).  How about life on Mars?  It’s looking good for critters in liquid water under the surface, especially at the poles.  That’s a tasty variety, just in one solar system.  There are billions out there.

Artist impression of a Carbon planet - by Lyuten, released to public domain

Okay, here are the types of exoplanets we’ve found to date:  Hot Jupiters, Hot Neptunes, Eccentric Jupiters, Pulsar planets, Goldilocks planets, Chthonian planets (they’re not sure about this one, but it’s a mess), Ocean planets, Carbon planets, Iron planets, Helium planets, and another mess called a Coreless planet.  We have Super Earths, Ocean Earths, more dwarf planets, Exiled planets of various flavors, and Silicon planets.  I think that’s it.  Exhausting, isn’t it?

ESO impression of Carot-7b, this hot mess is believed to be a Chthonian planet

What about verified (or almost verified) Earth-like planets?  There are six scientists are looking at now:  Gliese 581e, Gliese 581g, Kepler 10b, Kepler 11f, HD 142b, and Hd 17092b.  I think Gliese 581g is the current sweetheart of the group, believed to have the highest probability of liquid water, oxygen in its atmosphere, and sitting in the Goldilocks zone of its red dwarf parent star.  I know!  Isn’t that cool?  The jury is still out as more and more information on the planet becomes available.

NASA/JPL-CalTech, these are the planets around HR8799

Scientists have been playing around with thought proofs on what type of life may have evolved on these different planets, and there are lots of interesting programs on the Discovery Channel and the Science Channel.  Some have made it to YouTube, like this one, which is 90 minutes and very interesting.

One thing I’ve been interested in for years is what will happen when we discover life on another planet?  Let’s say we discover microbes on Mars tomorrow.  What will happen?  Do you think everybody will just go about their daily lives and really not think about it?  Or, let’s say my favorite astronomer Seth Shostak at SETI announces that they’ve verified a signal from an alien civilization.  Do you think that would have an impact on religion, the economy (i.e., would we suddenly put more funds into space exploration?), or the way we view our “destiny”?

Let me know what you think.

Collected things before I hop on a plane for France:

• I’m hopping on a plane for France. Spending next week at the Pope’s old palace in Avignon, conferencing with fellow cosmologists about the latest and greatest in the field. I have apparently been appointed to honorary Grand Old Man status, as I’m giving the closing talk at the conference. The title is “White smokes and Dark smokes in cosmology,” and I presume you all understand the reference. I didn’t pick the title, I swear. No live-blogging, but if I’m feeling energetic I might drop in with updates.
• I’m still thinking about the Open Science idea, haven’t forgotten. But I haven’t really homed in on an appropriate project if we were to try it out. Ideally (I think) you would have something relatively modular, where people could work on separate sub-tasks and then bring them all together. But my own kind of research really isn’t like that; it’s more like I have a single idea that works or doesn’t, and we work out the basic consequences. But still contemplating.
• Subsequent to the post about NASA giving up on LISA, more official words have come from NASA itself. (The original posts here and elsewhere were based on emails from officials to scientists.) You can read more at Steinn’s blog, or some words from project scientist Robin Stebbins at Jennifer’s Discovery News blog. As far as I can tell, NASA has indeed given up on LISA, but they’re saying that “funding for gravitational wave astrophysics is unchanged,” which is certainly great news.
• Also at Discovery, Jennifer blogs about Silent Sky, a play by Lauren Gunderson about Henrietta Swan Leavitt. Well worth checking out for you Southern Californians. Amazing what ground-breaking scientific research the women “computers” at Harvard College Observatory managed to do, essentially in their spare time.
• Sad news out of Yale: an undergraduate physics and astronomy major was killed in a machine shop accident. Thoughts go out to her family and friends.
• U.S. Federal prosecutors, clearly sitting around bored with nothing better to do, have indicted leaders of online poker sites, and attempted to shut down the sites entirely. There is some legal confusion concerning the status of online poker, stemming from a silly piece of legislation called the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act. It’s fairly clear that the people who wrote the bill intended to make online poker illegal, but the sites contend that they’ve found ways around the constraints, and have been operating openly for quite a while now. (I personally play at Full Tilt Poker.) Even more clear is that people should be able to play poker for money legally if they want to, and this is an absurd overreach by the government. But it might very well be the end of online poker, at least until the legislation is repealed.
• Interesting in giving a TED talk? Here’s your chance: they’re accepting auditions. Make a one-minute video that blows them away, and you might find yourself speaking in front of a global audience. Think of it as American Idol for ideas instead of voices.
• And while we’re talking about videos, the Dunlap Institute at the University of Toronto has a new effort to put science videos online. Right now mostly focused on their own videos, which have an astronomy slant, but they’re planning to branch out. Worth a look.

Off to Old Europe with me, see you on the flip side.

Likely area of language origin, in white, based on:
A) phonemes found in individual languages and
B) phoneme diversity averaged across language families

What’s the News: Southern Africa may be the birthplace of human language, according a new study published yesterday in Science. The study further suggests that language may have arisen only once, with one ancestral language giving rise to all modern tongues, an idea linguists have long debated. This finding parallels the human migrations out of Africa supported by genetic and fossil evidence.

How the Heck:

The study’s author, evolutionary psychologist Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland in New Zealand, looked at 504 modern languages from around the world.
He then tallied the phonemes—the distinct sounds of consonants, vowels and tones—that make up each language. Languages vary widely in how many phonemes they have: Some of the Khoisan languages in Africa (widely known for their click sounds) have more than a hundred phonemes, while languages spoken in many Pacific islands have far ...

“An experimental study was undertaken to assess the phenomenon of male preference for blondes. In the first study, 360 Polish men ages 18 to 46 years were asked to assess the attractiveness of the presented stimuli using a 9-point scale. Stimuli were 9 different pictures of the same women whose ages (about 20, 30, and 40 years old) and hair colors (blonde, brown, and brunette) were manipulated. Pictures of blonde-haired women were generally rated as younger than the others. The attractiveness ratings of female faces changed with age and hair color. Still, only the 30-yr.-old woman with blonde hair was rated as significantly more attractive than those with brown or brunette hair. In a second study (the analysis of 500 Internet advertisements) mature women dyed their hair blonde more frequently. These results are analyzed with regard to the evolutionarily formed male preference for younger females.”

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Photo: flickr/rockmixer

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1) First, a post from the past:

You know what you don’t get enough of? Hearing me blather on about astronomy and skepticism on a Sunday. So you’re in luck: I’ll be doing two interviews on Sunday:

1) At 6:00 p.m. Eastern (US) time (22:00 UT) I’ll be on Star Talk Radio with my old pal and all around cool dude Neil deGrasse Tyson, and my new pal, comedian and all around cool chick Leighann Lord (we’re the three on the left of that pic with producers Helen Matsos and Leslie Mullen on the right) . We’ll be dissecting the science in science fiction movies and basically having a good time with it. You can listen to the show when it airs, but keep in mind we pre-recorded it when I was in NYC last week for NECSS.

What I will do, though, is listen along when it airs Sunday, and then I’ll be on Twitter making dumb jokes and snarky comments as usual. So join me there and I’ll answer your questions if I can.

2) I’ll be on the Think Atheist radio/podcast at ...

Dr. Daniel MacArthur at Genomes Unzipped:

23andMe announced yesterday that it will now be releasing information on Alzheimer’s disease risk markers in the APOE gene to customers who purchased their recently upgraded v3 test. The APOE markers are famously associated with a major increase in risk for late-onset Alzheimer’s, with individuals carrying two copies of the ?4 version of the gene being around 15 times more likely than average to develop the disease. Customers who have been tested on the v3 platform will be able to able to access their APOE status after “unlocking” it; customers on earlier versions of the test will need to upgrade to get access. You can see screenshots of the unlocking and results pages here.

I don’t put much weight on 23andMe’s disease risk estimates since I have a relatively large pedigree, and my four grandparents all made it at least to age 75 (one made it to 100, and two to 80+), so I have some sense of my odds of late onset diseases. But, I will admit I was still a little anxious when “unlocking” my results for this locus. This is a classic “tail risk” event which hooks into all the ...

Researchers traced word rules across more than 3,000 languages.

What’s the News: Noam Chomsky, look out: If language has any universal grammar, it’s hiding really well, conclude the authors of a recent Nature study. The idea that all human languages share some underlying structure, regardless of where or when they evolved, an influential idea that nonetheless has drawn some controversy since Chomsky popularized it in the 1950s. One part of natural-grammar theory is the idea that certain word order rules (whether the verb or the noun goes first and whether a preposition goes before or after a noun, for example) will always associate together, regardless of which language they occur in.

But when cognitive scientists and a biologist teamed up to see whether there were shared patterns in word order across four large language families, they found almost none. A common cultural background, they found, was the best predictor for how a language orders words.

How the Heck:

Applying biology techniques to linguistics, the team built an evolutionary tree of word order. They treated word order as a trait, just as biologists might treat eye color or hair color.
They looked to ...

This is a datum which you can dine out on, The Bias You Didn’t Expect:

It turns out that legal realism is totally wrong. It’s not what the judge had for breakfast. It’s how recently the judge had breakfast. A a new study (media coverage) on Israeli judges shows that, when making parole decisions, they grant about 65% after meal breaks, and almost all the way down to 0% right before breaks and at the end of the day (i.e. as far from the last break as possible). There’s a relatively linear decline between the two points.

Yesterday, the Universe just got a little bit more accessible: about 57% of the WISE mission’s infrared data of the sky has been released and can be searched online. Instructions on how to tap into that archive are available as well.

WISE mapped the entire sky in the infrared and found a treasure trove of fantastic objects (see Related Posts at the bottom of this post). As part of the news of this data release, NASA put up an image I hadn’t seen before, and it’s really amazing: the Lambda Orionis Nebula:

[Click to ennebulanate, but do it with care: the high-res version is a whopping 15,800 by 14,700 pixels and weighs in at 25 MB!]

It may look entirely alien, but you’ve probably seen this part of the sky before. See that blue star in the lower left? That’s Betelgeuse! Marking Orion’s shoulder, Betelgeuse is a red supergiant, destined one day to go supernova. It looks blue in this image because WISE sees in the infrared, and uses false colors. What’s colored blue in the image is actually light at a wavelength ...

“The present study assessed the effect of negative information on perception of attractiveness of smiling and nonsmiling targets by undergraduate men and women. Analysis indicated that smiling faces were rated more attractive than nonsmiling faces, consistent with previous research. There was a significant interaction of participants’ sex and target description, in which women rated smiling faces less attractive after exposure to negative information about the target, but men rated smiling faces more attractive after exposure to negative information. Results are discussed in terms of an affective model of perception of people.”

Bonus excerpt from the text:

“The six negative descriptions for each target consisted of one of the following statements: “Convicted of insider trading on the stock market,” “Commits adultery on a regular basis,” “Alcoholic with anger management issues,” “Addicted to child’s Ritalin medication,” “Addicted to gambling after cashing paycheck,” and “Convicted of petty theft of expensive jewelry.”…

When a negative social or individual stigma was present, women evaluated the targets as less attractive, regardless of facial expression. To a certain extent, this corroborated with the research of Ferree and Smith (1979) and Kowner (1998), but it is only applicable to women. ...

Rock of Gibraltar

In The Humans Who Went Extinct the author makes much of the fact that Neandertals obviously lacked skill at crossing the water, insofar as their range was constricted by barriers to their south in Iberia. This sort of issue is kind of confusing to me, insofar as it seems probable that very ancient humans did make water crossings of a more arduous nature in Southeast Asia, if the Hobbits finds are valid.

I don’t really know what to think about the general issue of water crossings, but it does seem that the short distance between North Africa and Iberia has had a big impact. Bodies of water tend to serve as a major check on conventional gene flow between adjacent populations, because they limit “casual encounters.” An analogy can be made with the inbreeding coefficients in the mountainous regions of southern Italy. They were rather high until modern transportation made travel between isolated regions much easier, because the typical peasant simply wasn’t likely to venture far, or have a social network which would span valleys (rather, often the minimal transit avenues tended to lead back to ...

The asteroid 2011 GP59 is a small rock with an orbit that takes it from just inside the orbit of Venus to just outside that of the Earth. On April 15th at around 19:00 UTC, it’ll cruise by us at a distance of about 533,000 kilometers (330,000 miles) — farther away than the Moon. This asteroid poses no threat to us, but because it does get relatively close, amateur astronomers have been able to capture it in their telescopes.

In fact, Nick James of Chelmsford, Essex, England, took a series of images on April 11, 2011 and made this video:

You may have to watch it more than once; the asteroid starts in the center of the frame and moves to the lower right. The stars appear to move as the telescope tracks the asteroid, so it can be tricky.

See how the asteroid appears to wink on and off? It’s spinning as it orbits the Sun, and must have an elongated shape. When we see the side of it we see a bigger area, which means it reflects more light and it looks brighter. When the narrow part is pointed toward us the area ...

Several people have emailed/tweeted at me about the new paper in Science, Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa:

Human genetic and phenotypic diversity declines with distance from Africa, as predicted by a serial founder effect in which successive population bottlenecks during range expansion progressively reduce diversity, underpinning support for an African origin of modern humans. Recent work suggests that a similar founder effect may operate on human culture and language. Here I show that the number of phonemes used in a global sample of 504 languages is also clinal and fits a serial founder–effect model of expansion from an inferred origin in Africa. This result, which is not explained by more recent demographic history, local language diversity, or statistical non-independence within language families, points to parallel mechanisms shaping genetic and linguistic diversity and supports an African origin of modern human languages.

Though there are major differences between biological evolution, constrained by relatively regular forms of inheritance, and cultural evolution, which is much more potentially protean, I think that there is great potential for unity of model and process. That is why I read A Replicated Typo (and presumably why several of the contributors ...

Snowball the dancing, Backstreet Boys-loving cockatoo is more than a web meme: he is a scientific conundrum. Bobbing in time to music is a shockingly rare behavior, and even monkeys, capable of learning very complex tasks, find it impossible to get down to the beat even after more than a year of training. It’s marvelous evolutionary serendipity that humans dance, thinks neurobiologist Aniruddh Patel, who has found that our hearing system and motor control are intimately linked. In DISCOVER’s 2011 special issue on the brain, Patel discusses his idea that that animals needed a vocal-learning brain in order to get their groove on:

The implication is that dogs and cats can never do it, horses and chimps can never do it, but maybe other vocal-learning species can do it. I proposed that idea, but it was purely hypothetical until a few years after, when along came Snowball [in 2007].

But more importantly (drumroll), he issues a challenge:

If your pet really does have rhythm, he wants to know about it. “If someone has a dog that can dance to the beat, it will totally refute my hypothesis,” he says, “and that’s progress in ...

You know, over the past couple of years I’ve compared Saturn’s moon Mimas to the Death Star, an egg, Pac Man, and even now Rick Astley. But while I was prepping the image for that last one yesterday, it suddenly hit me that yet another comparison was in order.

I’ll just leave it here without comment…

… except to say that finding an image of Kenny from the side was almost impossible. At least one where he was still alive.

As dramatic fossils go, it’s hard to beat the Mongolian fighting dinosaurs – a Velociraptor and a Protoceratops locked in mortal combat. The Protoceratops, an early horned dinosaur, has the raptor’s arm in its mouth, and the raptor appears to be kicking its prey in the neck. The two combatants were killed in this pose, around 75 million years ago. And according to a new study, they probably met and died sometime around dawn or dusk.

Most dinosaur reconstructions portray the animals walking about in bright sunlight but of course, we know that living animals are active at all times of the day. The diurnal ones prefer the daylight hours, while nocturnal species haunt the night. Crepuscular animals favour twilight hours, while cathemeral ones are active in short bursts throughout the day.

It’s easy enough to work out which group a living animal falls into, but the task becomes far more difficult if the animal in question is extinct. With the exception of tracks, burrows or other trace fossils, behaviour doesn’t fossilise easily. But Lars Schmitz and Ryosuke Motani have developed a clever way of working out when ...

Today, I’m in Orono, Maine, for the National Science Foundation’s “Science: Becoming the Messenger” workshop. I’m demonstrating blogging before the group in plenary session, and as at the last workshop, we’re live blogging a crowd-sourced limerick about the subject of science communication. I gave them the first line–”There once was a workshop in Maine”–and this is what they came up with:

There once was a workshop in Maine:
The message delivered was plain.
If you want to inform ‘em
And you don’t want to bore ‘em
Use the triangle and get the right frame.

Here in the Era of (Attempted) Dark Matter Detection, new results just keep coming in. Some are tantalizing, some simply deflating. Count this one in the latter camp.

The XENON100 experiment is a detector underneath the Gran Sasso mountain in Italy (NYT article). It’s a very promising experiment, and they’ve just released results from their most recent run. Unlike some other recent announcement, this one is pretty straightforward: they don’t see anything.

Here we see the usual 2-dimensional dark matter parameter space: mass of the particle is along the horizontal axis, while its cross-section with ordinary matter is along the vertical axis. Anything above the blue lines is now excluded. This improves upon previous experimental limits, and calls into question the possible claimed detections from DAMA and CoGeNT. (You can try to invent models that fit these experiments while not giving any signal at XENON, but only at the cost of invoking theoretical imagination.) See Résonaances or Tommaso Dorigo for more details.

No need to hit the panic button yet — there’s plenty of parameter space yet to be explored. That grey blob in the bottom right is a set of predictions from a restricted class of supersymmetric models (taking into account recent LHC limits). So it’s not like we’re finished yet. But it is too bad. This run of XENON had a realistic shot of actually finding the dark matter. It could be harder to detect than we had hoped, or it could very well be something with an extremely small cross-section, like an axion. The universe decides what’s out there, we just have to dig in and look for it.

Last weekend I was in NYC attending the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism, aka NECSS. It was a lot of fun, as I kinda figured it would be. Skeptic conferences usually are! And of course it was a chance to catch up with a lot of old friends.

Attendees are writing their opinions of the meeting all over the place (like here, here, and here for starters). I’ll spare you the recap, which would boil down to how awesome my talk was, and cut to the chase which is to thank Michael Feldman from the New York City Skeptics, and all the folks from the New England Skeptical Society for inviting me and throwing such a fab conference.

I’d be remiss, though, if I didn’t include this little bit of funnery. Skeptical singer songwriter and BA friend George Hrab was at NECSS. On Geo’s last album, "Trebuchet", he wrote a tune called "Death from the Skies" — based on the brilliant book of the same name. He plays the funky beat, and I read statistics of getting killed by various astronomical events. We performed this song ...