Caves are dark, sheltered and often quiet. They’re seemingly ideal places for a bit of a nap. But for a small Mexican fish, they have done exactly the opposite. As a result of life in dark caves, the blind cavefish has evolved sleeplessness, on at least three separate occasions. They don’t go entirely without sleep, but they doze far less than their surface-dwelling relatives.

The blind cavefish (Astyanax mexicanus) is a sightless version of a popular aquarium species, the Mexican tetra. They live in 29 deep caves scattered throughout Mexico, which their sighted ancestors colonised in the middle of the Pleistocene era. In this environment of perpetual darkness, the eyes of these forerunners were of little use and as generations passed, they disappeared entirely. Today, the fish are born with eyes that degenerate as they get older. Eventually, their useless husks are covered by skin.

They went through other changes too. For example, their skin lost its pigment so they are all pinkish-white in colour. And now, Erik Duboué from New York University had found that they also sleep less than their relatives on the surface.

Duboué works in the lab ...

Some while back, Jonathan Chait had a thought provoking, if brief blog post at The New Republic entitled “Why Liberals Like Compromise and Conservatives Hate It.” The piece was about the possibility (then more distant) of a government shutdown, and reasoned that one was likely in part because conservatives and liberals differ in style and outlook:

Even aside from the underlying desire by the GOP for large spending cuts, Republican voters are less attracted to compromise as a matter of general principle….Liberalism is an ideology that values considering every question through the side of the other fellow and not just through your own perspective…The stereotype of liberalism, which is sometimes true, often runs toward bending over so far backward that you can’t make obvious moral judgments: Who are we to judge this or that dictator? Criminals are just the result of bad environment. In any case, the joke about liberals — a liberal is somebody who won’t even take his own side in an argument — is not a joke you’d hear about conservatives. Now, I think the qualities of confident assertion of principle and willingness to bend both have their place. One of my meta-beliefs about, well, everything is that one needs to be able to understand both black-and-white situations and shades-of-gray situations. In any case, I think conservatives tend to err toward the black-and-white worldview, and liberals toward the shades-of-gray worldview.

Chait may be on to something, more than he even (apparently) knows. After all, his basic schematic for the differences between liberals and conservatives does not merely spring from his own opinion or intuition—it reflects a literature in psychology. For instance, consider research by John Jost of New York University and his colleagues, as helpfully summarized by Psychology Today:

The most comprehensive review of personality and political orientation to date is a 2003 meta-analysis of 88 prior studies involving 22,000 participants. The researchers—John Jost of NYU, Arie Kruglanski of the University of Maryland, and Jack Glaser and Frank Sulloway of Berkeley—found that conservatives have a greater desire to reach a decision quickly and stick to it, and are higher on conscientiousness, which includes neatness, orderliness, duty, and rule-following. Liberals are higher on openness, which includes intellectual curiosity, excitement-seeking, novelty, creativity for its own sake, and a craving for stimulation like travel, color, art, music, and literature.

The study’s authors also concluded that conservatives have less tolerance for ambiguity, a trait they say is exemplified when George Bush says things like, “Look, my job isn’t to try to nuance. My job is to tell people what I think,” and “I’m the decider.” Those who think the world is highly dangerous and those with the greatest fear of death are the most likely to be conservative.

Liberals, on the other hand, are “more likely to see gray areas and reconcile seemingly conflicting information,” says Jost. As a result, liberals like John Kerry, who see many sides to every issue, are portrayed as flip-floppers. “Whatever the cause, Bush and Kerry exemplify the cognitive styles we see in the research,” says Jack Glaser, one of the study’s authors, “Bush in appearing more rigid in his thinking and intolerant of uncertainty and ambiguity, and Kerry in appearing more open to ambiguity and to considering alternative positions.”

As Chait hints, there are times for black and white, and times for shades of gray. If conservatives do tend to prefer the former and liberals the latter, this is no moral judgement of either of them. Rather, it’s an observation about styles and tendencies–both of which have benefits, both of which can lead us astray.

However, it is also the case that unresolvable conflict between the two styles and mindsets–which often occurs–can lead to results that benefit nobody (except, in the case of a shutdown, perhaps President Obama’s reelection chances). So I wish both sides were thinking along these lines in their final negotiations.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A Typical Day in America’s Airspace

I liked it anyways.

Source

I don’t think it matters how good a job your parents did raising you, no matter how great and supportive and wonderful they were, you will still get a twinge of jealousy when you read about the birthday party this mom threw for her son. You have to read the whole thing to appreciate it.

As a taste (haha!) here is a picture of the table setting:

Yes, that planet the astronaut is standing on is actually the birthday cake, suspended above the table!

Someone keep an eye on that kid. I suspect in 20 years or so NASA will want to recruit him. If he’s not running the joint by then.

Tip o’ the spacesuit visor to Steve deGroof.

From Genome Blogger Diogenes. Here’s the details:

I’m very interested in samples from Europe, like Ireland (particularly the Western part), UK (all, but more Cornwall, Wales, Scotland Highlands), Finland, Scandinavia (especially Norway), Iceland, Switzerland, Austria (especially Tirol), Slovakia, Carpathians in general (regions of Romania, Poland, etc), Germany, Ukraine, Iberia and France (especially Alps, Massif Central, Pyrenees) with regional identification. Plus people from the Americas with significant known Amerindian ancestry (tribe or regional-tagged please). Also any mountain or island region in the world not represented in my current sample. I know I’m naming several regions with few participants in other projects. So I’m not even mentioning Madagascar, Sami, Indonesia, or Australian samples with known or possible aboriginal origin.

I need to do a post rounding up a list of Genome Bloggers and also pointers to data sources soon. Also, in case you haven’t kept track of it, Zack Ajmal has been pruning problematic individuals from the various data sets he’s been collecting (e.g., duplicates, very close relatives, etc.).

Over the past few days I’ve been trying to read a bit on the Sandawe. Most of the stuff I’ve been able to find is in the domain of linguistics, and is basically unintelligible to me in any substantive manner. The crux of the curiosity here is that the Sandawe, like their Hadza neighbors, have clicks in their language, and so have been classified with the Khoisan. Here’s some background:

The most promising candidate as a relative of Sandawe are the Khoe languages of Botswana and Namibia. Most of the putative cognates Greenberg (1976) gives as evidence for Sandawe being a Khoesan language in fact tie Sandawe to Khoe. Recently Gueldemann and Elderkin have strengthened that connection, with several dozen likely cognates, while casting doubts on other Khoisan connections. Although there are not enough similarities to reconstruct a Proto-Khoe-Sandawe language, there are enough to suggest that the connection is real.

I can’t speak to the validity of this at all, obviously. Some scholars do argue that the clicks in the Sandawe language were only acquired through interaction with peoples such as the Hadza, making an analogy to Xhosa, a Bantu language which has been strongly influenced by Khoi dialects. ...

Should we be strapping these to our torsos?

We’re all a little bit radioactive now. Thanks to atom bomb tests in the mid-20th century, it’s possible to use radioactive (but harmless) carbon-14 to date not only bristlecone pines and putative Noah’s Arks but also, in a recent Karolinska Institutet study, Grandma and Grandpa’s artery fat.

The technique used in this study—radiocarbon dating—is widely employed by archaeologists and geologists to determine when organisms like fossilized trees or plants lived. All organisms absorb carbon-14 along with normal carbon-12 in a ratio that mirrors how much of each type is present in the atmosphere. (Carbon-14 is produced naturally in the upper atmosphere by cosmic rays, and then mixes throughout the atmosphere and into the oceans.) When an organism dies, the carbon-14 starts to decay at a known rate—half the atoms become nitrogen-14 in about 5,700 years—and the amount left in the tissue when it’s dug up can be used to back-calculate its age.

The above-ground atom bomb tests of the Cold War era raised the amount of carbon-14 in the air; after the tests stopped, atmospheric radiocarbon declined at a very precisely recorded rate. Using this information, scientists ...

What’s the News: Scientists have for the first time directly linked freeway vehicle emissions with brain damage. Scientists used a new technique that involved trapping airborne toxins along Los Angeles’ 110 Freeway, freezing them in water, and exposing lab mice to the toxins. “As a society, we need to figure out ways to minimize the level of the very, very nasty particulates we are dumping into the air we breathe,” University of Southern California gerontology researcher Todd Morgan told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s having terrible consequences.”How the Heck:

The researchers used a particle sampler to collect “fresh ambient particulate matter” along the CA-110 Freeway near Los Angeles City for 30 days. After gathering grime on filters, they then soaked the filters in water for 30 minutes before freezing the water-toxin cocktail.
Frozen pollutants only remain chemically stable for around 3 months, so after collecting freeway toxins, the scientists brought the toxic ice cubed back to their lab soon after. They thawed the ice and released the toxins into the air breathed by their lab mice, exposing them to the fumes for a total of 150 hours ...

UPDATE:  SOLVED by Patrick at 12:24 CDT

Hola!  What’s everyone up to this fine Saturday?  I’m pleased to report that I’ve almost caught back up with myself, and am now running only one blog post behind.  I did this amazing feat by working through several nights, past a case of food poisoning, and dumping everything else off on Tom.  I’m fortunate he has such a gracious personality, or he would surely wring my neck.

Before we get going today, I want to clarify a small point of confusion which cropped-up last week:  When I tell you that someone has “solved the riddle in my email”, the riddle is still open.  What I’m referring to is when someone emails their guess to me in order to play riddle, but doesn’t wish to “win” because they’ve already done so on the current cycle.  There are several who do this, and I like to give them credit in the comments.

Moving right along, I have an interesting riddle for you today, slanted slightly from what you’re used to solving.  You should find this a fun little exercise to get your neurons warmed-up.  You will be looking for something in the real world, today.  Ready?

NASA/CalTech, Thomas Jarrett

Think big.  Really big.

This is defined by… well, nothing.

I can say with all confidence that this is a noun.

Chernobyl, USSR archival photograph

You’re used to thinking of this as a thing.

As it’s applicable in astronomy, it’s a modern discovery.

This is not something you’ll find in your neighborhood, astronomically speaking, unless it’s located between your ears.

Taken from the JAANUS website, gorgeous image of gorintou

You might be more familiar with this as a concept.

Or, perhaps, as a place in which you would not wish to find yourself.

You find this everywhere; in accounting, SciFi, law, mechanical engineering, nuclear engineering, computer programming, mathematics, music, housing, cards… really, in all facets of your life.

Box artwork for Sonic Shuffle, Dreamcast, all rights reserved, North American version

Chew on that for a while.  While you’re chewing, enjoy this funny Roger sent to me.  Thanks, Doll!  You made my day.

We love you, Trudy!

UK readers: exciting new science writing competition opens

Fantastic! Bravo! The Guardian and Wellcome Trust have launched a new science writing prize for young talent. A similar prize (now defunct) organised by Roger Highfield at the Daily Telegraph helped to kickstart my career. All aspiring UK science communicators should enter this. Read Alok Jha’s advice too.

Top thirteen picks

Douglas Fox tells the story behind the story of his Antarctica features (with pitch letters too). A must-read for journalists and people who like good things.

The Man Who Dreamed He Was A Beetle. Robert Krulwich’s touching obituary for Tom Eisener.

“The anti-nuclear movement…has misled the world about the impacts of radiation on human health.” George Monbiot does an about-turn of opinion faced with evidence (or a lack of it) – the essence of good scepticism. In his own blog, he shouts “Citation needed” at the anti-nuclear industry

“The bacterial cause of cholera, rendered effectively untreatable. Think about that for a moment.” Maryn McKenna on NDM-1 in New Delhi water and sewage

What do you do if your pilot gets sucked out the cockpit window? A truly harrowing account.

Superb post ...

I took a family vacation recently (as those who follow me on Twitter already know; see also here, and here). I haven’t talked about it at all, but we were visiting friends in Mexico. We took a day to visit the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza — the day after the Equinox, thankfully; it’s massively crowded there due to a light show on the Temple of Kukulkan, the great ziggurat there — and it was spectacular. I promise I will write about that at some point, for what I hope are obvious reasons.

But in the meantime, since it’s Caturday, and I’ve chosen to expand that to any animal, here is a little fella we saw while we were there:

[Click to iguananate.]

We actually saw dozens of iguanas, and my brother-in-law Chris took lots of excellent pictures of them (like this one, too).

We learned the Mayan word for iguana is xtoloc, pronounced SHTO-lok. This is my new favorite word in the whole world (ironically, taking the spot previously held by "Quetzlcoatl"). Whenever we see a lizard on TV, I turn ...

The public is invited to vote for its favorite original song to wake up the crew of STS-134 during their up coming mission.

There’s  been over 1,350 songs submitted by songwriters and performers from around the world.

A song contest was held from August 20, 2010 to January 31, 2011 and the submissions were winnowed down to the final ten and the winners were notified on February 18th.

Here they are:

• “Boogie Woogie Shuttle,” by Ryan McCullough (Savannah, Ga.)
• “Dreams You Give,” by Brian Plunkett (Halfway, Mo.)
• “Endeavour, It’s a Brand New Day,” by Susan Rose Simonetti (Cocoa Beach, Fla.)
• “I Need My Space,” by Stan Clardy (Statesville, N.C.)
• “I Want to Be an Astronaut,” by Michael J. Kunes (Phoenix)
• “Just Another Day in Space,” by Kurt Lanham (Jacksonville, Fla.)
• “Rocket Scientist,” by Tray Eppes (Cullen, Va.)
• “Spacing Out,” by Jeremy Parsons (Nashville, Tenn.)
• “Sunrise Number 1,” by Jorge Otero (Ovideo, Spain)
• “The Countdown Blues (Hymn for Tim),” by Sharon Riddell (Nashville, Tenn.)

The TWO songs with the most votes from the public will be the first two original songs to be played as wake up music for a shuttle crew.

So let’s get over to NASA’s Space Rock and vote.

Also NASA is running a Face in Space opportunity, want to find out more?  Visit the Face in Space site.

The image comes from the Extras and Originality portion of a AMC Pacer page.

Scary part is I remember both! 

An image from Messenger's Wide Angle Camera. Click for larger. Image Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

Here’s one of a couple new images out from the Messenger spacecraft.  You know yesterday I said “First Messenger Image” that is from orbit naturally.  I know at least one of you were probably thinking “it’s not really the first one” and I’ve not looked at the comments yet as I’ve been away most of the day.

Anyway, boy this is pretty fun stuff, being at Mercury.  Power is coming from solar panels and the light ought to be plentiful!!  I believe the sunlight should be about eleven-times brighter than it is here. There is a sunshade that is supposed to keep the spacecraft at about “room temperature” in the midst of 840^oF (450^oC) temperatures.  Here is a little about the spacecraft and instruments.

Check out this image and the other new images here.

About the image and the camera from the Messenger site:

MESSENGER’s Wide-Angle Camera

The wide-angle camera (WAC) is not a typical color camera. It can image in 11 colors, ranging from 430 to 1020 nm wavelength (visible through near-infrared). It does this with a filter wheel: the 11 narrow-band filters (plus one clear filter) are mounted onto a wheel that can be rotated to allow the camera to capture an image through each filter. In this image the 1000 nm, 750 nm, and 430 nm filters are displayed in red, green, and blue, respectively. Several craters appear to have excavated compositionally distinct low-reflectance (brown-blue in this color scheme) material, and the bright rays of Hokusai crater to the north cross the image. During MESSENGER’s orbital operations, we will typically use just eight of the WAC’s filters. This decision was made to reduce the amount of data that must be stored on the spacecraft’s solid-state recorder before the information can be downlinked. It’s also quicker than cycling through all 11 filters – the spacecraft is moving rapidly over the surface, and there isn’t much time to image the same spot on the surface 11 times over before moving to the next area of interest. The sets of color images will help us learn about the variation in composition from place to place on the planet. For example, some minerals such as olivine and pyroxene often absorb more light at longer wavelengths than at shorter ones, so we’ll be looking for their signatures in the reflectance spectra derived from each eight-color set. WAC images will be used in coordination with the Mercury Atmospheric and Surface Composition Spectrometer (MASCS), a hyperspectral instrument that provides reflectance information at many more wavelengths, but only for one spot on the surface at a time.

Date acquired: March 29, 2011

A HiRISE image of Santa Maria crater and the rover Opportunity. Click for larger (~247 k). Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona

The crater you see in the image is Santa Maria on Mars.  The image was taken by the High Resolution Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on March 9, 2011.

If you look at about 4:00 you will see the arrow pointing to the Mars Rover Opportunity, click the image if you are having trouble seeing it.

This image has been cropped, to see the full versions and caption – click here.

The caption title is Opportunity is Still Smiling, the same cannot be said for the Rover Spirit.  It doesn’t look good folks, Spirit has been quiet for over a year and not only that, most heaters were turned off over the Martian winter subjecting the electronics to the most extreme cold thus far in the mission.

In the past few weeks Spirit went through the period where its location received the maximum amount of sunlight, it was hoped there might be some communication.  Nothing.  The peak sunlight occurred on March 10 and on March 15 mission managers sent commands for Spirit to use UHF relays and a back up transmitter to communicate with the orbiting spacecraft.

“The commands we are sending starting this week should work in a multiple-fault scenario where Spirit’s main transmitter is no longer working and the mission clock has lost track of time or drifted significantly,” said JPL’s John Callas, project manager for Spirit and Opportunity.

If nothing is heard in the next month or few months the mission will switch to a single rover mission.

Tomorrow!  Tomorrow NASA will release the first images from MESSENGER’s orbit insertion.  I’ll certainly be watching for them.  Here’s the NASA news notice:

NASA will release the first orbital image of Mercury’s surface, including previously unseen terrain, on Tuesday afternoon, March 29. Several other images will be available Wednesday, March 30 in conjunction with a media teleconference at 2 p.m. EDT to discuss these initial orbital images taken from the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury.

NASA’s MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging, or MESSENGER, entered orbit March 17 after completing more than a dozen laps within the inner solar system during the past 6.6 years.

Media teleconference participants are:
– Sean Solomon, MESSENGER principal investigator, Carnegie Institution of Washington
– Eric Finnegan, MESSENGER mission systems engineer, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel. Md.

To participate in the teleconference, reporters must contact Dwayne Brown at dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov or 202-358-1726 for dial-in instructions.

During the teleconference, MESSENGER information and images will be available at http://www.nasa.gov/messenger.

Audio of the teleconference will be streamed live on NASA’s website at: http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio.

First image returned from the Messenger at Mercury. Click for larger. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

Just look at that!  The first image of Mercury is just amazing. We will have to wait a little for the rest, probably tomorrow.  That big crater in the upper right is called Debussy, if you look west of there you will see a smaller crater with two dark rays.

Clicking the image will get you a larger version.  If you want the full sized version with a description you just need to go to the Messenger site – worth your while too.

1) First, a post from the past: Lydians & Etruscans.

2) Weird search query of the week: “girls from which country are the most attractive?+iran”

3) Comment of the week, in response to “Who thinks the sun goes around the earth?”:

This question was paired with another asking how long it took for the Earth to orbit the Sun: a day, a week, a month or a year. About half of the population got both questions right.

4) And finally, your weekly fluff fix:

In yesterday’s post on African genetics I tried to work with a large set of populations, but narrowed SNPs down to ~40,000. Today I thought I’d go another route, focus on having a thicker market set, but with fewer populations. So I did a bunch of runs with 400,000 SNPs. Here’s K = 8. Please note, I did some “trial” runs and pulled out people with obvious admixture which was recent or an outlier within their population. (e.g., Mozabites with a lot of Sub-Saharan African or San which obviously had European ancestry).

Notice that there are three non-Sub-Saharan modal components. South of the Sahara the European one is absent. But here’s the weird thing. Below are MDS representations of genetic distance between the ancestral groups inferred above:

Now without Eurasians + North Africans:

All of these “ancestral” groups are abstractions. More plainly, they’re fake but useful (physicists would say “toy models,” economists “stylized facts”). But the Nilotic one seems kind of crazy here. It told the program to go look ...

When it comes to redemption stories, gaming consoles aren’t usually the first items to come to mind (or even on the list). But the Xbox 360 has made a surprising comeback in Japan after last month’s tsunami swept over 5,000 consoles out to sea: One company has deployed Xbox’s hand-held controllers to help maneuver robots at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

Meet the Talon robots, which were sent to Japan by a Virginia-based tech company called QinetiQ North America. With Xbox pad in hand, Fukushima workers can now remotely drive these robust bots around the plant, where it would be far too dangerous for human workers to go. Without putting themselves in danger, operators can peer into the darkest parts of the plant using Talon’s night-vision cameras. They can also gauge the temperature and air quality around the plant, as well as identify over 7,500 hazardous substances using the robots’ chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive (CBRNE) detection kits (as long as they’re within the robot’s over-3,000-foot operating range).

It may seem odd to use Xbox 360 pads for such important ...

What’s the News: Bats are an economic boon worth approximately $23 billion per year, and possibly up to $54 billion, to U.S. agriculture, a study in today’s issue of Science estimates. Their voracious appetite for insects—a colony of 150 brown bats eats about 1.3 million pesky, crop-chomping bugs each year—means that bats function as effective, and free, natural pesticides.

How the Heck:

A previous study found that bats saved farmers an average of $74 an acre in pesticides (ranging from $12 to $174 an acre), across eight cotton-growing counties in southeastern Texas.
Using that figure as a jumping-off point, the researchers extrapolated how much the disappearance of bats across the nation would cost per year. They came up with the yearly cost of $3.7 billion to $54 billion, putting their own estimate at $22.9 billion.
That estimate, they point out, just includes money saved purchasing pesticides; it doesn’t take into account secondary costs, like the impact of pesticides on the environment.

What’s the Context:

Unfortunately, bats are dying at an alarming rate. The mysterious, as-yet-incurable white-nose syndrome has killed over a million bats in the U.S. and Canada since 2006.
Nor is white-nose syndrome ...