Japan’s massive earthquake today may be over, but we’re still feeling the effects, from nuclear reactor scares in Japan to tsunami warnings along the entire west coast of North America, from Mexico to Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. Much is still unknown about this earthquake, including official destruction assessments and total death tolls, but here’s what we do know:

Two preliminary earthquakes with magnitudes of 7.2 and 6.3 struck off the coast of Honshu, Japan, the day before the major blow: This 8.9-magnitude quake—the largest in Japan’s recorded history—struck at 2:46 pm local time on Friday, its epicenter located about 231 miles northeast of Tokyo at a depth of 15 miles. Even after this large one, over thirty aftershocks—the strongest measuring 7.1 in magnitude—continued to batter the island nation.

The Immediate Effects

Fires and collapsed buildings were the main cause of injuries and death early on, from conflagrations sweeping an oil refinery in Chiba prefecture near Tokyo to the roof collapsing during a graduation ceremony in Tokyo. But fears soon centered on Japan’s nuclear facilities: Four power plants successfully shut down, but one experienced problems:

According to Nature’s Tokyo correspondent, David Cyranoski, Japanese media ...

A devastating earthquake, 8.9 on the Richter scale, hit Japan today, causing extensive damage and a large tsunami. I can’t imagine what it would be like to look out your window and see something like this headed your way. Our thoughts go out to everyone affected by the disaster.

A force this big propagates around the world, so beaches here in Southern California were expecting heightened wave activity — nothing very serious, but certainly noticeable. Scientists of course immediately leapt into action to estimate what kind of effects should be expected. The National Weather Service circulated this map of predicted wave heights. Click to embiggen.

Naturally, the House of Representatives is trying to cut funding for tsunami warning centers.

If you’ve just been bitten by a venomous snake and your flesh is starting to rot and you can’t breathe, you may not be in the mood to hear how beautiful snake venom can be. But from a safe distance, it really is a marvel to behold.

Snake venom is a blend of molecules, many of which are exquisitely adapted for wreaking havoc. Some are enzymes that slice muscles apart. Some grab onto proteins that normally form clots, so that a snake’s victim can’t stop bleeding. Many snake venoms attack the nervous system with molecular precision that’s so good that neuroscientists have snakes to thank for some of their biggest discoveries.

In the 1950s, two researchers in Taiwan–CY Lee and CC Chang–decided to study the venom of the banded krait. A bite from the snake, native to Taiwan, caused paralysis and shallow breathing–suggesting to the scientists that the snake’s venom must interfere in an interesting way with the nervous system’s control of muscles.

Nerves trigger muscles to contract by releasing the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. At first Lee and Chang assumed that the snake venom must cut acetylcholine apart, but they found it had ...

Our thoughts are with Japan today after an 8.9 magnitude earthquake–the seventh largest in history–struck the Pacific Ocean near Northeastern Japan, triggering a tsunami. Google has created an information page on the earthquake with tools to help find missing persons. UN Dispatch has also posted a list of Twitter accounts reporting on the disaster.

[UPDATE: I have posted an article with more info on the earthquake and where you can donate money toward the relief efforts.]

Japan suffered a massive earthquake last night, measuring nearly magnitude 9. This is one of the largest quakes in its history, causing widespread and severe damage. Before I say anything else, I’m greatly saddened by the loss of life in Japan, and I’ll be donating to disaster relief organizations to help them get in there and do what they can to give aid to those in need.

While there isn’t much I can do to directly help the situation in Japan, I do hope I can help mitigate the panic and worry that can happen due to people blaming this earthquake on the so-called "supermoon" — a date when the Moon is especially close to the Earth at the same time it’s full. So let me be extremely clear:

Despite what a lot of people are saying, there is no way this earthquake was caused by the Moon.

The idea of the Moon affecting us on Earth isn’t total nonsense, but it cannot be behind this earthquake, and almost certainly won’t have any actual, measurable effect on ...

The Wilbur Awards are given annually by the Religion Communicators Council to “individuals in secular media who communicate religious issues, values and themes with the utmost professionalism, fairness and honesty.”

This year, my recent article in Playboy, “Born Again Scientists,” has won the award in the “editorial” category.

The piece is about scientists who don’t believe in God but still refer to themselves as spiritual. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be any official version of the article on the web that I can share with you. I’ll see about whether I can post it here.

I’m honored to be recognized, though I can’t attend the awards ceremony in Little Rock next month. I’ve just recorded an acceptance video and will see about posting that online.

As I write this, I just got back from hearing author Seth Mnookin give a talk here in Boulder about his book, The Panic Virus (the talk was sponsored by my friends at the Colorado Children’s Immunization Coalition — I love those folks). It’s an excellent book about the rise and power of the antivax movement. I recommend reading it. That is, if your stomach doesn’t get upset over the events it describes. Mine did.

The talk was quite good, with him going over the basics of the people who fight against vaccinations. The most interesting part was during the Q&A, when a woman sitting right behind me starting soapboxing about how vaccines weren’t tested enough, and there weren’t enough studies showing their safety, and so on. It was clear after she said just a few words that she was from some antivax organization, and I found out afterward she was from Safeminds — a group that tried to get really awful ads placed in movie theaters but which was fought tooth and nail by Skepchicks.

The woman’s tactics were pretty simple: sow doubt, and use bad ...

All inventors have their ups and downs.

Thomas Edison wanted to make pianos out of cement and Henry Ford tried to invent a nuclear car. Popular Science recently went through their 138 years of archives to find the insanest inventions on its pages, and now they grace us in gallery form on their website.

For every airplane, computer or chemical weapon appearing in our archives, there are a ton of other inventions that are, to put it bluntly, rather pointless. At best, they’re well-intentioned but a little impractical. Let’s take a look, shall we?

Don’t miss the magic of the combo piano-vacuum, because really, everyone likes a mash-up and the only way to improve a vacuum is to make it stationary. But I guess you could always use it to clean the piano itself.

Some of the others are more reasonable, like a dog-wheel powered bike (don’t say you haven’t thought about it), which PopSci explains in the gallery:

The so-called “Poochmobile,” invented by eighty year-old dog trainer Z. Wiggs, applied the squirrel cage principle to its primary ...

I picked up Clive Finlayson’s The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived mostly for its alternative history value. By this, I mean that it was published in the fall of 2009, less than a year before research which suggests that not all Neanderthals went extinct, in that ~2.5% of the genomes of non-Africans derive from this human lineage. Going by the subtitle I’d assumed that Finlayson’s treatment would be useful, despite its likely false premise. Of course the author was no fool, he was channeling the consensus of his time, even citing the mitochondrial DNA studies which indicated no admixture between between the Neanderthal and modern human lineages. But to my surprise the overturning of a central presupposition of the book did little to alter the theses of Finlayson’s narrative.

In many ways the subtitle was something of a bait & switch. The author clearly was only reluctantly working within the “Out of Africa” framework, which he believed fostered sloppy and incoherent thinking. From what I can tell this seems to be a function of Finlayson’s background in paleontology and ecology, rather than genetics. ...

Way back in 2003/2004, I wrote a kind of classic piece in Columbia Journalism Review about the problems with “he said, she said, we’re clueless” coverage of scientific topics. You can read it here.

There was much evidence back then that this was a problem, but we certainly lacked this–a new study showing that “he said, she said” coverage leaves readers less certain that they are able to discern the truth about politics. In other words, such “passive” journalism contributes to a postmodern state of affairs in which nobody thinks they can pin down what reality actually is. It is therefore damaging and detrimental to our efforts to achieve consensus in contested areas, and sound policy solutions.

I have much more to say about this at DeSmogBlog:

The study, conducted by The Ohio State University communications professor Raymond Pingree, did not focus on climate change but rather the U.S. healthcare debate—but the same lesson would seem to apply. Study subjects were asked to read fake news stories in which two disputes about the contents of a healthcare bill were either left unresolved, or factually adjudicated. In other words, sometimes the subjects were exposed to “he said, she said” coverage, and sometimes they were exposed to a breed of journalism that unflinchingly examines where the truth lies.

Then the study subjects answered survey questions about their confidence in whether it was possible to discern the truth in politics. For instance, they were asked how much they agreed that “If I wanted to, I could figure out the facts behind most political disputes.” What kind of article they’d read had a significant effect: Those who’d read the “passive” story were more, er, postmodern in outlook. They were less sure they could discern the truth (if it existed).

You can read the study here; and continue reading my DeSmogBlog analysis here.

Associations between climate and IQ in the United States of America.

“Relations between average temperature of each of the 48 contiguous states and estimates of state IQ were inspected. Additional state variables were controlled in the correlational analyses, namely gross state product, percent Hispanic, Black, and Asian in the state population, and the pupil-to-teacher ratio for each state. A significant correlation between average temperature and state IQ was found (r = -.70, p < .001). Possible explanations are discussed.”

Bonus excerpt from the text:
“Significant negative relationships were found between state IQ and both winter (r = ?.73, p < .001) and summer (r = ?.53, p < .001) temperatures. Moreover, a significant negative association was found between state IQs and year-round temperatures (r = ?.70, p < .001). Thus, as environmental temperature decreases, the state IQ tended to increase, congruent with the hypothesis and the findings of Templer and Arikawa (2006). While expected, these results are difficult to explain. Previous research has attributed the relationship between climate and IQ to the evolutionary process. Lynn (1991) posited that early humans who migrated from tropical climates to colder ones, were forced to undertake challenging cognitive ...

All bats aren’t created equal: Using robotic moths, scientists discovered that bats emitting non-stop radar-like calls catch more insects than their intermittent-emitting brethren—and they do this by hearing the “siren-like” echoes of flying bugs. This suggest that bats evolved their echolocation abilities to increase their nightly catch.
Scientists reported that ovarian cancer survival rates have doubled in the UK in the past 30 years, a change they attribute to better treatments, such as broader access to chemotherapy.
Cheetos, Snickers, and electricity: Japanese companies are rolling out the first vending machines capable of charging electric cars, with plans of installing at least 10,000 by the end of the year.

Laugh your leg ulcers away: After a five-year study discovered that ultrasound—commonly used to treat leg ulcers—was ineffective, lead researcher Andrea Nelson told the BBC, Instead, lead researcher Professor Andrea Nelson said: “The key to care with this group of patients is to stimulate blood flow back up the legs to the hear….[and] “believe it or not, having a really hearty chuckle can help… This is because laughing gets the ...

Planetar. Substar. Failed star. Sub-stellar object. Astronomers have pinned each of these monikers on brown dwarfs, a category that has always perplexed scientists because it raises questions about what it means to be a star or a planet. And if that wasn’t enough, now they’ve discovered the coldest brown dwarf yet, blurring the line between planet and star even further.

It’s name is CFBDSIR J1458+1013B, and may be cooler than the boiling point of water (at the pressure of Earth’s atmosphere). This strange body is about 75 light-years from us, where it orbits its binary partner, another brown dwarf. Using the infrared capabilities of the 10-meter Keck II Telescope on Mauna Kea, University of Hawaii researcher Michael Liu and his team estimated the brown dwarf’s temperature, and have a ballpark range for its mass: between 6 and 15 times the mass of Jupiter.

It’s special because it may be a class Y dwarf (temperature less than 225 degrees Celsius (440 F)), a type of object whose existence astronomers had predicted but never actually found. Before this candidate arose, the coolest known brown dwarf was in the T spectral class; while ...

At first glance, biologists slapping motion capture gear onto kangaroos sounds like a scientific foray into the 3-D-movie craze. But James Cameron can rest assured: The scientists are merely performing their day jobs, studying kangaroos—and using a nifty new camera to do it.

As kangaroos mosey along at low speeds, they walk, using their tail as a fifth limb. But as they speed up, they slip into their signature bounce. The mystery for scientists is why such large animals—some being over six feet tall—are so darn springy, and as Alexis Wiktorowicz-Conroy, a researcher at the Royal Veterinary College, told the BBC, “We can’t really explain … why their bones don’t break at high speeds.”So the question here isn’t only why and how roos hop, but also why they don’t fall apart when they do. To tackle these questions anew, a team of international scientists is trying out a new gadget on kangaroos at Australia’s Alma Park Zoo, in Brisbane: an outdoor motion-capture camera that uses infrared light—much like how a sonar uses sound—to study the kangaroos’ bodies movements in detail. After the scientists place several plastic-ball markers on the joints of kangaroos (a ...

I just got back from San Francisco, where I gave a keynote lecture about how our bodies are like ponds, and why doctors need to think like ecologists. It takes a lot of time for me to put these talks together, and so I like to share them afterwards with more people than those who were physically in the room with me. Sometimes the people who invite me videotape the lectures and put them online. (Example: A talk I gave about science and the media.)

Other times, I make an audio recording and merge it with the slides to create a video. (Example: A talk about Neanderthals.) Still other times, I turn my lecture notes into an essay, illustrated with some of my slides. (Example: a piece on why we get old.) Either way, it takes a fair amount of time and so I want to make sure I’m actually making something people want to watch or read. But it occurred to me that I don’t know audience psychology well enough to know what the best course of action is.

So, if you don’t mind, let me foist this quick little poll on you. I’d really appreciate your answers, ...

You know, I was going to write a post about how Skeptic Exchange is a really cool way for skeptics and critical thinkers to talk about various topics and get expert answers for questions, how it encourages thoughtful answers using community-based awards, and what a great resource it could be, but then Tim Farley went and wrote a very thorough discussion of it.

So I’m off the hook. Go read Tim’s write-up, then head over to Skeptic Exchange and contribute! Make the world more reality-based!

One of the most inspiring events I’ve attended in past years was the 2010 Clinton Global Initiative meeting. It’s a unique environment where heads of state, government and business leaders, scholars, and NGO directors come together “to analyze pressing global challenges, discuss the most effective solutions, and build lasting partnerships that enable them to create positive social change.” Members at last years meeting made close to 300 new commitments on issues involving economic empowerment, energy and the environment, education, global health, and more. Since launching CGI, they have put $63 billion toward improving nearly 300 million lives in over 170 countries. In other words, CGI demonstrates that we are truly becoming a global community.

Today President Clinton announced the Fourth Annual Clinton Global Initiative University Meeting, which will take place at the UC San Diego from April 1-3. Approximately 1,000 students will come together from all over the world to meet with non-profit leaders, entrepreneurs, and celebrities engaged in efforts to create positive change. Each student will make a Commitment to Action – a detailed plan for improving lives within one of CGI U’s focus areas: education, environment & climate change, peace & human rights, poverty alleviation, and public health. Since 2008, this university event has brought together more than 2,500 students from 575 schools in 99 countries. As Clinton explains:

“Their work has improved the lives of thousands of people around the world. I am looking forward to convening the next generation of global leaders once again, so they can learn from each other and gain practical skills that will help them turn their ideas into real change.”

What comes out of CGI U? So far, students have:

· Over $1.3 million in infrastructure improvements to schools and libraries in countries including the U.S., Rwanda, Nigeria, and Laos;
· Reached more than 74,000 students, faculty, and staff with educational efforts and outreach about clean energy and sustainability;
· Placed more than 3,800 new recycling containers on college campuses and in surrounding communities;
· Engaged 2,700 people in workshops on conflict resolution, diplomacy, and peace;
· Established and maintained more than 90,000 square feet of community gardens;
· Introduced more than 3,000 bicycles on college campuses in the U.S., Ghana, Uganda, Kenya, Cameroon, and China;
· and much more

CGI U will be webcast live at http://www.cgiu.org. You can read the full agenda here and follow updates on Twitter @cgiu and @ClintonGlobal and Facebook.

The ontological proof for the existence of God (really “proofs” or perhaps “arguments,” as there are various versions) has popped up in the blogs a few times recently: e.g. Ophelia Benson, Josh Rosenau, Jerry Coyne. You’ve probably heard this one; it was most famously formulated by Saint Anselm, and most famously trashed by Immanuel “Existence is not a predicate” Kant. A cartoon version of it would be something like

1. God is by definition a perfect being.
2. It is more perfect to exist than to not exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

Now, this is a really cartoonish version of the argument — it’s not meant to be taken seriously. This kind of ontological proof is a favorite whipping-argument for atheists, just because it seems so prima facie silly. Just ask Jesus and Mo.

This kind of mockery is a little unfair (although only a little). What’s important to realize is that the ontological proof is perfectly logical — that is, the conclusions follow inevitably from the premises. It’s the premises that are a bit loopy.

It’s instructive and fun to see this in terms of formal logic, especially because the proof requires modal logic — an extension of standard logic that classifies propositions not only as “true” or “false,” but also as “necessarily true/false” and “possibly true/false.” That is, it’s a logic of hypotheticals.

So here is one formalization of the ontological argument, taken from a very nice exposition by Peter Suber. First we have to define some notation to deal with our modalities. We denote possibility and necessity via:

Just given these simple ideas, a few axioms, and a fondness for pushing around abstract symbols, we’re ready to go. Remember that “~” means “not,” a “v” means “or,” and the sideways U means “implies.” Take “p” to be the proposition “something perfect exists,” and we’re off:

There is something beautiful here, even if it’s somewhat silly as a proof for the existence of God. It’s silly in an illuminating way!

As Suber says, the argument is “valid but unsound.” He pinpoints three premises with which reasonable people might disagree: 1 (“if perfection exists, it necessarily exists”), 2 (“perfection possibly exists”), and 5 (“if something is necessarily true, then it is necessarily necessarily true”). That last one is not a typo.

For me, the crucial mistake is some mixture of 1 and 2, mostly 2. The basic problem is that our vague notion of “perfection” isn’t really coherent. Anselm assumes that perfection is possible, and that to exist necessarily is more perfect than to exist contingently. While superficially reasonable, these assumptions don’t really hold up to scrutiny. What exactly is this “perfection” whose existence and necessity we are debating? For example, is perfection blue? You might think not, since perfection doesn’t have any particular color. But aren’t colors good, and therefore the property of being colorless is an imperfection? Likewise, and somewhat more seriously, for questions about whether perfection is timeless, or unchanging, or symmetrical, and so on. Any good-sounding quality that we might be tempted to attribute to “perfection” requires the denial of some other good-sounding quality. At some point a Zen monk will come along and suggest that not existing is a higher perfection than existing.

We have an informal notion of one thing being “better” than another, and so we unthinkingly extrapolate to believe in something that is “the best,” or “perfect.” That’s about as logical as using the fact that there exist larger and larger real numbers to conclude that there must be some largest possible number. In fact the case of perfection is much worse, since there is not single ordering on the set of all possible qualities that might culminate in “perfection.” (Is perfection sweet, or savory?) The very first step in the ontological argument rests on a naive construal of ordinary language, and the chain is no stronger than its weakest link.

A couple of house-keeping things.

Firstly, if you cast your eyes a few pixels upwards, you’ll notice the snazzy new banner. All the Discover blogs now have them to give us a bit more of an individual feel. I love mine/them. The designer’s done a great job with reconciling the “rocket science” bit with the fact that I write almost entirely about biology. You can see the rest of the logos on the sidebar, and I’ll probably be doing a Cafepress store at some point.

Secondly, you might have noticed that there’s also a “Support Science Writers” box in the sidebar. I’ve added this in light of my new initiative to voluntarily pay for the best science writing that I read. In the comments, people suggested various ways that these micropayments could be done easily, but all the best suggestions involve adding some sort of code to one’s site.

While a simple solution may take some more work, I’ve implemented these Paypal buttons as a temporary fix. The top one goes to the writers I pick every month, distributed equally (any donations this month will go to February’s picks, and so on). The bottom one goes to me and I’ll match a third of the donations and send that to the chosen writers too.

Both go to my Paypal account but they’re tagged differently so I can sort through all the donations and distribute them easily. This isn’t ideal by any means, but like many things on the Internet, I thought I’d give it a go and see what happens. So if any of you would like to support NERS or any of the other great blogs that I link to, please feel free to contribute. There is, of course, no expectation to do this.

For reference, here are the people who I’ve donated to this month:

• Human (amphibious model): living in and on the water, by Greg Downey
• Circadian clock without DNA–History and the power of metaphor, by Bora Zivkovic
• Hidden Light: The Visual Language of an Autistic Photographer, by Steve Silberman
• Iron-deficiency is not something you get just for being a lady, by Kate Clancy
• Ancestor Worship, by Brian Switek
• Running out of antibiotics — and other drugs too, by Maryn McKenna
• How IBM’s Watson Computer Excels at Jeopardy!, by John Rennie
• Saving Ethiopia’s Church Forests, by Delene Beeland
• The Mere Existence of Whales, by Carl Zimmer
• Science education for all, by Alice Bell

The critical thinking meeting season is about to kick off, and the first big one in the US is NECSS: The Northeast Conference for Science and Skepticism. It’s from April 9 – 10 in New York City, and has a pretty cool list of speakers. I’m honored to be giving the keynote address, and there are lots of fun extracurricular activities planned as well.

Still not convinced? Then listen to the smooth basso of my pal George Hrab in this promo he put together for NECSS. He’ll be there too, and I bet we can convince him to do a song or two from his latest album.

Registration is now open, and there’s an event page on Facebook if you’re into that sort of thing too.

UPDATE: George just let the cat out of the bag on this, too: we’ll be doing a live performance of his song "Death from the Skies!" Saturday night at the reception. Here’s a taste of what you’ll get: