Rhea, Dione and Saturn's rings by Cassini. Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Time for a stuff post or at least a mini stuff post.

Aurora – keep an eye on the K index as night falls.  The K-index has hit 5 today and as you know that could mean there is a possibility of seeing an aurora if you live at sufficiently high latitudes.  Remember last week I mentioned the possibility?  It had clouded up so I wasn’t able to see anything BUT there was a nice video released by the Solar Dynamic Observatory of the flare causing the ruckus.  See it here.

Out for a walk – The Discovery space-walkers spent six-hours and 34 minutes outside the spacecraft and ISS.  Mission specialists Steve Bowen and Al Drew moved a failed ammonia pump module installed an extension cable, extended the rail track along the station’s main truss and installed a camera wedge among other things.  There was a minor glitch caused by a problem with the robotic arm controls in the cupola.  Things got back to normal with the operators of the Canadarm2, Mission Specialist Michael Barratt and station Commander Scott Kelly moved to a duplicate control center in the Destiny Laboratory.

Message in a Bottle – Before the spacewalk ended Bowen and Drew opened a metal canister. The goal was simple use the metal canister to capture a bit of the vacuum of space.  The canister which was autographed by astronauts will be returned on Discover for display.

Dawn and Messenger – both spacecraft are getting closer to their targets but more on that later.

Cassini – Cassini is still out there and I really like the image above.  The image is looking beneath the heavily cratered southern portion of Saturn’s moon Rhea from the opposite side of the moon facing Saturn and toward the wispy moon Dione which is facing Saturn.  Dione appears to be sitting on Saturn’s rings, in reality the moon is beyond the rings.

And finally!!!!!

DON’T FORGET TO PARTICIPATE IN THE GLOBE AT NIGHT PROJECT – CLICK TO FIND OUT HOW, GO ON  AND DO IT!

Click here to view the embedded video.

A view of the STS-133 vapor trail as seen from a balloon with student payload at 110,000 feet.  Yes a student payload – very cool stuff!

From onorbit.com:

Last week a balloon with a student-oriented payload shot high resolution photos and video from an altitude of over 110,000 feet of Space Shuttle Discovery as it climbed into space.These images and video were released today as part of a mission report provided by Quest for Stars representative Bobby Russell at the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference (NSRC) at the University of Central Florida. More information on this conference can be found at http://nsrc.swri.org

Read the rest of the story at OnOrbit and be doubly-doubly sure to go to the link in the article (yeah it’s the very next paragraph) and I’ll include it here, watch the balloon pop video.

There is a Robonaut – 2 also, it’s onboard STS-133!

What a great project, wow, just wow. 

Click here to view the embedded video.

I saw still of this but didn’t know there was a video.  Check it out!

Thanks and hat tip to Rob

You’ve already heard about TEDx from Sean here and here. The main TED conference for 2011 has been going on this week, in Long Beach, and rumors have it that it’s been great. Physicist Janna Levin gave a talk, which is not yet posted. A few of the talks are, though — check out this inspiringly optimistic view of the current situation in the Arab world from Wadah Khanfar. More TED talks here, the ones from this week are starting to appear.

In any case, one of the first very large TEDx Events was organized as a part of Universal Children’s Day in November, with a whole bunch of simultaneous organized events called TEDxYouth. I had the opportunity to give a talk at one of the events TEDxYouth Castellija, to about 400 middle and high school students, about how the Universe works.

Because of the younger audience, they cut the standard ted talk time of 18 minutes to 6 minutes, which made it even harder — at least for those of us used to having a whole hour to say something! Anyways, I managed to try to explain dark matter, galaxies, and the last 14 billion years in this short time. You can take a look here:

The rest of the speaker lineup was really great, and very diverse, including a graffiti artist, the founder of guitar hero, the google chef, and a super compelling biochemist.

My favorite talk was by Garang Akau, one of the lost boys of Sudan, who has subsequently graduated from Stanford and started his own NGO called New Scholars, focused on incubating youth-led enterprise in Africa. His fearlessness and optimism in the face of incredible hardship was seriously inspiring. Check it out:

The best part of the whole thing was meeting and talking with some of the kids, who were truly engaged and curious. Lots more awesome talks are available from TEDxYouth Castelleja and from the rest of the TEDxYouth events. Looks like the day was a smashing success all around, and will be happening again next November.

It’s smelly week on NCBI ROFL! All week long we’ll feature the funniest papers about the science of stink. Enjoy!

Olfactory cues modulate facial attractiveness.

“We report an experiment designed to investigate whether olfactory cues can influence people’s judgments of facial attractiveness. Sixteen female participants judged the attractiveness of a series of male faces presented briefly on a computer monitor using a 9-point visual rating scale. While viewing each face, the participants were simultaneously presented with either clean air or else with 1 of 4 odorants (the odor was varied on a trial-by-trial basis) from a custom-built olfactometer. We included 2 pleasant odors (geranium and a male fragrance) and 2 unpleasant odors (rubber and body odor) as confirmed by pilot testing. The results showed that the participants rated the male faces as being significantly less attractive in the presence of an unpleasant odor than when the faces were presented together with a pleasant odor or with clean air (these conditions did not differ significantly). These results demonstrate the cross-modal influence that unpleasant odors can have on people’s judgments of facial attractiveness. Interestingly, this pattern of results was unaffected by whether the ...

An interview I did with Keith Daniels of the counter-culture site Suicide Girls is now up on the SG website.

I’ll be clear: that page should be OK, but the site itself may be somewhat more than NSFW, in much the same way that standing a meter away from a supernova is somewhat more than Not Safe For Staying a Solid.

I’ve been a fan of SG for a while — it gives a strong, nerdy voice to decidedly non-mainstream thinking in a wide variety of topics, and the interview is like that. We covered a lot of ground: Hubble, NASA, skepticism, politics, life on other planets, the media, and of course Not Being a Dick (while still maintaining a motivating level of anger and passion).

Clearly, after ten years or more of doing interviews, I still haven’t learned how to make a succinct, pithy point. And while I do suffer a bit from verbal diarrhea, I’ll note that some topics deserve more subtlety and longer discussion. Sound bites tend to gloss over vital details, and not everything can be adequately covered by a bumper sticker.

To give you ...

NASA has posted video taken from cameras mounted on the solid rocket boosters of STS 133, the Shuttle mission currently underway. It’s pretty amazing to watch:

Most of the video is silent. However, at the 14:46 mark the video cuts to a camera equipped with sound, and although the Orbiter is well out of the part of Earth’s atmosphere where sound can carry, the metal in the booster itself — as you can hear — is more than enough to transmit sound!

After about a minute in you can see the shadow of the plume on the ocean, and at the 2:25 mark… well, it gets pretty exciting. You’ll see. If there’s some moment in particular you like, leave a comment below and let others know!

Credit: NASA. Tip o’ the nose cone to Barbara at Spasms of Accomodation for helping me find this video.

Humankind’s experience visiting worlds beyond our own begins and ends with the dozen Apollo astronauts who skipped about on tiny swaths of the moon. But that doesn’t mean we can’t experiment with how and where we might visit (or live) on the extreme surfaces of other worlds. A few studies out recently are doing just that.

Radiation? Big deal

Our planet provides a protective shield from the most damaging radiation produced by the sun—a shield not available on the moon or Mars. It’s a hazard for any human leaving the planet, and it’s a hazard for plants, too.

However, a new study of the Chernobyl area in the Ukraine, site of the famous nuclear accident, is actually raising hopes for space farming.

Even 25 years after the catastrophic nuclear accident at Chernobyl, the area around the site harbors radioactive soil. But researchers working there have found that oil-rich flax plants can adapt and flourish in that fouled environment with few problems. Exactly how the flax adapted remains unclear, but what is clear is that two generations of flax plants have taken root and thrived there, and ...

Here’s a fascinating new result about black holes in five dimensions — actually from last October, but I missed it when it came out. I just noticed it this week because of a write-up by Gary Horowitz in Matters of Gravity, the newsletter of the gravity group of the American Physical Society. (I obviously missed David Berenstein’s post as well.)

You might be thinking that black holes in five dimensions can’t be that interesting, since they are probably pretty similar to black holes in four dimensions, and after all we don’t live in five dimensions. But of course, there could be a fifth dimension of space that is compactified on a tiny circle. (Of course.) So then you have to consider two different regimes: the size of the circle is much larger than the size of the black hole — in which the fact that it’s compact doesn’t really matter, and you just have a regular black hole in five dimensions — or the size of the circle is smaller than the black hole — in which case, what?

The answer is that you get a black string — a cylindrical configuration that stretches across the extra dimension. This was figured out a long time ago by Ruth Gregory and Raymond LaFlamme. But they were also clever enough to ask — what if you had that kind of cylindrical black hole, but it stretched across a relatively large extra dimension? That sounds like a configuration you can make, but it might be unstable — wiggles in the string could grow, leading it to pinch off into a set of distinct black holes. One way of seeing that something like that is likely is to calculate the entropy of each configuration; for long enough black strings, the entropy is lower than a collection of black holes with the same mass, and entropy tends to grow. Indeed, Gregory and LaFlamme showed that long black strings are unstable. However, it wasn’t clear what exactly would ultimately happen to them.

The problem is this: there is a singularity at the center of the black string. If the string simply divides into multiple black holes, that singularity should (at least for a moment) become “naked” to the outside world, violating cosmic censorship. Cosmic censorship is a conjecture, not a theorem, so maybe it is violated, but that would certainly be interesting.

What Lehner and Pretorius have done is to numerically follow the decay of an unstable black string, much further than anyone had ever done before. They find that yes, it does decay into multiple black holes, and the strings connecting them seem to shrink to zero size in a finite time. The implication seems strongly to be that cosmic censorship is indeed violated, although the numerical simulations aren’t enough to establish that for sure.

The cool part is the way in which the strings decay into black holes. They form a self-similar pattern along the way — a fractal configuration of black holes of every size, from the largest on down. Here’s a result from their simulations.

Beautiful, isn’t it? As the string shrinks in radius, it keeps beading off smaller and smaller black holes. Eventually we would expect them all just to bump into each other and make one big black hole, but the intermediate configuration is complex and elegant. And cosmic censorship is apparently violated when the strings finally shrink to zero radius. So it goes.

Little chance we’ll be observing any of this in an experiment any time soon. But Nature has the capacity to surprise us even if we’re just solving equations that are many decades old.

Everyone seems to be speculating about Charlie Sheen. The media paints things any way they want, and as a blogger, admittedly, with this post I add to the hullabaloo. But I’d like to contribute something to the conversation. I’ve seen Dr. Drew describing Sheen’s unusual behavior as possibly “drug induced,” bipolar, and/or manic. Meanwhile, he has reportedly tested negative for drugs and Neil DeGrasse Tyson recently tweeted:

Now I don’t know Charlie Sheen and cannot imagine what his lifestyle is really like. The media’s portrayal is assuredly not the full story.

That said, I suspect he may have more dopamine receptors dotting the tips of his nerve cells than the average man. Dopamine is a powerful chemical associated with craving, desire, and stimulation of pleasure-pathway nerves in the brain. As I explain in my book, research suggests that a high number may predispose us to sexual promiscuity or addictive behavior.

Should this be the case, then Sheen would be–as he describes–literally on a drug called “Charlie Sheen.”

It’s not hard to describe just how silly homeopathy is — after all, diluting a substance in water until nothing is left is clearly not a great way to base a medicinal practice. Unless you’re trying to cure dehydration. But if describing homeopathy’s silliness is easy, doing it well is another matter; most people don’t have a very good sense of scale when it comes to very big and very small numbers (I guess numbers that dwarf even a trillion weren’t necessary for our ancestors on the plains of Africa, so we never evolved a way to grasp them).

However, Steve DeGroof at MadArtLab (the same guy who does the skeptic web comic Tree Lobsters) has found a way to put homeopathy into perspective: use Felicia Day!

[You really must click through to see the whole thing.]

Well, pictures of her, anyway, and the concept of Felicia’s uniqueness. This is actually a pretty good analogy: you can put Felicia into various categories (like women named Felicia, redheads, guest stars on "House"*, and so on) and compare that number to how much homeopathy dilutes various solutions.

I think this ...

Taeggan Goddard over at Political Wire sent over this interesting piece on research out of The University of Michigan. A new study found that the language used to describe our warming planet may influence listeners’ reactions.

According to research by Schuldt, Konrath, and Schwarz, Republicans are less likely to say that global climate change is real when it’s referred to as “global warming” (44.0%) instead of “climate change” (60.2%). Meanwhile, word choice does not seem to matter for Democrats. The investigators observed the partisan divide dropped from 42.9 percentage points when they used “global warming” to 26.2 percentage points when they used “climate change.”

In other words, language matters tremendously and the outcome of polls can be highly dependent upon it.

James Hrynyshyn has a new post up entitled “Why it’s hard to change a climate denier’s mind.” He uses it to channel the insights of Simon Donner, who argues that throughout the history of, like, all of humanity, people have considered themselves powerless to influence the climate. So why would that suddenly change?

I don’t doubt that this is a factor. However, it isn’t a partisan one; it suggests incredulity about human-induced climate change should be equally distributed across the populace.

Yet we know this isn’t the case. We know Republicans are much less accepting of climate science, and the idea that global warming is a problem, than Democrats and Independents.

We also know that those with “egalitarian” and “communitarian” value dispositions are much more concerned (and accepting of the science) than those with “individualist” or “hierarchical” value systems. For more on this, listen to my podcast with Dan Kahan.

So: I’m afraid I’m sticking with the view that partisanship and values, rather than anything hardwired about how we understand climate and weather, is the driver here. (At least in the U.S. context. I would guess that if you had a populace that wasn’t politically polarized, the factor Donner is highlighting might then come to the fore.)

P.S.: If you want to see some unpersuadables, check out this thread.

“That’s brilliant. I’d pay good money for that.”

I’ve been saying this a lot recently. My RSS reader, Twitter stream and other sources of incoming goodies have been chock-full of stand-out pieces – posts that are long, thorough, beautifully written, and most of all, unpaid. Have a look at Greg Downey’s opus on the biology of holding your breath, or Delene Beeland’s piece on Ethiopia’s church forests, or Brian Switek’s post on human origins, or Bora Zivkovic’s tour de force on clock genes, or Steve Silberman’s… well pretty much everything by Steve Silberman.

I read these pieces in amazement that their writers should stick them up for free, when so many others pen far lesser works for a salary. Clearly, the writers are happy to provide free content and they get various advantages out of it. But I absolutely believe that good writers should be paid for good work. I read these pieces and think, “That took a lot of effort. It’s a shame they didn’t get paid for that. I’d pay good money for that.”

And then, last week, I thought, “Hey, why don’t I pay good money for that?”

So I’m going to. As of this month, I am putting my money where my mouth is and trying to set an example. The basic idea: every month, I’m going to choose ten pieces that I really enjoyed and donate £3 to the author as a token of my appreciation.

To clarify the rules further:

• This excludes pieces written for paying mainstream institutions. This is for rewarding people who give content freely. I include bloggers who belong to paying networks like Discover, Scienceblogs and Wired, on the grounds that their rewards are fairly small and are typically based on traffic not, say, word count. So a great, long post may get no views (and earn no money) because it doesn’t have Lady Gaga in the URL.
• There are no formal criteria about things like topic, length, style and so on. I naturally gravitate towards long-form journalistic pieces aimed at general audiences, but posts can make the list for all sorts of reasons not limited to making an important point, making me laugh, or being beautiful. Basically, whatever I enjoy with all the subjectivity that involves.
• The number of pieces and the donation per piece may change as we go along – maybe more pieces, and less money for each – but they seem like reasonable figures for now and not vastly different from what, say, the Times charges for its paywall.

Of course, at £3, the reward to the author is pretty trivial but this is more of an acknowledgement that I as a reader enjoyed the work and felt it was worth my money. People might not want it or feel weird about it. That’s fine and probably expected, (although I would hope that no one would actually take offence at the idea) and I’ll just redistribute among the other candidates. But I do feel that these personalised micropayments are a bit unexplored and I want to explore them.

Then, there are the not inconsiderable logistical problems. How do I actually get the money to people? For the moment, I’m going to do it primitively-as-you-like. I will contact people on the list myself about their Paypal accounts, if they have them. Londoners can claim a pint off me, if they prefer (yes, that’s what booze costs in London).

Ultimately, I’d love to have some way for readers to make similar donations if they so chose to – otherwise, this might just turn into a small group of people swapping money. Maybe a Paypal button on the side, where all the proceeds in a given month are split between the chosen writers for that month? Or a button for each writer? Or maybe one where donations are split between me and the others? I’m open to suggestions about how this could work and whether readers would be happy to contribute.

In an ideal world, every blogger would have a Paypal button or similar on their site that I could click on. Some people find that uncomfortable; some networked bloggers can’t actually install one (for technical or policy reasons). Alternatively, everyone could use something like Flattr – it’s a great model, but it runs into the same problems. There could be a third-party site where people could register their Paypal accounts? Again, I’m keen to hear any suggestions.

I know this might all sound a bit strange to a lot of people and I cannot stress enough that this is a giving initiative, not a collecting one. I’m not asking everyone to start demanding money for their work. I’m saying that good writers are finding it increasingly difficult to make a living because companies are increasingly unwilling to pay good money for good writing. And that would be to everyone’s detriment. To an extent, I think it falls to the consumer to support good writing financially and, as a consumer, I am willing to do my part.

And without further ado, my picks for February. I will be in touch with these fine people soon:

• 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

What could be better than two types of sexes? For one organism, the answer isn’t three, but seven! And to top it off, these seven sexes aren’t evenly distributed in a population, although researchers have now developed a mathematical model that can accurately estimate the probabilities in this crap-shoot game of sexual determination.

Meet Tetrahymena thermophila, which in addition to its seven different sexes—conveniently named I, II, III, IV, V, VI, and VII—has such a complex sex life that it requires an extra nucleus. This fuzzy, single-celled critter has a larger macronucleus that takes care of most cellular functions and a smaller micronucleus dedicated to genetic conjugation.

The other odd thing about this one-celled wonder is that the population of the seven sexes are skewed, leading Unversity of Houston researcher Rebecca Zufall and her colleagues to ask: What gives?

To answer that question, they created mathematical models of T. thermophila populations, and discovered that different versions of the same gene, or alleles, gave advantages to different sexes. Unlike humans, in which an individual’s sex is fully determined by its genes, the genotypes of these creatures provide only probabilities of developing ...

Y’know, I’ve posted a lot of really pretty and cool pictures of spiral galaxies lately, and I’ve given descriptions of how they have black holes in their cores, and how the spiral arms form, and where stars are being born, and and and.

So you know what?

Boom! There you go. [Click to galactinate it.] No fancy explanations, no expounding on the ethereal beauty of dust lanes in an infrared picture from Spitzer, no lectures on anything. Just a really, really pretty picture.

I mean, I could mention how this galaxy, M63, is nearby at only 37 million light years, and how I’ve seen it myself through my telescope. But no, I won’t do that. Nothing about the prevalent short, stubby arms — called spurs — or ring of dust circling the core. And certainly nothing on how the starlight has been subtracted from the image so all you see is warm dust.

Nope. Just the picture.

Pretty, isn’t it?

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Related posts:

- Gallery: Spitzer’s greatest hits
- The Milky Way’s (almost) identical twin
- A galaxy that’s all hat and no head

Since I posted about facial composites last week, I need to mention this, The most typical face on the planet:

The researchers conclude that a male, 28-year-old Han Chinese man is the most typical person on the planet. There are 9 million of them.

The image above is a composite of nearly 200,000 photos of men who fit that description.

Click through to see what the face looks like.

I’m in New Orleans this week, doing some writing and also attending…Mardi Gras. I just saw my first parade, Muses, last night.

Which inspired the joking title of this blog post. For fun, I Googled the phrase “the science of mardi gras” to see what turned up. All I got was a bizarre reference to a pretty unscientific comment by Anderson Cooper:

It’s a very public event, of course, but there’s something intensely personal about the throwing of the beads. You make eye contact with someone, toss them a necklace. They say thank you, and you roll on. The only beads people want are the ones they catch themselves. I find that very telling. The beads that fall on the ground are rarely picked up. They lack the personal connection, the bond has been broken.

That’s not my experience of Mardi Gras. My experience is that the good beads are fought for, and kids scavenge on the ground for whatever isn’t caught. If a bead is still lying on the ground it’s because it’s broken.

What’s more, as a look at the “science of mardi gras” this is pretty lame. A real science of Mardi Gras might examine, say, the strange and artificial economy that gets created for a short span of time. In this economy, completely worthless beads suddenly come to have a temporary but real value–especially if they’re plastic pearls–even as more “scarce” throws, like coconuts, spears, etc, are valued still higher. (Of course, the ones really making money are the people selling beads by the “gross”–a bag of 144 individual ones–for more than $ 20, just so they can be thrown off of floats.)

There would also be a lot of studies of alcohol’s effects on group behavior. So–Mardi Gras’s “science” very much awaits.

Dienekes points to two interesting phenomena which when juxtaposed together show how the pace of technological change can outrun ideological arguments and hand wringing. Those of you who have been reading me since the early 2000s know where I stand on issues such as the “Kennewick Man” controversy. I think there’s an objective reality which should be studied. The latter is a normative judgement. There’s no rule embedded in the universe that truth needs to be set free, it’s a preference. So when it comes to Creationism of organized institutional religions, or shamanic ethnic Creationism, I don’t put much weight in its value or importance. But the shadow of Kennewick Man still looms over contemporary controversies as we crest the peak swell of human genomics in terms of the rate of increase of insight. Apparently members of the America Indian Program at Cornell are objecting to The Genographic Project. The project is headed by Spencer Wells, who has an appointment at Cornell now. An English professor associated with the American Indian Program apparently sent the student newspaper an almost parody-like email of impenetrable obfuscating academic-speak:

In a statement issued by AIP, the program’s director, Prof. Eric Cheyfitz, ...

OK, a little off topic for this weblog…not science, not nerdy. But The New York Times has an article up, James Franco Straddles Two Roles at Yale, which made me think of this SNL sketch:

Do you think The New York Times reporter was playing an inside joke? Or is James Franco actually a real life parody of himself? (I don’t even know what I mean I guess)