News

By far my favourite story of the week: drunken 19^th-century cobra-wrangling. “Girling, emboldened by gin, had walked past the railing in the reptile house and proceeded to lift out a Morocco Snake from its glass-fronted cage. Despite the protests of his friend, he draped this snake around the unfortunate Stewart, crying “I am inspired!”… Stewart went about his work only to hear his friend cry “Now for the cobra”–a statement which must have chilled him into instant sobriety.”

“Deep in your brain there are probably several thousand neurons that will respond only to the sight of Lady Gaga.” Carl Zimmer teaches you how to harness your Marilyn Monroe neurons, while the BBC covers the same story with some crap about dream-recording.

“When I opened the new certificate, I found that the name of my mother was in fact my sister’s.” How Nobel Prize-winner Paul Nurse got the greatest genetic insight of his life, by Robin McKie.

An excellent and personal overview of the successful Science is Vital campaign by Della, one of its ringleaders.

A robot with pudgy, beanbag-like hands can grip a variety of objects (and would still have made a better bench scientist than me).

Mark Henderson covers the 1,000 Genomes Project, the study that shows how nobody’s perfect.

Where did all these monkeys come from? – Fossil teeth may hint at an Asian origin for anthropoid primates, says Brian Switek.

A giant virus has been found in a Cafeteria. Meanwhile, Ars Technica’s coverage attracts a grammar idiot, and an absolutely legendary takedownA great interview with an awesome headline. Katherine Harmon talks to the folks who sequenced Ozzy Osbourne’s genome.

A great analysis at Neuroanthropology about the role of cooking in human evolution.

A fifth of animals with backbones are endangered. England’s footballers are in the clear then.

“Young New Caledonian crows learn to use tools by going to “tool-school“, where they can observe their parents at work.”

More after the jump…

“It’s just an animal.” An award-winning (and utterly upsetting) photo essay on the international trade in wildlife products

“We care about people we know, even if they vote for the other party.” Jonah Lehrer on social closeness.

How monarch butterfly mums medicate their young, from A Scientific Nature

Why published papers in the behavioural sciences are quite likely to be wrong.

Mystery solved: Horrific corkscrew killings of British seals blamed on ducted propellers (paywall, Times, subscription needed, yadda yadda).

Imagopressionism? Southeastern Louisiana University researcher uses paintings made by maggots to turn students on to forensic entomology

Michael Marshall pays tribute to ancient fertiliser for promoting the evolution of complex life.

SciCurious explains how fat rat fathers beget pre-diabetic daughters

Russian bears eating human corpses out of graveyards. Are they drunk on second-hand vodka?

“The multiply mutated mouse and the black-faced cat are marvellous examples of how what seems simple is not, of how nature and nurture work together, and of how little geneticists understand about their own science.” Steve Jones on genetics, ADHD and the media

“We march to a different drummer.” A great piece on Aspergirls – women on the autistic spectrum – by Steve Silberman.

Researchers resurrect (part of) an ancient chimp virus.

The new snub-nosed monkey that sneezes when it rains via @eol

The terrifying chupacabras monster is… a mite-bitten coyote with mange.

Want to find out why lizards do push-ups? Build a robot lizard. Jason Goldman explains.

“Where are the women in the ‘population control’ debate?” Naomi MC asks and answers in the Guardian.

“Participants with lower levels of agreeableness responded more favorably to an angry leader.” Heh.

An excellent post on Williams Syndrome, and the linguistic side of a fascinating developmental disorder

In space, no one can hear you cover the world in soot. How space tourism could affect our climate, in New Scientist.

Narwhals: like research assistants but more awesome.

Heh/wow

Explaining the Internet to a 19th Century British Street Urchin

“Detailed retrospective history also confirmed accidental inhalation of the condom during fellatio.”

The physics of the wet dog shake, with some great hi-speed video

I love that the NYT publishes stuff like this – just the pure unalloyed joy of Sean Carroll being awed by king cobras, king snakes and other reigning reptiles.

Absolutely stunning photos of insects trapped in amber

A gallery of incredible new Amazon species including bald parrots, blue-fanged tarantulas and turnip-tailed geckos.

Beautiful Brainbow art.

Boba Fett’s invoice

When the kids of the future grow up, they will hunt down and brutalise the inventors of this little hell-gadget

A Maine diver fends off a shark with a camera

Blogging/internet/journalism

Hearty congratulations to Nick Lane for winning this year’s final Royal Society book prize for his amazing book Life Ascending. You should buy it, if you haven’t already. Meanwhile, Philip Ball decries the shameful death of the prize.

The Open Notebook: an awesome new site looking at the stories behind the stories. Journalists dissect their craft, starting with David Dobbs.

The Guardian bucks the trend by releasing blogging guidelines for journalists that are spectacularly spot on. Other newspapers should take note.

A stunning, brave and personal post by Sophia Collins about her abortion.

Deborah Blum writes about the trouble with scientists, Dr Isis replies on the trouble with journalists, and everyone gets drunk in the end.

“If you ever wanted to see how the media simultaneously loves and destroys stories on sex and science, this week we had a classic example of truly bad sex coverage,” says Petra Boynton.

The ever-provocative Alom Shaha urges skeptics to stop preaching to the converted

““Dude, you are speaking Romulan,” one of my colleagues blurted out… So before teaching scientists how to speak to nonscientists, perhaps scientists should first learn how to speak to other scientists.” An awesome post at the Plainspoken Scientist.

Can journalism students blog their way into a job? This lot can.

Now Hear This: a blog about sound. Which sounds cool.

Robert Niles eloquently explains why he’s no longer a newspaper subscriber.

Alice Bell asks, “Who’s the geek?” Icons of nerdery answer her.

Sophia Collins argues for young people’s involvement in science funding decisions.

The simplicity of this belies its awesomeness.

Ah yes, they use the Lirpaw. But that’s expected in the koon-ut-kah-li-feeline.

Related posts:

- Caturday night’s all right for fighting
- Big Caturday
- Eat. Pray. Loathe.
- I toad you it’s Caturday

Oren Harman, author of The Price of Altruism is on BHTV. Recommended.

SKY 3d's planet balloons over London. Click for larger. Credit: SKY 3d

Sky 3D is a new 3D channel in Europe.  To kick things off they brought to life some of the scenes from 3D version of:  The Universe: 7 Wonders of the Solar System above the London skyline and above Greenwich’s Royal Observatory.  What a sight!

Sky 3D has a short video of the set up of the balloons on their website you should check out.

You know what?  That’s doing things right and I’m glad to see science means something too!

I’ve had several people ask me to move the time I post riddles on Saturday.  As I’ve said, I only started posting them at noon CDT to make it easy for me to remember (I lead a complicated life), and it’s been that way now for 11 months.  I would be happy to post the riddle at whatever time is best for you; after all, I make the riddles for you, you ought to be able to enjoy them and participate.

In the comments, please let me know what’s best for you.  I would probably be in a better humor if you didn’t have me up at 3am posting a riddle, and I am on Central Daylight Time.  If you don’t care what time the riddle posts, let me know that, too.

The Orionids, the most prolific meteor shower associated with Halley’s Comet, are about at their peak tonight.  If you can’t go out tonight, don’t worry.  The shower will still be impressive tomorrow night.  Well, should be impressive.  You know how it goes.

This gorgeous green and red Orionid is from Mila Zinkova, an awesome astrophotographer. All rights reserved.

Anyway, the Orionids are the second of two showers associated with Halley’s Comet, the first being the Eta Aquarids.  The Orionids radiant (the point they appear to come from) is in the constellation of Orion.  The bad news is we are waxing gibbous on the moon, and that puppy will be full tonight, and with Jupiter shining beside it, it’s hard to take your eyes from it.  Aldebaran should grab your attention, too, as it’s been super-luminous lately, and is commanding quite a bit of attention.  At least Aldebaran is going to make it easy for you to find the radiant.

When you see Aldebaran, you know you’re close to Orion.  Just scan down a line to the SouthEast a bit.  You should see Betelgeuse, and right off the point of Betelgeuse (to the left) is the radiant.

Halley’s Comet has been around for some 2200 years, so there should be a lot of “stuff” out there.  The Orionids have been averaging about 60 meteors per hour for the last three years.

A funny story about Aldebaran.  It really is something where I live, and Tom sent me out early one morning to look for the comet.  I came screaming back in and quickly emailed, “That’s not MARS is it??  That can’t be MARS!!”  He patiently explained to me that it was probably Aldebaran, but it took some convincing.  Okay, shut up. It was early.  I hadn’t had coffee yet.

You do know NASA is building a new Mars rover named Curiosity.  What you may not know is you can now keep tabs on the progress by means of a new webcam.  The newly installed webcam streams video so you can watch the techs at work live.

Not sure how the techs feel about being watched but hey I like watching them so here’s the link.  The link takes you off site but it’s better that way, bandwidth and all that stuff.

The video immediately brought back memories of working in a clean room, if you’ve never done that all I can do is tell you it’s different.  Clean isn’t the word, part of what I did was industrial x-ray and a particle of just of just five-thousands of an inch in the wrong spot would ruin 6 hours of work – bang just like you never did it.

And that spider at the end of the post a couple back has gotten me about three times now.

103P/Hartley 2 as seen by the EPOXI spacecraft 34 days before encounter. Credit: NASA/JPL/UMD

Comet Hartley, no wait, comet 103P/Hartley 2 to more precise is out there.  Yes it’s important, I had a devil of a time finding this comet with binoculars.  It seemed I was always looking in just the wrong spot and I kept thinking “I should be able to see this”.  It turns out there is ANOTHER comet Hartley out there at least according to my Planetarium program.  Confusion ensued.

Once I figured out what was going on I went right out and found the comet both in the morning and the evening. If you have a pair of binoculars you stand a chance of seeing it – if you are not too far south of the equator and you have clear skies of course.

You have to keep a couple of things in mind.  The moon is getting brighter and will be washing out the sky, this is not going to help.  The comet isn’t exactly bright and it doesn’t look like what you might think of as a “classic comet shape”.  Hartley is almost a ghostly cloud for the lack of a better description, in fact you might not recognize it as a comet at all.  Come a couple more weeks and the EPOXI encounters the comet you will have seen the comet for yourself.  Besides comets are cool.

So how do you find it?  First the early morning is going to be your best chance considering the moon.  Sorry but that’s the way it happens to work this time around.  I would try sooner rather than later if I was you because the moon becomes more of a factor every day.

You will need to go outside and away from bright lights for a short time to acclimate your vision.  I found the comet after only a few minutes, but I have pretty dark skies.  Avoid looking at the moon because its brightness will interfere with the acclimation process.

Ready?  Now find Polaris, it’s the last star in the handle of the Little Dipper.  Got it?  Good.

Turn around and face the other way and locate Betelgeuse.  It is located in the constellation Orion and will be the reddish looking star.  You will see two reddish stars the western most one is Aldebaran (pronounced:  al – deb- ah -ron) and it is quite striking; it’s not the one you want specifically but it can help later too, as will be finding Capella which is a very bright star not quite half way on a line from Aldebaran to Polaris.

Here’s an annotated chart to help show what I am trying to explain.  Chart time 4:30 AM local on October 23 (should be valid for you too at your local time).

Ok draw a line from Polaris to Betelgeuse, the comet will be not quite halfway to Polaris from Betelgeuse along this line, either on the line or very close to it.  To help narrow it down a bit more, Look along the Polaris/Betelgeuse line (stay on that line) about half way between the corresponding to Aldebaran and Capella.

Here’s a chart for tomorrow morning (not annotated), as I was saying the moon will be less of a factor if you can look sooner rather than wait a few days.  Notice the position of the comet is slightly different as time passes.

Remember this isn’t going to look like one of the great comets, in fact you might go Huh, that’s it? Or Tom got me up for this??  HAHAHA Yep, I did.  But you can at least say you saw it.

Today we have something a bit different.  One of your fellow readers – William – went on a trip to Zimbabwe and I gave him a couple of star charts.  He provided the following story about the trip.  It is VERY interesting and brings up something I never would have dreamed.   So a great big THANK YOU to William for this excellent write up!!

My First Glimpse of the Southern Sky

Viewing the night sky wasn’t my primary reason for going to Zimbabwe.  But this was my first trip to Africa and I wanted to see, and experience as much as I could. My trip would not be complete without several nights of star gazing. Since this was my first time south of the equator I knew there would be stars and constellations visible that I couldn’t see from my home in North America. So I did a little research, and made my “wish list”. I even emailed Tom for his help with star charts and his suggestions of what I just couldn’t leave Africa without seeing.

We flew into Harare (S17 49’ 57” by E31 4’ 9”) on September 19 and as we walked through the parking lot to our car I was already checking out the night sky. The moon was high over head. It looked very bright and the surface features were really easy to make out. There were two planets, one on each side of the moon, that were visible as well; but I could only make out a few stars. Well, I thought, this is Harare, the capital and one of the three largest cities in Zimbabwe. It’s just light pollution ruining my view. I’m sure I’ll be totally blown away by the night sky once we get to Mashoko.

Mashoko (S20 25’ 37” by E30 49’ 39”) was four hundred fifty-four kilometers to the south and it took us six hours to travel there. The last fifty-four kilometers were over unimproved dirt roads in such poor shape that it was impossible to travel over 25 KM/h. We arrived at sunset and after we unloaded the cars and unpacked the suitcases I took a quick peek at the sky. The moon was up and I could see Jupiter, and one or two stars; but that was it. The next night I made sure to get outside before the moonrise. I could see a few more stars than the night before, but only those directly overhead. Then when the moon came up it was like someone flipped a switch and all the stars blinked out of view.

Each night was the same story. I could see a few stars directly overhead before the moonrise but then nothing once the moon was up. I had come to Zimbabwe with a group from my church to volunteer at the Mashoko Christian Hospital. The hospital is situated inside a compound and there are security lights around so I was convinced that even in rural Mashoko light pollution was stealing the show. So I asked my friend Munya (pronounced Moon-ya) where I could go where it was dark enough to really see the stars. “You can’t see any stars, it hasn’t rained”. That statement made no sense to me at all. To me rain means clouds and clouds mean no visibility, no stars, and no way to see the night sky. Munya went on to explain that we were at the end of the dry season. And because it hadn’t rained in over two months the air was filled with dust and smoke from grass fires that had sprung up all over the countryside. This dust and smoke reflected light and made seeing any stars next to impossible. He said that until the rains came and “washed” the dust and smoke out of the atmosphere there was nowhere to go and nothing to see in the night sky. I was devastated!  I knew that it was the end of their winter and that where as we were going into fall they were starting into spring but I never would’ve thought it would affect my star gazing.

I resigned myself to the fact that I wasn’t going to be able to see any of the “new” stars and constellations in the southern hemisphere. We finished our week working at the hospital and I’d go out each night and look up into the heavens and only see what few stars were directly overhead hoping and wishing for some rain before we had to head back to the states.

We had planned to spend the last two and a half days of our trip doing some sightseeing and we traveled west and north from Mashoko to Victoria Falls ( S18 25’ 1.4” by E26 39’49”) and we spent one day and two nights at a Safari Camp. So here I am the day before I have to head back home and I still haven’t seen what I wanted to see. I did notice that the moon was rising later in the evening giving me more time to look at what star were visible. So I pulled our host / guide aside at the Safari Camp and I told him my story. I explained that I didn’t want to be late night snack for a hungry lioness but I did want to see stars. Was there anywhere I could go where it was dark enough to see what I wanted to see? So later that day the owner told me that he was going to have one of the guides take me out away from all the artificial light and give me some time to see what I could see. My guide’s name was Gary and after dinner he and I jumped into one of the pickup trucks and we headed out into the bush. Gary took me to a clearing where just a few hours before I had seen a pride of 6 lions resting in the high grass. Gary steers the truck to the center of this clearing and then pulls a 360 shining the headlights into the bush to see if there were any “critters” lying in wait. He then turns off the headlights shuts off the engine and says “hop out!”

So we hopped out. Here I am in Africa, with someone I’ve only just met, standing in a clearing, in the dark, waiting for my eyes to adjust and the only thing going through my head is my mother saying “now Bill when you go to Africa, remember to stay with the group!” After about twenty minutes the sky started to light up. I could see the Milky Way. I hadn’t seen the Milky Way that bright since I was a teenager. Then I made out the Southern Cross, and I saw some stars and constellations that I couldn’t identify from memory. I had some trouble keeping my compass directions straight, I’m used to looking south to see the elliptical and now it was more overhead and a little bit north. All the stars that I could see seemed very close like I could almost reach out and touch them. But even here I couldn’t see anything down close to the horizon. The dust and smoke in the atmosphere still blocked our view.

After an hour or so Gary said he knew of another place we could go that might afford an even better view. So we jumped into the truck and headed across the field. We hadn’t traveled more than 300-400 meters when a herd of Impalas ran in front of the truck frightened out of their resting place. Obviously something was out hunting. Unfortunately the second location wasn’t any better than the first. Objects directly over head were bright and brilliant but we couldn’t see anything else.

There were several things on my wish list that I didn’t get to see, but what I did see was beautiful. What did I learn from my experience? I learned that if I’m ever going to travel eight thousand miles and hope to gaze at the night sky I’ve really got to do my homework. I’m not just going to research to see what stars and constellations should be visible I’m going to take time to learn about the climate, season, and atmospheric conditions for the time of year that I’m visiting. I’m going to know about anything that could potentially hinder my viewing pleasure. Even more importantly I was reminded how beautiful the stars can be, and that even if I didn’t see everything that I had hoped to see it was still fun and well worth the effort.

William

When you talk about the constellations, there is one that stands out from the crowd; Orion, the Hunter.  Since the constellation is located on the Celestial Equator, it is visible throughout the world.  It also lends its name to the Orionid meteor shower, to which you should be paying attention, since the shower reaches its peak around October 21st.

An unusual view of Orion, for STS59/NASA

The Constellation Orion formed about 1.5 mya, and will be recognizable for at least another million years.  Orion has been a feature in the folklore of every human civilization, even the Australian aborigines.

One of the most recognizable features of the constellation is Orion’s Belt, an asterism consisting of three bright stars in a line:  Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka.  Mintaka is actually an eclipsing binary variable star system, not a single star.

Orion - Besser Museum Planetarium

From Orion’s Belt, almost everybody can find the gorgeous Betelgeuse, a massive red super-giant.  Betelgeuse is expected to supernova sometime in the next thousand years, and lately has been doing some weird “stuff”, which many astronomers believe is a preamble to supernova.  As you know, I’m torn about the prospect of this beautiful giant going supernova.

After Betelgeuse, the next most recognized star in the constellation is Rigel.  A rare blue supergiant, Rigel is the sixth brightest star in the night sky.  Rigel is known to be fusing heavy elements in its core, which as you know signals the approaching end of a star’s life.  This bright beauty is responsible for illuminating several celestial objects, like the Witch Head Nebula.

Orion - image by Torsten Bronger, some rights reserved

Suspended from Orion’s Belt is his sword.  On the sword you find the Orion Nebula, which can be seen nicely with binoculars on a clear night.  This little hotbed of star formation is a beautiful sight, no matter how you view it.

Orion can be used to find other objects in the sky.  For example, if you follow the line of Orion’s Belt to the Southeast, you’ll run into Sirius.  Go Northwest along the line and you find Aldebaran.

Hubble and Spitzer team up for a look at the Orion Nebula - NASA/ESA

Truly one of the most known and loved of constellations; a hunter, a warrior, a shepherd, or just a familiar friend in the infinite.  Every time I look up and search the night sky, I look for Orion.  I’ve never lost the satisfaction of finding it.

An interesting tour of the Orion Nebula from Science Online.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ni-i-i-i-i-i-ice.

Just two weeks after the first solo flight of Virgin Galactic’s space tourist ship, the company’s bigwigs gathered again to celebrate the completion of the two-mile, 200-foot wide runway of the world’s first commercial spaceport.

Spaceport America is the world’s first facility designed specifically to launch commercial spacecraft. The celebration of its nearly-two-mile-long runway comes less than two weeks after another major step for Virgin Galactic: the first solo glide flight of its space tourism rocket ship. [ABC News]

Its name may make it sound like an amusement park, but Spaceport America is well on its way to being a real portal to space for the wealthy private citizen. Its construction is being funded by New Mexico taxpayer dollars and commercial space companies; it has already been designated the home of Virgin Galactic’s space tourism operations. But the spaceport, located 45 miles outside of Las Cruces, New Mexico, is able to support a variety of spacecraft, and other commercial space companies are beginning to get involved. The spaceport is scheduled to be fully operational in 2011.

Virgin Galactic says it has already signed over 380 customers (at $200,000 a head) to take a two and a half hour flight to the edge of space (that includes a whole five minutes of weightlessness); some of the customers were present for the runway dedication today. Richard Branson, the company’s founder, said that it will still be at least a year before their first tourist flight will take off. When that day finally arrives, the Virgin Galactic “mothership” will take off from Spaceport America’s runway and soar to an altitude of 48,000 feet before releasing the spaceship VSS Enterprise, which will take passengers the rest of the way up.

“The mothership has been finished and flying for a while now,” he said. “We’ll do many, many, many test flights over the next 12 months to maybe 18 months before we actually send people up into space. But we’re entering the last stages of the test program and we can see the light at the end of the tunnel now,” he said. [AFP]

Related content:
80beats: Virgin Galactic’s Spaceship-for-Tourists Takes Its First Solo Flight
80beats: Virgin Galactic Unveils Its New Space Tourism Rocket
Science Not Fiction: Ralph: The Official Mascot of Space Tourism
DISCOVER: #44: Spaceport Breaks Ground in New Mexico
Discoblog: Space Tourists Will Get Their Own Special Space Beer
Bad Astronomy: How safe is space tourism?

Image: Spaceport America

It’s case study flashback week on NCBI ROFL! All this week we’ll be featuring some of our favorite medical case studies from the archives. Enjoy!

“A 27-year-old lady presented with persistent cough, sputum and fever for the preceding six months. In spite of trials with antibiotics and anti-tuberculosis treatment for the preceeding four months, her symptoms did not improve. A subsequent chest radiograph showed non-homogeneous collapse-consolidation of right upper lobe. Videobronchoscopy revealed an inverted bag like structure in right upper lobe bronchus and rigid bronchoscopic removal with biopsy forceps confirmed the presence of a condom. Detailed retrospective history also confirmed accidental inhalation of the condom during fellatio.”

!

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Photo: flickr/letmehearyousaydeskomdeskom

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Accidental anal intercourse: does it really happen?
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Double feature: Personalities of punks and perils of their pointy parkas.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Oh, the irony!

WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

Did y’all catch last night’s episode of The Big Bang Theory on CBS? In one scene, Sheldon is walking down the steps of their apartment building and reciting a little ditty about the nearest stars to the Earth. How did he — heck, how do we — know what stars those are?

Happily, BBT science advisor David Saltzberg has a blog describing each episode, and he talks about this very thing! And what’s this? Why yes, he mentions that your host here on Bad Astronomy helped him with the pronunciations of the star names! David sent me an email a while back asking me if I could lend a hand (well, a vocal cord) to pronouncing some of the names which weren’t all that obvious. I love the show, and was glad to help.

And how weird is it to hear Sheldon saying stuff I was emailing about? Pretty weird. But also totally awesome, too.

Now if I could just get my URL to appear on their white board…

About two-fifths of marathon runners “hit the wall” on the big day. That means they completely deplete their body’s stash of readily available energy, which makes them feel wiped out and severely limits their running pace; it sometimes forces people out of the run completely.

Marathoner and biomedical engineer Benjamin Rapoport has been physically and mentally struggling with this phenomenon for years, and had the bright idea to turn it into a research project. He published a mathematical theory in the journal PLoS Computational Biology describing how and why runners hit the wall–and how they can avoid it.

By taking into account the energy it takes to run a marathon, the body’s energy storage capacity and the runner’s power, the researchers were able to accurately calculate how many energy-rich carbohydrates a runner needed to eat before race day and how fast to run to complete all 26.2 miles (42 kilometers). [LiveScience]

Rapoport’s studies of marathoners were prompted by his desire to run in the Boston Marathon in 2005, and his teacher’s desire for him to be in class. In return for missing class, Rapoport was tasked with giving a class lecture on the physiology of the marathoner. That same year, Rapoport himself hit the wall while running the New York Marathon.

“It feels a bit like you might feel if you’re on a crash diet,” Rapoport said. “Except that when you diet, it happens over the course of a few days, whereas a runner experiences it in the course of a few minutes.” [LiveScience]

The main limitation of a marathon runner’s ability is his or her aerobic capacity–how much oxygen the muscles can take up and keep working. The other important factors are how much energy is takes the person to run, and how much energy they have stored in an easy-to-access form, glycogen. By using estimations of these numbers, Rapoport was able to create a mathematical model of how long and fast any runner could run and how much they would need to fuel up in order to finish the race.

“This is a unique area that hadn’t been addressed in the medical literature in any substantial way,” says Mark Cucuzzella, a physician and running coach based in Harpers Ferry, W.Va. “He’s lending some hard numbers to what experienced runners and coaches have been doing.” [Science News]

By estimating their aerobic ability and other factors in the model, runners can estimate what their pace should be to complete a marathon in the best time.

Rapoport’s model also shows that a slightly faster pace can be maintained by consuming a midrace snack. This carb-eating strategy can help, but it can’t win races, since the body can store only so much fuel, says Cucuzzella, chief medical consultant for the Air Force Marathon and a marathoner himself. “It’s not about how much sugar or spaghetti you eat the night before a race,” he says. “There’s a critical pace.” [Science News]

And while following this formula won’t enable everyone to run a marathon without training, Rapoport has put an easy-to-use version of his unwieldy formula online to help trained runners calculate their ideal pace.

Related Content:
80beats: No Shoes, No Problem? Barefoot Runners Put Far Less Stress on Their Feet
80beats: Debate Over South African Runner Spotlights Confusing Nature of Gender
80beats: Scientist Smackdown: Are a Sprinter’s Prostethic Legs an Unfair Advantage?
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Drug improves endurance without need for exercise
DISCOVER: Born To Run

Image: Flickr/Pablo 2008-09

Final reminder: tomorrow is "w00tstock Presents" at the Boulder Theater here in my very own hometown! If you’re local, you should come, because I’ll be giving away a pony^*.

This event is so important to the cultural community here that The Daily Camera has an article about it. They even got Patrick Stewart to pose for the picture. I think.

Anyway, it’ll be awesome fun, so come and geek as hard as you can.

^† No it isn’t.

Recently I asked why science magazines seem to be marketed to men. On newsstands, they frequently appear alongside GQ, Esquire, Playboy, and other male-oriented content. Yes, men purchase science magazines more frequently than women, but I also think this is–at least in part–a chicken and egg problem: What’s traditionally marketed to male audiences gets purchased by them. A solution might be to change the target a bit, gear some more content to women, attract a wider audience, and–in doing so–maybe even encourage greater numbers of women to pursue the STEM areas over time. (Culture matters!)

Needless to say, I am disappointed to see Wired’s latest cover choice. Here’s the view from my iPhone at the Atlanta airport:

1. First, a post from the past: The Round-Eyed Buddha.

2. Weird search query of the week: “straight jacket sex.”

3. Comment of the week, in response to Glenn Beck, Evolution, Global Warming & Tea Parties:

People who don’t believe in evolution don’t comprehend evolution. Evolution is a struggle to survive as a species. How else can you explain Neanderthal man and the dead end they came to? They existed, despite the Bible’s not bothering to mention them. The traits that ensured modern man’s survival were passed on genetically. That’s what evolution is; the passing on of traits that are more suited for the survival of the species.

This is all self evident. It doesn’t threaten religious orthodoxy except in the most simple-minded way. You have to wonder if the people who dismiss evolution because it somehow conflicts with their religious beliefs have ever taken the trouble to actually read Darwin’s “Origin Of The Species”? I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess no.

Evolution is not only a fact, it’s a necessity. It’s all about a species being able to adapt to it’s environment in order to survive. Many species in the history of this planet have gone extinct. How do you account for it? Was it God’s will, or something more plausible? How about this? They ceased to exist as a species because of their failure to adapt to their environment. In other words, their failure to evolve.

Homo-sapiens didn’t become the dominant species on this planet because we had so much spirituality and trust in the Lord. How did we do it? Here’s a clue, our eyes are located in the front of our heads like any natural predator, we stand upright and have opposable thumbs. The homo-sapiens with eyes in the front, who grasped weapons and stood on their hind legs to hunt, survived and passed these traits along. The traits most suitable for survival were passed along. Get it? It’s called natural selection.

As to how evolution gacked up a human hairball like GLenn Beck is another matter entirely. I think he must be some kind of double agent planted by the left in order to make conservatives look like a bunch of clueless, bloviating demagogues. Mission accomplished.

Often people who believe in evolution don’t comprehend evolution

4) From last week: “Genomic sequencing will be able to predict offspring I.Q. as well as looking at parental values + regression in….”. Here were the outcomes:

Never – 26%
More than 30 years – 14%
16-30 year – 34%
11-15 years – 10%
5-10 years - 14%
Less than 5 years – 2%

View Survey

5) And finally, your weekly fluff fix:

It’s kind of amazing that with nearly 500 planets discovered orbiting other stars, we’re still finding ones that are really weird. Massive planets orbiting so close to their stars they are practically plowing through the stellar atmosphere; hot spots on the planet not aligned with their stars; planets orbiting so far out it’s a struggle to understand how they got there.

And now we can add the planets NN Serpentis c and d to that list.

Lying about 1500 light years from Earth, NN Ser is a binary star — most stars in the sky are part of multiple systems, so that in itself isn’t all that odd. But NN Ser is weird: it’s a very dinky red dwarf orbiting very close to a white dwarf. And by very close, I mean really close: they’re separated by only 600,000 km (360,000 miles), which isn’t much farther apart than the Earth and the Moon!

The planets

I’ll get back to the stars in a sec. The planets found (named c and d because the two stars are a and b, according to the naming conventions) are Jupiter-scale beasts, with masses of about 6 and 2 times Jupiter’s, orbiting the binary stars at a distance of roughly 825 and 450 million km (500 million and 270 million miles).

Those numbers don’t seem too odd; lots of planets have been found with similar characteristics. But when you take a closer look at the system…

The stars

Let’s go back to the stars. They orbit each other very rapidly: a complete orbit only takes about 3 hours! So those stars are really hauling. As it happens, the orbit is seen almost edge-on from here on Earth, so we literally see the stars pass in front of each other twice per orbit. That’s pretty cool, because it means that over a short time we can watch lots of eclipses and get really good statistics on how long the eclipses last, what the time period is between them, and so on. What the astronomers found is that the period of the eclipses is very slowly changing, and the best explanation is that of the two planets tugging on the stars as they orbit.

This turns out to be an incredibly difficult thing to measure; in fact a possible planet was reported just last year for this system, but the parameters for the planet didn’t fit more recent data. These new results for two planets are based on more data and analysis, and look pretty solid to me.

The bizarre history of NN Ser

Where things get really weird is when you look at the stars, or more specifically, the white dwarf. These are dense balls of compressed material left over when a star like the Sun dies. As it ages, a star like this will turn into a red giant, swelling up to hundreds of times its current size, and blow off vast amounts of material. Over tens of thousands of years or more, it loses mass, shedding its outer layers. Eventually, all that’s left is the core of the star, a hot compact object we call a white dwarf.

So that one star in NN Ser must have once been a star like the Sun which swelled up, blew off its material, then became a white dwarf. But wait a second… when it was a red giant, it was probably a hundred million kilometers across! But the other star in the system, the red dwarf, is only a few hundred thousand kilometers away. How does that work?

Almost certainly, the red dwarf used to be millions of kilometers or more away from the primary star. When the more massive star turned into a red giant, it would have literally engulfed the dwarf. Through friction, the red dwarf would’ve spiraled in, getting closer and closer to the core of the star. Eventually, when the bigger star blew off its outer bits, what was left was that white dwarf, and the red dwarf in its current, extremely tight orbit. It sounds incredible, but we’ve seen this happen before, and may be a relatively common occurrence in the Universe.

But hang on again! What about those two planets? How did this affect them?

Well, that’s a bit of a poser. There are two scenarios. One is that they formed along with the stars long ago, and somehow survived this cataclysm. However, this strikes me as pretty unlikely. When the primary star went red giant and started blowing off matter, it was losing mass, and therefore its gravity got weaker. That means its hold on those planets would’ve gotten more tenuous, and they would have migrated outwards. This in turn means they would’ve been much closer to the star in the past. But we know the red dwarf is there, and while it’s a dinky star, it’s far more massive than a planet. It’s very hard to see how planets could be in stable orbits so close to such a massive object. Models show they’d be ejected from the system relatively quickly.

That makes it unlikely they formed with the two stars. That leaves the second scenario: they formed after the primary star turned into a red giant!

That’s pretty weird, too. But some models suggest that as the red dwarf spiraled into the core of the red giant, a massive disk of material would form around it. This disk could then be the raw material from which the two planets were formed. That seems fantastic to me as well, but look: we have two planets orbiting a very tight binary star where one is a white dwarf and the other is red dwarf. Something weird must’ve happened here! The real choice is to pick which is the least bizarre.

The view

Whatever happened, we’ve got what we’ve got: two planets orbiting this weird binary. Now imagine you’re standing on one of those planets (well, since they’re almost certainly gas giants, imagine you’re standing on the surface of one of their moons). Look up. What would you see?

From the inner of the two planets, the two stars would be a bit less than a tenth of a degree apart; about 1/5th the width of the full Moon. You’d be able to see them as separate stars. The red dwarf would barely resolve itself as a disk; it wouldn’t look like just a dot in the sky. The star is far less luminous than the Sun, but would still shine about 20 times brighter than the full Moon on Earth. In other words, if it were the only object in the sky you could read by it, and looking at it would make you squint a bit.

The white dwarf, on the other hand, is tiny: only about 30,000 km (roughly 20,000 miles) across. It would be a dot in the sky from that distance. However, it’s so hot that it shines more brightly than the Sun does, and from that inner planet would be about half as bright as the Sun appears to us from the Earth. It would be an intense pinprick in the sky, a brilliant dot that would be very painful to look at. In fact, it would drown out the red dwarf completely, shining thousands of times more brightly.

What an incredible sight that would be! If alien life developed on a moon of one of those worlds, the only way they’d know of the existence of the red star would be due to the eclipses. Every 3 hours and 7 minutes, the primary star would suddenly disappear for a few minutes as the bigger but far less massive and bright star blocked it out. At that time, and pretty much only then, would the faint red star be visible at all.

Cultures all over the Earth worshiped the Sun for obvious reasons: bringer of light and heat, we depended and still depend on it. What sort of myths would have arisen had the Sun’s light been completely cut off a half dozen times a day?

And I have to wonder what other strange things await us as we discover more planets orbiting other stars. We have a pretty good idea of how stars age and die, but there will always be systems on the edge, ones we’ll have a hard time understanding. What new things will we uncover then? And what would the sky look like from those alien worlds?

In June, the Guggenheim Museum announced a collaborative video contest with none other than YouTube. Yes, you read that right: YouTube, the video website overrun with videos of cats and each tween’s latest shopping spree.

The contest was open to anyone and everyone who has made a video in the last two years. A total of 23,000 videos were submitted and judged by a panel of artists and curators, and the competition’s 25 winners were announced last night. These 25 videos will be on display at the Guggenheim Museum in New York through the weekend, and all the shortlisted videos will stay online indefinitely. While there was some excitement about the prospects of such a venture, the New York Times isn’t impressed by the final product:

At the time of the announcement, there was much talk about originality and discovery, which sounds rather hollow now, compared with the low quality of the 25 finally selected.

Ouch! When the competition was announced, some feared that it would dumb down the video art world, while others dreamed that it would break the community open to embrace YouTube’s DIY creativity and modern folk art stylings. The critics over at the New York Times seem to think the winning videos did neither, and fell somewhere between sophisticated video art and YouTube folk art:

One way to explain the lackluster quality of the first incarnation of “YouTube Play” is that almost none of the final 25 works, which are being screened in a gallery at the museum this weekend, fit either of those categories…. They seem to occupy a third sphere of slick and pointless professionalism, where too much technique serves relatively skimpy, generic ideas.

You can take a look a the 25 finalists and the additional 100 “shortlisted” videos online. In addition to the “Birds on the Wires” video above, here are some of my other favorites from the top 25:

“Bear untitled — DO Edit” is a tragic love story done in 8-bit by Christen Bach:

This video, called “Words,” has made the rounds of the interwebz before, but I think it deserves another mention, in case you haven’t seen it:

This video, called the “The Huber Experiments–Vol 1,” is a great use of high speed video. Who wouldn’t want to play with their food?

And another video that makes great use of technique, “Bathtub IV” by Keith Loutit:

Other videos that have been getting attention in the media include a video interview/spontaneous music video “Die Antwood – Zef side (official)” with South African Rap Trio Die Antwood, “This Aborted Earth: The Quest Begins,” by Michael Banowetz and Noah Sodano, “Noteboek,” created by Dutch video artist Evelien Lohbeck, and “I Met the Walrus,” by Jerry Levitan, Josh Raskin, James Braithwaite and Alex Kurina. ABC News liked a rap-Disney mash-up:

“Wonderland Mafia,” by Lindsay Scoggins of Tampa, Fla., fuses rap and cartoon. The Disney film “Alice in Wonderland” has been mashed-up with the hip-hop of Three 6 Mafia. Scoggins says the video “is meant to illustrate a disjointed amalgamation of the media one encounters in adulthood (versus) childhood.”

And even the New York Times found something it didn’t hate:

Amid all the artifice of the final 25, Lisa Byrne’s documentary short “Taxi III Stand Up and Cry Like a Man” may burn a hole in your heart. The third in a trilogy, it consists of interviews with taxi drivers who survived paramilitary attacks in Northern Ireland during the conflicts of the 1980s and ’90s.

I’m sure I missed some good videos. If you think I’m completely off base with my choice of favorites–or if you think the New York Times is being too cranky by far–tell me about it in the comments.

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Discoblog: “Dance Your PhD” Winner Knows the Molecular Moves
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DISCOVER: Museum-Worthy Garbage: The Art of Over-Consumption (photos)

Videos: Youtube.com/play