“Many furry mammals engage in oscillatory shaking when wet.” Translation: When a dog comes in from the rain, it engages in a body-twisting, jowl-flapping shake that sprays water over the living room. But exactly what kinds of oscillations are required to make the water droplets scatter? Thankfully a team of curious researchers decided to study the physics of that motion.

In the abstract posted on ArXiv, Andrew Dickerson of the Georgia Institute of Technology and some colleagues explain that they attacked the question via high-speed video and fur-particle tracking:

As you can see from the data in the video, the research raises further questions. Their mathmathical model is based on the idea that surface tension holds the water droplets to the animal’s hair, and that centripetal forces from the shaking have to exceed that surface tension in order to free the water. This implies that smaller animals (or as they might say, animals with a smaller radius) have to shake faster in order to get dry, a prediction borne out by observations of everything from mice to bears. But when the researchers plotted the data on a graph, it didn’t quite conform to their predictions.

Technology Review, where we first saw this story, explains where they may have gone wrong:

Clearly, their model misses some important correction factor. Dickerson and co make one suggestion. In their model, the radius is the distance from the centre of the animal to its skin. Perhaps the fur makes a difference, they say.

The video helpfully declares that no animals were harmed in its making; they were just somewhat dampened.

Related Content:
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80beats: Why a Greyhound or a Racehorse Doesn’t “Pop a Wheelie”
80beats: Study: A “Pessimistic” Dog Is More Likely to Destroy Your Slippers
80beats: Caught on Film: Raindrop Forms Parachute, Explodes Into Motley Smaller Drops

Video: Andrew Dickerson et al.

This photograph, taken in Masoala National Park, Madagascar, shows a Malagasi worker illegally felling a rosewood tree in UNESCO protected forest. Despite the risky work, dangerous conditions, and tremendous price of rosewood overseas, each worker is paid the equivalent of about four dollars per day. The wood is extracted deep from within the national parks and is financed by powerful local traders. The ancient and densely grained Malagasy rosewood trees are sought after for musical instruments and furniture. Plunder of the remaining rainforest stands for rosewood and ebony is wreaking ecological devastation in this unique habitat, home to around 14,000 species of plants, 90 percent of which exist here alone.

Photographer Toby Smith reports that after 4 months of continued unchecked extraction the labourers had to trek deeper into the forest to find stock. Smith met the worker in this photo previously, and asked permission to document him cutting a tree. One day this same worker suddenly appeared and beckoned Smith to where he and his partner were clearing the surrounding vegetation in order to swing an axe to cut down the tree. After making this image, the word was out that Smith was interested in tree-cutting, so Smith and his guide had to race back down the valley from there, their cover blown. The Environmental Investigation Agency will be using the photos Smith made in Madagascar as part of a case to prosecute those responsible for creating the international market for the illegally harvested woods.

Courtesy Toby Smith/Environmental Investigation Agency

“Return to previous Arctic conditions is unlikely.” That’s the understated conclusion from this year’s Arctic Report Card, which found that air temperatures will continue rising and ice will continue melting in the Arctic as global warming continues to take its toll on the region. The annual report was prepared by 69 researchers in eight countries, and was issued by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

What goes on in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic. The researchers note that conditions in the Arctic can affect global weather, and point to the huge snowstorms that hit the American northeast and mid-Atlantic states last winter as an example.

“Normally the cold air is bottled up in the Arctic,” said Jim Overland of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle. But last December and February, winds that normally blow west to east across the Arctic were instead bringing the colder air south to the Mid-Atlantic, he said. “As we lose more sea ice it’s a paradox that warming in the atmosphere can create more of these winter storms,” Overland said at a news briefing. [Washington Post]

The Arctic is feeling the effects of climate change faster than the rest of the globe due to a feedback cycle called polar amplification.

Warming air melts the sun-reflecting white snow and ice of the Arctic, revealing darker, heat-absorbing water or land, spurring the effects of warming. This is further amplified by the action of the round-the-clock sunlight of Arctic summers. [Reuters]

Other findings from the report: Sea ice has declined sharply over the past three decades and hit record lows in the last four years, glaciers are losing mass, and permafrost temperatures are increasing. These rapid changes are forcing Arctic animals to adapt or die; the report notes that some species of seabirds and whales seem to be prospering in a warmer world, but many more species are in decline.

Here’s a video NOAA put together to sum up its findings:

Related Content:
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80beats: Researchers in Greenland Drill 8,000? Down to Study 120,000-Year-Old Climate
80beats: NOAA’s Conclusive Report: 2000s Were Hottest Decade on Record
80beats: Senators Cut Climate Change Rules and Renewables From Energy Bill
DISCOVER: 8 Keys to Deciphering Ancient Climates (photo gallery)

Image: iStockphoto

No substantive blogging from me — I’ve lost my laptop and need to get a new one, with all the crapola that entails. (Speaking euphemistically here; it wasn’t “lost,” it was stolen. Story later.)

In the meantime here’s a video from Barack Obama, supporting Dan Savage’s It Gets Better campaign. (Via Jezebel.) Savage is a well-known sex columnist, and Obama is President of the United States, so it’s a newsworthy pairing in its own right. But this is an important message for every teenager, or for that matter for every person. The campaign is aimed primarily at LGBT (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgendered) kids, who are very commonly bullied and ostracized in school. But bullying isn’t right no matter who the target is. It does get better, as you grow up and figure yourself out and find supportive communities. It shouldn’t ever be bad in the first place, so we have to do what we can to change the cultural acceptance of harassment.

This is an old article, reposted from the original WordPress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. I’m on holiday for the moment, but you can expect a few new pieces here and there (as well as some exciting news…)

The birth of new languages is accompanied by a burst of rapid evolution consisting of large changes in vocabulary that are followed by long periods of relatively slower change.

Languages are often compared to living species because of the way in which they diverge into new tongues over time in an ever-growing linguistic tree. Some critics have claimed that this comparison is a superficial one, a nice metaphor but nothing more.

But the new study by Quentin Atkinson, now at the University of Oxford, suggests that languages evolve at a similar stop-and-start pace, which uncannily echoes a long-standing theory in biology, known as ‘punctuated equilibrium’. The theory’s followers claim that life on Earth also evolved at an uneven pace, full of rapid bursts and slow periods.

Famously championed by the late Stephen Jay Gould, the punctuated equilibrium theory suggests that most species change very little over time and big evolutionary changes are concentrated at rare moments where new species branch off from existing lineages. Together with colleagues from the US and New Zealand, Atkinson found similar patterns in three of the worlds’ largest families of languages.

They compared lists of words from the Indo-European group, which include English and Hindi; the Bantu group, consisting of several hundred African languages; and the Austronesian group, which includes over a thousand tongues from Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and the Polynesian islands. Between them, these three families account for a third of all the world’s languages.

Of course, languages borrow words from each other all the time and indeed, 50% of English words are loans from French and Latin. That was a potential pitfall of the study and Atkinson avoided it by only considering basic words such as numerals, body parts and pronouns that are very unlikely to have been co-opted from another tongue.

For each group, Atkinson built a family tree showing how newer languages split off from ancestral ones. The trees mirrored those that biologists use to chart the evolutionary relationships between species.

In the model, the birth of new languages is represented by new branches on the tree and the length of each branch depends on the difference in vocabulary between the new tongue and its parent one. The greater the changes, the longer the branch.

In each family tree, Atkinson saw that the parts of the tree with the most branches also had the longest ones. So groups that spawned the highest number of new languages also diverged most significantly in their repertoire of words. That’s the pattern you would expect if the birth of new languages triggered bursts of rapid evolution. If the pace of evolution was more constant, the number of branch points would have no effect on overall branch length.

These rapid bursts accounted for 31% of the vocabulary differences between Bantu speakers, 21% of the differences in Indo-European languages and 10% of the variation in the Austronesian group. For comparison, team estimated that these fast and slow evolutionary cycles explained about 22% of the genetic differences between biological species.

As they split from each other, new sister tongues begin to adopt new words at a fast pace and these are probably accompanied by equally quick changes in pronunciation, spelling and grammar. As their identities become clearer, the pace of change slows.

Atkinson thinks that this process happens when different groups of people try to establish distinct social identities by exaggerating differences in language. American English may have developed along these lines and the need for a unique identity was at the forefront of Noah Webster‘s mind when he published his first American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828. “As an independent nation, our honour requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government,” he said.

Reference: Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1149683

More on language:

• New Nicaraguan sign language shows how language affects thought
• Boom-boom-krak-oo – Campbell’s monkeys combine just six ‘words’ into rich vocabulary
• Revisiting FOXP2 and the origins of language
• The evolution of the past tense – how verbs change over time
• Bilingual children learn language rules more efficiently than monolinguals

Nick Lane’s book Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution has just won the Royal Society’s science book prize. The book chronicles the history of life on Earth through ten of evolution’s greatest achievements, from the origins of life itself to sex, eyes, and DNA.

The judges said that the ease with which Lane communicates these complex scientific ideas is what makes the book shine.

“Life Ascending is a beautifully written and elegantly structured book that was a favourite with all of the judges. Nick Lane hasn’t been afraid to challenge us with some tough science, explaining it in such a way that we feel like scientists ourselves, unfolding the mysteries of life,” said Maggie Philbin, chair of the judges. [The Guardian]

Instead of dumbing down the science, Lane’s words build the reader up to an understanding of evolution’s work.

Lane is a superb communicator. He knows exactly how much technical detail is required to provide satisfying explanations for the evolution of the genetic code, photosynthesis, complex cells, muscles and eyes, and his enthusiasm is catching. [The Guardian's book review]

Lane, a biochemist himself at University College London, believes in what he writes about. He studies and formulates hypotheses about the evolution of life for his job, and loves to communicate these ideas.

“Writing is my way to understand the world. I tried to get across the boundary between what we know and what we don’t know,” Lane explained. “It’s a thrilling tapestry that writing can take you across – you can ask any question you want, but there’s responsibility that goes with that.” [Nature]

Alas, this may be the last year of the prestigious book prize. It lots its sponsor, pharmaceutical company Aventis, in 1997, and has run out of funds.

Related content:
Not Exactly Rocket Science: The origin of complex life – it was all about energy
Not Exactly Rocket Science: A possible icy start for life
The Loom: Book (P)review #1: Life Ascending, The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution
The Loom: Microcosm On the Longlist for Royal Society Science Book Prize (Along With A Dozen Great Books)
The Intersection: Everyday Practice of Science

Image: W. W. Norton & Company

Remember in E.T. where the government finds E.T. and decides they should do all sorts of crazy awful experiments on him? Or how about in District 9 where an entire alien race is subjected to squalor, neglect, and vivisection? Or maybe in The Day the Earth Stood Still when Klaatu takes a round in the shoulder from some nervous infantrymen? What all of these movies have in common is that on present-day Earth, aliens have no rights. Despite a demonstration of equal or superior intelligence, a capacity for moral reasoning, complex culture, and peaceful intentions, aliens are regularly mistreated.

“Why should I care?” you might ask, gesturing with your cigarette holder and adjusting your pashmina scarf. You should care because either we are going to find aliens on an earth-like planet, like Gliese 581g, or they’ll find us first—and soon. We’ve got time, but not much, before we’ll be looking at some living something from another world.

Well why should aliens have rights? Because, as I’ve argued before, they have personhood. (Quick refresher: personhood is the idea that rights stem from aspects of an entity’s mind. For example, a sentient creature has the right not to suffer, and a self-aware creature has the right to self-determine. It doesn’t matter if the mind is in a robo-power suit, an ethereal protoplasm, distributed among a living swarm, or at the center of a writhing mass of tentacles. If a sentient, rational, and moral mind is present, it has personhood.)

If an alien can suffer, can reason, and can tell right from wrong, then it has rights and responsibilities. But what are they?

A Bill of Rights for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Draft)

I imagine the preamble would be pretty simple and to the point. Our goal is to outline what is protected (intelligent aliens) and what isn’t (probes, asteroids, King Ghidorah). Remember all those episodes of Star Trek where the Prime Directive gets the Enterprise crew in trouble because the non-warp civilization has no idea how to deal with aliens? Think of these rights as the Prime Directive in reverse—a list of rights to protect peaceful space explorers.

Preamble: The People of Earth recognize that any Extraterrestrial Intelligence that is sentient, conscious, autonomous, and recognizes other persons shall be protected by the rights articulated herein. The rights articulated remain in effect while the visiting Extraterrestrial Intelligence is within the scope of direct, immediate human interaction and does not present a clear and present danger to the People of Earth.

The main goal here is to prevent us from accidentally triggering an intergalactic war because we’re too jumpy. As Stephen Hawking pointed out, a superior species should have no trouble wiping us out if they wanted. It’s even more unlikely that aggressive intentions will be hidden or sneaky; even Independence Day only took 24 hours to go from first contact to Armageddon. If aliens don’t come out guns a-blazing, we should probably give them benefit of the doubt. Furthermore, peaceful aliens with personhood (like A.L.F.) would be protected while those without (the Blob), would not be. Pretty good so far! I’m a regular founding father.

On to the articles of rights. What are we trying to do with these articles? Protect the aliens from us. The same way the Bill of Rights is supposed to protect citizens from the government, we should be protecting aliens from humanity. Let’s take a shot.

Article I. The People of Earth shall, in a manner prescribed by national and international law, form a delegation of representatives appropriate to the Extraterrestrial Intelligence. This delegation will be entrusted with ensuring adherence to the values and articles within this document.

Just who, precisely, is going to interact with the aliens is quite important. My hope is that it isn’t a bunch of politicians, but actually some real scientists, philosophers, and the odd polymath (cough Jeff Goldblum cough) to round things out. Alright, now on to making sure we don’t mistreat our guests.

Article II. The People of Earth shall make no act of aggression, pre-emptive or otherwise, towards an Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

Article III. The People of Earth shall not unjustly imprison, restrain, or delay the movement of any Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

Article IV. The People of Earth shall observe the same standards of ethics—including dignity, autonomy, and informed consent—regarding any potential scientific or medical interaction with the Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

Whew! No being mean, no prisoners, and no evil experiments – I just made a whole lot of science fiction stories very boring. In all honesty, my suspension of disbelief is most rattled by films where one of these three articles is violated. I just can’t imagine someone thinking it would be a good idea to imprison, shoot at, or dissect a strange, advanced, alien species. But it’s better safe than sorry.

Back to the task at hand. What we need to round things out is some sort of catch-all article, like the 10th Article of the Bill of Rights, to end this little list. Ah, got it:

Article V. The People of Earth shall act as to best preserve a peaceful relationship with the Extraterrestrial Intelligence while working to preserve mutual cultures and identities.

Boom! There it is folks, a Bill of Rights for our first visitors. Any loopholes? As always, I’m sure the lovely commenters will provide fine fodder for thought.

In September, I wrote about how the conservative political party in control in Canada is throttling scientists, forcing them to get permission to discuss their scientific results with the media. This is a clear attempt to keep scientists from talking about results that are contrary to the ideology of the political party– and we’re talking about such topics as global warming here. This hearkens back to what was going on here in the US just a few short years ago.

Now Canadian scientists are firing back: they’ve launched a website where they can take their results straight to the public without government interference. The site — artfully named PublicScience.ca — features interviews and videos with Canadian government scientists.

The site is a beautiful thumb-to-the-nose to those in the government who think they can suppress science. Here’s their site description:

This site is sponsored by the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada.

PUBLICSCIENCE.ca opens up the world of science for the public good.

PUBLICSCIENCE.ca advocates for support for the science that touches the daily lives of Canadians in so many important ways.

"Opens up the world of science for the public good." Awesome. Their press release announcing the site makes this clear, too.

I’m certain this makes some government officials apoplectic, and I’m quite enjoying myself envisioning that right now. I loathe censorship in any form, but I especially abhor it when it’s done out of ideology to choke out science and reality.

Good on ya, Canadian scientists. Speak up, loudly and clearly. At the bottom of the site’s homepage is a call to action for Canadian citizens, too. I encourage my neighbors to the north to follow those links, and let your government know that science is for everyone, and not just when it agrees with your personal beliefs.

Tip o’ the toque to Boing Boing and Westsidekef.

On my latest podcast, I take a look at dengue fever, a viral disease that’s infecting some 50 million people a year and is even turning up in the United States. I talk to Thomas Scott of UC Davis about how this cunning virus takes advantage of human networks to spread its aches, pains, bleeding, and death. Check it out.

The other day NPR’s Planet Money quipped that the gold bubble was going to burst soon, as they’d decided to buy gold. Well, perhaps Facebook is nearing its bursting point…I created a Gene Expression fan page. I don’t have a good sense of the great utility of this sort of thing…you can after all find the two GNXP weblogs on the world wide web pretty easily. And I feed the blog posts to two twitter accounts. I can see the value-add of Facebook’s selective semi-permeability when it comes to the “social graph”, but less so for websites which have a robust presence on the internet. GNXP in some form has been around for over 8 years. I can’t but help feel that this is a flashier Geocities fan page.

Also, it has a URL that’s easy to remember: http://www.facebook.com/GeneExpression

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!

Mandibular angle augmentation with the use of distraction and homologous lyophilized cartilage in a case of morphing to Michael Jackson surgery.

“Correction of an ill-defined mandibular angle is not an easy task, whether it is requested by the “congenital, orthognathic or cosmetic” patient. Deliberate over-correction has not been reported to our knowledge. This article presents a combination of distraction osteogenesis and lyophilized cartilage used to three-dimensionally over-augment the mandibular angle of a long-face prognathic patient who had the wish to be morphed to Michael Jackson or at least as far as current technique and his endogenic features allowed.”

Photo: flickr/dalbera

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: The politically incorrect nose job.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: I still think listening to country music is degrading.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Sorry Pedobear, science proves drinking is no excuse.

WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

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A new approach to electrophoresis is giving researchers more control over how they play with small particles.

Electrophoresis is the movement of particles in solution under a current–a phenomenon that can be exploited for use in everything from ePaper to DNA separating gels. Instead of using a normal fluid to conduct current, researchers led by Oleg Lavrentovich tried using liquid crystals as their conductive fluid.

Liquid crystals, like those seen in the first three pictures above (which might look similar to the patterns you’ve seen when you push on the screen of some of your electronics), act like a fluid. But instead of being a disorganized jumble of molecules, the individual rod-shaped particles line up parallel to each other. When they take on different orientations, they refract different colors of light, a phenomenon called birefringence.

The last picture in the set shows a 10 micron glass sphere moving in a liquid crystal carrier. You can see the “tail” of unorganized liquid crystal around and above the object (it would be moving in a plane with the screen, from top to bottom). This tail is what propels the object through the charged liquid crystal.

The liquid crystal can be used to propel small objects (anything bigger than about a half a micron wide) in a variety of ways and trajectories based on how the crystals are aligned. The parallel lines of molecules can be set up in such a way that when a current is applied, the object moves through the liquid crystal, following the track, and being propelled by the “tail” of deformed liquid crystals behind it. In this way, the liquid crystal can also move non-charged particles and those with symmetrical structures, which were troublesome when using non-crystalline carriers.

From the paper, which was published in Nature:

The phenomenon offers new perspectives for practical applications where highly flexible, precise and simple control of particle (or cargo) placement, delivery, mixing or sorting is needed. Examples include microfluidic devices and electrophoretic displays.

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80beats: Electronic Ink Changes the Game for Newspapers and Magazines
80beats: Amazon’s New Kindle E-Reader Aims to Shake Up Academia and Journalism

Images: Nature / Oleg Lavrentovich, Israel Lazo, and Oleg Pishnyak

As has been oft remarked on this blog, we are in a golden age of astrophysics and cosmology. The data is pouring down from the heavens, in large part from 14 state-of-the-art NASA space telescopes. However, this cornucopia of astronomy is about to come to a crashing stop. We are at the high-water mark, and the next few years are going to see a rapid decline in the number of observatories in space. In five years most, if not all, of these telescopes will be defunct (WMAP is already in the graveyard), and it’s not clear what will be replacing them. This is brought into startling focus by the following plot:

The dotted line shows “today”. In a few years, the only significant US space observatory may be the James Webb Space Telescope (assuming it’s on budget and on time, neither of which are to be taken for granted). The reasons for the current “bubble” in resources, and the impending crash, are myriad and complex. These missions take many years, if not multiple decades, to plan and execute, and we are currently reaping the harvest of ancient boom times. But one aspect subtly implied by this graph is the impact of JWST on space funding. The cost of this mission is now over $5 billion, and continues to rise. Very optimistically, the mission will be in space in 2014, and will continue to consume major developmental resources until then. In an era of fiscal austerity, it is difficult to imagine that the immense ongoing cost of JWST leaves room for much else to be done. The community has gone through the painful exercise of winnowing down its “wish list” to a few key, high-impact missions (as detailed by Julianne here, here, and here; my summary here). It is not immediately apparent that even this fairly “modest” list is attainable given current budget realities. Astronomical data from space over the next decade will pale in comparison to the previous one. We are at a unique moment in the history of space astronomy; it is highly unlikely that we will have fourteen major space astrophysics missions flying again within our lifetimes. We need to make the most of what we have, while we still have it.

Want to see your tax dollars at work? There’s a more exciting way to do it than watching a road crew pour asphalt for the latest highway expansion. Now you can watch the next Mars rover being built in a clean room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, thanks to a well-positioned webcam.

Curiosity rover, also known as the Mars Science Laboratory, is a hulking beast compared to its smaller cousins, Spirit and Opportunity. The six-wheeled Curiosity is about the size of a car and weighs 2,000 pounds. The rover is scheduled to blast off toward Mars in the winter of 2011, and to reach the planet in August 2012. Its mission: to probe rocks, take pictures, and generally cruise around looking for signs of life, past or present.

The “Curiosity Cam” went live today. It will typically show technicians working from 8 in the morning until 11 at night, Monday through Friday, but the bunny suit-clad engineers sometimes disappear from the shot when their work draws them to other parts of the building. (During their lunch break today one commenter groused that it was boring to stare at an empty room.) Right now the technicians are working on the rover’s instruments, tomorrow they’re scheduled to put the suspension system and wheels on. Be sure to tune in!

Related Content:
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80beats: James Cameron to Design a 3D Camera for Next-Gen Mars Rover
80beats: Spirit Doesn’t Return NASA’s Calls; Rover Might Be Gone for Good
80beats: Mars Rover Sets Endurance Record: Photos From Opportunity’s 6 Years On-Planet

Image: NASA / JPL

There’s a lot of stuff you stumble upon via Google Public Data Explorer which you kind of knew, but is made all the more stark through quantitative display. For example, consider Saudi Arabia and Yemen. In gross national income per capita the difference between these two nations is one order of magnitude (PPP and nominal). Depending on the measure you use (PPP or nominal) the difference between the USA and Mexico is in the range of a factor of 3.5 to 5. Until recently most Americans did not know much about Yemen. It was famous for being the homeland of Osama bin Laden’s father and the Queen of Sheba.

Let’s do some comparisons.

Good luck Saudi Arabia! Couldn’t happen to a nicer nation.

Remember one year ago, when NASA’s LCROSS mission (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) blasted the moon to kick up a plume of debris? The satellite’s first look at that plume saw that, yes, there was water ice there, much to DISCOVER’s delight. One year later, scientists have published an in-depth analysis of the LCROSS plume and found that there might be even more water than they first thought: In certain places, the moon could be twice as wet as the Sahara Desert.

In a series of articles in Science (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), researchers detail just how much moisture—and what other surprises—they found when they bombed our natural satellite.

“It’s really wet,” said Anthony Colaprete, co-author of one of the Science papers and a space scientist at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. He and his colleagues estimate that 5.6% of the total mass of the targeted lunar crater’s soil consists of water ice. In other words, 2,200 pounds of moon dirt would yield a dozen gallons of water. [Wall Street Journal]

The water isn’t all (though there was lots of it in the plume, more 300 pounds). Other studies in the mix found methane, silver, gold, ammonia, and many more substances in the cloud of debris NASA created.

“This place looks like it’s a treasure chest of elements,” said Brown University planetary geologist Peter Schultz, one of the principal investigators of the NASA mission. He said the compounds migrate to the poles and then get quick-frozen and collect in craters, where they stay “in the permanent shadows.” Although the presence of some lunar ice and water vapor was reported earlier from that mission, the full richness of what lies in the coldest and darkest reaches of the moon took a year to tease out. [Washington Post]

While the menagerie of elements fascinates scientists, it could complicate matters for dreamers who want to go back to the moon and use its resident water supply to establish a base in the future. For instance, the LCROSS team found lots of mercury, which has a little toxicity problem that could get in the way of harvesting water in a drinkable form.

Not all of the moon is so rich in water and other materials, either. As Schultz noted, NASA chose a polar site for LCROSS because those sites don’t receive enough direct sunlight to blast off the material there. The rest of the moon is much, much drier than the driest places on Earth.

However, we’re continually ready to be surprised. If this year has shown us anything, it’s that our growing knowledge continues to paint a new picture of the moon.

“We’ve always been told the moon is bone dry and that was the legacy of Apollo and that’s true — in all the samples we picked up,” Schultz [says]. “It’s now a new moon to me. We know there are places we can explore that can tell us brand new things,” Schultz said. [Discovery News]

Related Content:
80beats: Lunar Impact! NASA Probe Slams Into Moon to Search for Water
80beats: Study: There’s Water on the Lunar Surface, but Inside It’s Bone Dry
80beats: Moon May Have 100 Times More Water Than We Thought. How’d We Miss It?
DISCOVER: The Moon Is Always New Nowadays

Image: NASA

I sometimes get requests from people asking if they can translate something I’ve written into a different language. The answer is usually yes, if they provide a link back to the original post. The funny part is not knowing if they’ve done a good job or not!

So there’s a certain trust involved, I suppose, because I don’t speak too many languages. And it’s even harder if they don’t use vowels! But that hasn’t stopped Yoav Landsman from translating some of my posts into Hebrew. He did three:

- Just in case you need reminding how nice place to live Earth is
- 30 years, a half million asteroids
- Do rainbow clouds foretell earthquakes? (also on Spinoza, the Israeli skeptics community website).

I can actually puzzle through some of the pronunciation of the words phonetically, but that’s about it; my knowledge of Hebrew is limited to probably fewer than two dozen words. But I’d like to thank Yoav for helping me reach a population that I might otherwise never reach. L’chaim!

Today I’m at North Georgia College & State University and can already report that I’m falling in love with the town of Dahlonega–known as the gateway to the Blue Ridge Mountains and the site where the Gold Rush began in 1928. I’m here as the speaker for the university’s information literacy initiative and will be talking to students and the community about scientific illiteracy in the United States.

Tonight’s event is free and open to the public so if you’re in the area, come on by! It takes place at 7:30 in the Health & Natural Sciences Building. You can read more about this terrific initiative and my participation at The Gainesville Times…

3D printers are beloved by geeks the world over. Enter the Lego 3D printer: it’s not only MADE of Legos, but it also PRINTS with Legos.

With only a few tweaks, this LegoBot could even take over the world print copies of itself, maker Will Gorman told Wired:

“There is a recursiveness to this whole thing,” says Gorman.

“I love the idea of self-assembly and the Star Trek replicator and I love Legos,” he says. “I wanted to bring those two worlds together.”

Gorman built this recursive masterpiece for the LegoWorld expo, happening from Oct 22th to 26th in the Netherlands. Dutch lego enthusiasts can visit the expo to see LegoBot in action, the rest of us can check out his website for detailed instructions on how to build your own.

Hit the jump for more info on his Lego-contraption and a video of it in action.

For now, the bot requires a human operator to stack bricks into the feeder system and program it with a design from MLCad (a computer-aided Lego designing program) through a PC, which determines the printout instructions. Currently the system uses only normal Lego bricks (not the Lego robotics NXT components) in the 1×2, 2×2, 3×2, 4×2, and 8×2 sizes, and can print up to 12 bricks tall. The printer itself is made out of 2,400 bricks.

Related content:
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Science Not Fiction: Knight Rider: 3D Printing
Bad Astronomy: Smart girls at the party
Bad Astronomy: Compasskirt

Image: Will Gorman

I’m happy to report that my alma mater, the University of Virginia, is not only fighting back against State Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s witch hunt against climate scientist Michael Mann, they are also being pretty clear about their protest:

In its most strongly-worded court filing to date, UVA characterized Cuccinelli’s investigation as "an unprecedented and improper governmental intrusion into ongoing scientific research” and said that Cuccinelli is targeting Mann because he “disagrees with his academic research regarding climate change."

In other words, they’re saying this is a politically and ideologically motivated abuse of power, which I’ve been saying all along.

I’m thrilled to see the University standing firm. Cuccinelli’s actions, on purpose or otherwise, are sending out a message that academic research can be chilled due to political ideology, and that is something that must not be allowed. I fully support what UVa is doing, and hope they can stop Cuccinelli in his tracks.

The University’s court filing really is worth reading. Thomas Jefferson would be proud.