---

In the western Caribbean, some coral reefs have turned into eerie white ghost towns.

Scientists with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute have documented a major bleaching event in the reefs near Panama and the island of Curaçao. Such bleaching occurs when a reef loses the tiny photosynthetic algae that typically live in the coral, providing it with food (and color). Bleaching occurs when coral is under stress, most typically due to higher ocean temperatures. And this was a hot summer.

Abnormally warm water since June appears to have dealt a blow to shallow and deep-sea corals that is likely to top the devastation of 2005, when 80% of corals were bleached and as many as 40% died in areas on the eastern side of the Caribbean. [ScienceNOW]

The rise in water temperature doesn’t have to be dramatic, just steady. In 2005, the water near the Virgin Islands was about 5 degrees Fahrenheit above average from August to November, and coral reefs in the eastern Caribbean suffered. This year, slightly higher ocean temperatures spread over a much broader area in the western and southern Caribbean. Near Panama, researchers reported that water temperatures reached a high of 7 degrees Fahrenheit above average in mid-September.

Hurricane season may be enhancing the current problem, resulting in low water circulation in the southwestern Caribbean and thus creating a “warm pocket” of water along the coasts of Panama and Costa Rica, the researchers speculate. [MSNBC]

Coral reefs can recover from bleaching, but there’s not guarantee–and as long as the reefs are pale shadows of their former selves, they’re in trouble. Bleaching impairs the coral’s ability to grow and reproduce, and the reefs can die altogether.

Related Content:
80beats: 2010’s Hot Summer Took a Toll on Arctic Ice, Walruses, and Coral
80beats: Endangered Species Meeting Brings Good News for Elephants, Bad News for Coral
80beats: Climate Change & Disease Have “Flattened” Caribbean Coral Reefs
80beats: Rare Corals’ Crossbreeding Ways May Stave off Extinction
80beats: In a More Acidic Ocean, Coral Reef “Skeletons” May Crumble

---

____________________________________________

Related content:
Discoblog: Nerd Bling: 13 Gift Ideas for the Geek Who Has Everything
DISCOVER: The Bizarre and Brilliant World of Knitted Science (photos)
Bad Astronomy: My Close Personal Doll (TM)
The Intersection: How To Impress Your Thesis Committee

I know a lot of the media do their best when it comes to reporting science and astronomical-related stories, but sometimes they seem to go way out of their way — or, more accurately, not go out of their way at all — to report nonsense.

Case in point: Fox News in New York City. Yesterday, there were UFO reports from all over the city. Not to keep you in suspense, but those UFOs were actually hundreds of balloons released on Broadway to celebrate a visit by Madrid officials. You can see more about this by my friend Ben Radford and at Science-Based Parenting.

Note that balloons explain everything: the UFOs were in clusters, they moved randomly, they were seen as dots, nothing was reported on radar, they floated for hours, they slowly disappeared, the timing was right. As far as explanations go, we’re done here. [I'll note that there were some reports of UFO earlier in the day, but those look just like balloons as well, probably from a different event.]

Now, I can forgive the Fox reporter for not knowing about the balloons; cases like this do happen. However, watch the video of the reporter: she clearly didn’t do any investigation at all of this other than to talk to a few people in the street (if the YouTube video gets taken down, you can watch it on the Fox page, but at lower res):

Pay attention around 35 seconds in. That star she spends a lot of time talking about is the planet Jupiter. Don’t believe me? To the right is a diagram I created using planetarium software showing Jupiter and its four big moons around the time the reporter’s talking about. Hmmmm. The blue flashing lights, broken up appearance, and tail she talks about are all clearly those four moons and Jupiter itself.

Again, I don’t expect a reporter to know what that might be, but come on. She sees something in the sky she couldn’t explain, and couldn’t talk to a single astronomer before going on the air? I hear Neil Tyson lives in New York City. Say.

Reports like this, which don’t do any actual investigating, damage both people’s perception of reality (reinforcing nonsense) and the ability of the news to cover actual, real events. And all it would’ve taken to fix this whole thing was a single phone call to an astronomer. The story would’ve still been fun and playful, but it also would’ve been accurate and had real science in it. Shouldn’t that be the goal of all such stories?

Tip o’ the probe to Colin Thornton for the balloon stories, and Dr. Marco Langbroek for the tip about the Fox story, and Jupiter.

Two new long-lasting options for treating opioid abuse could help heroin addicts avoid relapses.

The new drugs solve a problem with the current treatments for opioid addiction. These drugs, called methadone and buprenorphine, are really just replacement addictions, and their use needs to be closely monitored; patients take them daily at a clinic, because they can be abused by crushing up the pills and injecting them.

The first drug, which was just approved by the FDA, is called Vivitrol: The drug works by blocking the effect of opiates on brain cells, preventing the person from getting high. The effects of one injection last for a full month. In a clinical trial in Russia, 86 percent of people taking Vivitrol hadn’t relapsed after six months, while only 57 percent of placebo patients had stayed clean. However, researchers note that methadone isn’t available in Russia, and say it might be harder to convince addicts in the United States to opt for this treatment.

Vivitrol’s long-acting effect provides a kind of chemical willpower. “Someone who’s interested in not abusing opiates only has to make one good decision a month –- or their family member only has to help them make one good decision a month,”[Phil] Skolnick [of the National Institute on Drug Abuse] says. “That’s why it’s important.” [NPR].

The drug’s active ingredient, naltrexone, has been available to treat opioid addiction since the 1970s. To make this long-lasting Vivitrol, the non-addictive drug is encapsulated in tiny polymer bubbles, which break down over time and release the drug. Since it doesn’t provide a high like methadone or buprenorphine do, naltrexone researcher Charles O’Brien says its appeal may be limited.

Still, Vivitrol should be useful, O’Brien says, for “people who have been in a hospital and have become drug-free, people who are well-educated and have private health insurance.” In other words, people who are strongly motivated to end their opiate addiction. [NPR].

For those who want to stick with the opiates they know and love, the second new treatment could be a good fit. The implant releases the semi-synthetic opioid buprenorphine, which is commonly used to treat addiction–but it dribbles out the medication over a time frame of six months, instead of requiring the patient to take daily doses. Says addiction researcher Linda Gowing:

“The use of implants provides a degree of flexibility for clients, while also maintaining medication with minimal risk of misuse.” [Science News]

The drug is mixed with a plastic polymer, ethylene vinyl acetate–commonly found in hot glue gun glue–and is implanted under the skin, releasing the drug for 24 weeks. The implant is not on the market yet, but the results of a clinical trial were released this week in the Journal of American Medical Association.

The implant was tested on a group of opiate dependents. Two-thirds of the people who received the implant finished the trial, compared to less than a third of those with placebo implants. And the piss tests came back cleaner too–37 percent of those on the implant never tested positive for illicit drugs, compared to 22 percent of those with the placebo.

The company behind the implant, Titan Pharmaceuticals, is currently conducting a second trial of the drug, and the results should be out in early 2011. One worry about these long-lasting drugs is that patients who don’t have to come in and take their medication will be less likely to attend counseling sessions regularly, and therefore be more likely to relapse. Says addiction researcher Douglas Bruce:

“Most people become drug users because of sexual trauma as kids or other violence. Bad things happen to people, and drugs make them feel better.” To break the addiction cycle, Bruce says, medication must be complemented with counseling. “They will always have to take the meds if they never deal with the root issue.” [Science News].

Related content:
80beats: To Help Heroin Addicts, Give Them… Prescription Heroin?
The Intersection: The Politics of Addiction
Discoblog: New Especially Bad Heroin Can Give You an Overdose—or Anthrax
DISCOVER: The Biology of . . . Addiction
DISCOVER: Can an Injection Break a Cocaine Addiction?
DISCOVER: Molecular Psychiatrist Eric Nestler It’s a Hard Habit to Break

Image: Flickr/CrashTestAddict

The Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History has sponsored a video contest, asking participants to express in two minutes or less how science has moved them or impacted their lives. These contests are great ways to let an “audience” become real participants in a process, and have some fun along the way.

Sadly the deadline is passed, so we can’t encourage you to contribute, but you can check out the entries. Here’s a video about the LHC, by Luke Cahill. (I’m using YouTube’s new “iframe” embedding scheme; let me know if it doesn’t work.)

I love Crispian Jago. It is that simple. Why, you ask?

Because he’s created a New Age therapy treatment flowchart. And he’s British, and funny, so you know what to expect:

[Click to dehomeopathenate and see the whole chart.]

That’s just one part; the complete version has NSFW language, but it’s really funny. The thing is, Poe’s law reigns supreme amongst alt-medders. I wonder how many chiropractors will put this up on their office wall as a guide for their patients?

Tip o’ the subluxated spine to Fark.

The Secret of NIMH debuted in the summer of 1982 when I was three years old. Last night I watched the film again and while I remembered the music and characters, I had long forgotten the story. In this animated film, animal testing by scientists has transformed rats and mice into rodents with human intelligence. The ability to read helped them to escape from NIMH (which stands for the National Institute of Mental Health) where they had been subjects in a series of torturous experiments (notably alongside frightened puppies, chimpanzees, and rabbits). It’s a good movie, but I suspect that for some youngsters, likely served as a frightening introduction to scientists.

Yes the plot was fanciful, but the depiction of animal testing wasn’t completely exaggerated–some laboratories do conduct research on animals. Having been inside such facilities, I’ve observed firsthand that the conditions and the scientists involved vary tremendously. Some researchers care tremendously about the well being of each animal, treating them with a great deal of respect. Others act as if they couldn’t care less.

Obviously, this is not a black and white issue, but it is something I spend a great deal of time thinking about. On one hand, animal testing has led to tremendous advances in medicine. At the same time, needless suffering should be avoided at all costs. My perspective is similar to Jane Goodall’s: Since research will continue, I would like to see it limited to the greatest extent possible as we develop and utilize alternatives where appropriate.

With that, I am interested to hear our readers opinions…

1. First, a post from the past: 10 questions for Jim Crow

2. Weird search query of the week: “black mormons in utah”. They exist. One of my friends from college ended up marrying one and they live in Utah (he is Mormon as well, though not black).

3. Comment of the week, in response to Facebook & Dunbar’s number:

My personal hypothesis (henceforth to be known as Sandgroper’s First Hypothesis and kicked along for the next 25 years by a bunch of pseudo-intellectual airheads, since it seems OK with a lot of ’scientists’ to establish long-lived hypotheses based on slim anecdotal data) is that Dunbar’s number is shrinking. We no longer live in villages, but impersonal mega-cities. I have known of people who literally wound up not knowing anyone on any real personal level and died totally alone and friendless, some by suicide, and some sleeping and pissing on the streets despite being financially wealthy. People we converse with online we don’t really know in any true sense.

Yeah, sometimes I wish I was a meerkat. Or at least that all of my family lived or could stay in one continent, the ones I care about at least.

I never signed up for Facebook or Twitter, and would rather walk miles to talk to someone face to face than call them on the phone. This is eccentric of me and is going to have to change real soon.

Now if you will excuse me, I have to go back to watching the progressing rescue of 33 Chilean miners who have become very dear friends of mine (no they haven’t), plus of course the 4 rescue crew who have been lowered down the hole. What I want to know is how the last guy out is going to fasten the door on the Fenix 2 capsule so that they can winch him to the surface, given that the catches are on the outside of the door. Unless they have a duplicate set inside – I hope that’s the case, but I don’t know how smart Chilean engineers are – that contraption looks worryingly Heath-Robinson to me, and this is a field I know about.

The last thing you want at the site of an emergency rescue operation, apart from a ravening press mob, is a slimy grandstanding politician, and here we have two. I’ve been at sites where there were dozens of the bastards, posing grinning in front of locations where corpses of victims had very recently been extracted. (In fairness, in those cases, the press were pretty good, they kept their distance and didn’t get in the way.) If you ever need anything to destroy your faith in human nature, that will do it. But that’s getting pretty far from the point. Sorry Zeeb, my brain seems to wander. Can’t imagine why.

4) From last week: “Will the average human be wealthier 25 years from now?” 60% of you said yes, 20% said no, and 20% said uncertain.

View Survey

5) And finally, your weekly fluff fix:

Orion is a morning constellation right now, high in the sky if you get up early enough. The three stars making the belt are obvious enough, and just below it hangs his dagger^*. The middle star in the dagger is not a star, but a star-making gas cloud of mind-numbing size. There is much to see in the vast sprawl of its 5000 cubic light year volume, including young stars, still going through the pangs of birth.

One of these is the strange object called Herbig-Haro 502: a newly-born star shooting twin jets of material, far, far out into the nebula itself. Its beauty is simply breathtaking, as you can see in this spectacular image from Hubble:

[Click to ennebulanate to the giant 3800 x 3800 pixel version.]

Against the background gas of the Orion Nebula, HH 502, as those of us in the know call it, is almost lost — it’s the star just to the left of center wrapped in what looks like pink gauze (the jets are easier to spot in the full-res version). This image is a tiny, tiny fraction of the entire nebula, but the detail is exquisite. You can trace the jets of gas quite a ways. In real terms, the whole object is roughly a light year — 10 trillion km, 6 trillion miles — end to end. Neptune’s orbit would be a razor thin slice of a pixel on this scale.

There’s a lot to see. If you look carefully, you can see arc-shaped features all over the place. These are bow shocks, like the shock wave off the nose of a plane moving faster than sound. That’s usually caused by winds of gas screaming off of stars and slamming into the gas around it. Really elongated ones can be seen, too, and those are associated with the material firing away from the star at HH 502’s center.

Those jets are interesting: they are focused by a disk of material around the star far too small to be seen on this scale. But magnetic fields and other forces collimate the outflowing gas into those narrow beams. The flow of gas (which I found in a paper from 2001) is probably something like 400 km/sec (250 miles/sec), fast enough to cross the entire width of the United States in 15 seconds. The total amount of gas in the jets is something like 0.0001 times the mass of the Sun. That may not seem like much, but it’s the same as dozens of Earths! There are knots and clumps of gas, and astronomers have judged their ages to be around a thousand years. The jets are probably older than that, but probably not by much; they’re a short-lived feature of young stars.

I got a surprise when I zoomed in on the central star in HH 502. I’ve shown the detailed image here. I expected to see the jet go all the way down to the star, but it actually appears to curve around it! What the heck…?

It’s not clear what’s going on, but I think what’s happening is that close to the star is a dense disk of dust – stars form from these kinds of disks. The gas in the nebula itself is flowing; you can see that a lot of the bow shocks are aligned such that the gas must be flowing from the lower left to the upper right. If you look at the HH 502 central star carefully, you can see on the left is another bow shock, and there is a tear-drop shaped flow around it with the pointy end to the right. The edge of the shock pattern is bright, and curves around the star. The jet itself is fainter near the star, so our eye blends it with the curved edge of the shock wave. I’m not positive about this, but that’s what it looks like to me.

In larger images, the jets are not completely straight; they can be seen to curve, like a bow. If the star is moving relative to the gas in the nebula, it’ll blow the jets back a little bit, a little bit like the plume of a volcano gets blown by atmospheric winds.

All this makes me wonder if the Sun looked like this, once, 4.55 billion years ago. There’s some evidence we were born in a gas cloud like this one, with dozens or perhaps hundreds or even thousands of other stars. Were we once swimming in a miasma of hydrogen, oxygen, sulfur, and nitrogen? Did our Sun shoot out twin beams of matter, tossed around by interstellar currents, blasted by ultraviolet light from massive stars, slammed by subatomic particles from their stellar winds?

It’s funny how we can know so much about other stars, but stuck here, billions of years in the future, we only know a little bit about our own star’s birth. But observations like this one from Hubble let us, at least, take a small glimpse into our past.

Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA. And yes, I know this isn’t technically off the shoulder of Orion; it’s more off his hip. But who can resist quoting Roy Batty’s magnificent final speech if given the chance?

One of the questions of interest in the study of the evolution of culture is whether there is a direction in history in terms of complexity. As I have noted before in the pre-modern era many felt that the direction of history was of decline. That is, the ancients were wise and subtle beyond compare and comprehension. In contrast, in our era of rapid and boisterous technological innovation and economic growth we tend toward a “Whiggish” model, where the future is gleaming with potential and possibility. But we live in a peculiar time. The reality is that for most of history for most people there was very little change from generation to generation. Malthus reigned supreme. Values were timeless, and quality of life was unchanging.

There were exceptions. Theodore of Tarsus was born in the year 602, in Cilicia in southern Turkey, a subject of the Byzantine Emperor Phocas. It is Phocas to whom we can offer thanks for the preservation of the Pantheon of Rome down to the modern age (he sponsored its transformation into a Christian church). In his youth Theodore became a subject of the Sassanid Persians, who ruled Cilicia for a time before it was brought back under Byzantine rule thanks to the efforts of Heraclius. Eventually in adulthood he fled the armies of the Muslim Arabs, who conquered Cilicia, and relocated to Constantinople and then Rome. After Rome Theodore eventually settled in to a position as Archbishop of Canterbury, amongst the newly converted English. Theodore of Tarsus lived life at a “hinge of history,” when much changed in understanding of how the world was ordered (though to be honest there is a great deal of evidence that many Christians viewed Islam and the Arabs as but a momentary interruption until the 8th century). But he was very much an exception. In his longevity, his position as a literate man of power, and the radical shifts in the elite culture of his time. In the year of Theodore’s birth the English were a pagan people, and the Near East was staunchly Christian. At his death the English were a stoutly Christian people, and the Near East was crystallizing into what we now term the Islamic World.

Theodore gives us a specific personalized window into the coarse general dynamics through which history flows. History is a dynamic of people, but also operates upon people. A new paper in Nature illustrates the insights we may gain from abstraction and formalization of these dynamics. It is a lens upon history which is more crisply analytic and potentially more robust in inferential power, though of course far less rich in gripping narrative. Rise and fall of political complexity in island South-East Asia and the Pacific:

There is disagreement about whether human political evolution has proceeded through a sequence of incremental increases in complexity, or whether larger, non-sequential increases have occurred. The extent to which societies have decreased in complexity is also unclear. These debates have continued largely in the absence of rigorous, quantitative tests. We evaluated six competing models of political evolution in Austronesian-speaking societies using phylogenetic methods. Here we show that in the best-fitting model political complexity rises and falls in a sequence of small steps. This is closely followed by another model in which increases are sequential but decreases can be either sequential or in bigger drops. The results indicate that large, non-sequential jumps in political complexity have not occurred during the evolutionary history of these societies. This suggests that, despite the numerous contingent pathways of human history, there are regularities in cultural evolution that can be detected using computational phylogenetic methods.

The guts of the paper are really in the supplements. The short of it is that the authors used a phylogenetic framework and statistical methods to smoke out which models were the best fit for how patterns of social complexity mapped onto the branches of the Austronesian language family. The Austronesians are a group whose ethnognesis is understood to a great extent, and, who have expanded across a wide variety of ecologies in the recent past. They range from Madagascar to Easter Island, two points between which the distance is shorter traversing Africa and South America, rather than the Indian and Pacific oceans. In terms of complexity you also have singular groups situated upon Polynesian atolls, all the way up to the complex civilizations of the Javanese, whose polities sometimes spanned the whole breadth of the modern Indonesian archipelago.

There are four rough types of societies being analyzed in terms of their category of complexity. You can see them in figure 3, as well as the stylized model of shifts from one level of social complexity to another:

“Acephalous” means that there’s no level of leadership above the local one. So the clan chief presumably does not report to a superior. “Simple chiefdom” means that there’s a level above the clan chief. “Complex chiefdom” has another level above again. And the state means that there’s a subsequent level, or more.

As noted in the abstract they found that a step-wise incremental move up and down the levels of complexity best explained the patterns across Austronesian peoples which we see today. That is, complex ancestral societies may have devolved toward simpler organizational patterns, and simple ancestral societies may have given rise to complex ones. This is the “unilinear” pattern; what goes up does so gradually, and what goes down does so gradually. Interestingly this model shows that history can go in cycles. Empires can rise and fall. Rome and Angkor are not aberrations. But the second most supported model was a “relaxed unilinear” one, whereby societies still accrue complexity in a gradual step-wise fashion, but they may regress catastrophically. In other words, they can potentially go from being of relatively large scale to much smaller scale, atomizing and shattering. I believe that this is probably the more interesting finding. It is not surprising that societies change in complexity in an ordered fashion, but that complex systems are fragile and can lose institutional structures in a cascade would have big theoretical implications.

Obviously this sort of study on one set of societies has limitations. What has Java to tell us of Japan? This is a survey of patterns among Austronesians, and one can’t guarantee that they’ll be generalizable. Despite the ecological variation across these societies, it is notable that they all had a strong maritime bias. Perhaps continental polities are subject to different dynamics. Additionally, there is some limitation in the level of aggregation and institutional complexity which we can see among Austronesians. Even at its height Majapahit lacked the force-projection power of Rome, Imperial China, or even the Arab Caliphates. As a hypothesis I will hazard to guess that using a broader sample the relaxed unilinear model would be supported even more. Imperial Rome and Han China squeezed their populations much more than Majapahit on the economic margin to support enormous central cultural complexes. Once the interlocking systems of deference and rent-seeking snapped the regression could be extreme.

We can see the utility of this sort of model after the fall of the Roman Empire. Some regions, such as Anatolia, Italy, Spain and southern Gaul, regressed only so much (at most down to the level of complex chiefdoms, but usually down to a looser state-level political structure). On the other hand, Britain and much of the interior of the Balkans seem to have regressed much further and lost all touch with the institutional power of Roman civilization. Anglo-Saxon England had dozens of “kings” when it reemerged into the light of history in the late 6th century. These were basically complex chiefdoms, likely successors to simple chiefdoms, not states. This implies that much of Britain had gone from being part of an empire, a higher order of organization and complexity than a typical state, to a region characterized by tribalism. Something similar happened in the Balkans with the removal of Roman troops with the invasion of the Avars in the late 6th century. Once the region comes back into the historical record most of the Latin-speaking populations are gone, replaced by Slavic tribes under the hegemony of Ugric and Turkic elites (and possibly Iranian, there is some supposition that the Croats and Serbs may originally have been Iranian tribes which were later subsumed by their Slavic vassals, just as the Bulgars later were). Multiple levels of structure had been swept away, and institutions such as organized Christian religion had to be reintroduced later.

Luckily for Dark Age Europe reservoirs of civilization persisted from which institutions could begin the recolonization process. Isolated societies such as the Maya or Angkor seem to have dissolved more fully. A civilization which lasts clearly needs a commonwealth of states.

Citation: Currie, Thomas E., Greenhill, Simon J., Gray, Russell D., Hasegawa, Toshikazu, & Mace, Ruth (2010). Rise and fall of political complexity in island South-East Asia and the Pacific Nature : 10.1038/nature09461

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

I just realized that the American television show Survivor is now over 10 years old. Though The Real World had been around for nearly ten years when it premiered in the spring of 2010, Survivor was what triggered the lift-off of the current generation of “reality television.” I haven’t watched it since season (series) two, so I was curious what was going on with it. It looks like it’s been in long-term ratings decline. The host received a one year renewal on his contract early this year, instead of the two or four year contracts agreed to in the past.

Here’s the trend in terms of its ranking in the ratings:

And by millions of viewers:

Note the disjunction between the viewers who watched the premier, and those who watched the finale, on the first season. Survivor Borneo became a national phenomenon and built up momentum over the season. The second season, The Australian Outback, exhibited the opposite trend. The only outlier after those seasons is the All-Stars. Since season two it seems that the franchise has matured and is now slowly decaying into cultural and ratings irrelevance, though it’s had a very long run.

Anthony Leiserowitz at Yale has new data out on the public and its bizarre and troubling relationship with climate science. To quote some of the findings:

* 57 % know that the greenhouse effect refers to gases in the atmosphere that trap heat;

* 50 % of Americans understand that global warming is caused mostly by human activities;

* 45 % understand that carbon dioxide traps heat from the Earth’s surface;

* 25 % have ever heard of coral bleaching or ocean acidification.

Meanwhile, large majorities incorrectly think that the hole in the ozone layer and aerosol spray cans contribute to global warming, leading many to incorrectly conclude that banning aerosol spray cans or stopping rockets from punching holes in the ozone layer are viable solutions.

I’ve actually heard this ozone hole misconception with some frequency when talking with people about global warming.

Leiserowitz goes on to grade our countrymen and -women on their climate science scores: “only 8 percent of Americans have knowledge equivalent to an A or B, 40 percent would receive a C or D, and 52 percent would get an F.”

Think of it this way: Maybe in 20 years those scores will be a bit higher (or maybe not)–but the planet may be cooked by then.

New streams of religion: fly fishing as a lived, religion of nature.

“Fly fishers around the world frequently use terms such as religious, spiritual, sacred, divine, ritual, meditation, and conversion to describe their personal angling experiences. Further, drawing upon religious terminology, anglers will refer to rivers as their church and to nature as sacred. Often these latter pronouncements drive a concern for the conservation of these sacred spaces as evidenced by participation in both local and national conservation organizations. Informed by theoretical perspectives offered by religious studies, particularly “lived religion” and “religion and nature,” I shall trace a few of the historical, material, and everyday elements of fly fishers and their subcultures, demonstrating along the way the insights that come by understanding fly fishing as a religious practice, which can, at times, drive an ethic of environmental conservation.”

Pinned on Karma Rock: whitewater kayaking as religious experience.

“This paper argues that whitewater paddling constitutes religious experience, that non-western terms often best describe this experience and that these two facts are related and have much to tell us about the nature of religious experience. That many paddlers articulate their experiences using Asian and/or indigenous religious terms suggests that this language is a form of opposition to existing norms of what constitutes religious experience. So, investigating the sport as an aquatic nature religion provides the opportunity to revisit existing categories. As a “lived religion,” whitewater kayaking is a ritual practice of an embodied encounter with the sacred, and the sacred encounter is mediated through the body’s performance in the water. This sacred encounter-with its risk and danger-illustrates Rudolph Otto’s equation of the sacred with terrifying and unfathomable mystery and provides a counterpoint to norms of North American religiosity and related scholarship.”

Surfing into spirituality and a new, aquatic nature religion.

“‘Soul surfers’ consider surfing to be a profoundly meaningful practice that brings physical, psychological, and spiritual benefits. They generally agree on where surfing initially developed, that it assumed a religious character, was suppressed for religious reasons, has been undergoing a revival, and enjoins reverence for and protection of nature. This subset of the global surfing community should be understood as a new religious movement-a globalizing, hybridized, and increasingly influential example of what I call aquatic nature religion. For these individuals, surfing is a religious form in which a specific sensual practice constitutes its sacred center, and the corresponding experiences are constructed in a way that leads to a belief in nature as powerful, transformative, healing, and sacred. I advance this argument by analyzing these experiences, as well as the myths, rites, symbols, terminology, technology, material culture, and ethical mores that are found within surfing subcultures.”

Photo: flickr/Davichi

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Dude. I got pitted. And a lump on my chin.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Speedos: not just for streamlining your junk.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Horrified hot tub is horrified.

WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

How much harm would a robot cause, if a robot could cause harm?

Ok, admittedly that’s not as good of a tongue twister as the woodchuck chucking wood, but it’s a legitimate question being posed by researchers in Slovenia. In Slovenia, where electronic gadgets smack you.

Borut Povše at the University of Ljubljana has been testing the punching ability of an industrial-strength robot, inflicting everything from mild to unbearable pain on six of his colleagues and measuring how much they said it hurt. Povše told New Scientist’s Paul Marks that robots need to learn their limits to safely work side by side with humans:

“Even robots designed to Asimov’s laws can collide with people. We are trying to make sure that when they do, the collision is not too powerful,” Povše says. “We are taking the first steps to defining the limits of the speed and acceleration of robots, and the ideal size and shape of the tools they use, so they can safely interact with humans.”

And while robots inflicting pain on a human is a the number one no-no on Isaac Asimov’s list (if you happen to believe those rules), the robots must first learn what hurts before they can be programmed to not bring harm to (or allow others to harm) their human overlords, researcher Sami Haddadin told New Scientist:

“Determining the limits of pain during robot-human impacts this way will allow the design of robot motions that cannot exceed these limits,” says Sami Haddadin of DLR, the German Aerospace Centre in Wessling, who also works on human-robot safety. Such work is crucial, he says, if robots are ever to work closely with people. Earlier this year, in a nerve-jangling demonstration, Haddadin put his own arm on the line to show how smart sensors could enable a knife-wielding kitchen robot to stop short of cutting him.

The punching robot apparently performed its tasks admirably, but there’s no word on whether it enjoyed this job more than its previous line of work: assembling coffee vending machines.

Related content:
Discoblog: Why a Punch Hurts More If Your Attacker Really Meant It
Cosmic Variance: Who to Treat Best – Your Robot or Your Wife?
DISCOVER: The Robot Invasion Is Coming—and That’s a Good Thing
DISCOVER: The Rise of the Machines Is Not Going as We Expected
DISCOVER: Want to Learn Biology? Have Someone Punch You in the Face.

Image: B. Povše, et. al, at the IEEE’s Systems, Man and Cybernetics conference

One of the more fertile grounds of modern genetics with all its various tools is that it makes for some interesting possibilities of inquiry in relation to the genealogy of aristocratic elites. The vast majority of us have very shallow roots in terms of genealogy. Some of this ignorance can be compensated if you have a clear and distinct group identity. If you are a Cohen or a Levite you have some notional conception of your line of ancestry. If you are a member of a Chinese patrilineage your genealogy likely can be traced at least hundreds of years, and possibly nearly one thousand years. Many European nations, in particular in the Nordic nations, have excellent church records which go back centuries.

High aristocratic elites are different in the scope of what we know. For most of history marriage for them was a matter of politics, not war, and the details of their lives were often recorded punctiliously. The births of royal children may have been attended by most of the court at some point to certify legitimacy. Some European lines have deep histories indeed. There are two direct male line descendants of Hugh Capet who reign today, Juan Carlos of Spain and Henri of Luxembourg. Hugh was a Robertian, a descendant of Robert of Hesbaye, who was a ruler of a region in modern Belgium. Robert of Hesbaye was derived from the Frankish elite, but the details seem to be unclear. But it seems then that Juan Carlos of Spain and Henri of Luxembourg should be of Robert of Hesbaye’s lineage, and so have a paternal line going back 1,200 years.

I began to think of this when a friend with a strong interest in genealogy pointed me to this short article, Genetic analysis of the presumptive blood from Louis XVI, king of France:

A text on a pyrographically decorated gourd dated to 1793 explains that it contains a handkerchief dipped with the blood of Louis XVI, king of France, after his execution. Biochemical analyses confirmed that the material contained within the gourd was blood. The mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) hypervariable region 1 (HVR1) and 2 (HVR2), the Y-chromosome STR profile, some autosomal STR markers and a SNP in HERC2 gene associated to blue eyes, were retrieved, and some results independently replicated in two different laboratories. The uncommon mtDNA sequence retrieved can be attributed to a N1b haplotype, while the novel Y-chromosome haplotype belongs to haplogroup G2a. The HERC2 gene showed that the subject analyzed was a heterozygote, which is compatible with a blue-eyed person, as king Louis XVI was. To confirm the identity of the subject, an analysis of the dried heart of his son, Louis XVII, could be undertaken.

Let’s assume that the results are of Louis XVI. My friend was very interested in the fact that Louis XVI’s uniparental lineages were atypical; the direct male and female lines. I don’t know much about this area, but his maternal lineage was an undocumented branch of N1b. More common among Central Eurasian peoples than Western Europeans. His paternal lineage, of more interest because of our genealogical depth in the form of the remaining Bourbons, was a variant of G2a, again, of a branch or type which does not exist in current databases, though more common in the east of Europe than in the west. These data as to the distinctiveness of Louis XVI’s uniparental lineages need to be framed in light of the recent history of attempting to divide the French populace by class and ancestry; some theorists modeled the French elite as descendants of German Franks, while the commoners were Gallo-Romans. This narrative has long been out of fashion, but the cosmopolitan nature of the high nobility of Europe does mean that they will be distinctive and atypical (ergo, the tension between the nationalist and aristocratic ethos).

Of more interest for me is the discussion about the genetics of eye color and Louis XVI:

The amplification of the HERC2 gene provides controversial evidence on the physical appearance of the subject studied. Of course, lack of the rs12913832G allele would immediately imply that the subject is not Louis XVI because the presence of this variant is required for blue eyes. However, while most of the rs12913832 heterozygotes have hazel, brown or black eye colour, still about 15.8% of them (in a total sample of 388) have blue eyes The fact that both his parents, the Dauphin Louis-Ferdinand and Marie-Josephe of Saxony had brown eyes, as shown in their respective portraits available, makes slightly more probable that Louis XVI was heterozygous at rs12913832, despite having blue eyes….

They moot the real possibility that this isn’t Louis XVI’s sample. But what about issues of paternity? The probability is low for elite lineages, especially royal ones, but certainly not zero. More importantly, surveying the Y chromosomal lineages of aristocratic families would be very informative in getting a better grasp of the nature of human fidelity at the commanding heights. From what I have seen in the literature all things being equal culturally it is in low status lineages that paternity uncertainty looms largest in a concrete manner. This is balanced against the fact that the consequences of paternity uncertainty are graver in high status lineages, since paternity and property have a stronger relevance in kin-groups which have substantial levels of intergenerational wealth transfer.

Balanced against this is the dynamic of skew toward elites in demographics. In pre-modern times it seems likely that the top half, and especially top ten percent, of a society would contribute more to the next generation. Because of social (primogeniture) and economic (Malthusian era growth rates) pressures many of these offsprings of elites would descend down the ladder of status, presumably taking up the slots of commoners who did not reproduce above replacement. Oliver Cromwell is a classic case of a man born into the lower gentry whose ancestors were far wealthier and illustrious.

We don’t have the records of low status people for most of history. Additionally, we are unlikely to have marked graves from which DNA can extracted. But sometimes getting half the picture can allow you to construct the whole. A better map of the genes of the European nobility, their patterns of relationship, as well as extractions from tombs and mausoleums, would give us a very fine-grained understanding of the demographic parameters of this population. Though I’m not sure that some of the European nobility would be totally open to finding out the facts, as opposed to the myths.

The Canadian government today declared bisphenol A, a chemical in plastics also known as BPA, to be toxic.

A scientific assessment of the impact of human and environmental exposure to bisphenol A has determined that this substance constitutes or may constitute a danger to human health and the environment [Official notice]

The chemical has been linked to heart disease, impotence, and diabetes, while animal and cell culture experiments have shown that it can mimic the female hormone estrogen. It is found in some plastic containers, and some food cans are lined with it.

While Canada is forging ahead, most other governments are dithering about whether or not the chemical poses a health threat.

How much exposure is too much, though? There is no clear answer. Two weeks ago, the European Food Safety Authority declared that BPA did not pose sufficient risk to stop using it in food containers. While tiny amounts can leach out into food, they cannot raise human exposure to unacceptably risky levels, the authority concluded after an assessment of existing scientific studies. [Nature]

The move will enable Canada to regulate the use and sale of products containing the chemical through regulations, instead of legislation, which will speed up the process of removing it from products or limiting its use. The government’s first goal is to set limits on the amount of BPA that can be released from factories that use the compound; George Enei of the government agency Environment Canada says there aren’t yet definite plans to ban it from food packaging.

“This is a step in a journey,” Mr. Enei said. “Once you’re on the list, it signals Canada will do something.” [The New York Times]

Canada was the first country to move to regulate BPA in 2008 by making it illegal in baby bottles, and is has forged ahead by listing it as a toxic chemical. In the United States, about half a dozen states have banned BPA in children’s products, but the federal government has declared that it isn’t a health hazard. Across the Atlantic, reactions have also been mixed. Despite the European Food Safety Authority’s declaration that BPA is safe, France has banned the chemical in baby bottles, and Denmark has issued a temporary ban of BPA.

Obviously BPA supporters aren’t happy with Canada’s decision.

“Environment Canada’s announcement is contrary to the weight of worldwide scientific evidence, unwarranted and will unnecessarily confuse and alarm the public,” Steven G. Hentges, who leads the polycarbonate and BPA group at the council, said in a statement. [The New York Times]

Related content:
80beats: Controversial Plastics Chemical Causes Problems in Monkey Brains
80beats: BPA-Heart Disease Link Confirmed, But Levels in People Have Declined
80beats: BPA Won’t Leave Public-Health Conversation—or Your Body
80beats: Study: The Chemical BPA, in High Doses, Causes Impotence
DISCOVER: The Dirty Truth About Plastic

Image: Flickr/soopahgrover

Edge is collaborating with the Serpentine Gallery in London on projects at the art/science interface. Last year they looked at equations; this year they’re looking at maps. It’s a playful and broad conception of what constitutes a “map”; you will see a few astrophysical examples in there.

Here’s an excerpt from a map of the emotions by Emanuel Derman, based on Spinoza’s Ethics. I zoomed in on the cluster centered around pain, because that’s what people will be drawn to first anyway.

When the universe was young, massive galaxies formed quickly but surprisingly peacefully. Researchers say they’ve found evidence that these galaxies didn’t grow by sucking up the remnant materials from supernovae or by violent collisions with other galaxies–instead they were fed by streams of cold gas that were funneled into their central star-forming region.

Astronomers using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile have observed three primeval galaxies with patches of star formation near their centers, away from the heavy elements that signal the remains of previous stars. The team found that these galaxies were sucking in cool hydrogen and helium from the space between galaxies as fuel. “It solves the problem of providing to the galaxies fuel to form their stars in a continuous way, without having to invoke violent mergers and galaxy interactions,” said study researcher Giovanni Cresci. [SPACE.com]

The study, published in Nature, describes three galaxies that formed just 2 billion years after the Big Bang–which created lots of hydrogen and helium to feed hungry, growing galaxies, but created few heavier elements. Those formed later in stars and supernovae.

Related Content:
80beats: Hubble Spies Baby Galaxies That Formed Just After the Big Bang
Bad Astronomy: Hubble Sees Ancient Galaxies Rejuvenating Themselves
Bad Astronomy: Hubble Digs Deep to See Baby Galaxies
DISCOVER: Scientists Are Ready to Build Some Galaxies
DISCOVER: Are Black Holes the Architects of the Universe?

Image: L. Calcada (ESO)

Bacteria wield all sorts of molecular weapons that allow them to infiltrate their hosts. But one microbe – Salmonella enterica – has a particularly devious trick. It uses weapons that arm themselves by manipulating the host’s own proteins. When this bacterium infects cells, it turns them into accomplices to their own downfall.

S.enterica causes a variety of different illnesses including food poisoning and typhoid fever. There are over 2,500 different varieties and Chittur Srikanth from Harvard Medical School has been studying one called Typhimurium, which infects mice. In the first moments of infection, Typhimurium injects a small arsenal of proteins into its victim, which subvert its structure, defences and communications.

One of these injected weapons is known appropriately enough as SipA, or Salmonella invasion protein A. It has two business ends, both of which pose a threat to a host cell. One of them causes a host protein called actin to clump together into long filaments. These act as guide ropes that help to draw Salmonella into the cell. The other end of SipA causes white blood cells to enter the lining of the intestines, leading to inflammation and diarrhoea – a symptom that allows Salmonella to spread from one individual to another.

The problem is that SipA – in its initial form – doesn’t do either job very well. The protein needs to be split in two so that each end can go about its business separately. To do that, it recruits one of its host’s own proteins – a molecular executioner called caspase-3.

Caspases cut up other proteins. Their hacking and slashing typically provides a way for damaged or unwanted cells to commit suicide, but they can also encourage cells to divide and trigger inflammation. Srikanth found that caspase-3 cuts SipA right down the middle, producing two proteins when once there was one.

This is an essential event. When Srikanth engineered a version of SipA without the amino acids that normally attract caspase-3, the protein couldn’t be cleaved in two. As a result, Salmonella’s invasion was cut short. Infected mice showed no signs of inflamed bowels or symptoms of food poisoning.

It might seem that Salmonella is unduly reliant on its host; after all, its weapon stays capped unless it gets a hand from caspase-3. But the bacterium takes a more active hand than that. Srikanth found that SipA actually activates caspase-3, producing more of the very protein that it needs to activate itself.

This trick isn’t limited to SipA. Other proteins that are injected by Salmonella, and those from other gut bacteria like Escherichia coli and Shigella flexneri, also carry targets for caspase-3. And the majority of these proteins, like SipA, have two functions, with different ends performing different jobs.

Srikanth thinks that the release of caspase-3 in the lining of the intestine may originally have evolved as a defence against invading bacteria, helping to kill or disarm the intruders. However, it seems that a whole host of bacteria have managed to subvert these defences, using the executioner protein to activate and double their own arsenal.

Reference: Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1194598

More on infectious bacteria:

• Why gonorrhoea is like a general sabotaging his own siege
• Disease by coincidence – why we’re caught in the crossfire of a hidden war
• When bacteria fight bacteria, we lose
• MRSA in pigs and pig farmers
• Super-bacteria eat antibiotics for breakfast

White noise doesn’t just drown out other noises, it drowns out taste too, says research in the appropriately named Journal of Food Quality and Preference. This could help explain why airplane food tastes so bland, why we eat more with the TV on, and why space tourists need such strong beer, the study’s first author told BBC News:

“There’s a general opinion that aeroplane foods aren’t fantastic,” said Andy Woods, a researcher from Unilever’s laboratories and the University of Manchester. “I’m sure airlines do their best – and given that, we wondered if there are other reasons why the food would not be so good. One thought was perhaps the background noise has some impact.”

To test this theory Woods had a group of taste testers eat a variety of foods with head phones on and piped in either white noise or no sounds. The white noise not only made the food less tasty, it also increased the perceived crunch of the food. The noise could be drawing attention away from savoring the food, Wood said to BBC News:

“The evidence points to this effect being down to where your attention lies — if the background noise is loud it might draw your attention to that, away from the food,” Dr Woods said.

While the experiment is interesting, it doesn’t completely explain why astronauts seem to lose their sense of taste while they’re in orbit. This phenomenon could be related to the noisiness of the space station, with averages of around 75 decibels in the work station, but it could also be a mysterious side effect of weightlessness.

The group is hoping to expand the understanding of how sound influences food experiences. Any breakthroughs they come up with could even be used to improve eating enjoyment, Woods told The Telegraph:

“In addition, just as enjoyable music can enhance the eating experience, if you dislike the background noise it can reduce your liking of that food. Based on these findings, a salad bar chain wanting to serve crunchy salads may find that they benefit from louder music, whereas a restaurant that serves salty food could consider turning the background music down to reduce the need for additional sodium in their food.”

If only they could find a sound that makes kids enjoy eating their vegetables.

Related content:
DISCOVER: Like Chips in the Night
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: But do vegetarians taste better?
Discoblog: Nano Snacks! Researchers Say Edible Nanostructures Taste Like Saltines
Discoblog: Space Tourists Will Get Their Own Special Space Beer
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Fruit flies have a taste for fizzy drinks

Image: Flickr/alistelis