The rust-colored flood that has been spreading across Hungary all week after an alumina plant accident on Monday is far from contained, and five deaths have been attributed to the wave of toxic sludge so far. Responders there say, however, that at least the worst has been avoided.

The blue Danube turned red?

After the spill began spreading, the concern that jumped off the page when you looked at a map was that the stuff would reach rivers that feed the Danube. Europe’s second-longest river (after the Volga in Russia) weaves its way past Hungary through Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, and on into the Black Sea.

Indeed, parts of the spill reached the Danube on Wednesday, but Hungarian responders say today that pH of the main river is just over 8, down from about 9 when the material first arrived. Neutral pH is 7, but a range of about 6.5 to 8.5 is considered a safe zone for consumption.

Hungarian disaster officials said alkaline levels in the Danube were normal after emergency crews poured plaster and acetic acid (vinegar) into rivers that flowed into it. “These data give us hope … and we have not experienced any damage on the main Danube so far,” Tibor Dobson, a Hungarian disaster spokesman, told Reuters. [The Guardian]

There were reports of dead fish in several of the smaller tributaries that feed into the Danube; in the small Marcal river, the first to be hit by the spill, all wildlife reportedly died. But officials are relieved that the much larger Danube doesn’t appear to be in serious danger. If the industrial waste that reaches the Danube is sufficiently neutralized and diluted, then the main worry is back in Hungary where the breadth of the red sludge remains, flooding the village of Kolontar. If weather turns warmer, the material could start to dry out and potentially get into the air, creating the danger of inhalation.

How toxic is this stuff?

The red sludge, which now reportedly covers an area of 16 square miles, is waste created by an industrial plant that processes bauxite (an ore made of several aluminum minerals) into alumina (or aluminum oxide—a molecule of two aluminum atoms and three oxygen atoms), which will later be refined into aluminum.

Much of the spill is iron oxide, which is why it has that rust color. The other ingredients, like calcium oxide and silicon dioxide, help to make the sludge itself highly basic, up to around 13 in pH. Hydrogeologist Paul Younger explains:

In the most concentrated areas, he says, it could be compared to products you would clean your kitchen with, causing dry or cracked skin, or — in cases of prolonged contact — it can “lift off the top layer of your skin.” Scores of people have already suffered burns in affected areas, with at least 120 receiving treatment. [BBC News]

So how much should we worry about it making people sick in the long term?

Dr John Hoskins, a consultant toxicologist, says that while the initial spill was quite dangerous, there should not be any long-term impact on human health as long as the waste is cleaned up. “It will be neutralised by nature, because of rain which will dilute it and because of the chances that it will come into contact with slightly acidic substances in soil… but that will take a little time,” he says. For humans, he says, “the danger would essentially be in ingestion, which is unlikely.” [BBC News]

That’s the official consensus at the moment. But Greenpeace scientists are on the ground in Hungary, and they say they’ve found “surprisingly high” levels of arsenic and mercury in the red muck.

Could it happen in the United States?

Probably not, the AP reports, because alumina plants here don’t store their waste as a liquid. The few such plants that operate in the United States dry the material before it goes into storage, leaving it in a consistency more like damp earth than water.

The three U.S. facilities are not required to “dry stack” the waste. But Sandra Bailey, environmental manager at the Sherwin Alumina Co. in Gregory, Texas, said dry waste is easier to handle and is less toxic. Most of the waste in Sherwin’s facility is 80 percent solid and strong enough for heavy equipment to ride on, she said. [AP]

Related Content:
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80beats: After a Massive Tennessee Ash Spill, Authorities Try to Assess the Damage
DISCOVER: Beautiful Pools of Pollution
DISCOVER: Man’s Greatest Crimes Against the Earth, in Pictures

Image: Google Maps

After almost ten years of diligent observations of the earliest light in the universe, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) fired its thrusters on September 8, and entered the world’s longest and most tedious holding pattern, circling the sun in a so-called graveyard orbit.

WMAP has been a triumph of observational cosmology. It has strengthened the case for cosmic acceleration, one of nature’s most mysterious phenomena; measured the composition of the universe, teaching us about dark matter and dark energy; observed the polarization signal, telling us about reionization; provided results consistent with an inflationary origin for the universe, while constraining and even ruling out some of the simplest models; and has left us with some intriguing open questions of its own. To those of us in the field, it seems like only yesterday that we were eagerly awaiting the first 3-year data release from WMAP. Now, the final data, collected on August 20, will form part of the complete 9-year dataset, capping a remarkable decade of cosmic discovery.

From a fundamental physics perspective, WMAP is a crucial component of increasingly accurate cosmological observations that challenge the standard model of particle physics. In accurately determining the dark matter abundance, it has specified even more precisely the requirements of the new particle physics required to account for that portion of the energy budget. If dark matter is made of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), for example, the range of properties they might have is more tightly constrained. In supporting the case for cosmic acceleration, it has sharpened the need for a fundamental explanation for the size of the cosmological constant and possibly for entirely new physics, such as dark energy or a modification of General Relativity. In providing a measurement of the baryon content of the universe in agreement with that required for successful primordial nucleosynthesis, it has further underscored the need for an explanation for the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the universe, some proposals for which will be tested at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). And in its precise measurements of the spectral index of the temperature fluctuations, it has constrained existing and newly-proposed models for the physics of the very early universe, requiring an almost scale-invariant spectrum, with specific small deviations.

We’re going to miss WMAP, but we’re not standing still – cosmologists are a very forward looking bunch for people whose lives revolve around what happened so far in the past. A host of new projects are coming, and in the microwave field the big one is the Planck satellite, already taking eagerly awaited data. So goodbye WMAP, and thanks! Now, what’s next? We’re hungry for more information!

If you are interested in human genomics and the types of papers I often review and discuss in this space, there’s a chapter of Vogel and Motulsky’s Human Genetics: Problems and Approaches you might find of interest. And, I just noticed that you can get it online (if you have academic access). It’s titled: Genetics and Genomics of Human Population Structure. Here’s the abstract:

Recent developments in sequencing technology have created a flood of new data on human genetic variation, and this data has yielded new insights into human population structure. Here we review what both early and more recent studies have taught us about human population structure and history. Early studies showed that most human genetic variation occurs within populations rather than between them, and that genetically related populations often cluster geographically. Recent studies based on much larger data sets have recapitulated these observations, but have also demonstrated that high-density genotyping allows individuals to be reliably assigned to their population of origin. In fact, for admixed individuals, even the ancestry of particular genomic regions can often be reliably inferred. Recent studies have also offered detailed information about the composition of specific populations from around the world, revealing how history has shaped their genetic makeup. We also briefly review quantitative models of human genetic history, including the role natural selection has played in shaping human genetic variation.

If you’re a “close reader” of the blog posts here you won’t see too much that’s new, but the authors of the chapter really tie many points of interest together well, and they bring a historical perspective to it, going back to The History and Geography of Human Genes. A worthwhile 25 pages if you’re interested in current developments in human genetics and genomics, but can’t follow what’s going on because of the lack of context or technical confusions.

Here’s a chart reproduced from The History and Geography of Human Genes:

And now a little less than 20 years later, a similar chart, but with fine-grained positioning of individuals instead of just relationships between populations:

This is an old article, reposted from the original WordPress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. I’m travelling around at the moment so the next few weeks will have some classic pieces and a few new ones I prepared earlier.

Among Jacky dragons, females are both hot and cool, while males are merely luke-warm. For this small Australian lizard, sex is a question of temperature. If its eggs are incubated at low temperatures (23-26ºC) or high ones (30-33ºC), they all hatch as females; anywhere in the middle, and both sexes are born.

This strategy – known as ‘temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD) – seems unusual to us, with our neat gender-assigning X and Y chromosomes, but it’s a fairly common one for reptiles. Crocodiles are all-male at high temperatures and all-female at low ones, while turtles flip the rules around and produce more males in cooler climes. Assigning gender based on temperature is not uncommon but it is nonetheless puzzling.

Gender seems like an incredibly fundamental physical trait to leave to something as variable as the temperature of your surroundings. How has such a system evolved? What possible benefits could a species receive by switching control of from chromosomes to the environment? Now, a thirty-year old explanation for this puzzling system has finally been confirmed.

The most widely accepted hypothesis was put forward by Eric Charnov and James Bull over thirty years ago. They suggested that TSD occurs when the temperature of the environment affects the success of males and females strongly but differently. Parents can then use local temperatures as a sort of crystal ball, producing more males in conditions that are suited to males, and more females in conditions where they have the edge.

The idea is sound, but testing it has been remarkably difficult. The ideal experiment would involve hatching both males and females at the entire range of incubation temperatures and comparing their success over the course of their lives. Obviously, the very nature of TSD rules out that approach; how do you hatch males at low temperatures if those same conditions, by definition, beget females?

If that weren’t enough, most species that use TSD are large and long-lived. Imagine following a turtle for its entire 60 year lifespan and you begin to see the problem. All that changed this decade when TSD was found in the small and short-lived Jacky dragon (Amphibolorus muricatus). With a lifespan of 3-4 years, here was an animal that could be reasonably studied in experimental conditions.

With one problem down, Daniel Warner and Rick Shine from the University of Sydney solved the other by using hormonal treatments to sunder the link between temperature and sex. Temperature may decide gender but it does so through hormones. The key event is the conversion of testosterone to oestradiol (a relation of oestrogen) by an enzyme called aromatase. This happens at low temperatures and tells developing dragons to become females.

Warner and Shine overrode this process with a chemical that blocks aromatase. With the enzyme disabled, the duo managed to hatch male babies at temperatures that are exclusively female. The hormonally nudged Jackies were physically similar to their male siblings who developed in the normal way; that was essential if they were going to be compared fairly. The duo raised the babies in enclosures that mimicked their natural environments, and waited.

After three consecutive breeding seasons, Warner and Shine found (as predicted) that males sired more offspring on average if they were hatched at an intermediate 27ºC, a normal temperature for them in natural conditions. Males hatched at temperatures that are usually the province of females produced almost three times fewer young. The reverse was true for females; they enjoyed greater reproductive triumphs if they were hatched at a cooler 23ºC or a warmer 33ºC.

Although these results don’t explain why males and females should fare better at different incubation temperatures, they do fully vindicate the Charnov-Bull model. Exactly as predicted, male Jacky dragons produce more young if they hatch at temperatures that usually produce males, and likewise for females.

Such careful fine-tuning has done the lizards well over the course of evolution but it may put them in danger as the globe continues to warm. Like crocodiles, turtles and other reptiles that use TSD, the Jacky dragon may become a casualty of climate change, as rising temperatures lead to an all-female population and no way of producing a new generation.

Reference: Warner, D.A., Shine, R. (2008). The adaptive significance of temperature-dependent sex determination in a reptile. Nature DOI: 10.1038/nature06519

More on sex determination:

• Every cell in a chicken has its own male or female identity
• How prehistoric sea monsters sorted males from females
• Skinks set their sex in three ways – genes, temperature and egg size
• When the heat is on, male dragons become females

Are hydrophobins and/or non-specific lipid transfer proteins responsible for gushing in beer? New hypotheses on the chemical nature of gushing inducing factors.

“Gushing of beer is characterised by the fact that immediately after opening a bottle a great number of fine bubbles are created throughout the volume of beer and ascend quickly under foam formation, which flows out of the bottle. This infuriating gushing phenomenon has been, and still is, a problem of world-wide importance to the brewing industry. It is generally assumed that the causes of malt-derived gushing are due to the use of “weathered” barley or wheat and the growth of moulds in the field, during storage and malting. We now develop a hypothesis connecting several lines of evidence from different laboratories. These results indicate that the fungal hydrophobins, hydrophobic components of conidiospores or aerial mycelia, are gushing-inducing factors. Furthermore, increased formation of ns-LTPs (non-specific lipid transfer proteins), synthesised in grains as response to fungal infection, and their modification during the brewing process may be responsible for malt-derived gushing.”

Photo: flickr/ToOb

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WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

While the temperature effects of climate change are expected to be less dramatic in the equatorial regions, the cold-blooded tropical animals that live there may be in for a dramatic shock.

A study published this week in Nature focused on these cold-blooded animals–including insects, amphibians, and lizards–whose body temperatures are not constant, but instead rise and fall with the temperature of their environment. The researchers found that these creatures show great increases in their metabolism from slight changes in temperature; the metabolic increases were on the order of twice that of warm-blooded animals.

“The assumption has been that effects on organisms will be biggest in the place where the temperature has changed the most,” [first author Michael] Dillon said. “The underlying assumption is that … no matter where you start, a change means the same thing. But with physiology, that’s rarely the case.” [Scientific American].

This means that though climate change will be more extreme in toward the Earth’s poles, the cold-blooded animals that live near the equator (where changes should be milder) may react more strongly to the changes.

The team found this correlation by looking at readouts from temperature records from 3,000 weather stations around the globe, which collected six readings a day between 1961 and 2009. They ran this temperature information through models to determine how the changes over the last 50 years has affected the metabolism of cold-blooded animals.

“If we just pay attention to temperature patterns, that leads us to think we can ignore the tropics, because temperature change hasn’t been very great there,” [Dillon] said. “But even though the temperature change has not been great, the effect on organisms may be really, really big.” [Scientific American].

The findings suggest that these tropical animals will feel the brunt of increased metabolism brought on by climate changes.

“Large effects of recent climate warming on metabolic rates are predicted for invertebrates, amphibians and reptiles in equatorial West Africa, the Caribbean and Central America, Ecuador, eastern equatorial Brazil and the Persian Gulf region,” the report says. [Montreal Gazette]

While the idea of having a higher metabolism isn’t considered bad for people looking to lose their wealth of stored energy (i.e. fat), the researchers are worried about how it might affect the the future of these species, some of which live in areas where food and water is limited.

Dillon speculates that sped-up ectotherms [cold-blooded animals] in the tropics might become more vulnerable to starvation if resources can’t keep pace, he speculates. “If you’re burning more energy, you need more energy,” Dillon says. Food webs may shift. Soil respiration may increase. Mosquitoes may breed faster. Also, in the tropics, Dillon says, “the potential for big impacts on a global scale is the highest there simply because the biodiversity is the highest.” [Science News]

Related content:
80beats: Extinct Goat Tried out Reptilian, Cold-Blooded Living (It Didn’t Work)
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Giant, fruit-eating monitor lizard discovered in the Philippines
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Climate change squeezes jumbo squid out of oxygen
Discoblog: S.O.S.: Global Warming Will Submerge My Country, President Says
DISCOVER: Molding the Metabolism
DISCOVER: Top 100 Stories of 2009 #97: Tropical Heat Speeds Up Evolution

Image: Flickr/Mr. Usaji

Plant genetically modified corn, help your neighbor? That’s the argument of a study out in Science today—corn modified to keep pests away creates a “halo effect” that also reduces crop damage at neighboring farms that don’t plant the pest-resistant variety.

Bill Hutchison of the University of Minnesota led the study, which surveyed the records going back to 1996 for Minnesota and four other Corn Belt states: Nebraska, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois. 1996 is the key year because that’s when farmers first planed Bt corn, a variety modified to produce a toxin that keeps away the European corn borer. As the name suggests, that insect is an invader from across the pond that likes to devour corn, and Hutchison and colleagues wanted to see how effectively Bt corn kept the pest at bay during the last decade and a half.

“We were surprised to find that a higher proportion of the total benefit is actually going to the non-Bt farmers,” says Hutchison. The reason for the conventional farmers’ windfall is tied up in the effectiveness of the transgenic crop. Not only does Bt maize suppress the corn-borer population in fields planted with the GM crop, it exerts a ‘halo effect’, lowering the pest population in conventional maize fields too. As a result, farmers planting non-GM crops benefit from fewer pests, but don’t have to pay the higher prices for the GM seeds. [Nature]

Why don’t the corn borers simply flock to the non-Bt fields and wreak havoc there? I called Hutchison, who explained: “The female moths can’t tell Bt corn from non-Bt corn” when they go to deposit their offspring. So, he says, imagine a section of land that’s 80 percent Bt. If the females moths distributed their young evenly across that territory, 80 percent would be in Bt corn, and they would die. “The same thing happens the next generation,” he says, which leads to an overall decline in borer population that benefits everyone. But because the non-Bt growers didn’t pay the premium for the modified seed, they received the greatest benefit.

[The scientists] valued the extra corn harvested because of the reduction in corn borer numbers and took into account the extra $1.7 billion farmers had paid for the GM seeds, equivalent to $10-20 per hectare. The total benefit was $6.8 billion but they found it was not evenly distributed: non-GM fields gained two-thirds of the total benefit, despite making up only one-third of the land. [The Guardian]

At the moment, 63 percent of U.S. corn is Bt; you can see the distribution in the map above. As for Hutchison’s example, he didn’t pluck the 80 percent figure out of nowhere—that’s been the highest percentage EPA has allowed farmers to plant because of worries that a greater percentage would lead to resistance in the borers.

The US Environmental Protection Agency has recently approved a “refuge in the bag” approach, in which a mix of 90% GM corn and 10% non-GM corn is sold. Previously farmers had to plant at least 20% non-GM corn. “As we transition to this, I do have concerns about long-term resistance management and sustainability of the technology,” Hutchison said. [The Guardian]

Related Content:
80beats: GM Corn & Organ Failure: Lots of Sensationalism, Few Facts
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80beats: Germany Joins the European Mutiny of Genetically Modified Crops
DISCOVER: Genetically Altered Corn tells how a corn not intended for humans got into the food supply

Image: Hutchison et. al

Craig Callender is a philosopher of science at UC San Diego, who has written a lot about the nature of time, including a fun illustrated book. He’s more than a bit skeptical of the multiverse idea, and somewhat contrarian about the low-entropy nature of the early universe: he thinks it’s just a fact we should observe and accept (”nomological”), rather than a feature that cries out for a better explanation.

Here we’re having a chat on the recently launched Philosophy TV, sort of Bloggingheads for philosophers. Craig’s head obviously looms much larger than mine, so I had to use my wiles to bob and weave, intellectually speaking.

Callender and Carroll from Philosophy TV on Vimeo.

For Day 4 of Book Week, I’m focusing on a unique read from artist Franke James entitled Bothered by My Green Conscience: How an SUV-driving, imported-strawberry-eating urban dweller can go green. This is no ordinary book. James uses colorful artwork and photography to convey her message and the result is an extremely successful convergence of images and ideas. In the author’s own words:

Bothered by My Green Conscience is the story of my true-life adventures in going green. It includes the story of us selling our only car (an SUV), winning approval from Toronto City Hall for the right to build a green driveway (and actually building it as a long weekend DIY project), rediscovering eccentric glamour in my own closet, understanding the real poop on social change, and also writing a visual letter to my future Grandkids in 2020, and wondering how they will judge us. The collection of five visual essays was published as a 160-page full color book by New Society Publishers in April 2009.

I really enjoyed flipping through this creative account of climate change and personal decisions. I’m not alone either: Bothered by My Green Conscience recently won the 2010 Green Book Festival Award for Graphic Novels. Visit Franke at her website here to see more of her artwork.

Drunk fights are a typical occurrence at some bars–but why does drinking make us more likely to fight? Kate Shaw over at Ars Technica gives us a good example of a typical confrontation:

If you’ve ever had one (or ten) too many drinks at a bar, you’re probably familiar with this scenario: a drunk guy stumbles past you, spills a beer all over you, and you get angry. You’re convinced he did it on purpose, and you start fuming.

New research from Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that this “thinking he did it on purpose” is because alcohol makes you likely to interpret someone’s actions as intentional rather than accidental. In a bar situation, this can translate to a conviction that an offending act was aimed specifically at you–great, so alcohol essentially brings out the paranoid narcissist in all of us.

The researchers studied a group of unwitting “taste testers” who were given either juice or juice with alcohol. Half of each group was told that they were imbibing the alcoholic drink, even if they weren’t (this enabled the researchers to separate the alcohol’s actual effects from the effects of expecting to be drunk).

After the “taste test” they were all asked to label a list of actions as deliberate or accidental. Each action fell into one of three categories: deliberate, accidental, and those that could have been interpreted as either (Ars Technica gives an example of an ambiguous action: “He deleted the email”). When compared to the sober participants, the drinkers (whether they knew they were drinking or not) were more likely to assume that the ambiguous actions were done deliberately.

The made man blog explains the researchers’ interpretation of why alcohol changes our intentionality bias:

It takes cognitive effort and control to overcome intentionality bias. Those are skills you lack when you’ve been boozing. Alcohol also is known to decrease reasoning skills and the ability to pick up on social cues. A drunken ass clown lacks the cognitive ability to correctly interpret an unintended slight, the reasoning ability to allow both parties [to] save face and misses the social cues exhibited by everyone around him. Add testosterone, and faces across America are punched every Saturday night.

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Image: iStockphoto

Its multicolored ovals have become some of the most distinguishable pictures in science. Its estimate of the age of the universe is the most accurate ever produced. Its science team ought to win the Nobel Prize for Physics, Nobel predictors at Thomson Reuters say. But now, after nine years in space, the accomplished Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) is headed for its retirement home.

The spinning WMAP satellite scanned the sky to measure tiny variations in the temperature of the cosmic microwave background radiation 380,000 years after the Big Bang. Scientists consider the CMB the first light from the young universe after matter and light could exist independently as the universe cooled. Only sensitive microwave space telescopes can detect the temperature fluctuations, which amount to just a millionth of a degree against an average backdrop of less than -450 degrees Fahrenheit. [Spaceflight Now]

By finding these tiny differences in energy, WMAP allowed scientists to calculate when the birth of the universe happened—13.75 billion years ago, plus or minus about 0.1 billion years (100 million years or so).

But WMAP didn’t stop there. Although scientists have hypothesized that the universe went through rapid inflation just after the Big Bang, WMAP has managed to find even more supporting evidence that this growth spurt did happen. Thanks to WMAP, we also know that a mysterious entity called dark energy fills 72 percent of the cosmos and dark matter makes up for around 23 percent. “Normal” baryonic matter makes up for a piddly 4.6 percent of the observable universe. [Discovery News]

The satellite launched in 2001. Now that its nine-year mission has ended, NASA moved it from its position at the L2 Lagrange point to a permanent parking orbit. The researchers behind WMAP will continue to analyze its data for two more years—when a mission has been so fruitful, you want to stay with it until the bitter end.

Says principal investigator Charles Bennett of WMAP’s legacy:

“It was almost miraculous,” Bennett said. “All of a sudden, in one fell swoop, we suddenly had all these numbers: the density of atoms, the density of dark energy, the age of the universe, when the first stars formed, the distance light has traveled to get to us…. It was just really stunning to suddenly have all this fall into place.” [Wired.com]

Related Content:
Bad Astronomy: New WMAP results: quantum fluctuations, galaxies, and the first stars
Cosmic Variance: WMAP 5-Year Results Released
DISCOVER: A Field Guide to the Invisible Universe
DISCOVER: The Fingerprint of Creation (From our wayback machine, a 1992 article about WMAP’s predecessor, COBE)

Image: NASA

Long a staple in  SciFi, terraforming is the hypothetical process by which the properties of another celestial body are changed, allowing it to support terrestrial plants and animals.  While terraforming isn’t within our current capabilities, it’s not as far off as you might think.

There are several good reasons for developing this technology; exploration, adventure, advancement, over-crowding on Earth, and survival.  Yes, survival.  Eventually the Earth will no longer be able to support life.  That’s a given.  Further down the line of the Sun’s lifespan, it will expand.  It might not completely engulf the Earth (the Earth will be pushed away some as the Sun expands), but it will certainly get too close for life.

More than likely, the Moon will be our first destination for colonization, but not for terraforming.  Not only is its mass too low to easily retain an atmosphere, it’s too close if we’re trying to buy some time to get away from the expanding Sun.  Still, we’ll need that moon colony to be able to launch manned missions to Mars that will also be transporting equipment.

Terraforming Mars - artistic impression - image by Doein Ballard

The mass of Mars, in the absence of plate tectonics, may also be too low to effectively hold a viable atmosphere (viable for us, that is).  It does look feasible to build up enough of an atmosphere that we could survive with a little help, like protected enclosures, breathing apparatuses, and protective clothing.  That’s not much, when you compare it to living inside sealed, pressurized domes, wearing pressurized suits, and having clothing that must withstand sub-Arctic temperatures.  This is “living on the summit of Mt. Everest”, compared to “living at the bottom of the ocean”.

Our first challenges with Mars will be (A) to build up the atmosphere, (B) keep the atmosphere from escaping into space, and (C) keeping the planet – or at least parts of it – warm.  We already know a low-mass planet with no plate tectonics can hold heat through greenhouse gas effects (Venus), but it’s extremely arid.  Some scientists think we could get around that problem by manipulating the orbit of a celestial body with an abundance of water to “join” Mars (i.e. crash Ceres into Mars).  I’m not kidding.

(Hmmmm. Maybe not.)

It just got so quiet out there I can hear crickets chirping.

Okay, not as flashy but much safer is the idea of artificially raising the temperature of the Martian South Pole a few degrees, which would cause the CO2 stored there as “dry ice” to sublimate, releasing CO2 into the atmosphere.  CO2 is a greenhouse gas.  This should raise the temperature enough to have areas of liquid water released from the permafrost below the surface.  Next, you introduce basic plant life like plankton, and critters which produce oxygen as a waste product of metabolism.  The beauty of this plan is it doesn’t take much for sublimation to occur; we see it all the time on Earth.  Think about when a pile of snow gets smaller and smaller, but isn’t melting.  Or when ice cubes in the freezer shrink over time.  That’s sublimation.  Matter goes from a solid to a gas without passing through a liquid form.

Once the process gets a toe-hold, there is much we can do to speed things along.  We could make Mars less “shiny” (reduce the albedo) by seeding it with lichens, algae, and a whole zoo full of cyanobacteria.  This would make it so the surface would retain more heat, and add a bit more oxygen to the mix.

..

..
While we’re on the path to having the ability to terraform Mars, there’s still the question of whether or not we have the right.  There are people who feel that we have no business spreading our microbes to any other environment, even ones we consider to currently be devoid of life.  That’s the school of thought that says humanity is an infectious disease to the rest of the solar system… and that’s a discussion I’ll save for another day.

Google announced this weekend that it has been driving automated cars around California’s roads, and that the vehicles have already logged about 140,000 miles. A fully automated car just finished a big trip–all the way from Google’s campus in Mountain View, California to Hollywood.

Larry and Sergey founded Google because they wanted to help solve really big problems using technology. And one of the big problems we’re working on today is car safety and efficiency. Our goal is to help prevent traffic accidents, free up people’s time and reduce carbon emissions by fundamentally changing car use. [Official Google Blog]

A Google car drives with the help of a variety of sensors–including cameras on the roof and in front, radars, and laser range finders–which build a detailed map of the car’s surroundings. This information is transmitted to the Google servers and processed to detect and react to any obstacles that get in the car’s way, mimicking the decisions a human driver would make.

In the official Google blog post about the announcement, Google said it believes automated cars could cut the number of deaths by traffic accidents by up to a half. The vehicles could also reduce car usage if more people pile into self-piloted shared cars, or what Google calls the “highway trains of tomorrow.”

Right now, the company doesn’t have a detailed plan for how to use the technology, it seems more focused on proving that it works. And while the cars’ technology is quite advanced, it will still be several years–possibly more than eight–before the cars could be commercially available. The big question looming over this computer-controlled software is safety.

And in the event of an accident, who would be liable — the person behind the wheel or the maker of the software? “The technology is ahead of the law in many areas,” said Bernard Lu, senior staff counsel for the California Department of Motor Vehicles. “If you look at the vehicle code, there are dozens of laws pertaining to the driver of a vehicle, and they all presume to have a human being operating the vehicle.” [The New York Times]

Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt hinted at the project in a speech at TechCrunch Disrupt, discussing the next wave of computing: teaching computers to do the things we can’t do well.

Schmidt noted that it’s ridiculous that humans and not computers drive cars. “Your car should drive itself. It just makes sense,” Schmidt said. “It’s a bug that cars were invented before computers,” Schmidt remarked. [TechCrunch]

The cars weren’t able to log all of those driving miles (1,000 of which were completely human-intervention free) without being spotted. The self-driven Priuses have been caught driving along California’s roads for over a year, but most people seemed to think they were upgraded versions of Google’s mapping cars.

Related content:
80beats: Location-Software Maker Sues Google, Saying It’s Being Evil (& Microsoft-like)
80beats: Scientists Use Google Earth to Spot a Meteor Crater in Egypt
Science Not Fiction: The Car of the Future Is Looking More Gadgetmobile Than KITT
Science Not Fiction: Knight Rider: The self-driving car
Discoblog: How to Build a Car for Blind Drivers: With Vibro-Gloves and Air Puffs

Image: Flickr/karlnorling

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Virgin Galactic has taken its suborbital spaceship, the VSS Enterprise, for its first spin. On Sunday, the Enterprise was carried to an altitude of 45,000 feet by a larger “mothership,” and was then successfully released for a long, slow glide back to the Mojave Air and Space Port. The solo test flight is a step towards the day when the Enterprise will carry not only test pilots but also six space tourists up to the edge of space, where they’ll experience a few precious moments of weightlessness and a killer view.

When it eventually enters service, Enterprise will be carried to its launch altitude by the “Eve” carrier plane before being released in mid-air. Enterprise will then ignite its single hybrid rocket engine to make the ascent to space. Although Eve and Enterprise have made several test flights together, Sunday was the first time the spaceplane had been released at altitude. [BBC News]

Hit the jump for more info and video footage of the historic flight.

This test flight was intended to test the mothership’s release mechanism and the Enterprise’s flight-worthiness. According to Richard Branson, the British billionaire behind the company, the test was a great success:

“This was one of the most exciting days in the whole history of Virgin. For the first time since we seriously began the project in 2004, I watched the world’s first manned commercial spaceship landing on the runway at Mojave Air and Space Port and it was a great moment.” [Virgin Galactic]

A seat on the Enterprise will cost $200,000, and apparently people are willing to pay up: Virgin Galactic has reportedly taken deposits from 370 customers thus far.

George Whitesides, until recently chief of staff at NASA, and now CEO of Virgin Galactic, says: “Our challenge going forward will be to complete our experimental program, obtain our Federal Aviation Administration licence and safely bring the system into service at Spaceport America in New Mexico.” On the ground, things are moving fast, too: an inauguration ceremony for the Spaceport America runway is due to be held on October 22. [New Scientist]

Related Content:
80beats: Gallery: Boeing Joins Start-up Companies in the Private Space Race
80beats: Russian Company Plans to Open Orbital Space Hotel in 2016
80beats: Virgin Galactic’s Spaceship-for-Tourists Soars in a Successful Test Flight
80beats: Virgin Galactic Unveils New Rocket for (Super-Rich) Space Tourists
80beats: Work Starts on Spaceport America, the Tourist’s Gateway to Space

Last week I posted a story about an experiment suggesting monkeys can recognize themselves in the mirror. One of the experts I contacted was Peter G. Roma, who was the lead author of a 2007 paper that failed to find evidence for this kind of self-recognition. Roma responded today with an interesting response, which I’m posting here, and at the end of the original post...

Although the video samples are provocative, I cannot agree with the conclusion (and title) of the paper.

The lack of social behaviors towards the mirror is irrelevant because the monkeys all had an extensive history with mirrors prior to the study, so there was no reason to expect social responses after years of habituation to reflective surfaces. To anthropomorphize, they may still think the monkey in the mirror is another animal, but over the years they’ve learned that he’s harmless.

The examples of putative genital viewing were not convincing either. The authors repeatedly asserted that the monkeys used the mirrors to view areas they could not see directly, but monkeys can see their genitals unaided, and they play with them all the time with or without mirrors! Even the video samples show the monkeys looking at their genitals directly then viewing the same area(s) in the mirror. This is why scientists do the mark test!

In my view, the most compelling evidence was the first video of the monkey touching the head implant while holding the mirror. There is no doubt that the monkeys could not see the implant without a reflective surface, but the key here is whether or not this self-examination behavior occurred more frequently in the presence of the mirror vs. without. The authors report increased incidence of touching “unseen” areas in the presence of the mirror (figure 2C), but these data include touching the cranial implant and the genitals. I suspect these data are artificially inflated by what the authors perceive as mirror-guided genital examination, which even in the video examples did not appear to be anything more than typical stereotyped “acrobatic” behaviors often seen in individually-housed rhesus monkeys. The authors provide no data on the frequency of just cranial implant touching with vs. without mirrors, and no visual evidence except for the single incident from the video. Why wouldn’t they report the number of implant explorations independently of the genital viewing?

My primary concern is that all monkeys failed the mark test, and the strongest apparent evidence of mirror self-recognition (MSR) was only seen in two monkeys following cranial surgery–a manipulation with strong tactile cues that could elicit exploration regardless of the mirror’s presence. Their argument rests largely on the assertion that the cranial implant is a “super mark” that somehow awakened a latent ability in the monkeys to self-recognize, but it’s unclear why the implant would be more visually salient than a brightly contrasting color marking on the face. The more parsimonious conclusion is that the tactile sensation of the implant was enough to elicit exploration, but even then, the authors provide no evidence that implant exploration occurred more frequently in the presence of the mirror vs. without.

If the authors’ hypothesis is true that a cranial implant serves as a “super mark,” then their procedures warrant replication, which frankly they should have done before making such a bold assertion. Currently within the Order Primates, the overwhelming preponderance of evidence still limits MSR and the fundamental cognitive precursor to a “sense of self” to the apes.

Samir Okasha is a philosopher of science and author of Evolution and the Levels of Selection. So his recent comment in Nature, Altruism researchers must cooperate, is informed by a scholarly background in these controversies. From what I can gather Okasha’s stance in this case is to “push back” on Nowak & Wilson in particular, who are the ones making positively audacious claims:

All this disagreement creates the impression of a field in massive disarray. In reality, many of the players involved are arguing at cross purposes. Nowak and his colleagues, for instance, have developed a mathematical model that they claim provides a more direct way to calculate the evolutionary dynamics of a social trait such as altruism…However, they overlook the fact that inclusive fitness theory explains what organisms are trying to maximize. It is not just a tool for calculating when a social trait will evolve.

Likewise, in arguing that ecological factors, rather than kinship, are key to the evolution of social-insect colonies, Wilson is imposing a false dichotomy…To fully understand how these colonies evolve, researchers need to consider ecological factors and relatedness. Whether they stress the importance of one over the other will depend on the question they are asking. For example, relatedness has proved crucial to understanding conflicts between the queen and her workers over the production of male versus female offspring in ants, bees and wasps. For questions about how tasks are allocated to the workers in an ant colony or why the size of colonies differs across species, ecological factors are probably more relevant.

As a “big picture” guy Okasha takes a step back, and compares evolutionary biology to physics (not favorably I might add):

Much of the current antagonism could easily be resolved — for example, by researchers situating their work clearly in relation to existing literature; using existing terminology, conceptual frameworks and taxonomic schemes unless there is good reason to invent new ones; and avoiding unjustified claims of novelty or of the superiority of one perspective over another.

It is strange that such basic good practice is being flouted. The existence of equivalent formulations of a theory, or of alternative modelling approaches, does not usually lead to rival camps in science. The Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formulations of classical mechanics, for example, or the wave and matrix formulations of quantum mechanics, tend to be useful for tackling different problems, and physicists switch freely between them.

History shows that, despite its enormous empirical success, evolutionary biology is peculiarly susceptible to controversy and infighting. This is particularly true of social evolution theory, in part because of its potential applications to human behaviour. In the 1970s and 1980s, for instance, left-wing scholars bitterly rejected biological explanations for phenomena such as religion and homosexuality, because they feared such explanations would be used to justify a continuation of existing inequalities.

When evolutionary biologists start to look like macroeconomists from the outside, it’s not a pretty picture.

Last month in Nature Reviews Genetics there was a paper, Measuring selection in contemporary human populations, which reviewed data from various surveys in an attempt to adduce the current trajectory of human evolution. The review didn’t find anything revolutionary, but it was interesting to see where we’re at. If you read this weblog you probably accept a priori that it’s highly unlikely that evolution “has stopped” because infant mortality has declined sharply across developed, and developing, nations. Evolution understood as change in gene frequencies will continue because there will be sample variance in the proportions of given alleles from generation to generation. But more interestingly adaptive evolution driven by change in mean values of heritable phenotypes through natural selection will also continue, assuming:

1) There is variance in reproductive fitness

2) That that variance is correlated with a phenotype

3) That those phenotypes are at all heritable. In other words, phenotypic variation tracks genotypic variation

Obviously there is variance in reproductive fitness. Additionally, most people have the intuition that particular traits are correlated with fecundity, whether it be social-cultural identities, or personality characteristics. The main issue is probably #3. It is a robust finding for example that in developed societies the religious tend to have more children than the irreligious. If there is an innate predisposition to religiosity, and there is some research which suggests modest heritability, then all things being equal the population would presumably be shifting toward greater innate predisposition toward religion as time passes. I do believe religiosity is heritable to some extent. More precisely I think there are particular psychological traits which make supernatural claims more plausible for some than others, and, those traits themselves are partially determined by biology. But obviously even if we think that religious inclination is partially heritable in a biological sense, it is also heritable in the familial sense of values passed from one generation to the next, and in a broader cultural context of norms imposed from on high. In other words, when it comes to these sorts of phenotypic analyses we shouldn’t get too carried away with clean genetic logics. In Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? Eric Kaufmann notes that it is in the most secular nations that the fertility gap between the religious and irreligious is greatest, and therefore selection for religiosity would be strongest in nations such as Sweden, not Saudi Arabia. But as a practical matter biologically driven shifts in trait value in this case pales in comparison to the effect of strong cultural norms for religiosity.

Below are two of the topline tables which show the traits which are currently subject to natural selection. A + sign indicates that there is natural selection for higher values of the trait, and a – sign the inverse. An s indicates stabilizing selection, which tells you that median values have higher fitnesses than the extremes. The number of stars is proportional to statistical significance.

Some of this is not surprising. The age of the onset of menarche has been dropping in much of the world. I suspect this is mostly due to better nutrition, but a consequence of this shift is earlier fertility for some females. The authors are nervous about the robust correlation of higher fertility with lower intelligence, but notice that the pattern for wealth and income is different and more complicated. The key is to look at education. Whether you believe intelligence exists or not in any substantive concrete sense, those who are more intelligent are more likely to have had more education, and there’s a rather common sense reason why investing in more schooling would reduce your fertility: you simply forgo some of your peak reproductive years, especially if you’re female. The higher you go up the educational ladder the stronger the anti-natalist cultural and practical pressures become (the latter is a heavier burden for females because of their biological centrality in child-bearing, but both males and females are subject to the former). As with religion even if the differences have no biological implication because you believe the correlations are spurious or reject the existence of the trait one presumes that parents and subcultures pass on values to offspring. If higher education has anti-natalist correlations we shouldn’t be surprised if subsequent generations turn away from higher education. Their parents were the ones who were more likely to avoid it.

We live in interesting times.

Looks like Dr. Daniel MacArthur & company went and did it, go get their genotypes, or browse them online. This should be interesting. Since Dr. MacArthur’s wife has agreed to be a participant in some ways Tobias MacArthur is also part of the project by implication. To some extent the same is true of the current or future children of all the participants. And you can work your way up and across the family trees as well. I’m 99.9% sure that this won’t really matter. I believe that by the time Tobias MacArthur is self-aware people won’t be so paranoid about genetic privacy. On the other hand I too have a raw 23andMe data file, and I haven’t posted it online, and I won’t just quite yet. This is a case where I’ll let others get on the elevator first to test it out.

We’ve just put up an in-studio (so to speak) edition of Point of Inquiry, which is a reprise of the “New Atheist/accommodationist” debate that took place Friday in Los Angeles at the 30th anniversary Council for Secular Humanism Conference. Here’s the show description:

Recently at the 30th anniversary conference of the Council for Secular Humanism in Los Angeles, leading science blogger PZ Myers and Point of Inquiry host Chris Mooney appeared together on a panel to discuss the questions, “How should secular humanists respond to science and religion? If we champion science, must we oppose faith? How best to approach flashpoints like evolution education?”

It’s a subject about which they are known to… er, differ.

The moderator was Jennifer Michael Hecht, the author of Doubt: A History. The next day, the three reprised their public debate for a special episode of Point of Inquiry, with Hecht sitting in as a guest host in Mooney’s stead.

This is the unedited cut of their three way conversation.

PZ Myers is a biologist at the University of Minnesota-Morris who, in addition to his duties as a teacher of biology and especially of development and evolution, likes to spend his spare time poking at the follies of creationists, Christians, crystal-gazers, Muslims, right-wing politicians, apologists for religion, and anyone who doesn’t appreciate how much the beauty of reality exceeds that of ignorant myth.

Jennifer Michael Hecht is the author of award-winning books of philosophy, history, and poetry, including: Doubt: A History (HarperCollins, 2003); The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism and Anthropology (Columbia University Press, 2003); and The Happiness Myth, (HarperCollins in 2007). Her work appears in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. Hecht earned her Ph.D. in History from Columbia University in 1995 and now teaches in the graduate writing program of The New School University.

Again, you can listen to the show here.

Why do I get the feeling this one will be popular?

With the big hullabaloo around The Social Network I’ve been reflecting a bit about my incorrect intuition since ~2008 that the Facebook bubble would burst at any moment. The bubble may still burst, or a new competitor may come out of the blue, or Google might actually release a comparable offering, but Facebook is still surfing on the crest of victory (which may be a sign that it has “peaked”). But along the way I stumbled onto this article about the marginalization of Digg:

According to Quantcast, an online audience measurement firm, Digg’s domestic traffic has dropped sharply in recent months, from 27.1 million unique users in April to 13.7 million in July. By contrast, Facebook had 145.2 million domestic users in June, according to comScore. While not giving specifics, Mr. Desai of Digg attributes the decline in domestic traffic to changes in Google’s search function that resulted in fewer Digg stories showing up in Google searches.

When the rate of change goes into negative territory in the USA you’re on the way to becoming Friendster (big in Asia) or Orkut (big in Brazil). Here’s the issue:

Digg executives say the redesign, which has been plagued by technical glitches, is less about limiting power users than it is a response to consumers’ desire for customized content. Keval Desai, vice president for product management at Digg, says that people surveyed by the company loved the site’s wisdom-of-crowds ethos but that they also said, “I want to add something curated from my own crowd.”

I appreciate the readers who submit the stories from this weblog to Reddit, but looking at the comments on the posts it is often shocking how lacking in intelligence or discernment most people on the internet are (or, perhaps they choose not to manifest intelligence and discernment on the internet). In contrast, the core cluster of blogs which I read, people who I allow on Google Reader to recommend links, etc., are narrowed to those who I judge to be intelligent, and whose discernment is aligned with my own.