I feel like I have successfully negotiated a Hollywood rite of passage. I was being interviewed on camera for a TV pilot, when I took off my microphone, tossed it aside, and stormed off. How awesome is that??

Not so awesome at all, actually, but it did happen. I much prefer a low-drama lifestyle, and it takes a certain kind of talent to get me that annoyed. Nothing to be proud of; I should have been more careful in learning what the show was about in the first place.

The backstory is that I was called on the phone by producers at a company I had never heard of, but that means nothing, as I haven’t heard of the vast majority of TV production companies. [Update: name of the company removed because I signed a non-disclosure agreement. They didn't complain, just being cautious.] They wanted to come to campus to interview me for a pilot they were producing. I’ve done the drill before, for respectable outlets like the History Channel, Science Channel, and National Geographic. It’s a couple of hours of work, no heavy lifting, and hopefully you get to explain some cool science that will be seen by a much larger audience than I could possibly reach by giving a thousand public lectures. And it’s fun — I get to be on TV, which growing up wasn’t the kind of thing I ever thought I’d get to do.

They explained that they wanted me to talk about quantum teleportation. I countered by mentioning that there were surely better experts that they could talk to. But they really just needed some background information about quantum mechanics and relativity, and were comforted by the fact I had appeared on camera before. And the producer emphasized that they knew perfectly well that teleportation wasn’t realistic right now, but thought it was interesting to speculate about what might ultimately be consistent with the laws of physics. So I agreed. There was a slight hint of sketchiness about the operation — they seemed to be unable to come to an agreement with Caltech in regards to consent forms, which National Geographic or the History Channel never had trouble with. But my antennae weren’t sensitive enough to set off any alarm bells.

So the taping was this afternoon, and it consisted of me chatting informally with the show’s two hosts, while taking a leisurely walk around Caltech’s quite lovely campus. But as soon as we started talking, things went rapidly downhill. The first question was what I thought about claims that people had actually built successful teleportation devices. When I expressed skepticism, one of the hosts challenged me by asking whether I would just be repeating the “party line” of the scientific establishment. I admitted that I probably would, as I think the party line is mostly right. And that we have very good reasons for thinking so.

They next asked whether it wasn’t possible that people had built teleporters by taking advantage of extra dimensions. I explained why this wasn’t possible — extra dimensions are things that physicists take very seriously, but if they are macroscopically accessible they would have shown up in experiments long ago. From there, the downhill spiral just continued. They asked whether I was familiar with the “black projects” conducted by the CIA and the military? What about eyewitness testimony of people who had been to Mars and back? Was it possible that ghosts and/or extraterrestrials used quantum mechanics to travel through walls?

It sounds even worse in retrospect than it did at the time, because they would intersperse the craziness with relatively straightforward questions about physics. But I think that even the straightforward questions were just an accident — they were trying to be goofy, but didn’t understand the difference between what is possible and what is just crazy. (”Do you think it’s possible to travel into the future at a faster rate than normal?”) The producer would occasionally interrupt with some sort of suggestion that they actually say something about quantum teleportation. “I don’t really know anything about that,” replied the host to which I was speaking.

Eventually one of the hosts mentioned psychic remote viewing, and smirked when I tried to explain that it’s easier to disbelieve a few eyewitness reports than to imagine a complete breakdown of the laws of physics. With that, after having resisted the temptation for a good fifteen minutes, I cut it off and walked away. The producers tried to get me to come back, but there was no way. I don’t know whether they will go ahead and use any of the footage from my interview; I don’t think I said anything I would later regret, but I did sign a consent form. Hopefully they will try to salvage a shred of their own respectability, and not use me on the show.

The problem for me wasn’t primarily the credulous attitude toward craziness — although there was that. The real problem was dishonesty. In their last-ditch effort to get me to come back, the producers tried to explain that they really were interested in quantum teleportation, and the hosts had simply wandered off-script. The show wouldn’t be biased in favor of the paranormal, they assured me. The problem is, nowhere in talking to me about the show was the word “paranormal” ever mentioned. I was given the impression that it was a straightforward science show, and that was simply untrue.

There is a perfectly reasonable debate to be had, concerning the extent to which respectable scientists should publicly engage with pseudoscientific craziness. Under the right circumstances I could conceivably be willing to participate in a show that discussed paranormal phenomena, as long as I could be convinced that it was done in a sensible way and my views would be fairly represented. This was nothing like that — all of my pre-interview communication with the producers was strictly about quantum mechanics and teleportation, with no mention of pseudoscience at all. Once the cameras started rolling, it was all ghosts and remote viewing. Completely unprofessional; hopefully next time I’ll be more careful.

Also, for future reference: no brown M&M’s in the green room!

If you look west after sunset, you’ll probably spot the fourth brightest object in the sky^*: Venus.

But as I looked west recently, I noticed two bright(ish) objects just above it. It didn’t take me long to figure out that they were the planets Saturn and Mars. Both looked red due to their low altitude above the horizon, and both were about the same brightness, so I wasn’t sure which was which. Happily, Sky and Telescope has a map (shown here) and a write-up of what’s what.

Interestingly, although Saturn is far larger than Mars, it’s much farther away, so they appear to be about the same brightness in the sky. All three of these planets will change their positions noticeably over the next few weeks, so you can watch as the dance of gravity morphs their configuration. Also, on August 12 and 13, the crescent Moon will slide past the trio, which should make for a very nice photo opportunity.

Not only that, but if you stay up late, you can catch the Perseid meteor shower as well. I’ll have more about that later. But until then, even people who go to bed early can spot and appreciate the view to the west.

Ecologists recently took to the highways of North Dakota on the hunt for genetically modified canola. Along 3,000 miles of interstate, state, and county roads, they found it: 86 percent of the 406 road-side plants they collected showed evidence of modification.

Sager announced these results at this week’s Ecological Society of America meeting.

The scientists behind the discovery say this highlights a lack of proper monitoring and control of GM crops in the United States…. “The extent of the escape is unprecedented,” says Cynthia Sagers, an ecologist at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, who led the research team that found the canola. [Nature]

Though Sager does not believe that the modified canola will overtake North Dakota, she thinks the study is important for understanding how and to what extent a genetically modified crop can spread.

“We found the highest densities of plants near agricultural fields and along major freeways…. But we were also finding plants in the middle of nowhere–and there’s a lot of nowhere in North Dakota.” [BBC]

Specifically, the team looked for traces of a genetic modification that makes the crop resistant to herbicides. There are two manufacturers of these modified plants: Roundup Ready crops have a bacterial gene that gives them resistance to the weed-killer Roundup (glyphosate), and Liberty Link crops are resistant to glufosinate. At least two of the plants Sager found showed cross-breeding between the two varieties.

It was during a pit stop in Cavalier County that the two had an idea. “We looked through the windshield and there were these beautiful yellow flowers blooming,” Sagers recalled. They recognized the plant as canola, and wondered if it was a genetically modified variety. The duo had test strips that would detect proteins present in genetically modified canola. They walked across the parking lot, documented the plant and then tested it. Sure enough, it was a genetically modified variety resistant to herbicides. [NPR]

Despite that large percentage of GM plants in Sager’s study, many ecologists agree that the canola itself–as a domesticated plant–should not cause concern. Sampling by the road means that the plants likely resulted from trucks spreading the seed; some samples came from herbicide-sprayed areas (meaning the modified percentage is higher); and most of the plants, given their usually pampered lives, aren’t likely to survive in competition with wild plants.

Norman Ellstrand, a professor of genetics at the University of California, Riverside says that GM corn and soybeans have not made strongholds off the farm, and notes that they’re grown more often than GM canola.

“They are super-domesticated and they just don’t really like to go wild.” [New York Times]

Though GM canola might appear next to roads, Linda Hall, a researcher at the University of Alberta in Canada, says she also believe the plant is unlikely to compete in more wild terrains.

“It’s pretty spoiled — it’s used to growing in well-fertilized, clean seedbeds without competition, so it does not do well if it is having to compete with other plants.” [NPR]

Related content:
80beats: Genetically Modified Salmon May Soon Land on Your Dinner Plate
80beats: Genetically Modified Tomatoes Can Last 45 Days on the Shelf
80beats: GM Corn & Organ Failure: Lots of Sensationalism, Few Fact
80beats: India Says No to Genetically Modified Eggplants
80beats: GM Cotton in China Drives Off One Pest, But Another Sneaks In

Image: flickr / Paraflyer

The Antennae Galaxies. Click for slightly larger. Credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/J.DePasquale; IR: NASA/JPL-Caltech; Optical: NASA/STScI

Here’s a Chandra release of the Antennae Galaxies. The compilation of the colliding galaxies is a collaborative effort by Chandra, Hubble and the Spitzer Space telescopes. I’ve included the press release below, but there is also a video on the Chandra site and you can access more and larger images including desktops so be sure to have a look.

The Chandra press release:

A beautiful new image of two colliding galaxies has been released by NASA’s Great Observatories. The Antennae galaxies, located about 62 million light years from Earth, are shown in this composite image from the Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue), the Hubble Space Telescope (gold), and the Spitzer Space Telescope (red).

The collision, which began more than 100 million years ago and is still occurring, has triggered the formation of millions of stars in clouds of dusts and gas in the galaxies. The most massive of these young stars have already sped through their evolution in a few million years and exploded as supernovas.

The X-ray image from Chandra shows huge clouds of hot, interstellar gas that have been injected with rich deposits of elements from supernova explosions. This enriched gas, which includes elements such as oxygen, iron, magnesium and silicon, will be incorporated into new generations of stars and planets. The bright, point-like sources in the image are produced by material falling onto black holes and neutron stars that are remnants of the massive stars. Some of these black holes may have masses that are almost one hundred times that of the Sun.

The Spitzer data show infrared light from warm dust clouds that have been heated by newborn stars, with the brightest clouds lying in the overlap region between the two galaxies. The Hubble data reveal old stars in red, filaments of dust in brown and star-forming regions in yellow and white. Many of the fainter objects in the optical image are clusters containing thousands of stars.

The Antennae galaxies take their name from the long antenna-like “arms,” seen in wide-angle views of the system. These features were produced by tidal forces generated in the collision.

Credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/J.DePasquale; IR: NASA/JPL-Caltech; Optical: NASA/STScI

If there’s a certain smell or sound that instantly brings back traumatic memories, it could be because those memories are stored—at least in part—in brain regions associated with the input of your senses, according to a study this week in Science.

Neuroscientist Benedetto Sacchetti went looking in rat brains for the neural connections between the senses and intense memories.

Each sense, including sound, smell and vision, has a primary and a secondary sensory cortex area in the brain. The primary cortex sends sensory information to the secondary cortex, which then connects to emotional and memory areas of the brain [Science News].

In the experiments, Sacchetti and colleagues first trained their test rats to connect the painful memory of an electric shock with a particular sight, sound, or smell. Once trained, the rats froze in fear upon hearing, seeing, or smelling the signal. Then the scientists damaged that secondary sensory cortex for the sense in question. Afterward the rats happily ignored the signal, their brains apparently no longer able to connect the sensation to the traumatic memory.

How, though, can we know that the rats became brave because they lost the particular connection between one sound and one memory?

In all these experiments, rats with lesions were still able to form new fear memories, suggesting that the sensory cortices are needed to store, but not create, emotional memories [LiveScience].

Neuroscientist Norman Weinberger countered that the study can’t say whether these secondary cortices are the sole areas connected to strong, emotional memories. Memory is difficult to restrain.

“What is the big story of the 21st century is that primary and even secondary cortices appear to be sites that are likely to store memories,” Weinberger says. “And there’s no part of the brain which is immune from memory storage of some kind” [Science News].

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Related Content:
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DISCOVER: The Brain: The Primitive, Complicated, Essential Emotion Called Fear

Image: flickr / perpetualplum

In my post below I refuted the contention that the Democrats are the party of the rich. As I noted there is some evidence that the super-rich may tilt Democrat. There are some economic and social sectors which lean Democratic because of their social liberalism, but there is no preponderance that I have seen in the data for the rich identified with that party. As I have observed, even in New York City, one of the citadels of cultural liberalism, the wealthy tend to be more Republican. The only precinct in Manhattan with more Republicans than Democrats is in the Upper East Side across from Central Park.

But there is more granular nuance here. In Andrew Gelman’s Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State he reports data which shows that though Democratic leaning states tend to be wealthier, on average within those states the wealthy tend to vote Republican. Another detail is that the correlation between income and voting Republican is weaker within Democratic leaning states, but very stark in Republican states. Even when you control for race in states like Mississippi this remains the case. Gelman’s data and analysis tends to rebut the argument in What’s the Matter with Kansas?.

And yet going back to the aggregate, there’s still more to be said. As noted in the comments there is actually data to suggest that the modal Republican is middle class, while Democrats have a more varied socioeconomic coalition. Quite often middle class Republicans tend to be above average in income and wealth, but are not necessarily college educated. By contrast, the lower classes lean strongly Democratic. The upper classes are more polarized. So one model using the aggregate Democrat and Republican coalitions is that the former are an alliance between the lower class, minorities, knowledge professionals and liberal wealthy, and the latter are a coalition between the middle class, the business class, and the conservative wealthy.

Below are some data from the GSS. The survey was taken in 2006, and had a variable which inquired into household wealth. I looked at voting for Bush, Republican identification, and liberal and conservative orientation, for whites. As one ascends education, intelligence, an wealth, the ideological landscape becomes more polarized, so I thought that showing “one half of the equation” was misleading in the last case. I added the tick-marks for confidence intervals since the sample sizes get small as you go up the class ladder.

Note: The previous post brought out a lot of empty and baseless (aside from one’s own self-worth) commentary in people, some of which I did not publish. I understand that political posts tend to bring the retard out in people, but try to keep it under control unless you want to waste time tapping away at a keyboard and not having anything to show for it. Having your comment published is not a right. Here’s a link to the GSS ANES browsers.

Variables:

Row – wealth(r:1-3″Less than $40 K”;4-5″$40 – $75 K”;5-6″$75 – $150 K”; 7″$150 – $250 K”;8″$250 – $500 K”;9″$500 – $ 1 million”;10-12″More than 1 million”)
Column – PRES04 partyid(r:0-2″Democrat”;3″Independent”;4-6″Republican”) polviews(r:1-3″Liberal”;4″Moderate”;5-7″Conservative”)
Select – race(1)

The Reinventing Media session at Techonomy this morning had a somewhat different tone than many of the others here: It was tinged with sadness. There is a lot of hurt in the media world today, a lot of pain. And…the Internet did it.

The traditional print media industry has been decimated by the growth of the web, which has undermined the business models of newspapers and magazines. And this is surely no unmitigated good, despite the massive amounts of information now freely available—because it means that despite the many advantages of online content, quality and professionalism often suffer.

As Scientific American VP and Publisher Bruce Brandfon put it at today’s session, “Information wants to be free, but it needs to be very expensive.” Otherwise, the best reporting, the best analyses, the journalistic endeavors that maintain the highest standards, may not be able to compete with less valuable but more sensationalized content. Information, Brandfon continued, “needs curators.” You can’t make it a full democracy, or you run the risk of being overwhelmed with misinformation and lowest-common-denominator fare.

To be sure, there are some major media innovators out there who have found ways to make it work in this upended landscape. People like Paul Steiger, editor in chief of Pro Publica, an online investigative reporting outlet that has managed to not only fund itself and thrive but break some very big stories—like this one about the state of California hiring nurses who’d already been sanctioned in other states. Pro Publica has alreadywon a Pulitzer prize for its work, partners regularly with traditional media organizations for its investigations, and has a healthy operating budget of more than $ 10 million per year.

And yet Steiger himself recognized the woes of the media industry…read on…

You know what’s cool? This:

I love this song. And yeah, that’s me doing the voiceover for it. You should buy Geo’s album "Trebuchet", too. It has that song and lots of other cool ones, too.

As the Large Hadron and the Tevatron Colliders compete to find the suspected mass-giving particle known as the Higgs boson, another competition has already begun: who should get credit when/if they find it? Six physicists came up with the theoretical mechanism to describe how the boson would work, but the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences can only split a Nobel Prize three ways.

Here are the contenders: Robert Brout and François Englert in Belgium, Peter Higgs in Scotland, and Tom Kibble in London with Gerald Guralnik and Carl R. Hagen in the United States. Each group published their papers at almost the same time (all in 1964) and devised their descriptions independently.

As Nature News reports, the debate arose after a web advertisement for a meeting last week on the Higgs mentioned only Brout, Englert, and Higgs. Though Kibble, Guralnik, and Hagen were last to publish and cited the other physicists’ papers, the three recently shared an American Physical Society award with the other trio in part for the describing the boson’s mass-giving technique: the so-called Englert-Brout-Higgs-Guralnik-Hagen-Kibble mechanism.

Given that the Nobel also can’t be awarded posthumously, that may leave something else for the six to consider, CERN physicist John Ellis said to Nature News:

“The first three in the Nobel queue probably feel quite relaxed—all they have to do is stay alive until the the particle is discovered…. The ones just behind them may understandably be quite nervous.”

Related content:
Discoblog: I Swear: Subatomic Particles Are Singing to Me!
Discoblog: World Science Festival: What if Physicists Don’t Find the Higgs Boson?
Discoblog: LHC Shut Down By Wayward Baguette, Dropped by Bird Saboteur
Discoblog: Will the LHC’s Future Cancel Out Its Past?
80beats: Fermilab Particle Physicists Wonder: Are There 5 Higgs Bosons?

Image:Wikimedia / Winners of the J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics (L to R Kibble, Guralnik, Hagen, Englert, and Brout — Higgs also won but not pictured)

About seven years ago, I reported regularly on the science of longevity, and the prospect of human life extension, for a site called Sage Crossroads. And then I stopped—pretty much dropping the topic for a while and going on to other things.

So when I attended the Techonomy session yesterday entitled “The Longevity Dividend,” it was a perfect chance to hear just how far scientists think their field has come since I last reported on it closely. And I have to say, I was struck by the difference in tone.

Seven years ago, scientists who study aging—so-called biogerontologists—already thought it was possible or even likely that at some point in the future, we would find a way to retard its rate in humans. After all, there were already numerous studies showing that genetic interventions could lengthen the lifespan of other species, particularly mice and roundworms. And caloric restriction—reducing dietary intake by about 1/3—had also been shown to extend lifespan in a number of animal species. (That’s why some humans themselves are already trying it.)

So there were reasons to think that human life extension was coming—and more specifically, that a means of slowing the rate of human aging would be possible. But most mainstream scientists weren’t so bullish then. So optimistic. In particular, they were very worried about giving false hope, and encouraging anti-aging quackery.

I detected a different tone yesterday….read on…

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Tired of the faceless urbanites crowding their Google Street Views, computer scientists aimed to remove the pedestrians entirely. The images above show they succeeded, mostly.

The software was developed by Arturo Flores of the University of California, San Diego; earlier this summer he unveiled (pdf) the proof-of-concept. It’s built off of a previous algorithm developed in 2005 that can pick out pedestrians in urban settings. The new program removes the identified pedestrian and covers the gap using pixels from slightly ahead and slightly behind what appears to be someone walking down the street. But it only works in cities (where tall buildings give a relatively flat backdrop), can create a human smear when the photographed person walked at the same speed as the Google camera, and, one could imagine, has trouble in huge crowds–where neighboring pixel-swapping might result in blurry Frankenhumans.

But otherwise, it leaves a non-distracting, relatively “ghost free” image, a university press release says, that will further protect pedestrian privacy. When it almost succeeds, it gives users a good laugh: a post-apocalyptic cityscape including disembodied feet, ownerless dogs, and floating umbrellas.

Related content:
Discoblog: Confused (and Injured) Pedestrian Sues Google Maps Over Bad Directions
Discoblog: And the Survey Says: Google Is Not Making You Stupid
Discoblog: My Name Is Topeka, Kansas, but You Can Call Me Google
Discoblog: Tweet Your Prayers, Google Your Ancient Texts

Images: Arturo Flores

Five years ago, there were six and a half million little brown bats in the Northeastern United States. In 2020, there may be next to none.

This week in Science, a study models the collapse in bat populations brought on by white-nose syndrome, which was first found in 2006 and is seemingly caused by a nasty fungus. Researchers think that bats with the affliction awaken too early from hibernation, messing up their natural cycles and draining their reserves of energy. A team led by Winifred Frick checked the math on bat population decline and found that they could be locally extinct in many parts of the United States by 2020.

The loss of all these bats would be bad for us, not just them, because they like to dine on pesky insects. So far, researchers have little idea how to cure diseased bats or stop the blight from spreading. The U.S. Forest Service last month proposed to close off abandoned mines in several states, hoping to protect the bats who live in them from the disease. For more about the bats, check out Ed Yong’s Not Exactly Rocket Science.

Become a fan of DISCOVER on Facebook.

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Image: Al Hicks, NY DEC

It was three years ago to the day that I wondered out loud whether scientists wore tattoos of their science. The result was a resounding yes, and that yes turned into the Science Tattoo Emporium. And today, I’m pleased to announce, the emporium is going to turn into a book.

The book, tentatively entitled Science Ink, will be published next year by Sterling. The images will be accompanied by some of my own reflections on the tattoos, in which I will unpack the inside jokes and strange histories of the science behind the pictures.

The ultimate purpose of the book, like the Emporium, will be to illustrate the passion that science can inspire. To that end, I also plan to donate a portion of the proceeds from the book to DonorsChoose, a great organization that funds science projects in the classroom.

If you have a tattoo that you’d like me to consider for inclusion for the book, please get in touch. I’ll send you the paperwork and instructions for submission of a book-ready image. I will also be getting directly in touch with people whose tattoos I have already posted here and which I’d like to include in Science Ink. We will need the image and the paperwork back by October 1, 2010.

(P.S.: And for those of you who hate tattoos, no matter how scientifically inspired, stay tuned. I’ll have news of a tattoo-free book in the not-too-distant future.)

Wet. Dry. Wet. Dry. You’d think the moon were a vacuum cleaner infomercial.

A series of studies in the last few years has raised our hopes that the moon is not completely dry—researchers have said that it’s still drier than the driest places on Earth, but some small amount of water ice is there. Then, this afternoon, along comes another study to reassert that the interior of the moon is drier than bone-dry.

For his paper in Science, Zachary Sharp peered into the lunar samples brought back to Earth by the Apollo missions. Where previous studies of those Apollo rocks suggested water ice was locked inside the minerals, Sharp’s assessment focuses on the chlorine in the sample because it could tell him about the moon’s history.

Most scientists think the moon was born when a huge object roaming the inner solar system — something about the size of Mars — smashed into the embryonic Earth. Debris from the collision coalesced to form the moon. As it cooled, an ocean of magma covering its surface began to crystallize. Sharp and his colleagues studied what happened to two isotopes of the element chlorine during that process [Science News].

The two isotopes are chlorine-35 and chlorine-37. What matters is the ratio between them. Here on Earth it’s pretty constant, varying by just about a tenth of a percent. On the moon, Sharp found, the ratio varies wildly—by as much as 25 times the variation seen on Earth.

Chlorine loves to bind to hydrogen, and because of this, you’d expect the chlorine isotope ratios to be pretty constant across the moon if it had been wet way back when.

“Knowing the chlorine content, we can back-calculate the amount of hydrogen,” Sharp said. “We found that the hydrogen content had to be really low, so essentially the moon was extremely dry relative to Earth” [Space.com].

So how do we get these conflicting studies about water on the moon? Sharp argues that they may not truly conflict. His study is about the history of moon—he says that the chlorine study shows it didn’t retain water after it formed. The water that other studies found on the surface may have gotten there through comets impacts. He says:

“There are two types of water on the moon.” The type most people hear about is the stuff hidden in dark craters near the lunar poles, which probably came from comet collisions. “That is completely different from what we’re talking about” [Discovery News].

Related Content:
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DISCOVER: The Moon: Cold, Wet, and Breathing
DISCOVER: Where Did the Moon Come From?

Image: NASA

Not Exactly Pocket Science is a set of shorter write-ups on new stories with links to more detailed takes. It is meant to complement the usual fare of detailed pieces that are typical for this blog.

Spongebob’s genome reveals the secrets of building an animal

Sponges are animals but, outside of children’s cartoons, they’re about as different from humans as you can imagine. These immobile creatures lie on the very earliest branch on the animal family tree. They have no tissues or organs – their bodies are made of just two layers of cells, twisted and folded into simple shapes. But despite this simplicity, the first complete sponge genome tells us a lot about what it takes to build an animal.

The genome was sequenced from an Australian species called Amphimedon queenslandica by a large team of scientists led by Mansi Strivastava from the University of California, Berkeley. It tells us that sponges share a ‘genetic toolkit’ with humans and all other animals. This includes 4,670 families of genes that are universal to all animals, 1,286 of which separate us from our closest single-celled relatives, the choanoflagellates. Within these families lie the keys to a multicellular existence.

This shared toolkit controls all the fundamental processes that allow individual cells to cooperate as part of a single creature, including how to divide, die, grow together, stick to one another, send signals to one another, take up different functions, and tell the difference between each other and outsiders. They also include many genes that are implicated in cancer, a disease where individual cells go rogue and multiply out of control at the expense of the collective. The presence of cancer-related genes in the sponge genome tells us that as long as cells have been cooperating within a single body, they have needed to guard against the threat of cancer.

Srivastava estimates that the foundations of multicellular life were laid between 600 and 800 million years ago. More than a quarter of the big genetic changes that separate humans from the single-celled choanoflagellates took place during this window, before sponges split off from the ancestors of all other animals. The last common ancestor of all animals emerged during this period and it was a creature of remarkable complexity – a multicellular species that could sense, react to and exploit its environment.

Read more from Adam Mann at Nature, Bob Holmes at New Scientist and an earlier post from me on how sponges provide clues to origin of nervous system

Reference: Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature09201; Image by Adamska et al

Holy extinction, Batman! One of America’s most common bats could be wiped out in 16 years by new disease

The little brown bat is one of the most common bats in North America but in 16 years, people on the East Coast will be lucky to see any. The bat is being massacred and the culprit is a new disease known as white-nose syndrome caused by the ominously named fungus Geomyces destructans. The fungus grows on the wings, ears and muzzles of hibernating bats, rousing them too early from their deep sleep, sapping their fat reserves and causing strange behaviour.

White-nose syndrome was first identified in a New York cave in February 2006, but it spreads fast. In the last four years, it has covered over 1200 km and contaminated wintering roosts throughout the north-eastern US and its neighbouring Canadian provinces. In infected areas, the fungus is slaughtering bats at a rate of around 45% a year. Cave floors are littered with carcasses.

Five years ago, the little brown bat was thriving, thanks to the installation of bat boxes, conservation efforts and a reduction in pesticide use. The eastern seaboard alone was home to 6.5 million of them. But all of that good is being undone by a single disease. Using a mathematical model, Winifred Frick from Boston University calculated a 99% chance that the species will become locally extinct within 16 years. Even if the current death rate slows to just 5% a year – a highly optimistic target– the population will still collapse to around 65,000 individuals. These last survivors would be just 1% of the previous total, with a 60% chance of dying off by the end of the century. At this stage, the question isn’t if the little brown bat will go locally extinct, but when.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. White-nose syndrome is spreading across North American and at least six other bat species are affected. These animals eat such a large volume of insects that their disappearance would have severe economic and ecological consequences. There’s a desperate need for more research to understand the disease, to keep a track of it, to find ways of fighting it, and to ensure that something like it doesn’t happen again. Frick thinks that white-nose syndrome spread so quickly with such devastating results that it must have been introduced from another part of the world, hitting species whose immune systems were totally unprepared for it. This problem of “pathogen pollution” is a neglected issue in conservation – perhaps the demise of the little brown bat will provide the impetus to take it seriously.

Read more from Brandon Keim at Wired and more from me on bats and how wind turbines burst their lungs

Reference: Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1188594

If the citation link isn’t working, read why here

I’m a Craig Ferguson man, truth be told, but I have to give Jimmy Fallon major props for devoting major time to Milky J this week.

C’mon, you remember Milky J: he’s the Hubble Gotchu guy. He was on Fallon’s show again this week, but this time got some bad news: Hubble will be replaced with the bigger James Webb Space Telescope.

What ensued was simply made of win:

Ha! That was awesome! All those people in the video are actual NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center employees (or contractors; hard to tell). NASA can’t buy this kind of publicity, but here it is, handed to them for free. And I love it! It’s funny and cool, sarcastic yet has this terrific undertone of sincerity. And Holy Haleakala, the science is accurate^*! I loved the part where the team shouts JWST specs at him.

And it doesn’t hurt that one of the pictures Milky J holds up at the beginning is of Supernova 1987A, which was the topic of my PhD research. Still, Hubble being replaced isn’t a bad thing; JWST will still return amazing images, and also be more sensitive than Hubble to boot. Hubble may gotchu, but JWST will hold you tight.

You can also read some cute behind the scenes notes on two blogs: Geeked on Goddard, and NASA Blueshift.

Does attractiveness in men provide clues to semen quality?

“The psychological mechanisms underlying attractiveness judgements in humans are thought to be evolved adaptations for finding a high quality mate. The phenotype-linked fertility hypothesis proposes that females obtain reliable information on male fertility from male expression of sexual traits. A previous study of Spanish men reported that facial attractiveness was positively associated with semen quality. We aimed to determine whether this effect was widespread by examining a large sample of Australian men. We also extended our study to determine whether cues to semen quality are provided by components of attractiveness: masculinity, averageness and symmetry. Each male participant was photographed and provided a semen sample that was analyzed for sperm morphology, motility and concentration. Two independent sets of women rated the male photographs for attractiveness, and three further sets of 12 women rated the photographs for masculinity, symmetry or averageness. We found no significant correlations between semen quality parameters and attractiveness or attractive traits. Although male physical attractiveness may signal aspects of mate quality, our results suggest that phenotype-linked cues to male fertility may not be general across human populations.”

Photo: flickr/Retinafunk

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: OMG! ur cell phone is mkng u impotent.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Pepsi is not a good method of birth control
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: [Insert oral sex joke here].

WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

I notice that Roger L. Simon has an uninformed post up, The Party of the Rich, where he says:

Back when I was a kid, we used to assume the Republicans were the party of the rich. It was a given — all those plutocrats with chauffeurs shuttling them between the penthouse in Sutton Place and the weekend manse in Southampton.

Of course that was pretty idiotic then (a Kennedy was in the White House), but it’s outright moronic now.

There are some isolated data that the super-rich may now be more favorable to Democrats than Republicans, but by and large the classes with capital remain Republican. I looked at the American National Election Studies data set for 2008. Since minorities voted overwhelmingly for Obama I limited the sample to whites. Then I broke it down by income and looked at who they voted for and which party they identified with. The data seem to indicate that Roger L. Simon should not be throwing around terms like “moronic,” as he lives in quite the glass house.

I assume at this point my liberal readers may wonder if there is a vast conservative media conspiracy to create a false model of reality. Perhaps. But I think there’s a less complicated answer: liberal social and economic elites are culturally much more prominent on a day to day level than conservative social and economic elites. By the former I mean the entertainment and media industries. So wealthy liberals may be outnumbered, but they can project their voices and attain greater visibility more easily because they have more friendly operators of the cultural megaphones. In contrast, socially liberal but broadly politically conservative plutocrats such as David Koch generally allow more folksy types such as Dick Armey to speak for them in public.

Also, there’s a weird dichotomy on the Right when it comes to their self-image, and the esteem which the rich and the not-so-rich are held. I attended a Cato Institute event in the early 2000s, and among economic conservatives there was a worry that the public did not understand the critical role that the “producers” played in our society. And yet by contrast there is also an element of the Right which has internalized an almost Marxist frame whereby the economic elites, the holders of capital, are delegitimized as sources of authority. Ergo, the social conservative folksy face of the American Right which takes pride in its petit-bourgeois base.

Note: My own personal sympathies lean with the Right. But I am also extremely turned off by the faux and authentic populism which is currently ascendant. A genuine conservatism accepts hierarchy, distinction of role, a certain authority given to elites and specialists. I understand why cultural conservatives feel that the elites and specialists (technocrats) can not be trusted, but it seems to have gone too far in rejecting the very concept and idea of elites and technical knowledge, welcoming a radical and revolutionary flattening of social orders.

Variables:

Row – v085195 v083097
Column – v083249(r:1-9″-$20 K”;10-14″$20-$40 K”;15-17″$40-$60 K”;18-20″$60-$100 K”;21-*”$100 K+”)
Select – v081102(1)

Dienekes has a post up where he highlights the fact that the recent paper on South Asian metabolic diseases has a figure which elucidates population structure within the region. Accounting for structure is important for genome-wide associations since you might get a spurious correlations if trait value/disease frequency is simply tracking cryptic population variation. Dienekes says:

The existence of two clusters is kind of obvious, while their interpretation is not as dots of the same color appear in both clusters: a placement of these individuals in a global context might have been useful here. Things are clearer at the top cluster which shows a clear gradient anchored by Punjabi Sikh and Hindu Tamils on either end.

Also of interest is the group of isolated Muslim/Christian individuals on the left which deviate strongly from the mainstream; these probably represent exogenous elements that don’t resembe the bulk of the Indian population.

The second issue is easily addressed. The Christian outliers are both give English as their native language. That suggests to me that they’re Anglo-Indian, a community of mixed South Asian and European origin. South Asian Muslims are overwhelmingly of indigenous origin. But, a minority of the Muslim elite are West Asian, or have substantial West Asian ancestry, as is evident by the fact that they look white. Benazir Bhutto’s mother was of Kurdish and Persian ethnic background (her family was from Esfahan in Iran). I’ve reedited the religious & linguistic PC plots to fit onto the screen.

So what’s going on with the cluster which extends along the second principal component? The first component is probably just a European/West Asian-South Asian axis of variation. But I don’t understand where the variation for the second is coming from. Observe that the one South Indian group, Tamil speakers, are not represented in the secondary cluster. The plot reminded me of something I saw last fall.

Below is figure S4 is from the supplements of Reconstructing Indian population history. I added some labels. The Indian cluster is tight when the genetic variation includes non-Indian groups. But, when you constrain the variation to Europeans and South Asians only, something strange happens:

The Gujarati sample is from Houston, and is from HapMap Phase 3. I have a suspicion that the secondary cluster among the Gujaratis here is of the same class of phenomenon as the secondary cluster in the first plot. The Anglo-Indians and West Asian Muslims serve as rough proxies for Europeans, and you have an expected European-South Asian axis. But you also have this strange orthogonal component. I had assumed that the plot from the Reich et al. paper was an anomaly, but I’m not so sure seeing the second paper.