We have a riddle postponement.

Marian may have some serious computer issues, she’s been plagued with them lately.  We will get the riddle in.

In all the solar system, in all the galaxy, in all the Universe, there is but one world we know for sure harbors life.

Home.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter took this picture in June 2010. From 373,000 km (231,000 miles) away, however, the evidence of life is scant. The image is gray scale, with no blue-green color to give away forests, oceans, carbon-based oxygen-breathing organisms. But we still know it’s there.

Click the image to bring it home, or download a reference image if you need a little help identifying locations. I will never leave this planet, and you probably won’t either, but our machines do. And a precious few of us humans do as well. Maybe, in just a decade or two, this view will be a common one for a lot more of us.

I like lists.  I especially like lists about space “mysteries”.  Of course, there are very few true mysteries remaining, and what many people think of as a “mystery” is really only something that sounds mysterious.

Keeping that in mind, I’d like you to consider these “bizarre” (not my word for it) things in space.  I would call them interesting… certainly not mysterious or bizarre.  Anyway, let me know your favorite.  These are in no particular order.

False Vacuum WikiUser Stannered All Rights Reserved

VACUUM ENERGY

This is the creation and destruction of energy in a vacuum… believed by some to be the force which is pushing the universe apart (at an accelerated rate).

Cloud Chamber of first Positron ever observed, Image Carl D. Anderson, American Physical Society

ANTI-MATTER

This is theoretical matter which carries an opposite electrical charge.  An electron, for example, carries a negative charge.  It’s “anti-matter” compliment, a positron, carries a positive electrical charge.  Unlike apocryphal sci-fi writing, it IS possible for matter and anti-matter to exist in the same universe.  It’s just rather impressive when the particles run across each other.

MINI BLACK HOLES

Cute little critters, mini black holes are believed to be left-overs from the Big Bang.  About the size of an atomic nucleus, these are believed to affect space time differently because of their close association with the fifth dimension.

COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND

Believed to be the best evidence so far for the Big Bang, the Cosmic Microwave Background (or CMB) is probably the most seriously strange thing on this list; mostly because it emanates from everywhere… all at once.

DARK MATTER

Whether or not it exists is still up for grabs.  We do know that there is not enough observable matter to hold the galaxies together.  Something else is going on with them, and the “discussion” gets heated pretty quickly.

NASA/ESA/JPL Formalhaut b

EXOPLANETS

Believe it or not, there are STILL people who don’t believe in exoplanets.

GALACTIC CANNIBALISM

Yes, children; we are going to run into Andromeda.  I don’t think you should stay up nights worrying about it, though.

QUASARS

Seriously interesting, quasars are the most luminous objects in the known universe.  Discovered in the late 1950′s, we’ve identified over 200,000 of them.  They emit unbelievable amounts of energy.  Wow.  

There you have it; my short list of interesting things in space.  Of course, you know my “long list” would fill whole books, so we won’t go there.  Let me know what you find interesting (doesn’t have to be on this list).  I know some of you are lit up by supernovae, and some by quarks.  Thermonuclear fission and exobiology get some of us going (yes… me).  I think that’s one thing that’s so completely cool about the sciences… you just never run out of things to talk about.  

One night every few years, this bat-pollinated cactus flower blossoms. Tonight in Austin, TX…

Exposure to parental verbal abuse is associated with increased gray matter volume in superior temporal gyrus.

“OBJECTIVE: Exposure to parental verbal aggression (PVA) during childhood increases risk for the development of psychopathology, particularly mood and anxiety disorders. Other forms of childhood abuse have been found to be associated with alterations in brain structure. The aim of this study was to ascertain whether exposure to PVA was associated with discernible effects on brain morphology… …RESULTS: Gray matter volume (GMV) was increased by 14.1% in the left superior temporal gyrus (STG, BA 22) (P=0.004, corrected cluster level). GMV in this cluster was associated most strongly with levels of maternal (ss=0.544, P<0.0001) and paternal (ss=0.300, P<0.02) verbal aggression and inversely associated with parental education (ss=-0.577, P<0.0001). CONCLUSION: Previous studies have demonstrated an increase in STG GMV in children with abuse histories, and found a reduction in fractional anisotropy in the arcuate fasciculus connecting Wernicke’s and frontal areas in young adults exposed to PVA. These findings and the present results suggest that the development of auditory association cortex involved in language processing may be affected by exposure to early stress and/or emotionally abusive language.”

Thanks to Robert for today’s ROFL!

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WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

Is the taboo against incest really just a psychological device to keep us from people we subconsciously find attractive? Could be, since apparently, these hotties are our parents, and even ourselves, according to research published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Studies have shown that people are more turned on by photographs of faces morphed with their own or a parent’s. More recently, when subjects were subliminally primed with a photos of a parent, they found the subsequent photos of faces more attractive than photos when they weren’t primed. Subjects also found photos morphed with their own faces more attractive than others. But if they were told that a morphed face contained their own image, they ranked that one as less attractive than others. (Wouldn’t want to look narcissistic, would they?)

Wired explains:

“All three experiments support the Freudian idea that we have subconscious mechanisms that make us attracted to features that remind us of our own, and that cultural taboos against incest exist to override that primitive drive….“People appear to be drawn to others who resemble their kin or themselves,” said [lead author] R. Chris Fraley. “It is possible, therefore, as Freud suggested, that incest taboos exist to counter this primitive tendency.”

Of course, a theory such as this one is basically impossible to prove or disprove. Still, it’s food for thought, although it might not be the best topic to bring up at your next family meal.

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Image: flickr / thecameo

A new device may one day save those with diabetes from the frequent finger-pricking and cumbersome external monitors required to check glucose levels–by instead keeping tabs from inside their torsos. In a study published online today in Science Translational Medicine, researchers report that an implantable glucose sensor has worked in pigs. Ultimately, clinical trials and FDA approval will determine if the device holds any promise for humans, but researchers say this animal test is an important first step.

“You can run the device for a year or more with it constantly working, and recording glucose quite satisfactorily. Now, we are focused on getting the human clinical trials going. We hope to begin the first human trial within in a few months,” said [lead author, David Gough.] “If all goes well with the human clinical trials, we anticipate that in several years, this device could be purchased under prescription from a physician,” said Gough.[University of California - San Diego]

As Popular Science reports, the device is “just a bit smaller than a Double-Stuf Oreo”–around 1.5 inches wide and half an inch thick. Gough and colleagues implanted the device in two pigs: one for 222 and and another for 520 days. It works by monitoring oxygen consumed in a chemical reaction with the enzyme glucose oxidase–the amount of oxygen consumed is proportional to the amount of glucose in the user’s blood. Though some already use similar sensors, none have lasted this long.

The authors say that short-term glucose sensors already exist, but they need to be replaced every 3-7 days and haven’t been approved by the Food and Drug Administration as a “primary standard for glucose measurement”.[Nature]

The device can make up for variations caused by exercise and surrounding scar tissue doesn’t seem to affect its readings. It relays glucose levels wirelessly to a data recorder about the size of a cellphone.

“Continuous glucose monitors are very helpful, but the key thing is that you have to wear them, and that’s a big challenge for many people,” says Aaron Kowalski, research director for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation’s [a co-sponsor of the study] artificial pancreas project. He notes that, because current devices are still slightly conspicuous and require vigilance, teenagers and young adults are less likely to wear them. “So the idea of having a one-year sensor that is implanted is very, very appealing” [Popular Science].

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Image: C. BICKEL/SCIENCE TRANSLATIONAL MEDICINE

The Australian Vaccination Network, an antivax organization fronted by Meryl Dorey, has long been an antiscience group devoted to spreading any kind of nonsensical rhetoric they can. The good news? Now they’re being called out on it.

As The Sceptic’s Book of Poo-Poo extensively documents, the media used to be pretty easy on the AVN, but now are routinely pointing out that they are antivax, and one has even highlighted some of Dorey’s outrageous and fallacious claims. This all comes on the heels of the New South Wales Health Care Complaints Commission concluding that the AVN is in fact and in deed antivax, and needs to have disclaimers on their site — a finding Dorey has ignored.

The AVN has been the loudest of the antivaxxers in Australia, a country that has seen a rise in many preventable diseases, including pertussis, which has claimed the lives of several infants.

This is not a free speech issue, and this is not an issue where two sides need equal and balanced discussion. In this case, the AVN and Meryl Dorey are wrong, wrong, wrong, and what they are preaching is dangerous and, in fact, can be deadly. As I have said many times, vaccines are one of the greatest medical triumphs in history, saving literally hundreds of millions of lives.

The antivaxxers, on the other hand, only have spin, distortion, and scare tactics… which, sadly, can be effective with people. I am very glad the media have finally figured out Dorey, and are vocal about it.

Now if we can just get them to do the same with Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carrey, Kevin Trudeau, Andrew Wakefield, purveyors of homeopathy…

And remember: it’s not just Australia, and this isn’t happening to poorly educated people in rural areas. Whooping cough is making a comeback in Marin County, California, home of some of the wealthiest and best-educated people in the country. These diseases are coming back because vaccine rates are low. Go to your doctor and get the real info, and if they recommend getting vaccinated, do it.

Tip o’ the syringe to my brother Sid for the link to the MSNBC video.

The 2000s, the “aughts”—whatever you want to call the first decade of the 21st century, you can also call it the warmest 10 years on record. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration just released its annual “State of the Climate” report, and after sampling 37 climate indicators including the biggies like sea surface temperature, glacier cover, and sea level, they came to that conclusion.

The NOAA report—published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society—is different from other climate publications, because it’s based on observed data, not computer models, making it the “climate system’s annual scorecard,” the authors wrote… “It’s telling us what’s going on in the real world, rather than the imaginary world,” said Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the Boulder, Colorado-based National Center for Atmospheric Research [National Geographic].

While one climate group trumpets its mountain of climate data, the scientists at the University of East Anglia are just climbing out from the scandal that broke out over theirs. This month another investigation cleared the Climate Research Unit of scientific misconduct or dishonesty, without condoning the emails’ tone or the unit’s handling of the controversy.

To try to improve its bruised public image, and appease climate skeptics’ calls to see the data, the university is working on way to get the unit’s data online and openly accessible.

It will not be as simple as putting the numbers online, as the data sets are frequently updated, and the steps leading to updates will also be made clear [New Scientist].

But, in a Q&A with New Scientist, former CRU director Phil Jones and East Anglia’s Trevor Davies argue that they shouldn’t have to bend over backward to all the freedom of information requests made for their data or correspondences. Says Davies:

The FOI act is clearly laudable. But we also believe there is an argument for confidentiality. The trouble is, that is interpreted by some as being somehow sinister, when it clearly is not in the vast majority of cases.

US law accepts that emails between colleagues when they’re working on a paper and around peer review should not be disclosable. That came about because of what was described as a potentially chilling effect on research if every single email exchange was released [New Scientist].

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

When you hear mention of BPA, or bisphenol-A, plastic bottles and food containers likely come to mind. Now, a report presented by activists at the Environmental Working Group says the chemical is also in some paper store receipts.

In the study, which has not been peer reviewed, the environmental group looked for BPA in 36 sales receipts. They found that about forty percent used thermal paper (which has a chemical coating that changes colors when heated) that contained 0.8 to nearly 3 percent pure BPA by weight, 250 to 1,000 times greater than the amount of BPA typically found in a can of food or a can of baby formula. Other research, their report says, shows that BPA can transfer from receipts to a person’s skin, but how much BPA transfers or if it penetrates into the bloodstream remains uncertain. A chemical-industry trade group says the amount transferred is low:

“Available data suggests that BPA is not readily absorbed through the skin,” a spokeswoman from [The American Chemistry Council] said. “Biomonitoring data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control shows that exposure to BPA from all sources, which would include typical exposure from receipts, is extremely low.”[Washington Post]

Still, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has initiated a program to determine alternatives to using the chemical in thermal paper, the group’s report says. And those alternatives shouldn’t be hard to find, says the environmental group.

“Since 60 percent of the receipts EWG tested did not contain BPA, we know there is an easy fix for retailers who still use paper containing the chemical,” Environmental Working Group senior scientist Dr. Anila Jacob told AOL News.[Time]

BPA, an estrogen-mimicking chemical used in manufacturing plastics, causes concern in part because it led to reproductive problems in animal studies. Research has shown that most people carry traces of the chemical: A study conducted from 2003 to 2004 by researchers at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention found (pdf) it in urine samples of 93 percent of 2,517 Americans tested. Still, BPA’s links to human health problems and the chemical’s leading source remain hard to confirm.

In animals, fetal exposures to BPA can be especially risky, sometimes fostering brain, behavioral or reproductive problems. Canada and some states are moving to ban polycarbonate plastic in baby bottles for that reason. And heart data suggest that even adult exposures to BPA might cause harm… A vexing question has been where people are acquiring the BPA that taints nearly everyone’s body. Last year, green chemist John Warner argued that his data suggested store receipts could be a — if not the — leading source. [Science News]

Charts including the locations, retailers, and amounts of BPA represented in the study are available here.

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Image: flickr /Dan4th

Sure, public transportation is cheaper, better for the environment, and conducive to livable cities. But today we’ll celebrate another of its fabulous features: It can be visually awesome. Case in point: A visualization of the movement of the San Francisco Municipal Railway, also known as Muni. The video is based on June 2010 data harvested from Nextbus, which uses GPS and software to predict and follow vehicles such as shuttles and buses.

Via sfist:

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Jonah Lehrer has a post up, How Preschool Changes the Brain over at Frontal Cortex. He reports on a paper, Investing in our young people, which has been around for about 5 years. The top line of it is this, an investment in a $2,500/year (inflation adjusted) pre-school program in the early 1960s seems to have been effective in improving the life outcomes of at-risk low SES young black Americans tracked over their lives up to the age of 40. Their measured I.Q.s were not initially high, 85-75, 15th to the 5th percentile (though the median black American IQ is ~85, so not so low within ethnic group). They did gain an initial I.Q. boost, but like most of these programs that boost disappeared over time. But in terms of their non-cognitive skills there remained an appreciable effect which impact their life outcomes. What were these non-cognitive skills? To me they resemble classical bourgeois values rooted in low time preference. Willing to be a “grind,” work hard and forgo short-term pleasures and not cave in to impulses with short-term gains and long-term costs.

Here’s a figure from the paper which I’ve reedited with labels:

Intuitively we understand this. Through experience we know of this. There are individuals with high intellectual aptitudes who lack self-control. Who do not succeed in life because of poor life choices. There are individuals with mediocre intellectual aptitudes who achieve a certain amount of comfort and prestige in their life because of their rock solid focus on their goals. By analogy an old under-powered computer with Ubuntu installed on it running Open Office will still perform at a higher level in achieving productivity goals than a high-powered computer which is loaded with Windows riddled with spyware and mostly running games which require a lot of computational muscle power beyond the specs of the box.

My main question is one of interpretation: is the change in non-cognitive skill portfolio due to intervention at a “critical period” in a neurobiological sense? The authors make explicit analogy to language. If children are exposed to a language before the age of 12 they generally can learn and speak it without an accent with marginal effort. Severely abused, or in rarer cases “feral children,” who are not exposed to language at all in their formative years, may remain unable to speak fluently in any language for the rest of their years after recontact with mainstream society. This is likely a function of the biological aspect of language acquisition and learning. Or at least that is the contemporary consensus.

Does this apply to non-cognitive skills? I am moderately skeptical, though my attitude here is provisional at best. Through the pre-prints the authors take a methodological individualistic perspective. Individuals invest in their skills, and the earlier they invest in their skills the more positive feedback loops can emerge so that their skills can mature, extend and sharpen. There’s clearly something to this. But the focus on family environment and such in the paper makes me a touch skeptical. There is a large behavior genetic literature which suggests that family environment, “shared environment,” is not very predictive of long term outcomes. Rather, “non-shared environment” explained about 1/2 of the outcomes for many behavioral traits (the balance is genetic variation).

In The Nurture Assumption Judith Rich Harris argued that the non-shared environment really referred to peer groups. Again, the analogy to language is illustrative. Children do not speak with the accent of their parents, they speak with the accent of their peer groups. There is an exception to this: autistic children (or, children who consciously want to have a particular affect). Though I was not explicit, this is the sort of dynamic I was indicating when I suggested that culture matters in saving. Different cultures have different norms, values, and frameworks in which you can express your personality predispositions. In genetic terminology I’m talking about a norm of reaction.

Quickly skimming through the original paper which Jonah Lehrer’s post was based on (and skipping over the guts of the economic modeling) I was unclear if there was a long-term peer group effect, as they didn’t seem to explore this possibility. Perhaps instead of a critical period in a neurobiological sense, what we’re seeing here is the emergence of specific peer groups which reinforce and buffer individuals in decision making and goal setting? Perhaps the original intervention resulted in the emergence of a new subculture within the low SES black community of Ypsilanti, Michigan?

Life outcomes can vary a great deal based simply on social norms.

In terms of the bottom line this may not change the policy conclusion that much. The operational outcome of a given policy may be the same even if the means by which the outcomes are realized differ. That being said, I probably does matter on the margins if the effect is due to individual level biological changes vs. group level norm shifts when it comes to details of policy formation.

Image Credit: CDC

As I wrote about recently, I have teamed up with Skepchick Surly Amy to raise money for the American Cancer Society: she has created 200 lovely hand-made ceramic Bad Astronomy pendant necklaces, and for each one she sells for $20 she’s donating $10 to the ACS. Each one is different, so check them all out!

Over half the necklaces have been sold, but there are still quite a few left. Hurry and buy one (or more) soon; the total raised will be announced at the star party at Dragon*Con this year, September 2!

Find out more at Amy’s Skepchick post, which has more pictures, including one cute one of how one necklace is keeping a couple together, despite their reading material.

The Earth’s oceans are mysterious and largely unexplored. Many of their inhabitants are familiar to us but their whereabouts and numbers are far less clear. This is starting to change. In two new studies, Boris Worm from Dalhousie University has revealed an unprecedentedly detailed portrait of the planet’s marine life, from tiny plankton to mighty whales. And with that knowledge comes concern, for neither study paints an optimistic picture about the fate of tomorrow’s seas, as changing climate slowly raises their temperature.

Graduate student Daniel Boyce focused on some of oceans’ smallest but most important denizens – the phytoplankton. These tiny creatures are the basis of marine food webs, the foundations upon which these watery ecosystems are built. They produce around half of the Earth’s organic matter and much of its oxygen. And they are disappearing. With a set of data that stretches back 100 years, Boyce found that phytoplankton numbers have fallen by around 1% per year over the last century as the oceans have become warmer, and if anything, their decline is getting faster. Our blue planet is becoming less green with every year.

Meanwhile, post-doc Derek Tittensor has taken a broader view, looking at the worldwide distributions of over 11,500 seagoing species in 13 groups, from mangroves and seagrasses, to sharks, squids, and corals. His super-census reveals three general trends – coastal species are concentrated around the western Pacific, while ocean-going ones are mostly found at temperate latitudes, in two wide bands on either side of the equator. And the only thing that affected the distribution of all of these groups was temperature.

Together, the results from the two studies hammer home a familiar message – warmer oceans will be very different places. Rising sea temperatures could “rearrange the global distribution of life in the ocean” and destabilise their food webs at their very root. None of this knowledge was easily won – it’s the result of decades of monitoring and data collection, resulting in millions of measurements.

Boyce’s study, for example, really began in 1865, when an Italian priest and astronomer called Father Pietro Angelo Secchi invented a device for measuring water clarity. His “Secchi disk” is fantastically simple – it’s a black-and-white circle that is lowered until the observer can’t see it any more. This depth reveals how transparent the water is, which is directly related to how much phytoplankton it contains. This simple method has been used since 1899. Boyce combined it with measurements of the pigment chlorophyll taken from research vessels, and satellite data from the last decade.

Boyce’s data revealed a very disturbing trend. Phytoplankton numbers have fallen across the world over the last century, particularly towards the poles and in the open oceans. The decline has accelerated in some places, and total numbers have fallen by around 40% since the 1950s. Only in a few places have phytoplankton populations risen. These include parts of the Indian Ocean and some coastal areas where industrial run-off fertilises the water, producing choking blooms of plankton.

On a yearly basis, the rise and fall of the phytoplankton depends on big climate events like the El Nino Southern Oscillation. But in the long-term, nothing predicted the numbers of phytoplankton better than the surface temperature of the seas. Phytoplankton need sunlight to grow, so they’re constrained to the upper layers of the ocean and depends on nutrients welling up from below. But warmer waters are less likely to mix in this way, which starves the phytoplankton and limits their growth.

It’s not just the phytoplankton – Tittensor found that water temperature dictates the fate of all manner of marine species right up the food web, including animals like whales that are 10 billion times heavier. He studies 13 groups of plants and animals, including zooplankton, seagrasses, seals, billfishes, octopuses and sharks. On the whole, they were concentrated in predictable hotspots like the Caribbean, South-east Asia and the Australian coast. Ocean wanderers like whales, squid and tuna were found at temperature latitudes away from the equator, while South-east Asia had the richest concentration of coast-lovers, like corals, mangroves and coastal fishes.

As you might imagine, several factors influence the distribution of these diverse species. Some parts of the ocean are more productive than others, some are richer in oxygen, and some have more stable climates. Some species might react to specific geographical features like length of coastline, while others may be limited to specific areas because of their evolutionary history. But the only thing that explained the patterns of diversity in all 13 groups was the surface temperature of the sea. None of the other factors had quite the same impact.

In general, warmer waters were more likely to be hotspots of diversity for marine species, with the exception of seals and sealions that are specially adapted to colder seas. But even with a census this big, Tittensor has merely glimpsed at the full panorama of ocean life through a keyhole. A more thorough survey would have to include groups that we don’t have a lot of data for, including deep-sea species, invertebrates other than cephalopods, bacteria and viruses. Meanwhile, the existing patterns are merely correlations and need to be checked at a more detailed, local level.

Nonetheless, the results suggest that changes in ocean temperatures could have a big impact on the spread of oceanic species. For the moment, the blue parts of the planet have to contend with more immediate threats. Tittensor found that the areas that are richest in life are also those that are most heavily affected by human activity, including pollution, habitat destruction and overharvesting. And as Boyce showed, warming waters have already taken their toll on the phytoplankton at the base of the food web. The time to act has already come, if the future of our marine life is to be preserved.

References: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature09268 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature09329

Images: Topmost phytoplankton images by Michael Stringer, Harry Taylor and Karl Bruun,

More on ocean life:

• Overfishing gives toxic seaweeds an edge in their competition with corals
• Scientists, film-makers team up to expose illegal international trade in whale meat
• Male and female mako sharks separated by invisible line in the sea
• Worrying slowdown of coral growth in the Great Barrier Reef
• Climate scientists recruit elephant seals to study Antarctica’s waters

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

Is this battery the one? Toshiba’s Super-Charge Ion Batteries, which reportedly lose hardly any capacity after thousands of charges, could be coming to cars next year.

As Slashdot noted today, this battery technology has been a long time coming. In 2007 Toshiba announced the creation of the SCiB, and unveiled the prototype the next year. It lasts 5,000 to 6,000 cycles as opposed to the 500 for standard lithium-ion batteries, and charges to 90 percent of capacity within five minutes. Earlier this month, the company announced it has been working with car maker Mitsubishi on electric vehicle batteries, and could be making SCiBs for cars staring next year.

For EV applications Toshiba has developed a new anode material and a new electrolyte to improve safety and rapid recharging. According to Toshiba, the long life will promote reduction in the waste that results from battery replacement, reducing the impact on the environment [Gizmag].

The potential for Toshiba’s long-lasting battery has electric car enthusiasts excited as the tech moves to vehicles, where current batteries‘ limitations have held back electric car development. But the company is far from the only one working up new ideas for Japan’s car makers—battery makers want contracts for their company’s design, and car makers want to sign up multiple designs in case some don’t pan out.

Toshiba’s Japanese rival Panasonic Corp. supplies batteries for Toyota Motor Corp., the world’s top automaker, while NEC Corp. does it for Nissan Motor Co. Sanyo Electric Co., a Panasonic subsidiary, has deals with Volkswagen AG, Honda Motor Co. and Toyota [AP].

Presuming Toshiba succeeds in scaling up the SCiB, the company wants to use the idea not only in cars, but also in smaller vehicles like electric motorcycles and in large projects like storage on the power grid, another place where the lack of a worthy battery system has held back the development of renewable energy sources and safety backups for the power supply.

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Image: Toshiba

Update, 9pm, July 29: Thanks to a tip from a commenter, we learned there was a crucial factual error in this post, so the text and headline have been altered to fix the problem.

In the West, breast cancer occurs 10 percent more often in the left breast than in the right, and skin cancer also pops up more on the left side. Oddly enough, this disparity is nonexistent in Japan. Why the discrepancies between left/right and West/East? Swedish scientists think they have the answer to the riddle—and it’s kind of weird.

The researchers lay out their case in a recent study in Pathophysiology, and the title (”Sleep on the right side—Get cancer on the left?”) gives a hint of where it’s going: The discrepancy is due to a difference in the types of beds commonly used in Japan and the West, and how radio and television waves interact with this furniture.

In the West, most people use mattresses (and often box springs) that contain coiled-metal springs, which reflect the radio waves all around us, which decreases the chance that the body will develop cancerous tumors. And because more people sleep on their right sides than their left sides—the heartbeat is quieter that way—the left sides of their bodies are further from the coils’ protective effects, and they get more cancers there. In Japan, many people sleep on futons right on the ground, so there’s no metal to prevent cancer and no difference depending on how you sleep.

Or so the story goes. There are a lot of leaps and holes here (for instance: most researchers think non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation like TV transmissions do not cause cancer) and not enough evidence—not yet, anyway—to prove the whole causative chain. So as reasonably skeptical people, we should wait for some hard supporting evidence before accepting what is, uh, a rather novel theory. Until then, sweet dreams!

Note: The original version of this post quoted from a Scientific American blog post, which is where we found out about this study. But that piece gets the researchers’ explanation exactly backwards: it said that the springs acted as antennas and amplified radio waves, increasing the likelihood of cancer; the researchers actually said the springs attenuate radio waves and decrease incidence of cancer. This post was altered to reflect that important difference.

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Image: flickr / jm3

I just found out that video of my talk at w00tstock has been posted on YouTube. The quality is a little shaky, since it was a handheld video taken from a distance back, so some of the pictures may be hard to discern, but I think it suffices to get the point across.

This may surprise you, but the content is pretty much Not Safe For Work. Yeah, I know: I’m not generally known for that. But hey– it’s an astronomy talk! What better place to go a little blue?

The video is in two parts; the first has the last couple of minutes of the warmup before my talk (I came on after the intermission), and the second part includes the premier of the trailer for my new TV show. The reaction of the audience was… well. It made me happy indeed.

Here are both parts. Part 1…

… and Part 2:

That last slide with the Hubble image says, "W00tstock: Where no astronomer has gone before."

I want to make sure I give plenty of credit Amanda Bauer, aka AstroPixie, once again for her inspiration for this talk. It’s something I’d been thinking of doing for a long time, but her blog post really got things started. Way-hey. Giggity.

There are pictures going up about w00tstock all over the place, so check with Flickr to see ‘em. And also, please read Wil Wheaton’s thoughtful and wonderful words about that night.

Thanks also to Kevin Savino Riker for posting that video. One of the beautiful things about w00tstock is that everything is licensed under the Creative Commons theme, which means it can posted publicly. Why? Because like Wil, Adam, Paul & and Storm, I agree that things like this get better the more they are shared, and become more valuable when they cost less. Or nothing at all.

[Brief update: Julia Sherred has many more w00tstock videos on her blog.]

Dienekes points to a new paper which highlights genetic variation in Fenno-Scandinavia (or in this case, Finland, Sweden and Denmark). A two-dimensional plot with the variation is pretty illustrative of what you’d expect:

Finns are genetic outliers in Europe, to some extent even in comparison to Estonians, who speak a very similar language. But, I wonder if the situation will change a bit when we have more samples from Finnic populations of northern Russia. Remember that the nature of these representations is sensitive to the variation which we throw into the equation in the first place.

Since the reader survey is topping out in response, I though I’d report some of the results. Since I’ve been doing these surveys my readership has exhibited a few patterns, and I was curious as to any changes since moving to Discover. Not too much has shifted. Instead of 15% female, as was the case for years, the readers are now 25% female. It looks like ~10% of the readers know this website only through Discover. Feel free to browse the results yourself.

I think the most interesting aspect for many is the political diversity. Generally the readership is split between Left liberals and libertarians. Though there are a small number of conventional conservatives, it is very rare to find those who are socially conservative and fiscally liberal. These “populists” tend not to be as intelligent as the other combinations, and so I suspect that’s why they’re not well represented on the web, among my readership, or the political elite of the United States in general (for what it’s worth, I’ve been moving in a more populist direction over the years, starting from a libertarian stance).

First, a few summary statistics. I asked readers their index of liberalism, with 0 being as conservative as possible, 10 as liberal, and 5 in the middle. I asked on two dimensions, social and economic.

Social:

Median – 8
Mean -7.4
Standard Deviation – 2.48

Economic:

Median – 5
Mean -5.01
Standard Deviation – 2.74

The correlation between social and economic liberalism was 0.37. Here is a chart which illustrates the different distributions:

I’ve smoothed a bit, but it’s clear that while there’s several modes in the economic liberalism distribution, there’s a strong liberal slant on social issues. Not that surprising. But I wanted to look at the combinations, so I created some bubble plots. The size of the circle is proportional to the weight of the particular political combination within the set (or subset).

First, the whole data set.

You see four quadrants. The plural majority of readers are liberal, followed by libertarians, then conservatives, then populists. Remove the centrists (those who selected 5 on either social or economic responses) and summing up the numbers in the quadrants, here are the percentages:

Liberals – 40%

Libertarian – 28%

Conservative – 11%

Populist – 3%

(the rest are in the borderline zones)

Now let’s look at the subsamples and how that impacts distribution.

Female readers tend to be more liberal.

I’ll just leave you with the rest of the bubble charts with minimal comment. But if you want to know something about the data, ask in the comments. Doing the analysis isn’t usually that hard, but I don’t know what people want to know (virgins are young, but not different than the rest of the readership).

Thanks to readers for all of your great suggestions in comments and over email about burr removal.

Pup and I have persevered.