Carla Speed McNeil writes the Finder graphic novels, a work that in many ways blends science fiction and fantasy. With a hybrid work, she’s had to confront some of the definitional questions of the genres:

• Super hero comics are not SciFi. They’re stories of emotion and character embroidered with these scientific ideas.

• Fantasy and SciFi are both speculative fiction, but approached from different angles. Where SciFi builds on physics and chemistry and the laws of nature. Fantasy, when done well, draws from the “softer sciences” (McNeil’s phrase) like sociology and anthropology. When I think about the fantasy novels I’ve read, at least the good ones, I think she’s spot on. Also, by this rule, Super hero stories like Spider-Man and Superman are works of fantasy, not works of science fiction.

• I asked her thoughts on the question of breaking the rules that I raised in yesterday’s post. She pretty much admitted that one of the big problems is that a lot of SciFi and fantasy writers simply don’t know the rules of science well enough to know when they’re breaking the rules. But she also agreed with Zack Stentz, in that she said she obeys, “the rule of cool”: If it’s cool, you can break the rule. The art of the writing is making the rule breaking not off putting or boring.

A quick note for McNeil fans, she recently signed with Dark Horse Comics after years of self-publishing. She said the relationship is great so far, but still new. It’ll be interesting to see how or if the books change.

Here at Comic-Con 2010 it is a standard and recurring complaint that the event has been taken over by branding: An event that started out as a grass-roots gathering of comic-book culture has been overrun by corporate money, corporate product, and above all corporate advertising. Sure, it’s easy to see what they mean. The entire exterior of my Hilton hotel is covered with an ad for Scott Pilgrim (”an epic of epic epicness” — it’s a comic, soon to be a game and a major motion picture starring Michael Cera). The hotel elevators are wallpapered with promos for True Blood. Other buildings are draped in similarly vast posters for the game Red Faction and the upcoming movie Skyline.

The overall effect is a little overwhelming. It is also kind of…awe-inspiring.

First of all, there is the sheer technical achievement of making a 10-story-tall vinyl banner. The ads are an impressive showcase of what current graphics technology can do: extremely large-scale digital images printed directly onto enormous sheets of vinyl mesh. At a conference that is in no small part a celebration of the graphic arts, this kind of over-the-top element seems apt. Then there is the public art aspect of the thing. The San Diego skyline around the convention center here isn’t the most inspiring thing to begin with. The ads, garish as they may be, are more creative and personal than the jumble of generic modernist architecture they are covering.

And really, the application of digital technology to realize visuals that previously existed only in the realm of imagination is a central theme of the conference. In the “State of the Geek” session here, former Digital Bits editor Bill Hunt evocatively recalled a childhood memory of making copies of the USS Enterprise from paper plates and toilet paper tubes–and then being amazed to when Star Wars came out and showed for real the kinds of images that had been dancing around in his head. At the same session people lavished praise on the digital dreams of Inception.

In the exhibit hall, a showcase of special effect designs from Stan Winston Studios powerfully illustrated how the special-effect master progressed from latex and paint to far more elaborate and evocative imagery conjured directly from bits. His creations also blurred the boundaries between solitary vision and corporate branding. Which category do the Iron Man suits belong to? Which category properly holds the military tech from Avatar?

Looking out at the cityscape here, San Diego looks like nothing so much as a giant comic book. If that is the effect of branding run amok, I’m strangely OK with it.

News

“You can just engineer a crime scene.” Scientists can fabricate blood and saliva samples containing DNA from a person other than the donor of the blood and saliva. (Andrew Pollack, NYT)

New research suggests one reason women are underrepresented in science and math is they see such careers as impeding their desire to help others. (Tom Jacobs, Miller-McCune)

Researchers implant false symptoms: we can be convinced we reported symptoms of mental illness that we never mentioned and, as a result, we can actually start believing we have the symptom itself. (Vaughan Bell, Mind Hacks)

Eradicating any organism would have serious consequences for ecosystems — wouldn’t it? Not when it comes to mosquitoes. (Janet Fang, Nature)

Is Torosaurus just an older version of Triceratops? (Brian Switek, Smithsonian Dinosaur Tracking)

Mark Henderson has had his genes tested three times by three different companies. Read about his surprising and sometimes alarming comparison. (Times; paywall (but it’s worth it))

More after the jump…

How to read a genome-wide association study (Jeff Barrett, Genomes Unzipped)

Fossil hunters in Australia have discovered a cave filled with the 15-million-year-old remains of prehistoric marsupials, including babies still in their mothers’ pouches (BBC)

The following occurs in real-time: Scientists have viewed the expression of an individual gene inside a human cell. (Brendan Borrell; Nature)

A Panamanian park has lost around 40% of its amphibian species in the past decade, with some dying out before biologists had even learned of their existence (Janet Fang, Nature)

Breakthrough? Fingers crossed. A vaginal gel used by women before sexual intercourse halved the numbers who became infected with HIV. (Sarah Boseley, Guardian)

Pure-food worshippers put their health at risk—especially when they drink unpasteurized milk (Deborah Blum, Slate)

RIP Robert Galambos, the neuroscientist who showed us how bats echolocate (Douglas Martin, NYT)

Follow a stranger on Twitter, says Jonah Lehrer. Speaking of which, Jonah is now at Wired and you must read his stuff.

An important environmental win: advocates in Hong Kong opposed a shark fin soup promotion (Bettina Wassener, NYT)

Why some snakes have slit pupils (Doctor Zen, Neurodojo)

It’s a star. A really big star. No, really, it’s BIG. It’s bigness goes up to 11. (Ian Sample, Guardian)

A 40-tonne whale breached onto a boat. Why? (Philip Hoare, Guardian)

Wow/heh

Amazing photos of deep-sea creatures at the BBC

This is a plane being shot down by a frickin’ laser beam. I’ll be in my bunker…

Is this the laziest (or best) caption ever?

Blogging/journalism/internet

This week’s must-read post – a storming history of science blogging as Bora Zivkovic says goodbye to ScienceBlogs. Check out how one person can inspire an entire community, and follow Bora to his new home. Continuing the SciBling exodus, read goodbyes from Deborah Blum (in the style of Tennyson), Zuska, Abel Pharmboy, and, er, me, and a summary in Nature News

The Guardian published a truly moronic piece on Pepsigate by one David Appell. Another David, he of Dobbs fame, absolutely destroyed the piece. “Few have ever packed as much error and folly into seven paragraphs.” Go for the eyes, David!

“If you’re worried about inspiring the next generation of scientists, listen to young people, don’t (just) feed them space-dinos,” argues Alice Bell.

How Facebook has to cope with death

“Given women will remain under the microscope indefinitely, I hope increasing numbers aim for high magnification for reasons beyond appearances,” says Sheril Kirshenbaum in an excellent post on sexism in science.

The New England Journal of Medicine sets a 65-minute embargo. Coming soon: the count-to-ten embargo.

At Comic Con, I moderated a wonderful panel about how science sometimes gets screwed up by science fiction. Sponsored by Discover Magazine and The NAS Science and Entertainment Exchange, it’s the third time we’ve done this panel, and it’s been really fun every year. I already talked a bit about this — we had Jaime Paglia from Eureka, Kevin Grazier from BSG and "Eureka", Zack Stentz from "Thor" and "Fringe", and Sean Carroll who is a cosmologist and blogs for Discover as well.

We showed our picks for representative good and bad science in shows and movies, and I have to commend Sean for his pick of "Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure" for good science (the consistency of the time travel in that movie is wonderful) and "Big Bang Theory" for the philosophy of science — they discuss the physics of Superman, making the assumption that a man actually can fly.

We were short on time, and had to cut the Q&A off short, but as usual we got great questions from the audience and a lot of fun back-and-forth with the panelists. We’ll have the video up at some point, and I think you’ll like it when we do.

So far, I’ve seen two reviews: one from ScriptPhD, and the other from our own Science Not Fiction. You can check out my Comic Con 2010 pix at Flickr, too.

[Update: Eric Wolff wrote an interesting piece on the discussion of when to break the rules of science. I may write more on this later, but I don't think Zack Stentz's contention that science must bend to the story would faze any of us on the panel; we know we're talking about fiction here. Science won't bend when you're publishing in the Astrophysical Journal, but it must when put under the constraints of telling an engaging fictional story.]

Ray Bradbury is the last living of the great early titans of science fiction, now that Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke have passed. He said he’s attended every Comic-Con since the first one, when he went to the El Cortez Hotel and spoke to a few of the 300 attendees that year. These days, 125,000 people turn out for Comic-Con every year, and I had to wait 30 minutes to get in to see Bradbury speak. He’ll be 90 in August, and he’s hard of hearing, but he’s still sharp, and he’s forgotten nothing.

The Bradbury panel featured Bradbury talking to his biographer, Sam Weller. I’m just going to share select quotes from his remarks. These are in order, but incomplete.

“The Internet to me is a great big goddamn stupid bore.”

“I got a call from a man who wanted to publish my books on the Internet. I told him, prick up your ears and go to hell.”

[Bradbury has met most, if not all, of the Apollo and Gemini astronauts.]

“All those astronauts had read the Martian Chronicles. When they were young men, they read my books and decided they wanted to become astronauts.”

“[Twilight Zone creator] Rod Serling came to my house many years ago, he didn’t know anything about writing science fiction and fantasy. So I took him down to my basement and gave him copies of books by Richard Matheson, copies of books by Henry Kuttner, copies of books written by Roald Dahl and by John Collier, and a couple of books by myself. And Rod Serling forgot he read all those books, and when he wrote the program, he copied some of the ideas without telling me. So we got into a big argument, so finally I walked away from the Rod Serling show. He had a great show, but he forgot the basis of the show were all the books I gave him by all my friends.”

[* Thanks to commenter John Joseph Adams for figuring this one out.]

“I read comic strips all my life I have all of Prince Valiant put away. I have all of Buck Rogers put away, too. I put away those starting when I was 19 years old. So my background in becoming a writer was falling in love with comic strips.”

“I read the comic strips, I learned how to write.”

“My favorite that’s in the paper every day is called Mutts.”

[Bradbury is a tireless advocate for free public libraries.]

“When I left high school, I had all my grades to go to college, but I had no money. I decided I will not worry about getting money to go to college, I will educate myself. I walked down the street, I walked into the library, for three days a week, for 10 years, and educate myself. It’s all free, that’s the great thing about libraries. When I was 28 years old, I graduated from library.”

“We have to reinvest in space travel. We should never have left the moon. We have to go back to the moon and build a firm base there, so we can take off from there to the planet Mars. We have to become the Martians. I tell you to become the Martians. We have to civilize Mars, build a whole civilization on Mars, and then move out 300 years from now, into the universe, and when we do that, we have the chance of living forever. Our future is investing right now in space travel. Money should be given to NASA to build the rockets to go back to the moon.”

“It’s been 90 god-damned incredible years.”

“Every day I’ve loved it. Because I’ve remained a boy. The man you see here is a 12-year-old boy, and the boy is still having fun.”

“You remain invested in your inner child by exploding every day. You don’t worry about the future, you don’t worry about the past, you just explode. If you are dynamic, you don’t have to worry about what it is you are. I’ve remained a boy, because boys run every where, they never look back, they run everywhere, they keep running running running. That’s me , the running boy.”

[Weller asked: Do you have any regrets?]

“I regret that I didn’t have more time with Bo Derek.”

“She came up to me in a train station in Paris 30 years ago and said ‘Mr. Bradbury?’, I said, ‘Yes.’ She said, ‘I love you,’ I said ‘Who are you?’ She said. ‘My name is Bo Derrick,” she said, “Mr. Bradbury will you travel on the train with me?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I will.’”

“Mel Gibson owns the [movie] rights to Fahrenheit 451. Did you see him on TV last week? Right now he’s not doing a thing with Fahrenheit 451.”

“I’ve got a new book of short stories, I’m working on, that will be published next Christmas. The title of it is Juggernaut, a book of 20 new short stories, which will be published next Christmas.”

See here. It is a very good piece of work–and you know I don’t often agree with Coyne. I’ll have a bit more to say as soon as I can get a post together, but there really isn’t much more to say…

About six months ago I did a survey of the readership of my two Gene Expression blogs (before moving to Discover). The N was around 600. You can view the raw frequency results here. One of the issues which I was curious about: did the disciplinary background of readers have any major correlates with responses? So I created three categories from the data on disciplines:

-Science
-Social Science
-Not Science

Social science had its own section, but for science I amalgamated those who studies Math, Engineering, Natural Science and Medicine. The balance were under “Not science.”

Turns out there’s no big difference, except for in calculus. A particular type of person must be attracted to the substance and style of this weblog (I suspect the biggest substantive difference between the readership and myself is that I’m on the extroverted side). I’ll probably post a survey for tomorrow, mostly to see how much Discover has changed my readership. But periodically I’ll also look at the results for previous surveys like this.

Note: Some of the results do not add to 100% because I rounded.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The X-51A Waverider built by Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne set a record for the longest supersonic combustion ramjet-powered flight in late May eclipsing the previous record of 12 seconds by the NASA X-43A, although the X-43A was almost twice as fast.

The flight was a bit more than 200 seconds and the X-51A accelerated to Mach 5.  March 5 is about 3,800 mph or 6,155 kmh.  The flight was short of the 300 second burn and Mach 6 target because the vehicle began to slow once it hit Mach 5 and apparently there was some unexpected heating in the rear of the engine bay detected and the vehicle was destroyed by its operators.  That said, the flight was a success.

The scramjet’s claim to fame (one of them anyway) is that it can operate at hypersonic speed and pull oxygen out of the rarified atmosphere at high altitudes so it doesn’t need to carry an onboard oxygen supply.  The scramjet engine has no moving parts so as long as it has fuel it can operate, the problem is the engine has to be going very fast in order to work.

What you are seeing in the video isn’t necessarily the result of the scamjet engine,  especially at the start. In the video the vehicle is dropped from the B-52 at 50,000 feet and a solid rocket motor accelerates the vehicle to almost Mach 5 and it is at this point where ethylene is used to start the scramjet engine and a transition is made to JP-7 aviation fuel.

Read more about the flight.

Video

Several readers have written asking why I’ve been so slow about updating the kissing gallery. Chalk it up to a busy summer and my wedding in two weeks. But thanks for so many great submissions to my inbox! I’ll be sure to get some of the best posted here soon.

In the meantime, a music video: Here’s 3OH!3’s My First Kiss featuring Ke$ha. As I detail in my upcoming book The Science of Kissing, that very first romantic kiss with a new partner can make all the difference between a fleeting encounter or lifetime commitment…

Submit your original photo or artwork for consideration in the gallery. The more creative, the better.

I have no real news here, except that one of my missions at Comic Con was to meet up once again with Zach Weiner, who writes and draws my favorite web comic, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. My wife and I went over to his booth, and there he was! As this picture shows, I was overjoyed to see him:

While we were chatting and mutually insulting/praising each other, who should walk up but blogger, actor and all around good-guy Wil Wheaton! I was shunted aside, but managed to make my presence known:

Anyway, you should go read Zach’s comic and buy his stuff and support him in his attempts to take over the galaxy. Don’t forget to click the red button.

Readers might find these responses of interest. Mostly I just laughed, though some of you may be a bit more serious than I, so if anthro-gibberish drives you crazy, don’t follow the links. As I told “ana” below a lot of the discussion we had was basically just talking past each other. I kept telling her she was vacuous because she was assuming presuppositions which I simply did not share as empirical background descriptions of the world (e.g., a strong form of linguistic relativism where the specific nature of a language shapes cognition). Though at least she was concise. On the other hand, see this small section of Creighton’s response:

I think this is what bothered me the most about Khan’s piece. No discussion of what poverty means, what it is, how it’s defined. I could be completely wrong, but that led me to feel that there was a high degree of Eurocentric neo-colonialism behind Khan’s proposition. Who is saying to who what “median human utility” means? Are we assuming that homeownership, vehicle ownership, and other tangible measures of economic prosperity are involved? Is access to fresh food and water part of this measurement? Khan didn’t discuss poverty at all and he didn’t acknowledge that the neo-colonial policies of certain nations are at least partially responsible for the long-term economic suffering of many of the people he is referring to. I just got the feeling that he was telling the people who belong to small language communities to accept defeat and learn English. It incited me even more that his justification for making this decision was in purely economic terms. Abandoning your heritage will pay out in the end. But will it?

Dhaka smells like human shit. That’s poverty. Most people think that to get rich is glorious, and an understanding of wealth is cross-cultural. Many anthropological types problematize too much for my taste. They confuse the nuance and shading which vary between societies, for the core truths, which are relatively culture-free. For almost all of human history most people lived at the poverty line, because Malthusian conditions were operative. The possibility for wealth, and consumer society, is new. Those who opt-out in modern societies do so for explicit ideological reasons and are aware of the trade offs (e.g., the Amish, Hasidic Jews, people who live in communes).

The point which I tried to emphasize a few times, but generally ignored by my interlocutors, is that people as individuals, and communities, make rational decisions in a world of constrained choices. Quite often, and especially today, language change does not occur from on high (in fact, the top-down imposition of standard national languages on the masses is more a recent feature of post-Enlightenment nationalism; Latin spread in the Roman Empire over centuries among the western peasantry). Most Africans who adhere non-world religions are shifting to Islam or Christianity. There is little explicit coercion in this (though a fair amount of social pressure from elites who find Vodun and other native traditions backward). The moral panic that many Westerners have over the extinction of small-scale societies is not shared by many members of those small-scale societies, who wish to opt-out, often for material reasons. And by material, I’m not talking McMansions, I’m talking having income above subsistence. The level of wealth of a Chinese factory worker, not that of an academic adjunct.

As for my critics, note that I don’t really engage them directly, because the theoretical frameworks we use are so distinct. They misunderstand me, and I misunderstand them (honestly, I have no idea what they’re saying most of the time in the broad sense, aside from the fact that they’re offended). I have as much respect for most American cultural anthropology as I do for Talmudic scholarship; I’m sure they’re bright individuals, but they aren’t doing anything which I think relates to a world outside of the minds of the practitioners.* Contrast that with Jared Diamond, who I think is positively wrong in many of his models (not to mention recent ethical controversies which have erupted), but, who I can understand in terms of what he is saying. Being wrong, and asserting things which turn out false, are essential in the process of building a better model of the world. Extreme projects in cultural relativism, and fixation on semantics, tells us more about the psychology of WEIRD people than anything else.

For a better understanding of how I approach anthropology, and the study of human culture, the first half of D. Jason Slone’s Theological Incorrectness describes it almost perfectly. If you continue to read this weblog, you’ll note that I have a deep interest in culture and history. But, my treatment is not going to resemble much of what would find in cultural anthropology in the United States. In fact, I’ll drive you crazy, and perhaps an r-squared here and there will strike as you positivist gibberish. No one’s paying you to read though.

Oh, and yes, I am Euro-centric. Some things can be stated as objective facts, but obviously where you start from impacts how you judge the import of particular facts. Though I think Epoche is methodologically useful. Or at least the attempt.

* To be fair, a large number of people do take the Talmud seriously, and so the scholarship does have an impact because people take the scholarship seriously. But I don’t think this is like mechanical engineering, where the reason to take it seriously from the outside is not dependent on a normative view of the importance of mechanical engineering. As for cultural anthropology, I don’t think it matters too much, aside from intellectual types who think that it is a form of scholarship with non-trivial empirical basis. I think most American cultural anthropology is about as empirically robust as astrology.

Related: Also see my post Knowledge is not value-free.

A Hypervelocity star in the center of the image. Click for larger. Credit: NASA, ESA, O. Gnedin (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor), and W. Brown (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass.)

This is very strange, this star was ejected from our galaxy and is traveling at about 1,600,000 miles per hour — that’s 2,500,000 km/hr !! Of the 16 known hypervelocity stars this is the fastest. To add to the strangeness this star also should have burned out long-long ago but yet we can still see it.

Read how it came to be ejected, how it got going so fast and why we can still see it with Hubble in the Hubble press release, you can also visit Hubblesite to see more images:

A hundred million years ago, a triple-star system was traveling through the bustling center of our Milky Way galaxy when it made a life-changing misstep. The trio wandered too close to the galaxy’s giant black hole, which captured one of the stars and hurled the other two out of the Milky Way. Adding to the stellar game of musical chairs, the two outbound stars merged to form a super-hot, blue star.

This story may seem like science fiction, but astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope say it is the most likely scenario for a so-called hypervelocity star, known as HE 0437-5439, one of the fastest ever detected. It is blazing across space at a speed of 1.6 million miles (2.5 million kilometers) an hour, three times faster than our Sun’s orbital velocity in the Milky Way. Hubble observations confirm that the stellar speedster hails from the Milky Way’s core, settling some confusion over where it originally called home.

Most of the roughly 16 known hypervelocity stars, all discovered since 2005, are thought to be exiles from the heart of our galaxy. But this Hubble result is the first direct observation linking a high-flying star to a galactic center origin.

“Using Hubble, we can for the first time trace back to where the star comes from by measuring the star’s direction of motion on the sky. Its motion points directly from the Milky Way center,” says astronomer Warren Brown of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., a member of the Hubble team that observed the star. “These exiled stars are rare in the Milky Way’s population of 100 billion stars. For every 100 million stars in the galaxy lurks one hypervelocity star.”

The movements of these unbound stars could reveal the shape of the dark matter distribution surrounding our galaxy. “Studying these stars could provide more clues about the nature of some of the universe’s unseen mass, and it could help astronomers better understand how galaxies form,” says team leader Oleg Gnedin of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “Dark matter’s gravitational pull is measured by the shape of the hyperfast stars’ trajectories out of the Milky Way.”

The stellar outcast is already cruising in the Milky Way’s distant outskirts, high above the galaxy’s disk, about 200,000 light-years from the center. By comparison, the diameter of the Milky Way’s disk is approximately 100,000 light-years. Using Hubble to measure the runaway star’s direction of motion and determine the Milky Way’s core as its starting point, Brown and Gnedin’s team calculated how fast the star had to have been ejected to reach its current location.

“The star is traveling at an absurd velocity, twice as much as the star needs to escape the galaxy’s gravitational field,” explains Brown, a hypervelocity star hunter who found the first unbound star in 2005. “There is no star that travels that quickly under normal circumstances — something exotic has to happen.”

There’s another twist to this story. Based on the speed and position of HE 0437-5439, the star would have to be 100 million years old to have journeyed from the Milky Way’s core. Yet its mass — nine times that of our Sun — and blue color mean that it should have burned out after only 20 million years — far shorter than the transit time it took to get to its current location.

The most likely explanation for the star’s blue color and extreme speed is that it was part of a triple-star system that was involved in a gravitational billiard-ball game with the galaxy’s monster black hole. This concept for imparting an escape velocity on stars was first proposed in 1988. The theory predicted that the Milky Way’s black hole should eject a star about once every 100,000 years.

Brown suggests that the triple-star system contained a pair of closely orbiting stars and a third outer member also gravitationally tied to the group. The black hole pulled the outer star away from the tight binary system. The doomed star’s momentum was transferred to the stellar twosome, boosting the duo to escape velocity from the galaxy. As the pair rocketed away, they went on with normal stellar evolution. The more massive companion evolved more quickly, puffing up to become a red giant. It enveloped its partner, and the two stars spiraled together, merging into one superstar — a blue straggler.

“While the blue straggler story may seem odd, you do see them in the Milky Way, and most stars are in multiple systems,” Brown says.

This vagabond star has puzzled astronomers since its discovery in 2005 by the Hamburg/European Southern Observatory sky survey. Astronomers had proposed two possibilities to solve the age problem. The star either dipped into the Fountain of Youth by becoming a blue straggler, or it was flung out of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighboring galaxy.

In 2008 a team of astronomers thought they had solved the mystery. They found a match between the exiled star’s chemical makeup and the characteristics of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The rogue star’s position also is close to the neighboring galaxy, only 65,000 light-years away. The new Hubble result settles the debate over the star’s birthplace.

Astronomers used the sharp vision of Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys to make two separate observations of the wayward star 3 1/2 years apart. Team member Jay Anderson of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., developed a technique to measure the star’s position relative to each of 11 distant background galaxies, which form a reference frame.

Anderson then compared the star’s position in images taken in 2006 with those taken in 2009 to calculate how far the star moved against the background galaxies. The star appeared to move, but only by 0.04 of a pixel (picture element) against the sky background. “Hubble excels with this type of measurement,” Anderson says. “This observation would be challenging to do from the ground.”

The team is trying to determine the homes of four other unbound stars, all located on the fringes of the Milky Way.

“We are targeting massive ‘B’ stars, like HE 0437-5439,” says Brown, who has discovered 14 of the 16 known hypervelocity stars. “These stars shouldn’t live long enough to reach the distant outskirts of the Milky Way, so we shouldn’t expect to find them there. The density of stars in the outer region is much less than in the core, so we have a better chance to find these unusual objects.”

The results were published online in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on July 20, 2010. Brown is the paper’s lead author.

“Sleepwalkers have been described to be involved in complex motor activities like cooking, eating, driving a car, playing an instrument, stabbing and murder [1]. We describe a case of a 44-year-old woman with idiopathic insomnia almost all her life. She tried various medications, psychotherapy and behavioral techniques for the treatment of her insomnia without any significant effects. She was started on Zolpidem 10 mg 4 years ago. She was able to sleep 4–5 h each night, but then the effects started wearing off. She increased the dose of Zolpidem by herself to 15 mg every night; she would take 10 mg tablet around 10 p.m. and 5 mg around 3 a.m. With this regimen she started sleeping for 5 h every night and felt alert during the daytime. After increasing the dose, she began to have episodes of sleepwalking. During one such episode, she went to bed around 10 p.m., she woke up 2 h later, and walked to the next room on the same floor. She turned on the computer and connected to the internet. She logged in by typing her user ID and password to her email account. She sent three emails to her friend inviting her to come over for dinner and drinks (Fig. 1A and B). Her friend called her the next day to accept the invitation. She said that the emails had strange language. The patient was not aware of these emails. She checked her sent folder and found three emails sent at 11:47 p.m., 11:50 p.m. and 11:53 p.m. They were in upper and lower cases, not well formatted and had strange language. She was shocked when she saw these emails, as she did not recall writing them. She did not have any history of night terrors or sleepwalking as a child. Her overnight video polysomnogram did not capture any episode and was normal. She was advised to reduce her dose of Zolpidem; after which she did not have any more episodes of sleepwalking.”

Bonus Figure:

Fig. 1. (A) Emails written by patient during an episode of sleepwalking. (B) Emails written by the same patient three minutes after the first e-mail (A) during an episode of sleepwalking.

Photo: flickr/Ingorrr

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Then how come I still check my email every 5 minutes?
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: The case of “Judge Nodd” and other sleeping judges–media, society, and judicial sleepiness.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Sleep disturbances in Disney animated films.

WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

Looking at a planetary nebula 6,500 light years away, scientists recognized an old friend: the buckyball. The large, soccer ball-shaped molecule–made from bonding 60 carbon atoms together–was first seen in a lab in 1985. In a paper published today in Science, scientists confirm the first known extraterrestrial existence of the rare carbon balls.

The buckyballs’ planetary nebula, called TC 1, surrounds a white dwarf star. Using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, a team led by Jan Cami of the University of Western Ontario observed traces of the the 60-atom balls and their 70-atom cousins while looking at light coming from the white dwarf.

When light hits molecules and atoms, they will vibrate in specific, measurable ways–a field of science known as spectroscopy. One of Cami’s colleagues, who was studying Tc 1, found some unfamiliar fingerprints in the nebula’s infrared light. Cami recognized them as carbon’s 60-atom configuration and its favored 70-atom carbon partner. [Discovery News]

The researchers think a lack of hydrogen in this nebula allowed the formation of the buckyballs, known more generally as fullerene (named after architect Buckminster Fuller and his geodesic domes).

The team suspects that abundant carbon and a lack of hydrogen in the nebula created just the right environment to give rise to buckyballs. When hydrogen is present, it combines with carbon, preventing the pure-carbon spheres from forming. [New Scientist]

The spherical version of the carbon molecule has found many applications in chemistry and physics research, for example, in building nanostructures. Researchers suspect that the balls, given their temperature, formed within the past 100 years, but may be impossible to make out a century from now.

The finding “shows that complex, large molecules can exist in space,” said astrophysicist Theodore Snow of the University of Colorado in Boulder, who was not involved in the research. “Buckyballs are very stable and resistant to interstellar ultraviolet radiation, so once formed they can have long lifetimes in space.” [SPACE.com]

Sir Harry Kroto, who won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering buckyballs, waxed poetic about their interstellar presence, wondering if there might be buckyball leftovers in each of us.

“It’s so beautiful that it’s been hiding from us and it took an experiment trying to uncover what was going on in stars to find it…. All the carbon in your body came from star dust, so at one time some that carbon may have been in the from of buckyballs.” [BBC]

Related content:
Discoblog: Nano-Nascar? Tiny Dragster Has Chassis, Axles, & Buckyball Wheels
80beats: Researchers Want to Build a New World Out of Nanotech “Buckypaper”
DISCOVER: Cages of Carbon
DISCOVER: Does Your House Have Robotic Vision Yet? (on Buckminster Fuller’s far out ideas)

Image: Artist’s rendition / NASA/JPL-Caltech

Well, Darlene’s last guest post went stratospheric on Digg, and we are still reeling from the traffic. For some strange reason–having to do with the bizarre combination of “Tom Johnson,” a list of “sexy” scientists, and now this–this July we are on track to break our all time traffic record from precisely a year ago, when everybody was debating Unscientific America.

Thanks, Darlene. Or, to paraphrase the original title of your post:

“Who gets the credit for the BP Container Cap post? Darlene Does.”

---

Let’s say you’re a peat moss plant. Since you’re stuck in one place, and it’s low to the ground where there’s little wind or air turbulence, you have to find a way to shoot your spores way up into the air where they can be dispersed.

In reality, mosses have conquered this problem by shooting their spores into the sky at speeds of greater than 30 meters (nearly 100 feet) per second. Their spherical capsules containing the spores deform inward until the pressure forces a ferocious explosion to propel spores at that velocity. But even this is not enough—air would slow the spores before they reached a high enough height to get carried away.

Luckily, Dwight Whitaker and Joan Edwards found that the moss plants have another trick, which they published in the journal Science. After shooting video at 100,000 frames per second, the scientists saw that the plants shoot their spores in a vortex ring, like a tiny mushroom cloud or a smoke ring. The fluid dynamics of the vortex rings allow it to carry those spores through the air much farther than they could travel without it.

For plenty more about this, read Ed Yong’s post at Not Exactly Rocket Science. But first, watch this short video the researchers made.

Related Content:
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Mosses Use Explosive Cannons And Mushroom Clouds To Spread Their Spores
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Flowers Change Color And Back Again To Advertise Their Opening Hours
80beats: Spores in Mastadon Dung Suggest Humans Didn’t Kill Off Ancient Mammals
The Loom: Fungus Opera

Video: Clara Hard, Joan Edwards, Dwight Whitaker

Though the wing-flapping contraptions of early human flight haven’t quite caught on, researchers think birds may still have something to teach us about navigating the air: how to land. MIT researchers have made a system that can bring a modified glider to an elegant bird-like stop, causing it to set down on its tail.

Russ Tedrake of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and his student Rick Cory developed the computer model to bring a basic foam glider to a unique landing. The principle behind the plane’s stop is the same one used by stunt planes–stall. When its wings tilt back, the plane loses lift and falls from the sky. Traditional planes don’t use this method to land because the airflow is chaotic (see smoke visualization above) making it hard to predict how the plane will behave.

Birds come to a stop by tilting their wings back at sharp angles. This creates turbulence and large, unpredictable whirlwinds behind the wings. If an airplane pointed its wings up in this way, it would lose lift and fall out of the sky. But MIT researchers wanted to take advantage of stall–specifically, post-stall drag–to help a plane come to a controlled landing. [Popular Science]

Video after the break.

Tedrake and Cory developed a computer program to control the glider with a steering motor attached to its tail. The program predetermined the best flight paths to bring the glider to a safe landing, and also how to correct or switch courses if it veered too far off the path.

For a range of launch conditions, they used the model to calculate sequences of instructions intended to guide the glider to its perch. . . . Cory and Tedrake also developed a set of error-correction controls that could nudge the glider back onto its trajectory when location sensors determined that it had deviated from it. [MIT]

They launched the 90-gram craft from 12 feet away from its landing wire, in winds between 13 and 19 miles per hour. Though they don’t predict a passenger plane landing like this anytime soon, they think the technique might prove useful for flying robots that could perch and recharge their batteries on a power line. With more research, they might also make craft that use other bird strategies.

The researchers say they are continuing the research and will next be moving outside into real-world conditions. They also plan to explore the use of flapping wing vehicles as well as more typical propeller driven aircraft. [Wired]

Related content:
80beats: Scientists Glean Secrets of Flight From Birds, Bats, and Bugs
80beats: Boeing’s “Phantom Eye” Joins the Roster of Unmanned Spy Planes
8obeats: DARPA Loses Contact with Mach 20 “Hypersonic Glider” During Test Flight
80beats: Flying the Sunny Skies: Solar-Powered Plane Completes 2-Hour Test Flight

Image: Courtesy of Jason Dorfman (MIT/CSAIL).
Video courtesy of Russ Tedrake and Rick Cory

As you read this, forceful explosions are rocking the planet, covering it in mushroom clouds. Thankfully, nuclear winter isn’t going to befall us quite yet. These explosions are caused by biological cannons rather than man-made bombs and the clouds they produce are mere millimetres high. They are the means by which peat mosses disperse their spores.

There are over 285 species of peat moss, all belonging to the genus Sphagnum. They are among the most common plants in the world, growing in the cold, moist parts of the Earth and covering about 1% of its land. They rely on the wind to disperse their spores and all of them face a similar problem. They grow in flat mats, which hug the ground at a level where the air is relatively still. Ideally, they need to get their spores into the ‘turbulent boundary layer’ – a zone up to 10cm off the ground, where swirls of air and sideways currents can carry the spores over long distances.

Most species place their spores at the end of stalks, but even these only stick out a centimetre off the ground. To get the spores even higher, the peat mosses shoot them out, using their stalks as mini-cannons. Each one has anywhere from 20,000 to 250,000 spores loaded into a round capsule at its tip. On sunny days, the capsule dehydrates and collapses inwards, transforming from a sphere into a cylinder and squashing the air inside it. Soon, the pressure becomes too great and the capsule literally blows its top, shooting out both spores and air.

The whole process takes less than a hundredth of a millisecond. The spores are ejected at around 30 miles per hour at around 32,000 times the force of gravity. And they reach a height of around 10 centimetres, more than enough to reach the turbulent layer of air above the moss.

But this isn’t the whole story. Despite its forceful launch, the spore shouldn’t be able to reach that height. Given its initial speed, it should get to a maximum height of no more than 7 millimetres in less than half a millisecond. In reality, it goes far higher for much longer. After 5 milliseconds, the average spore has already risen by 4 centimetres, with only vague signs of slowing down.

To solve this mossy mystery, Dwight Whitaker from Pomona College and Joan Edwards from Williams College filmed the firing of the spore cannons. The action is so quick that they had to use ultrahigh-speed cameras that shoot up to 100,000 frames every second. These videos revealed that each launch is accompanied by a tiny mushroom cloud. These clouds are rolling haloes of air called ‘vortex rings’. It’s these rings that give the spores the extra boost they need to rise above it all.

Vortex rings are produced when a ball of fluid (in this case, the air trapped in the capsule) moves through larger mass of fluid (in this case, the atmosphere). As the ball of capsule air explodes outwards, its leading edge pushes the molecules of the surrounding air apart. But remember that air has friction – because of this, the outer layer of the ball is pulled outwards only to roll back in on itself later. The result is a moving doughnut of air – a vortex ring. You can see this happening more clearly in the animations on this page.

Squid and jellyfish commonly produce vortex rings behind them to push themselves along. Humans make them whenever we blow smoke rings. Dolphins produce them sometimes by blowing water rings. But this is the first time that anyone has found a plant that can create its own vortex rings. The fact that the low-lying peat mosses can shoot their spores to such a height is a crucial element of their success.

Reference: Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1190179

Images by Clara Hard, Dwight Whitaker and Joan Edwards

More amazing plants:

• Tobacco plants foil very hungry caterpillars by switching pollinators to hummingbirds
• The 13,000-year old tree that survives by cloning itself
• Review: Royal Institution Christmas Lecture – the 300 million year war
• Ancient plants manipulate insects for hot, smelly sex
• Flowers change colour and back again to advertise their opening hours
• 2,000 year old “Phoenix” seed rises from the ashes
• Orchid lures in pollinating wasps with promise of fresh meat

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

David Dobbs has a long measured response up to David Appell’s strange argument that Pepsi’s “free speech” rights were violated during the recent ScienceBlogs kerfuffle, by way of which he casts some aspersions on the character and agenda of specific bloggers. Here’s the thing about Appell, he has a long history of confused and surly criticisms and interrogations of others and himself. I know that history because I first became familiar with Dave Appell in May of 2002. In between pointers and commentary on physical science, his primary beat as a science journalist, he would offer some personal reflections, frustrations, and worries. I’m not big into bloggers who “overshare,” especially science bloggers, so I tried to ignore that as I focused on the substance of Appell’s posts.

But he popped up again in subsequent years with what I felt to be peculiar and emotionally driven behavior. First, in early 2007 I heard Rod Dreher offer a long explanation and apology on NPR for his support and subsequent opposition to the Iraq War. Dreher was heartfelt from what I recall, and didn’t soft pedal his faults which led him to his initial opinions. Well, that wasn’t enough for Dave Appell, he sent Dreher a nasty note where he stated that hoped that Dreher would burn in hell for the suffering that he caused. For someone who believes in free speech Appell certainly does not incentivize public candor about error. If you do something stupid, and perhaps even foul, keep your mouth shut! Then in 2008 he had a relatively widely linked post up criticizing the whole enterprise of blogging and the blogosphere. He concludes:

So more and more I am focusing on real writing, detailed reporting for magazines where you can do some real investigation and reporting and your audience isn’t just people reading over their calzone at lunch. I don’t want to end up some vapid blogger who tries to say everything and so who says nothing whatsoever. Life is too short. I’m really not sure what the solution is.

Two years on he’s obviously still reading blogs, still blogging (posting YouTube clips and updates on his kittens even!), and commenting on the situation of the blogosphere. He even wants to broaden the discussion and let a thousand flowers bloom.

Sometimes when the message seems a bit muddy, it’s not because you lack powers of perception. If you see the byline “Dave Appell,” and it doesn’t have to do with atmospheric physics or such, update your priors! (or better yet, click away)

Since I’ve moved to Discover Blogs I suspect my readership has changed a bit. I have the results of a previous survey from early in 2010, back when I was at ScienceBlogs, but haven’t posted on it in detail. I’ll try and do that in the next few days, but I also will put up a survey for this incarnation of the weblog to see if there are changes. I’ll ask the standard demographic questions (age, sex, race, income, education, etc.), but the comments are open if you are curious about something about the readership of this weblog and would like me to include a question regarding that issue. I can’t guarantee I’ll add it, but I might.

Additionally, I want to highlight that I have a personal delicious feed going. That’s where I usually get the stuff for “Daily Data Dumps.” If you want to subscribe, the RSS address for that is http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/gnxp?count=15. I also contribute to two other blogs, Gene Expression Classic and Secular Right. If you subscribe to my total feed you can get all the content of this weblog, as well all the posts for those two blogs, as well as my periodic contributions to Comment is Free at The Guardian.

Finally, some blogs which you might not know about, but perhaps should. A Replicated Typo, on the evolution of culture (with a focus on language). And I can’t recommend Genomes Unzipped enough. What blogs are you reading out of curiosity? I “circulate” my RSS feed subscriptions a fair amount outside of a core set.