Schemes to hack the planet and save us from global warming have two layers of obstacles to overcome. First, is it technologically and physically possible to do what’s proposed? And then there’s the second: Is it politically possible to tinker with the planet?

Those who would argue “absolutely not” to the latter got a boost by a new study out in Nature Geoscience. Katharine Ricke and her team modeled the effects of one of the most popular geoengineering plans: seeding the atmosphere with aerosols to reflect away some of the sun’s rays, mimicking the way a massive volcanic eruption can cool the Earth. Ricke found that the effects on rainfall and temperature could vary wildly by region—and that what’s best for one country could spell disaster for another.

For example, Ricke says, her study found that levels of sulphate that kept China closest to its baseline climate were so high that they made India cold and wet. Those that were best for India caused China to overheat. She notes, however, that both countries fared better either way than under a no-geoengineering policy [Nature].

Given the complex connectivity of the climate system, it’s not possible to fix everything to everybody’s liking. While the team’s study shows that geoengineers could control either temperature or precipitation pretty well by fine-tuning their atmospheric seeding, they couldn’t control both at once.

“People won’t agree on what level of geoengineering is desirable,” says Myles Allen of the University of Oxford, who was involved in the study. “It works, but it won’t work the same way for everyone” [New Scientist].

Nevertheless, the drumbeat for geoengineering isn’t quieting. Two books that came out this spring, Jeff Goodell’s “How To Cool the Planet” and Eli Kintisch’s “Hack the Planet”, delved into the idea. Several more out this year try to predict what the Earth will be like in the warmer future, and whether you should go ahead and buy that summer vacation property in Canada. Last September Britain’s Royal Society issued a report calling for investment in geoengineering as a backup plan in case nations fail to constrain their emissions. And that was before the failure of the Copenhagen climate summit.

But, as climate models improve, scientists could get a better picture of the fallout from such a dramatic action as seeding the atmosphere with aerosols, according to climate guru Ken Caldeira.

“I don’t think climate modelling is at the point where we should trust one single model at that scale,” Caldeira says. “But I think the results are robust in the sense that it’s the kind of issue that people will need to face. The qualitative idea is that you’re going to have differential results in different regions, and that’s going to cause people to want different amounts of this stuff up there, if they want any of it up there at all” [Nature].

Related Content:
80beats: Bill Gates Funds Seawater Cloud Seeding, “The Most Benign Form of Geoengineering”
80beats: Iron-Dumping Experiment Is a Bust: It Feeds Crustaceans, Doesn’t Trap Carbon
80beats: If We Can’t Stop Emitting CO2, What’s Our Plan B?
DISCOVER: 5 Most Radical Ways to Squelch a Climate Crisis (photo gallery)
DISCOVER: It’s Gettin’ Hot in Here: The Big Battle Over Climate Science

Image: iStockphoto

The force of blog nature known as BORA! has decided he does not like the Pepsi aftertaste and is leaving Scienceblogs. I’m just back from a wonderfully rain-soaked vacation in Ireland, so I’m scrambling to get back up to speed. I won’t update my post on the scienceblogs diaspora till this afternoon. But in the meantime, read the epic farewell from BORA!

Science fiction is often associated with depictions of technology which, to quote Arther Clarke’s third law, is “so advanced that it seems like magic to us.” But science fiction’s other side is less about techno-gizmology and more about pushing us to think about what it is to be human. It asks what it would be like to live with different social norms (think of the group family structure in Caprica, or the androgynous society of Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness), different notions of identity (think of Star Trek’s “The Borg”, Avatar), and of reality itself (The Matrix).

The examples I’ve mentioned are from literature, movies, and TV. What about theater? Science fiction rarely shows up on the stage. But there are exceptions. This past week I was a guest instructor in a class called “Theater for Nerds” in Northwestern University’s summer program in theatre arts for high school seniors. It’s a class created by JC Aevaliotis for in-depth readings of plays that work at the intersection of art and another discipline (history, philosophy, science)–nerdy stuff indeed. I was invited to help discuss a play called On Ego, a collaboration between playwright Mick Gordon and neuropsychologist Paul Broks. The play is an exploration of different ideas about how we can go from what David Foster Wallace called the “2.8 pounds of electrified pate” that is our brain to something so vaunted as a sense of self. One idea, called “ego theory,” holds that there is an inner essence, denoted by “I”; the other idea, called “bundle theory” holds that there is no inner essence, but instead we are long series or bundle of interconnected sensations and thoughts. The underlying brain processes such as memories, feelings, thoughts, are sprinkled across diverse regions of the brain with no special point of convergence. Instead, we “come together in a work of fiction” – our brain is a story-telling machine, and the “self” is a story.

The play uses a thought experiment rooted in science fiction, and originally posed by philosopher Derek Parfit. You get beamed by a teleporter to a different location. But, a malfunction occurs and your original version is not destroyed. Which one is your “true” self? An ego theorist, who believes there must be a persistence of an inner “I” to maintain identity, would say the original; a bundle theorist, who thinks that the self is just the bundle of memories and experience, all faithfully copied by the teleporter, would say the copy is no less “you” than the original.

A beautiful ambiguity is introduced through Alice, the wife of the protagonist of the play, Alex. Alice has Capgras Syndrome. In Capgras there is a disconnection between the part of our brain that does facial recognition and the part of the brain that gives you an emotional response when you see someone familiar. Facial recognition occurs, but not the emotional reaction. This isn’t noticeable for strangers, but when your wife or husband appears, the strangeness of not feeling any emotional reaction causes people with Capgras to claim that the person before them is an imposter. Alex has a teleporter accident, where his “original” is not destroyed, but his copy goes on to visit Alice. But Alice refuses to believe that Alex is her husband. Is this the Capgras talking, or is she someone who believes in the “I” as persisting inner essence and has detected that Alex is, in fact, a “fake”?

The play manages to pack in all of these deep questions into a tight and dramatic story. It’s a great role model for how scientists might collaborate with story makers in a deeper way than increasing the plausibility of a far-out plot point or helping to fact check dialog. What makes this collaboration between science and art so successful is that the science fiction of the teleporter and science fact of Capgras are needed for the story to work as a piece of theater. They serve to dramatically present open questions about what it is to be human in a way that will leave the audience with a lot to think about.

In a future (pun intended) post, I’ll look at what some recent sci-fi movies and TV series (Avatar, Surrogates, Caprica) say about the nature of the self.

Earlier this month, we described the successful flight of Solar Impulse, a manned solar plane that flew for over 26 hours before a safe landing in Switzerland. Now comes news of another feat of solar-powered derring-do. Currently circling above Arizona, a British-built unmanned solar plane dubbed the Zephyr has now flown for a record-breaking seven days straight. Zephyr’s developer, the defense company QinetiQ, hopes the plane can stay aloft and double its own record for a total of fourteen days.

With a 74-foot wingspan, this latest version of the Zephyr is fifty percent bigger than its predecessors. Its designers hope that the plane will one day find use both for military reconnaissance and also for scientific research. Without a payload, it weights about 110 pounds. Says project manager Jon Saltmarsh:

“Zephyr is basically the first ‘eternal aircraft.’… The launch was absolutely beautiful; it was just so smooth,” said Mr Saltmarsh. “We had five people lift it above their heads, start running and it just lifted away into the sky.” [BBC]

The plane is currently circling over its take-off location, a U.S. military installation called the Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert. It uses paper-thin silicon solar arrays that cover its wings for power in the day, which also charge lithium-sulphur batteries for power when the sun goes down.

QinetiQ chose this time and place for its test because the plane can soak up the sun only 32 degrees north of the Equator in the midst of summer’s longer days.

The sun is tracking as nearly dead overhead as it ever does over US territory just now, meaning that the Zephyr is getting far more energy from its cells than it would farther north or at other times of year. One should note that in operational use the Zephyr will have to power a payload as well as itself–and for much of the year in many locations it will have to do this with less output from its cells than it is getting now. [The Register]

The Zephyr has already flown for four times as long as the unmanned aircraft that previously held the official endurance record, the United States’ Global Hawk. This one-week flight also doubles the unofficial record held by a previous version of the Zephyr.

Related content:
80beats: Sunshine-Powered Plane Takes Off for a 24-Hour Test Flight
80beats: Flying the Sunny Skies: Solar-Powered Plane Completes Two-Hour Test Flight
80beats: Meet the “Puffin,” NASA’s One-Man Electric Plane
80beats: Two New Eyes in the Sky Will Keep Watch on Earth’s Climate
DISCOVER: Who’s Flying This Thing?

Image: QinetiQ

If three months of waiting for BP to fix its oil leak have taught us anything, it’s not to get too optimistic about potential fixes. On Thursday, BP installed a cap that appeared to cut off the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, but yesterday the federal government officials overseeing the leak response said (pdf) that there appear to be hydrocarbons leaking from the seafloor near the well, and possibly methane detected above the well.

The upshot is that BP has until tomorrow (Tuesday) to investigate this possible leak. If it is there, the government could force BP to reopen the cap and resume pumping oil up to tankers on the surface.

The discovery of a seep and the unspecified anomalies suggest that the well could be damaged and that it may have to be reopened soon to avoid making the situation worse [The New York Times].

BP says it soon will have the capacity to capture more than 60,000 barrels of oil per day, so it’s prepared for action if the government asks it to restart pumping oil. The company, however, isn’t on the same page as its government overseers about the cap’s performance:

On Sunday, [Chief Operating Officer Doug] Suttles said that no leaks had been detected and that pressure had built to 6,778 pounds per square inch. That was mostly good, he said, although officials had initially expected the well’s pressure to climb higher, to 8,000 or 9,000 pounds per square inch. If nothing changed, Suttles said, the company hoped to make its “test” of the closed cap open-ended. He said that if the company reopened the well to connect it with ships on the surface, that would cause the well to leak into the gulf for as many as three days [Washington Post].

Besides the leak-or-no-leak discussion, there’s a telling bit of political posturing going on behind the scenes. Throughout BP’s three months of futility at trying to stop the main leak, we’ve covered the difficulty in getting an accurate measure of the amount of oil gushing into the Gulf. First it was 1,000 barrels per day, then 5,000, and then scientists who finally got access to video footage guessed figures in the tens of thousands. At present, the official estimate is between 35,000 and 60,000 barrels. But:

If the well is never reopened and connected to ships on the surface, it could complicate the U.S. government’s efforts to calculate the “flow rate” — the speed at which the oil was leaking. That would be vital to determining BP’s liability for the spill [Washington Post].

We’re also getting close to August, when BP says its relief wells—the proposed final solution to the leak—will intercept their target. We hope.

Related Content:
80beats: Photos from the Gulf’s Great Sea Turtle Relocation
80beats: BP’s Cap Has Stopped the Oil Leak—For Now
80beats: One Cap Off, One Cap On: BP Tries Another Plan To Catch Leaking Oil
80beats: Next from X Prize: An Award for Cleaning up BP’s Oil Spill?

Image: NASA

Earlier this year Nicholas Kristof wondered aloud (via twitter), “Why are most pundits men?” In another context, we might ask why men compose 97% of OpEds in the Wall Street Journal. Both involve the hesitancy of women to express opinions. Yet prominent female voices in our culture matter tremendously because they help to define our place in society. But if men get cast into the spotlight, you might say that women are examined under the microscope. As an author, blogger, researcher, and former Hill staffer, I regularly observe problems with the status quo across arenas. Rather then help women find their voices, we tend to send those testing the waters of public punditry dashing back out of focus.

Having spent my formative years as a run-of-the-mill tomboy, I never considered using the “feminist” label and naively assumed that since I was as good at science and math as the boys, my sex wouldn’t matter. But a funny thing happened when I entered academia; I learned that when a woman expresses herself visibly in any traditionally male-dominated field, the platform comes with the expectation that she will address gender issues. And over time it becomes a necessity. Last week Luke Muehlhauser caused a stir when he included me on a list of “sexy scientists.” Early on that thread, “Hansen” noted:

Oh dear, you may be in serious trouble now for placing Sheril Kirshenbaum on that list.

The link leads to “Singled Out“: My response from March 2009 to the remarks about my appearance heard ’round the science blogosphere when Chris and I joined the Discover network. Luke followed up with a second post asking whether he’s sexist, a third summarizing the hundreds of comments piling in, and a fourth on objectification. He also emailed me personally and seems genuinely interested to hear my perspective. So I’ve decided to weigh in and explore the topic with readers.

Long before I set out to write a book dealing with human sexual behavior, I knew that evolution primed us to notice the alluring qualities of other members of our species. These are often indicative of health and fertility and women are held to different standards of judgment than men. But even if biology has an influence on how we behave, it’s not an adequate scapegoat. After all, we also have a large cerebral cortex that allows us to choose the way we interact in our communities.

In my profession today I work closely with many talented men. We write on related topics and speak to similar audiences. Yet, I’m regularly reminded that I face many challenges they don’t have to deal with. No one jokingly whispers about their receptivity to sex during conferences just loud enough to overhear. No one questions whether they were hired so the boss could to get some “tail.” These kinds of experiences are common for women in and out of the ivory towers. We rarely complain for fear of being considered troublemakers or worse. We work hard and don’t want special treatment or penalization, so we turn a deaf ear, aware that some will never see past what’s on the surface. We stop speaking up and a negative feedback loop continues to reinforce gender roles over time.

Just consider the political arena: While candidates should never be chosen based on a number of X chromosomes, it would benefit everyone if women became more involved in the decision-making process given we represent about 50% of the population. But watching the way Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton were each cast as stereotypes, ogled, and photo-shopped by the media during their 2008 campaigns, I often wondered to myself why any little girl would dream of being in that position someday?

So Mr. Kristof, that’s likely why there aren’t more female pundits and commentators. Increasing our numbers will involve changing cultural expectations by highlighting the accomplishments of a wider spectrum of women to demonstrate what we are capable of.

Returning to the hullabaloo over last week’s “sexy scientists” list, I honestly don’t think any real harm has been done to me personally. And it’s worth pointing out that in 2005 when Chris was named one of Wired Magazine’s “Sexiest Geeks,” no one complained. So while this may not be the way I’d most like to be featured, far worse items pop up across the Internet about me on a regular basis. To survive in the blogosphere, you grow a thick skin and keep in mind that there’s more to life than what happens online.

That said, I would like to see Luke, and others, think more carefully about the ripple effects of such posts. He can moderate his own site, but also doesn’t have to deal with the related extended commentary now percolating about the web because of his actions. For example, I’m currently receiving comments such as “I’d hit that,” which are promptly deleted, but do make me uncomfortable regardless. And since I can only filter content here, who knows what else is being added to message boards and websites elsewhere. In other words, it’s important to remember that words travel well beyond one’s own blog and can quickly get out of hand. That’s the nature of new media communication–you can’t control or keep up with what’s out there. So it’s important to acknowledge that there are often unintended consequences down the line for those unknowingly involved.

Additionally, in response to Luke’s commentors, I’ll clarify that I’m not offended by being called a “woman in science.” It’s an accurate description. (In fact, in a few months I’ll be moderating a L’Oreal/Discover panel on Capitol Hill about that very topic). When I wrote that “I’d rather not be labeled a woman in science,” I meant that I would prefer that others recognize there are more dimensions to who I am and what I do than those assigned by base pairs.

What I know for sure is that we need to find more ways to acknowledge women who speak up, take a nontraditional path, defy expectations, and contribute to society in and out of science. And there are better ways to do so than commentary on our physical assets. But I also want to emphasize that I appreciate the way Luke is taking the time to explore a topic that doesn’t get nearly enough attention. When someone is willing to engage others and turn over ideas on sexism and gender–especially when they are attempting to understand the other side–it can be quite a constructive dialog. Further, this conversation isn’t really about photos on a blog post. It’s vastly more complex and deals with social and cultural mores and the objectification of females in our society.

In conclusion, given women will remain under the microscope indefinitely, I hope increasing numbers aim for high magnification for reasons beyond appearances. To achieve more equal representation in all realms, it will be necessary to identify and celebrate a diverse set of talented and motivated individuals so that they may become the role models our children deserve. Superficial beauty is ephemeral after all, so we we ought to spend more time focusing on the qualities that matter more and last indefinitely. And if we succeed, today’s visible voices will motivate the career aspirations of tomorrow’s leaders across the gender divide from Mars to Venus.

* * * * * * * * *

Related Posts:

(I will continue to update this list, so please add links in comments)

SeXy Science- You’re Doing It Wrong by rocketscientista

Because You Think Being A Girl Is Degrading by Nerdista

Sexism and Objectification by ramblingperfectionist

I have been objectified! by PZ Myers

Creating a “Photos of sexy women” post does not make one a skeevy sexist creep by Joé McKen

The 16 Sexiest Atheists by Geoff

Cientistas sensuais e lindas by Frank Coelho de Alcantara

If You Think I’m Sexy And You Like My Data by SheThought.com

Hot Scientist Babes Gate by Physioprof

Save us from the armchair philosopher with a blog. by Janet D. Stemwedel

Top 15 science hotties and labia-punching by Evil Monkey

Sex(ism) in Science by AmoebaMike

Now at Fark

If you live in the northern hemisphere and go outside in the winter, hanging not too far from Orion’s left shoulder is a small, tight, configuration of stars. A lot of people mistake them for the Little Dipper — I get asked about it all the time — but really it’s the Pleiades (pronounced PLEE-uh-dees), an actual cluster of stars about 400 light years away. To the eye you can usually spot six of the stars (the seventh, seen in ancient times, may have faded a bit since then), and in binoculars you can see dozens.

But when NASA’s Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) looked at it in February, this is what it saw:

Coooool. Literally! WISE looks in the infrared, and can see cool objects that are invisible to our eyes. The Pleiades stars are bound together in a cluster by their own gravity, and are currently plowing through a dense cloud of dust and gas in the galaxy. The material has been warmed up by the hot stars, and glows in the infrared. Deep images in visible light also show the material, but it looks blue as it reflects the optical light from the stars. In the WISE images, we’re seeing the matter actually glowing on its own, emitting infrared light.

When I was younger it was thought that this material was the leftover stuff from which the stars formed. But it was later found that the stars are older than first thought; about 100 million years old. While still quite young — the Sun is 4.5 billion years old! — that’s long enough for the original cocoon of material that made up these stars’ nursery to have dispersed. So it’s a cosmic coincidence that we happen to see the cluster as it’s ramming through this material. On the other hand, the Milky Way galaxy is loaded with lots of junk floating out there, and the Pleiades are in an area of high traffic. It’s not too surprising we’d see something like this happening, and it’s nice that it’s going on close enough that we get a good view of it.

WISE doesn’t just get pointed wherever astronomers see something interesting: it’s an all-sky survey, spinning on its axis and taking snapshots continuously. These are stored, and astronomers on the ground can then put them together in a mosaic. This image is actually pretty big, covering 2×3° of the sky. That’s about the size of a postage stamp held at arm’s length, and is a fair bit bigger than the full Moon on the sky. This image was released to celebrate the fact that as of July 17, WISE has now scanned the entire sky, and its primary mission has been fulfilled. Yay!

Funny, too: I’ve observed the Pleiades a lot, and seen lots of pictures too, yet it’s difficult to identify the stars in the WISE image — I had to rotate the visible image to match the one from WISE, but even then it’s not entirely obvious how they line up. In the IR, stars are bright that might be dim in optical, and vice-versa! But I’d recognize the sheets and filaments of the disturbed dust anywhere. One of my favorite things in astronomy is seeing a familiar object in an unfamiliar way. It reminds me that there’s still plenty to learn about the Universe.

Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA and NASA, ESA and AURA/Caltech

[An old post I'm fond of]

Scoop up some dirt, and you’ll probably wind up with some slime mold. Many species go by the common name of slime mold, but the ones scientists know best belong to the genus Dictyostelium. They are amoebae, and for the most part they live the life of a rugged individualist. Each slime mold prowls through the soil, searching for bacteria which it engulfs and digests. After gorging itself sufficiently, it divides in two, and the new pair go their separate, bacteria-devouring ways. But if the Dictyostelium in a stamp-size plot of soil should eat their surroundings clean, they send each other alarm signals. They then use the signals to steer toward their neighbors, and as many as a million amoebae converge in a swirling mound. The mound itself begins to act as if it were a single organism. It stretches out into a bullet-shaped slug the size of a sand grain, slithers up toward the surface of the soil, probes specks of dirt, and turns around when it hits a dead end. Its movements are slow – it needs a day to travel an inch – but the deliberateness of the movements eerily evokes an it rather than a they.

After several hours, the Dictyostelium slug goes through another change. The back end catches up with the tip, and the slug turns into a blob. About 20 percent of the cells move to the top of the blob and produce a slender stalk. In order to keep the stalk from flopping over, these cells must produce rigid bundles of cellulose. Unfortunately, this cellulose also tears apart the amoebae that make it. The remaining amoebae in the blob then take advantage of the suicide of their slugmates. They slide up to the top and form a globe. Each amoeba in the globe covers itself in a cellulose coat and becomes a dormant spore. In this form the colony will wait until something – a drop of rainwater, a passing worm, the foot of a bird – picks up the spores and takes them to a bacteria-rich place where they can emerge from their shells and start their lives over.

The individual amoebae forming the stalk make the ultimate sacrifice so that other Dictyostelium may live and perhaps reproduce. These stalk-formers are not marked for death when they are born. When the amoebae mix together and the slug takes shape, the individuals that wind up in the front end of the slug will be the ones that form the stalk. In other words, they get a losing ticket in the Dictyostelium lottery. Aside from their rotten luck, they are indistinguishable from the amoebae that will survive as spores.

It is remarkable that stalk-forming amoebae should remain loyal to their fellow amoebae. Why should they willingly join a group of other amoebae when their loyalty will end in its and their death? Why shouldn’t amoebae just stay away from the group and try to tough it out on their own? Of course, just joining a group is not a guarantee of loyalty. It’s not hard to imagine amoebae finding a way to avoid the lottery of death. Actually, we don’t even have to imagine them: scientists have discovered that some Dictyostelium will cheat their fellow amoebae, thanks to genes that ensure that they will form spores rather than stalks.

The puzzle of loyal amoebae is, at its foundation, a puzzle about evolution. In each generation, the members of a population will vary in all sorts of ways – in their size, in their shape, and in their behavior. Depending on the environment in which the population lives, some of these variations will give certain members an edge when it comes to surviving and reproducing. Genes that make successful variations possible will become more common, while the unsuccessful genes will become less common.

Imagine that a Dictyostelium divides in two, and one of its offspring undergoes a mutation that makes it cheat. It escapes the stalk lottery, and is guaranteed to become a spore. Over generations, its descendants would become more common because none of them have to die making a stalk. Its cheating gene would become more common in the population as a result. Other individuals might also mutate into cheaters on their own, and their offspring would thrive as well. Meanwhile, genes that promote cooperation would become less common. It might be possible for Dictyostelium to continue organizing slugs and stalks if only a small fraction of amoebae cheated. But in time natural selection could produce so many cheaters that a slug would fail to produce a stalk, dooming the spores to death. As plausible as this scenario may be, scientists don’t see it happening in the real world. Dictyostelium is thriving happily in forests around the world. Clearly betrayal has not evolved to catastrophic levels. Why not?

A paper in the new issue of Nature sheds some light on the answer. It comes from the laboratory of David Queller and Joan Strassman at Rice University in Texas. They and their students went to the Houston Arboretum and dug up dirt from various spots. They extracted Dictyostelium purpureum from the dirt and raised the isolates in a lab. Then they mixed the slime mold together, adding several million cells from different pairs of isolates to a single dish. To tell the slime mold apart, they added green fluorescent dye to one isolate in each pair.

The scientists then waited for the slime molds to use up their food and then start to seek out one another. The results were striking. In any given stalk, almost all the cells came from one isolate or the other. One stalk glowed green, while the other remained dark. This result was in stark contrast to the results the scientists got when they mixed together fluorescent and non-fluorescent cells from a single isolate. In those cases, the stalks were half and half.

The scientists conclude that the slime mold has some way of telling apart cells of its own isolate from others. It has an “us versus them” view of the world.

Recognizing kin can be a powerful weapon against the evolution of cheating. In the 1960s evolutionary biologists William Hamilton and George Williams recognized individuals that share a lot of genes may evolve seemingly altruistic behavior towards one another. Even if one individual doesn’t pass on its own genes, it may be able to help a relative pass on those genes more successfully. This dedidation to one’s kin is not such a big sacrifice from an evolutionary point of view, because even if you don’t get to reproduce, your sibling may. And some of your genes will be carried by your nephews and nieces. For these slime molds, becoming a stalk cell may not be such a terrible fate, evolutionarily speaking, because they help their kin survive as spores. It may pay more than cheating your way to the top. All these slime molds need is a way to tell which amoebae are kin and which are not. And the new study shows that they have a keen sense for us versus them.

What makes these results particularly interesting is that another species of slime mold, Dictyostelium discoideum, does not appear to stay with its kin so carefully. Queller and Strassman have found that unrelated D. discoideum will come together and form a single slug. Queller and Strassman suspect that amoebae join forces with strangers because they can form larger slugs. A larger slug can move farther and faster, possibly raising the odds that its spores will be able to reach fertile ground elsewhere.

But these mixed slugs offer more opportunities for cheaters, since kin selection is not so strong. One opportunity arises with the signals that tell each cell how to develop. Once amoebae become destined to develop into stalk cells, they still need to receive signals from neighboring cells to complete their development. You could well imagine that if a mutant amoeba became deaf to these signals it could avoid its fate as a dead stalk cell and become a spore instead.

Queller and Strassman have experimentally created these deaf amoebae by knocking out the gene D. discoideum needs to receive the development signal. (The gene is known as dimA.) The scientists mixed the dimA mutants with ordinary amoebae that were still able to receive the signal and turn into stalk cells. As they expected, the deaf amoebae did not become stalk cells. Instead, they prepared to become spores.

But when Queller and Strassman allowed these colonies to develop completely, they got a surprise. Most of the deaf amoebae failed to get into the ball of spores at the top of the stalk. The scientists don’t yet know exactly why deaf amoebae can’t become spores as well as ordinary ones. But what is clear is that dimA must have more than one role. In some cases, it acts as a signal that tells an amoeba to become a stalk cell. But in cells that are destined to become spores, it must also have some essential role in their development. It’s common for genes to play different roles, and this research on slime molds suggests it may pose a major obstacle to the evolution of cheaters. The advantages a cheating amoeba gains by losing one of dimA’s functions are wiped out by its losing another, equally important one.

It may also be difficult for D. discoideum to hide its cheating ways from its fellow slime mold. In another experiment, Queller and Strassman discovered that some mutant Dictyostelium cheat if they lose a gene called csA. Normally csA produces a sticky protein on the surface of amoebae. The csA mutants, by contrast, are slippery. When amoebae form a slug, these slippery mutants slide back to the rear, where they will have a good chance of becoming spores rather than stalk cells. The problem for a csA cheater is that this same sticky protein serves as a badge of loyalty. When individual Dictyostelium start moving toward one another in the soil, they recognize their neighbors by their csA badge. This sticky protein allows two Dictyostelium to glue themselves together and continue searching for other amoebae with the same badge. Cheating amoebae don’t have the csA badge, and so they are shunned. Cheating can only benefit slime mold once they’re in a group. If they can’t get in a group at all, they’re out of luck.

It looks like we’ll have to wait for future research to show why one species of slime mold is so careful to stay with its kin, while another mingles with strangers. But these results make Dictyostelium a great model for scientists to study to understand the evolution of cooperation in bigger creatures, such as ourselves.

Source: NJ Mehdiabadi et al, “Kin preference in a social microbe,” Nature, August 24, 2006, doi:10.1038/442881a

Nishanta Rajakaruna, a professor of botany at College of the Atlantic, sent me UC Davis geologist Eldridge M. Moores’s list on why serpentine should remain the State Rock of California (background here). Why should you care? It’s simple:

When politicians make so-called “scientific” decisions based on nonsense, it’s our collective responsibility to call them out on it!

Alright, so what can you do? Judgment on the bill in question (SB624) happens this week, so if you live in CA, please email/call:

1. Senator Feinstein

2. Senator Boxer

3. The Governor

4. Gloria Romero who is naively pushing for this (and we’re not sure why)

5. Your state assembly person

Let them know that sound science must play a role in the policy-making process. Here are Eldridge’s talking points:

• Serpentine is closely associated with gold deposits in the foothills, with the California Gold Rush, and California’s history;
• Serpentine is formed by hydration of rocks (peridotite) that come from the Earth’s mantle, the layer beneath the Earth’s crust.
• Principally, serpentines and associated rocks are part of rock suites called ophiolites that are fragments of ocean crust and mantle emplaced in continents;
• Ophiolites are widespread in California–in the Coast Ranges, the Klamath Mountains, the Sierra Nevada, along other parts of the western margin of North America, in the Appalachians, and in Latin America, Eurasia, and elsewhere. Thus these rocks are important for a full understanding of the complex evolution of the California landscape and our planet.
• Serpentines are fairly easy to identify, being mostly shiny black or green. Many serpentines are also weak rocks and prone to landslide. Having serpentine as California’s State Rock calls attention to these issues in many places; and provides a “teaching moment.”
• The asbestos in serpentine is mostly the less-harmful form, chrysotile, rather than the more dangerous form – amphibole. The latter forms by different geologic processes from a variety of rock-types;
• Having children possess samples of serpentine should not endanger their health any more than samples of many other rocks;
• Many rare species of plants grow only on serpentines, including special trees, shrubs, and non-woody plants. California is world-famous for these plants: indeed many grow only in California. These plants also provide a “teaching moment”.
• Serpentines and their original mineral, olivine are increasingly viewed as an ideal repository of carbon dioxide (CO₂), because they chemically combine to fix the CO₂ in the solid mineral magnesite (magnesium carbonate). This possibility is important for the future of California serpentines, for the US’s efforts to control its greenhouse emissions, and provides an additional “teaching moment” for all of us.
• Serpentine plays an important role in small movements (creep) where serpentine is present along active faults, reducing the hazard of large earthquakes.
• “Defrocking” serpentine as the California State Rock is not going to make any of these issues go away. It will, however, make it more difficult to communicate the many issues, both bad and good, to the public in California.

Related, there’s now a Serpentine Protest Song.

Update: Helpful links

The Law Against Serpentine: The Attorneys’ Arena

Geotripper

Highly Allochthonous

Twitter: #CAserpentine

Serpentine: A Group of Minerals

Throwing the Baby Out with the Bathwater: The Serpentine Issue in California

Asbestos in California’s State Rock? Not Really

Moon over Oregon. Credit: Greg Lyons

Here is an image taken by one of our readers, Greg Lyons, of the moon as seen presumably in his back yard.

This is obviously a very good image, guess what? He took this with a little Kodak C875 camera! This proves you can take some pretty remarkable images of the night sky with affordable equipment you may already own. He used the manual mode in the camera and a tripod.

Greg has sent me a few photos,  in this one he caught the planetary lineup of Venus, Mars, Saturn and of course the moon.

I need to find my little tripod! He gave me some of the settings he used and I want to try them out with my little Cannon 520.

I really-really like this image and made it into various sized wallpapers and it looks great on my screen. I did not modify the image at all, other than changing the size to reduce the file size.

Thank you very much Greg for all the great pictures. Hopefully this will inspire more to get out there and give it a try, I’m gonna – right after I get done dodging the thunderstorms I’m getting this afternoon.

Here’s some wallpaper sized versions:

Determination of Human Penile Electrical Resistance and Implication on Safety for Electrosurgery of Penis.

“Electrosurgery has been a surgical application since the late 19th century. Although many urologists take this daily application for granted, the effects of electrical treatment on penile nerves and vessels have not been well documented. Aim. To investigate the electrical characteristics of the penis and erectile tissues and to discover the potential hazards of electrosurgery on the penis. Methods. Measurement of the electrical characteristics of three human penises in order to create models to analyze the effect of electricity on penile nerves and vessels. Main Outcome Measures. Electrical resistivity of the penile shaft, electrical current density, and electric field strength on penile nerves and vessels, proportion of generated heat on the penis and electrical current density of the electrosurgery return electrode. Results. Electrical resistivity (rho) of the penile shaft is 127.14 Omega . cm at 500 kHz. Electrical current density (J) of the penis shaft is 71.06 mA/cm(2), nerve (60.23 mA/cm(2)), vessel (67.93 mA/cm(2)), and return electrode (2.11 mA/cm(2)). Electrical field strength (E) of the whole penis shaft is 9.03 volt/cm. The proportion of generated heat on the penis is four times as much as on other body parts of the circuit. Conclusions. Potential and subclinical injury to erectile tissue caused by electrosurgery on the penis cannot be underestimated. The injury mechanism can be attributed to a thermal (electrical current) effect and a nonthermal (mainly electrical field) effect. Ways to avoid the electrosurgical injury are: using less power (W)/electrical field and less time, biopolar electrosurgery confining the injured area, ligation to achieve hemostasis, and new laser technologies.”

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Civilian gunshot injuries of the penis: the Miami experience.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Bonus double feature: Acute management of the zipper-entrapped penis.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Fine-touch pressure thresholds in the adult penis.

WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

In early July we brought you news of the Great Sea Turtle Relocation–an ambitious plan dreamed up by conservationists to scoop up some 70,000 sea turtle eggs from Gulf Coast beaches, to prevent the hatchlings from crawling straight into oil-fouled waters. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service noted that the plan carried considerable risks to the unborn turtles, but said it was the best chance of preventing the die-off an entire generation.

Now the update: Over the past week, the plan has gone into action, and baby turtles are now swimming free in the Atlantic Ocean. But some experts question whether the launched turtles have a chance.

On Alabama and Florida beaches workers are carefully digging up nests, marking the eggs with “this end up” symbols, and packing them in styrofoam coolers for the truck ride to a Kennedy Space Center warehouse. The eggs belong mostly to threatened loggerheads, along with some endangered green, leatherback, and Kemp’s ridley turtles.

Check out a photo gallery of the turtle rearing and release operations after the jump.

---

The first batch of turtles gave the project managers cause for optimism, according to Jane A. Provancha, a contractor working in the warehouse:

On Saturday and Monday evenings, she released 56 baby turtles into the dark waters of the Atlantic and watched them swim away. Turtles from about 83% of the eggs in the first nest have emerged and swum out to sea, she said. “They looked really great. They were a little slow at first, but then they started moving around,” she said. [Los Angeles Times]

But some experts are worried that these newly released hatchlings will run into navigation trouble. Marine biologist Ken Lohmann notes that these baby turtles typically take their first swims in the Gulf of Mexico, but instead they’re being released into the Atlantic from Florida’s east coast. That may be enough to scramble their navigational systems and interfere with their normal migratory routes.

His view is backed up by evidence that suggests turtles are programmed from birth to follow a specific migratory path once in water. Indeed, turtles from different nesting sites seem to inherit different sets of navigational instructions. And that means a turtle born in the Gulf but displaced to the Atlantic coast may follow the wrong path out to the open ocean, Lohmann says. [New Scientist]

Recent posts on the BP oil spill:
80beats: BP’s Cap Has Stopped the Oil Leak–for Now
80beats: Gulf Coast Turtle News: No More Fiery Death; Relocating 70,000 Eggs
80beats: Next from X Prize: An Award for Cleaning up BP’s Oil Spill?
80beats: Obama’s Speech on the Oil Spill: What Do You Think of His “Battle Plan”?
80beats: BP to Kevin Costner: We’ll Take 32 of Your Oil Clean-up Machines

Images: NASA

Earlier today on Apple’s Cupertino campus, Steve Jobs held a press conference regarding the iPhone 4 reception saga, which he said is not “antenna-gate.” The overall gist: Jobs says the iPhone 4’s reception isn’t perfect, but not any worse than other phone’s, and Apple will give out a free “bumper” case to iPhone 4 phone buyers.

The cases are meant to reduce the dropped reception problem that can occur if a person’s hand covers a crucial bit of the antenna. The bumpers will be free until September 30th, and buyers can return their phones for a refund if still unhappy.

We’ve rounded up opinions of Jobs’ conference, which you can catch a video of through Apple’s site, here.

Jobs started the meeting by showing other phones (BlackBerry Bold, Droid Eris…) also dropping signal strength depending on how they’re held. But some think that comparing the iPhone 4 to other devices isn’t a valid excuse when you have a brand built on exclusivity (and expense).

It didn’t matter whether Jobs thought complaints about the reception problem were overblown. Nor did it matter if other phones had similar problems–if you set yourself up as a premium brand generating fanatical loyalty, the last thing you want to do is say “but others have the same glitch.” [Computer World]

Others think Jobs kept his cool in a situation that might have had some executives pressing the recall button, a reflex that will at least make investors happy.

Journalists are howling. Customers are complaining. Late night comics are cracking wise. Drama, however is Apple Chief Steve Jobs’ thing. . . . The master showman didn’t flub any of his lines Friday as he sought to reframe the discussion about problems with the new iPhone’s antenna, which wraps along the outside edge of the phone to form an integral part of the smart phone’s shell. [Forbes]

If the phone is no worse than others, then why the apparent reception debacle? Jobs implies that it’s a matter of perception; in part, the phone has gotten too much bad press and not enough cases (which improve reception). But if the dropped call ratio is in fact worse than the previous 3G model (Job says less than 1 more dropped call per 100), some argue, you can’t blame the phone’s problems all on image.

Like Mark Twain’s death, reports of the iPhone 4’s reception problems have been greatly exaggerated, Jobs insisted. A mere 0.55 per cent of iPhone 4 users have called AppleCare about reception problems, he said. Only 1.7 per cent have returned their phones, under a third of the six per cent returns of its predecessor, the iPhone 3GS. That 1.7 per cent, by the way, apparently didn’t include the unfortunate phone of TV talk-show [the View] host Whoopi Goldberg, who instead “murdered” her malfunctioning iPhone 4, according to CNET. [The Register]

Though originally some customers called for nothing short of a recall, Andy Ihnatko at the Chicago Sun-Times empathizes with Apple, defending the device which he happily purchased after testing, despite knowing that it “sporadically” lost its reception.

It’s a demonstrable and repeatable problem, but mostly it’s being experienced by people who are actively trying to make it happen … folks like me, who write about technology and review new hardware. “There’s yet to be any video of a baby dolphin coated in spilled iPhone 4’s, adorably drowning,” I said in a morning blog post. So in the end, it was the trickiest kind of PR problem imaginable: the kind in which the company can do way more damage by responding poorly than they might by simply letting events take their course. A massive recall of the iPhone 4 would have heaved the phone on the scrapheap next to the G4 Cube, a desktop Mac design that was just as innovative as the new iPhone, but which was never heard from again. [Chicago Sun-Times]

Do you have an iPhone 4? Did you see Jobs’ speech? What are your thoughts on Apple’s response?

Related content:
80beats: The iPhone 4: Snappy Visuals and Shiny New Video Chats
Discoblog: Lefties Cry Discrimination Over iPhone’s Faulty Antenna
Discoblog: Shoot it, Blend it, Burn it: 3 Ways to Destroy Your iPhone 4
Bad Astronomy: Resolving the iPhone Resolution

Image: flickr / William Hook

The show just went up, and he's my latest guest. Here's the write-up:
Our guest this week needs no introduction for those in the skeptical and secular world. After all, he has a frakkin' asteroid named after him.
He’s Phil Plait—science blogger extraordinaire for Discover Blogs, where he authors “Bad Astronomy.” Recently, Plait joined Point of Inquiry for a wide ranging conversation about standing eggs on end, Apollo moon landing deniers, wacky yet endearing Hollywood bad science, something called “spaghettification," ... and the end of the world.
Phil Plait is a skeptic and an astronomer, and former president of the James Randi Educational Foundation. He lectures widely across the country and is the author of two books, most recently Death from the Skies: These Are the Ways the World Will End.
Check the show out here, and stream it here....

Dear male reader: Just so you know, your sperm isn’t that different from a sea anemone’s.

Sperm is so vital, a new study in PLoS Genetics found, that one of the genes responsible for it hasn’t changed in 600 million years. Insects, humans, marine invertebrates, other mammals, even fish—the males of all these creatures share a common sperm gene that dates back to before all those animals diverged all those millions of years ago, according to the team led by Eugene Xu.

From an evolutionary point of view, that longevity is simply stunning.

“It’s really surprising because sperm production gets pounded by natural selection,” Xu said. “It tends to change due to strong selective pressures for sperm-specific genes to evolve. There is extra pressure to be a super male to improve reproductive success. This is the one sex-specific element that didn’t change across species. This must be so important that it can’t change” [MSNBC].

The gene in question in called BOULE. Xu and colleagues went hunting for versions of it in all those creatures listed above, trying to find out whether sperm evolved multiple times, or rather arose once in a long-ago ancestor. When they found some form of the gene in all of them, even sea anemones, they had their answer.

Next, the researchers tested mice to be sure the gene was in charge of just sperm production, not more general cell processes. Sure enough, the protein encoded by the gene was found only in mouse testes. And if the BOULE gene was disrupted, otherwise healthy mice didn’t produce sperm [Science News].

That part of the find could be crucial; beyond explaining how our “sex-specific elements” evolved, it could have practical applications, too.

BOULE is the only gene known to function only for the production of sperm, said Xu. This makes it an ideal target for designing a male contraceptive drug or agents that halt the reproduction of infectious parasites or the carriers of germs, he said, because knocking it out wouldn’t harm other bodily processes [Wired.com].

Related Content:
80beats: New Contraceptive Wins Gates Money: Blasting Testicles with Ultrasound
80beats: Revealed: The Secret of the Sperm’s Wild Dash to the Egg
Discoblog: Warning All Male Competitive Cyclists: Less Than 5% of Your Sperm May Be Normal

Image: iStockphoto

In 2009, the hip hop duo Insane Clown Posse released the song “Miracles.” The song asks how certain things work: stars, rainbows, inherited genetic traits, magnets–and other stuff to “shock your eyelids.” The exact lyrics are a bit off-color for this blog, but the two singing clowns certainly ask some valid questions. Unfortunately, the song attributes these scientific happenings to “magic” noting, “I don’t wanna talk to a scientist.”

For members of the somewhat nontraditional science outreach group Nosebridge, that simply wouldn’t do. Surely, Insane Clown Posse fans–called juggalos–wanted to know the real answer to how a “[expletive] magnet” works! So earlier this summer, the Nosebridge crew brought their posters to a crowd of fans waiting to go into a concert. Surely those fans would be interested in understanding the science behind apparent miracles like magnetism.

The videos and other pictures, available on the blog Laughing Squid, show the real magic that unfolded that evening. The Nosebridge team reports that many juggalos were very receptive to learning, for example, why a solar eclipse happens, but eventually San Francisco police had to step in to make sure things didn’t get too physical.

Related content:
Discoblog: Evolution, With Dope Rhymes and a Funky Hip-Hop Beat
Discoblog: Sneak Preview of Darwin: The Musical
Discoblog: Worst (and Best) Science Rap of the Week
Discoblog: Buzz Aldrin, Rapper?

Image: flickr /michiexile

At around the same time that the two big Jewish genetics papers came out, there was another one in BMC Genetics which I had overlooked. It’s open access so you can read the whole thing, but seems like they used 32 STR’s as markers. Their primary finding about Jewish populations was that there was a north vs. south distinction, illustrated in this map:

Speaking of Brea Grant…

Many years ago, I wasn’t a huge fan of Kevin Bacon until I saw "The Big Picture", and then "Tremors", and so I finally decided he cracks me up and is cool.

Then someone told me about the Oracle of Bacon, where you enter an actor’s name and get their Bacon Number; their degree of separation from Kevin Bacon (if you don’t know what this is then I won’t explain because you are hopelessly unhip).

I put my name into The Oracle and it came up with nothing. Drat. But wait a sec…

I’m in this video with Brea Grant (see below), who was in "Halloween II" with Octavia Spencer, who was in "Beauty Shop" with… Kevin Bacon.

I have a Bacon Number of 3!

OK, not officially, since my video with Brea probably doesn’t count. So I looked again at The Oracle, and realized it was only searching movies. As it happens I’ve done a few documentaries which are listed on IMDB, so I hit the "allow all" button on the Oracle which includes documentaries…

Aha! It still works! It doesn’t include Brea, sadly, but I suspect Aretha is pretty cool, too.

Hey, cool! I still have a Bacon number of 3.

Still, since both methods are a little dodgy, I think it’s fair to fudge it a bit. Let’s just say I have a Bacon Number of a tad more than three… say, 3.1415.

Mmmmm. Bacon Pi.

Biwu English kokafo wapisi? That’s “Will English kick the bucket?” in a new language called ROILA (Robert Interaction Language). Perhaps it’s an apt question of my mother tongue. Under development by a group of researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, ROILA is a language made specifically for human-robot communication.

The language hopes to make up for speech-recognition software’s shortcomings by modifying human language to be more comprehensible for machines. Using an algorithm, it takes parts of natural and artificial languages and combines them to make sure that no two words sound too similar.

But a quick look at its grammar shows that ROILA goes a step further: when it comes to sentences, ROILA has cut out all the patap (English: the crazy). Irregular verbs? No. Most gendered words? No. Most punctuation? No. From the grammar website:

Every sentence will conclude with a full stop: “.” Question marks can be used in sentences where a question is asked. We do not support commas, apostrophes and quotation marks.

In a world where awkward computer-communication quirks easily turn into hip sentence stylings, as in @people #hashTagsAreUgly, one could see a language named with an acronym getting some real traction.

Perhaps I’m overreacting. As Popular Science duly notes, there have been similar computer-required human languages, like Palm Inc.’s Graffiti for hand-held devices to aid in stylus writing; most people I know aren’t making their Ts look like 7s. There is also safety in the fact that ROILA is not yet a spoken language.

Something should also be said for ROILA’s simplicity. “What color is the museum?” becoming “Biwu wekepo buse kulil bubas?” which back into English is “What color not new house?” has some real charm.

Related content:
Discoblog: How to Make a Hospital Stay Even More Dehumanizing: Robot Workers
Discoblog: Robot Model Struts the Catwalk in Japan
Discoblog: Tiny Jumping Robot Can Find Enemies, Scale Fences
Discoblog: Update: “Corpse-Eating Robot” Actually a Vegetarian

Image: flickr / a voir etc…

You’ve been running for hours, chased by a crazed grizzly bear. Suddenly you lose your footing, and you’re balancing on the edge of a cliff. Your stomach lurches as gravity pulls you down. Instantly you’re jolted awake and find yourself teetering precariously over the edge of your bed in your New York apartment. You’ve been asleep for just 5 minutes.

Like me (or whoever I stole that bizarre-o dream about the crazed grizzly from), everyone has dreams that strangely intertwine with reality. That’s what makes Chris Nolan’s newest thriller, Inception, so fun to watch. It plays with ideas we’ve all experienced—how dreams can reveal our most guarded memories, feel like days when only hours have passed, or affect our emotions when we wake up.

Inception’s Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, a man trained in the art of stealing personal info using a process called dream sharing. He builds the world of a dream, brings his subject into that world, and guides events so he can extract needed information, or plant a life-altering idea. Cobb is charged with creating a dream to convince Robert Fischer, the son of a multi-billionaire businessman, to use his inheritance to build his own company. To do this, Cobb and his crew induce an incredibly deep sleep, and enter a dream, within a dream, within a dream, and at one point (I think) within another dream.

Sure, busting into dreams and planting very specific ideas in someone’s mind is pretty far removed from even the most leading-edge brain science, but Nolan got the basic idea right: Neuroscientists say sleep plays an important role in memory consolidation. While we’re sleeping (or perhaps dreaming), our long-term memories stabilize deep in our hippocampuses. If someone were to plant a memory in a dream, who knows how long it would persist.

As the plot develops, the dreams are so realistic that it becomes challenging for the characters—and audience—to distinguish the dream state from reality. But that’s all part of the game, drawing us in as we attempt to sift fact from fiction. The film’s cinematographer, Wally Pfister, told me that in his earliest conversations about the film with Nolan, the director said “Remember, this is a dream world. When you’re in a dream, it feels real and you want to believe it’s real.” This warped reality triggers some moments of confusion (as you try to keep track of which dreamscape you’re in, and how actions in one realm affect the others) but by the end my brain had adjusted to the scheme.

I emerged from the theater into a chatty crowd—some firing questions excitedly at their neighbors or calling friends to announce how confused they were, while others praised the film’s brilliance. Fans and critics alike, everyone was talking.

—DISCOVER reporter/researcher Amy Barth