We know about exoplanet HD 209458b, nicknamed “Osiris.” We know it’s 153 light years away, that it has water in its atmosphere, and that it orbits its star in three and a half days at a distance 100 times closer than Jupiter is to the sun. But we didn’t know this for sure until now: This planet has a tail.

In a study in The Astrophysical Journal, a research team says Osiris, a gas giant, orbits so close that its star is blasting away its atmosphere. As the planet progresses on its blazing hot and hasty revolutions, a tail like that of a comet follows behind it. The Hubble Space Telescope’s Cosmic Origins Spectrograph caught the effect as Osiris made repeated transits in front of its star.

The instrument detected the heavy elements carbon and silicon in the planet’s super-hot 2,000 degrees F (1,100 C or so) atmosphere. This detection revealed the parent star is heating the entire atmosphere, dredging up the heavier elements and allowing them to escape the planet.

Jeffrey Linsky, of the University of Colorado, who led the study, said: “We have measured gas coming off the planet at specific speeds, some coming toward Earth. The most likely interpretation is that we have measured the velocity of material in a tail” [Christian Science Monitor].

The planet may be losing material to that tail at a rate of 10,000 tons per second. But fear not for brave Osiris. Even at that rate, hot Jupiters don’t disappear overnight.

“It will take about a trillion years for the planet to evaporate,” Linsky said [Space.com].

New exoplanets catch our attention all the time, especially with the Kepler mission now out in space and on the hunt. But Osiris is one of the best-studied alien worlds.

Scientists first spotted it in 1999. Since then, studies have shown it holds not only water vapor in its atmosphere, but also compounds connected to life, like methane and carbon dioxide (though Osiris is probably a little toasty for life as we know it). And just last month, astronomers found fierce storms raging on Osiris with wind speeds in excess of 3,000 miles per hour—making the strongest winds known in our own solar system look meek by comparison.

If you like these artist’s impressions of this exoplanet, check out an astronomer’s thoughts on such creative renderings.

Follow DISCOVER on Twitter.

Related Content:
80beats: Weather Report from an Exoplanet Shows Winds of 4,300 MPH
80beats: Astronomers Find Bevy of Exoplanets; Won’t Discuss Most Interesting Ones
80beats: First Ever Weather Report From an Exoplanet: Highs of 2240 Degrees
Visual Science: Astronomer Mike Brown on Arty Exoplanets

Image: G. Bacon, NASA/ESA

[An old post from 2005 I'm fond of]

There was a time not that long ago when sequencing a single gene would be hailed as a scientific milestone. But then came a series of breakthroughs that sped up the process: clever ideas for how to cut up genes and rapidly identify the fragments, the design of robots that could do this work twenty-four hours a day, and powerful computers programmed to make sense of the results. Instead of single genes, entire genomes began to be sequenced. This year marks the tenth anniversary of the publication of the first complete draft of the entire genome of a free-living species (a nasty little microbe called Haemophilus influenzae). Since then, hundreds of genomes have emerged, from flies, mice, humans, and many more, each made up of thousands of genes. More individual genes have been sequenced from the DNA of thousands of other species. In August, an international consortium of databases announced that they now had 100 billion “letters” from the genes of 165,000 different species.

But this data glut has created a new problem. Scientists don’t know what many of the genes are for.

The classic method for figuring out what a gene is for is good old benchwork. Scientists use the gene’s code to generate a protein and then figure out what sort of chemical tricks the protein can perform. Perhaps it’s good at slicing some other particular protein in half, or sticking two other proteins together. It’s not easy to tackle this question with brute force, since a mystery protein may interact with any one of the thousands of other proteins in an organism. One way scientists can narrow down their search is by seeing what happens to organisms if they take out the particular gene. The organisms may suddenly become unable to digest their favorite food or withstand heat, or show some other change that can serve as a clue.

Even today, though, these experiments still demand a lot of time, in large part because they’re still too complex for robots and computers. Even when it comes to E. coli, a bacterium that thousands of scientists have studied for decades, the functions of a thousand of its genes remain unknown.

This dilemma has helped give rise to a new kind of science called bioinformatics. It’s an exciting field, despite its woefully dull name. Its mission is to use computers to help make sense of molecular biology–in this case, by traveling through vast oceans of online information in search of clues to how genes work.

One of the most reliable ways to find out what a gene is for is to find another gene with a very similar sequence. The human genes for hemoglobin and the chimpanzee genes for hemoglobin are a case in point. Since our ancestors diverged about six million years ago, the genes in each lineage have mutated a little, but not much. The proteins they produce still have a similar structure, which allows them to do the same thing: ferry oxygen through the bloodstream. So if you happen to be trolling through the genome of a gorilla–another close ape relative–and discover a gene that’s very similar to chimpanzee and human hemoglobins, you’ve got good reason to think that you’ve found a gorilla hemoglobin gene.

Scientists sometimes use this same method to match different genes in the same genome. There isn’t just one hemoglobin gene in humans but seven. They carry out different slightly functions, some carrying oxygen in the fetus, for example, and others in the adult. This gene family, as it’s known, is the result of ancient mistakes. From time to time, the cellular machinery for copying genes accidentally creates a second copy of a gene. Scientists have several lines of evidence for this. Some people carry around extra copies of genes not found in other people. Scientists have also tracked gene duplication in laboratory experiments with bacteria and other organisms.

In many cases, these extra genes offer no benefit and disappear over the generations. But in some cases, extra genes appear to provide an evolutionary advantage. They may mutate until they take on new functions, and gradually spread through an entire species. Round after round of gene duplication can turn a single gene into an entire family of genes. Knowing that genes come in families means that if you find a human gene that looks like hemoglobin genes, it’s a fair guess that it does much the same thing as they do.

This method works pretty well, and bioinformaticists (please! find a better name!) have written a number of programs to search databases for good matches between genes. But these programs tend to pick the low-hanging fruit: they are good at recognizing relatively easy matches and not so good at identifying more distant cousins. Over time, related genes can undergo different mutations rates, which can make it difficult to recognize their relationship simply by eyeballing them side by side. Another hazard is the way a gene can be “borrowed” for a new function. For example, snake venom genes turn out to have evolved from families of genes that carry out very different functions in the heart, liver, and other organs. These sorts of evolutionary events can make it hard for simple gene-matching to yield clues to what a new gene is for.

To improve their hunt for the function of new genes, bioinformaticists are building new programs. One of the newest, called SIFTER, was designed by a team of computer scientists and biologists at UC Berkeley. They outline some of their early results in the October issue of PLOS Computational Biology (open access paper here). SIFTER is different than previous programs in that it relies on a detailed understanding of the evolutionary history of a gene. As a result, it offers significantly better results.

To demonstrate SIFTER’s powers of prediction, the researchers tested it on well-studied families of genes–ones that contained a number of genes for which there was very good experimental evidence for their functions. They used SIFTER to come up with hypotheses about the function of the genes, and then turned to the results of experiments on those genes to see if the hypotheses were right.

Here’s how a typical trial of SIFTER went. The researchers examined the family of (big breath) Adenosine-5′-Monophosphate/Adenosine Deaminase genes. Scientists have identified 128 genes in this family, in mammals, insects, fungi, protozoans, and bacteria. With careful experiments, scientists have figured out what 33 of these genes do. The genes produce proteins that generally hack off a particular part of various molecules. In some cases, they help produce nitrogen compounds we need for metabolism, while in other cases they help change the information encoded in genes as it is translated into proteins. In still other cases they have acquired an extra segment of DNA that allows them to help stimulate growth.

The SIFTER team first reconstructed the evolutionary tree of this gene family, calculating how all 128 genes are related to one other. The shows how an ancestral gene that existed in microbes billions of years ago was passed down to different lineages, duplicating and mutating along the way. The researchers then gave SIFTER the experimental results from just five of the 128 genes in the family. The program used this information to infer how the function of the genes evolved over time. That insight then allowed it to come up with hypotheses about what the other 123 genes in the family do.

Aside from the 5 genes whose function the researchers had given SIFTER, there are 28 with good experimental evidence. The scientists compared the real functions of these genes to SIFTER’s guesses. It got 27 out of 28 right.

SIFTER’s 96% accuracy rate is significantly better than other programs that don’t take evolution so carefully into consideration. Still, the Berkeley team cautions that they have more work to do. The statistics that the program uses (Bayesian probability) get harder to use as the range of possible functions gets bigger. What’s more, the model of evolution that it relies on is fairly simple compared to what biologists now understand about how evolution works. But these aren’t insurmountable problems. They’re the stuff to expect in SIFTER 2.0 or some other future upgrade.

Those who claim to have a legitimate alternative to evolution might want to try to match SIFTER. They could take the basic principles of whatever they advocate and use them to come up with a mathematical method for comparing genes. No stealing any SIFTER code allowed–this has to be original work that doesn’t borrow from evolutionary theory.

They could then use their method to compare the 128 genes of the Adenosine-5′-Monophosphate/Adenosine Deaminase family. Next, they could take the functions of five of the genes, and use that information to predict how the other 123 genes work. And then they could see how well their predictions were by looking at the other 28 genes for which there’s good experimental evidence about their function.

All the data to run this test is available for free online, so there’s no excuse for these antievolutionists not to take the test. Would they match SIFTER’s score of 96%? Would they do better than random? I doubt we’ll ever find out. Those who attack evolution these days aren’t much for specific predictions of the sort SIFTER makes, despite the mathematical jargon they like to use. Until they can meet the SIFTER challenge, don’t expect most scientists to take them very seriously.

Identifying the functions of genes is important work. Scientists need to know how genes work to figure out the causes of diseases and figure out how to engineer microbes to produce insulin and other important molecules. The future of medicine and biotech, it appears, lies in life’s distant past.

Update Monday 10:30 am: John Wilkins says that bioinformatician is the proper term, although no improvement. I then googled both terms and found tens of thousands of hits for both (although bioinformatician has twice as many as bioinformaticist). Is there an authority we can turn to? And can it try to come up with a better name? Gene voyagers? Matrix masters?

High heel wearers likely guessed it: Walking around on your tiptoes isn’t great for your calf muscles. Researchers looking at leg sonograms of women who frequently wear 2-inch or higher heels found that these women had calf muscle fibers that were an average of 13 percent shorter than their flat-wearing counterparts.

The small study, published yesterday in the Journal of Experimental Biology, has given some credence to complaints of lasting pain even after the pumps come off.

Anecdotally it has long been said that regularly wearing high heels shortens the calf muscle. Study leader Professor Marco Narici, from Manchester Metropolitan University, said in the 1950s secretaries who wore high heels complained that they struggled to walk flat-footed when they took their shoes off. [BBC]

From a group of 80 women, the researchers chose 11 women who had frequently worn two-inch or higher heals over the past two years and complained of pain when they weren’t wearing the shoes. MRI scans showed no difference in the calf muscle length of these women, but sonograms did. Sonograms showed that the Achilles’ tendons were stiffer, making it difficult for the calf muscles to stretch when the women were not wearing their heels.

“This confirmed the hypothesis that when you place the muscle in a shorter position, the fibres become shorter,” said Prof Marco Narici, who led the study. “We found the Achilles’ tendon was the same length in the two groups, but in women who wore high heels it was much thicker and stiffer, making it harder for them to stretch their feet out when they were on the flat.” [The Telegraph]

The researchers say that this doesn’t mean that heel-wearers should give up their favorite shoes entirely. They suggest stretching exercises and switching now and again from stilettos to other shoes.

Fortunately, only die-hard fashionistas appear to be at risk. Discomfort “will primarily occur in women wearing almost exclusively high-heeled shoes,” says [coauthor Robert] Csapo. In the study, the women who experienced pain wore heels for an average of about 60 hours a week. [CNN]

Related content:
80beats: The Ur-Sneaker: 5500-Year-Old Shoe Found in Armenian Cave
80beats: No Shoes, No Problem? Barefoot Runners Put Far Less Stress on Their Feet
80beats: Scientist Smackdown: Are A Sprinter’s Prosthetic Legs An Unfair Advantage?
DISCOVER: Born To Run, on humanity’s long-distance running abilities

Image: flickr / Herr Bert

Do you hear that? That’s the sound of oil not gushing uncontrollably into the Gulf of Mexico from BP’s leak, for the first time in nearly three months. BP is still running tests on the new cap the company installed this week, but at least for now there’s some for slight optimism.

The flow stopped yesterday afternoon, and BP video feed of its leak site showed quiet containment.

The view on Thursday afternoon was eerily tranquil, just the slate blue of the deep interspersed with small white particles floating across the screen. Though the exact amount of the oil that has poured out of the well may never be known, it was suddenly and for the first time a fixed amount. The disaster was, for a little while at least, finite [The New York Times].

The task now is a pressure test, which will take place over two days. Lower pressure inside the well would mean the surrounding rocks are leaking a little; high pressure would indicate the well is sealed off.

Things won’t stay this way, though. The capping stack—as this newest in a long line of BP jargon is known—isn’t meant to be any kind of permanent stopper. It provides the option to seal the well temporarily for testing (or if a hurricane sweeps through), but it may not stay on after the tests are done. If the pressure test show the well is leaking still, BP will resume pumping oil to its tankers on the surface. Meanwhile, the company is still trying to reach the leak site with its (hopefully) end-all solution, the relief wells.

Regardless of whether BP and the government decide to keep the well closed at the top, the ultimate solution to the blowout is a mud and cement bottom-kill from a relief well that is four feet from Macondo laterally and has only about 150 feet vertically to drill. During the integrity test, drilling of the relief well has been suspended as a precaution against oil and gas surging into the new hole from Macondo [Washington Post].

Even if BP succeeds, its convoluted and strung-out attempts to cap the leak may look simple compared to the cleanup task ahead. But for now, just for a moment, it’s a sigh of relief to pull up the video feed and see no black clouds of crude bursting into the bottom of the sea.

“I was excited. I was happy about it,” New Orleans resident Michael Jackson, 50, said of reports that the gushing oil well had been capped. “But who’s to say that cap’s going to hold?” [CNN].

Check out the Facebook home of DISCOVER’S wild new Internet TV show, “Joe Genius.”

Recent posts on the BP spill:
80beats: One Cap Off, One Cap On: BP Tries Another Plan To Catch Leaking Oil
80beats: BP Oil Update: Tar Balls in Texas & Lake Pontchartrain
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?

Image: BP

It's always fun to give a talk in my own town, so I'm especially excited for this afternoon's event in Austin at UT's Cactus Cafe. I'll be speaking at 5pm with Lindsay Patterson of EarthSky at Science In The Pub and would love to meet some readers from the neighborhood! Here a copy of the flier for details:

BABloggee Jason Marsh sent me an interesting picture he put together. He was thinking about what was current in our culture when Apollo 17 went to the Moon… the last time a human set foot on another world.

The date was 1972. Here’s what he put together:

[Click to embiggen.]

Hmmm. Gas lines. Viet Nam. Nixon. Elvis with Nixon. Disco.

It’s been too long. We need to go back. I certainly hope the President and Congress can figure out how; my biggest gripe about Obama’s space plan (scroll down to Point #4 in that link) is ignoring the Moon for other goals. I think we do need to go back to the Moon, create a base and then a colony there, and use that knowledge to go to asteroids and beyond (even concurrently, to tell the truth).

Posters like this one really drive the point home. It’s been too long.

Kristin writes,
“This is a rendition of Andreas Vesalius’ ‘The Quivering Brain.’ I admired many of his anatomy studies in art school, as I spent fifteen years as a painter, but I was always a little more interested in science than art. I even considered a career as a medical illustrator at one point.

Using science as artistic reference and researching for a painting was my favorite part of painting. Actually, it was the only thing I really enjoyed. It took me many years to realize this. I got this tattoo right before going back to school to study neuroscience. It couldn’t be more perfect.”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

Several long-time Intersection readers have emailed asking how I feel about being included on a list of "sexy scientists" at Common Sense Atheism. On that thread, someone named "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 hullabaloo and broader discussion in the science blogosphere after I joined the Discover Network. Blogger Luke Muehlhauser followed up with a second post asking whether he's sexist based on what I wrote back then. [The context on why I composed it could have been clearer.] Initially, I hesitated to get involved because it's an area that has been discussed in detail here already. But Luke took the time to contact me himself and seems polite and genuinely interested in my perspective. I looked back at Common Sense Atheism and the growing discussion that's now over 300 comments. It's mostly a thoughtful discourse and you can follow along here. Since so many people seem to assume they know what I'd say or how I feel, I've decided it's worth weighing in myself. Luke appears to be open-minded, so I will think on this over the weekend. ...

UPDATE:  SOLVED by Amresh at 12:25 CDT

Cogitate!  It’s Saturday, and we get to play.  You’re getting very good at solving these riddles, so just to increase the confusion the subject is slightly more obscure than usual, but you have certainly heard about it.

You ready?  Okay… jumping right in:

Recreated Firestone radio dial - image by wrnewton, PhotoBucket

Today’s riddle answer is a thing — which happened.

The year this happened was also the year a very special PET was introduced to the world.

This thing/happening is closely linked to the constellation Sagittarius.

Chi Sagittarii star group in Sagittarius - Benjamin Crowell/En Wiki user Fashionslide

Its properties have been heatedly debated.

To our knowledge, this thing has never been repeated.

Something about this is forbidden – and that’s extremely important to consider.

Forbidden - PhotoBucket wiifan420 some rights reserved

It is, in and of itself, a riddle.

One possible solution to the “real-life” aspect of today’s riddle would strongly impact every person on Earth.

Dr. Seth Shostak could solve today’s riddle in 60 seconds flat, and not just because he’s so smart!

Cartesian graph - PhotoBucket image by muiriath

Okay… have I puzzled you?  I’m sure a few people will find this riddle easy (I’m talking to you, Rob and Roger), but I had fun with its creation.  That’s the whole point of these little brain-busters; right?  I hope you have as much fun with its solution.

Enjoy.

Antics

I spoke at a Science Blogging Talkfest earlier this week – I had a great time and was honoured to feature on a lot of the attendees’ picks for favourite blog. There’s a transcript of the entire event here as told through Twitter, a nice write-up from Noodlemaz, and an audio recording at some point. In advance of the event, Alice Bell did a set of four great interviews with British bloggers Daniel Macarthur, Imran Khan, Mun-Keat Looi and Jenny Rohn.

I did a photoshoot with some other science journalists for Geekcalendar, a (non-nude) initiative looking to raise money for Libel Reform. Have a look at some outtake photos here.

News

Two great pieces from Brian Switek: one on Prolibytherium, the mammal with a butterfly face, and another on Saadanius, a new fossil primate

The Queen’s executioner beetle is the latest beneficiary of a great common name, as a result of a wonderful Guardian competition.

The oil spill has stopped apparently. There’s too much to link to but the best place to find out more is Deep Sea News.

The BBC says that plants can “think and remember”. Ferris Jabr tears them a new one in Scientific American, but shows how plants are sophisticated anyway.

The exoplanet Osiris orbits so close to its star that its atmosphere is being blasted away, giving it a tail, says 80beats.

A world of viruses, lurking in your intestines, exposed by Nature News

“Apparently we have learned nothing…” Climate scientists were warned to keep a distance from the media by the IPCC, according to Andy Revkin. They were also sent a “media backgrounder” that’s absolutely fascinating. Chris Mooney illustrates what the letter could have said.

The Earth’s had some work done. She’s now 4.467 billion years old, compared to the previous estimate of 4.537 billion years old. Doesn’t look a shade over 4 billion, but getting a bit oilier of late…

Just 15 of the world’s biggest ships may now emit as much pollution as all the world’s 760m cars, says the Guardian.

Amazon river dolphins “are showing up in record numbers on riverbanks, their flesh torn away for fishing bait”

“For a quick summary of the last 25 million years in human brain evolution, just watch how our brains change between infancy and adulthood,” says Brandon Keim in Wired.

“Marketing departments everywhere have been left scratching their heads and wondering how exactly you go about marketing an unappealing tube of brown powder if you can’t call it Slim-Fast.” Martin Robbins on new food labelling regulations.

Carl Zimmer talks about the world’s strangest life-saving transplant – faecal bacteria.

Why Johnny can’t name his colours: Melody Dye gives a great first-hand account of her own research in Scientific American.

They found the Higgs boso… oh wait, they didn’t.

Did Archimedes build a “flaming steam cannon”? Well MIT scientists certainly have…

“A game similar to tag may prepare gorillas for real conflicts over food and mates,” reports Ian Sample.

Matt Soniak dissects the complex vacancy chains of hermit crab real estate.

Bob Holmes has a great New Scientist feature on the next-generation of genetically-modified animals and the advances they could herald.

Ars Technica has an excellent piece on confirmation bias in science and how to avoid it, with a footnote on climate denialism.

Heh/Wow

A clam attacks and kills an oystercatcher, surely making it an oystercatchercatcher. Darren Naish has the story.

One of the most evocative space images of all time – a haunting use of light and shadow

A Periodic Coffee Table, with embedded samples of all the elements. Yes, even the toxic and radioactive ones.

A great Oatmeal cartoon explains how the male angler fish becomes a pair of degenerate balls.

Best sign ever.

In which we (and Gillian McKeith) learn that you cannot simply delete things on the Internet.

It would take 134 cans of Red Bull to kill me. You?

Sharktopus. I don’t really need to elaborate.

Journalism/internet/blogging

The Pepsigate fallout continues with Obesity Panacea and the Primate Diaries leaving too. Check out OP’s new digs and follow Eric on his exile tour. Meanwhile, Abel Pharmboy asks two excellent questions about the farrago, I chip in with comments, and John Pavlus talks about the time he quit ScienceBlogs. And please follow and support some of the excellent writers who have struck out on their own – Skulls in the Stars has the full list but here are my personal picks:

• Brian Switek, Laelaps – tomorrow’s next big thing. Go read him now so you can say you were a fan from the beginning.
• SciCurious, Neurotopia – she loves neuroscience and after reading her talk about it, so will you.
• Alex Wild, Myrmecos – beautiful, beautiful photography
• Rebecca Skloot, Culture Dish – still author of my favourite non-fiction book of all time
• Chris Rowan and Anne Jefferson, Highly Allochthonous – science of rocks that rocks, now in their all-new, easier-to-spell domain
• David Dobbs – insightful musings on neuroscience, genetics, journalism and more
• Daniel Macarthur is still blogging at ScienceBlogs at Genetic Future, but has also formed his own collective called Genomes Unzipped. Definitely worth following.

I love Ben Goldacre’s idea of a unified news repository in which each news story gets a unique ID and anyone can add or upload a full press release or quote to that story’s page, add a link to a primary source, vote these up or down, or add a link to media coverage of that storuy.

A lovely piece by Andrew Marr about why it’s a great time to be a young journalist.

Writers have to read this interview with Rebecca Skloot, which reads like a masterclass in structure and narrative.

Stan Carey jumperates to my defensitation after some readers decide to debate the use of orientate vs orient. Stan’s blog Sentence First is my find of the week. Along similar lines, the Guardian discusses whether ‘data’ is singular or plural.

Oh dear – have scientists solved the chicken or egg problem? No. Thoughtomics and Why Evolution is True tell us why.

“Agreeableness [correlated] with ‘wonderful’ and negatively correlated with ‘porn’.” An analysis of blogger word use, covered in BPS Research Digest.

Should newspapers publish full interview transcripts online? Ezra Klein says, “It’s a no-brainer.” You get incoming links from other niche media sites, you make use of the web’s lack of space limitations and you prove transparency.

Blogging isn’t dead, says Cory Doctorow. I agree. Look, I’m doing it right now…

While I was at The Amaz!ng Meeting 8, attendee Scott Carnegie (from the Winnipeg Skeptics) grabbed a moment with me to ask me which of the ways the world might end would look coolest from the ground. Here’s what I said:

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to be able to actually see a comet in the sky, and know that in some amount of time, months say, it will 100% for sure and for real hit the Earth. What would happen? Riots? Panic? Or acceptance? Probably disbelief until the last minute, and then panic.

Yikes. Good thing there’s nothing out there so far that can hit us. But that day may yet come… and I hope by then we have a space program in place that can take care of it.

Melissa writes,

I have a mathematical tattoo on my left forearm. It’s in Frege’s notation (from “Grundgesetze der Arithmetik”), which was one of the first modern logical notations. If it were written on a flat surface, it would start with the short vertical line, which is the assertion sign. What it asserts is: If {Cantor’s theorem} then {heart}.

Cantor’s Theorem says that the power set of any set is strictly larger than the set itself. (The power set of a set is the set of all its subsets.) For finite sets, this is pretty obvious; for example, the power set of {1,2} is {{}, {1}, {2}, {1,2}}. In general, if a finite set has n members, its power set has 2^n. But Cantor’s Theorem is also true for *infinite* sets, which is kind of unexpected. After all, the set of all even numbers is the same size as the set of all numbers — why does the power set of the set of all numbers have to be bigger?

That’s why the proof of the theorem is so cool. It proves it for finite sets and infinite sets, no matter how huge, at the same time. You start by assuming that some arbitrary set S has the same number of members as its power set P(S). That is, assume there’s a one-one function f which maps the members of S to the members of P(S). Now consider the set D, which consists of all and only the members of S that don’t get mapped to a set of which they’re a member. (So, for instance, if 7 is a member of S, and f(7) = {4, 5, 12}, then 7 is in D because it’s not a member of f(7).) D is a subset of S, so it’s a member of P(S). That means that f maps some member of S, call it d, to D. But: is d in D or not? If it is, then it’s a member of f(d), so by the definition of D, it’s not in D. If it’s not in D, then it’s not a member of f(d), so, again by the definition of D, it’s in D. Either way leads to a contradiction, and there’s only one way out: it’s not possible to have a one-one function from any set to its power set. QED! (Of course, you also have to prove that P(S) can’t be *smaller* than S, but that’s easy.)

When I saw how short and simple (and beautiful!) the proof of such a powerful theorem was, I knew I could spend the rest of my life doing set theory and logic. So last year, when I got my bachelor’s degree in philosophy and went on to grad school, I celebrated by getting the theorem tattooed on my arm. As for the tattoo itself, it’s easiest to read from the bottom. The stuff on the right-hand side of the ‘=’ means: for all a, if a is in r, then a is in u. (In other words, r is a subset of u.) The whole bottom line means: for all r, r is in v if and only if it’s a subset of u. (So v is the power set of u.) The bottom line and the one above it together mean: if v is the power set of u, then v is strictly bigger than u. So those two lines state Cantor’s Theorem, and the whole tattoo means: if Cantor’s Theorem, then {heart}. (Incidentally, I got that heart symbol from an illustration in “Alice in Wonderland”. It’s the top of the King of Hearts’s crown.)

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

[A post from 2005 I'm fond of]

Clint, the chimpanzee in this picture, died several months ago at a relatively young age of 24. But part of him lives on. Scientists chose him–or rather, his DNA–as the subject of their first attempt to sequence a complete chimpanzee genome. In the new issue of Nature, they’ve unveiled their first complete draft, and already Clint’s legacy has offered some awesome insights into our own evolution.

The editors of Nature have dedicated a sprawling space in the journal to this scientific milestone. The main paper is 18 pages long, not to mention the supplementary information kept on Nature’s web site. In addition, the journal has published three other papers that take a closer look at particularly interesting (and thorny) aspects of the chimpanzee genome, such as what it says about the different fates of the Y chromosome (the male sex chromosome) in chimpanzees and humans. Other scientists offer a series of commentaries on topics ranging from brain evolution to chimpanzee culture. The journal Science has also gotten in on the action, with a paper comparing the expression of chimp and human genes as well as comments on the importance of chimpanzee conservation and research. (Thankfully, some of this material is going to be made available online for free.)

Why all the attention to the chimpanzee genome? One important reason is that it can tell us what parts of the human genome make us uniquely human–in other words, which parts that were produced by natural selection and other evolutionary processes over the past six million years or so, since our hominid ancestors diverged from the ancestors of our closest living relatives, chimpanzees. (Bonobos, sometimes known as pygmy chimpanzees, are also our first cousins, having split off from chimpanzees 2-5 million years ago.) Until now, scientists could only compare the human genome to the genomes of more distantly related species, such as mice, chickens, and fruit flies. They learned a lot from those comparisons, but it was impossible for them to say whether the differences between humans and the other species were unique to humans, or unique to apes, or to primates, or to some broader group. Now they can pin down the evolutinary sequence much more precisely. Until scientists rebuild the Neanderthal genome–if they ever do–this is going to be the best point of comparison we will ever get. (For more of the background on all this, please check out my new book on human evolution, which will be out in November.)

The analysis that’s being published today is pretty rudimentary. It’s akin to what you’d expect from a reporter who got to spend an hour flipping through 10,000 pages of declassified government documents. But it’s still fascinating, and I’d wager that it serves as a flight plan for research on the evolution of the human genome for the next decade.

First off, scientists can get a more precise figure of how different human and chimpanzee DNA is. In places where you can line up stretches of DNA precisely, there are 35 million spots where a single “letter” of the code (a nucleotide) is different. That comes to about 1.2% of all the DNA. The scientists also found millions of other spots in the genomes where a stretch of DNA had been accidentally deleted, or copied and inserted elsewhere. This accounts for about a 3% difference. Finally, the scientists found many genes that had been duplicated after the split between humans and chimps, corresponding to 2.7% of the genome.

By studying the human genome, scientists have also gotten a better picture of the history of the genomic parasites that we carry with us. About half of the human genome consists of DNA that does not produce proteins that are useful to our well-being. All they do is make copies of themselves and reinsert those copies at other spots in the genome. Other animals have these virus-like pieces of DNA, including chimpanzees. Some of the genomic parasites we carry are also carried by chimpanzees, which means that we inherited them from our common ancestor. Many of these parasites have suffered mutations that make them unable to copy themselves any longer. But in some cases, these parasites have been replicating (and evolving) much faster in one lineage than the other. One kind of parasite, called SINES, have spread three times faster in humans than in chimps. Some 7,000 genomic parasites known as Alu repeats exist in the human genome, compared to 2,300 in the chimp genome. While a lot of these parasites have no important effect on our genome, others have. They’ve helped delete 612 genes in humans, and they’ve combined pieces of some 200 other genes, producing new ones.

In some cases, the interesting evolution has occurred in the chimpanzee lineage, not in our own ancestry. Scientists have noted for a long time that the Y chromosome has been shrinking for hundreds of millions of years. Its decline has to do with how it is copied each generation. Out of the 23 pairs of our chromosomes, 22 have the same structure, and as a result they swap some genes as they are put into sperm or egg cells. Y chromosomes do not, because their counterpart, the X, is almost completely incompatible. My Y chromosome is thus a nearly perfect clone of my father’s. Mutations can spread faster when genes are cloned than when they get mixed together during recombination. As a result, many pieces of the Y chromosome have disappeared over time, and many Y genes that once worked no longer do.

Scientists have discovered that Clint and his fellow chimpanzee males have taken a bigger hit on the Y than humans have. In the human lineage, males with mutations to the Y chromosome have tended to produce less offspring than those without them. (This is a process known as purifying selection, because it strips out variations.) But the scientists found several broken versions of these genes on the chimpanzee Y chromosome.

Why are chimpanzees suffering more genetic damage? The authors of the study suggest that it has to do with their sex life. A chimpanzee female may mate with several males when she is in oestrus, and so mutations that give one male’s sperm an edge over other males are ben strongly favored by selection. If there are harmful mutations elsewhere on that male’s Y chromosome, they may hitchhike along. We humans are not so promiscuous, and the evidence is in our Y chromosome.

As for the mutations that make us uniquely human, the researchers point out some suspects but make no arrests. The researchers found that a vast number of the differences between the genomes are inconsquential. In other words, these mutations didn’t have any appreciable effect on the structure of proteins or on the general workings of the human cell. But the scientists did identify a number of regions of the genome, and even some individual genes, where natural selection seems to have had a major impact on our own lineage. A number of these candidates support earlier studies on smaller parts of the genome that I’ve blogged about here. Some of these genes appear to have helped in our own sexual arms race; others created defenses against malaria and other diseases.

When scientists first lobbied for the money (some twenty to thirty million dollars) for the chimp genome project, they argued that the effort would yield a lot of insight into human diseases. The early signs seem to be bearing them out. In their report on the draft sequence, they show some important genetic differences between humans and chimpanzees that might have bearing on important questions such as why we get Alzheimer’s disease and chimps don’t and why chimpanzees are more vulnerable to sleeping sickness than we are, and so on.

There is also a lot of variation within our own species when it comes to disease-related genes, and here too the chimpanzee genome project can shed light. The researchers show how some versions of these genes found in humans are the ancestral form also shared by chimpanzees. New mutations have arisen in humans and spread in the recent past, possibly favored by natural selection. The ancestral form of one gene called PRSS1, for example, causes pancreatitis, while the newer form does not.

But our genetic defenses and weaknesses to diseases aren’t really what we’d like to think make us truly, uniquely human. The most profound difference between the bodies of humans and chimpanzees is the brain. Much of the evolution that’s been going on in genes expressed in the brain has been purifying. There are a lot of ways to screw up a brain, in other words. But some genes appear to have undergone strong positive selection–in other words, new mutation sequences have been favored over others. It’s possible that relatively few genes played essential roles in producing the human brain.

You can feel the excitement of discovery thrumming through these papers, but it comes with a certain sadness as well. It doesn’t come just from the fact the chimpanzee whose DNA made this all possible died before he became famous. Lots of chimpanzees are dying–so many, in fact, that conservationists worry that they may become extinct from hunting, disease, and habitat destruction. And once a species is gone, it takes a vast amount of information about evolutionary history with it.

I was reminded of this fact when I read another chimpanzee paper that appears in the same issue of Nature, reporting on the first fossil of a chimpanzee ever discovered. It may be hard to believe that no one had found a chimp fossil before. A big part of the problem, scientists thought, was that chimpanzees were restricted to rain forests and other places where fossils don’t have good odds of surviving. The fossils that have now been discovered don’t amount to much–just a few teeth–and they raise far more questions than they answer. They date back about 500,000 years, to an open woodlands in Kenya where paleoanthropologists have also found fossils of tall, big-brained hominids that may have been the direct ancestors of Homo sapiens. So apparently chimpanzees once coexisted with hominids in the open woodlands that were once thought to be off-limits to them. More chimpanzee fossils will help address this puzzle, but they may never fully resolve it.

The chimpanzees of Kenya became extinct long ago, and now other populations teeter on the brink. To make sense of Clint’s genome, scientists need to document the variations both within and between chimpanzee populations–not just genetic variations, but variations in how they eat, how they organize their societies, how they use tools, and all the other aspects of the lives. If they don’t get that chance, the chimpanzee genome may become yet another puzzling fossil.

Guess what?  NASA is up to its usual tricks – wowing us when we least expect it.

How many of you have heard of the “World Wide Telescope”?  NASA sent out emails about it Monday (071210), and I have to admit I was extremely interested when I read about it.  Take a look at this Mars image (it enlarges), just for starters:

NASA/Microsoft World Wide Telescope - Mars

You see the possibilities immediately.  Here’s one of Olympus Mons, and it also enlarges:

NASA/Microsoft - HiRIS Olympus Mons

Read this about it from NASA:

Today, Microsoft Research and NASA are providing an entirely new experience to users of the WorldWide Telescope, which will allow visitors to interact with and explore our solar system like never before. Viewers can now take interactive tours of the red planet, hear directly from NASA scientists, and view and explore the most complete, highest-resolution coverage of Mars available. To experience Mars up close, Microsoft and NASA encourage viewers to download the new WWT|Mars experience at http://www.worldwidetelescope.org.

Dan Fay, director of Microsoft Research’s Earth, Energy and Environment effort, works with scientists around the world to see how technology can help solve their research challenges. Since early 2009, he’s been working with NASA to bring imagery from the agency’s Mars and Moon missions to life, and to make their valuable volumes of information more accessible to the masses.

“We wanted to make it easier for people everywhere, as well as scientists, to access these unique and valuable images,” says Fay. “NASA had the images and they were open to new ways to share them. Through the WorldWide Telescope we were able to build a user interface at WWT|Mars that would allow people to take advantage of the great content they had.”

To create the new Mars experience in the WorldWide Telescope, Fay worked closely with Michael Broxton of the NASA Ames Research Center’s Intelligent Robotics Group (IRG). Broxton leads a team in the IRG informally called the Mapmakers, which applies computer vision and image processing to problems of cartography. Over the years, the Mapmakers have taken satellite images from Mars, the moon and elsewhere, and turned them into useful maps. Broxton says that getting the results of NASA’s work out to the public is an important part of his mission.

“NASA has a history of providing the public with access to our spacecraft imagery,” he says. “With projects like the WorldWide Telescope, we’re working to provide greater access so that future generations of scientists can discover space in their own way.”

Interested?  Here’s a link to the NASA press release, with of course more images and links.

Enjoy.

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Our sun and a much bigger star that resides 10,000 light years away have something in common: the way they were born. Though scientists had previously wondered if stars 10 to 20 times the sun’s size required a different setup to grow, new observations show that both our sun and plus-sized stars can form from large hoops of dust called accretion disks.

Astronomers arrived at the findings, published online today in Nature, by weaving together observations from two observatories–the Very Large Telescope Interferometer of the European Southern Observatory in Chile and NASA’s orbital Spitzer Space Telescope. Researchers combined the observatories’ power to get a “virtual” telescope of much better resolution, the equivalent of one with a 280-foot mirror.

Lead researcher Stefan Kraus and his colleagues took a close peek at a 60,000-year-old stellar infant about 20 times our sun’s mass, called IRAS 13481-6124. The researchers were able to piece together temperature data to make a model of stellar birth that might resemble something from our 4.6 billion-year-old sun’s baby-book.

The team’s observations yielded a jackpot result: the discovery of a massive disk of dust and gas encircling the giant young star. “It’s the first time something like this has been observed,” Kraus said. “The disk very much resembles what we see around young stars that are much smaller, except everything is scaled up and more massive.” [Jet Propulsion Laboratory]

Previously, scientists weren’t sure if giant stars could form from accretion disks. They wondered if solar winds and other radiation coming out of bigger stars would prevent the disk’s dust from falling into the forming star.

As an alternative, some proposed that bigger stars came from smaller stars colliding into one another. Though IRAS 13481-6124 gives one example of stellar birth by disk, researchers must find others to say that this is the preferred birthing technique.

Astronomers are on the hunt for other big baby stars still wrapped in dust cocoons, but massive young stars are relatively rare, quite distant and typically clumped together so that it is difficult to pick out individual objects in the tumultuous, complicated environment. “For now, we can only talk about this object, where we found a disk, but it means in general it is possible for a disk to exist around stars with these properties,” Kraus said. [Discovery]

The picture isn’t exactly the same for smaller stars and larger ones. IRAS 13481-6124 had a much larger disk, 12 billion miles across, or 130 times the distance between Earth and the Sun. Still researchers say the findings suggest that the accretion disks around massive stars could, at least temporarily, serve as home to planet offspring. The neighborhood, though, wouldn’t be too pleasant.

“In the future, we might be able to see gaps in this and other dust disks created by orbiting planets, although it is unlikely that such bodies could survive for long.” Kraus said. “A planet around such a massive star would be destroyed by the strong stellar winds and intense radiation as soon as the protective disk material is gone, which leaves little chance for the development of solar systems like our own.” [Jet Propulsion Laboratory]

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Image 1: ESO/L. Calçada, Image 2: ESO/Spitzer/NASA/JPL/S. Kraus, Image 3: ESO

“Sex differences in toy preferences in children are marked, with boys expressing stronger and more rigid toy preferences than girls, whose preferences are more flexible. Socialization processes, parents, or peers encouraging play with gender-specific toys are thought to be the primary force shaping sex differences in toy preference. A contrast in view is that toy preferences reflect biologically-determined preferences for specific activities facilitated by specific toys. Sex differences in juvenile activities, such as rough-and-tumble play, peer preferences, and infant interest, share similarities in humans and monkeys. Thus if activity preferences shape toy preferences, male and female monkeys may show toy preferences similar to those seen in boys and girls. We compared the interactions of 34 rhesus monkeys, living within a 135 monkey troop, with human wheeled toys and plush toys. Male monkeys, like boys, showed consistent and strong preferences for wheeled toys, while female monkeys, like girls, showed greater variability in preferences. Thus, the magnitude of preference for wheeled over plush toys differed significantly between males and females. The similarities to human findings demonstrate that such preferences can develop without explicit gendered socialization. We offer the hypothesis that toy preferences reflect hormonally influenced behavioral and cognitive biases which are sculpted by social processes into the sex differences seen in monkeys and humans.”

Photo: flickr/jackol

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WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

Carolyn Porco just tweeted about a beautiful image from Cassini, showing the icy moon Tethys hanging in space:

How forbidding and lovely!

Tethys is big, about 1100 km (660 miles) across (about 1/3 the diameter as our own Moon). Its density is actually a bit less than that of water, so it’s most likely predominantly composed of water ice. The surface is bombarded with craters, including the big one at the bottom called Melanthius. It’s 250 km across (150 miles!) and sports a massive central peak, common in larger craters. The crater itself is from a gigantic impact on the moon, and the central mountain forms when material is first displaced by the impact, then flows back. Under those titanic stresses, solid material can actually flow as the impact shock wave passes through, so these peaks are seen on lots of big objects in the solar system.

Cassini was 670,000 km (415,000 miles) from Tethys when it took this shot, which is nearly twice the Earth-Moon distance. The Sun is shining on Tethys from the left (the angle between the Sun, Tethys, and Cassini was about 41°, for those keeping track at home). You can see just how beaten Tethys is by looking at the terminator, the day/night dividing line, where shadows highlight the cratering. Even so, sandblasting by particles in Saturn’s rings has smoothed the moon’s surface, making it highly reflective — it’s shiny!

If there ever comes a day when I tire of seeing pictures like this, write my obituary. I’ll be done.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Ikaros hasn’t flown too close to the sun. It’s flown just close enough to ride the light.

Japan’s space agency JAXA confirmed on Friday that its solar sail project, Ikaros, achieved another of its goals: The sun’s photons pushed against the sail and accelerated the craft.

The effect stems from the cumulative push of light photons striking the solar sail. When measured together, it adds up to a small continuous thrust that does not require fuel use by the Ikaros craft. JAXA engineers used Doppler radar measurements of the Ikaros craft to determine that sunlight is pressing on the probe’s solar sail with a force of about 1.12 millinewtons (0.0002 pounds of force) [MSNBC].

Japan launched Ikaros in May and unfurled the sail in June. Now, JAXA scientists say, “with this confirmation, the IKAROS was proved to generate the biggest acceleration through photon during interplanetary flight in history.” Coming soon: A controlled flight in which the researchers turn the sail toward or away from the sun to control Ikaros’ velocity.

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Image: JAXA

New York Times bestselling author Scott Sigler has just come out with another novel in the fast-moving, horrific, science-tastic style that he’s made his trademark. The new book is about a creature engineered to be the perfect organ donor–the ANCESTOR of the title–and he (and his publisher, Crown) have agreed to let us run an excerpt right here on SNF for your reading pleasure. To entice you to read on, check out the great blurbs from these top-notch reviewers:

“ANCESTOR isn’t science fiction. It’s science acid-trip pulp-horror, an irresistible genre unique to Scott Sigler’s wonderfully warped mind.” —Carl Zimmer

“Fun, creepy, and impossible to stop reading, ANCESTOR is the rare thriller that’s based on cutting-edge science and is entirely possible. Long after you’re done with the book, you’ll still be looking over your shoulder. Just in case.” —Phil Plait

Without further ado, here is your ANCESTOR excerpt:

The tiny, floating ball of cells could not think, could not react. It could not feel. If it could, it would have felt only one thing . . .

Fear.

Fear at the monster floating close by. Amorphous, insidious, unrelenting, the monster reached out with flowing tendrils that touched the ball of cells, tasting the surface.

The floating ball vibrated a little each time one of its cells completed mitosis, splitting from one cell into two daughter cells. And that happened rapidly . . . more rapidly than in any other animal, any other life-form. Nothing divided this fast, this efficiently. So fast the living balls vibrated every three or four minutes, cells splitting, doubling their number over and over again.

The floating balls had begun as a cow’s single-celled egg. Now? Only the outer membrane could truly be called bovine. The interior contained a unique genome that was mostly something else. The amorphous monster? A macrophage, a white blood cell, a hunter/killer taken from that same cow’s blood and dropped into a petri dish with the hybrid egg.

The monster’s tendrils reached out, boneless, shapeless, flowing like intelligent water. They caressed the rapidly dividing egg, sensing chemicals, tasting the egg for one purpose only:

To see if the egg was self.

It was not. The egg was other.

And anything other had to be destroyed.

Jian knew, even at this early stage, that failure had come calling once again. She, Claus Rhumkorrf, Erika Hoel and Tim Feely watched the giant monitor that took up an entire wall of the equipment-packed genetics lab. The monitor’s upper-right-hand corner showed green numbers: 72/150. The rest of the huge screen showed a grid of squares, ten high, fifteen across. Over half of those squares were black. The remaining squares each showed a grainy-gray picture of a highly magnified embryo.

The “150” denoted the number of embryos alive when the experiment began. Fifty cows, three genetically modified eggs from each cow, each egg tricked into replicating without fertilization. As soon as a fertilized egg, called a zygote, split into two daughter cells it became an embryo, a growing organism. Each embryo sat in a petri dish filled with a nutrient-rich solution and immune system elements from the same cow: macrophages, natural killer cells and T-lymphocytes, elements that combined to work as the body’s own special-ops assassins targeted at viruses, bacteria and other harmful pathogens.

The “72” represented the number of embryos still alive, not yet destroyed by the voracious white blood cells. Jian watched the counter change to 68/150. Rhumkorrf seemed to vibrate with anger, the frequency of that vibration increasing ever so slightly each time the number dropped. He was only a hair taller than Jian, but she outweighed him by at least a hundred pounds. His eyes looked wide and buglike behind thick, black-framed glasses. The madder he became, the more he shook. The more he shook, the more his comb-over came apart, exposing his shiny balding pate.

65/150

“This is ridiculous,” Erika said, her cultured Dutch accent dripping with disgust. Jian glared at the demure woman. She hated Hoel, not only because she was a complete bitch, but also because she was so pretty and feminine, all the things that Jian was not. Hoel wore her silvery-gray hair in a tight bun that revealed a haughty face. She had the inevitable wrinkles due any forty-five-year-old woman, but nothing that even resembled a laugh line. Hoel looked so pale Jian often wondered if the woman had seen anything but the inside of a sunless lab for the last thirty years.

61/150

“Time?” Rhumkorrf asked.

Jian, Tim and Erika automatically looked at their watches, but the question was meant for Erika. “Twenty-one minutes, ten seconds,” she said.

“Remove the failures from the screen,” Rhumkorrf said through clenched teeth. Tim Feely quietly typed in a few keystrokes. The black squares disappeared.

Sixty-one squares, now much larger, remained.

Tim was Jian’s assistant, a biologist with impressive bioinformatics skills. He wasn’t on Jian’s level, of course, but his multidisciplinary approach bridged the gap between Jian’s computer skills and Erika’s biological expertise. He was bigger than Rhumkorrf, but not by much. Jian hated the fact that even though the project had two men and two women, she was always the largest person in the room.

Jian focused on one of the squares. The tiny embryo sat helpless, a gray, translucent cluster of cells defined by a whitish circle. At sixteen cells, the terminology changed from embryo to morula, Latin for mulberry, so named for its resemblance to the fruit. It normally took a mammalian embryo a few days to reach the morula stage — Jian’s creatures reached this stage in just twenty minutes.

Left alone, the morula would continue to divide until it became a hollow ball of cells known as a blastocyst. But to keep growing, a blastocyst had to embed itself into the lining of a mother’s uterus. And that could never happen as long as the cow’s immune system treated the embryo like a harmful foreign body.

54/150

Jian focused on a single square. From the morula’s left, a macrophage began oozing into view, moving like an amoeba, extending pseudopodia as it slid and reached. All along the wall-sized monitor, the white squares steadily blinked their way to blackness.

48/150

“Dammit,” Rhumkorrf hissed, and Jian wondered how he could speak so clearly with his teeth pressed together like that.

The macrophage operated on chemicals, grabbing molecules from the environment and reacting to them. The morula’s outer membrane, the zona pellucida, was the same egg membrane taken from the cow. That meant it was 100 percent natural, native to the cow, something macrophages would almost never attack. But what lay inside that outer shell was something created by Jian . . . Jian and her God Machine.

34/150

“Clear them out again,” Rhumkorrf said. Tim tapped the keys. The black squares again disappeared: the remaining grayish squares grew even larger. Instantly, the larger squares started blinking to black.

24/150

“Fuck,” Erika said in a decidedly uncultured tone. Inside the morula, a cell quivered. Its sides pinched in, the shape changing from a circle to an hourglass. Mitosis. A macrophage tendril reached the morula, touched it, almost caressing it.

14/150

The macrophage’s entire amorphous body slid into view, a grayish, shapeless mass.

9/150

The squares steadily blinked out, their blackness mocking Jian, reminding her of her lack of skill, her stupidity, her failure.

4/150

The macrophage moved closer to the morula. The dividing cell quivered once more, and the single cell became two. Growth, success, but it was too late.

1/150

The macrophage’s tendrils encircled the ball, then touched on the other side, surrounding it. The tendrils joined, engulfing the prey. The square turned black, leaving only a white-lined grid and a green number.

0/150

“Well, that was just spectacular,” Rhumkorrf said. “Absolutely spectacular.”

“Oh, please,” Erika said. “I really don’t want to hear it.”

Rhumkorrf turned to face her. “You’re going to hear it. We have to produce results. For heaven’s sake, Erika, you’ve built your whole career on this process.”

“That was different. The quagga and the zebra are almost genetically identical. This thing we’re creating is artificial, Claus. If Jian can’t produce a proper genome, the experiment is flawed to begin with.”

Jian wanted to find a place to hide. Rhumkorrf and Erika had been lovers once, but no more. Now they fought like a divorced couple. Erika jerked her thumb at Jian. “It’s her fault. All she can do is give me an embryo with a sixty-five percent success probability. I need at least ninety percent to have any chance.”

“You’re both responsible,” Rhumkorrf said. “We’re missing something here. Specific proteins are producing the signals that trigger the immune response. You have to figure out which genes are producing the offending proteins.”

“We’ve looked,” Erika said. “We’ve gone over it again and again. The computer keeps analyzing, we keep making changes, but the same thing happens every time.”

Rhumkorrf slowly ran a hand over his head, putting his comb-over mostly back in place. “We’re too close to it. We’ve got to change our way of thinking. I know the fatal flaw is staring us in the face, we just don’t recognize it.”

Tim stood up and stretched. He ran both hands through his short but thick blond locks, looking directly at Rhumkorrf when he did. Jian wondered if Tim did that on purpose, to mock Rhumkorrf’s thinning hair. “We’ve been over this a hundred times,” Tim said. “I’m already reviewing all of Jian and Erika’s work on top of doing my own.”

Erika let out a huff. “As if you could even understand my work, you idiot.”

“You shut up!” Jian said. “You do not talk to Tim like that.”

Erika smirked, first at Jian, then at Tim. “Such a big man, Tim. You need a fat old woman to fight your battles for you?”

Tim’s body stayed perfectly still except for his right hand, which extended and flipped Erika the middle finger.

“That will be enough, Mister Feely,” Rhumkorrf said. “If you’re not smart enough to contribute to the work, the least you could do is shut your mouth and focus your worthless brain on running your little computer.”

Tim’s hands clenched into fists. Jian felt so bad for him. All his life, Tim Feely had probably been used to being the smartest person in the room. Here, he was the dumbest — something Claus never let him forget.

“I realize we’re all frustrated,” Rhumkorrf said, “but we have to find a way to think in new directions. We’re so close, can’t you all feel it?” His bug-eyed glare swept around the room, eliciting delayed nods of agreement from all of them. They were close, maddeningly so. Jian just couldn’t find that missing piece. It almost made her long for the days before the medicine, when the ideas came freer, faster. But no, that wouldn’t do — she knew all too well where that led.

Rhumkorrf took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I want you all to think about something.” He put the glasses back on. “It took us an hour to conduct this experiment. In that hour, at least four people died from organ failure. Four people who would have lived if they had a replacement. In twenty-four hours, almost a hundred people will die. Perhaps you should consider that before you start bickering again.”

Jian, Tim and even Erika stared at the floor.

“What ever it takes,” Rhumkorrf said. “What ever it takes, we will make this happen. We’ve just failed the immune response test for the sixteenth time. All of you, go work from your rooms. Maybe if we stop sniping at each other, we can find that last obstacle and eliminate it.”

Jian nodded, then walked out of the lab and headed back to her small apartment. Sixteen immune response tests, sixteen failures. She had to find a way to make number seventeen work, had to, because millions of lives depended on her and her alone.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s full report on Toyotas and their “sudden unintended acceleration” problem has yet to see the light of day, but the first wave of information from it suggests that driver error—not some mysterious mechanical problem in the electronic throttle control—could be to blame in many, if not most, of the reported accidents.

NHTSA has been studying data recorders from wrecked Toyotas—dozens of them—in their investigation, which will go on for months to come. Those data recorders show that the cars had their throttles open and brakes disengaged at the times of the crashes.

The early results suggest that some drivers who said their Toyotas and Lexuses surged out of control were mistakenly flooring the accelerator when they intended to jam on the brakes [Wall Street Journal].

A tip of the hat to our friends at Popular Mechanics who called this months ago, saying it made no sense to blame some “ghost in the machine” and pointing out incidents in the past—like the investigation of Audi in the 1980s—where claims of sudden unintended acceleration turned out to be a bust.

But the news isn’t all good for Toyota. The company still must deal with the problems of sticky accelerators and sliding floor mats that can trap accelerators on the floor.

Those equipment and mechanical problems were behind the worldwide recall of more than 8 million Toyota and Lexus vehicles in October 2009 and January 2010 for unintended acceleration. Toyota faces a potential civil liability estimated at more than $10 billion from lawsuits sparked by complaints of runaway cars and trucks [Reuters].

However, a traffic fatality from last August, in which the gas pedal got stuck in the floor mat, is the only one so far that the NHTSA has tied to a mechanical problem.

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