One pied tamaran turns to another: Do you hear that infant monkey call?

That’s one weird-sounding baby, the other responds. Shrugging their shoulders, the pair goes to investigate. Surprise! It’s not a baby monkey at all, but a margay cat doing impersonations. Then it’s up to the monkeys to escape becoming a snack.

In the domain of jungle tricks, monkeys usually take center-stage. They may give false alarms to steal bananas or (shamelessly) carry an infant to strike up a conversation. But the above fake-out scene, documented in 2005 by Wildlife Conservation Society researchers, hinted that at least one feline is giving monkeys a dose of their own medicine.

The small spotted margay won’t be winning any stand-up awards: Fabio Rohe, a researcher at the Society, told National Geographic that the cat’s impressions were “poor.” Though researchers watched the monkeys escape, they still found the ruse impressive, given that no other cat is documented to have used vocal mimicry in hunting (though some people claim to have heard similar strategies used by jaguars and cougars).

The margay’s acting skills may soon prove crucial, since the South American species is threatened by hunting, the pet trade, and habitat destruction. As National Geographic reports, researchers believe the cat may have other animals in its “repertoire” including macuco birds and agouti rodents.

Given its apparent skills and the fact that the seven-pound cat also eats lizards, perhaps the tongue-flick pictured here is only another act of cunning.

Related content:
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Discoblog: Monkeys Master Mind Control of Mechanical Arm
Discoblog: Calvin Klein’s Obsession for Men (and Cats)
80beats: Why Gorillas Play Tag: To Learn Social Etiquette and to Settle Scores

Image: Wikimedia / Malene Thyssen

On June 21, an intense blast of X-rays from a distant explosion slammed into NASA’s Swift satellite, and was so bright it actually temporarily blinded the observatory!

Swift is a satellite designed to look for gamma-ray bursts (GRBs); incredibly violent cosmic explosions that occur when black holes form. We think there are several ways this can happen, but the most common is when a massive star explodes at the end of its life. Forces in the star’s core can create unbelievably destructive power; essentially packing all the energy the Sun emits in its entire lifetime into two narrow beams that march across the Universe. A GRB beam can be so intense that from a hundred light years away it would blowtorch the Earth, and so bright it can be seen from clear across the observable Universe.

For once, I’m not exaggerating.

In the case of last month, the GRB was about 5 billion light years away. Called GRB 100621A (from right to left, the first GRB seen on the 21st of June in 2010), it was unusually, amazingly bright in X-rays. A lot of GRBs emit light across the spectrum, from radio to super-energetic gamma rays, but this one really overachieved in the X-ray department. Swift, normally easily able to handle the X-ray load from these explosions, was overwhelmed, and actually shut down temporarily when software detected that the cameras onboard might get damaged by the flood of light. That’s never happened before.

The burst was so bright in X-rays it put other GRBs to shame: slamming Swift with 143,000 X-ray photons per second, it was 5 times brighter than the previous record holder, and nearly 200 times as bright as a typical GRB! Weirdly, it didn’t look out of the ordinary in visible light.

So why was this burst such an overachiever? At the moment, that’s not clear. The good news is, GRBs don’t just blink on and off, they fade over time, allowing for long observations, and for other observatories to take a peek at other flavors of light (like radio, optical, and infrared). With a fleet of telescopes keeping their eyes on this prize, I expect the journals will soon see their own flood of papers being submitted to explain this extraordinary event.

I can’t help but add that for several years I worked on the Swift team, doing education and public outreach. Whenever we got an extraordinary burst like this one — and we did see a few whoppers! — everyone got very excited and the email and phone calls would fly. Neil Gehrels, the Principal Investigator of Swift (think of him as Big Daddy) was always particularly gung-ho about these, and was really supportive and willing to give time to talk to me about them. He was incredibly helpful to me when I wrote the GRB chapter of my book, and is just an all-around good guy. I’m really glad to see that Swift — one of NASA’s all-time most successful satellites — is still cranking out the hits, and the team is still jumping into action when it does.

Tip o’ the Cesium-iodide X-ray detector to my old pal Dan Vergano. Image credits: NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler, NASA

The next generation of spies from on high continue to emerge, with two secretive unmanned planes making their public debuts this week.

Boeing Phantom Eye

Engadget calls it a “bowling pin with wings.” I’d say it’s more like a flying maraca.

The Phantom Eye, which Boeing unveiled this week, will take to the skies next year on the power of hydrogen. The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) should be able to cruise at an altitude of 65,000 feet.

But the propeller-driven Phantom Eye is no muscle plane. It’ll have a pair of 150-horsepower, 2.3-liter, four-cylinder engines. Boeing says the UAV, with a 150-foot wingspan, will be able to cruise at about 150 knots [172 miles per hour] and carry a payload of up to 450 pounds [CNET].

The plane won’t need to carry much weight, though, because it’s intend to spy, not attack. Boeing says the Phantom Eye will be able to stay aloft for four consecutive days, executing “persistent intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.” Its size and breezy pace mean it’s built for endurance and not stealth. But that might not be true for Boeing’s other UAV project, the menacing Phantom Ray that will make a test flight in December.

The U.K.’s Taranis

You can be even more brash when naming secretive military aircraft than when naming flashy new cars, and Britain’s new UAV bears the name of the Celtic god of thunder.

Taranis is the first step in the development of unmanned strike aircraft, capable of penetrating enemy territory. Unmanned aircraft carrying weapons are already used in service, such as the MQ-1 Predator which carries Hellfire missiles, although these are only suitable for use where the airspace is under allied control [BBC News].

Taranis is a tech demo that will likely be a testbed for developing future aircraft rather than flying into service itself. For the U.K., it’s a major step in going from manned to unmanned fighters.

It is accepted that the most vulnerable part of a plane is the pilot. While the airframe is capable of pulling multiple Gs – the gravitational force exerted on a body when standing on the Earth at sea level – the maximum safe level for a pilot, even when wearing a protective G-suit, is 8 or 9, above which they will lose consciousness [BBC News].

Don’t Sleep on the X-37B

Those UAVs will reach lofty heights, but not quite as high as the U.S. Air Force’s secret space plane, the X-37B. That unmanned craft was launched into orbit in April.

For a story in the upcoming September issue of DISCOVER hitting newsstands next month, Brian Weeden of the Secure World Foundation told me that what little we know about the plane suggests it’s probably for surveillance and not attack. Weeden also argued that there’s no one thing the X-37B does that we couldn’t do better or cheaper with existing technologies, like satellites. “But, it does a lot of things,” he says. “The X-37(B) is a milepost on the road, not the end of the road.”

Related Content:
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Image: Boeing; UK Ministry of Defense; USAF

[An old post I'm fond of]

It’s strange enough that beetles grow horns. But it’s especially strange that beetles grow so many kinds of horns. This picture, which was published in the latest issue of the journal Evolution, shows a tiny sampling of this diversity. The species shown here all belong to the genus Onthophagus, a group of dung beetles. The colors in this picture, which are false, show which parts of the beetle body the horns grow from. Blue horns grow from the back of the head, red from the middle of the head, and purple from the front of the head. Green horns grow from the center of the body plate directly behind the head (the pronotum), and orange horns grow from the side of the pronotum. These beetles can grow horns big and small, single or multiple, shaped like stags or like rhinos. And, as these colors show, the beetles can take very different developmental paths to get to their finished product. The biologist JBS Haldane was supposedly asked once if he could say anything about God from his study of nature. Haldane replied He must have an inordinate fondness for beetles. Add to that a fondness for putting horns on those beetles.

A century before Haldane, Charles Darwin was fascinated by the horns of these beetles. He proposed that they were produced through sexual selection. Natural selection was based on how traits helped an organism survive and have offspring—staying warm in winter, fighting off diseases, and so on. Sexual selection was based on the struggle to have sex. If females preferred to mate with males with certain traits (big tails in peacocks, for example), the males would gradually evolve more and more elaborate versions of that trait. Males might also fight with other males to get access to females, and here too their struggle could lead to baroque anatomy—such as beetle horns.

Modern evolutionary biologists have followed up on Darwin’s suggestion, and have made a close study of beetle horns. There are thousands upon thousands of species with horns to compare, and scientists can observe how the horns develop and are used by the males. A lot of fascinating work has been published on beetle horns, such the work I described in this post. The picture I’ve shown here comes from a paper that represents a big step forward in understanding this explosion of diversity. Douglas Emlen of the University of Montana and his colleagues have, for the first time, reconstructed some of the evolutionary history that produced this embarrassment of horns. (You can download the paper for free here on Emlen’s web site.)

Emlen and his colleagues focused their attention on Onthophagus dung beetles. These beetles, which are found all over the world, search out dung and then dig a tunnel underneath it. The female beetles then make a ball of the dung and lay eggs in it. The male beetles will guard the opening of these tunnels and fight off any males that try to get in and mate with the female inside. It’s here the horns come in handy, helping a guarding male make it impossible for other males to get past them.

The scientists extracted DNA from 48 different species of Onthophagus and used the sequence to figure out their evolutionary relationships. They then reconstructed the changes that evolved in the horns as new species arose. And finally, the researchers looked at the natural history of the animals—where they lived, how they lived, and the like.

It turns out that beetle horns have changed a lot. Judging from the species that sit on the oldest branches of the tree, the scientists concluded that the common ancestor of these 48 beetle species had a single horn growing from the base of the head (the second from the top on the left hand side of the photo may bear a resemblance). As new species arose, they tended to grow bigger horns, and they also tended to grow horns from new parts of their bodies. On the other hand, sometimes a lineage with elaborate horns gave rise to species with much smaller ones. Sometimes one horn became two which became one. This chart shows the tortuous paths that evolution has taken in these beetles. (The thickness of the arrows shows how often these transformations took place in different lineages.) Given that the researchers analyzed only 48 out of the 2000 Onthophagus species, the true scale of change is probably far greater.

Emlen and his collagues argue that sexual selection has driven the horns of these beetles to outrageous lengths. If you’re a male dung beetle and you want pry another male out of his tunnel, it helps to have a longer horn. If you’re that male in the tunnel, your own chances of victory depend on the horn too. So it’s the males with bigger horns that are most likely to win. And yet, as this beetle flow chart shows, these insects have lost their weaponry in some lineages. What is the countervailing force in beetle evolution?

Horns, the scientists point out, are expensive. It takes a lot of energy and the dedication of large swaths of a beetle’s body to grow horns. When you’re talking about horns that can get longer than a beetle’s entire body, the costs can be huge. In fact, growing bigger horns means that beetles have to reduce the size of other organs. Experiments have shown that the growth of horns can reduce the size of beetle eyes by 30%.

The researchers proposed that growing horns would force a trade-off with other important parts of the body, such as eyes and antennae. And the beetle tree supports their proposal. It is harder for beetles to detect the odor of dung with their antennae in a pasture than in a forest, because the odor plumes last longer in the woods. Four out of the five gains of new horns took place in forests—perhaps because beetles could afford to grow smaller antennae in a place where smelling wasn’t so hard. On the flip side, in seven of the nine cases in which horns were lost, the beetles became nocturnal. Beetles that fly at night need larger eyes, and so they can’t afford to shunt resources to big horns any more. The pressure to evolve bigger horns still exists in these lineages, but it’s been offset by other demands.

Emlen’s study is a nice reminder that we don’t have to stand back, slack-jawed, at nature’s diversity. When you look at a line-up of beetle horns like the one at the beginning of this post, they can seem like an impenetrable mystery. But understanding of how these beetles live, and how they evolved from a common ancestor, makes them less mysterious. But no less marvelous.

The first sea turtle eggs rescued from the Gulf have hatched! From the Associated Press:
About 700 sea turtle nests — each containing about 100 eggs — are being trucked from oiled shores along the Gulf to Cape Canaveral, where they're kept at a climate-controlled facility. The turtles are being released into the Atlantic as they hatch. Scientists feared that a generation of the imperiled species would die if they hatched and swam into the oil.
One small step toward restoration. One giant leap for the oil spill's tiniest refugees. They face a tough road ahead. Godspeed and good luck little dudes!
(Photo: The Ocean Conservancy)

It’s an honor doled out by about half of the American states: the naming of an official state rock. West Virginia has bituminous coal. Florida has agatized coral. California has the olive-green beauty serpentine–for the moment. State legislators are moving to cast off the rock, saying it contains the mineral chrysotile asbestos.

Exposure to chrysotile asbestos, according to the pending “serpentine bill,” increases the risk of cancer, and State Senator Gloria Romero wants nothing to do with the once-loved rock. She sponsored the bill, which has received support from the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization and the Consumer Attorneys of California.

But geologists think the rock bill is dense, Malcolm Ross a retired geologist from the United States Geological Survey told The New York Times.

“There is no way anyone is going to get bothered by casual exposure to that kind of rock…. Unless they were breaking it up with a sledgehammer year after year.”

Geologists like Ross have hope to save serpentine’s special status, given concern that the bill–as a perfect excuse for litigious jewelery owners and park visitors–could make many Californians’ lives rocky.

The bill recently passed the State Senate, so serpentine’s fate is now up to a vote in the Assembly.

Meanwhile, in “granite state” New Hampshire, the granite cliff formation “Old Man on the Mountain” continues to appear on state license plates, though the rocky visage collapsed in 2003.

Follow DISCOVER on Twitter.

Related content:
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Discoblog: The Latest (and Hardest) Tool for Battling Climate Change: Rocks

Image: flickr / AlishaV

There may be no game simpler than tag. To play, you need nothing but a few friends and some energy. In fact, tag is so easy to play that it reaches other primate species: Gorillas like to play, too.

Marina Davila Ross and colleagues spent three years watching and filming gorilla colonies at Germany and Swiss zoos for a study now out in Biology Letters. They shot footage of 21 different young gorillas goofing around in a game that resembles human children playing tag.

Like human tag, one gorilla runs up to another and taps, hits, or outright punches the second. The hitter then usually runs away, attempting to avoid being hit back. Davila Ross and her colleagues also noticed that, like kids, the gorillas would reverse roles, so sometimes the first hitter would be the tagger, and vice versa. All African great apes appear to play tag, and younger apes play it much more often than their elders. Tree-dwelling orangutans likely also play a similar game, but not on the ground, according to Davila Ross [Discovery News].

Gorillas games, like their analogues in human kids’ games, would seem to play a role in social development and learning to play nice with each other. Gorillas strike each other pretty hard during play, Davila Ross says, but they’re careful not to strike too hard.

The game is thought to prepare gorillas for conflicts that might arise over food or mates. “This kind of playful behaviour lets them test their group members and learn what the borders are,” she added. “How far you can go with an individual is important for social interactions later in life” [The Guardian].

Davila Ross argues that gorilla tag is even more revealing than that. Those who are lower on the social ladder tend to be the instigators of the game, trying to get a leg up or an ego boost from besting a gorilla with more social status. Thus, she argues, the gorillas are aware of social inequities, and the competition of playing tag teaches them how to deal with unfair situations by seizing a competitive advantage, like smacking your friend and then running away.

“It remains unknown to what extent unequal play itself gives animals a more competitive edge,” the scientists write. But while further research will attack that question, one thing is clear: Humans probably wouldn’t fare well in an inter-species game of tag, as we wouldn’t describe the force with which they strike one another as “playful.”

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Video: Davila Ross et. al.

Once again, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has captured pictures of humanity’s presence on the Moon! This time, it’s the Apollo 16 landing site:

What an awesome picture! It was taken at local noon, so the Sun is shining almost straight down on the surface. That means there are no shadows, which de-emphasizes topology of the surface (changes in height like craters, hills, and dips) but provides brilliant contrast in brightness features.

For example, the metal and white man-made lander and rover are so bright they are saturated in the picture. However, wherever the astronauts walked they stirred up the lunar dust, creating dark spots. The more often they walked in one spot, the darker that area. So the region around the lander itself (LM) and the rover (LRV) are almost black from bootprints. You can also see lines of bootprints radiating away from the lander and other spots. Amazing!

Also marked are the locations of the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP) and the radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) used to power it. These were a series of scientific experiments designed to learn more about the surface, interior, and environment of the Moon. The geophone line was a seismograph used to measure moonquakes generated by the astronauts themselves using — seriously — mortar shells. You might think astronauts would be nervous carrying small bombs to the Moon, but given they rode at the top of a Saturn V rocket which carried about 3 million kilograms (6 million pounds) of fuel, I can’t think a mortar or two bugged them very much.

Someday we’ll head back to this spot. When we do, we’ll learn about how our artifacts have aged, and hopefully with a few decades of advances — as well as trained scientists to poke around in situ — we’ll learn even more about our nearest neighbor in space.

I just purchased a copy of William Golding’s The Inheritors. Golding is famous for writing Lord of the Flies, a work of literature of such influence that it has made the transition into our everyday lexicon. But I just listened to a podcast of an interview with a biographer of the great author, and it seems that Golding and many of his admirers who are “close readers” judge The Inheritors as his finest novel.

The general outline of the plot is easy enough to find on Wikipedia, it is one of those stories about the transition from a “bushy” hominin tree of life to the dominance of H. sapiens sapiens. Neandertals are finally expiring as a species in the face of the advance of modern humans, who marginalize and extirpate all those who came before. But I get the impression that the execution of Golding’s attempt is very different from Clan of the Cave Bear. Not having read the book yet I do not know if William Golding’s depiction is up to snuff with the latest scholarship on the Neandertals (granted, I am not up to date on the latest scholarship on Neandertals!), though he did guess correctly in all likelihood as to their pigmentation. But, in light of the highly probable non-trivial Neandertal ancestry in over 80% of humans, I feel like revisiting Golding’s vision in the near future, as we carry within our genomes the shadows of both the inheritors and the dispossessed.

Billy Hudson, a mathematician, writes, “I was in a introductory Number Theory class when Professor David Ferguson told me that e^(ipi) + 1 = 0. Of course, Euler’s equation had the same affect on me as it has on many undergraduate mathematicians, i.e. I was hooked. I had the equation tattooed on my arm in May of 1998, thinking that if nothing else it would be unique. I’ve still yet to meet anyone else with the tattoo, but as your site shows, there are others (although I still think I may have been the first .”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

There was a pretty disturbing story in the Los Angeles Times recently about how much trouble some government scientists are having in the Obama administration--which has not formally issued its promised scientific integrity rules yet. Now, organizations whose work I trust, like Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) and the Union of Concerned Scientists, are going on record saying that there are some serious cases of science being suppressed or interfered with in various government agencies. I have not independently investigated any of the cases here, but you have got to take these kinds of charges seriously. Let's go through some claims from the Times article, to list and also to comment:
In Florida, water-quality experts reported government interference with efforts to assess damage to the Everglades stemming from development projects.
In the Pacific Northwest, federal scientists said they were pressured to minimize the effects they had documented of dams on struggling salmon populations.
In several Western states, biologists reported being pushed to ignore the effects of overgrazing on federal land. These sound like very serious charges, and should be officially looked into, if that is not occurring already. Let's continue:
In Alaska, some oil and gas exploration decisions given preliminary approval under Bush moved forward under ...

One of the trends that makes me less pessimistic about the inevitability of an idiocratic end-point to technological civilization is that it seems young Americans are more likely to accept evolution than earlier age cohorts. The EVOLVED variable asks whether one believes that “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animal.” It was asked in 2004 and 2008, and its response is dichotomous between true and false. The favorable age trend I was aware of, but almost randomly I decided to control for some demographic variables, and I stumbled onto something which surprised me a bit, but in hindsight shouldn’t have: much of the greater acceptance of evolution among the youth has to do with a closing of the sex gap between men and women. Traditionally women have been more religious and Creationist in their inclinations, but far less so in Gen Y. Chart below of EVOLVED.

The convergence between men and women here seems to mirror what is occurring with religion more generally. Young men aren’t getting that much more secular, but women are, resulting in an aggregate of serious secularization.

Here are the percentages for 2004 and later in relation to attitudes toward the bible.

So some, but not all, of the closing of the “evolution gap” across sexes can be attributed to decreased belief in the core precepts of organized religion (e.g., the revealed nature of scripture). Rather, if you constrain the beliefs about evolution to those who believe that that the Bible is the inspired Word of God, you see that women are converging with men in the proportion who are theistic evolutionists, and turning away from Creationism. Among these believers, for those who were 61 or older 42% of women accepted evolution vs. 56% of men. For those in the age bracket 18-30 the proportion was 65% for both sexes.

In yesterday’s link dump I expressed some dismissive attitudes toward the idea that loss of linguistic diversity, or more precisely the extinction of rare languages, was a major tragedy. Concretely, many languages are going extinct today as the older generation of last native speakers is dying. This is an issue that is embedded in a set of norms, values which you hold to be ends, so I thought I could be a little clearer as to what I’m getting at. I think there are real reasons outside of short-term hedonic utility why people would want to preserve their own linguistic tradition, and that is because I am no longer a total individualist when it comes to human identity. I have much more sympathy for the French who wish to preserve French against the loss of their linguistic identity against the expansion of English than I had a few years ago.

Language is history and memory. When the last speaker of English dies, or, when English is transmuted to such an extent that it is no longer English as we today understand it, our perception of the past and historical memory, our understanding of ourselves, will change. There is a qualitative difference when Shakespeare becomes as unintelligible as Beowulf. Though I tend to lean toward the proposition that all languages are a means toward the same ends, communication, I agree that there are subtleties of nuance and meaning which are lost in translation when it comes to works of literature and other aspects of collective memory. Those shadings are the sort of diversity which gives intangible aesthetic coloring to the world. A world where everyone spoke the same language would lose a great deal of color, and I acknowledge that.

But we need to look at the other side of the ledger. First, we’re not talking about the extinction of English, French, or Cantonese. We’re talking about the extinction of languages with a few thousand to a dozen or so speakers. The distribution of languages and the number of speakers they have follows a power law trend, the vast majority of languages have very few speakers, and these are the ones which are going extinct. We are then losing communal identity, a thousand oral Shakespeare’s are turning into Beowulf’s and Epic of Gilgamesh’s, specific stories which have to be reduced to their universal human elements because a living native speaking community is gone. Let me acknowledge that there is some tragedy here. But this ignores the costs to those who do not speak world languages with a high level of fluency. The cost of collective color and diversity may be their individual poverty (i.e., we who speak world languages gain, but incur no costs).

Over the arc of human history individuals and communities have shifted toward languages with more numerous following. Sometimes, as in the case of the marginalization of the dialects of France for standard French in the 19th century, there was a top-down push. In other cases there needed to be no top-down push, because people want to integrate themselves into networks of trade, communication and participate in the family of nations on equal footing. Losing the languages of your ancestors means that your ancestors are made to disappear, their memory fades, and is replaced by other fictive ancestors. Modern Arabs outside of Arabia will often acknowledge that they are the products of Arabization (this is most obvious in the case of regions like Egypt or Mesopotamia which have long and glorious historical traditions pre-dating Islam). But they also in particular circumstances conceive of themselves as descendants of Ishmael, because they are Arab. A similar sort of substitution occurs when peoples change religions. The early medieval European monarchies, such as the Merovingians and the House of Wessex, traced their ancestry to German pagan gods. Later European dynasties tended to establish fictive ties to the House of David.

But letting one’s ancestors die also means that one can live with other human beings, and participate clearly and with a high level of fluency. You may object that this does not entail monolingualism. And certainly it does not, but over the generations there will be a shift toward a dominant language if there is economic, social and cultural integration. The way we can preserve local traditions and languages in the face of the homogenizing power of languages and cultures of greater scope is to put up extremely high barriers to interaction. The Amish have preserved their German dialect and religious traditions, but only through opting out of the mainstream to an extreme extent (and the Amish are bilingual too).

On a deeper cognitive level some readers point out that there are hints that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis may be correct. This is still not a strong enough reason for the perpetuation of linguistic traditions which are not widely subscribed. Humans have a finite amount of time in their lives, and the choices they make may not be perfectly rational, but quite often in the aggregate they are. When it comes to some aspects of cultural diversity, such as dress and religion, the importance we place on these traits is imbued by aspects of human psychology. Not so with language. Communication is of direct utilitarian importance.

Now that I’ve addressed, at least minimally, the tensions on the macro and micro level when it comes to linguistic preference, I want to address the aggregate gains to linguistic uniformity. My family is from Bangladesh, which had a “language movement”, which served as the seeds for the creation of that nation from a united Pakistan. Though there was a racial and religious component to the conflict I don’t think it would have matured and ripened to outright civil war without the linguistic difference. Language binds us to our ancestors, and to our peers, but also can separate us from others. A common language may not only be useful in a macroeconomic context, reducing transaction costs and allowing for more frictionless flow of information, but it also removes one major dimension of intergroup conflict.

So if only everyone spoke the same language there would be peace and prosperity? Perhaps not. Recently I have been convinced that it is best to have an oligopoly of languages so that “group-think” doesn’t impact the whole world in the same way. I’m basically repeating Jared Diamond’s argument in Guns, Germs, and Steel, as to why Europe was more cultural creative in the early modern period than China. Institutional barriers can allow for more experimentation, and prevent “irrational herds” from taking the whole system into dead-ends. Another way to think of it is portfolio diversity. Though linguistic diversity will introduce frictions to communication, on the margins some friction is useful to prevent memetic contagion which might occur due to positive feedback loops.

Below I present my model in graphical form. One the X axis is a diversity index. Imagine it goes from 1 to 0. 1 is the state where everyone speaks a different language, and 0 is the one where everyone speaks the same language. A state of high linguistic diversity converges upon 1, and one of low diversity upon 0. I believe that as linguistic diversity decreases one gains economies of scale, but there are diminishing returns. And, beyond a certain point I suspect that there are decreases to utility because of the systematic problem of irrational herds. I didn’t put a scale on the X axis because I don’t have a really clear sense of when we’re hitting the point of negative returns on homogeneity, though I don’t think we’re there yet.

Note: My confidence in the hypothesis that there are negative returns at some point is modest at best, and I have a high level of uncertainty as to its validity. But, I have a high confidence about the shape of the left side of the chart below, that very high linguistic diversity is not conducive to economic growth, social cooperation, and amity more generally scaled beyond the tribe.

“‘President John F. Kennedy’s death was a neurotoxin-assisted homicide’ is the hypothesis of this study. A review of medical evidence demonstrates evidence of a neurotoxin-assisted homicide. The convergence of three independent actions, or the signature traits of a neurotoxin-assisted homicide- the emergence of neurological signs consistent with a neurotoxin-induced paralysis, the induction of a small neck wound consistent with a flechette-transported neurotoxin entry wound, and the execution of a coverup to eliminate neurotoxin evidence, supports this hypothesis. This review suggests, JFK’s death had all the signature traits of a neurotoxin-assisted homicide.”

Bonus figure:

Fig. 5. Flechette-transported neurotoxin with Popup Fins.

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WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

What 15 million years ago was very bad for Australian marsupials is now very good for paleontologists: Researchers have uncovered a death trap, an underground limestone cave where hundreds of animals stumbled to their demise.

A paper published today in Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology details the resulting fossil menagerie, which includes an extinct wombat-like marsupial known as Nimbadon lavarackorum.

Karen Black of the University of New South Wales led the excavation and says in a press release that her team has already uncovered 26 Nimbadon skulls. The varying ages of the skulls detail the Nimbadon’s whole life cycle from “suckling pouch” to “elderly adults.”

“This is a fantastic and incredibly rare site,” says Dr. Black [regarding the cave]. “The exceptional preservation of the fossils has allowed us to piece together the growth and development of Nimbadon from baby to adult.” [Society of Vertebrate Paleontology]

See a photo gallery of the excavation and fossil processing below the jump.

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Researchers believe that there are even more fossils deeper in the Queensland cave, known officially as AL90. They also suspect that finding so many of the same animal might mean the Nimbadon exhibited “mob” behavior–traveling in large groups–as seen with today’s grey kangaroos.

The skulls are relatively large, but researchers think Nimbadon didn’t have much in the way of brains. Perhaps that’s not surprising, given the animals fell into a hole en masse.

“We think it needed a large surface area of skull to provide attachments for all the muscle power it required to chew large quantities of leaves, so its skull features empty areas, or sinus cavities,” said study team member Mike Archer of the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney. “Roughly translated, this may be the first demonstration of how a growing mammal ‘pays’ for the need to eat more greens—by becoming an ‘airhead.’” [Society of Vertebrate Paleontology]

Related content:
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My friend Surly Amy wrote a fantastic piece at Skepchick about why being a skeptic, being a critical thinker, is important. She includes a letter from a reader that… well, just read it for yourself. Make sure you read the whole thing.

Then go out and be skeptical. Go! It’s important.

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Hello again, Mercury. This week in a trio of papers Science, the scientists behind the Messenger probe released their findings from the craft’s third and final flyby of the planet closest to the sun, which it executed last September. Mercury, they’ve shown once again, is full of surprises—and they’ll get the chance to explore them when Messenger returns and finally enters Mercury’s orbit in March 2011.

Scientists have now mapped 98 percent of the planet by combining the new observations with the first two flybys in January and October 2008, plus the Mariner 10 mission in the ’70s, [said Brett Denevi, coauthor of one of the papers]. The latest flyby filled in a 360-mile-wide gap that had never been imaged before.

“It wasn’t a huge amount of real estate, but there was a lot of really interesting stuff there,” Denevi said. The most exciting features include a 180-mile-wide basin filled with hardened lava, and a crooked bowl surrounded by glass and magma that may be the largest volcanic vent ever identified on Mercury. Together, these features suggest that Mercury had active volcanoes later in its history than scientists had suspected [Wired.com].

The first image above shows a smooth basin dubbed Rachmaninoff, which is one of the smoothest regions seen on Mercury—so smooth that it must have formed from volcanic material in the last billion years or so. The yellowish part in the upper right of this false color image is that volcanic vent.

Louise Prockter, one of the scientists on the volcanism paper, says the findings suggest a Mercury that was active longer than most scientists thought—perhaps up to one to two billion years ago.

“Until MESSENGER, we had expected Mercury to get rid of all its heat early on in its history because it’s pretty small,” Prockter said. “We’ll want to see if the volcanism we see with this basin was an isolated case or whether it was widespread across the surface, which would have us perhaps rethinking our models of Mercury. It seems that Mercury did not get rid of her heat nearly as efficiently as had previously been thought” [Space.com].

That’s not all. Mercury, the researchers found, also releases fierce magnetic storms.

The September MESSENGER flyby is the first time scientists have documented the buildup of magnetic energy in Mercury’s magnetotail, the magnetic lines of force that form a region shaped like a comet’s tail on the planet’s night side. The magnetotail absorbed 10 times more magnetic energy from the sun than Earth’s magnetotail does. It then dumped that energy in just two to three minutes, compared to two to three hours for Earth’s field [Science News].

Now, the waiting is the hardest part. The countdown to Messenger’s big adventure in March stands at eight months.

Related Content:
80beats: Latest Mercury Pics Reveal Massive Craters & Possible Volcanic Vents
80beats: Space Probe Soon to Study Mercury’s Comet-Like “Tail”
80beats: Mercury Flyby Reveals Magnetic Twisters and Ancient Magma Oceans
80beats: Brand New Postcards From Mercury, Courtesy of Messenger Space Probe

Images: NASA/JPL/Johns Hopkins

The Benguela region, off the coast of Namibia, is a shadow of its former self. In the first half of the 20^th century, it was one of the world’s most productive ocean areas and supported a thriving fishing community. Today, the plentiful stocks of sardines and anchovies, and the industries that overexploited them, are gone. The water is choked of oxygen and swarming with jellyfish. Plumes of toxic gas frequently erupt from the ocean floor. But one fish, the bearded goby, is positively thriving in this inhospitable ecosystem. It’s a critical link in a food web that’s on the verge of collapse.

For every tonne of fish currently swimming in the Benguela waters, there are more than three tonnes of jellyfish. Some scientists have suggested that the jellyfish explosion has trapped the region in a “trophic dead-end”. Jellyfish have few predators so, having skyrocketed, their numbers are unlikely to fall back to levels where fish can return.

Below the zone where the jellyfish live, there is a layer that is completely devoid of life, extending from the bottom to around 20-60 metres above it. The mud and sediment along the Benguela ocean floor is extremely low in oxygen (hypoxic), and dominated by algae and large mats of bacteria. It frequently releases massive amounts of toxic gases, like methane and hydrogen sulphide, into the waters above with disastrous consequences for marine life.

But Anne Utne-Palm has found cause for hope. The bearded goby is tough enough to endure in conditions that have driven away most other fish and it’s one of the few species with a strong presence in Benguela. The goby’s success is a bit of a mystery since it’s now the main target for predatory birds, mammals and fish, following the loss of the sardines. And yet, despite being snapped at by hungry beaks and jaws, its population is growing. Now, Utne-Palm has found out why.

The goby lives its life at either ends of the Benguela dead zone and it has very strange inclinations. It spends its days resting on, or hiding inside, the hypoxic mud and it actually prefers these sediments over more typical sand. If another fish did the same, its metabolism would grind to a halt because of the lack of oxygen and the toxic concentrations of hydrogen sulphide. It would become sluggish and vulnerable to predators, and its heart would become irrevocably damaged after a short span of time.

But the goby doesn’t suffer any of these consequences. Its tolerance for low oxygen levels surpasses that of any other bony fish, and it can generate energy aerobically with so little oxygen that the conditions within the Benguela mud are no challenge for it. It’s virtually unaffected by high concentrations of hydrogen sulphide. And even if it’s kept in hypoxic conditions, below its critical threshold, it remains alert and its heart recovers quickly afterwards.

During the evening, the goby rises up to the mid-level waters before sinking back in the early morning. It spends the intervening hours in the company of two species of large jellyfish that rule these waters. And again, it will actually opt to spend time in a chamber with jellyfish, when given the option to swim in an empty tank. By analysing the contents of the gobies’ stomach, and the chemical content of their flesh, Utne-Palm found that the fish actually eats the jellies, which comprise up to 60% of its diet.

Whether it actually hunts live jellies is unclear. Other items in the goby’s stomach, including bottom-dwelling worms and algae, suggest that it probably scavenges upon dead jellies that sink to the ocean floor. Its fondness for loitering among the living jellies might be a way of protecting it from predators like mackerel, which shun the swarm of tentacles.

Rising above the dead zone might have other benefits too. It might help their digestion, which tends to be suppressed in hypoxic conditions. Utne-Palm noted that the gobies’ stomachs are far fuller, and their meals more intact, when they rise to the surface than when they return to the bottom. The waters of the open ocean are also richer in oxygen, allowing the goby to replenish its supply before sinking back to hypoxic levels.

While some species have suffered from the ashes of Benguela’s decline, the bearded goby has the right adaptations to make the most of this almost post-apocalyptic landscape. And it now plays a pivotal role in this brave new world. By eating jellyfish and algae in the hypoxic mud, it transfers some of these dead-end resources back into the food web.

Reference: Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1190708

More on fishing:

• Overfishing gives toxic seaweeds an edge in their competition with corals
• Restoring predator numbers by culling their prey
• Human-induced evolution reverses for shrunken fish once fishing stops
• Shark-hunting harms animals at bottom of the food chain
• Fishing bans protect coral reefs from devastating predatory starfish

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

Imagine enough forest to cover the state of Florida. According to a recent report (pdf), a downturn in illegal logging has protected that amount of forest land–some 42 million acres–over the past decade.

The decrease is a good start, London think tank Chatam House authors say, but there is still more work to do.

“We’re a quarter of the way there,” said Sam Lawson, one of the report’s authors. He expressed the hope that newer regulations–such as a European law passed last week that will ban the import of illegal timber by 2012–would cut the amount of illegal logging even further. [AP]

During the last decade, the report says, Cameroon, the Brazilian Amazon, and Indonesia have decreased logging between 50 and 75 percent. Meanwhile, the seven studied consumer and processing countries have decreased illegally harvested wood imports by 30 percent.

Among those importing countries is the United States, which in 2008 became the first country to ban all imports of illegally logged plants and plant products, including furniture and paper. Europe’s ban, passed earlier this month, will go into effect in 2012.

Still, despite these laws and others in exporting countries, a good deal of illegally sourced lumber still makes it to market. Some exporting countries, like Ghana and Malaysia, haven’t reduced their output, and “processing countries” like China and Vietnam can allow illegal lumber to pass through. Finally, even in the United States some importers don’t abide by the ban.

[C]ompanies still often turn a blind eye, “prioritizing profits over ethical standards,” according to the report’s lead author, Sam Lawson…. But even a total end to illegal timber imports wouldn’t solve the problem, as the contraband would likely find its way to “less sensitive” markets, such as the Middle East, according to Lawson. “If the United States just shuts off its market—even if it could—it would still be a great problem,” he says. [Nature News]

The reports’ authors also outline the consequences if the current illegal harvest does not stop. The report cites the amount of money lost to illegal logging and also logging’s environmental consequences–it estimates that forest destruction is responsible for up to 20 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions caused by human activities.

As a specific example, the report estimates that the 42 million acres mentioned above store 1.2 billion tons of Co2 and are worth 6.5 billion dollars (if harvested legally). The forests’ also serve as home and livelihood for many of these producer countries’ people.

The stakes are high, said lead author Sam Lawson. “Up to a billion of the world’s poorest people are dependent on forests, and reductions in illegal logging are helping to protect their livelihoods,” he said. [AFP]

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Image: flickr / Nirudha Perera