If you ever read Skepchick, you already know of Surly Amy: skeptic, artist, photographer, and all around cool chick. I’m glad to have her as a friend.

She also creates wonderful critical thinking jewelry she calls Surlyramics. These are ceramic necklaces and other accouterments with skeptical, scientific, and critical thinking phrases and drawings on them. They’re very cool, and wildly popular at meetings I’ve been to.

She and I have teamed up to create a limited edition Surlyramics Bad Astronomy pendant necklace. Each one is hand-formed and painted, and only 200 will be made. Once they’re gone, they’re gone.

The reason we’re doing this is that when you order a Bad Astronomy Surly necklace for $20, half of that will be donated to the American Cancer Society. Our goal is to raise $2000 in honor of my friend Jeff Medkeff, an astronomer and really nice guy — he’s the one who named an asteroid after me, as well as others for other skeptics and scientists. Jeff succumbed to cancer in 2008, and this is our way of letting people know about the good work he did and that his legacy lives on.

We’re trying to raise as much money as we can so that we can announce the total at Dragon*Con in Atlanta this year, which is September 2. These necklaces are honestly really cool — Mrs. BA loves hers — and when you buy one you’re doing a Good Thing. Also, if your order totals more than $50 you get free shipping. Details on how to order are at her site; click a pendant to find out more.

[Note: Amy is making them as this gets posted; if the site says sold out don't fret! She'll be making more and getting them online after TAM 8 finishes on July 12.]

So show off your love of astronomy (bad or otherwise), look cool doing it, and know that you’re helping medical researchers fight cancer. Thanks.

We’re copying DISCOVER’s other bloggers and calling out to commenters. Here we give you, Discoblog readers, a chance to speak your minds.

Ed Yong on Note Exactly Rocket Science, Carl Zimmer on The Loom, Razib Khan on Gene Expression, Daniel Holz at Cosmic Variance, and Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum on The Intersection want to know who you are, what your background is and what you do…

If you want to shout back with more about you and how you found our little piece of the interwebs, that’s great. Or, feel free to answer to any of these questions:

1) What animal would you never want to be?

2) You can have one superpower, but is has to be based on an iPhone app. What would you choose and why?

3) Name one science acronym that you find questionable.

4) You discover a subatomic particle, new species, or near earth object. You have to name it after a science fiction character or living scientist. What did you find and what did you name it?

Also feel free to just tell us how we’re doing, topics you’re most interested in, or favorite stories from Discoblog past.

Follow DISCOVER out on Facebook.

Image: flickr/a2gemma

Don’t be fooled by those sinister fangs: For saber-toothed cats, much of the killing power was concentrated in the front limbs.

The long canine teeth that gave the extinct cat its name are an unmistakable feature, protruding from the snarling faces of models in natural history museums everywhere. But while those fangs were deadly, their great length also made them delicate and liable to break if the cat’s prey jostled and writhed in an attempt to escape. Researcher Julie Meachen-Samuels had an idea how such a precarious killing device could have evolved: The cats had incredibly strong front limbs to hold down prey while they used their saber teeth to cut them up.

For a study that appears in the journal PLoS One, the team x-rayed the bones of many saber-toothed cats (Smilodon fatalis), and compared them to a variety of modern-day cats. According to Meachen-Samuels:

Species with longer limbs generally had stronger bones. However, while saber-tooth leg bones fell within the normal range, their arm bones were exceptionally thick for their length. Not only that, their arms also had thicker cortical bone — the dense outer layer that makes bones strong and stiff. “When I looked at Smilodon, I knew they were thicker on the outside than other cats, but I was really shocked at how much thicker they were on the inside as well” [LiveScience].

Previous research showed that the cats would’ve had relatively weak bites, ruling out the kind of aggressive biting and thrashing that animators and filmmakers might image. And determining the thickness and strength of these arm bones reinforces the theory that the saber-toothed preators attacked in a different way than modern cats.

The strong forelimb–sharp tooth combination was perfect for pouncing on prey, pinning it down and quickly gouging its throat. Sabertooths were thus probably good at hunting large animals like bison and camels [Science News].

However, the researchers say, the cats may have been too well adjusted to their killing method. When those large animals died out during the last ice age, the saber-toothed cats’ specialized equipment could have made them unfit to adapt to new prey and doomed them to extinction.

Related Content:
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Saber-Toothed Cats Had Weak Bites
Not Exactly Rocket Science: 2.1 Billion Year Old Fossils, And Arm Wrestling a Saber-Tooth Cat
DISCOVER: Saber-Tooth Tales
DISCOVER: A New Saber-Toothed Cat

Image: Wikimedia Commons / Dantheman

Looking for a midnight snack, you open a Tupperware container. Inside you find not your dinner leftovers, but a nasty cockroach. You stick your hand in.

Welcome to augmented reality psychology. The cockroach in the Tupperware is only in your mind–or your virtual reality goggles–and is part of an exposure therapy technique meant to treat those with extreme phobias.

Though traditional exposure therapy might require a person afraid of elevators to ride one repeatedly, or demand that a person afraid of cockroaches meet one face to bug-eyed face, the mere prospect of such experiences is enough to drive some patients out of therapy.

But perhaps, as described in a small study in Behavior Therapy, an augmented reality cockroach can provide all of the benefits without the ick.

Technology Review blogger Christopher Mims describes the setup, in which virtual cockroaches are inserted into video images of the real world.

“Combined with a camera on the front of the headset, the system allows researchers to show wearers both the real world and realistic cockroaches. The paper reports that the roaches could skitter, wave their antenna, and even change size from small and medium to hideously large.”

In the study, six women underwent a three-hour exposure session with the faux roaches. The hand in the Tupperware scene was a final test, which the study participants passed. Follow up tests over the next year showed that they continued to stay strong against virtual creepy crawlers.

Commenters on the Tech Review blog are already calling for non therapeutic uses, i.e. video-gaming: Duck Hunt meet bug squash.

Related content:
Discoblog: Let Them Eat Dirt! It Contains Essential Worms
Discoblog: Small Comfort: Cockroaches, Too, Get Fat on an Unbalanced Diet
Discoblog: Your Augmented Reality Life: Coming Soon in 2020
Discoblog: Augmented Reality Tattoos Are Visible Only to a Special Camera

Image: flickr / Steve Snodgrass

In April, I noted with sadness the passing of the artist (and friend) John Schoenherr. (His New York Times obituary appeared a few days later.) His son, the artist Ian Schoenherr, has been sifting through his mountain of paintings and other effects, and yesterday he launched a blog to publish interesting things as he comes across them.

It’s a wonderful way to celebrate a wonderful life full of bears, geese, astronauts, and, of course, giant alien sandworms. So check it out!

Shortly after moving, I met a new neighbor on my street. He loves astrophysics and we have similar tastes in books and music. His name isn't Phil, but for the purpose of this post, that's what I'll call him. I like Phil a lot. He's smart and witty with a healthy dose of skepticism. We run into each other often--in part because we both walk our dogs regularly, but also because he's hard to miss: Phil nearly always wears one of those black t-shirts with a large red A across the front to express "where his allegiances lie" (his words). He has three of them that he rotates through each week to avoid doing laundry. They all look just the same. Early on, Phil wanted to know whether I was an atheist too since I'm in science. I explained that I don't like labels because they mainly serve to divide people one way or another. And then we get war, bigotry, genocide, and so on. I told him how I like the way Vonnegut described Humanism and try to behave decently and fairly while here on Earth. "Kurt's up in heaven now," I added. He got the joke. Yesterday I asked why the ...

In a column in the latest edition of Nature, Daniel Sarewitz, co-director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University, takes on the National Academy’s Science Entertainment Exchange (SEE). SEE seeks to enrich and improve the quality of science and the depiction of scientists in movies and TV. (Full disclosure: I sometimes consult for science fiction movies and TV shows through the Exchange.)

Sarewitz takes aim at the SEE’s interest in less stereotyped depictions of scientists by asserting those stereotypes are correct: “as biologist E. O. Wilson … has explained, scientists must work 80 hours a week if they hope to do important research. That doesn’t leave much time for developing social skills or shopping for nice clothes.” This is going to come as a shock to many top scientists I know, who manage to have a social life and dress fashionably all while working significantly less than 80 hours a week. His vision of the socially isolated and perennially unkempt scientist is out of touch, despite what he saw in Back to the Future a quarter-century ago.

Sarewitz believes that scientists are different from cops and morticians because we are “part of an enterprise that is continually transforming society, nature and even humanity in ways that everyone can experience but no one can truly understand.” Because of this fact, Sarewitz says “there’s a naivety bordering on the oblivious in the academy’s efforts to render science and scientists more familiar and palatable through mass entertainment.”

On several levels, this is a bizarre claim. I’ll focus on the most relevant point, which is that the SEE is not about sugar-coating the ultimately inexplicable work (!) of scientists to transform humanity. SEE is enabling story-makers to get to know real working scientists so that their dramatic depictions don’t just trade in stereotypes, but make contact with reality–in some ways more familiar and palatable, in others less so. That means richer characters that have more depth–just as a novelist who goes to the trouble of doing background research on what life as a journalist is like can write about a journalist character with more depth.

Finally, Sarewitz suggests that the aims of the SEE are at odds with the creation of good drama. That to make scientists more realistic and improve the quality of science in movies would sanitize great drama into insipid pedantry. This is the one part of the commentary which might resonate, if only it were true.

Scientists who work with SEE and the creatives that SEE connects them to come together in a collaborative spirit to enrich depictions of science and scientists. They are not there to consult on how a good drama should be constructed–which, as Sarewitz correctly points out, often includes elements of mystery, ambiguity, open-ended questions, and depictions of the kinds of hubris and will to power that affects us all, including scientists. As a consultant for a sci-fi show that is all about the hubris and will to power of scientists who develop robots (the Cylons) that try to annihilate humanity (a prequel to Battlestar Galactica called Caprica), I can make strong assurances on that score. As it should, the job of crafting a good story remains in the hands of the folks who are talented at it, while we stick with what we do well. Entertainment and science are two different worlds, and Sarewitz exhibits a naivety bordering on the oblivious to suggest that the people participating in the meeting of these two worlds aren’t acutely aware of what they bring to the table.

It’s unfortunate that Nature, one of the most widely read periodicals in science, has given Sarewitz a forum for these poorly considered remarks. No approach to improving science literacy in our society is without faults, and we should embrace critical examination of which approaches are the most effective. His piece fails to do so, instead giving voice to his own preconceptions and naivety about the process.

It will take more than a little sun to get one of the world’s biggest solar power plants up and running: it will also require 1,600 workers to build it and a lot of cash. On Saturday, President Obama announced that the U.S. Department of Energy will use last year’s stimulus bill to issue $1.85 billion in loan guarantees to two solar power companies, one of which plans to build one of the planet’s largest solar power plant in Arizona.

Solana, the big solar power plant planned by Abengoa Solar Inc., will cover an area of around 1,900 acres near Gila Bend, Arizona. As detailed in a White House press release, the company claims that the plant will be one of the first in the United States able to store its own power. According to the release, it will also be able to generate 280 megawatts of power—enough energy to run more than 70,000 homes–and will prevent the emission of 475,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year. After construction, the plant will support 85 some permanent jobs, the company claims.

“After years of watching companies build things and create jobs overseas, it’s good news that we’ve attracted a company to our shores to build a plant and create jobs right here in America,” Obama said of Abengoa. . . . “What’s more, over 70 per cent of the components and products used in construction will be manufactured in the USA, boosting jobs and communities in states up and down the supply chain. Once completed, this plant will be the first large-scale solar plant in the US to actually store the energy it generates for later use—even at night.” [Consumer Energy Report]

The other company, Abound Solar Manufacturing, will get $400 million to build two solar-panel manufacturing plants, one in an empty Chrysler supplier factory in Tipton, Indiana. The company estimates that building the two plants will require 2,000 workers and operating them will create 1,500 permanent positions; the company also says it will be first to use a new solar panel technology commercially.

Abound Solar Manufacturing, will manufacture state-of-the-art thin film solar panels, the first time anywhere that such technology has been used commercially. [BBC]

Obama’s focus on the amount of jobs created by each plant comes on the tail of an announcement from the U.S. Labor Department:

Obama coupled his announcement with an acknowledgment that efforts to recover from the recession are slow a day after the Labor Department reported that private hiring in June rose by 83,000. “It’s going to take months, even years, to dig our way out and it’s going to require an all-hands-on-deck effort,” he said. [The Independent]

Related content:
80beats: Making Super-Powered Solar Panels Via Quantum Dots
80beats: Tech Prize Goes to Inventor Who Wants to Turn Skyscrapers Into Generators
80beats: The Dream: Print-Out Solar Panels That Can Be Stapled to Your Roof
80beats: Glitter-Sized Solar Cells Could Be Woven into Your Power Tie
80beats: Self-Assembling Solar Panels Use the Vinaigrette Principle

When I first heard in the media there was a new study of longevity which had produced a model based on your SNP profile that was “77% accurate” as to whether you’d live to the age of 100 or not, I assumed this was confusion or distortion (perhaps The Daily Mail had broken embargo first and its spin was percolating around the mediasphere). But later I listened to one of the researchers on the radio, and though he seemed to want to tone down the certitude as to that prediction, he did not debunk the claim. Whatever the details, I did not believe that the model was that relevant to most people since very few are going to make it deep into their nineties in any case (I did have a grandfather who made it to 100 [in Bangladesh!], so my chance is presumably greater than the norm). The model would be moving you along the margins. Additionally, over the years it has paid off to be skeptical of the discovery of large effect genes for X, Y and Z. When the X, Y and Z has medical significance I’m even more skeptical, because the non-scientific biases within medical research seem to be really strong. There’s a lot of fame and money to be had. Some of the media were asking the researchers up front whether this might unlock the genetic “Fountain of Youth.” This is entrancing stuff.

So is this post from Dr. Daniel MacArthur, Serious flaws revealed in “longevity genes” study, warrants notice:

If the paper’s claims were true they would be truly remarkable. However, the general feeling from the GWAS community is that the identified associations are likely to be largely or even entirely artefactual, the result of failing to fully control for differences in the genotyping methods used in the cases and controls. The study used a mixture of two different genotyping platforms (albeit both made by Illumina) for their centenarians, while the control data was taken from an online database containing samples examined using multiple platforms. Disturbingly, similar potential genotyping bias also affects their replication cohort.

In the Newsweek piece I mentioned yesterday Kári Stefánsson has this to say about one of the platforms:

Kári Stefánsson, the Icelandic geneticist who founded deCode Genetics, knows something about the 610-Quad—his company has used it too. He says it has a strange and relevant quirk regarding two of the strongest variants linked to aging in the BU study, called rs1036819 and rs1455311. For any given gene, a person will have two “alleles,” or forms of DNA. In the vast majority of people, at the rs1036819 and rs1455311 locations in the genome, these pairs of alleles consist of one “minor” form and one “major” form. But the 610-Quad chip tends to see the wrong thing at those particular locations. It always identifies the “minor” form but not the “major” form, says Stefánsson—even if the latter really is present in the DNA, which it usually is. If you use the error-prone chip in more of your case group than your control group—as the BU researchers did—you’re going to see more errors in those cases. And because what you’re searching for is unusual patterns in your cases, you could very well mistake all those errors (i.e., false positives) for a genetic link that doesn’t actually exist.

Stefánsson says he is “convinced that the reported association between exceptional longevity and most of the 33” variants found in the Science study, including all the variants that other scientists hadn’t already found, “is due to genotyping problems.” He has one more piece of evidence. Given what he knows about the 610-Quad, he says he can reverse-engineer the math in the BU study and estimate what fraction of the centenarians were analyzed with that chip. His estimate is about 8 percent. The actual fraction, which wasn’t initially provided in the Science paper, is 10 percent, the BU researchers tell NEWSWEEK. That’s close, given that Stefánsson’s calculations look at just two of the variants found in the study and there may be similar problems with others.

Stefánsson recognizing one of the 150 SNPs as a problematic one is another red flag. The effect sizes of the SNPs in the study seem really large, so that should make you curious as to what’s going on. Here’s a post from 23andMe suggesting we should be cautious of the results for that reason:

-A large study combining results of four genome-wide association studies of longevity was published in May in the Journals of Gerontology. That study found no associations meeting their pre-specified criteria for genome-wide significance. While they used a more inclusive phenotype (age 90 or older), it is surprising that there could be so many loci associated with survival to age 100 in the new study, some with very large effect sizes, yet none were found in the larger study from earlier this year.

23andMe applied the model (the SNPs) outlined in the paper and attempted to see if it had any utility in to their admittedly small sample within their own database. They found nothing of note:

We took a preliminary look in our customer data to see if the proposed SNP-based model described in Sebastiani et al. is predictive of exceptional longevity. A commonly used measure of test discrimination is to calculate how often, for a randomly selected case and control, a test correctly assigns a higher score to the case. This is known as the “c statistic” or “area under the curve”. The authors of the new study say their model scored a 0.93 for this statistic. But when we compared 134 23andMe customers with age ? 95 to more than 50,000 controls, we obtained a test statistic of 0.532, with a 95% confidence interval from 0.485 to 0.579. Using 27 customers with age ? 100, we get a value of 0.540, with a 95% confidence interval from 0.434 to 0.645. A random predictor of longevity would give a 0.5 on this scale, so based on our data, performance of this model is not significantly better than random. Even with our small sample size, we can also clearly exclude values as high as the published result of 0.93.

If you go back to Dr. MacArthur’s post he has a chart which indicates that even by eyeballing their are indications that the results in the Science paper were artifacts of the methodological limitations. Newsweek ends with this caution:

Still, one has to wonder how the paper wound up in Science, which, along with Nature, is the top basic-science journal in the world. Most laypeople would never catch a possible technical glitch like this—who reads the methods sections of papers this complicated, much less the supplemental material, where a lot of the clues to this mystery were?—but Science’s reviewers should have. It’s clear that the journal—which hasn’t yet responded to the concerns raised here—was excited to publish the paper, because it held a press conference last week and sent a representative to say as much.

This isn’t about the media. They didn’t have to sensationalize too much; the findings themselves if correct are moderately sensational. But if Dr. Daniel MacArthur could spot something indicative of serious problems by scanning the supplements presumably it shouldn’t have made it through the review process without the issue being mooted and addressed. But then again, it’s medical genetics, and there’s a lot of pressure to find the roots of human morbidity and mortality. It’s a field where results like ALH 84001 abound. The heart wants what is wants. That’s why it’s nice to focus on less practical evolutionary genetic questions; no one really cares that much whether we’re descended from Neandertals. Right?

Note: And earlier post from Nature with more quotes from scientists who are skeptical of the findings.

Athanasius (b. 293) was an ascetic known not only for his piety but—like many ascetics– for his penchant for wearing hairshirts (these were also available as underwear for the truly hard core). Hairshirts are made from goats’ hair, and they are as itchy as they sound, although the true test of your fealty to God was to wear one that was flea infested. Thanks to a new study on the cognitive effects of the feel of everyday objects, we now have some science to help us understand what effect wearing a hairshirt had on the way Athanasius thought. Ackerman, Nocera, and Bargh have discovered that people are more likely to judge an ambiguous passage as difficult and harsh after they have completed a jigsaw-puzzle covered in rough sandpaper, compared to folks who read the same passage after completing the same puzzle that was smooth to the touch. They also explored a few other examples of bleed-through from the way things feel to the way we think. Participants evaluating resumes judged ones that were on heavier clipboards to be better than ones on light clipboards. Sitting on hard chairs versus soft cushioned chairs caused negotiations to be more rigid in character, with less flexibility in a negotiation task.

These are remarkable effects with many potential implications, and applications (next time you’re trying to sell something, make sure you’re seated in a hard chair, and your buyer is in soft chair, for example; and clothes designers have a whole new dimension to consider). What is their underlying basis? The researchers hypothesize that our experiences with touch early in our development provides a scaffold for the development of conceptual knowledge. In adult life, these same touch experiences activate the scaffold in the same way, and lead to unconscious influences on our attitudes and decision making. The experience of weight gets metaphorically associated with seriousness and importance. Idioms like “that’s heavy” reflect this association. Similarly, rough textures get associated with difficulty, and we say “having a rough day.”

This research is another example of how the way we think is all wrapped up in the way we body. The new results add to our growing understanding of the ways in which embodiment and thought are more intertwined than was previously believed. The ways in which cognition is embodied was also the topic of a recent volume in the Cambridge Handbook series, called “The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition”, which I had the pleasure of writing a chapter for.

Research into the ways in which cognition is intertwined with bodily experiences raise interesting issues regarding common science fiction fables and science fact predictions. Many of these hinge on being able to dispense with the body. The body, in this view, is just a convenient output device, easily replaced with another, or not replaced at all so as to be a disembodied intelligence like Hal of 2001. Our body is the computer, and who we are is the software, so if the hardware falls short we can just get new hardware. But what if who we are is this particular software running on this particular kind of hardware? The Cylons of Battlestar Galactica are an interesting mix of these ideas. They never died: as soon as their current body was eliminated, their consciousness was uploaded to another body. But they were not into body swapping: you got uploaded to the same body model, or not at all (aka, death), potentially compatible with embodiment ideas.

I was going to post a set of links for the weblogs from ScienceBlogs who have left for new digs, but Skull in the Stars is tracking it. Probably best to check in this weekend if you’re really curious, some people are still in wait-and-see mode.

As I continue to bake today, yearning for just a few minutes in Senator Inhofe’s igloo, I’ve been keeping tabs on a saddening train wreck over at my old haunt, Scienceblogs. Before I brought the Loom to Discover, I blogged at Scienceblogs, which was hosted by the folks behind the now-defunct (?) Seed Magazine. There was a lot I enjoyed about that time, and I still keep tabs on a number of excellent bloggers still at Scienceblogs. Except that, as of today, a lot of them are no longer there.

Here’s the quick story: the powers that be at Scienceblogs thought it would be a good idea to sell Pepsi a blog of its own on the site, where its corporate scientists could tell the world about all the great nutrition science Pepsico is doing.

Yes. Really. I’m totally sober as I type this.

I first heard about this in a post by Peter Lipson, a doctor who writes a blog at SB. He offers a common reaction from a lot of the bloggers there: they don’t like what Pepsi stands for, and they don’t like Scienceblogs giving the company an opportunity to dole out their PR to readers alongside blogs that have built up their reputations for years, for the most part for very little pay.

Here’s a response, of sorts, in the form of an email sent to the bloggers after the story made its way all the way into the newspapers, from the editor, Adam Bly.

Yes. Really. After. I swear, I am still sober.

It’s not an inspiring reply. For one thing, Bly tells us how hard it is these days to make journalism pay. Um, you don’t have to tell bloggers that. For another, Bly seems to justify the Pepsi affair by saying Scienceblogs has hosted blogs from corporations before. Somehow that means this new situation is okay. I can’t stop thinking of the line from As You Like It, “More villain thou.”

Even if you set aside the paradox of Pepsi telling us about eating right (Step 1: maybe put down that 10 liter bottle of Pepsi?), this just doesn’t make editorial sense. If you want to sustain respect and trust in readers, you simply can’t do this sort of thing. John Rennie and Paul Raeburn explain this Journalism 101 lesson.

What I find particularly galling about this whole affair is that bloggers who don’t want to associate themselves with this kind of nonsense have to go through the hassle of leaving Scienceblogs and setting up their blog elsewhere. The technical steps involved may be wonderfully easy now (export files, open account on WordPress, import), but the social steps remain tedious. Take it from me, someone who has moved his blog three times over the past six years: your readers lose your trail, and it takes a long time for Google to start helping them. These folks did nothing to deserve this irritation.

So let me do my small part here. Over the next couple weeks, I plan to build a list of bloggers who refused to drink the Kool Aid Pepsi who left [failed joke!] and tell you where to go to read them now. Please let me know about bloggers not yet on the list in the comment thread. And I will update my blog roll when I have a free minute.

BLOGGERS ON THE MOVE:

Causabon’s Book

David Dobbs

Good Math/Bad Math: Mark Chu-Carroll is definitely leaving. Will post his destination soon.

Highly Autochthonous: On hiatus, trending towards escape.

Jonah Lehrer: Moving to Wired this summer (a plan that was in effect before Pepsi popped on the scene)

The Quantum Pontiff

Scicurious

Science After Sunclipse

Rebecca Skloot: TBA. (You can follow her for now on Twitter)

Brian Switek, Laelaps: TBA. (You can follow him for now on Twitter)

Alex Wild

[Image: Wikipedia]

It makes sense: stay where it’s warm, sunny, and there’s a lot of food. What, then, were prehistoric people doing on the British seashore? New research published today in Nature pushes human arrival in Britain back to about 800,000 years ago, roughly 100,000 years earlier than our previous estimations. The evidence? A trove of 70 flint tools found on the Happisburgh shore in Norfolk.

Dating artifacts that old isn’t easy (for example, carbon dating doesn’t work), so the researchers had to be thorough. Led by Simon A. Parfitt of The Natural History Museum in London and Nick Ashton of the British Museum, London as part of the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project, the team used both biological and physical evidence to date the tools. Looking at insect and plant fossils found with the artifacts, researchers determined that the species dated back to the Early Pleistocence period, between 990,000 and 780,000 years ago. The researchers also tested sediment around the tools, and established that they were buried when the Earth’s magnetic field was flipped. The last time this happened was also about 780,000 years ago.

Researchers suspect that the humans made their way to Britain via a land bridge that once connected the UK to continental Europe. Homo antecessor, known as “Pioneer Man,” has previously been found in northern Spain and is also known to have lived around 800,000 years ago; this early human could be a candidate for the tools’ maker. Unfortunately, since the researchers haven’t yet uncovered any human remains at the site, they can’t know for sure what species lived in Happisburgh.

Whoever they were, they must have been pretty tough to survive the British winters.

“Although we don’t have the evidence for fire or of clothing to get through the winters up here, I think they must have had some extra adaptations,” said [study coauthor Chris Stringer]. “I think the evidence suggests that they were living at the edge of the inhabited world in a really challenging environment and indeed they were real pioneers living here in Britain, nearly a million years ago,” he said. [BBC]

For all the details, including pictures of the flint tools, check out Ed Yong’s post and gallery on Not Exactly Rocket Science.

Related Content:
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Norfolk – the home of the earliest known humans in Britain
80beats: The Ur-Sneaker: 5500-Year-Old Shoe Found in Armenian Cave
80beats: How Ancient Beekeepers Made Israel the Land of (Milk and) Honey: Imported Bees
80beats: 4 Days of Laser Scanning Reveals More of Ancient City Than 20 Years of Hoofing
80beats: Is the Mysterious Siberian “X-Woman” a New Hominid Species?

Image: John Sibbick/AHOB

On Saturday, five gallons of tar balls appeared on the Bolivar Peninsula and Galveston Island in Texas. Their arrival means that BP oil has now hit all five gulf states. Researchers don’t believe that ocean currents alone carried the balls, but instead say that the glops of gloop washed off recovery ship hulls.

Specifically, the researchers from a joint BP-Coast Guard response team looked at the tar balls’ “weathering,” which they say was too light for oil that had traveled from the leak site, around 550 miles away.

Galveston’s mayor, Joe Jaworski, said he was hopeful the analysis was correct and that the tar balls were not a sign of more oil to come. “This is good news. The water looks good. We’re cautiously optimistic this is an anomaly,” he said. [BBC]

Greg Pollock, Texas Deputy Commissioner of the Oil Spill Prevention and Response, has worried that this day was coming; he sounded a call in a June Texas Land Office newsletter:

“This ain’t our first rodeo with tar balls. We will be ready.” [NPR]

According to the AFP, the largest are only slightly larger than an inch in diameter and, all combined, cover less than one percent of the beaches where they were spotted: East Beach on Galveston Island and Crystal Beach on Bolivar Peninsula, which both remain open.

Though Texas officials say that the beaches remain safe, they also promise that BP will pay for any damage:

“Any Texas shores impacted by the Deepwater spill will be cleaned up quickly and BP will be picking up the tab,” Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson said in a news release. [Philadelphia Inquirer]

Meanwhile, in Louisiana, oil has reached Lake Pontchartrain, known for its seemingly miraculous recovery from the pollution in the 1990s and again after Army Corps of Engineers drained Katrina floodwaters from New Orleans into the lake. The body of water is technically an estuary that is connected to the Gulf of Mexico through several straits.

Recent posts on the Gulf oil spill:
80beats: Gulf Coast Turtle News: No More Fiery Death; Relocating 70,000 Eggs
80beats: Hurricane Alex Held Up Oil Cleanup—And in Some Places, Made Things Worse
80beats: Next from X Prize: An Award for Cleaning up BP’s Oil Spill?
80beats: Obama’s Speech on the Oil Spill: What Do You Think of His “Battle Plan”?
80beats: BP to Kevin Costner: We’ll Take 32 of Your Oil Clean-up Machines

Image: flickr / Geoff Livingston

As far as stars go, it’s one of the largest, the most luminous, brightest, most massive, and one of the best supernova candidates on the list.  Betelgeuse is huge.  If it were in our sun’s place, it would extend out beyond the orbit of Mars, possibly beyond that of Jupiter.  It is the ninth brightest star in the night sky, and the second brightest (behind Rigel) in the constellation Orion.

The constellation Orion - image courtesy of Zwergelstern, released to PD

The origin of the name “Betelgeuse” is an interesting read in itself, if you happen to be interested in etymology (which I am).  There are also many and varied pronunciations floating around, and “beetle juice” is perfectly acceptable.  I was taught to pronounce it “BET el juz”.  You can avoid the whole issue and just call it “alpha ori/orionis”, if that grabs you.

Betelgeuse is a semi-regular variable star, and is believed to be about 8.5 million years old.  While that makes it an infant compared to our sun (actually, it makes it a fetus), Betelgeuse is old for its type.  Scientists believe it will supernova any time in the next 1,000 years; in fact, it could go tonight.  Betelgeuse has been doing some strange things lately, things which many astronomers believe to be a preamble to supernova.

NASA/JPL/ESA - Hubble - This 1999 image was the first direct image of the surface of a star other than the Sun

When Betelgeuse does supernova, it will become the brightest object in the night sky – easily outshining the Moon.  It would even be perfectly visible during the day.  We would see it increase in brightness over a two-week period, hold intensity for about two or three months, then rapidly dim.  What would be left?  It could be a neutron star remnant, a white dwarf, or even a pulsar.  We don’t have to worry about a gamma ray burst from Betelgeuse; its rotational axis is positioned so that the burst won’t be headed our way.  Not that worrying about it would do any good, you know.  If we were looking down the barrel, Betelgeuse is close enough to fry us to a cinder.

Long an object of speculation and study, Betelgeuse has been receiving even more attention with the advent of the new “super telescopes” like Gemini.  It’s fair to say that at any moment, someone… somewhere… is looking at Betelgeuse.

Betelgeuse, image by ESO's Very Large Telescope

Many people think it would be really cool to watch Betelgeuse supernova.  Maybe.  If I sound grouchy here it’s because although I would like to see a supernova that close (and we should be perfectly safe at this distance), I don’t want to lose Betelgeuse.  Sure, we wouldn’t really lose Betelgeuse… SOMETHING will still be there… but it won’t be that big, beautiful red star I’m used to seeing.

Keep looking up, Alejandro.

I love me some of the Captain! Captain Disillusion, that is. He’s just created a new skeptical video, this time in 3D!

YouTube doesn’t allow 3D videos to be embedded yet, but here’s the link to it, and you can watch the 2D version below.

I hear that Captain Disillusion will be at TAM 8, but he may be disguised as a mere mortal. I will never give away his secret identity — we superheroes stick together — but if you go, maybe you’ll run into him. He’ll be the one with length, depth, and width.

The oceans are getting louder and forcing some whale to speak up, according to a study published yesterday in the journal Biology Letters.

Lead researcher Susan Parks of Penn State University eavesdropped on seven male and seven female North Atlantic right whales by attaching acoustic tags to them via suction cups. Each tag recorded from 2 to 18 calls, which included the whales’ greeting “upcalls” (seemingly questioning “hmm?” sounds that go from a low to high pitch — see video), as well as background noise–believed to come from commercial shipping.

Bioacoustics researcher Christopher Clark of Cornell University, who did not participate in the study, says that ocean noise is becoming a serious issue.

“If I had to immerse you into the sea off Boston, you’d be shocked. You’d be like a country mouse dropped in the middle of Heathrow Airport,” says Clark. “In one generation, we have raised the background level for an entire ocean ecosystem.” [New Scientist]

At 400 hertz, some of this background noise seems to overlap with the frequency of right whale greetings, and Parks believes that these endangered whales are shouting to compensate. The team recorded background noise ranging from 92 to 143 decibels; whales seemed to respond by increasing the volume of their calls in line with the background noise, producing calls which ranged from 120 to almost 150 decibels.

“The impacts of increases in ocean noise from human activities are a concern for the conservation of marine animals like right whales,” [said Parks]…. “The ability to change vocalizations to compensate for environmental noise is critical for successful communication in an increasingly noisy ocean.” [Penn State]

The study was small, only including fourteen whales, and therefore preliminary. Background noise levels vary depending on ocean location, and different whale species make calls at different volumes and frequencies. Still, if the noise in the oceans continues, the study’s authors argue, the whales may have trouble making the calls necessary for activities such as feeding and mating.

One downside is that “shouting,” as for humans and other animals, requires more energy expenditure and probable strain, so we are making life more difficult for these already at risk marine mammals…. “When noise exceeds a certain level, right whales will not be able to increase their call amplitude enough to compensate,” [Parks said]. [Discovery News]

Newsweek has a long piece up which reviews some major issues with the new study of centenarians that’s been all over the media right now. Ed Yong already covered the paper, but I’m going to look at the details myself. Here’s a update from the Newsweek post:

Within an hour of this story’s publication, the Science study’s authors released a statement which a BU spokeswoman described as appearing “because of your inquiry and a similar one from the New York Times concerning methodology used to test 2 of the 150 genetic variants.” Here is what the statement says: “Since the publication of our study in Science, which was extensively peer-reviewed, a question has been raised about two elements of the findings. One has to do with two of the 150 genetic variants included in the prediction model, while the other is related to the criteria used to determine the significance of the individual variants. On the first concern, we have been made aware that there is a technical error in the lab test used on approximately 10% of the centenarian sample that involved the two of the 150 variants. Our preliminary analysis of this issue suggests that the apparent error would not effect the overall accuracy of the model. Because the issue has been raised since the publication of the paper, we are now closely re-examining the analysis. Another question that was raised concerns the criteria used to determine if an association between a genetic variant and exceptional longevity was statistically significant. We used standard criteria for the analysis, and we are confident that the appropriate threshold was used.”

It has just been revealed that "Tom Johnson," whose story I elevated from the comments of this blog into a distinct post, and who I praised for coming forward, was also "bilbo," "milton c," and various other commenters here. And now he's going by "William." Needless to say, I no longer consider his story credible. Until these revelations, I had no idea of any of this. Not only had I never checked my commenters' IP addresses or for sock puppets before (although now I see that I should have). But moreover, when it came to "Tom Johnson," I emailed him after his first comment, to check on his identity. The response claimed to be a specific person--a specific Ph.D. candidate at a specific university--and provided a university website and considerable detail about this person's scientific career, publishing record, outreach endeavors, and so on. Now, "William" says, "When Chris contacted me, I made up a story about being a grad. student as an explanation about where the story came from because I didn’t want the Tom character to get exposed as false." No. It wasn't just a story about being a graduate student. A specific name was given, a specific career, a specific website, a specific university, ...