This morning I fly out to Buffalo, and then ride on to Amherst, New York, home to the Center for Inquiry -- the hub of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, Free Inquiry, and much else, including the Point of Inquiry radio show and podcast. This is the place I worked, for my very first job out of college, along with Matthew Nisbet in the summer of 1999. Also present back then: Derek Araujo, now Vice President and General Counsel of the Center for Inquiry, director of CFI’s legal programs, and CFI’s Representative to the United Nations; and Austin Dacey, a writer in New York and author of The Secular Conscience. The occasion is the Center for Inquiry On Campus Leadership Conference -- and, well, I'm reminiscing. It is hard to believe that ten years ago, I was in a secular humanist rock band with Araujo, Dacey, and a few other young skeptic/freethinkers called the House Judiciary Committee (it was the time of impeachment). I was the rhythm guitar player, though I didn't have any rhythm. One of our hits? An instrumental called "Hook, Quine, and Pinker." My goals in Amherst are several. First, I'm going to give a talk to the young freethought advocates. ...

When you pick up an object, you might think that you are manipulating it, but in a sense, it is also manipulating you. Through a series of six psychological experiments, Joshua Ackerman from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has shown that the properties that we feel through touch – texture, hardness, weight – can all influence the way we think.

Weight is linked to importance, so that people carrying heavy objects deem interview candidates as more serious and social problems as more pressing. Texture is linked to difficulty and harshness. Touching rough sandpaper makes social interactions seem more adversarial, while smooth wood makes them seem friendlier. Finally, hardness is associated with rigidity and stability. When sitting on a hard chair, negotiators take tougher stances but if they sit on a soft one instead, they become more flexible.

These influences are not trivial – they can sway how people react in important ways, including how much money they part with, how cooperative they are with strangers, or how they judge an interview candidate.

First off, in two experiments reminiscent of another study I’ve written about, Ackerman showed that holding a light or heavy clipboard can affect a person’s decision-making. In a study of 54 volunteers, those who clutched the heavier board rated a job candidate more highly based on their resume, and thought that they displayed a more serious interest in the job. They even rated their own assessments as being more important! However, the boards didn’t affect the recruits’ judgments on areas unrelated to importance, such as the candidate’s ability to get along with others.

In a second test with 43 volunteers, those who held the heavier boards were more likely to call for government funds to be spent on serious social matters like setting air pollution standards, over more trivial affairs like public toilet regulations. Again, the mere feeling of weight appears to influence the importance we give to matters.

In the next experiments, Ackerman asked recruits to complete a puzzle with pieces that were either smooth and varnished, or covered in rough sandpaper. 64 volunteers were then asked to read a transcript of an ambiguous social interaction. Those who touched the rough pieces found the liaison to be harsher and more adversarial than those who touched the smooth pieces, but no less familiar.

This also affected the decisions they made. After completing the puzzle, Ackerman asked 42 people to play an Ultimatum game, where they had to decide how many lottery tickets to give to a (fake) partner, out of a total of ten. The catch is that if the partner refuses the offer, all the tickets are confiscated. Wary of this, players who touched the rough pieces (and were primed for harsh and difficult dealings) offered more tickets outright than those who touched the smooth pieces.

Ackerman also looked at the influence of an object’s hardness. He asked 49 volunteers to touch either a hard block of word or a soft blanket, under the pretence of examining objects to be used in a magic act. Afterwards, when they read an interaction between a boss and an employee, those who felt the wood thought the employee was stricter and more rigid than those who touched the blanket (but no less positive). It doesn’t have to be the hands that do the touching either – when he repeated the same task with 86 volunteers who sat in either a hard, wooden chair or a soft, cushioned one, he found the same results. “We primed participants by the seat of their pants,” he writes.

The chair experiment also gave Ackerman the opportunity to test the effect of hardness on decision-making. He asked his recruits to place two offers on a $16,500 car, the second following a straight refusal of the first by the dealer. While the volunteers offered the same average amount at first, those who sat on the softer seats offered far more on their second go than on their first. That’s consistent with the idea that hardness has connotations of rigidity and stability. People who feel hard sensations are less likely to shift in their decisions. Harder chairs made for harder hearts.

In all six experiments, the effects were very specific. People deemed conversations to be stricter after touching a hard object, but not more positive. Heavy boards make interview candidates seem more serious but not more sociable. As Ackerman says, “These findings emphasize the power of that unique adaptation, the hand, to manipulate the mind as well as the environment.” And the last study with the chair suggests that even our buttocks have some sway over our minds.

According to Ackerman, these effects happen because our understanding of abstract concepts is deeply rooted in physical experiences. Touch is the first of our senses to develop. In the earliest days of our lives, our ability to feel things like texture and temperature provides a tangible framework that we can use to understand more nebulous notions like importance or personal warmth. Eventually, the two become tied together, so that touching objects can activate the concepts that they are associated with.

This idea is known as “embodied cognition” and the metaphors and idioms in our languages provide hints about such associations. The link between weight and importance comes through in phrases such as “heavy matters” and the “gravity of the situation”. We show the link between texture and harshness when we describe a “rough day” or “coarse language”. And the link between hardness and stability or rigidity becomes clear when we describe someone as “hard-hearted” or “being a rock”.

Al l of the effects that Ackerman demonstrated were small but statistically significant. They’re sizeable enough to have serious implications for our day-to-day lives. The way we interact with our peers, our chances of getting a job, and maybe even our voting choices could all be influenced, quite literally, by whatever’s at hand. As Ackerman writes, “Perhaps the use of such “tactile tactics” will represent the next advance in social influence and communication.”

Reference: Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1189993

Image by Chonophotos

More on embodied cognition:

• Social exclusion literally feels cold
• Warm hands, warm heart – how physical and emotional warmth are linked
• The Lady Macbeth effect – how physical cleanliness affects moral cleanliness
• Clean thoughts can soften moral judgments
• Holding heavy objects makes us see things as more important
• Clean smells promote generosity and fair play; dark rooms and sunglasses promote deceit and selfishness

A few months ago I was thinking a fair amount about the Neandertals. One issue which became more stark to me due to that particular finding, that a few percent of the human genome seems to have derived from Neandertal populations, is the reality that genetic distinctiveness can persist long after cultural coherency is no longer a reality. That made me reconsider one of the facts of contemporary scholarship, that the Amerindian populations of the two most populous nations of the New World, the United States of America and Brazil, have disappeared or been totally marginalized demographically.

I’ve observed before it looks like that about 15-20% of the ancestry of the Argentine population is Amerindian, despite the nation’s proud identity as a European settler offshoot (i.e., more like the United States or Australia, than Mexico, which has an explicit hybrid identity). But I realized that Brazil was perhaps the bigger catch.

Only 0.4% of Brazilians identity as Amerindian. That’s about 700,000 people. But we know that a substantial number of white, brown and black Brazilians have Amerindian ancestry. Assuming for argument’s sake that the 700,000 Amerindians have undiluted indigenous ancestry, how much of the distinctive Amerindian genome in modern Brazil is to be found in this segment of the population?

There was a paper which came out in an obscure Brazilian journal which can help answer this question, DNA tests probe the genomic ancestry of Brazilians. For the purposes of the paper they needed to find a small number of ancestrally informative markers which would allow them to partition the ancestries of the individuals in their data set into European, African, and Amerindian, segments. Luckily these are three very distinctive populations. They cross-checked the utility of their markers against the HGDP data set. In other words the precision and accurate of the 40 markers they ended up selected should be assessed by how well they can distinguish these three “pure” populations. Their Brazilian subjects consisted of self-identified whites from various regions, as well as a black men from Sao Paulo. Brazil’s racial taxonomy has a brown (pardo) category which is large, but judging from the very high proportion of African ancestry among the blacks in their sample I don’t think they included self-identified mixed-race people in that group (some scholars lump mixed and black Brazilians together into the black category).

First, let’s see how well the markers allow for us to distinguish populations’ whose ancestry we’re pretty sure about.

No that bad. Observe the trailing off of Europeans and Amerindians along their axis of variation. It seems that the HGDP Amerindian sample has non-trivial European ancestry. This shouldn’t be that surprising in light of the history of Latin America, and the centuries of racial fluidity which occurred. Additionally, I assume that it would be more difficult to find markers which vary between Europeans and Amerindians than between these two groups and Africans (remember that Africans have more genetic diversity, and non-African populations can be thought of as simply one branch out of Africa).

The following chart shows the outcome from the markers across various regions of Brazil. I assume that the core American readership will be pretty ignorant of the regions, so this map will help. Southern Brazil is white. The rest of the country far less so. All of the panels are for whites (through self-identification) except for the last.

Despite the limitations of 40 markers I think the results here are probably pretty good. The South region has the whitest whites. This was an area with massive immigration, and fewer non-whites to start with. It is in the northeastern region that you see more Amerindian than black ancestry among the whites. From what I have seen in other papers the brown category in Brazil is more skewed toward European ancestry than panel F, so that’s why I assume that these are men who self-identify as black.

But for the purposes of my original question we need to assess ancestral contributions within these groups from Amerindians. The following table does just that.

The authors note a curious fact: there’s no statistically significant difference between the regions in terms of Amerindian ancestry for self-identified white Brazilians. This resembles the pattern we saw with Neandertal admixture, and I assume the explanation is the same: the integration of Amerindian ancestry occurred early in the history of the white Brazilian population and has now distributed throughout it via generations of intermarriage. The figure for blacks from Sao Paulo is about the same as whites as well.

Let’s assume 10% Amerindian ancestry and 200 million Brazilians to make the math easier. Since it is about 10% in whites and blacks, I suspect it will be 10% in those who identify as mixed race as well. Where does that leave us? That would mean 20 million Brazilians of Amerindian ancestry! As you can see around 95% of the Amerindian genome in Brazil is found among those who do not self-identify as Amerindian.

Of Americans (Americans who live in the USA) it is then interesting to wonder how of the Native genome is found in whites, particularly old stock colonial descended whites, and how much in self-identified Native Americans. Looking at the genetic studies I believe that the Amerindian proportion is much lower among white Americans than 10%. Additionally, while 700,000 Brazilians identify as Amerindian, 2.4 million Americans do (though I believe that a much larger proportion of American Native Americans are of mixed ancestry than Brazilian Aboriginals). I think that the odds are that the majority of the ancestry which is pre-Columbian in the USA does reside within the white population, but it may be a close thing. And of course there are Latino populations which need to be added into the equation.

But doing those sums is for another post.

Image credit: UnaFraseCelebre.com

I highly recommend this discussion between Paul Bloom & Robert Wright. The topic under consideration is the psychology of pleasure, as reviewed in Bloom’s new book How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like. You can also find out about Bloom’s ideas in this exchange in Slate. The essentialism examined in Descarte’s Baby is being taken for another spin, though with a more precise focus. The bottom line is that pleasure is often contingent on more than proximate empirical sensory input; it depends on what you perceive to be the essence of the object of pleasure, even its history (or more crassly, its price). This truth may make the calculation project of the utilitarian heirs of Gottfried Leibniz pragmatically impossible.

Those of you who follow me on Twitter may remember that on Father’s Day, my wife and mom-in-law made us an incredible meal of beef ribs with homemade BBQ sauce, twice baked potatoes, grilled corn, homemade sangria, and homemade apple pie.

It was awesome.

And I have proof, of a sort. This being Caturday and all, and with me expanding it on this blog to include all animals as I see fit, here is a picture of our two dogs, affectionately and pseudonymously known as Canis Major and Minor, giving their opinion on the ribs:

Oh right, they can’t give their opinion because they’re too busy licking every last beef molecule off the pan. That’s all they got though. Leftover ribs are the domain of humans. Specifically, this human.

Picture credit: my brother-in-law Chris, who has lots more great pictures on his Flickr page.

Two images of the Phoenix Mars lander taken from Martian orbit in 2008 and 2010. The 2008 lander image (left) shows two relatively blue spots on either side corresponding to the spacecraft's clean circular solar panels. In the 2010 (right) image scientists see a dark shadow that could be the lander body and eastern solar panel, but no shadow from the western solar panel. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

The caption on the image is right from the Phoenix site.  Here’s my question:  Could the super cold combined with the weight of the frozen out carbon dioxide really cause it to break? The article suggest hundreds of pounds of ice could have accumulated on the lander during the winter.  Seems like a lot of build up, they’re the experts.

Oh well, fun to think about if nothing else.  The outcome is the same and we all sort of knew it would end this way.  After all the little lander wasn’t designed to last a Martian winter.

The Phoenix lander is now pretty much a monument to the exploration efforts from another planet. Click the image for a larger version.

Here’s the press release at the Phoenix site.

According to a statement just released by the California Department of Public Health, pertussis — whooping cough — is now officially an epidemic in California.

That’s right: an almost completely preventable disease is coming back with a roar in California. There have been well over 900 cases of pertussis in that state this year, over four times as many as this time last year (and 600 more suspected cases are being investigated). If this keeps up, California may see more cases in 2010 than it has in 50 years.

If that doesn’t anger and sicken you enough, then this most assuredly will: there have been five deaths this year from pertussis as well, all babies under three months of age.

Infants aren’t fully protected against pertussis until they have completed the first schedule of vaccinations, when they reach 6 months. Before then, they are vulnerable to the disease. The most likely reservoir for the bacterium? Unvaccinated people, including other children. If too many people go unvaccinated, the disease can find a host and survive long enough to infect others. If enough people are vaccinated, that chance drops. This effect is called herd immunity, and it’s the only thing that can keep this highly contagious and potentially fatal disease away from infants.

As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle:

There is no shortage of vaccines, which are provided for free to hospitals and participating counties by the state health department.

Emphasis mine. So why aren’t people getting vaccinated?

Of course, some people cannot be vaccinated due to allergies or other medical reasons. And it’s too early to say for sure if the antivax movement is behind this… but their shoulders have plenty of room for blame. [Note: some comments below are indicating that this outbreak is actually tied to the immigrant population in California. I want to be clear that I am not blaming the antivax movement for this particular epidemic, but that in many cases they can be directly or indirectly tied to lower vaccine rates. However, pending any evidence for this, which may yet be forthcoming, it is also premature to blame immigrants for this as well.] We know for a fact that in Sydney Australia, where the antivax movement was quite strong in recent years, pertussis gained strength, and several babies died, including Dana McCaffery. She was four weeks old when pertussis took her.

Four weeks.

Meryl Dorey, the head of the now-happily-defunct Australian Vaccination Network — a fringe but vocal vaccine denialist group — said all sorts of horrid things about vaccinations, all of which were incorrect. She distorted the truth, ignored evidence, and used every means at her disposal to terrify parents into not vaccinating.

Jenny McCarthy and the recently-disgraced Andrew Wakefield are also vocally spreading false information about vaccines. The result is that they are aggressively giving diseases like pertussis, measles, rubella, and even polio a chance to come back.

Vaccines work. They are one of the greatest medical inventions of all time. They have saved hundreds of millions of lives. They are inexpensive, easy to get, and may save not just your life and the lives of your children, but also those of children you’ve never even met.

This is America, this is the 21st century, and people are still dying of pertussis. It’s shameful, it’s unnecessary, and it’s completely preventable.

Syringe picture from ZaldyImg’s Flickr stream.

Jacopo Annese, Director of the Brain Observatory at the University of California at San Diego and his team are creating open-access, high-resolution, three-dimensional atlases of the human brain. This is done through a painstaking and exacting process of slicing brain specimens tissue thin, drying, staining, storing them, scanning each slice in stunningly high resolution and finally serving it all up digitally as a virtual model.

While shooting at the Brain Observatory at the University of California at San Diego, Spencer Lowell photographed floor-to-ceiling freezers loaded with brains in giant plastic buckets, high-tech slicers being used to dice frozen human brains, and laboratory assistants meticulously unfolding gauzy brain slices with paintbrushes onto glass slides. Lowell noted that the Brain Observatory Director Jacopo Annese came across as a humanitarian as well as a neurological anatomist. Lowell: “Jacopo Annese’s job may be to orchestrate the dissecting, preserving, categorizing, and digitally archiving the brains of his donors, but he seemed to genuinely care as much about what the donors were like while they were alive. Since he’s recording what a person’s brain looks like after having lived a life full of experiences, he stressed the importance of learning about those experiences and how they could have imprinted the brain.”

Indeed, much of the emphasis at the Brain Observatory and its related brain library project will be on finding donors who are able to participate in a monitoring, data-gathering program while they are still alive and healthy. The intended purpose would be to link this more personal information–an anonymous narrative biography, for example, to the scientific brain data to create a more complete picture.

Photograph by Spencer Lowell

Brain specimen at UCSD’s Brain Obervatory, Nov 18th, 2009

Chronoastrobiology: proposal, nine conferences, heliogeomagnetics, transyears, near-weeks, near-decades, phylogenetic and ontogenetic memories.

“Chronoastrobiology: are we at the threshold of a new science? Is there a critical mass for scientific research?” A simple photograph of the planet earth from outer space was one of the greatest contributions of space exploration. It drove home in a glance that human survival depends upon the wobbly dynamics in a thin and fragile skin of water and gas that covers a small globe in a mostly cold and vast universe. This image raised the stakes in understanding our place in that universe, in finding out where we came from and in choosing a path for survival. Since that landmark photograph was taken, new astronomical and biomedical information and growing computer power have been revealing that organic life, including human life, is and has been connected to invisible (non-photic) forces, in that vast universe in some surprising ways. Every cell in our body is bathed in an external and internal environment of fluctuating magnetism. It is becoming clear that the fluctuations are primarily caused by an intimate and systematic interplay between forces within the bowels of the earth–which the great physician and father of magnetism William Gilbert called a ’small magnet’–and the thermonuclear turbulence within the sun, an enormously larger magnet than the earth, acting upon organisms, which are minuscule magnets. It follows and is also increasingly apparent that these external fluctuations in magnetic fields can affect virtually every circuit in the biological machinery to a lesser or greater degree, depending both on the particular biological system and on the particular properties of the magnetic fluctuations. The development of high technology instruments and computer power, already used to visualize the human heart and brain, is furthermore making it obvious that there is a statistically predictable time structure to the fluctuations in the sun’s thermonuclear turbulence and thus to its magnetic interactions with the earth’s own magnetic field and hence a time structure to the magnetic fields in organisms. Likewise in humans, and in at least those other species that have been studied, computer power has enabled us to discover statistically defined endogenous physiological rhythms and further direct effects that are associated with these invisible geo- and heliomagnetic cycles. Thus, what once might have been dismissed as noise in both magnetic and physiological data does in fact have structure. And we may be at the threshold of understanding the biological and medical meaning and consequences of these patterns and biological-astronomical linkages as well. Structures in time are called chronomes; their mapping in us and around us is called chronomics. The scientific study of chronomes is chronobiology. And the scientific study of all aspects of biology related to the cosmos has been called astrobiology. Hence we may dub the new study of time structures in biology with regard to influences from cosmo- helio- and geomagnetic rhythms chronoastrobiology. It has, of course, been understood for centuries that the movements of the earth in relation to the sun produce seasonal and daily cycles in light energy and that these have had profound effects on the evolution of life. It is now emerging that rhythmic events generated from within the sun itself, as a large turbulent magnet in its own right, can have direct effects upon life on earth. Moreover, comparative studies of diverse species indicate that there have also been ancient evolutionary effects shaping the endogenous chronomic physiological characteristics of life. Thus the rhythms of the sun can affect us not only directly, but also indirectly through the chronomic patterns that solar magnetic rhythms have created within our physiology in the remote past. For example, we can document the direct exogenous effects of given specific solar wind events upon human blood pressure and heart rate. We also have evidence of endogenous internal rhythms in blood pressure and heart rate that are close to but not identical to the period length of rhythms in the solar wind. These were installed genetically by natural selection at some time in the distant geological past. This interpretive model of the data makes the prediction that the internal and external influences on heart rate and blood pressure can reinforce or cancel each other out at different times. A study of extensive clinical and physiological data shows that the interpretive model is robust and that internal and external effects are indeed augmentative at a statistically significant level. Chronoastrobiological studies are contributing to basic science–that is, our understanding is being expanded as we recognize heretofore unelaborated linkages of life to the complex dynamics of the sun, and even to heretofore unelaborated evolutionary phenomena. Once, one might have thought of solar storms as mere transient ‘perturbations’ to biology, with no lasting importance. Now we are on the brink of understanding that solar turbulences have played a role in shaping endogenous physiological chronomes. There is even documentation for correlations between solar magnetic cycles and psychological swings, eras of belligerence and of certain expressions of sacred or religious feelings. Chronoastrobiology can surely contribute to practical applications as well as to basic science. It can help develop refinements in our ability to live safely in outer space, where for example at the distance of the moon the magnetic influences of the sun will have an effect upon humans unshielded by the earth’s native magnetic field. We should be better able to understand these influences as physiological and mechanical challenges, and to improve our estimations of the effects of exposure. Chronoastrobiology moreover holds great promise in broadening our perspectives and powers in medicine and public health right here upon the surface of the earth. Even the potential relevance of chronoastrobiology for practical environmental and agricultural challenges cannot be ruled out at this early stage in our understanding of the apparently ubiquitous effects of magnetism and hence perhaps of solar magnetism on life. The evidence already mentioned that fluctuations in solar magnetism can influence gross clinical phenomena such as rates of strokes and heart attacks, and related cardiovascular variables such as blood pressure and heart rate, should illustrate the point that the door is open to broad studies of clinical implications. The medical value of better understanding magnetic fluctuations as sources of variability in human physiology falls into several categories: 1) The design of improved analytical and experimental controls in medical research. Epidemiological analyses require that the multiple sources causing variability in physiological functions and clinical phenomena be identified and understood as thoroughly as possible, in order to estimate systematic alterations of any one variable. 2) Preventive medicine and the individual patients’care. There are no flat ‘baselines’, only reference chronomes. Magnetic fluctuations can be shown statistically to exacerbate health problems in some cases. The next step should be to determine whether vulnerable individuals can be identified by individual monitoring. Such vulnerable patients may then discover that they have the option to avoid circumstances associated with anxiety during solar storms, and/or pay special attention to their medication or other treatments. Prehabilitation by self-help can hopefully complement and eventually replace much costly rehabilitation. 3) Basic understanding of human physiological mechanisms. The chronomic organization of physiology implies a much more subtle dynamic integration of functions than is generally appreciated. All three categories of medical value in turn pertain to the challenges for space science of exploring and colonizing the solar system. The earth’s native magnetic field acts like an enormous umbrella that offers considerable protection on the surface from harsh solar winds of charged particles and magnetic fluxes. The umbrella becomes weaker with distance from the earth and will offer little protection for humans, other animals, and plants in colonies on the surface of the moon or beyond. Thus it is important before more distant colonization is planned or implemented to better understand those magnetism-related biological- solar interactions that now can be studied conveniently on earth. Thorough lifelong maps of chronomes should be generated and made available to the scientific world. Individual workers should not have to rediscover cycles and rhythms, which can be a confusing source of variation when ignored. By contrast, once mapped, the endpoints of a spectral element in chronomes can serve everybody, for instance for the detection of an elevation of vascular disease risk. Chronomic cartography from birth to death is a task for governments to implement, thereby serving the interests of transdisciplinary science and the general public alike. Governments have supported the systematic gathering of physical data for nearly two centuries on earth in order to serve exploration, trade, and battle on land and on the seas, and indeed agriculture. These government functions have been augmented enormously with satellite technology in more recent decades. The biological comparison with regard to government support and chronomic needs would be the mapping of the human genome. The complete sequences of DNA might have eventually become available due simply to countless individual laboratories publishing piecemeal results in scattered journals. But there would have been enormous redundancy and confusion in assembling and piecing the information together. The waste of time and money involved in the redundancy and confusion would have been considerable. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED)

Related content:
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WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

GDP PPP inhabitant by European region. Combining Italy or the UK into one GDP number is deceptive. Lombardy has twice the GDP PPP of much of southern Italy. The regional differences are not nearly as stark in Spain, where poor regions like Andalusia and Galicia exhibit less of a gap from prosperous regions. By the way, does anyone know if there’s the ability in R to map these differences easily? I’ve only done USA mapping.

Separation Between Neanderthal and Homo Sapiens Might Have Occurred 500,000 Years Earlier, DNA from Teeth Suggests. Not sure if this makes any difference evolutionary genetic wise, though these sorts of issues are relevant for paleoanthropologists trying to reconstruct paleoecologies of hominins.

Mystery of the pregnant pope: New film reopens one of the Vatican’s most enduring wounds. I saw this film on a Lufthansa flight a few months back. I liked it. Though the article doesn’t make it clear enough that it’s 99.9% likely to be based on a legend concocted for purposes of propaganda.

New Nicaraguan sign language shows how language affects thought. As Joe Biden would say, this is a big f**king deal.

Anthrogenetics. A reader pointed me to this interesting weblog/review page. Feel free to point to other interesting science weblogs in the comments.

After yesterday’s depressing picture, how about one that will make you smile?

The ever-amazing Cassini spacecraft sent back this pretty nifty shot of Saturn’s icy moon Rhea playing peekaboo in the rings:

Beautiful, isn’t it? You can see that Rhea was on the other side of the rings from Cassini when this image was taken, and that the spacecraft was almost, but not quite, in the plane of the rings, too.

But there’s more to this shot… Take a closer look. What’s that, hiding in a gap in the rings, apparently hovering over Rhea’s terminator (the line dividing day and night)?

Surprise! It’s Prometheus, a tiny potato orbiting the planet much closer in. It’s far smaller than Rhea, only about 120 km (75 miles) long versus Rhea’s 1530 km (950 miles) diameter. Rhea is Saturn’s second largest moon — only Titan is bigger — and one of the ten biggest moons in the entire solar system. Prometheus, on the other hand, is so small it wasn’t even discovered until the Voyager 1 probe spotted it in 1980.

Nice. And I’m sure there’s science galore to be extracted from this image, but sometimes I think pictures like this will have a more lasting impact because they are simply so amazingly cool.

Tip o’ the F Ring to CICLOPS imaging team leader Carolyn Porco. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.

Think picking a date on looks alone is a little shallow? How about picking your kids? The owners of the dating site BeautifulPeople.com have no qualms on the subject–they’ve launched a “virtual sperm and egg bank” where users can select beautiful people’s beautiful genetics by signing up for their beautiful gametes.

Though the company won’t perform egg extractions or accept sperm donations, they will serve as matchmakers and then forward the interested parties to the proper clinics. The company says its exclusive dating site–you can only join if other members judge you attractive enough–is a magnificent resource for those looking to breed up.

As reported by ABC News, the site has decided to generously offer its services even to the beauty-challenged.

“Initially, we hesitated to widen the offering to non-beautiful people. But everyone–including ugly people–would like to bring good looking children in to the world, and we can’t be selfish with our attractive gene pool,” company founder Robert Hintze said in a statement.

Everyone from bioethicists to the professionals who run clinics are concerned about site visitors skipping over the proper medical and psychological screenings. There is also concern about the participants’ expectations–and perhaps basic understanding of genetics. Just because biological mummy and daddy have good looks, it doesn’t necessarily mean their offspring will. If BeautifulPeople.com doesn’t make that clear, things could get very ugly.

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80beats: No Gattaca Here: Genetic Anti-Discrimination Law Goes Into Effect

Image: flickr / alainelorza

The most violent winds in our own solar system whip around the Great Dark Spot of Neptune at 1,200 miles per hour, making the worst storms here on Earth look like kid stuff. But when astronomers trained their telescopes on one of the longest-studied planets around another star, suddenly even Neptune didn’t look so impressive. This week in Nature, astronomers say that the exoplanet HD 209458 b has a super-storm whose winds rage at 3,000 to 6,000 mph.

The exoplanet (which we’ll call by its friendlier nickname, Osiris) sits 150 light years from here, in the neighborhood of the constellation Pegasus. It’s an old friend, too. Osiris was the first exoplanet seen transiting in front of its star back in 1999. A decade later, though, with technology a decade more advanced, the team could spy on Osiris with the a spectrometer at the Very Large Telescope in Chile and track its carbon monoxide signature.

In fact, the VLT’s data is so good that the astronomers could see not only the planet’s orbital speed, but also the relative speed of the gas on its surface, according to study author Ignas Snellen.

“We see this clear change in velocity” of HD 209458 b, Snellen says. “There’s also an offset—the gas during the transit seems to be moving toward us.” The carbon monoxide appears to be flowing at two kilometers per second, or roughly 7,000 kilometers [~4,350 miles] per hour [Scientific American].

Why so stormy? Osiris is dangerously close to its star, creating a huge temperature imbalance.

Because the planet circles its star at a distance only one-twentieth of the distance between Earth and the sun, the temperature of the upper atmosphere on HD 209458b’s sun-facing side is thought to be as high as 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit (10,000 degrees Celsius) while the dark side is much cooler. The upper layers of the atmosphere were observed rushing from the hot side to the cold side [MSNBC].

The team’s data produced a second effect that, while drier than a splendorous super-storm, is perhaps more important to science. Up to now, astronomers have guessed exoplanet mass indirectly—seeing a star move oh-so-slightly and computing the mass the orbiting planet would need to produce that effect. But these scientists managed to figure Osiris’ size directly once they determined its orbital velocity.

With relative ease, Snellen’s team was then able to calculate the masses of both star and planet using Newton’s law of gravitation, knowing also the velocity of the host star due to its orbit round the centre of mass of the system. “This is exactly the same method used to calculate the mass of binary star systems, except one of the bodies here is an exoplanet,” says Snellen [Physics World].

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Image: European Southern Observatory

It makes for a good movie: 12,900 years ago, a comet slams into Earth, igniting forest fires across North America and sending the planet into a thousand cold years, killing off mammoths, giant sloths, and a bunch of other big mammals. But scientists have fiercely debated whether such a movie, about the cause of the planet-wide cooling period called the Younger Dryas, should be documentary or science fiction. According to a paper recently published in the Geophysical Research Letters, new evidence–or refuted, old evidence–points to science fiction.

Those that think a comet hit the planet cite “carbonaceous spherules” and nanodiamonds found in sediment from the period of the suspected impact. They argue that these particles formed from the intense heat of the collision.

Lead author of this new study, Andrew Scott of the University of London in Egham suspects those spherules are not from a comet collision, but are bug poop, fungal spores, or charcoal pellets.

From a test that measures how much light the spherules reflect, Scott’s team has determined that the spherules were slow-roasted in a low-intensity heat (perhaps from natural wildfires) instead of in intense, comet impact heat. As shown in the figure, the researchers compare the charred spherules to fungal sclerotia, emergency cell balls created by stressed fungi that can germinate after a bad growing period is over, and saw a striking similarity.

Some of the more elongate particles are “certainly fecal pellets, probably from termites,” says Scott…. “There’s certainly no evidence [that any of these particles are] related to intense fire from a comet impact,” says Scott. Part of the problem, he says, is that “there was nobody [among impact proponents] who ever worked on charcoal deposits, modern or ancient. If you’re not familiar with the material, you can make mistakes.” [Science Now]

Scott’s team also radiocarbon dated the particles, and says those spherules aren’t unique to the collision time.

“There is a long history of fire in the fossil record, and these fungal samples are common everywhere, from ancient times to the present,” Scott says. “These data support our conclusion that there wasn’t one single intense fire that triggered the onset of the cold period.” [American Geophysical Union]

Other researchers aren’t buying it–like James Kennett, a proponent of the impact theory from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

“We disagree that charred fungal sclerotia … have the same morphology” as certain carbonaceous spherules, paleoceanographer James Kennett writes in an e-mail. “Their alternate hypothesis that the carbon spherules are simply charred fungal spores is incorrect.”[ScienceNOW]

Kennett also clings to the nanodiamonds that impact-believers say formed under the extreme conditions of the collision. The new study doesn’t address these nanodiamonds, but Scott says there is more to come.

His team has studied the nanodiamond issue, but he’s not yet able to discuss the results. He did, however, hint that the particles might not be nanodiamonds at all: Fungal spores the team examined have similar microscopic features. And, Scott said, “obviously [spores] are not nanodiamonds.” [National Geographic]

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Image: American Geophysical Union

As the 2006 Sea Grant Fellow for Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL), I spent much of the year working hard to keep oil drilling away from the state's coast. I am completely devastated to see photos of the Panhandle taken this morning by The Ocean Conservany. The full set is here, but be warned, these images are hard to see...

Via SciFiWire comes this amazing series pictures from the SciFi Airshow. This is seriously cool geeky stuff.

Sigh. Beautiful. The gifted artist Bill George has created a huge series of pictures depicting real-life scenes with some of the best science fiction spaceships of all time. I suspect most of you out there haven’t even heard of the old scifi series "Space:1999" — it had a profound impact on my young self, and it spawned one of the most beautiful ships of all time: the Eagle. George has created a whole passel of Eagle images, and they’re spectacular! He even has several hi-res versions you can download.

He has shots of ships from "Battlestar Galactica", "2001", "Land of the Giants" (who remembers that show?), and "Star Trek". These are truly amazing photos he’s put together, and if you’re of a certain age I expect your heart will pang with what could’ve been.

I hope he puts out a lot more of these. My heart races when I watch rocket launches and space activity IRL, but it was these shows that excited and inspired me as a kid… and still do as a grownup. We need to dream, and seeing these dreams made real — even if only in Photoshop — is still compelling.

This week’s crucial whaling meeting continues until Friday has come and gone, but the result is… nothing.

As we reported last week, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) was ready to consider a proposal to lift a quarter-century-old moratorium on whaling, in exchange for agreements from whaling nations like Japan, Norway, and Iceland to reduce their catches over the coming decade.

Whaling in Antarctic waters, where Japan hunts hundreds of whales each year, would have been sharply curtailed. But that became the major sticking point in the talks. Delegates said that Japan and antiwhaling nations could not reach agreement on the size of the catch and that Tokyo had balked at agreeing to eventually phase out the hunt altogether [The New York Times].

The talks will continue into next year while some whaling continues under loopholes in the old rules. But given the present impasse it seems like the IWC nations are a long way from agreeing on anything.

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Image: Flickr/ Rene Ehrhardt

The latest entry into the cellphones-radiation-health debate is a British study of thousands of children, which investigated whether the proximity of pregnant women to cellphone towers had any effect on whether their kids developed tumors or leukemia. The result: a big no.

Researchers from Imperial College London identified 1,397 children under five who were diagnosed with leukaemia or a tumour of the brain or central nervous system between 1999 and 2001. They compared each child with four children of the same gender who were born on the same day but had not developed cancer [The Guardian].

They then cross-compared all those children to how much radiation their mothers likely received during pregnancy, based on a survey of more than 80,000 cell towers and their radiation output. No matter how they ran the numbers, the team couldn’t find a significant effect.

For instance, the mothers whose children were diagnosed with cancer lived an average of 1,173 yards from a cellphone tower while they were pregnant — statistically indistinguishable from the 1,211 yards that separated the other pregnant women from their nearest cellphone towers. Tallying up the total power output of all cellphone towers within 766 yards of each pregnant woman’s home, they found that both groups had nearly the same exposure — 2.89 kilowatts for the mothers of cancer victims and 3.00 kilowatts for the other mothers [Los Angeles Times].

In a commentary that accompanied the study in the British Medical Journal, John Bithell notes its weaknesses. First, to take such a large sample requires estimating a person’s radiation exposure based on their address; measuring it more directly would be “scientifically valuable,” Bithell writes, though right now that’s impractical for such a large study. The scientists also couldn’t estimate the cellphone usage by mothers during pregnancy, or which of them may have moved.

Even so, he says, the independently funded study is strong, and reinforces the fact that people should be more worried about known dangers like driving and talking than they should be about living near cell towers, which seems to have no effect.

“It’s reassuring,” said Elliott, a professor of epidemiology and public health medicine at Imperial College in London. “On the basis of our results, people living near mobile phone stations shouldn’t consider moving based on health reasons” [AP].

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Image: flickr / Jeff Kubina

Trying to cut back on beef, but tired of fish and chicken? Try unicorn. According to a joke advertisement on the website ThinkGeek, unicorn is the “new white meat.”

But according to the National Pork Board, it had better not be. The Board’s lawyers sent the nerdy site–also sellers of Tauntaun sleeping bags (real) and Tribbles ‘n’ Bits cereal (fake)–a 12-page-long, cease-and-desist letter last month telling the site to lay off “the other white meat,” which is trademarked in the United States, Europe, and Canada.

ThinkGeek thinks the two meats can’t compare. Unlike pork, unicorn is an excellent source of sparkles. Also unlike pigs, unicorns aren’t real–so ThinkGeek believes the slogan “Pate is passe. Unicorn — the new white meat” constitutes fair use as a parody.

As reported in The Washington Post, Board spokeswoman Ceci Snyder says their lawyers must protect any use of the phrase:

“Clearly there’s some fun being had, and we can laugh, too,” Snyder said. “But in the end [the lawyers are] just following the law.”

From their site, it doesn’t look like ThinkGeek is budging. If the Pork Board is successful, maybe the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association might have a better sense of humor. “Unicorn: It’s What’s For Dinner” has a nice ring to it.

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Image: flickr / Scorpiorules58 / Tanakawho

As we continue to talk about energy, we'll be exploring its relationship with the food we eat. Food and energy are inextricably linked, but all too often, their connections are overlooked. But before we begin considering average daily per capita intake for humans and how that relates to production and availability, it's necessary to consider that an adequate amount of food is a vastly different topic from nutrition. The US National Research Council has set Recommended Daily Allowances for what we consume, which includes vitamins, minerals, and trace elements. In affluent countries like ours, it's relatively easy to obtain what we need, but micronutrient deficiencies occur at very high numbers globally. Micronutrients are necessary to make hormones, enzymes, and ensure proper growth and development. So deficiencies can lead to mental impairment, blindness, compromised immunity, infant mortality, hearing loss, and more. Billions around the world are now at risk. In Feeding the World, Vaclav Smil writes "the eradication of micronutrient deficiencies could exceed the impact of the global elimination of smallpox." How to get there--or at least, move in that direction? We can either provide the necessary foods to those who do not currently have regular access to them and/or make supplements readily ...