I just got back from a European trip, and I have to say I did not miss tipping. I especially appreciated not having to do the song & dance typical of larger groups in sit-down restaurants in the USA where you figure out how much you’re going to tip on a communal basis, when everyone has different tipping set points and perceptions of service and such. The money is less of an issue than the extra wasted time at the end of a meal & drinks which are spent on the terms of calculation rather than more conventional conviviality. In fact now that I think about it way too much time in my life has been spent discussing the etiquette of tipping, often outside of a situation where people are going to have to tip imminently. I thought about this after seeing this post in The Atlantic on tipping. One correspondent observes:

I lived in Japan for a while. There is no tipping there, and it works great. If we could be like Japan, I’d be all for it. However, I don’t think we’d be like Japan. Anytime I have ever eaten somewhere that does not practice tipping, service has been abysmal. Customers herded through like cattle, dishes brought out late, then diners rushed through them, eyes rolled, etc. We just do not have the service culture that would allow us to disconnect pay from performance and continue to expect the same kind of service.

The point about national culture is well taken. I experienced some bad service in Italy and Finland, but the quality of badness was very different, in keeping what with you’d expect from the respective national cultures (though in general I experienced service as good as in the states in both places).* But the empirical observation about American restaurants without tipping having lesser service suffers from sampling bias. Establishments which don’t have tipping are generally lower-end, verging on cafeterias. So it’s not an apples to apples comparison. A better one would be looking at higher end restaurants which have mandatory gratuities for large groups vs. those which do not. Even here you have the peculiar distortion of the larger group, which can often be more difficult for a server to manage.

Of course one’s perspective on this probably varies by the amount of disposable income one has. If you don’t have much disposable income the small but repeated investments of time & energy which go into tipping might be worthwhile if you can manage to pay less than you would otherwise. If you have a fair amount of disposable income the marginal potential savings introduced by greater price variation which you can control at the cost of time & energy needed may not be worth it.

* I had to bargain very hard with a Finnish server on whether I could handle Indian levels of spiciness. This was obviously a well rehearsed conversation on her part, but I thought she should have updated her priors in my case. The lighting was dim, but not that dim. Usually American servers at Indian restaurants aren’t too resistant when I assert I can handle high levels of spice.

It’s Optenet’s business to find porn and, apparently, they’re pretty good at it. In a recent press release, the company that offers family-friendly filters for your computer claims that one-third of internet is porn.

Ana Luisa Rotta, director of child protection projects at Optenet, says in the release:

“When you consider that more than one third of the Internet’s content is pornographic, combined with the overwhelming increase in young people now curiously visiting Websites with such ease of access, it is becoming increasingly imperative that adults take responsibility for the management of home PC security.”

“Home PC security”? Was that a subtle reference to Homeland Security? We don’t know, but according to Optenet we’re all in danger. Their study, which looked at “a database of hundreds of millions of URLs,” churned out these stats:

-Pornography makes up 37% of the total content on the Internet
-Websites related to online role-playing games (RPGs) have grown by 212%
-Websites that contain violence have increased by 10.8%
-Websites that contain terrorism content have increased by 8.5%
-Websites that contain illegal drugs purchase have increased by 6.8%

An excellent point made on the blog Geeks Are Sexy, which broke the story: if these numbers only reflect the total number of sites in each category, then an increase doesn’t really mean much of anything. If the whole internet is getting bigger, then of course the number of each type of page on the internet is also increasing.

One wonders if that huge database also showed an increase in more wholesome websites–for example, corporate pages for porn filtering businesses.

Related content:
Discoblog: To China’s Internet Filter, Garfield is Pornography, Porn is Not
Discoblog: Got Child Porn Stored in Your Xbox? New Forensic Tool Will Find It
Discoblog: Bad News for Cyberporn: Internet Sex Linked to Depression, Anxiety

Image: flickr / gcfairch

On November 26-28, 2010, the very first official TAM Australia will be held in Sydney! The Aussie skeptics have put together that website to give you all the info you need on the meeting, including the current guest list and all that.

Registration starts on June 20 for members of the JREF and the Australian Skeptics, and then open to the public two weeks later.

I was in Australia for the national skeptics conference in 2004, and had just about the best time of my life. If you’ve never been, now’s your chance to kill two birds with one stone. And you can bring me back Minties.

When it comes to research on HIV and AIDS treatments, it can be hard to know when to celebrate a small advance–everyone wants to see progress, but so many experimental avenues that seemed promising have turned out to be dead ends. Still, a new study that tried a sophisticated form of gene therapy as an HIV treatment seems cause for cautious optimism. If it bears out under further testing, the technique could lead to a one-shot, long-lasting treatment that could replace the punishing regimen of daily medications.

Treating HIV currently comes down to controlling the viral load with a mixture antiretroviral drugs, but over time, this drug cocktail becomes less effective. Researcher John Rossi and his colleagues tried to craft a more permanent treatment by genetically modifying the HIV-infected patients’ own blood stem cells and increasing the cells’ ability to fight off the virus. The researchers weren’t able to truly combat the virus in this experiment–the patients’ viral loads remained the same–but their work moved beyond previous attempts in two ways: They successfully modified blood stem cells by giving them anti-HIV genes, and those cells survived for two years in patients.

Earlier clinical studies the group conducted with the same strategy made little headway, but now the researchers have overcome two key obstacles, says Rossi, a molecular geneticist. One is that they managed to stitch the anti-HIV genes into a high percentage of the appropriate stem cells. The other is that the cells lived for a long time. “If we could increase the number of modified cells by 10- or 100-fold, we might be able to stop the virus itself,” says Rossi. [ScienceNow]

The small study published in Science Translational Medicine tested the safety of the technique for HIV-infected patients, and served as a proof of concept. The four patients in this study were undergoing therapy for AIDS-related lymphoma at City of Hope cancer center in California. Part of the usual treatment for this condition is to remove blood stem cells (found in bone marrow) before cell-damaging chemotherapy, and to then return them after treatment. Researchers wanted to test their virus-fighting cells’ survival skills, so with each patient’s normal blood stem cells, the researchers also reintroduced a small number of modified cells.

They modified the cells in three ways: They boarded up the cells’ doors to keep the HIV virus out, and made two genetic changes to the cells’ internal defenses so that the virus would have a harder time copying itself if it made it through.

[T]he team added three genes to the immune stem cells’ DNA: one that cripples the CCR5 receptor that HIV exploits to enter the cell (this mimics a successful transplant recently done in Berlin with a much discussed patient who apparently was “cured” of his HIV infection), and two others that disable viral genes and prevent HIV from copying itself. This makes it increasingly difficult for HIV to find new targets and mops up any new virus produced [ScienceNOW].

As a safety precaution, the researchers didn’t implant enough of these novel cells to test how well they might fight the virus, but they did get a glimpse of how long the modified cells could stay in a person’s system. Up to two years after the treatment, patients still had low levels of these special cells.

“That’s a major finding,” Rossi added. While the number of cells expressing those genes was too low to provide any therapeutic benefit, it’s “proof of principle” that gene therapy may provide long-term HIV treatment, he said. [The Scientist]

As a next step, researchers hope to implant a greater number of modified cells in patients, to see how well they can fight and how long their defenses hold.

Related content:
80beats: Did the Eradication of Smallpox Accidentally Help the Spread of HIV?
80beats: Researchers Track the HIV Virus to a Hideout in the Bone Marrow
80beats: S. African HIV Plan: Universal Testing & Treatment Could End the Epidemic
80beats: If Everyone Got An Annual AIDS Test, Could We Beat Back the Epidemic?
80beats: Beware of Hype: AIDS “Cure” is Good Science, But Won’t Halt the Epidemic

Image: flickr / euthman

Reihan Salam points me to a presentation by a Facebook executive who claims that “E-mail…is probably going away….” Well, remember Google Wave? I assume that email-as-we-know-it will evolve. But one thing I pointed out to a friend the other day: remember when you were excited to get “new mail?” (perhaps the reference will be lost on younger readers, but there was a time when it was cool and special to have an email account, and be able to receive messages from people who lived in Ecuador at digital speed) Now it’s more like, “now what!?!?!” Email is a utility through which your boss may contact you. The excitement factor has now shifted to Facebook, where old friends you’ve lost touch with may request to be your friend. But if Facebook becomes as ubiquitous as email, as taken-for-granted, you might start getting wall messages from your boss. And at that point Facebook will become a utility you’ll want to not log into, not because you want to avoid wasting time procrastinating, but because the “real world” has infected it.

Technology has been one reason we humans have by and large broken out of the Malthusian trap. But a key difference between innovation on the physical dimension (e.g., the combustion engine) and technologies which have social utility is that human psychological faculties can shift only on the margins by much smaller degrees. In theory you can have as many Facebook friends as Facebook will allow you to have; it’s a scalable phenomenon. But in reality a small circle of friends become Facebook “friends” who you barely know, because your mind isn’t geared to really keep track of so many social relations.

Of course the people who run tech companies are smart and many know this. But their jobs hinge on you becoming invested in the idea that their firm is going to Change Everything. So they’re not going to emphasize too much the fact that human utilization of technology is substrate constrained, so to speak.

There’s a war going on that you’re completely oblivious to, even though it’s happening right under your nose. Well, actually, inside your nose. Rival species of bacteria compete for precious real estate within the damp linings of your nasal passages. In some cases, this microscopic combat works in our favour, when harmless species repress the growth of deadlier ones. But not always – sometimes a species can only gain the advantage over its competitors by becoming more virulent, and we suffer collateral damage.

Elena Lysenko from the University of Pennsylvania has discovered one such rivalry, at least within the noses of mice. She studied the conflict between two species of bacteria – Haemophilus influenzae and Streptococcus pneumoniae, both of which can cause pneumonia, meningitis and other human diseases.

S.pneumoniae spends much of its time in our noses without causing any harm. Only in a minority of carriers does it gain the potential to cause diseases, such as pneumonia and sepsis. But that doesn’t make any sense, because these conditions are potentially fatal but not contagious. The bacteria risk killing their host (and by extension themselves) without gaining the opportunity to colonise a new one. Why would they go down this dead end route? Lysenko thinks she has an answer – S.pneumoniae turns nasty as a side effect of its tussle with H.influenzae.

There’s not enough space in a nose for these two bacteria. H.influenzae plays dirty – it actually summons our own immune system into battle, setting white blood cells called neutrophils against S.pneumoniae. This call-to-arms is so effective that in most cases, H.influenzae can completely oust its rival from a nose.

But S.pneumoniae has a defence. The bacterium is surrounded by a sugary capsule and there are at least 90 different types of these coats. Some of them are particularly thick and they act as suits of armour that protect the bacterium against white blood cells that try to engulf it. Encased in these shields, S.pneumoniae can evade the host’s immune system. It neutralises H.influenzae’s secret weapon but it also gains the ability to invade other tissues and cause serious diseases.

Lysenko demonstrated the effects of this battle using both mathematical models and experimental evidence. When she incubated H.influenzae with different strains of S.pneumoniae, she found that only those with armoured shells could hold their ground against their competitor. Strains without these thicks shells were soon driven out. And just to show that this competitive edge wasn’t due to the genes carried by different strains, she managed to turn a weedy strain into a tough one by transplanting an armoured shell onto it.

But why doesn’t S.pneumoniae use its armoured shells all the time? To find out, Lysenko pitted the different strains against each other in the absence of any other competing species. This duel revealed that the armoured strains are actually inferior to non-armoured ones in terms of colonising the nose. Presumably, making a heavy shell takes up a lot of energy, which means that these well-defended strains can’t grow as quickly as other more vulnerable ones.

They only gain the upper hand when H.influenzae is around. At that point, the ability to resist death by white blood cell more than makes up for their natural disadvantages. And of course, the armoured strains, by shrugging off attacks from the immune system, are better at causing invasive infections than their mild-mannered cousins.

Of course, Lysenko has only demonstrated that this happens in mice but it is likely that similar competitions operate in human noses. And that’s fascinating – it means that many human diseases really have nothing to do with us at all. They’re the result of battles waged between different species of bacteria, and we just happen to be caught in the crossfire.

Reference: Current Biology http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2010.05.051

More on bacteria:

• Fighting bacteria with bacteria – common nose germ provides new weapon against superbugs
• Bacteria on your keyboard point to your identity but forensic value is unlikely
• When enslaved bacteria go bad
• The bacterial zoo in your bowel
• Cooperating bacteria are vulnerable to slackers
• Bacteria and languages reveal how people spread through the Pacific

Behold La conversione di San Paolo (The Conversion of St. Paul), one of the masterworks of Caravaggio. The Italian artist of the Baroque era was famous for the chiaroscuro shading—dramatic contrasts of light and dark—evident in this conversion scene. But he was also renowned for living hard and dying young. Four centuries after his death, Italian researchers say they’ve found his bones, and they might know what actually killed him: the lead in his paints.

First, the researchers had to find his remains. Caravaggio died in 1610 in the Tuscan town of Porto Ercole, but his remains were whereabouts unknown until a researcher claimed to turn up a death certificate in 2001 pointing to the crypts there. The bones the scientists found there matched a man aged 38 to 40 (Caravaggio’s age range at his death) and dated to his era. And the DNA matched combinations found in people from the painter’s hometown and sharing his original surname, Merisi or Merisio.

“There can’t be the scientific certainty because when one works on ancient DNA, it is degraded,” Giorgio Gruppioni, an anthropologist on the team, told The Associated Press. “But only in one set of bones did we find all the elements necessary for it to be Caravaggio’s — age, period in which he died, gender, height.” The group says there is an 85 percent probability they are right, though team leader Silvano Vinceti says that is conservative. “We are being cautious,” he said. “As a historian I can say we have found the remains… All evidence concurs” [AP].

The bones in question carry a high concentration of lead, which convinced the researchers that Caravaggio—known to be messy with paints—unknowingly could have given himself lead poisoning.

Despite the romantic allure of “dying for one’s art,” the explanation is fairly tame compared to the more exotic ends that Caravaggio’s wild reputation suggested.

Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio after the Lombardy town where he grew up, was a young man at the height of his career in Rome when he killed a man in a brawl in 1606, fleeing to find new patrons in Naples and then Malta, only to be thrown off the island two years later for more brawling. “After a fortnight’s work he will swagger about for a month or two with a sword at his side and a servant following him, from one ballcourt to the next, ever ready to engage in a fight or an argument,” wrote one observer [The Guardian].

Rumors persisted the that painter died of malaria or syphilis, or perhaps crossed the wrong person and wound up murdered. Of course, the DNA-sampling researchers are only 85 percent sure their find in truly Caravaggio. So maybe he really did meet a more operatic end.

Related Content:
80beats: Diagnosing the Illness That Killed Mozart, 218 Years Later
80beats: Tattoo-Removing Lasers Also Remove Grime from Classic Works of Art
80beats: New Imaging Technique Shows Parthenon Was Once Brightly Painted
80beats: Beauty and the Brain: Men And Women Process Art in Different Ways
DISCOVER: The Natural History of Art explores the field of “evolutionary aesthetics”

Image: Wikimedia Commons

This is a guest post from a member of Science in the News (SITN), an organization of PhD students at Harvard University whose mission is to bring the newest and most relevant science to a general audience. For over a decade, SITN has been presenting a fall lecture series at Harvard Medical School, with talks on a diversity of current and newsworthy topics, such as stem cell biology and climate change. SITN also publishes the Flash, an online newsletter written by graduate students at Harvard, which presents current scientific discoveries and emerging fields in an accessible and entertaining manner. SITN engages in additional outreach activities such as "Science by the Pint", and hopes students at other institutions will also make the commitment to strengthen science communication. The following post is from Harvard graduate student Amanda Nottke. How Do We Identify Extinct Species? Paleontologists have always differentiated between extinct species by comparative anatomy of their fossil remains. Those scientists who study living organisms have an additional technique available – the comparison of DNA sequences between specimens. More recently, due to rapid advances in the efficiency and reduced cost of DNA sequencing, it has become possible to sequence DNA extracted from the remains ...

A ladybird larva is on the prowl on a witch hazel plant. The youngster is a voracious predator and it’s hunting for aphids. It seems to have found a bountiful feast – a swollen structure called a gall that houses an entire aphid colony. With so many meals in one place, the colony seems easy prey, but it has staunch defenders.

As the ladybird approaches, aphids pour out of the gall and grab the predator by their jaws and legs. It’s a suicide defence. The aphids secrete massive amounts of waxy liquid from their bodies, which quickly solidifies and glues the ladybird to the plant. Unable to walk or bite, the ladybird dies and the aphids go with it. In the video below, you can see what happens when one of these aphids is prodded with a needle.

There is more to these suicidal protectors that meets the eye. Keigo Uematsu and University of Tokyo found that all of them are ‘menopausal’. They are the parents of the other aphids in the gall but their reproductive days are long behind them. With no further opportunities to raise the next generation, their final role is to defend their offspring, with their lives if necessary.

Many species of aphids live in galls, stimulating the plants they suck to form large, hollow chambers. These species tend to be cooperative and social, a more basic version of the supersocieties of ants and termites. They all have special ‘soldier’ individuals, who are tasked with defending the colony, repairing the gall and keeping it clean. Some do this at the cost of their own lives. Last year, another Japanese team discovered that the gall aphid Nipponaphis monzeni employs suicide-plasterers, individuals who repair holes in the gall by fatally leaching their own bodily fluids onto the hole.

Quadrartus yoshinomiyai is another gall-forming species whose soldiers have sticky fluids and suicidal tendencies. Its galls are formed on witch hazel by a single founding female, who initially seals herself away. This matriarch produces a line of wingless clone offspring, who then mate with one another to give rise to another generation of winged adults. All this takes around two years. Come mid-spring, the aphids cut an exit hole in the gall and the winged generation fly away to another host plant – the sawtooth oak.

The wingless middle generation are the ones who conduct suicide campaigns against attacking predators. By cutting into freshly collected galls, Uematsu found that these wingless adults tend to be clustered near the exit holes. When she set ladybirds upon these defenders, she found that more than half became stuck in an aphid pile-on, their jaws and legs gummed up with wax. Only 23% managed to infiltrate the gall. If the wingless adults were removed, only 14% of ladybirds were glued down, and 64% entered the gall.

Through April, as the winged aphids leave their homes, the wingless adults stay behind to defend the remaining colony. At the point when the gall opens, the wingless aphids go through menopause. They lose the ability to reproduce but they don’t die immediately – instead, they shift from sex to defence.

Virtually all aphids carry mature embryos if they’re still capable of breeding but when Uematsu dissected the defenders, less than 5% of them contained embryos. Instead, their abdomens were almost exclusively taken up by their defensive waxy liquid. Rather than producing embryos, they had devoted their energies towards producing wax. They still get benefits though, for their suicidal actions ensure that their young, who carry their genes, are more likely to survive.

This is subtly different to the situation in many other social insects, where some individuals never reproduce for the sake of helping their relatives who do. Nonetheless, there are other examples of insect menopause. The ant Pristomyrmex punctatus permanently shifts from reproduction to foraging as it ages. And in some paper wasps, individuals fight for dominance and the losers give up the right to reproduce and act as workers instead.

Reference: Current Biology http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2010.04.057

More on aphids and menopause:

• Did conflict between old and young women drive origin of menopause?
• The heavy cost of having children
• Aphids defend themselves with chemical bombs
• The suicide plasterers – aphids that repair their homes with their own bodily fluids
• Aphids got their colours by stealing genes from fungi

Recently, I was performing the mundane task of taking out the trash.

I went from room to room, collecting the detritus of the week. I then spent a few minutes scooping out and changing the cat litter, and, sighing, finally tied up the bag and hauled it out to the bins around the side of the house.

As I lugged the hefty bin out to the curb in the darkness, I did what I do, what I always do, when I go outside: I looked up.

I was greeted instantly with an astonishing sight: the reddish, glowing dot of Mars bumped right up against Regulus, the brightest star in Leo. The two were paired less than a degree between each other, low over the western horizon.

It was beautiful. Mars was the slightly brighter of the pair, and even in the mildly light-polluted and sparsely clouded night sky of Boulder I could see the color difference between the planet, some 240 million kilometers away, and the star, 3 million times farther distant yet.

I let my gaze drift a bit over and saw Saturn looming near Leo’s other end. Venus, I knew, was already behind the mountains, but I could see the Big Dipper standing on its bowl to the northwest. Following the arc of the dipper’s handle, I was led to mighty Arcturus, an orange giant nearing the end of its life, and a harbinger of things to come for our own star. Turning, was that Vega I saw dancing in between my neighbor’s tree branches? Why yes, yes it was. Summer’s coming, Vega is telling me.

My trash-hauling chore was forgotten. I suddenly had a flashback, visceral and total, of being a teenager. Standing at the end of my family’s driveway, I watched the sky. Every clear night you’d find me out there. I spent hundreds of hours, thousands, either gazing with my eye to the telescope or simply with my chin tipped up, the Universe unfolded above me. I would always have to pause when a car drove by, and while my absorption with the task didn’t allow it to occur to me then, I now wonder how many of those people saw me and thought to themselves that I was wasting my time.

But as I stand outside my house as an adult, gaping up at the sky, I am familiar there. The stars are my friends… no, that’s hopelessly anthropomorphic and somewhat twee. But they are like slipping your feet into well-worn slippers, like the first bite of a recipe you’ve perfected by countless trial-and-error meals, like holding a book whose spine has been softened through years of reading and re-reading.

I’m comfortable with the sky. I’m at home there. When I stand in my yard and look up, my heart sings and my mind reaches out. My weekly chore was interrupted, delayed, but it didn’t matter.

I don’t know what your own passion is. But I will say this, and you hear me well: no time is wasted spent under the stars. And no time is wasted spent doing what you love.

Picture credit: Il conte di Luna’s Flickr photostream, used under the Creative Commons license.

Water, water (or ice) everywhere—that’s the refrain this year. This week we covered the study declaring that the moon was home to perhaps 100 times more water than previously thought, and it was just two months ago that sky-watchers spotted the first frosty asteroid out in the Asteroid Belt. Now, in a study in Nature, a team of astronomers says they’ve found another icy surprise in our solar system: a bright shiny object way out in the Kuiper Belt.

The Kuiper Belt is that mess of objects orbiting the sun out beyond Neptune, but not as far as the Oort Cloud (once-proud Pluto is a Kuiper Belt object). There are plenty of icy bodies out there, including Pluto. But what doesn’t make sense about this one, KBO 55636, is how it stayed so pristine after a billion years of floating alone. MIT’s James Elliot, who led the study, says the object’s albedo, or reflectivity, is striking:

“That turned out to be very high, almost 90 percent… That’s consistent with it having a very highly reflective surface like water ice.” The finding was surprising because such old, distant bodies tend to have weathered, dull surfaces. “Objects orbiting that far out in space get generally darkened by accumulating dust… We don’t have an explanation for how it could stay so pristine” [Space.com].

To study the object, Elliot’s team relied on a method called stellar occultation—when an object passes in front of a star and obscures its light. It’s something like the way exoplanet hunters find new worlds by employing the transit method: watching a star dim as its planets pass in front of it. In this case, Elliot knew about KBO 55636 already. He’d been tracking it for years, waiting for it to make this pass so his team could figure out its true size (89 miles across) and brightness.

He wasn’t expecting the tiny rock to be a shiny enigma.

Bigger objects, such as Pluto or Saturn’s moon Enceladus, are able to brighten their surfaces with a fresh supply of ice from processes such as cryovolcanism which sees ice – not lava – spew from the interior of the objects. This explanation did not really apply to the KBO due to its tiny size and the time it had spent floating in space, said the professor [BBC News].

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Beyond the Nine Planets
DISCOVER: Pluto Explored, on the New Horizons mission
80beats: Moon May Have 100 Times More Water Than We Thought. How’d We Miss It?
80beats: Frost-Covered Asteroid Suggests Extraterrestrial Origin for Earth’s Oceans

Image: NASA

Seventy-five million years ago, mammals couldn’t compare to the big boy reptiles ruling the earth. Still, that didn’t stop one spunky, prehistoric squirrel-like creature. He wasn’t hungry for meat, but he needed his minerals. He eyed a dino bone, the equivalent of modern-day vitamin shop, and wrapped his teeth around it, his very own corn-on-the-cob-osaurus.

Yesterday, researchers published a paper in Palentology on these exploits. They claim to have found the oldest known mammal bite marks.

The researchers found the bones bites in two Canadian, Late Cretaceous-period dinosaur bone collections–and also on additional bones during fieldwork in Alberta. They suspect the marks were made by multituberculates, extinct rodent-like creatures, and they first found them on the femur bone of Champsosaurus, a swamp-dweller that looked a bit like an crocodile.

The researchers say that the form of the bite marks indicate that they were made by opposing pairs of teeth, a tell-tale sign of mammal chompers (think rats). And the fact that they came from paired upper and lower incisors points to multituberculates. Though these early mammals didn’t have the bite power that modern day rodents developed, their marks look similar.

Nicholas Longrich, lead author on the paper, says in a Yale press release:

“The marks stood out for me because I remember seeing the gnaw marks on the antlers of a deer my father brought home when I was young,” he said. “So when I saw it in the fossils, it was something I paid attention to.”

Related content:
Discoblog: Egad! Oldest Spider Web Dates Back to Dinosaur Era
Discoblog: Will Jurassic Park Ever Really Come True?
80beats: New Analysis Reveals Color of Dinosaur Feathers for the First Time
80beats: The Ur-Sneaker: 5500-Year-Old Shoe Found in Armenian Cave

Image: Nicholas Longrich/Yale University

In my latest column for Discover, I take a look at epigenetics and the brain. Along with the genetic circuitry in the DNA of our brain cells, we also have an additional layer of molecules that can switch genes on and off. A lot of this so-called epigenome gets locked into place when our brains are first developing, but it still remains malleable throughout our lives. Our environment can rework our epigenome, and some studies suggest that this reworking may produce long-term changes in personality. Even mental conditions like depression may be partly epigenetic. And if we can figure out how conditions like depression alter the epigenome, we may be able to re-alter it to counter those disorders.

For some reason, epigenetics is getting burdened with a lot of sensationalist quasi-mysticism these days. Epigenetics does not overturn everything we ever knew about everything. But it’s possible for something to be woo-free and cool at the same time, as I hope my column makes clear. Check it out.

[Image: U.S. Army Center of Military History]

Two years ago I noted that George Orwell had started a blog. Or, rather, Orwell’s diaries began to be posted, day by day, online. I liked the idea at first, but after a while I drifted away. The initial entries came from a relatively quiet time in Orwell’s life, dealing with stuff like how many eggs he got from his chickens on a given day.

But there’s nothing like a war to make life all too interesting:

It is impossible even yet to decide what to do in the case of German conquest of England. The one thing I will not do is to clear out, at any rate not further than Ireland, supposing that to be feasible. If the fleet is intact and it appears that the war is to be continued from America and the Dominions, then one must remain alive if possible, if necessary in the concentration camp. If the U.S.A is going to submit to conquest as well, there is nothing for it but to die fighting, but one must above all die fighting and have the satisfaction of killing somebody else first.

[Image: Wikipedia]

I love big, splashy spiral galaxies. They are such eye candy, and of course their breadth and scale are magnificent. Sweeping, curved arms of stars and gas a hundred thousand light years long…

One of my favorites is NGC 253, a nearly edge-on spiral that lies roughly 11 million light years away in the constellation of Sculptor. I’ve seen it many, many times, but I was honestly surprised when a new image was released by the European Southern Observatory. I’ve never seen it like this:

Wow! Click to galactinate.

As you can see, it’s tilted pretty severely to our line of sight. You can clearly see the spiral arms, and the dust lanes wrapping around the galactic center. I was amazed to see the dust appears to be thicker on the top half than on the bottom. I was even more amazed to clearly see the bar — the elongated rectangular region in the center of the galaxy! That’s almost completely undetectable in a visible light image of the galaxy:

That’s how I’m used to seeing it: loaded with dust that hides the shape of the galaxy itself. The top image, taken by the new VISTA 4.1 meter telescope, is in the infrared, which cuts through most of the dust and shows cooler, redder stars. The bar in the center of the galaxy is formed due to the way the gravity of all the stars of the galaxy shapes the way they orbit the center. In our solar system, the Sun outmasses everything else, and dominates the gravity of the system. This makes the system fairly simple. But in a galaxy the mass is spread out, and bizarre effects can occur as the combined mass of the stars affects the overall galaxy. Spiral arms are one outcome of this, and bars are another.

One way to form such a bar is to have a big galaxy collide and merge with another galaxy. Interestingly, NGC 253 is a starburst galaxy, which means it’s making new stars at a prodigious rate. This can also happen when two galaxies merge, and their gas clouds collide. On top of that, other studies looking at the velocities of stars and gas in the galaxy also indicate a merger. It seems pretty clear NGC 253 had a very violent event happen to it in the recent past. I suspect this may explain the thicker dust on one side than the other too. It could be the remnants of the smaller galaxy, or perhaps the collision triggered huge amounts of star formation along one arm — dust is created when young, massive stars die. Perhaps I’m way off here, but so many odd things happening in one galaxy with one clear explanation for so many of them makes me suspicious.

But the most important thing to me is that here we have a galaxy I thought I was at least passingly familiar with, and it turns out to have some major features about which I hadn’t a clue. I suppose I could be embarrassed by that, but instead, quite honestly, it makes me glad! I don’t think familiarity breeds contempt, necessarily, but it does tend to dull the sense of wonder. And here I get to re-kick start that wonder. It’s not often anyone gets a chance to do that.

ESO/J. Emerson/VISTA. Acknowledgment: Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit

“This research explored differences in how men and women approach “friends with benefits” (FWB) relationships. Specifically, this study examined sex differences in reasons for beginning such involvements, commitment to the friendship versus sexual aspects of the relationship, and partners’ anticipated hopes for the future. To do so, an Internet sample of individuals currently involved in FWB relationships was recruited. Results indicated many overall similarities in terms of how the sexes approach FWB relationships, but several important differences emerged. For example, sex was a more common motivation for men to begin such relationships, whereas emotional connection was a more common motivation for women. In addition, men were more likely to hope that the relationship stays the same over time, whereas women expressed more desire for change into either a full-fledged romance or a basic friendship. Unexpectedly, both men and women were more committed to the friendship than to the sexual aspect of the relationship. Although some additional similarities appeared, the findings were largely consistent with the notion that traditional gender role expectations and the sexual double standard may influence how men and women approach FWB relationships.”

Image: flickr/mando2003us

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WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

The latest episode of Point of Inquiry just went up, with Bill McKibben, the author most recently of Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet, a truly intense read (as I say on the show). You can download it here, and stream it here. Here's the show's description: Global warming, we're often told, is an issue we must address for the sake of our grandchildren. We need to cut carbon because of our moral obligation to future generations. But according to Bill McKibben, that's a 1980s view. As McKibben writes in his new book Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet, the increasingly open secret is that global warming happened already. We've passed the threshold, and the planet isn’t at all the same. It's less climatically stable. Its weather is haywire. It has less ice, more drought, higher seas, heavier storms. It even appears different from space. And that’s just the beginning of the earth-shattering changes in store—a small sampling of what it’s like to trade a familiar planet (Earth) for one that's new and strange (Eaarth). We'll survive on this sci-fi world, this terra incognita—but we may not like it very much. And we may have to change some fundamental ...

Artist Tim Knowles uses external forces to create his artworks through processes outside his direct control. About the “Tree Drawings” series Knowles writes: “These images are produced by trees, most of which are located in England’s Lake District. I attach artist’s sketching pens to their branches and then place sheets of [paper] in such a way that the tree’s natural motions–as well as their moments of stillness–are recorded. Like signatures, each drawing reveals something about the different qualities and characteristics of the various trees as they sway in the breeze: the relaxed, fluid line of an oak; the delicate, tentative touch of a larch; a hawthorn’s stiff, slightly neurotic scratches. Process is key to my work, so each Tree Drawing is accompanied by a photograph or video documenting the location and manner of its creation.”

Tim Knowles is one of the many thought-provoking artists featured in rich and satisfying new book from Gestalten, Data Flow 2.

Images courtesy Gestalten, “Data Flow 2″

Tree Drawing, Hawthorn on Easel #1 (part one of diptych)

I know I’ve been picking on Texas a lot lately, but c’mon guys, you keep electing people like this!

Joe Barton (R-TX) is the Representative for a landlocked (i.e., non-Gulf shore) district of Texas in the U.S. Congress, and happens to be the biggest recipient in that august body of money from the oil and gas industry ($1.7 million over the past 20 years). I’m sure that had no impact at all on his wanting to make the cringe-worthingly embarrassing apology to BP exec Tony Hayward when Hayward was getting his head handed to him by every other member of Congress yesterday. Barton said the $20 billion restitution fund was a White House "shakedown" and "a tragedy of the first proportion", and then clearly apologized to Hayward for it.

It’s hard to imagine a political low-point in this entire, vast environmental disaster, but I think Barton pretty much nailed it. In the most brain-asplodey way possible.

But wait! There’s less!

Barton, after getting eviscerated online and in the media, decided to apologize again. And for what did he apologize? Basically, he apologized because we — the public and the media — misunderstood what he said.

"I want to be absolutely clear that I think BP is responsible for this accident, should be held responsible and should in every way do everything possible to make good on the consequences that have resulted from this accident," he said. "And if anything I said this morning has been misconstrued to the opposite effect I want to apologize for that misconstrued misconstruction."

[Emphasis mine]

<sarcasm>Certainly, there was no way any rational person could possibly interpret what he said as Barton thinking BP wasn’t responsible for the accident. I’m glad he made that clear. And I’m glad he apologizes for the entire planet having misconstrued what he said.</sarcasm>

Sigh. Nothing makes insincerity more glaringly obvious than when someone says "I’m sorry you misunderstood me."^* Politicians, let me help you out here: that’s not an apology. In fact, it’s the exact opposite of an apology.

An apology, see, is when you say you’re sorry for something you did. In a very real way, it’s taking responsibility for that action. When you phrase it like Barton did, it’s actually a shifting of blame, and therefore you are not taking responsibility for that action.

I hope this helps y’all come re-election time. This has been a Public Service Announcement, brought to you by reality.

Tip o’ the top hat to Fark.

Sure, you’ve seen doctors use robots to perform surgeries, but how about robots to bring you your Jello afterward? That’s the plan at one Scottish hospital. Forth Valley Royal Hospital in Larbert, Stirlingshire is running final tests on a robot helper fleet that will deliver food, give drugs, and clean the OR–the first such system in the UK.

As the BBC reports, hospital staff can use PDAs to call the laser-guided robots, which will travel through the hospital via underground corridors and can open doors and operate elevators. The hospital will have some robots performing clean tasks (like prepping a room for surgery) and others dirty tasks (like removing clinical waste)–and believes this will reduce infection caused by the current human system.

The hospital claims that the system isn’t meant to replace people, only to give the staff more time with patients. The robot designers claim that the machines have programming to keep them from hitting people. No one claims that patients will be happy to be attended to by metallic minions, or that doctors and nurses won’t get annoyed by the robots rattling down the hallways.

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Image: flickr / davef3138