Gas production by feces of infants.

“BACKGROUND: Intestinal gas is thought to be the cause abdominal discomfort in infants. Little is known about the type and amount of gas produced by the infant’s colonic microflora and whether diet influences gas formation. METHODS: Fresh stool specimens were collected from 10 breast-fed infants, 5 infants fed a soy-based formula, and 3 infants fed a milk-based formula at approximately 1, 2, and 3 months of age. Feces were incubated anaerobically for 4 hours at 37 degrees C followed by quantitation of hydrogen (H2), methane (CH4), carbon dioxide (CO2), hydrogen sulfide (H2S), methanethiol (CH3SH), and dimethyl sulfide (CH3SCH3) in the head-space. RESULTS: H2 was produced in greater amounts by breast-fed infants than by infants in either formula group, presumably the consequence of incomplete absorption of breast milk oligosaccharides. CH4 was produced in greater amounts by infants fed soy formula than by infants on other diets. CO2 was produced in similar amounts by infants in all feeding groups. Production of CH3SH was conspicuously low by feces of breast-fed infants and production of H2S was high by soy-formula-fed infants. CH3SCH3 was not detected. Only modest changes with age were observed and there was no relation between gas production and stool consistency, although stools were more likely to be malodorous when concentrations of H2S and/or CH3SH were high. CONCLUSIONS: Gas release by infant feces is strongly influenced by an infant’s diet. Of particular interest are differences in production of the highly toxic sulfur gases, H2S and CH3SH, because of the role that these gases may play in certain intestinal disorders of infants.”

Photo: flickr/Amy L. Riddle

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Finally, science brings you…the baby poop predictor (with alarm)!
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: “Back and forth forever” (or, DIY poop therapy).
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: At least my experiments don’t require fresh slug feces…

WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

Researchers have published the largest-existing study on the genetic causes of autism, comparing 996 autistic individuals to 1,287 people without the condition. Their results, which appear today in Nature, may provide unexplored avenues for treatment research, but also show in new detail the disorder’s sheer genetic complexity. For example, they have found “private mutations” not shared between people with autism and not inherited from their parents.

According to The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in 110 children in the United States has autism spectrum disorder, and that the prevalence of autism among eight-year-olds has increased 57 percent from 2002 to 2006. There is no known cure, although intensive behavioral therapy helps some kids.

Hilary Coon, Ph.D., a lead author on the study and research professor of psychiatry at the University of Utah School of Medicine, said while research shows scientists are making progress in understanding the causes of autism, it is increasingly clear that autism is a multifaceted disorder with both genetic and environmental causes. “We are whittling away at it,” Coon said. “But a brain-related disorder, such as autism, is amazingly complex. It’s not really one entity.” [University of Utah press release]

For this study, researchers at the international Autism Genome Project wanted a closer, more detailed picture of the over 100 genes commonly linked to autism. They looked for rare variants–small deletions or additions to the DNA sequences that make up these genes. They found that people with autism had a higher number of these variants than those without the disorder, and that some of these DNA differences were not inherited. That means these DNA changes occurred either in the egg cell, sperm, or in the developing embryo.

“Most individuals that [sic] have autism will have their own rare form,” genetically speaking, concludes senior author Stephen Scherer, a geneticist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada. That said, the team found that genes deleted in autistic patients tended to perform similar tasks. Many were involved in aspects of cell proliferation, such as organ formation. A number participated in development of the central nervous system and others in maintaining the cytoskeleton, which protects the cell and helps it move. “These are not random hits in the genome” and clearly have some connection to autism, says Jonathan Sebat, a geneticist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York state. [Science Now]

Some believe that looking more closely at these variants may eventually lead to novel treatments.

Two categories of genes were affected more frequently than others: those coding for the neural cell development, and those involved in the signalling or “communication” between cells. Many of these same genes are thought to play a role in other neuro-development disorders. There may even be some overlap with conditions such as epilepsy and schizophrenia, the researchers said. “These and other recent findings have very real potential to lead to the development of novel interventions and treatments for these disorder,” said Louse Gallagher, a professor at Trinity College Dublin, one of the universities in the consortium. [AFP]

So what’s the next step towards such treatments? For now, it’s more big genetics studies. The Autism Genome Project has enrolled another 1,500 families and hopes for their next testing phase to look at people’s complete genomes and exomes (the part of the genome that codes for RNA or protein), reports Nature’s blog The Great Beyond.

The study has been hailed as a positive step by researchers, though one can imagine the parents of autistic children still feeling frustrated by the slow pace of progress. Perhaps to avoid giving false hopes, Dr Gina Gomez de la Cuesta of The National Autistic Society was cautious in her assessment of the study, saying:

“This study furthers our understanding of genetic variation in autism, however there is a great deal more research to be done. Research into autism is constantly evolving but the exact causes are as yet still unknown. The difficulty of establishing gene involvement is compounded by the interaction of genes with the environment. Genetic testing for autism is still a long way off, given that autism is so complex.” [BBC]

Related content:
DISCOVER: Galleries / Six Degrees of Autism
DISCOVER: Why Does the Vaccine/Autism Controversy Live On?
DISCOVER: Autism: It’s Not Just in the Head

Image: flickr / net efekt

Had her baby been switched at birth in a hospital mishap? That’s what one mother thought after getting her child’s results from the personal genetics testing company 23andMe and finding that his genetic profile was inconsistent with the rest of the family’s. After she finished screaming and crying, she contacted the company. Sorry for the inconvenience, she was told–we just mixed up his sample.

The company that asks clients to spit in vials is now putting its foot in its mouth: it gave up to 96 customers a look at the wrong genes. 23andMe posted an apology, viewable only to clients, on their website.

The Los Angeles Times also published the statement, which blamed the snafu on a processing error at a contractor lab:

“Up to 96 customers may have received and viewed data that was not their own. Upon learning of the mix-ups, we immediately identified all customers potentially affected, notified them of the problem and removed the data from their accounts. The lab is now concurrently conducting an investigation and re-processing the samples of the affected customers and their accurate results will be posted early next week.”

The statement also says that, pending the results of their investigation, they will “adopt corrective action as warranted,” but states that “23andMe’s personal genetics service remains proven and sound.”

23andMe says the tests can show customers whether they’re at risk for certain diseases, and can reveal their ties to ancestors. While lab mix-ups happen, we’re thankful these tests were not used on impressionable college freshman, suspected cheating spouses, or for sentencing criminals.

Related content:
Discoblog: Welcome, UC Berkeley Freshmen! Now Hand Over Your DNA Samples
80beats: 5 Reasons Walgreens Selling Personal DNA Tests Might Be a Bad Idea
80beats: No Gattaca Here: Genetic Anti-Discrimination Law Goes Into Effect
DISCOVER: Who’s Your Daddy?

Image: flickr / nosha / juhansonan

Fancy yourself a good photographer of the heavens? Got some dynamite images to back that up? Then submit them to the Royal Greenwich Observatory’s annual Astronomy Photographer of The Year contest! A whole pile of images have already been uploaded to Flickr for the contest. Click around those pictures; the competition is fierce. The images are lovely.

The winner receives a £1000 prize, and their shot will be displayed at an exhibition at the observatory. But hurry; the deadline for submission is noon (BST) on Friday, 16 July 2010. Get snapping!

Photo courtesy Andrew Stawarz on Flickr, from the contest’s photostream.

It’s been an interesting week for UK science journalism. On the one hand, we had a veteran science journalist laying out a manifesto for failure, by suggesting that reporters are messengers with no remit for analysis or fact-checking.

I’m still staring wide-eyed in disbelief over that, but a couple of noteworthy events today have lifted my spirits about the state of the country’s science journalism. For a start, we have Mark Henderson at the Times continuing to understand that the Internet offers interesting possibilities denied to print publication. His interview with our new science minister David Willetts was published in the Times, but also posted in a much fuller form on its blog.

At the Genetic Future blog, Daniel Macarthur broke a brilliant story about a screw-up at personal genomics company 23andme, which ended up with up to 96 people receiving the wrong data. It was a great example of excellent journalism emanating from the blogosphere and both New Scientist and Nature deserve credit for credting Daniel appropriately.

Nature once again shows why it produces some of the best science coverage out there by dissecting two reports that cast suspicion on the WHO’s pandemic response, suspicion that now seems unsubstantiated.

And most excitingly of all, the Guardian have launched the first of their Story Trackers – a new way of telling science stories that Alok Jha described to me as a “slow live-blog”. The idea is that they pick specific big stories and continuously update their coverage for a few days with reactions, comments and links, sourced from other coverage, blog posts, tweets and more. It’s an idea that stems from Alan Rusbridger’s “mutualisation of news” idea that he expounded in his Hugh Cudlipp lecture.

That is, the Guardian realises that there are plenty of other conversations going on about the stories it covers, often by people with more knowledge and expertise, and it is silly to ignore that. It’s the same idea that drove the unconference format so enjoyed by attendees at the ScienceOnline’10 conference. Quoting Rusbridger:

“We feel as if we are edging towards a new world in which we bring important things to the table – editing; reporting; areas of expertise; access; a title, or brand, that people trust; ethical professional standards and an extremely large community of readers. The members of that community could not hope to aspire to anything like that audience or reach on their own; they bring us a rich diversity, specialist expertise and on the ground reporting that we couldn’t possibly hope to achieve without including them in what we do.”

Spot on, and enter the story trackers. By pulling in material from all across the internet, they tap into this rich vein of expertise while providing the people who they’re quoting and linking to with extra traffic. It’s a win-win.

The trackers are also based on the idea of living stories. News stories don’t finish at the point of publication or the lifting of the embargo. There’s a huge amount of reaction and commentary that goes on long after the first words appear in print or pixels. That’s all part of the experience of reading modern news and, again, it’s silly to ignore it and wise to capitalise on it.

For all of the above, I’m feel really quite optimistic about the future of mainstream science journalism in the UK. There are good people doing good things and while my joy will almost inevitably be dashed tomorrow morning, I think it’s wise to highlight the best examples when we see them.

They’re new, they’re small, and they didn’t make sense.

That’s what could be said for five of the littlest members of Saturn’s expansive satellite family. The largest of this group, Janus, measures barely more than 100 miles in diameter, but it’s the age of these little moons that’s the odd bit. Their clean, crater-free surfaces help reveal that they’re only 10 million years old, meaning they didn’t form the way the planet’s other moons did—from the accretion disk that formed mighty Saturn itself billions of years ago. This week in Nature, astronomers published evidence to support an explanation for that oddity: Those moons formed from Saturn’s rings.

Like so much new knowledge about the sixth planet and its moons, including Titan and Enceladus, the research team’s findings come from the Cassini mission:

Sailing past Saturn’s outer rings, it found lumps of ice up to 100 metres across, ten times bigger than the rings’ other icy particles. For some researchers, the discovery called to mind another intriguing fact: that the moons and the rings share a composition of the purest ice in the Solar System. “When you put all this together, you had the strange feeling that something is going on in the rings’ outer edge,” says Sébastien Charnoz at Paris Diderot University, who was involved in the latest research [Nature].

Some scientists had suspected this explanation, but they lacked the computer power to model how it could happen (even the most powerful machine would struggle to model the trillions of orbits in the solar system’s history). So the team created a simplified model with the ring as a single dimension, tested it out on our own planet and moon’s history, and then applied it to Saturn and its rings. At the out edge of the rings, it works: material can clump together.

“Disks in astrophysics are like pancakes—they spread,” [Charnoz] says, adding that collisions within the disk or ring drive the spreading detritus outward. Once the icy ring particles venture beyond about 140,000 kilometers from Saturn’s center, they become unstable, clumping into tiny protomoons and then moonlets [Scientific American].

As the clumps get bigger, Saturn’s gravity pushes them further out (our own moon is slowly receding from us). While it’s nice to have a workable answer to the puzzle, the bigger implication is that the solar system is alive. Says Charnoz:

“There are still new objects forming in the solar system today. We used to think everything was formed four, five billion years ago, but no! New objects are still forming today” [MSNBC].

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Hello, Saturn
80beats: Cassini Sends Back Ravishing New Photos of Saturn’s Rings
80beats: Cassini Probe Finds “Ingredients For Life” on Saturn’s Moon Enceladus
80beats: Cassini Spacecraft Snaps Pictures of Saturn’s Geyser-Spouting Moon

Image: NASA

On stage at the World Science Festival on Saturday night, festival co-founder Brian Greene recalled the early days of string theory–the theory that brings together competing ideas in physics by postulating that there exist six or seven extra dimensions beyond space and time.

Greene was a graduate student in physics when string theory got its start, and remembers waking up early each morning to run to the mailbox in search of news of harmony and peace; that is, for signs that the long, obdurate conflict between general relativity and quantum mechanics was resolving itself into a beautiful universe of tiny vibrating strings.

That was in the 1980s. Now, almost thirty years later, the conflict continues, and the strings—though beautifully imagined by artists and scientists—still haven’t made themselves apparent in the form of a testable prediction. This is a big problem for skeptics like Lawrence Krauss, who insist that untestable scientific theories are—well, not really science.

But Krauss, presumably out of deference to his host, didn’t say that on stage on Saturday. Instead, he took a soft approach, presenting the audience with a picture of an anthropological find, a 33,000-year-old wood carving of a half-man, half-lion creature. “Who knows what the artist was thinking when he—or she—created this?” he mused. Perhaps the artist had seen a lion before, and had also seen people, and had imagined the existence of a combination-type-creature.

“Maybe that’s what string theory will look like in another 33,000 years,” Krauss suggested.

Greene said he thought string theory was “a touch more well-motivated than the lion-human,” but agreed that human understanding is a pitiful thing (especially when limited by the senses).

The most effusive string theorist on the panel was Shamit Kachru, who described himself as “still excited”–more like the young, mailbox-happy version of Brian Greene, ever optimistic for the arrival of proof.

John Hockenberry, the panel’s moderator, asked Greene if he thought experimental evidence would come during his lifetime.

“I’d be surprised,” said Greene.

“And in your lifetime?” Hockenberry asked Kachru.

“…I’d be surprised,” conceded the young physicist reluctantly.

“I’d be surprised if we weren’t surprised,” concluded Krauss, before the lights went down.

Related Content:
Discoblog: World Science Festival: Will Scientists Ever Know Everything?
Discoblog: World Science Festival: Waiting for Einstein’s Gravity Waves
DISCOVER: The Man Who Plucks All the Strings, an interview with Brian Greene
DISCOVER: String Theory in Two Minutes or Less (videos)

Image: World Science Festival

James Randi — conjourer, critical thinker, skeptic, and friend — did a series of great interviews on Big Think. Here’s one where he talks about spending his life attacking antiscience and its purveyors, specifically Uri Geller and Sylvia Browne.

The interviews are all short, just a few minutes long, and you can access all of them on the Big Think site. It’s well worth your time to hear from this giant of skepticism.

Bonus: the James Randi Educational Foundation just announced they have education grants available! If you’re an educator developing or disseminating critical thinking materials, take a look.

It’s up, listen here, or, subscribe on iTunes to “ResearchBlogCast.” We highlight Ed Yong’s post Protect biodiversity, alleviate poverty: the surprise benefits of protected areas, which reviews a new PNAS paper, Protected areas reduced poverty in Costa Rica and Thailand.

These are mother Mexican free-tailed bats emerging from a limestone cave in Texas. They fly as far as 60 miles from the cave, and sometimes a mile or two high, to catch insects. Several million pups (one per mother) are left behind in the cave, where they are packed at densities up to several thousand per square yard. Remarkably, mothers are able to find their pups to nurse them in these dark, noisy caverns. They do so by learning a mental map of the cave geometry, and using a combination of vocal and scent recognition to locate and identify their own pups. As the pups get older they participate more actively in these reunions.

Author of Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals, Jonathan Balcombe, on his recent book: “We need a complete overhaul in our relationship with (other) animals. The core reason for this is that they are, like us, highly sentient—intelligent, aware, emotional, perceptive, etc. I studied this species of bat for my PhD. Their excellent memories, individual recognition skills, and their capacity to make fine sensory discriminations (spatial, acoustic and olfactory) to identify their babies are a good illustration of the inner lives of animals.”

Photo by Jonathan Balcombe, courtesy Palgrave Macmillan

Have you seen this man? If so, please ask him to make up his mind.

Shahram Amiri, a 32-year-old Iranian nuclear scientist, is at the center of an episode of United States-Iran intrigue that just got weirder, thanks to YouTube. Amiri disappeared during his pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia last year, and anonymous U.S. officials confirmed that he defected, presumably bringing information about Iran’s nuclear program. Now he—or someone purporting to be him—appears in two contradictory videos that claim he was either abducted and tortured by the United States or is living happily here and going about his studies.

The first video:

The dark-haired man, appearing unshaven and disheveled, said he was being held against his will in Tucson. “I was kidnapped in a joint operation by the American intelligence, CIA terror and kidnap teams, and Saudi Arabia’s Istikhbarat” spy service, the man said in a grainy video aired in Iran on Monday night. He said he had been drugged before being smuggled out of Saudi Arabia, adding that he had been subjected to “severe torture” and “psychological pressures” [Washington Post].

A very different Amiri showed up in a second video today. He, or someone like him, appears in a professionally shot video sitting in front of some parlor with a globe and a chess board, as if he wants to have a few minutes of our time to talk about life insurance.

In it, the man claiming to be Amiri contradicts many of the claims made in the earlier video, noting he is safely and happily residing in the U.S., though experts say it appears he is reading from a script. “I am free here, and I assure everyone I am safe,” he says in Farsi [Huffington Post].

So is it really him? Iran, of course, has the political motive to make it look like Amiri was a kidnapping victim and not a defector. And it makes no sense at all to think someone held against his will would be handed a Webcam and Internet access to beam his plight back to Iran. So maybe it’s an Iranian fake.

But there are more intriguing possibilities:

“Assuming there is some truth to the fact that he cooperated with CIA, he is either having mental issues or he is just trying to make the Iranians go easier on friends and family of his still inside by pushing the story he left against his will,” said Charles “Sam” Faddis, a retired CIA officer and author of several books on intelligence. He added: “Nobody kidnaps Iranian scientists and drags them against their will to the United States” [Washington Post].

Frankly, the bent and diction of both talks sound like they were written by government propagandists from one side or the other. The weird jockeying and doubletalk will probably continue because political tensions between Iran and the U.S. seem to be escalating: The U.S. just pushed through more diplomatic sanctions against Iran for its nuclear activities, and Iran quashed rumors that it would trade the three American hikers still held there for Amiri. Pressing the case that Amiri was kidnapped, Iran filed a formal complaint with the Swiss. (Switzerland’s envoys handle our business there since official relations with Iran were cut off long ago.)

Related Content:
80beats: Iran Blocks Gmail; Will Offer Surveillance-Friendly National Email Instead
80beats: The Tweets Heard Round the World: Twitter Spreads Word of Iranian Protests
80beats: Iran Gets Its Sputnik Moment with First Successful Satellite Launch
Discoblog: Update: Iran’s Numbers Even Fishier Than Previously Reported

Not Exactly Pocket Science is a set of shorter write-ups on new stories with links to more detailed takes by the world’s best journalists and bloggers. It is meant to complement the usual fare of detailed pieces that are typical for this blog.

Bursting bubbles create rings of daughter bubbles

Popping a bubble on a body of water seems like an unspectacular event, but there’s real beauty in what happens if you look at it carefully. For James Bird at Harvard University, that meant filming the exploding bubbles with a high-speed camera. His beautiful videos reveal that contrary to popular belief, a popped bubble doesn’t just vanish. Instead, it gives birth to a ring of smaller daughter bubbles, each of which can produce an even smaller ring when it bursts.

The bubble’s curved nature means that the air inside it is at a higher pressure than air outside it. When a hole forms in the bubble, this pressure difference disappears and the film starts to recedes away. The film experiences an inward force along its surface, but an outward force at its rim – as a result, it folds outwards back onto itself, trapping a donut of air. The donut, however, is unstable and it soon breaks up into several smaller bubbles. The whole process takes place in a few thousandths of a second and it can only happen twice before the daughter bubbles get too small.

This process is surprisingly common. It applies to liquids from water to oil, regardless of their viscosity, and it happens in soapy sinks and foamy oceans alike. Bird also found that the bursting of each daughter bubble released tiny liquid droplets into the atmosphere. These aerosols may be miniscule but they have a few important repercussions. They’ve been implicated in the spread of infectious diseases in swimming pools and hot tubs and they contribute to the cycling of chemicals from the oceans into the atmosphere.

Reference: Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature09069

More from Geoff Brumfiel at Nature

Image and video by C.Bird

Snakes on the wane (credit to Sciencepunk for the headline)

A depressing number of important animal groups are facing massive population crashes, including amphibians, corals and most recently lizards. Now snakes are the latest faction to join this pessimistic list. An international team of scientists led by CJ Reading did a survey of 17 snake populations, covering 8 species from the European grass snake to the African gaboon viper. They found that 11 of the populations have declined at an alarming rate since the mid 1990s, while 5 have remained relatively stable. The crashing populations all showed a “tipping point” trend, where their numbers suddenly and steeply fell over four years, after a lengthy period of stability. They’ve all levelled off since but one decade on, their numbers show no sign of recovering.

The trends are worrying especially because we still have no idea what’s behind them. It’s telling that all of the five stable populations lived in protected areas, while the crashing species hailed from regions troubled by human activity. Their fates could be driven by falling habitat quality and a lack of prey. It’s also notable that all but one of the stable five are wide-ranging and active foragers, while the declining species are typically ambush predators that stay in the same restricted range. These “sit-and-wait” hunters are more vulnerable to human activity that disrupts the habitats they need to hide in, and they usually grow and breed slowly.

Whatever the cause, it seems to be universal. Reading’s team found that tropical species like Nigeria’s rhinoceros viper are experiencing similar population crashes as temperate ones like the British smooth snake, and all within the same period of time. To Reading, this suggests that the declines share a common and widespread cause – climate change would be an obvious candidate but that needs to be tested.

Reference: Biology Letters http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2010.0373

More from the Guardian

Photos by Fafner and Tim Vickers

Scientists have long thought humpbacks loners. New research shows this isn’t so: Researchers have observed some female whale form friendships that last for years. The behavior has only been observed in lady humpbacks of similar age, with the whales going their separate ways during the breeding season, but reuniting in the open ocean each summer. These bonds can be quite strong: the longest association endured for six years.

The study appears in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, and it also found that the whales with the longest-lasting associations gave birth to the most calves–another animal kingdom example that friendship is beneficial. The whales are probably improving their feeding efficiency, suggests lead author Christian Ramp.

“Staying together for a prolonged period of time requires a constant effort. That means that they feed together, but likely also rest together…. So an individual is adapting its behaviour to another one.” [BBC]

When categorizing fraternal sea animals, scientists used to make a dental distinction: tooth-sporting sperm whales, dolphins, and orcas make friends, but baleen whales like the humpback–those whales that use stringy baleen to strain their food out of the water–were thought less social. Says Ramp:

“I was very surprised by the prolonged duration…. I was expecting stable associations within one season, not beyond. I was particularly surprised by the fact that only females form these bonds, especially females of similar age.” [LiveScience]

Snapping pictures of yearly whale visits to the Gulf of St. Lawrence off Canada’s coast since 1997, scientists including Ramp recorded the familiar groupings. As for where the summering whales meet up and how they recognize their old friends, those things are still mysterious.

Ramp wonders whether whaling has made humpbacks’ social pairings increasingly rare since traveling together might make them easier targets, though he says he would need more research to make this conclusion.

Related content:
80beats: Whales vs. Navy: NOAA May Limit Sonar Tests, but Another Case Heads to Court
80beats: Primitive Proto-Whales May Have Clambered Ashore to Give Birth
80beats: Is the Whaling Ban Really the Best Way to Save the Whales?
Discoblog: Should Dolphins and Whales Have “Human Rights”?

Image: flickr / NOAA’s National Ocean Service

Exhibit A: Still fighting the Civil War, one Lincoln five dollar bill at a time.

(FYI, “Deo Vindice” is from the Great Seal of the Confederacy, and is loosely translated by our good friends at Wikipedia as “With God our Vindicator”)

Exhibit B: Showing that crazy deep emotion is not restricted to one end of the political spectrum.

Poor Hillary, getting robed like that.

Kidding aside, I’m fairly moved by the thought that there are people who have such a depth of frustration that scrawling on currency feels like the only voice they have — one may find the source of that frustration repellent or deranged, but that feeling of impotence in the face of what seems like the end of the world is something most of us have felt at one time or another (Gulf oil spill, anyone?).

(FYI, These two examples are just the ones that happened to pass through my hands during the past few months, but many more examples have been cataloged here and here, the latter being a compendium maintained by a burrito restaurant, of all things.)

Yesterday, I wrote about the comet 2009 R1 McNaught which is currently in the extreme northern sky in the early morning. By coincidence, just hours after posting it, I got an email from the amateur astronomer Anthony Ayiomamitis (the same guy who took the very cool picture of the ISS and Jupiter in the daytime), who sent me this picture of the comet he took in Greece at just around the same time that post went live:

Wow, very pretty! The solid part of the comet, called the nucleus, is far smaller than a single pixel in this image, since the comet was more than 175 million km (110 million miles) away when he took this shot. The nucleus of even a huge comet is only a few dozen km across, so at that great distance is just a tiny dot. Anthony has details on his observations on his McNaught page.

The comet looks huge — and the fuzzy part can be bigger than planets! — because what you’re seeing is gas expanding away from the nucleus. Far from the Sun that gas is frozen, and the comet is solid. But heat it up, and that ice turns into a gas, creating the comet’s coma (Latin for hair). In that gas methane, water, ammonia, and lots of other things, many of which are pretty nasty.

But why is it green?

Ah, that’s a good question (I’m glad I asked it!) and takes just a little bit of background.

When the gas suffusing out from the nucleus gets hit by ultraviolet light it becomes ionized; one or more electrons get stripped off the atoms. That’s important because the Sun is blowing a wind of subatomic particles called the solar wind, and as it moves out from the Sun it carries a magnetic field with it. This field interacts with the comet’s ions in the coma, shearing them away (this process is pretty complicated, and not completely understood). The solar wind is moving far, far faster than the comet (many hundreds of km/sec, versus maybe just a few dozen), so the ion tail points straight away from the Sun. As far as the solar wind cares, the comet is just standing still.

And that brings us to the comet’s verdant glow. That green color is real, and not just from the way the picture was made! And it’s the same reason a neon sign glows. When you have an ionized atom or molecule (or just an excited one, with an electron bumped into a higher energy state so that it can fall back down), the electron can recombine with its parent. When it does, it gives off light. The color of the light depends very strongly on the type of atom or molecule. Excited hydrogen glows red, for example, which is why so many gas clouds in deep space glow that color.

In a comet, the molecule cyanogen (CN)₂ and diatomic carbon (C₂) both glow characteristically green, which is why some comets, like McNaught, are green. And I wouldn’t blame you if you thought that these comets must be mostly made of those two molecules since the comet is so green. But, like everything in science, there’s more going on…

Some atoms and molecules emit more strongly than others. Under the same circumstances, a kilo of cyanogen would glow much more fiercely than a kilo of, say, hydrogen. It depends on some relatively complicated quantum physics — forgive me if I leave off the details — but you can think of it as one person who can yell louder than a bunch of other people combined. That one person dominates the emitted sound, even though there are lots of people in the room. It’s the same in the comet: (CN)₂ and C₂ are strong emitters, so their presence dominates the color we see. That’s not the case for every comet (some may be deficient in those compounds), but it’s certainly true for McNaught; lots of observers are reporting its strongly blue-green color.

I’ve seen quite a few green comets in my time, and while it’s a little odd to see something glowing a ghostly hue like that in the sky, it’s always lovely. This comet promises to be a good one, so if you get a chance, go out and hunt it down.

Eugene Lim was one of my first graduate students at the University of Chicago. We violated Lorentz invariance together (it’s not as dirty as it sounds), and he’s since gone on to think about bubble collisions and eternal inflation at prestigious places like Yale, Columbia, and Cambridge.

But Eugene always cared about other things in addition to physics, and today he’s bringing us a guest post about a heart-wrenching topic: education in Haiti in the aftermath of their devastating earthquake. Not content to agitate for support from the comfort of his computer, Eugene is actually hopping on a plane this weekend to spend a month teaching math at a poor rural university. Here’s his introduction, and we hope to have a follow-up post after he returns from his travels.

———-

On Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at 4:53pm, a massive quake hit Haiti, killing an approximate quarter of a million people, injuring another quarter of a million, and causing massive infrastructure damage. Today, more than five months later, as the news cycle has moved on, Haitians are still pulling themselves out of the disaster, with 1.5 million people still homeless.

Fondwa is the 10th Communal Section of Leogane situated about 60 km south of the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, near the epicenter of the quake. It is a rural community with big dreams, the peasants banded together in 1988 to form the APF (Association of Peasants of Fondwa) to create a model community, not just with the aim of providing basic services but to empower the people of Haiti by providing them with the education and knowledge to improve their own lives.

One of their amazing achievement is the founding of a university, the University of Fondwa (UNIF) in 2004 in the mountains of Haiti, offering majors in Management, Agricultural Engineering and Veterinary Science — skills necessary for a rural community to survive and thrive — with about 40 students from all over Haiti. They graduated their first class last year.

The quake destroyed all the buildings of UNIF : the main building, the dorms and the lecture halls. Remarkably, classes continued after the quake, first in tents, and hopefully soon in temporary shelters. Final exams were given and graded, and the new semester began on schedule, May 5.

I met the founder of the University, Fr. Joseph Phillipe in New York a few weeks ago (he also founded Haiti’s biggest microfinance bank, FONKOZE, but that’s another story) — a series of hopeful email inquiries inspired by the watching a documentary about Fondwa led to having coffee with him in uptown New York City. Despite the challenges that his community is facing, he was full of energy, focusing on what to do for the future. I was impressed. I told him I want to help out.

I told him I wanted to volunteer to teach in UNIF, but I was not sure what I need to do. He said “We are waiting for you in Fondwa.”

This week, I am headed down to Fondwa to teach math for a month. I was told to be prepared to be caught unprepared. Internet permitting, I hope to post a follow-up to this when I get to Fondwa with more pictures from the ground.

A month is not exactly a long time. But I hope that any help is better than no help at all — they are short on teaching staff after the quake. Personally, I have been inspired by humanitarian groups like Doctors without Borders and Paul Farmer’s Partners in Health. I can’t save lives as a doctor, but I can teach! A long term hope is to be able to build ties in Fondwa, and perhaps do this on a yearly basis. I believe that academics have a lot to contribute in making this world a better place beyond hanging out in our ivory towers.

I asked Fr. Joseph what else I can do to help, he said “Tell your friends about us, and ask your friends to come too”.

Sean has kindly allowed me to use this blog to publicize the plight of the community at Fondwa. They are still trying to get basic services in. Their main needs are monetary donations, temporary housing, clean water and volunteers! They are especially looking for long term volunteers for six months of longer. They are also looking for a President for UNIF — I am serious — if you are interested or know anybody who might be interested, email APF below.

If you like want to volunteer, the best way is to contact APF directly at apf222@aol.com or go to the APF homepage. If you like to donate directly to APF click on the link to my blog for the bank information. If you want help out Haitians to help themselves : support Fonkoze’s microfinancing efforts by helping out here.

The turn of the millennium was not kind to the snakes.

Herpetologist Chris Reading and his team have been counting snakes through their own surveys and looking at population data going back to 1987 to see what’s happening to snake populations. The alarming findings, to be published soon in Biology Letters, indicate that most of the species studied saw a great decrease in population, with the greatest loss between 1998 and 2002.

Reading’s team monitored 17 different species in different climates—including snakes from Europe, Africa, and Australia—to try to get a global picture. Eleven of the 17 declined sharply over the study’s two-decade-plus period, with some declining as much as 90 percent. Five remained more or less stable. Only one saw a population increase, and a very slight one at that.

“All the declines occurred during the same relatively short period of time and over a wide geographical area that included temperate, Mediterranean and tropical climates,” write the authors. “We suggest that, for these reasons alone, there is likely to be a common cause at the root of the declines and that this indicates a more widespread phenomenon” [Guardian].

Last month, we saw other scientists point the finger at climate change as a reason for lizard declines; with the snakes Reading and his colleagues are being more cautious, simply ringing the alarm bells that snakes could be in danger around the world. The proximate cause is likely to be less abundant prey or a changing habitat, such as less available cover in which snakes can hide. Given the widespread nature and the timeline, however, climate patterns can’t be ruled out.

The year when many of the snake declines began – 1998 – raises the question of whether climatic factors might be involved, as very strong El Nino conditions contributed to making it the hottest year recorded in modern times [BBC News].

The real trouble is going to come in sorting out just how many snakes, or which ones, are in great danger. Because, frankly, they’re hard to count.

More data may or may not bear out the pattern, says ecologist Rick Shine of the University of Sydney, who was not part of the study. “The jury is still out on whether or not there is a general crisis here, but the reports are alarming” [Science News].

Related Content:
80beats: Lizards Can’t Take the Heat, But Are They Really Going Extinct?
80beats: Weird Blind Snakes Drifted With Continents And Rafted Across Oceans
80beats: Uncle Sam: No More Snakes on Planes, Already
Discoblog: When Animals Invade, Part II: Pythons Taking Over South Florida

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Do you remember when They Might Be Giants famously covered a 1959 children's song called 'Why Does The Sun Shine?' It begins like this:
The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is built into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees
I thought I'd start the morning with a bit more detail 50 years after the original... At temperatures over 13 million K, the fusion of hydrogen atoms into helium produces much of the sun's power. Every second, ~ 4.4 Mt of matter is converted to energy by way of thermonuclear reactions in this star's core, and (following Einstein's mass-energy equation) that's a rate about 30 trillion times higher than our yearly use of all primary electricity and fuels on planet Earth. (And no, I haven't come up with a new tune yet...)

One musky Calvin Klein fragrance isn’t just making humans go Rawr. When sprayed on rocks by zookeepers and field researchers, the cologne Obsession for Men draws big cats like cheetahs and jaguars. They cuddle against it; they take long sniffs, savoring it longer than they do their meals; they may even track it down from half a mile away.

As reported by The Wall Street Journal, spraying perfume on zoo exhibits is something of a trade secret among zookeepers–sniffing out the foreign scents keeps the cats curious and active in captivity. In 2003, Pat Thomas, general curator at the Bronx Zoo in New York, conducted a smell test with his jaguars. The cats certainly didn’t turn up their noses at Estée Lauder, Revlon, or Nina Ricci, but Calvin Klein’s Obsession kept them sniffing the longest, keeping them engaged for about eleven minutes.

During the seven years after Thomas’ test, the scent’s secret feline attraction has helped big cat researchers to observe the animals’ behaviors in the wild and conduct conservation population studies. In one jaguar survey in Guatemala, scientists sprayed the cologne on rags placed in front of their motion-sensitive video cameras. Researchers’ biggest difficulty is getting their hands on the stuff, which runs for about $60 per bottle and is hard to come by in the rain forest. The Bronx Zoo keeps its supplies up by taking donations of the smelly stuff.

Fragrance-designer Ann Gottlieb, who worked on Obsession for Men, described the scent to The Wall Street Journal:

“It’s a combination of this lickable vanilla heart married to this fresh green top note—it creates tension,” she says. The cologne also has synthetic “animal” notes like civet, a musky substance secreted by the cat of the same name, giving it particular sex appeal, she adds. “It sparks curiosity with humans and, apparently, animals.”

Me-ow.

Related content:
Discoblog: Love Potion Number 10: Oxytocin Spray Said to Increase Attraction
80beats: A Gory Aphrodisiac: Spiders Feast on Blood to Get Their Sexy On
Science Not Fiction: Eleventh Hour: Funky Pheromones
Cosmic Variance: Eau de Stilton

Image: flickr / Cinz / 03ahmed

Wow, that’s like three puns in one title.

Anyway, scientists have revealed they have found large amounts of carbonates (minerals containing CO₃ in them) in rocks on Mars. That’s kind of a big deal: it’s been expected that a lot of rocks would have this compound in them, because there’s lots of carbon dioxide afoot there, and plenty of evidence that Mars was once wet. Those two ingredients lead to carbonates. Yet the rocks looked at closely by the rovers have been strangely devoid of them.

For the rover Opportunity it’s not all that strange; the water on that part of Mars was acidic, and that makes carbonates tough to form. But Spirit is on the other side of the planet, and it was expected it would find carbonates all over the place. Well, turns out it finally has. Some rocks it examined back in 2005 are loaded with carbonates, but it took this long to figure that out because dust that got in the instrument on the rover screwed things up. The scientists had to do some heroic work to tease the data out.

At this point we’ve pretty much exhausted my knowledge of this, but happily we have access to Emily Lakdawalla and her blog, where she goes into detail about the rocks, talking to a scientist involved in all this, too. So go over there and get the rest of this interesting story.

And when you’re over there, don’t forget: we’re talking about a whole planet here. A world. And it was once warmer, wetter, with a thicker atmosphere. Sure, it was over a billion years ago, but it’s always a good idea to keep an eye on Mars when thinking about Earth. There but for the grace of random chance go us.