For some endangered birds, captive breeding programmes are the only way to boost fading wild populations. But such programmes have a problem – they often rely on artificial insemination, which gets much poorer results than expected. Adeline Loyau and Frederic Lacroix from Morocco’s Emirates Center for Wildlife Propagation (ECWP) have found a way to help, by priming the females with pictures of sexy males strutting their stuff.

The duo worked with the Houbara bustard, a large bird that has been hunted extensively because its meat is prized as an aphrodisiac. It’s classified as a vulnerable species and the ECWP has set up a captive breeding programme to restore its numbers. Females are kept apart from the males and many never actually see one before being artificially fertilised. This is the only method that successfully breeds these birds in captivity, but it’s also associated with a 15% fall in hatching success. Loyau and Lacroix thought that the females themselves might be responsible for this deficit.

In the past, many researchers have shown that female birds can control the amount of energy they invest in the next generation. The female makes her decision after weighing up many factors such as the quality of her mate and the conditions of her environment. If she thinks she’s onto a genetic winner, and her chicks will be born into a world of riches, she would do well to give them a head-start. If her mate is a dud and food is scarce, it might be best to conserve energy and try again next season. Clearly, these decisions can dramatically affect the chicks’ chances of hatching and surviving.

To manipulate their decisions, Loyau and Lacroix placed the females in spectator aviaries that gave them a bird’s eye view of a displaying male. When a male Houbara bustard wants to woo a female, he runs around while erecting the feathers on his head and neck. It’s an honest sign of his quality, for weaker males simply can’t keep up the vigorous showmanship for long.

Loyau and Lacroix found that when females saw males that displayed more frequently, they were more likely to be successfully artificially fertilised and their eggs were more likely to hatch even though they laid the same number. When the females saw the seductive dance of a Casanova bustard, they added more testosterone into the yolk of their eggs, to the same extent that they would do in the wild. The dance of a dud male triggered no such investment. This hormonal trust fund gave the chicks a headstart in life. They produced more testosterone themselves, and they grew faster as a result.

By studying the birds that provided the sperm samples, Loyau and Lacroix found that the actual quality of the chicks’ fathers had no bearing on their odds of hatching or their growth rate. Those were purely down to mum’s influence, and she was in turn influenced by the quality of the male whose courtship she witnessed. In the wild, he would probably have been the one she eventually mated with but captivity allowed the researchers to tease apart her influence from that of her chicks’ biological father.

Loyau and Lacroix’s study has important implications for captive breeding programmes. These rely heavily on artificial insemination so that females can be mated with males who are specially selected to boost the genetic diversity of the next generation. This work shows that there’s more to doing this well than simply mixing sperm and eggs in a tube. Female animals often have a big say on the fate of their young and conservationists are need to understand their preferences and work with them in order to get the most out of their breeding programmes.

It’s possible that different versions of the same trick would work on other species. In Houbara bustards, courtship is a visual affair, but other birds woo each other with calls and songs – perhaps for them, a recording of a virtuoso singer would have the same effect on their breeding success.

Reference: Proc Roy Soc B http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2010.0473

Images from ECWP website

More on animal sex lives:

• Ballistic penises and corkscrew vaginas – the sexual battles of ducks
• Smell a lady, shrug off flu – how female odours give male mice an immune boost
• Pregnant male pipefish abort babies from unattractive females
• Crayfish females lure males with urine, but then play hard to get
• Tree frogs shake their bums to send threatening vibes

Evidence to Suggest that Copulatory Vocalizations in Women Are Not a Reflexive Consequence of Orgasm.

“The current studies were conducted in order to investigate the phenomenon of copulatory vocalizations and their relationship to orgasm in women. Data were collected from 71 sexually active heterosexual women (M age = 21.68 years +/- .52) recruited from the local community through opportunity sampling. The studies revealed that orgasm was most frequently reported by women following self-manipulation of the clitoris, manipulation by the partner, oral sex delivered to the woman by a man, and least frequently during vaginal penetration. More detailed examination of responses during intercourse revealed that, while female orgasms were most commonly experienced during foreplay, copulatory vocalizations were reported to be made most often before and simultaneously with male ejaculation. These data together clearly demonstrate a dissociation of the timing of women experiencing orgasm and making copulatory vocalizations and indicate that there is at least an element of these responses that are under conscious control, providing women with an opportunity to manipulate male behavior to their advantage.”

Image: flikr/oddsock

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Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: The G-Spot: nature vs. nurture.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Weak with sex: sexual intercourse as a trigger for cataplexy.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: What kind of erotic film clips should we use in female sex research? An exploratory study.

WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

I was interviewed by my friend, SETI- and astronomy enthusiast Lourdes Cahuich for the SETI.cl website. And, because the site is in Chile, it’s also en Español.

I talk a bit about how I got started in astronomy and outreach, why I love social networks, and why I’m so strongly anti-antivax.

Bonus: there’s an interview with an article about Frank Drake there too!

“It’s as if we’re fish who have suddenly discovered we’re in water,” said Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek about the Large Hadron Collider. “The LHC is the device for ruffling up the waters so that we can see waves.”

Wilczek took part in a panel discussion at a World Science Festival event on Saturday. The discussion revealed a bit more about how physicists will do the ruffling and what waves they expect to see. Besides once again allaying doomsday fears, the panel discussed each detector in the LHC and how it will help them find the “cosmic molasses” we’re swimming in–what gives everything in the universe mass.

Their prime suspect is, of course, the Higgs Boson–the last animal in the Standard Model theory’s particle zoo–but what happens if the LHC can’t find it?

“My experiment is looking at the primordial soup, and we know it exists,” said Jennifer Klay, who helped to develop the detector for ALICE. “We have more job security.” By soup, she means quark-gluon plasma, a liquid-like substance made from proton and neutron innards.

The three-story-tall ALICE detector will first look at a smash-up between lead nuclei. She explains that a nucleus behaves very much like a liquid drop: “We’re taking two liquid drops, colliding them at very high energies, and trying to boil them into a steam, essentially, of quarks and gluons.” She won’t see the quarks and gluons directly, but will watch the process as they “condense” into more familiar protons neutrons.

The ATLAS and CMS detectors will hunt for the Higgs. In the same way that physicists can’t see quarks, they won’t directly observe Higgs. Instead, they will use the seven-story-tall ATLAS to pick through the particle spray from protons’ collisions in an attempt to sieve out four familiar particles: two electrons and two “fat” electron cousins called muons. Monica Dunford, an experimental high-energy particle physicist who helped bring the ATLAS detector into operation, calls this “a double needle in the haystack.”

Wilczek believes that experimenters will see these four particles in two to five years after the LHC is running at full speed.

“The worst scenario to me, is that the LHC completes the Standard Model and doesn’t do anything more,” Wilczek said. “That would be horrible. We would learn something very profound, but we would also learn that Nature is a tease.”

Dunford agreed with Wilczek, but added that, given the $6 billion price tag on the first machine, the LHC better find something. “We can’t say, ‘Gosh, we didn’t find anything? How about 20 billion?”

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Bad Astronomy: LHC smacks some protons!

If you’re an early riser in the mid-northern latitudes of our planet (and statistically speaking, the odds are good for the latter part), then there’s a comet you might want to check out.

Comet McNaught (C/2009 R1) is currently moving rapidly across the northern sky, and it’s just on the edge of being bright enough to see with your unaided eye. Over the next few days it may even get bright enough to see easily in dark skies.

This picture, taken by Ernesto Guido and Giovanni Sostero, shows the comet and its long tail. It’s a multiple exposure centered on the comet, which is why you see several star images for each star. You won’t get a view this nice (probably) with binoculars, but you should be able to spot the tail.

The CometChasing website provides a helpful map of the comet’s location over the next few days. On June 21 it’s pretty close to the bright star Capella (one of the brightest in the sky) but it’s not known how bright the comet will be by then. Also, McNaught reaches perihelion (closest point in its orbit to the Sun) on July 2/3, so it’ll be tough to see in a few weeks (though probably brighter; as they gets closer to the Sun most comets get much brighter, but their proximity to the Sun makes them very difficult to spot). With comets it’s always good to get them while the getting’s good. Go look now!

You can find more info on the Cometography site, a spectacular picture on APOD, and an interesting animated GIF showing the motion of the comet, too.

As a bonus for early risers, Jupiter and Uranus will have a series of close approaches to each other in the sky, so you can check that out as well.

If we’re lucky, BP’s relief wells will be done in August and the company’s all-time blunder will stop leaking. But even it that happens, the Coast Guard now concedes, it will take years to clean up this disaster.

“It’s the breadth and complexity of the disaggregation of the oil” that is now posing the greatest clean-up challenge, the commander, Adm. Thad W. Allen, said at a news conference at the White House [The New York Times].

The oil has now spread 46 miles from the original site of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration now says, and has been found at a depth of more than 3,000 feet. That confirms the wide undersea plumes of oil; BP initially denied those existed. Admiral Allen said it’s time to think of this not as one spill, but rather as hundreds of thousands of little ones.

Meanwhile, more oil continues to enter the Gulf. BP says its containment dome is capturing 11,000 barrels a day, though the government’s revised estimation of the total flow rate was 12,000 to 25,000 barrels, and the flow would have increased when BP sheared off the top of the riser during the recent operation that put the cap in place.

And as the oil patches flirt with the coastline, slathering some spots and leaving others alone, residents who depend on tourism and fishing are wondering in the here and now how to head off the damage or salvage a season that’s nearing its peak [AP].

In those areas where oil has already made landfall, cleanup workers continue to slog away. But at least 75 in Louisiana have grown ill, including fisherman George Jackson.

“They didn’t supply us with nothing,” says Jackson. “Now they’re starting to disperse gloves and hazmat suits.” Chemicals and vapors, both from oil and dispersants, can pose serious health risks. They can inflame the nose, throat and lungs, and aggravate asthma. When absorbed in the bloodstream, oil compounds like benzene or toluene can cause headaches and dizziness and could have long term toxic effects on the brain, liver and kidneys after prolonged, direct contact [CBS News].

As all this goes on, President Obama continues to star in his weird rehash of The Queen. If you haven’t seen Helen Mirren’s Oscar-winning performance, she played Queen Elizabeth II during the weeks after Princess Diana’s death, when the British people demanded their sovereign show some emotion. There has been a similar groundswell in the U.S.—especially among its punditry—for the Prez to break his legendary cool and show some anger about the spill. This morning he obliged.

“I don’t sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar,” Obama told Matt Lauer. “We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick” [USA Today].

Previous Posts on the Gulf Oil Spill:
80beats: Meet the Oil-Covered Pelicans, Symbols of the BP Oil Spill
80beats: This Hurricane Season Looks Rough, And What If One Hits the Oil Spill?
80beats: We Did the Math: BP Oil Spill Is Now Worse Than the Exxon Valdez
80beats: “Top Kill” Operation Is Under Way in Attempt to Stop Gulf Oil Leak
80beats: Scientists Say Gulf Spill Is Way Worse Than Estimated. How’d We Get It So Wrong?

Image: U.S. Coast Guard photo by PA2 Gary Rives

What if an unknown researcher predicts an earthquake using a disfavored technique? If an earthquake then happens and hundreds die, should naysayer scientists go to jail?

Some in the city of L’Aquila, Italy answered that odd question with a resounding yes. An April 6, 2009 earthquake that was predicted by Giampaolo Giuliani killed 308 people. Now the city’s prosecutors are considering charging seven researchers at the National Geophysics and Vulcanology Institute (INGV) and members of the city’s Major Risks Committee with manslaughter.

The prosecutors say the committee could be considered criminally negligent for telling the townspeople that there was no need to evacuate. A formal investigation has been opened, but charges haven’t yet been filed.

As reported in Life in Italy:

“Those involved were highly qualified individuals who should have provided the public with different answers,” said L’Aquila’s chief prosecutor, Alfredo Rossini. “It was not the case that we received no warning, because there had already been tremors. However, the advice given was that there was no need for people to leave their homes”.

Giuliani, the man who predicted the quake, works at the National Laboratories at Gran Sasso, though he has been misreported in both Italian and American media outlets as a physicist, seismologist, and a collaborator with the National Institute of Nuclear Physics. According to Science Insider, Giuliani’s work on earthquakes is a “hobby” and seismologists do not use the radon tests he cited, since statistically they have failed to accurately predict quakes.

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Image: United States Geological Survey

If you relax and concentrate, you’re more likely to make a goal. Seems pretty logical, but researchers at Britain’s Exeter University have tracked soccer players eye-movements to make sure. They have confirmed that players who ignore goalies’ distracting antics are more likely to make the shot.

The latest in the why-Britain-hasn’t-won-the-World-Cup-since-1966 line of research–which has also looked at the ball’s surface (smooth is good but some grooves necessary) and the psychological benefits of playing on your home field (it’s better)–Greg Wood’s study will appear in the Journal of Sports Medicine. Hopefully it will be available in time for the World Cup’s start on June 11th.

Wood says that goalies can make use of a biological instinct to screw up a kicker’s shot.

“We focus on things in our environment that are threatening. In a penalty kick, that threat is a goalkeeper,” Wood said. “If he (the goalkeeper) can make himself more threatening, he can distract the kicker even more. By doing (certain) behaviors, he can make it so the kicker will kick (the ball) near the goalie.” [AP]

The study tracked eighteen university-level players’ eye movements as they attempted penalty shots with varying levels of distraction from the goalie. It found that the players who lined up the shot, ignoring the chance that the goal-keeper might block it, were more likely to score.

Wood, a psychologist at the School of Sport and Health Sciences at the university, said the main problem was not skill but anxiety levels. “England definitely has a problem with this especially when compared to other teams such as Germany. While Germany wins 80 per cent of its penalty shoot outs, England loses 70 per cent. “If I was giving advice to the England team I would say pretend you are in a practise match, look at where you are going to hit the ball and aim it there. Totally ignore the goalkeeper. Even if he knows where the ball is going he is not going to get to it if it is well placed.” [Telegraph]

Anecdotal evidence has hinted at the same conclusion. Case in point: Bruce Grobbelaar’s 1984 European Cup goal-saving “spaghetti legs” shown in this video.

“The biggest memory I have is the 1984 European Cup final against Roma and my ’spaghetti legs’ routine during the penalty shootout that won us the trophy,” Grobbelaar said [as quoted in the study]. “People said I was being disrespectful to their players, but I was just testing their concentration under pressure. I guess they failed that test.” [ABC]

As also reported in The Telegraph, the study also concluded that teams that go first win sixty percent of penalty shootouts and that the best uniform color is red, “a dangerous and dominant colour in nature.”

Related content:
Discoblog: Soccer Star Seeks Out Serbian Placenta Massage to Speed Healing
Cosmic Variance: The Physics of Beckham
Cosmic Variance: Yet Another World Cup Post
DISCOVER: The Brain: Why Athletes Are Geniuses

Image: flickr / Shine 2010 -2010 World Cup Good News

I hope you all can do this, I am.

HOUSTON — NASA is inviting members of the public to send electronic images of their faces into orbit aboard one of the final remaining space shuttle missions.

Visitors to the “Face in Space” website can upload their portrait to fly with the astronauts aboard shuttle Discovery’s STS-133 mission and/or shuttle Endeavour’s STS-134 mission. Participants will receive special certificates from the Internet site once the mission is completed.

“The Space Shuttle Program belongs to the public, and we are excited when we can provide an opportunity for people to share the adventure of our missions,” said Space Shuttle Program Manager John Shannon. “This website will allow you to be a part of history and participate as we complete our final missions.”

To submit your image, visit: http://faceinspace.nasa.gov

Those without a picture can skip the image upload section, and NASA will fly their name.

Discovery and Endeavour’s missions are the final two flights remaining until the retirement of the space shuttle fleet. They are targeted to launch in September and November, respectively. For more information about the STS-133 and STS-134 missions, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/shuttle

Image: ©2006 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

Recently, I learned that the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, with support from the Sloan Foundation, had undertaken a path-breaking project to examine what scientists understand about the public. The Academy held four sessions on the topic with experts over the past year and a half, and then asked me to write a paper about the workshops and what they taught and revealed. The initiative, and my paper, are scheduled to be unveiled at an event at the American Association for the Advancement of Science auditorium in Washington, D.C., on June 29, co-sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Washington Science Policy Alliance. The event requires registration, and here is a write up for it:
While considerable attention has been paid to strengthening public education in science and technology, less effort has gone into helping researchers understand what lies behind the public response to new advances and discoveries. Public concerns about scientific developments can come not only from ignorance, but also from legitimate worries. In 2008, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences launched a study on what the scientific community knows or should know about the public and its concerns. Funded by the Alfred P. Sloan ...

The U.S. National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study, a quarter-century look at the welfare of kids born to lesbian couples, has finally come out in the journal Pediatrics this week with the headline-grabbing finding that those children not only do as well as the rest of the population, they might actually fare better. You can download the paper by lead author Nanette Gartrell for free right now, but here are the key parts:

Select population only

Census data says that there are more than 270,000 American kids in same-sex households, with twice that many having a single gay parent. Gartrell’s study follows a particular slice: Lesbian couples who were together before the child’s birth, identified themselves as a lesbian couple, and went through the artificial insemination process. It didn’t include, for instance, women who may have had a child in a previous heterosexual relationship and then entered into a lesbian one later.

Better than the rest?

The study, which began in 1986, ended up following 78 kids from lesbian couples who were recruited for the study in Boston, Washington D.C., and San Francisco.

The mothers were interviewed during pregnancy or the insemination process, and additionally when the children were 2, 5, 10 and 17 years old. Those children are now 18 to 23 years old. They were interviewed four times as they matured and also completed an online questionnaire at age 17, focusing on their psychological adjustment, peer and family relationships and academic progress [CNN].

The children of these lesbian couples were just as well-adjusted as the kids of heterosexual couples to whom the researchers compared them. Indeed, the kids in the study proved superior in some areas, like academics, self-esteem, and behavior, as shown by the standard “Child Behavior Checklists” that were part of the surveys.

Planning, and parenting

This is a quantitative study, so the “why” question becomes the subject of speculation. But for Gartrell, the fact that she studied families with planned pregnancies and involved parents was the key.

Salon’s Tracy Clark-Flory puts the first point more forcefully:

One factor that seems awfully important here is that these pregnancies were all planned. Like, really, really planned. There were no forgotten pills, broken condoms or one too many glasses of red wine; these women had to actively seek out sperm donors and then undergo artificial insemination [Salon].

The parents in her study, Gartrell says, “reported using verbal limit-setting more often with their children” (as opposed to any kind of corporal punishment). They had dealt early with the difficult conversations about sexuality and prejudice, she says. That may have contributed to the fact that at 10 the kids of lesbian families appeared to have experienced more anxiety from being stigmatized, but by 17 that effect no longer showed up.

“They are very involved in their children’s lives,” she says of the lesbian parents. “And that is a great recipe for healthy outcomes for children” [TIME].

That is, good parenting is what matters, not gay parenting.

D-I-V-O-R-C-E

Buried in the study is a curious stat: When heterosexual first marriages end in divorce, 65% of the time mothers end up with sole custody. But, in the study of lesbian couples, things ended up much differently.

The percentage of separation was about the same: about 50% for heterosexual couples and 56% for the lesbian couples in the study. But when the study couples split up, they retained joint custody in 70% of the cases. The paper says, “Custody was more likely to be shared in these families when the mothers had previously completed a co-parent (second parent) adoption agreement.”

Weaknesses

The study’s long-term view of families headed by lesbian couples is its strength, along with the fact that gathering study participants before they gave birth meant the study wouldn’t be skewed by “families who volunteer when it is already clear that their offspring are performing well.”

But it does have weaknesses. For one, Gartrell’s funding came in part from gay and lesbian organizations like the Gill Foundation and the Lesbian Health Fund from the Gay Lesbian Medical Association. That has led anti-gay organization to respond to the study with charges of bias. Indeed, if Gartrell had been able to secure complete funding from an independent source like the National Institutes of Health, that would have been nice. But there have been easier things to do in the last quarter-century than glean government grants to study families led by same-sex couples.

A more pressing scientific question is: How much you can extrapolate the study’s data to 2010? As the study says, the differences between 1986 and today made recruiting a nationally representative sample quite difficult:

The NLLFS sample is drawn from the first-wave planned lesbian families who were initially clustered around metropolitan areas with visible lesbian communities, which were much less diverse than they are today; recruiting was limited to the relatively small number of prospective mothers who felt safe enough to identify publicly as lesbian, who had the economic resources to afford DI, and who, in the pre-Internet era, were affiliated with the communities in which the study was advertised.

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Image: iStockphoto

The European Southern Observatory has unveiled a new planet-hunter: TRAPPIST: TRAnsiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescope. I know, I know, but we’re running out of acronyms here, folks. If it makes you feel better, it was named after a beer.

It sits in the high and dry Atacama desert in Chile, rapidly and autonomously scanning the sky, looking at millions of stars and recording their brightnesses. It does this over and again, looking for the tell-tale dip in starlight caused when a planet passes in front of its parent star.

In the meantime, it also takes incredible pictures of the sky:

That’s the Tarantula Nebula, a sprawling complex of gas and dust churning out stars at an incredible rate. To give you an idea of how luminous it is, at 180,000 light years away (that’s 1.8 quintillion kilometers, or more than a quintillion miles!) it’s still visible to the naked eye (if you live in the southern hemisphere, that is). TRAPPIST’s primary mission is to look for transiting planets as well as comets visible in the southern skies, but like any good telescope pointing up it’s capable of all sorts of good science — if, for example, there are any changes in the Tarantula (a star explodes, or flares up) TRAPPIST will catch it.

This is all pretty amazing considering the telescope is only 60 cm (20 inches) in diameter! Because the transit method looks for dips in a star’s brightness, it’s best to look at bright stars; they give off so much light that even a small dip is easier to see. You don’t need a honking big ’scope to look at bright stars, and in fact something smaller is even better: it can see larger areas of sky at once, and won’t overexpose the detector like a bigger ’scope might do when it floods the camera with starlight.

Small telescopes are less expensive and easier to design, too; TRAPPIST went from being just an idea to getting its first images in only two years. And it’s fully robotic! It does its thing on its own, preprogrammed to sweep the heavens and send the data to astronomers without them ever having to actually be at the dome.

Other such smaller-scale projects are popping up all over the planet, and I think that’s terrific. You don’t always need a huge expensive piece of equipment to do solid science, and, amazingly, even a telescope no bigger than one you can keep in your garage can actually be used to discover planets orbiting other stars!

The first image in this gallery of images from Dutch artist Levi van Veluw shows the result of van Veluw covering his head with light-generating foil. Photographed in total darkness, the radiant bright blue light produced by this material defines the shape of his head. Van Veluw’s photo series are self-portraits, created and photographed by himself in a completely solo process. The work simultaneously suggests visions of primitive and futuristic humankind, in the archetypal language of fairy tales.

Of his own work, Levi van Veluw writes: “The images that I make consist of often unlogical combinations of materials, patterns, colours, forms, with my head as the only constant factor. Each element is consciously chosen so as to affect a pre-determined transformation. By playing with the value of the each material and by using them for a purpose that was not originally intended for them, I construct within the image, in a very small way, a different perspective on the world.”

All images courtesy Levi van Veluw

Light II, 2009

We’re not that special.

At least, not for the reasons we thought we were. Our knack for acting altruistically, for communicating, for putting a complicated brain to good use: We’ve claimed all these as our own, as the things that set humans apart from every other species.

But recently, science has shown that we have a lot more in common with other animals, from bonobos to bees, than you might expect. On Saturday, five researchers helped set the public record straight by busting up a few humanocentric myths during “All Creatures Great and Smart,” a panel event at the World Science Festival in New York.

Myth #1: Humans are the only altruistic animals.

From proffering a shovel in the sandbox to writing a check to our favorite charity, humans commit altruistic acts whenever they do something for someone else without any concrete benefit for themselves. But you can cross sharing off the “uniquely human” list; in a simple experiment, anthropologist Brian Hare demonstrated that bonobos do it, too.

Alone in a room with some delectable snacks, each bonobo in the study had two choices: Enjoy the snacks on his own, or open a door to let another bonobo in an adjoining room come share the feast. Hare found that, time and again, bonobos in this situation chose to voluntarily share.

“It could be that they feel bad for the other guy, or maybe they’re just being politicians,” sharing now with the expectation they’ll be shared with later, Hare said. “Or maybe they just want to go on a blind date.” The fact that altruism might come with an agenda doesn’t make the bonobos’ actions any less remarkable, Hare added. These same motivations prompt a lot of the sharing we do, too.

Myth #2: Humans are the only true communicators.

When scouting for potential dangers, monkeys in the rainforest go by the same rule people do: If you see something, say something. What’s more, what monkeys say depends on what exactly they see, said primatologist Klaus Zuberbühler. One alarm call signals “Oh no, a leopard!”, while another signals “Look out, an eagle!” It’s clear the calls mean different things because they don’t just sound different, they elicit different responses. Play a leopard alarm call, and a monkey will start peering down at the forest floor; play an eagle alarm call, and he’ll start scanning the skies. “Calling it a conversation might be too much,” Zuberbühler said, but monkeys can convey detailed information using their voices.

Some animals can even dabble in the languages of other species. Hornbills, birds that live a safe distance off the ground, ignore monkeys’ leopard alarm calls, but they’ll flap their wings in panic when the monkeys say an eagle’s nearby.

Myth #3: We can learn because of our big brains.

Even insects, far from us on the evolutionary tree as they are, are capable of some surprising mental feats. Understanding how their neural circuits work and what they do can give us insight into the building blocks of our own brains and behavior. “Insects are incredibly sophisticated,” said insect neuroscientist Jeremy Niven. “When you see what they can do with their tiny brains, you wonder why we need an extra billion neurons or so.”

– by Valerie Ross

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In an ever more connected and globalized world, we're increasingly confronted with the ways in which our actions--whether political, economic, or other--can have enormous impacts in other regions. Unfortunately, when it comes to oceans, it has been easy to ignore the devastation that occurs below a seemingly pristine surface. Today is World Oceans Day and as Brett Israel points out, they make up 70 percent of the planet's surface. And given that 95 percent remains unmapped, the marine realm is our generation's great unexplored frontier. After a disaster like the BP spill, images like this brown pelican drenched in oil remind us that we ought to be better stewards of oceans. But too often, we forget as soon as we turn the newspaper page or click a different url. Jeremy Jackson's right: We're wrecking oceans through overfishing, climate change, and pollution. So watch, listen, and most importantly, remember...

As archaeologists dug up the ancient corpse, something looked a little off. For one, it didn’t have a head. Second, one of the skeleton’s arms looked like it supported a lot more muscle than the other. Third, it seemed a lion had chewed on it.

Meet a dead Roman gladiator. Archaeologists uncovered around eighty such skeletons in York, England over the past seven years. Though they admit that the 1,600- to 1,800-year-old corpses might have had other origins, the researchers say all signs point to the ancient circus. A decapitated corpse suggests that individual got a thumbs down from the jeering crowds, the mismatched arms signify much swordplay, and the bite marks imply that a lion, tiger, or bear had taken a taste in battle.

Michael Wysocki, who examined the remains in the forensic anthropology laboratory at the University of Central Lancashire, discussed those tell-tale bite marks with CNN:

“Nothing like them has ever been identified before on a Roman skeleton…. It would seem highly unlikely that this individual was attacked by a tiger as he was walking home from the pub in York 2,000 years ago,” he said.

One other clue comes from the fact that the skeletons, despite their violent lives and deaths, had what appears a ceremonial burial, resting in their graves with some great ancient goodies (i.e. horse bones and cow remains, the believed leftovers from a feast). Still, archeologists speculate that none of these fighters were the stars of their day, and that many bit the dust after only one or two battles.

“You’re seeing the losers instead of the Russel Crowes,” archeologist Kurt Hunter-Mann said in a CNN video.

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Blue is for losers
DISCOVER: Dressed to Kill
DISCOVER: Gladiators Get a Thumbs Up
DISCOVER: Thumb and Thumber

Image: flickr / storem

A mathematician, a philosopher, a physicist, and an artificial intelligence expert get together to define the limits of human knowledge. Chaos ensues.

That’s the short version of Friday evening’s World Science Festival discussion, The Limits of Understanding, where panelists Gregory Chaitin, Rebecca Goldstein, Mario Livio, and Marvin Minsky bravely tackled the scientific and philosophical implications of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem for a packed house.

Gödel’s work has perplexed thinkers for decades, but the on-stage team dispensed with the basics pretty quickly. As philosopher Goldstein put it, Gödel’s infamous proof from 1931 revealed that “there are true propositions [in mathematics] that can’t be proved.” Livio took a stab at incompleteness via analogy to physics: “We physicists look for a theory of everything in physics; Gödel showed that there is no theory of everything in math.”

In keeping with the theme of a theorem that overflows with philosophical implications, the ensuing conversation leapt from Gödel’s proof to evolution, the effectiveness of mathematics at describing the universe, and even the nature of consciousness. (Consciousness, Minsky insisted, is not a single thing, but is actually a catch-all term philosophers and psychologists use for 26 distinct problems about the human mind that they don’t fully understand. It was around this time that the moderator, Nobel-prize-winning biologist Paul Nurse, announced that he was “giving up” on corralling the discussion.)

One of the more interesting ideas that crept up was whether, in the wake of Gödel, math can reveal any objective, independent truths that exist “out there” in the real world, or whether it’s just a system of rules built by humans, relying on our peculiar perceptions of the universe. Livio proposed a compromise: “Are we discovering mathematics, or inventing them? It might be an intricate combination: We invent concepts and then discover the relations among them,” he said, pointing to the square root of negative one—the imaginary unit—as an invention that opened up whole new realms of discovery in math.

As for Gödel, mathematician Chaitin’s take was probably the most honest and salient: “Eighty years later, we still don’t know what the hell Gödel proved,” he said. The audience seemed happy to agree with him on that one.

Related Content:
Discoblog: World Science Festival:Waiting for Einstein’s Gravity Waves
Discoblog: World Science Festival: The Science of Star Trek
Discoblog: World Science Festival: Telling Scary Stories of Strangelets
Discoblog: World Science Festival: Listening to Illusions of Sound
Discoblog: World Science Festival: The 4 Ways to Find E.T.

It took Turkish bees to make Israel flow with milk and honey.

When archaeologist Amihai Mazar and colleagues turned up 3,000-year-old remains of hundreds of preserved beehives from the ancient town of Tel Rehov in 2007, it was the first confirmation of the ancient beekeeping suggested by Egyptian paintings and Biblical references. Now, three years later, the team has published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences with the analysis of the “honeybee workers, drones, pupae, and larvae” found inside those hives. Surprise—they’re from Turkey, hundreds of miles away.

The findings “would imply an incredible amount of commodity trading of bees,” said bee expert Gene Kritsky of the College of Mount St. Joseph in Cincinnati, editor of American Entomologist. The importation of Italian bees to the United States in the 1860s “was thought to be a big deal then,” he said, “but the Israelis may have been doing this as far back as the first millennium BC” [Los Angeles Times].

Why go to all the trouble? The Syrian bees native to Israel are aggressive and uncooperative. The Turkish bees, by contrast, are more docile and much more efficient at honey-making: They produce eight times as much.

This ancient trade shows those beekeepers back then were skilled: Not only did they manage to move bee colonies across hundreds of miles of bouncy ancient roads, they also adapted Turkish bees to the hotter and drier climate of Israel. And the finding shows that modern beekeeping in Israel is just a little bit of history repeating:

In fact, “Jewish settlers in Israel in the 1900s may have unwittingly followed in the footsteps of the ancient bee-keepers of Tel Rehov,” says Bloch. When they arrived in Israel, they attempted to farm Syrian bees – but failed and had to resort to importing the less aggressive Turkish strains [New Scientist].

Related Content:
80beats: Bee Killer Still at Large; New Evidence Makes Pesticides a Prime Suspect
80beats: Honeybees Get High on Cocaine And Dance, Dance, Dance
DISCOVER: The Baffling Bee Die-Off Continues
DISCOVER: Who Killed All Those Honeybees? We Did
DISCOVER: The Alluring and Alien Sights of a Bee in Ultra Close-up (photo gallery)

Image: flickr / cygnus921

As we ramp up to the mid-term elections in November 2010 — sure to be just a warmup to the insanity that will be the Presidential election in 2012 — you can bet your bottom shekel that we’ll be hearing from a lot of "family values" politicians decrying our lack of morality. That’s de rigeur for any election, but every cycle it seems to get worse.

A lot of these claim that the United States is either a Christian nation — a ridiculous and easily-disprovable notion — or that it was founded on Judeo-Christian principles (the "Judeo" part is a giveaway that these politicians are Leviticans: they seem to keep their noses buried more in the fiery wrath of the Old Testament than in the actually gentle, politically-correct teachings of Jesus… more on this later, promise). Specifically, they claim quite often that our laws are based on the Ten Commandments.

I was thinking about this recently. People seem to accept that our laws are based on the morals of the Old Testament laid out in the Commandments, but as a proper skeptic, I decided to take a look myself. Why not go over the Commandments, said I to myself, and compare them to our actual laws, as well as the Constitution, the legal document framed by the Founding Fathers, and upon which our laws are actually based?

So I did*.

For those of you not familiar with the Bible — which includes many politicians most willing to thump it, it seems — what follows is the relevant passage from Exodus 20 in the King James Version^†. I found it online at the University of Michigan’s Digital Library, which matches other online versions I found. Note: apparently, God said some other stuff interspersed among the Commandments, a sort of legal commentary to stress the aspects He felt important. I have highlighted the actual Commandments below.

Let’s take a look:

[1] And God spake all these words, saying,
[2] I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
[3] Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
[4] Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth:
[5] Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;
[6] And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.
[7] Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.
[8] Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.
[9] Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work:
[10] But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates:
[11] For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.
[12] Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.
[13] Thou shalt not kill.
[14] Thou shalt not commit adultery.
[15] Thou shalt not steal.
[16] Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.
[17] Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s.

So let’s take these one at a time, and see how many points of U.S. law that overlap the Ten Commandments shalt rack up.

1) I am the LORD thy God… Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

OK, that’s clear enough. Obviously, God is saying He’s the only one, and all other religions that have other gods, or other versions of The One God, are wrong.

So let’s take a look at the Constitution, specifically the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;

Right away, we have a problem. That’s the very first thing laid out in the Bill of Rights, and I mean the very first sentence. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion."

What this says to me, and is pretty clear about it, is that we cannot make laws saying this god or that god is The God. Not only that, if you want to worship a god, any god, you have the legal right to do so.

Clearly, this very First Right of all Americans is in direct contradiction to the very first Commandment sent down by God. So people saying our laws are based on the Ten Commandments must never have even gotten to the first one of the ten. I guess they got to Exodus 19 and stopped.

Points: 0

Running total: 0

2) Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

Obviously, we have no laws governing this. As I understand it, this is a point of contention between many different sub-sections of Christianity, which is understandable. If you have a statue of, say Jesus, and you worship it, does it break this Commandment? Maybe you can claim it only represents God. I suppose transubstantiation is also something to consider here. But I wonder; sometimes people leave little offerings to statues and such, like when a statue of the Virgin Mary is seen to bleed, or when a religious icon appears in an overpass or a window. Is that a violation of this Commandment?

These sorts of arguments are interesting to me, but I’m not a religious scholar, so I’ll leave it for others to decide. The point is, no laws are on the books or in the Constitution to prevent that, and again the First Amendment says it’s OK to worship whomever you want.

So…

Points: 0

Running total: 0

3) Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain

Ah, another easy one. The very second phrase in the First Amendment states:

[Congress shall make no law] abridging the freedom of speech

There’s no codicil that says, "…except for taking the Lord’s name in vain", so I have to conclude the Constitution not only is not based on this Commandment, but directly contradicts it as well.

Points: 0

Running total: 0

4) Remember the sabbath day

Well, we do have Blue Laws in the US, restricting things like business practices (notably liquor sales) on Sunday. Of course, the Jews say the sabbath is from Friday night to Saturday night, and don’t see Sunday as being the sabbath at all, so interpreting this Commandment is a bit up in the air. But even ignoring that, most of these Blue Laws have — correctly — been repealed. Not only that, but I suspect that a lot of these politicians making claims about the Ten Commandments themselves work on Sundays (or even Saturdays).

Since we do in fact have laws based on this Commandment — even if they are unconstitutional — I’ll give this one half credit.

Points: 0.5

Running total: 0.5

5) Honour thy father and thy mother

This is good advice, certainly, and at the very least worth keeping in mind and even attempting in daily life. But is this the basis for any legal precedent? Children disrespect their parents all the time — I might even accept that as a definition of childhood. Of course, before they’re 18 we can’t toss a kid in jail for saying their dad is a poopyhead, but after they come into the majority… but then adult offspring still do all sorts of disrespectful things to their parents. Again, think as I might on this, I can’t come up with any laws (or any Constitutional statements) specifically saying you can’t be disrespectful. Sure, you can’t slander your parents, or libel them, or beat them up, or any number of other awful things. But you can’t do that to anyone, and those are illegal for other reasons, and don’t count.

Points: 0

Running total: 0.5

Intermission

So here we are, halfway through the Ten Commandments, and there is not yet one single thing they say that actually has legal precedent. Mind you, if I were God, I’d put the most important rules first, so I think even at this midway point we can safely say our laws are not based on the Ten Commandments. But it’s worth going through them all, and besides, I promised. I don’t want to be accused of bearing false witness.

6) Thou shalt not kill.

Now we’re getting somewhere. This action forbidden by God actually is illegal!

Now, I can argue that this particular action was objectionable long before the Ten Commandments were etched in stone. Heck, even some other primates apparently can grieve over the loss of other primates. So I don’t think we can actually state that our laws are based on this Commandment; it’s more like they have a common ancestor. Note too that the code of Ur-Nammu, which predates Moses by centuries, expressly forbad murder.

Also, people kill all the time, and it’s not necessarily illegal. Soldiers, for example, or killing in self defense. Some people say that the Commandment actually translates to "murder", which would then exclude my two examples. Fair enough. But either way, the Commandments can’t really claim first rights to this one.

However, I can’t rule out that our law is based on this Commandment; even if other civilizations had their own rules, ours may have a different pedigree. From what I’ve read, much of the rules laid out in the Constitution were taken from British law, and that itself may have roots traceable back to the Commandments.

Given all this, I can be generous, and give this one a full point.

Points: 1.0

Running total: 1.5

7) Thou shalt not commit adultery.

Well, we do have some laws dealing with this as well — though they are seldom enforced, and vary wildly from state to state. To be honest, I think these laws are silly, and I’m glad they’re not taken too seriously. If someone chooses to have adulterous relations outside their marriage, that’s up to them. If they have a contract — legal or emotional or personal — to someone else, and betray them in this way, then yeah, that’s pretty awful, and immoral. We’ve evolved to be mostly monogamous creatures, and we feel pretty bad when our mate goes off with someone else. But we do have the capability to exceed our evolutionary limitations. And what if both people in the relationship mutually agree to bring in a third party? Isn’t that up to them, and not some Senator who peeps into their bedroom window to decide?

Something like this, I suspect, should be taken on a case-by-case basis, and not have blanket laws thrown over everything. In this sense (and more things listed below), my feelings would fall under the purview of libertarianism. Mind you, there are some things that may be bad behavior but aren’t necessarily illegal. If you disagree with this, think about some bad behavior you personally might have, and ask yourself if they should be illegal. Bear in mind marijuana is illegal, but tobacco and alcohol aren’t. Hmmm.

Since few of these laws even exist, and those are on the wane — and not enforced — even half credit would be a stretch.

Points: 0

Running total: 1.5

8) Thou shalt not steal.

Well, sure. No quarrel here. And since a lot of the arguments behind this follow those of #6 above, I’ll have to give this a full point.

Still, something here bugs me. After all, this one’s a bit specific, don’t you think? I mean, if God went out of His way to start mentioning specific acts to be bad, why this one? Why not other ones that are generally considered to be more important? Sure, stealing is bad, but I’d rather someone steals a loaf of bread than rapes someone, for example. I would put rape much higher on the list even than adultery, too. What kind of legal or moral code would leave that act off its list of "Thou shalt nots"? I’ll note that the above-mentioned Code of Ur-Nammu made rape a capital crime.

Since we do have laws about this, and given #6, I’ll grant this a full point.

Points: 1.0

Running total: 2.5

9) Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.

Of all the Commandments, this is the one I like the best. Why? For one thing, as a skeptic and scientist, I think it’s incredibly important to be honest.

But another reason is schadenfreude. So many people who interpret the Bible literally seem to ignore this Commandment, like, for example, here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here. Say.

However, the strict interpretation of this Commandment is not simply lying. Bearing false witness is a phrase that implies you are lying in some sort of official capacity; for example, in front of a local judge or magistrate. In that case, it’s perjury, and illegal. Again, these rules are more ancient than the Commandments, but with #6 and #8 above, I’ll have to give this a full point.

Points: 1.0

Running total: 3.5

10) Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s.

I’m not a big fan of coveting. It’s more than simple jealousy, it’s the actual inordinate desire to possess something owned by or associated with someone else. It can be an ugly emotion, to be sure, but making it illegal would, I think, be overstepping the bounds of the legal system.

I’m also not so big on outlawing an emotion. Coveting is uncool, but there is a whole laundry list of negative emotions, many of which are ugly indeed. We don’t have laws against those, but it’s odd to me that the one emotion listed in the Commandments is coveting. Either way, this certainly argues against the idea that we’re basing our laws on the Commandments.

Flipping this around, there’s also a huge list of immoral actions that are illegal, but not mentioned in the Ten Commandments. Torture, for one. Waging false war would be up there pretty high on my list. Nepotism is a good one, too. I bet you can think of others.

Anyway, since we don’t have actual laws against coveting this one gets no credit.

Points: 0

Running total: 3.5

Conclusion

GRAND TOTAL: 3.5

Hmph. So at the very best — and I think I was generous — not even half the Commandments translate into law, and those that do have a suspicious pedigree. Moreover, the first four Commandments, and the ones that most pertain to religion and Judeo-Christianity specifically, are expressly forbidden by our Constitution (and the fifth is arguably unconstitutional as well). If the Founding Fathers really wanted our country’s system of laws to be based on the Commandments, then this is not an auspicious way to do it.

One might even think they were trying on purpose, very hard, to prevent such a thing.

Now, some people say that it’s not really our laws, but our morality that’s based on the Ten Commandments. I think that’s a silly claim as well, for many of the same reasons outlined above. Remember too that many civilizations had codes of ethics and legal systems that had similar ideas long before Moses climbed Mt. Sinai.

Moreover, reading through the teachings of Jesus, I see a lot of things like (paraphrasing a bit) "Be nice to each other", "Forgive one another", "Look at your own failings before sniping at someone else", and others. Not only are these not in the Ten Commandments, most of them aren’t even hinted at. Sure, not coveting and stealing your neighbor’s possessions is a good place to start for morality, but I think those could both be encompassed by saying "Your neighbor’s a person too, and you should respect that."

I might even claim that rule to be golden. Say.

So the Ten Commandments are clearly neither the moral nor legal basis of the United States of America. At best, you can say that 2 (rounding up) overlap our laws, but they are a hardly a basis for laws. And they fall far, far short of being a basis of morality. I would think a lot of the things (but not all of them!) in Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount would be in a better position for claims of our moral basis, but I don’t see anyone saying a transcript of that speech should be hung in a courtroom.

And it would be illegal in many cases to do so anyway.

Of course, nearly all politicians making claims about moral issues based on the Bible are themselves going against a whole lot of the things Jesus was pretty specific about. Go ahead and read the Sermon on the Mount, and ask yourself if the politicians so fond of bringing up that old-time religion are really following in the footsteps of the One they claim to follow.

^† I will ignore the list that is made in Deuteronomy 5, which is slightly divergent from the one in Exodus 20, or the Ritual Decalogue in Exodus 34 which is way, way different from what most people consider to be THE Ten Commandments. I’d include them as well, but that would be very inerrant of me.

It's received both tremendous praise and endless scorn. The president's science adviser and the National Science Teachers Association extol it. The New Atheists loathe it and have repeatedly attacked it. And today, after a whirlwind first year in print, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future officially debuts in paperback! Already over at Amazon.com, there are only two paperbacks now left in stock...but we're assured more are on the way. The paperback edition contains a new preface, addressing some of the questions and criticisms that earlier editions received. Without giving too much away:
* We consider the latest data on science and the U.S. public.
* We consider the impact of "ClimateGate" on the book's broader argument about science communication.
* We stand by and defend our "Chapter 8," about the New Atheism. * We identify the sector--guess which--where the most positive changes are occurring to bring science and the public into better relations.
*We propose new initiatives--and one in particular that seems to really inspire people--to further advance this goal. In addition, with the added perspective that a year in print makes possible, it is clear that Unscientific America emerged in the summer of 2009 at the front of a larger incoming wave in the scientific world--which ...