Last year, in July, something smacked Jupiter. Hard.

It was discovered when an amateur astronomer found a black spot marring Jupiter’s cloud tops. Followup observations saw the spot glowing in the infrared, meaning it was hot, and therefore was not just a storm (which are common). For real and for sure, something impacted Jupiter and exploded – and I mean exploded, releasing the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of nuclear weapons.

But what was it?

A new paper just published indicates that it was an asteroid that hit Jupiter. However, since it wasn’t seen beforehand, how do we know?

Because we’ve seen this sort of thing before. In 1994, the big planet was hit repeatedly by the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. The comet had broken up into dozens of pieces, including several chunks a kilometer or so across, and they slammed into Jupiter one after another over the course of a week. That was one of the most well-observed astronomical events in history; every telescope on the planet was focused on Jupiter at the time.

And telescopes off the planet were too: Hubble took a lot of data, and found two key differences between the 1994 and 2009 events.

One is that there was a halo of lighter debris around the comet impact points in 1994 (as seen in this image on the right), but no such halo around the 2009 impact site. That indicates that the impacting objects were different.

Also, Hubble observed Jupiter both times in the ultraviolet. Images like that show where small, lighter-weight particles fell from the impact because those particles absorb UV light, leaving dark spots. Even nearly two weeks later, dark spots on Jupiter were evident around the 1994 impact sites. Since comets have a lot of ices in them — what you might call frozen gases like ammonia, methane, and so on — that’s expected. The lighter particles floated around in Jupiter’s clouds, absorbing the UV for quite some time.

But observations from last year’s impact don’t show that behavior! As you can see in big the image above, the dark spot fades rapidly. That’s most likely due to the impact debris (made up of vaporized impactor plus material from Jupiter’s atmosphere that got heated and chemically altered) to sink beneath the clouds. That indicates the particles were heavier than the SL9 impact in 1994, pointing toward the impacting object being an asteroid, not a comet. This is also consistent with the lack of a halo as mentioned above; halos are also made by finer particles. The 2009 impact site lacking a halo means the particles were heavier, as you’d expect from an asteroid.

So even though we didn’t see the object before it hit, it left — haha! — a smoking gun pointing toward its origin.

And here’s a funny thing: this impact occurred 15 years to the week after the SL9 onslaught. I remember getting a lot of email asking me if that meant they were related, but if you think about it you’ll realize it has to be a coincidence: after all, why would Earth’s orbital period have to do with anything hitting Jupiter? And now we see that the object that hit was not comet-like, proving the point.

Asteroid and comet impacts are a real threat to us on Earth. Jupiter, being so much more massive than the Earth, is a bigger target; its gravity draws in more debris. By observing it we can get a better idea of just how much stuff is out there in the solar system, waiting to put the hurt on a planet, including our planet. Just in case you have any lingering doubts, astronomy is important. It is no exaggeration at all to say that learning about astronomy and astronomical events may very well save the human race one day.

Image credits: NASA, ESA, M. H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley), H. B. Hammel (Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.), I. de Pater (University of California, Berkeley), and the Jupiter Impact Team; HST Comet Team and NASA

Guess which astronomer with two thumbs was interviewed in this week’s A. V. Club section of The Onion?

This guy! OK, that joke works better if you could see me pointing at myself with my thumbs, but you get it. I hope.

Anyway, yeah, I was interviewed for America’s Finest News Source about end of the world scenarios as they pertain to terrible, terrible Hollywood movies. Of course, we talked asteroid impacts and that cinematic crapsterpiece, "Armageddon".

Despite my brilliant contributions, however, the article fails in two ways. One, in the online version they put me on page two (in the print version it’s like page 20). Page 2! The shame. And B, when it comes to 2012, they did a straight interview with John Major Jenkins, a guy who makes all sorts of weird claims about the Mayans. Apparently, unlike almost every 2012 crackpot out there, Jenkins says there’s nothing to worry about in 2012, but then goes on to say that the Mayans knew about a major Galactic alignment and loads of other things that are clearly wrong. I guess that makes him better than the chuckleheads claiming 2012 will see the Earth cracking in half like an egg or something, but by how much is unclear.

Still and all, the article is pretty in-depth and funny, and worth perusing just to relive all the times you’ve thrown away money on box-office sewage.

The town of Palmerston, Australia is now the unwilling host of a parrot frat party. Hundreds of lorikeets appear to be drunk: The disoriented birds are passing out cold and falling from tree branches.

Though seemingly inebriated parrots have been spotted before in Palmerston, never has the town seen this many at once. The situation concerns veterinarians, since the birds are injuring themselves, and, untreated, could die.

About eight lorikeets arrive each day to the Ark Animal Hospital, which cares for about thirty at a time. “They definitely seem like they’re drunk,” Lisa Hansen, a veterinary surgeon at the hospital told the the AFP. “They fall out of trees… and they’re not so coordinated as they would normally be. They go to jump and they miss the next perch.” Hansen and colleagues nurses them to health by feeding them a “hangover” broth that includes sweet fruit.

Literally drunk parrots have appeared in other parts of the world, for example in Austria in 2006, when birds ate rotting, fermenting berries. This time the inebriated birds remain a mystery: Some locals speculate that the birds are feasting on something something alcoholic, but others fear they have caught an unknown illness.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons / Mats Lindh

The tiny islands of the Pacific Ocean appear to be the very the picture of climate change vulnerability—some rise such a short distance above current sea level that it seems like any rise would swallow them up. The Earth’s climate system, though, is a great deal more complex than the simplistic rhetoric that fills the political echo chamber. That’s demonstrated again in a new study that argues some the Pacific’s low-lying islands are actually increasing slightly in land area rather than decreasing. It’s good news, yes—but not without caveats.

First, the specifics. Arthur Webb and Paul Kench published their work, based on decades of aerial and satellite photos, in the journal Global and Planetary Change. During the years spanned by those images, the sea level in the area has been rising by about 2 millimeters per year. Nevertheless, they say that 23 of the 27 Pacific islands they studies either held firm in land area or saw a slight increase. How could this be?

Unlike the sandbars of the eastern US coast, low-lying Pacific islands are made of coral debris. This is eroded from the reefs that typically circle the islands and pushed up onto the islands by winds, waves and currents. Because the corals are alive, they provide a continuous supply of material. “Atolls are composed of once-living material,” says Webb, “so you have a continual growth.” Causeways and other structures linking islands can boost growth by trapping sediment that would otherwise get lost to the ocean [New Scientist].

For the people of places like Kiribati, Tuvalu, and the Federated States of Micronesia, who fear the rising seas will swallow up their homes, the idea that these islands might have some kind of resistance to sea level rise is certainly a reprieve. Says Kench:

“We have now got the evidence to suggest that the physical foundation of these countries will still be there in 100 years, so they perhaps do not need to flee their country” [BBC News].

But even if Webb and Kench are right, it wouldn’t put the islands out danger in the longer term. As Kench notes, just having an island isn’t enough:

“An important question is — if islands still exist, will they still be able to carry human communities?” [AFP].

This study measures only total land area. It doesn’t consider the nature of that land, nor the effects of a shape-shifting island on the people who actually live there.

Even on islands where the total land mass is stable or grows, one area may be eroded while another is being added to. It’s not possible to simply move people living in highly urbanised areas to new land, says Naomi Biribo of the University of Wollongong in New South Wales, Australia [New Scientist].

Furthermore, it’s not known whether that influx of coral sediment that recharges the islands with material could keep up if sea level rise accelerated past its current pace. And the coral reefs themselves that supply this material aren’t in the best of shape, either—marine scientists worry that they won’t be able to cope with the increasing acidification of the ocean, which is another effect of rising carbon dioxide levels.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

All over the world, people greet, talk, eat, dance and celebrate according to their own cultural practices. We’re not the only species with such traditions. Chimpanzees have rich cultural traditions that determine how they forage for food, communicate, groom each other and wield tools. Other species with their own local customs, including orang utans, monkeys, dolphins and killer whales, are all united by their vaunted intelligence. But another mammal with a comparatively smaller brain has just joined this cultural club – the banded mongoose.

Corsin Muller from the University of Exeter gave wild mongooses a plastic shell containing some food (like a reverse Kinder egg). He found that adults preferred to break into the shells using one of two possible tactics, and that they passed on these traditions to their pups.

The results earn some kudos for the humble mongoose, but they’re important because our evidence for animal traditions has always come from studies that compared the practices of wild populations, or that ran carefully controlled experiments in captive groups. This is the first time that anyone has used experiments to show that wild mammals pass on traditions by imitating one another.

Banded mongooses live in large groups of up to 40 individuals, who cooperate to find food and raise their young. Muller worked with five such groups in Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park. Banded mongooses eat an eclectic menu of insects, centipedes, small reptiles, eggs and even mice. Many of their snacks come in a hard shell that needs to be cracked and mongooses do so either by biting them or smashing them against a stone or tree trunk.

Individuals have clear preferences about these two techniques. When Muller gave the adults his plastic shell, containing a mix of rice and fish, he found that some were exclusive biters, others only smashed and yet others used a combination. Critically, they were stuck in their ways. When Muller tested them three months later, they each showed the same preferences.

He also found these adults transferred their preferences to the pups who watched them. Banded mongoose pups form exclusive one-to-one associations with specific adults who act as their mentors. These adults are usually young males, who aren’t necessarily related to the pup, and the youngster will aggressively monopolise the attentions of these chaperones.

Around 2-4 months after the adults infiltrated their Kinder surprises, Muller gave their attendant pups (now independent) their own eggs to break into. Even though none of them had seen the toy eggs in the intervening time, they showed a significant preference for the technique that their mentors had used. Those who saw an adult bite the toys open did the same themselves; those whose mentors liked to smash copied that strategy instead; and those whose mentors had ignored their toy eggs were themselves uninterested. These preferences even persisted as the pups grew into adults.

Muller’s study expands on experiments with other captive species in a number of ways. In finding the same trend in all five groups of mongooses, he added some valuable replication to his study, which is often missing from experiments that focus on one group of captive animals. Muller showed that multiple traditions can coexist within a single population. And he showed that animals don’t need big brains to pass on traditions across the generations. It may be that such traditions are more commonplace than previously thought.

Reference: Current Biology http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2010.04.037

Photo by Reini68; video by Corsin Muller

More on animal cultures

• Chimps prefer to copy others with prestige
• Culture shapes the tools that chimps use to get honey
• How dolphins prepare the perfect cuttlefish meal

This animation is a pretty good lesson in chemistry … but I’m not sure it’s all that safe for little kids.

No, that helium atom was not me in middle school. But I never dated the Hydrogen twins either. I guess my life is a little bit more Boron than Oxygen.

Tip o’ the O₂ tank to BIL Chris Setter.

All aboard for fake Mars!

Earlier today, a six-man crew battened down the hatches on an 1,800-square-foot module for 520 days of isolation as they pretend to go to Mars and back again. The Mars-500 project, run by the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems (IBMP) and funded in part by the European Space Agency, hopes to test the psychological mettle required for such a journey.

“See you in 520 days!” shouted Russia’s Sukhrob Kamolov as he was sealed inside the simulator at around 1000 GMT. [Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty]

The trip will have three stages, including the trip to and from Mars and a simulated landing and planet exploration.

Psychologists said the simulation can be even more demanding that a real flight because the crew won’t experience any of the euphoria or dangers of actual space travel. They have also warned that months of space travel would push the team to the limits of endurance as they grow increasingly tired of each other. [AP]

Using a variety of unforeseen (for the crew at least) simulated disasters, the project managers hope to keep the men on their feet.

Dr. Maggie Aderin-Pocock, a space scientist with the satellite manufacturer EADS Astrium and a strong advocate of a manned mission to Mars, believes that the experiment will be extremely valuable–but expects that the main difference between a real and simulated voyage will be the difficulty for the crew in maintaining motivation. “I think the main challenge for them will be trying to maintain motivation for a long period of time,” she says. “It’s far less likely this would be a problem if you really were going to Mars. But the danger is that because you know you’re really in a hangar in Moscow, you start thinking: ‘I can’t be bothered’.” [BBC]

During their voyage, the team of three Russians, a Frenchman, an Italian-Colombian and a Chinese will eat canned food similar to that on the International Space Station, have limited communication with the outside world, shower once every ten days, and play video games. One crew member brought a guitar to entertain the others. Why they didn’t recruit college freshmen, we don’t know.

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Image: ESA

This is a guest post from Vanessa Woods, author of the new book, Bonobo Handshake. Vanessa is a Research Scientist in Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University and studies the cognition of chimpanzees and bonobos in Congo. Here is the latest from Martin Subeck - who I met a few years ago at Lola ya Bonobo sanctuary in Congo. The first thing about Martin is he's an excellent scientist working with Gottfried Hohmann, who is one of the best. The second thing is, that like Max the bonobo, Martin is really really ridiculously goodlooking. Anyway, I digress. Martin saw something totally cool - bonobos cannibalizing an infant - cool because it's the first time something like this happened. So I was blogging about it on my other blog, bonobo handshake, and I got messages like:
Dave H. said...
Why do you "wonder if the infant was killed by a high ranking male"? In chimpanzees it has always been the adult females that killed and ate their groupmates' offspring. The male chimps have only been seen killing juveniles from other groups. And it would make no sense for a high ranking male to kill what may very well have been his offspring. Anyway, from the New ...

Contraceptive efficacy of polyester-induced azoospermia in normal men.

“Every 2 weeks, a physician at the Faculty of Medicine at Cairo University in Egypt examined 14 32-47 year old male volunteers wearing a polyester scrotal sling day and night for 12 months to determine if polyester fabrics can act as a contraceptive in men. They changed the sling only when it became dirty. None of the men dropped out of the study. The sling did not cause any complications or reactions. Their partners took an oral contraceptive until 3 sperm samples proved the men to be azoospermic. The men became azoospermic from 120-160 days (mean 139.6 days) after 1st putting on the sling. They remained azoospermic throughout the study. None of the partners became pregnant during the study. All 5 couples who wanted a pregnancy after the study period did indeed conceive. 4 had normal live births and 1 a miscarriage. The volume of their testicles fell greatly from 22.2-18.6 sd ml during the 12 months (p.05), but returned to pretest levels 75-135 days after removal. Further the mean rectal-testicular temperature difference was lower 3 months after wearing the sling than it was before they wore it (1.3-3 degrees Celsius; p.001). 3 months after they stopped wearing the sling, the mean rectal-testicular temperature difference reverted to normal. The polyester in the sling generated greater electrostatic potentials during the day than at night (326-395 volt/sq. cm. vs. 142-188 volt/sq. cm.; p.01). This was a result of the friction between the scrotum and the polyester sling. Germ cells of the seminiferous tubules still exhibited degenerative changes 6 months after removal of the sling. Within 140-170 days after removal, sperm concentration levels returned to pretest levels (40 million/ml). Apparently the electrostatic field effect and the disordered thermoregulatory effect of the polyester sling produced azoospermia. In conclusion, the sling is a safe, acceptable, inexpensive, and reversible method of contraception in men.”

Bonus Figure:

"Figure 2: Diagrammatic illustration of the electrostatic potentials created on the polyester suspensor and the scrotal sac. The electrostatic field is demonstrated."

Image: flickr/Whatsername?

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WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

Just how connected are the Jews, genetically speaking? Despite the fact that pockets of Jewish people are spread around the globe, the new genetic analysis by Harry Ostrer and his team says that they share genetic markers that go back thousands of years.

In the study in the American Journal of Human Genetics, Ostrer investigated Jewish people from all over the world:

Historians divide the world’s 13 million living Jews into three groups: Middle Eastern, or Oriental, Jews; Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal; and Ashkenazi Jews from Europe [ScienceNOW].

Taking nuclear DNA samples from 237 Jews—some from each group—the team compared them to samples from more than 400 non-Jewish people who lived in the same regions.

The authors found that not only did the Jewish group as a whole constitute a distinct population cluster, but that one by one each of the three Diaspora subgroups themselves also represented a distinct cluster within the larger Jewish group. They further noted that the two largest subgroups — Middle Eastern Jews and European Jews — were found to have split off from one another about 2,500 years back [BusinessWeek].

Within the Jewish subgroups, the study found, people are about as closely related as fourth or fifth cousins. That isn’t a surprise, but the analysis clears up some of the origin stories of different Jewish peoples. That’s especially the case regarding the Ashkenazi, who account for the vast majority of Jews living in the United States.

Some writers, notably Arthur Koestler in his 1976 book The Thirteenth Tribe, have argued that the Ashkenazis stem from a Turkic tribe in Central Asia called the Khazars, who converted to Judaism in the 8th century. And historian Shlomo Sand of Tel Aviv University in Israel argues in his book The Invention of the Jewish People, translated into English last year, that most modern Jews do not descend from the ancient Land of Israel but from groups that took on Jewish identities long afterward [ScienceNOW].

The relatedness is also a confirmation that history can show up in the genome—even specific events.

Historical records suggest there were about 50,000 Ashkenazi Jews in 1400 and that the number expanded to 5 million by 1800, one of the largest population booms ever recorded, Ostrer says. That bottleneck and population explosion is also recorded in the DNA, his team found [Science News].

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Image: flickr / katmere

The Falcon 9 rocket blasted away from its Florida launch pad this afternoon, marking a major victory for the private space company SpaceX. The company, founded by the daring entrepreneur Elon Musk, hopes to build space taxis for NASA that can ferry cargo and crew to the International Space Station.

As we reported earlier today, Musk downplayed expectations for the test launch. But judging from the company’s live webcast, the procedure appeared to go remarkably well. Three minutes after liftoff the two stages of the rocket separated and the second stage’s engines ignited; nine minutes after liftoff the rocket achieved Earth orbit.

SpaceX verified that the rocket reached orbit, but hasn’t released any further information yet (stay tuned for details). If all continued to go as planned, SpaceX engineers are now studying the dummy version of the crew module, called the Dragon Spacecraft, that went up with the rocket and is now orbiting the planet. The plan called for Dragon to make several orbits and then reenter the Earth’s atmosphere and splash down in the Pacific Ocean, where SpaceX could retrieve it for study.

Today’s successful launch also gives a boost to President Obama’s proposal to let private space companies take over the routine tasks of space flight, allowing NASA to set its sights higher–a plan that has been met with considerable opposition. Following the Falcon 9’s launch, NASA administrator Charles Bolden praised the company in a statement:

“Congratulations to Space X on today’s launch of its Falcon 9 launch vehicle. Space X’s accomplishment is an important milestone in the commercial transportation effort and puts the company a step closer to providing cargo services to the International Space Station.” [NASA]

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Image: SpaceX

SpaceX, a private company that is developing the capability to launch both manned and unmanned missions into space, today successfully launched their Falcon 9 launch vehicle into orbit from Cape Canaveral in Florida. This is the rocket that is designed to eventually deliver Dragon spacecraft to low Earth orbit, including to the International Space Station. It was quite a thrill to watch the launch live on webcam — there was one little glitch that delayed the flight at the very moment of planned launch, but they quickly recovered and made a successful attempt within today’s launch window. Congratulations to SpaceX!

Video via Steinn.

Show them the money: The winners of the Kavli Prizes have been announced, and the eight scientists will split a total of $3 million in prize money.

No, these aren’t the Nobels. The Kavlis are a relatively new award created to award scientists whose fields don’t get much recognition in Stockholm:

These are only the second ever recipients of Kavli Prizes, the biennial awards launched in 2008 by Fred Kavli. Recipients in the fields of astrophysics, neuroscience and nanoscience each receive a scroll, a gold medal and (perhaps most importantly) a share of the $1 million pot for each discipline [Nature].

1. Astrophysics

The prize recognized three men—Jerry Nelson, Roger Angel, and Raymond Wilson—not for finding new phenomena deep in the cosmos, but for engineering the telescopes to make those searches possible. Nelson and Angel are renowned for their prowess in casting the mirrors for the largest telescopes on Earth; Nelson’s work will go into the Thirty Meter Telescope, for which Mauna Kea in Hawaii was just chosen as the preferred location.

Dr. Wilson pioneered the use of a technology known as active optics, in which computer-controlled supports correct the shapes of telescope mirrors to cancel the distortions caused by gravity, wind and temperature, allowing astronomers to build mirrors that are thinner and lighter [The New York Times].

2. Nanotech

Nadrian Seeman of New York University and Donald Eigler of IBM shared the recognition for nanotech.

Seeman discovered that DNA — the genetic material of living creatures — could be used to construct an assortment of molecule-sized devices and machines. In a recent study published in the science journal “Nature,” Seeman and others showed how they built from DNA a functioning assembly line of molecular robots [AP].

Eigler, more than two decades ago, became the first person to accurately move atoms from place to place. Famously, he used 35 xenon atoms to spell out “IBM”—perhaps nanotechnology’s version of a marching band spelling out its college’s name on the football field.

3. Neuroscience

This prize went for communication across the brain, and Thomas Suedhof, Richard Scheller, and James Rothman shared the accolades. Rothman, of Yale, investigated the vesicles in the brain that move neurotransmitters between cells. Suedhof and Scheller discovered much of the genetics that underlie these structures.

“These three people took the study of communication between synapses and brought it from a physiological to molecular level,” neuroscientist Eric Kandel of Columbia University and member of the Kavli committee [San Jose Mercury News].

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Image: Thirty Meter Telescope Observatory Corp; IBM; iStockphoto

The latest episode of Point of Inquiry has just gone up. My guest this week is Naomi Oreskes, science historian and author (with Eric Conway) of the new book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. You can stream the eposide here, and download/subscribe here. Here's part of the write up: Through extensive archival research, Oreskes and Conway have managed to connect the dots between a large number of seemingly separate anti-science campaigns that have unfolded over the years. It all began with Big Tobacco, and the famous internal memo declaring, “Doubt is our Product.”
Then came the attacks on the science of acid rain and ozone depletion, and the flimsy defenses of Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” program. And the same strategies have continued up to the present, with the battle over climate change.
Throughout this saga, several key scientific actors appear repeatedly—leaping across issues, fighting against the facts again and again. Now, Oreskes and Conway have given us a new and unprecedented glimpse behind the anti-science curtain. Once again, you can stream the eposide here, download/subscribe here--and order Merchants of Doubt here.

How do you hunt for extraterrestrial life? You visit other planets, you find new planets, you study our own planet, or you listen.

All four methods came together last night at the World Science Festival when four speakers took part in a conversation called, simply, “The Search for Life in the Universe.” When you put four lively scientists with four different ways of thinking on a stage together, consensus isn’t the first thing to emerge. But the panel could agree on one thing: If you yearn to know whether we’re alone in the universe, it’s a hell of a time to be alive.

1. Mars

Steve Squyres of Cornell University is one of the project leads on the Mars rovers, those endurance robots Spirit and Opportunity that continue sending back Martian data. Spirit may be stuck, but in this week’s edition of the journal Science, Squyres’ team has published a new study based on information the rover found at a rock outcropping called Comanche about four years ago.

Spirit found evidence of carbonates that would have formed in the presence of water. The rover had done that before, but what’s exciting now, Squyres says, is that the chemistry of these new carbonate finds show they formed in water of a more neutral pH, rather than the more acidic circumstances that would have formed prior carbonate finds.

That water no longer flows on the martian surface, but “this points to more life-friendly conditions” billions of years ago, he said.

2. A Second Earth?

Humans have long imagined faraway planets around other stars, Harvard astronomer David Charbonneau said. “We are all alive at this magical moment when we have the technical ability to find those planets.”

The count of known exoplanets now stands at greater than 400, and astronomers have found most of those by one of two methods. There’s the wobble, in which astronomers spy a star jostled ever so slightly by its planet’s gravity. It’s like watching a dance, Charbonneau said, “it’s just that one of the dance partners is 1,000 times heavier than the other.” Secondly, there’s the transit method, in which a planet passes in front of its star and dims the star slightly, giving away its presence.

Charbonneau is also a member of the Kepler Space Telescope team. It launched last year with the express purpose of exoplanet hunting, and at the World Science Festival he predicted it would find a truly Earth-like world in two to three more years (he’s gotten close already). Plus, in 2014, exoplanet hunters will get another assist from this bad boy, the James Webb Space Telescope, a full-scale replica of which is currently on display in Battery Park.

3. Science Staycation

“This is my favorite planet, I have to say.”

Michael J. Russell is the most Earth-focused of the four panelists who spoke last night. And he might be the most convinced that Earth is not alone in harboring life. As someone who studies the emergence of life on our homeworld, especially the possibility that it emerged in the pressure cooker of deep-sea vents, Russell is impressed by the reach and expansion of life here. And that’s a good sign for life elsewhere in the universe.

What can Earth tell us about life on distant worlds? Life, Russell says, leaves evidence of itself in the waste it leaves behind. It accelerates chemical reactions—through photosynthesis, for example. Says Russell: “The question isn’t, ‘What is life?’ What we should ask is, ‘What does life do?’”

4. SETI

Zeta rays. Zeta rays are the key.

OK, I don’t know what zeta rays are, and neither does Jill Tarter, longtime member of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). The point is that we’re using technologies and weird physics that we didn’t know about a half-century ago when SETI was founded. Given our location in the galaxy, she says, any civilization that might like to contact us probably has had more time to mature. “We can be fairly confident that we are the youngest,” she said.

Thus, we use the methods we know—like optical and radio signals—to search for alien intelligences. But they might be trying to reach us with zeta rays, or some other crazy thing we haven’t discovered yet. That, plus the great vastness of the galaxy, tells Tarter that 50 years of nothing but silence doesn’t mean SETI is a failure. It means they’re just getting started.

[Read more about SETI's first 50 years in the feature "Call Waiting" in the July/August issue of DISCOVER, on newsstands soon.]

So what if it’s out there?

“First of all, I’m going to take a drink of champagne,” Tarter said.

In case you were worried, SETI does have a plan in place for its response to an alien signal. Tarter says the scientists won’t attempt to respond themselves, but would rather tell the world and try to reach a global consensus for our planet’s next move.

Right… “global consensus.” Tarter concedes that this sounds great on paper and is probably impossible to achieve. But in a socially connected world, maybe we can just take a vote on whether or not we want to tell E.T. we’re here.

That plan, of course, would apply only if we found intelligent life. But if we detected even “pond scum,” Squyers said, the achievement would be monumental. He’s willing to accept that habitable environments proliferate throughout the galaxy. Even in our own solar system, promising locales for life like the moons Europa and Titan lie outside what we would call the “Goldilocks Zone.” But finding that life independently arose twice just in our own tiny solar system would mean to him that the universe is “teeming with life.”

I hope it is.

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A couple of weeks ago we heard news that the Tevatron at Fermilab, soon to be superseded by the LHC at CERN as the world’s cutting-edge high-energy particle accelerator, might not be completely out of surprises just yet. The D0 experiment released results that seemed to indicate an asymmetry between the properties of matter and antimatter, at a level just a smidgen above what you need to claim a statistically significant result. Blogs started chattering right away, of course, but this was big enough news to be splashed across the front page of the New York Times.

The measurement concerns the decay of B mesons — particles consisting of one bottom (b) quark and one lighter antiquark, or vice-versa. If the other quark is a down, the corresponding meson B_d is electrically neutral, as is its antiparticle. They can therefore practically indistinguishable, and can oscillate back and forth between each other. The one difference is that the meson and anti-meson decay a little bit differently; this has been studied in great detail at B-factories, with results that have been very useful in determining values of parameters in the Standard Model of Particle Physics.

The new D0 results use a different kind of particle — the B_s meson, in which a strange quark rather than a down quark is stuck to the bottom quark. They measured the relative rate of decay of the B_s and its antiparticle, and found a discrepancy that appears inconsistent — barely — with the Standard Model. In particular, they looked at decays that produced muons or anti-muons.

You would expect that a single collision would produce one B_s and one anti-B_s, and that one would decay into a muon and the other into an anti-muon. But because the neutral B mesons can oscillate into their own antiparticles, sometimes you will get decays into the same kind of particle — both muons, or both anti-muons. If matter and antimatter were completely symmetric, each possibility should happen equally often; 50% of the time you’d get two muons, and 50% of the time you’d get two anti-muons. But you don’t; D0 reports that they see muons more often than anti-muons. That breaks the symmetry between matter and antimatter, and in a way that doesn’t seem compatible with the Standard Model. If the only thing going on was ordinary Standard Model interactions, the discrepancy should be too small to be observed by the experiment. That’s what all the excitement is about.

Like most just-barely-significant results, this one is very likely to ultimately go away once more data are obtained. Indeed, the competing CDF experiment at Fermilab has already indicated that they don’t see the effect. But you never know.

And after that lengthy introduction, what I actually wanted to say is: I find the way that exciting results about matter/antimatter asymmetry are marketed to be somewhat annoying. (I know you are fascinated to hear about my pet peeves.)

In technical jargon, what’s actually being measured is CP violation. Built into the framework of quantum field theory, which is the basis for all of modern particle physics, are three different “reflection” symmetries — transformations with the property that, if you do them twice, you come back to where you started. One is time reversal, labeled T; one is parity or mirror symmetry, labeled P; and one is “charge conjugation”, or matter-antimatter exchange, labeled C. Every one of them was originally believed to be a symmetry, i.e. that the behavior of matter stayed the same under these transformations; in every case, we were wrong and Nature chooses to violate them. We still believe that the combination of all three, labeled CPT, is a good symmetry, but by now we’re a bit more open-minded.

Charge conjugation C is violated pretty blatantly in the standard model. Fermions — “matter” particles like quarks and leptons, in contrast to bosons that are “force” particles like photons and gluons — come in right-handed and left-handed varieties. These are related by parity; if you have a right-handed particle and you do a P transformation, you get a left-handed particle. The weak interactions of particle physics, as it turns out, only involve left-handed fermions and right-handed antifermions; the right-handed fermions and left-handed antifermions simply don’t feel the weak interactions at all. Charge conjugation would change a left-handed electron, which does feel the weak interactions, into a left-handed positron, which does not. That’s a pretty easy difference to detect, so C is dramatically violated in the Standard Model.

But the combination CP changes a left-handed electron into a right-handed positron, both of which do feel the weak interactions. So this is a good symmetry — almost. It turns out that much more subtle effects do violate CP (including the decays of B mesons). Nobel Prizes were handed out for the experimental discovery in 1980, and for the theoretical background in 2008.

So CP violation is interesting — it’s a deep feature of particle physics, representing a breakdown of a fundamental symmetry, for which Nobel Prizes are handed out on multiple occasions. But that’s doesn’t seem juicy enough to some people. Whenever a new result concerning CP violation is announced, it’s never enough to give the kind of explanation I just did. It’s always couched in terms of “Why are we here?”

The point is that CP violation plays a crucial role in baryogenesis, the mysterious process that accounts for the excess of matter over antimatter in our actual universe. Long ago Andrei Sakharov showed that you couldn’t generate such an imbalance unless you violated CP. And baryogenesis is very important — we wouldn’t be here, blogging, if there were equal numbers of particles and antiparticles in the universe.

So in some general terms, the subject of CP violation and the subject of “Why are we here?” are intertwined. But not that much. The logic seems to be something like this:

1. CP violation has something to do with baryogenesis.
2. This experiment has something to do with CP violation.
3. Therefore, this experiment has something to do with baryogenesis.

I’ll leave it to the trained philosophers in the audience to find the logical flaw in that argument. Try substituting “George Washington” and “cherry trees” for “CP violation” and “baryogenesis.”

The point is that the conclusion doesn’t hold — not everything about CP violation is necessarily related to baryogenesis. We don’t know how baryogenesis actually happened — there are many theories on the market, and any of them or none of them may be right. Therefore, there’s no way of knowing whether any particular manifestation of CP violation is in any way related to baryogenesis. There could be lots of different ways in which CP is violated. In particular, there’s no compelling theoretical reason why the CP violation being studied in the decays of B mesons has anything at all to do with baryogenesis. It’s possible — lots of things are possible. But what’s being studied isn’t baryogenesis; it’s CP violation.

So why isn’t that enough? The answer is obvious — explaining why we are here seems to be something that a wider audience can get excited by more directly than studying the details of a slightly-broken symmetry. The only problem is that it’s not true; these experiments aren’t really studying why we are here.

We can’t blame journalists for this one; here is a case where they are just reporting what the scientists tell them, and the scientists are quite willing to be shameless. I understand the motivation for being shameless — it’s hard to explain the details, and the results are legitimately interesting. But ultimately I don’t think it’s right to say untrue things in the name of getting people excited about true things.

I would therefore like to see particle physicists take a slightly more honest tack about the importance of CP violation. It’s perfectly okay to say that it gives us insight into the difference between matter and antimatter — that’s true. And that should be enough! It’s not okay to say that it gives us insight into the imbalance between matter and antimatter in our observable universe; it’s completely possible (even likely) that such a statement is simply false. If we get people excited about what we’re doing by causing them to misunderstand what that actually is, we’re ultimately not winning.

Stolichnaya or Grey Goose, martinis shaken or stirred: Everybody’s got a preference. Vodka may not taste like much—in industry terms, it’s neutral—but any bartender can tell you about the fierce partisanship its different types inspire. This division among drinkers, a new study suggests, could be a result of slight differences in the vodkas’ molecular structure.

Vodka is about 60 percent water by volume, and 40 percent ethanol, an alcohol. The water and ethanol naturally mingle in such close quarters, and some of the molecules stick together in interesting ways.

Researchers at the University of Cincinnati and Moscow State University compared the chemical composition of five common brands—Belvedere, Grey Goose, Oval, Skyy, and Stolichnaya—to see if those water-ethanol groupings always happen the same way. They found that two of the vodkas had a higher concentration a certain cage-like chemical structure, in which five or so molecules of water surround each ethanol molecule. This difference, the researchers say, might explain our preferences for one brand over another. It’s even possible that the act of shaking a vodka martini breaks up those cage structures.

It’s not clear if such a subtle change in molecular make-up could affect taste, or even that those cage-like structures hold together long enough to have much of an impact at all. So for now, it may be wise to take this explanation with a grain of salt—and, while you’re at it, maybe a few olives.

– by Valerie Ross

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Image: flickr / paPisc

The scene is set at Cape Canaveral: Atop the two-stage Falcon 9 rocket sits a dummy of the Dragon Spacecraft capsule that could one day taxi cargo and astronauts to and from the International Space Station. This will be the first launch of the the rocket, built by the privately-owned company SpaceX and funded in part by a $1.6 billion contract with NASA. The Falcon 9 should take off between 11 this morning and 3 in the afternoon (eastern daylight time), though the company has reserved a second launch window for tomorrow. Currently, a live feed of the launch pad shows the rocket primed to go, but announces a launch delay of unknown duration.

SpaceX’s ultimate goals for this test, as described on the company’s website: “launch and separate from Falcon 9, orbit Earth, transmit telemetry, receive commands, demonstrate orbital maneuvering and thermal control, re-enter atmosphere, and recover Dragon spacecraft.” This is a pretty big wish list, since many first launches have failed, including several of SpaceX’s own early attempts with the Falcon 9’s predecessor, the smaller Falcon 1 rocket. So SpaceX company founder Elon Musk hedged his bets when asked what he expected from the Falcon 9’s debut launch.

Historically, the maiden flights of rockets have a notoriously high failure rate. Some two-thirds of the rockets introduced in the past 20 years have had an unsuccessful first outing. “A 100% success would be reaching orbit,” Mr Musk told reporters on the eve of the launch, “but I think given this is a test flight, even if we prove out just that the first stage works correctly – that will have been a good day. And it will be a great day if both stages work correctly.” [BBC]

The Dragon’s voyage to orbit will last about 10 minutes. If successful, the capsule, capable of carrying 13,000 pounds, will later provide supplies to the ISS and also carry satellites into orbit. SpaceX has kept human spaceflight in mind as they designed the capsule, but fitting it for humans (the company says seven passengers could fit inside) would require an estimated three years and a contract with the International Space Station. As reported by The Wall Street Journal, the company has developed this system at a fraction of the cost that big name competitors like Boeing and Lockheed Martin needed to design the current generation of rockets, and the indefatigable company hasn’t given in to early criticism from the likes of the U.S. Air Force.

“There are a lot of critics out there we wouldn’t convince under any circumstances,” Mr. Musk said in an interview earlier this year. “There is zero chance of [NASA] affording another Apollo program” and funding it with tax dollars, he said. “If we want to do great things on that scale again, it’s going to be for a much smaller budget.” One that relies on commercial entities providing and operating spacecraft at discounted prices. “The best thing that NASA can do is define the goal, but not define the path.” [Wall Street Journal]

Others at SpaceX echo Musk’s definition of success, noting that even if the ship fails to meet today’s goals that is could provide information to make later launch attempts.

“If the vehicle lifts off the pad, no matter what the outcome is, we’re going to learn something that’s going to make the second flight more likely and the third flight and the fourth flight,” added Ken Bowersox, a SpaceX vice president and former NASA astronaut.[Reuters]

If successful, next steps will include first an ISS fly-by and later a docking with the station.

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Image: SpaceX

Anthony Wesley, who discovered the impact event on Jupiter yesterday, has posted a lovely color image of the flash:

Wow. He was only taking greyscale video, but put together a three-color composite and added in the data from the flash. So this image is not precisely real, but on the other hand is no less real than other astronomical images. He has also posted a greyscale video of the flash which is pretty tremendous, too. It’s also up on YouTube:

Note the ring of light just around the flash itself, just barely visible around the central point. That’s probably not a physical halo; it’s an artifact of how telescopes and detectors see bright point sources — the way the light spreads out in an optical system is called the point spread function. Many Hubble images of stars, for example, show the same ring.

By coincidence, the impact point appears to be near the edge of where the South Equatorial Belt on Jupiter is. That’s the belt that disappeared recently. That’s guaranteed to be a coincidence; the belt vanished many weeks ago. And I expect some folks will ask if the impact may affect the belt. My gut says no. You have to appreciate the scale of what you’re seeing here: Jupiter is 140,000 km (86,000 miles) across — 11 times the diameter of the Earth! In this picture, the Earth wouldn’t even stretch across the North Equatorial Belt, the dark red band above Jupiter’s equator.

So even though this explosion may have been the equivalent of thousands of nuclear weapons all blowing up at once, it probably will only have a passing and unnoticeable effect on Jupiter’s weather. But note: I’m guessing. Jupiter is a complex and weird planet.

Also, a lot of people are asking how this can be an impact if Jupiter isn’t solid. After all, what’s getting hit?

Again, remember the scale. What you’re seeing on Jupiter is the tops of its clouds, which are tens of thousands of kilometers deep. When a large rock enters at high speed — and with Jupiter’s gravity, those speeds can reach 80 km/sec (50 miles/sec) or more — it slams into the air and feels a huge amount of pressure. Moving at hypersonic speeds, it compresses the gas violently, and the gas heats up. The rocks slows, converting its enormous energy of motion into heat. It also starts to break up due to stress, creating many smaller chunks. These each slam the gas and heat it, and also get stressed. They fall apart, creating smaller chunks… and at some moment, usually just seconds after everything starts, the pieces are so small they burn up completely due to the heat, dumping all their energy all at once into the atmosphere. This happens so suddenly, and the energy release so vast, it’s by any definition an explosion.

The bigger the rock, and the faster it moves, the more explosive energy it releases. A rock 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) across moving at 80 km/sec will explode with the energy of almost <Dr. Evil>one million one-megaton bombs</Dr. Evil>.

So that’s why you don’t need to hit anything solid to make a big boom.

By the way, had this event happened here on Earth with the same energy release, it wouldn’t be an extinction level event like the dinosaur killer, but it would — not to get too technical or anything — suck mightily. Anything within hundreds of kilometers would be totaled and burning, global weather patterns would be affected, and even though it wouldn’t kill everybody, I expect there would be a global economic collapse that would cripple the planet. And I wonder if some governments might see this as an opportune time to attack any pesky neighbors… happily, on average an impact this large is extremely rare, like once every half million years or so.

It’s not clear how often Jupiter gets hit, and this is only the third confirmed impact we’ve seen (along with the Shoemaker Levy 9 comet impact in 1994, and last year’s asteroid impact also discovered by Wesley). But with amateurs getting more sophisticated in their technique and equipment, expect to see more of these. And they can monitor Jupiter far better and more completely than professional observatories can (which are usually pointed elsewhere; it’s a big sky), so not only will we see more of these, but they’ll be almost exclusively the domain of the amateur astronomer.

And my sincere and very hearty congratulations and thanks to Wesley and Christopher Go for their amazing images and footage of this incredible event!

Image and video credit: Anthony Wesley

Thanks to everyone who nominated posts from the Loom for 3 Quarks Daily’s Science Prize. Now it’s time to vote!

If you need some background information on the prize, go here. You can then peruse the list of nominated posts here. Great stuff abounds, so you won’t hurt my feelings if you decide someone else’s post is the best! When you’re ready, vote here. The deadline is June 7, 11:59 PM eastern time.

The top 20 vote-getting posts will then be judged by the folks at 3 Quarks Daily, who will then pass their top 6 to Richard Dawkins. Dawkins will then select the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize winner. Winners will be announced June 21, 2010.