At this point the question “now what?” has reached a sort of repetitive absurdity in the Gulf of Mexico. With BP having failed to stop its oil leak with robots and failed with containment domes and failed with the “top kill” maneuver, the company has decided it’s going to try the dome approach again.

On Monday, engineers positioned submarine robots that will try to shear off a collapsed 21-inch riser pipe with a razorlike wire studded with bits of industrial diamonds. If that is achieved, officials will need at least a couple of days to position a domelike cap over the blowout preventer [The New York Times].

The cap is called the lower marine riser package (LMRP), and—stop me if you’ve heard this one—it’s never been tested at the depth of 5,000 feet, so BP has no idea whether it will work. The previous version of the containment dome had the same goal: establishing a seal on the seal and piping the oil up to a tanker on the surface. But because of buildup on the dome, that first attempt in early May was unsuccessful.

Meanwhile, the disastrous numbers just get worse. The oil spill is now worse than the Exxon Valdez and increasing in size by the day. Yesterday wind patterns from the south threatened to carry more oil toward Mississippi and Alabama. The fishing ban has been extended to nearly 62,000 square miles, or about a quarter of the Gulf.

And as more people clamor for President Obama to step in and do more, given BP’s ineptitude, it’s become clear that there’s not a lot he can do.

The public anger and frustration over the spill poses a major domestic challenge for Obama, who has been forced to admit publicly that the U.S. government and military do not have the technology to plug the leaking well and must leave this to BP and its private industry partners [MSNBC].

While Washington can’t stop the oil, one thing they can do is question and investigate the leaders of the companies involved. Today Obama meets with the leaders of the commission he formed two weeks ago to investigate the spill. And Eric Holder, the attorney general, is traveling to meet leaders and government prosecutors in the region, another hint that the Obama Administration is considering a criminal investigation of the Deepwater Horizon incident.

The opening of a criminal investigation or civil action against BP, if either were to happen, would create the unusual situation of the federal government weighing charges against a company that it is simultaneously depending on for the most critical elements of the response to the record oil spill [Washington Post].

Last week’s top kill maneuver failed, BP says, because the pressure of the gushing oil and gas was too intense to overcome with injections of heavy mud. As with that top kill effort, we’re now left with not much to do but hope for the best for BP’s current containment attempt. If it doesn’t work, there might not be another “now what?” other than waiting until drills finish the relief wells in August (supposing their work isn’t interrupted by hurricane season or some other new calamity).

Recent posts on the Gulf 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?
80beats: 5 Offshore Oil Hotspots Beyond the Gulf That Could Boom—Or Go Boom

Image: U.S. Coast Guard

Well, I'm back. Over the past month, the devastating BP spill that began April 20th has become catastrophic in scale. And that's an understatement. When I checked on my inbox early May, it was overflowing with questions from our readers about oil's impact on the marine realm, its potential to spread, and the long-term possibilities across sectors. Foremost, I want to thank Wallace J. Nichols and Philip Hoffman for posting in my absence when I asked them to provide details. Chris has also done a good job covering the reasons we should all be concerned about the 2010 hurricane forecast. In short, the BP oil spill is as bad as it gets. It's an unprecedented social, environmental, and economic disaster in the US. And it's not over. The public seems to have expected that scientists and engineers would have a quick fix immediately--not surprising given that on television, problems take less than an hour to solve (with commercials). Now any fix will do, but no one's sure what we're dealing with 5000 feet below sea level. I haven't kept up with all of the coverage while overseas, though I'm sure much of what I'd say about the tragedy itself would be repetitious. ...

Most mammals can trace their origins to a single ancestral species. But in the Caribbean islands of the Lesser Antilles, there is a fruit bat with a far more complex family tree. Artibeus schwartzi’s genome is a hybrid mish-mash of DNA inherited from no less than three separate ancestors. One of these is probably extinct and the other two of which still live on the same island chain. It’s a fusion bat, a sort of fuzzy, winged spork.

The ancestry of A.schwartzi has puzzled scientists for almost three decades, and the idea that it’s a hybrid has been mooted before. Peter Larsen from Texas Tech University confirmed the bat’s unique ancestry by sequencing DNA from 237 individuals belonging to the seven fruit bat species of the Lesser Antilles. He found that A.schwartzi’s main genome is a cross between those of two other fruit bats, A. jamaicensis and A. planirostris, with a tiny minority of sequences that don’t match either genome.

Complicating matters, animal cells also have a separate smaller genome, housed in energy-providing structures called mitochondria. But A.schwartzi’s mitochondrial genome doesn’t resemble that of either of the two species that gave rise to it. These accessory genes must have come from yet another source – a third species of fruit bat that has either since gone extinct or that hasn’t been discovered yet.

A. jamaicensis and A.planirostris must have first hybridised fairly recently, for their ranges only overlapped around 30,000 years ago. Nonetheless, today, A.schwartzi is a distinct species in its own right. It has a stable population that can sustain itself without the need for the two ancestral species to continuously mate with each other.

Larsen thinks that its success stems from events that took place after the last Ice Age. Rising sea levels severely isolated the islands that it now lives on, particularly St Vincent. This separated the new hybrid from its parental species, cutting off the flow of genes that would otherwise dilute this unique lineage. Today, A.schwartzi is St Vincent’s dominant bat.

A.schwartzi is also a perfect example of a phenomenon that’s often seen in hybrids, called ‘transgressive segregation’. You might think that a hybrid would blend the features of its parents, leading to a body that’s half-way between the two. But not always – hybrids often do the opposite, developing extreme and overstated traits well beyond the natural variation of their parents. There are many possible explanations for this, including a clash between genes from the two parents or malfunctions in the way the hybrid develops. Either way, A.schwartzi is living proof of the effect – its skull is much bigger than those of either A.jamaicensis or A.planirostris, which are both roughly the same size.

A.schwartzi’s three-way chimeric genome is a rare find indeed. Some animal hybrids go on to establish new species, but such examples are rare, especially among mammals. Some scientists have suggested that the red wolf is a hybrid of the gray wolf and the coyote, but that’s been disputed of late. A couple of monkeys – the stump-tailed macaque and the kipunji – might also be hybrids, but the evidence for this is still uncertain. A.schwartzi is the clearest case study yet that hybridisation can give rise to new species of mammals.

Reference: PNAS http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1000133107

Photo by Tobusaru; depicts A.jamaicensis

More on hybrids:

• Extra chromosomes allow all-female lizards to reproduce without males
• Drought drives toads to mate with other species
• New plant species arise from conflicts between immune system genes
• When bacteria merge – two species are turning into one
• And one that isn’t… The pink Galapagos iguana that Darwin never saw

Louise Bourgeois died yesterday. Perhaps at that very moment I was in the garden of the Leeum museum in Seoul being humbled by her sculpture, Maman. I had previously run into Maman at the Tate about a decade ago. She’s not someone you easily forget. At first all you notice is the immense, menacing, and tremendously unsettling spider. Then you notice that there’s a smaller spider nearby, perhaps a child. And then, much later, you notice that the larger spider has a sac at her belly, filled with eggs. She’s a mother (hence her name, which is french for the same). But this is not your canonical nurturing, soothing, swaddling mother figure.

The Leeum museum is outstanding: an oasis in the heart of Seoul. The museum is split into 3 buildings, each distinct and marvelous (both architecturally, and for their contents). One wing consists entirely of ancient art, with a beautiful collection of celadon (coming from someone that has always had trouble appreciating old pots and jars). One wing is an interactive space, encouraging you to be creative in various clever ways (and with lots to entertain children, who have no doubt suffered from hours of museum-going). The third wing is one of the most impressive small collections of contemporary art I have ever seen, including pieces by Warhol, Close, and a whole alcove devoted to Barney (with Cremaster 3 running on a loop). My favorites by far were two beautiful pieces by Richter: a photo-painting of two lit candles and a gorgeous abstract. As you leave the museum you wander into the garden, and confront the 3-story high mother in all her glory. There is something primal about the encounter, especially as the vast metropolis of Seoul stretches out in the distance below.

Although Bourgeois is now gone, her spiders will no doubt haunt generations to come.

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. The following is a modified excerpt from Bonobo Handshake. In 1988, a crane operator called Joe Honner was digging out telegraph poles on Darrell Tree’s farm in South Australia. Joe’s three-year-old son was sitting with him in the cabin while Joe maneuvered the crane. Suddenly, the crane swung into live telegraph wires. Over nineteen thousand volts of electricity shot through the broken wires into the crane, which, being made of metal, was a superb conductor. Joe jumped clear, but his son was stuck in the cabin. Joe rushed forward to get his son, but he was held back by the farmer, Darrell. The little boy was fine, Darrell said, as long as he didn’t move. The electricity wound around the crane, creating a perfect circuit, but the leather interior of the cabin was untouched. The boy was frightened and started to cry. As Darrell turned to get a rope to rescue him, Joe rushed forward. As soon as he touched the crane, he tapped into the circuit ...

The strange quantum state of entanglement isn’t just challenging to think about, it’s hard to create. This “spooky” phenomenon—in which two particles are linked, even if they’re separated by distance—can be created by scientists in the lab using bulky lasers. But scientists published a study in Nature today in which they created a light-emitting diode (LED) that produces entangled photons.

One reason entanglement is exciting is the potential to drive quantum computers that make today’s best look pokey by comparison, like so:

Quantum computers exploit the inherent uncertainties of quantum physics to perform calculations much faster than computers currently in use. Whereas conventional ‘bits’ of information take only the values zero or one, quantum bits, or ‘qubits’, exist in a fuzzy superposition of both. In theory, this ambiguity allows any number of qubits to be lumped together or ‘entangled’ and processed in parallel, so that a huge number of calculations can be made at once [Nature].

That’s great in theory, but the standard practice for making entangled particles is unwieldy and unreliable, according to team member Mark Stevenson of Toshiba:

Entangled photons have previously been made using a crystal to split laser light into photon pairs. The trouble with such “parametric down conversion” is its unpredictable nature. “Sometimes you get two pairs of photons, sometimes one, sometimes zero,” says Stephenson [sic]. “That’s not exactly reliable if you want an error-free quantum computer” [New Scientist].

The team’s device, which produces these particles just in pairs, is a indium arsenide quantum dot connected to a little LED. (A quantum dot is semiconductor that measures only nanometers in size—small enough that weird quantum behaviors arise.)

When the researchers supply the LED with electric current, two electrons hop into two positively charged ‘holes’ in the quantum dot’s lattice, releasing energy in the form of a photon pair. Crucially, the nature of this process means that the polarization of one generated photon is determined by the other, so the pair is entangled [Nature].

Using entanglement-producing LEDs for practical tasks is still daunting. The team reports that making these quantum dots is so difficult that only 1 percent entangle particles successfully, and they must be cooled to just a few degrees above absolute zero. But this is an impressive first step toward entangling particles at the flip of a switch.

Related Content:
80beats: Physicists Achieve Quantum Teleportation Across a Distance of 10 Miles
80beats: Quantum Cryptography Improves By a Factor of 100; Ready for Primetime?
80beats: Quantum Leaf? Algae Use Physics Trick To Boost Photosynthesis Efficiency
80beats: Quantum Physics’ Big News: Weird Quantum State Observed in the Largest Object Yet

Image: Wikimedia Commons

On the road somewhere in Tennessee tonight, I read the present top story at the NYTimes:
Nuclear Option on Gulf Oil Spill? No Way, U.S. Says The chatter began weeks ago as armchair engineers brainstormed for ways to stop the torrent of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico: What about nuking the well? Decades ago, the Soviet Union reportedly used nuclear blasts to successfully seal off runaway gas wells, inserting a bomb deep underground and letting its fiery heat melt the surrounding rock to shut off the flow. Why not try it here?
Of course this won't happen, but the idea isn't actually all that far fetched. Furthermore, does anyone have a better suggestion? Now go read the article and let's get an interesting discussion going in comments...

Investigation of normal flatus production in healthy volunteers.

“Flatulence can cause discomfort and distress but there are few published data of normal patterns and volumes. Twenty four hour collections were made using a rectal catheter in 10 normal volunteers taking their normal diet plus 200 g baked beans. Total daily volume ranged from 476 to 1491 ml (median 705 ml). Women and men (both n = 5) expelled equivalent amounts. The median daily flatus hydrogen volume was 361 ml/24 h (range 42-1060) and the carbon dioxide volume 68 ml/24 h (range 25-116), three volunteers produced methane (3, 26, and 120 ml/24 h), and the remaining unidentified gas (presumably nitrogen) or gases contributed a median 213 ml/24 h (range 61-476). Larger volumes of flatus were produced after meals than at other times. Flatus produced at a faster rate tended to contain more fermentation gases. Flatus was produced during the sleeping period, but the rate was significantly lower than the daytime rate (median 16 and 34 ml/h respectively). Ingestion of a ‘fibre free’ diet (Fortisip) for 48 hours significantly reduced the total volume collected in 24 hours (median 214 ml/24 h), reduced the carbon dioxide volume (median 6 ml/24 h), and practically eradicated hydrogen production. The volume of unidentified gas was not significantly affected (median 207 ml/24 h). Thus fermentation gases make the highest contribution to normal flatus volume. A ‘fibre free’ diet eliminates these without changing residual gas release of around 200 ml/24 h.”

Thanks to P. M. for today’s ROFL!

Image: flickr/marcelo träsel

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Flatufonia–or the musical anus.
Discoblog: Finding the frequency of Fido’s farts.
Discoblog: High Altitude Flatus Expulsion (HAFE).
Discoblog: It’s like a Brita filter for your butt.

WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ahh this is but a teaser video, head on over to the ESA site for some stunning images of NGC 3603.  They have a very nice write up and did I mention desktop backgrounds of the images?  Well they do.

An hour southwest of Berlin, in the town of Treuenbrietzen, Mozart has played non-stop for two months. The classical composer’s audience? Waste-eating microbes.

As Spiegel Online reports, the German waste-facility’s owners believe the music, coupled with more oxygen, will make their microbes eat biosolids more efficiently, saving money and leaving less residual waste. Their idea comes from the German firm Mundus, headquartered in Wiesenburg, whose founder cites Mozart’s “very good effect on people.”

It’s fairly easy to poo-poo this experiment, especially given other wildly-marketed but later refuted claims attributed to the man’s music. Many of these Mozart miracles first surfaced after Frances Rauscher at the University of California, Irvine questioned in a 1993 paper (pdf) in Nature if listening to classical music could increase adolescent performance on IQ tests. Though Rauscher found that the music did seem to increase performance, later studies showed no effect.

Though the waste-facility spent hundreds on fancy stereo equipment, management hopes the scheme will save them thousands in expenses each year. One only hopes that the music will make their human employees a bit happier at a job that might otherwise stink.

Related content:
Discoblog: Will Watching Videos of the Great Outdoors Make Cows “Happy and Productive”?
Discoblog: Mozart Won’t Make Your Baby Smarter, But the Right Food Might
Discoblog: Will Computer Programs Replace Mozart?
DISCOVER: No Smarts in Mozart

Image: flickr / gruntzooki

Hey, remember Congressman Ralph Hall (R-TX) who inserted a totally non sequitur amendment into a science research and education funding bill in a blatant partisan ploy to derail the bill and make Democrats look bad? And remember how the Democrats tried to compromise, removing almost $40 billion of the funding from the bill, but Republicans still stonewalled?

After the Democrats managed to pass the bill despite this, guess what the honorable Ralph Hall had to say. Go on. Guess.

Did you guess this?

"I am disappointed that my Democratic colleagues resorted to using a procedural tactic to defeat Republican changes that would have saved over $40 billion and restored the original COMPETES priority of basic research," science committee ranking member Ralph Hall said in a press release after the vote.

Oh, Representative Hall. It wasn’t enough for you to accuse the Democrats of blatant and transparent partisan parliamentary tactics when they were responding to your very own blatant and transparent partisan parliamentary tactics, was it? So you went ahead and blamed them for not saving the $40 billion that they offered to cut to make you happy in the first place. Instead of taking that compromise, you slammed the door in their face.

Oh, that wacky, wacky Representative Hall. Hyperpartisan hypocritical hackery doesn’t look good on anyone, sir. I sometimes think the Emperor would be better off just coming out and saying he’s naked, rather than trying to sell us on his new clothes.

Here’s what’s new in the Gulf of Mexico:

1. Saw stuck.

When we left the BP oil spill yesterday, the “top kill” had failed and the “top cap” plan—cutting the pipe at a strategic location and then placing a containment dome on top—was commencing. But like every other BP attempt to stop the leak, the dome effort hit a snag.

The attempt bogged down overnight as a special diamond-wire saw snagged in the pipe. The work has stalled as BP tries two old logger tricks: changing the angle of the pipe to let the saw get through and, if that doesn’t work, bringing the saw to the surface to replace the blade [Christian Science Monitor].

What’s more, even if the saw gets free and BP successfully cuts the riser, the already-gushing flow of oil will increase by at least 20 percent between the time engineers finish the cut and the time they install the cap. Whether BP can install the cap, or instead a looser-fitting shell that would capture less of the oil, depends on how smoothly the company makes the final cut. Getting the saw stuck isn’t a good sign.

2. Criminal investigation.

The word is official now: Attorney General Eric Holder says the United States government will be opening a criminal investigation into the spill.

The attorney general said there was a range of possible violations under a number of statutes, including the Clean Water Act, the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 and the Endangered Species Act. He said charges could include everything ranging from “false statements” to “the way in which certain entities conducted themselves.” Mr. Holder said his department had instructed all relevant parties to preserve documents. “If we find evidence of illegal behavior we will be extremely forceful in our response,” he said, adding that “we have what we think is a sufficient basis for us to have begun a criminal investigation” [Wall Street Journal].

3. Dreaming of a crude Christmas?

Through all the failures by BP to plug the well, there’s always been the hope in the background that even if nothing works, the relief wells will be completed in August and finally put an end to this toxic mess. But like everything else happening at a depth of 5,000 feet, even this is no guarantee.

It took Mexico’s state-owned oil company, Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, nine months to plug its Ixtoc I well after an explosion and fire in 1979. The company’s first attempt with a relief well failed, so it had to drill a second. Eventually, more than 140 million gallons of crude spilled into the Gulf of Mexico — the biggest offshore oil spill on record [Bloomberg].

BP is drilling two wells simultaneously as an insurance policy. But energy expert Dan Pickering told Bloomberg that if something went wrong and delayed those operations, he could envisions a scenario in which oil still leaks at Christmastime. Of course, the actual worst-case would be if no one ever successfully stops the leak, in which case it could continue for more than a decade.

4. New wells will go on.

And yet, offshore drilling will continue. We need our gas, we need our plastic. The AP reports today that the federal government has approved the first new shallow water well since President Obama lifted the drilling ban there last week. The moratorium on deep water drilling continues.

Previous posts on the BP oil spill:
80beats: With “Top Kill” a Failure, BP Goes Back to the Containment Dome Plan
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: BP

The nominations for this year’s 3 Quarks Daily Science prize are in and voting is now open. I’ve got quite a few entires in there, so a hearty thank you to everyone who nominated one.

The way it works now is that voting will continue for a week and the top 20 will go through to a semi-final, where the 3QD crew will select their top six. Richard Dawkins will pick the first, second and third prize winners.

Obviously, if you’d like to cast your votes for one of my entries, I’d really appreciate it. There are six to choose from and my personal favourite is the Japanese gut bacteria one, but it’s entirely your call.

Cheers,

Ed

Your brain is hungry. That big gray calculating machine in your head is an energy hog that needs lots of calories—more than the diet of fruits and plants that our distant hominin ancestors probably ate could provide. It’s a mystery, then, just how human ancestors like Homo erectus—who were around when our craniums started to expand in a hurry—ate enough to start growing big brains. But buried in Kenya, a two-million-year-old hint has emerged: Those hominins started eating seafood way back then, archaeologists say.

Near a place called Lake Turkana, archaeologists David Braun found two intriguing groups of items: The bones of fish, turtles, and even crocodiles with the scars of stone tools still showing, and stone fragments that Braun says come from the simple tools these hominins used to carve up the marine animals. He and his colleagues report the find of our ancestors’ ancient feast in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Today, their leftovers—in the form of hundreds of bones and several thousand stone tools—are the earliest “definitive evidence” of hominins butchering and eating aquatic animals, which are rich in fatty acids essential for growing bigger brains [ScienceNOW].

If the hominins of this time dined on the bounty of the sea, Braun says, they could have ingested the calories and fatty acids needed for accelerated brain growth without resorting to scavenging for animal remains, which would have brought our small ancestors in competition with large and fierce predators.

Braun thinks river and lake floodplains of the sort that preserved his fossils gave early hominids a low-risk hunting opportunity. “As lakes and rivers flooded and receded, animals could have been caught. The remains could be easily collected,” he said. Humanity’s ancestors “could have entered the higher trophic level without taking on the risks” [Wired.com].

If Braun is correct, then this was a stroke of good fortune in humanity’s history. The hominins who would have lived at that time and place didn’t have the cognitive wherewithal to get organized and hunt, but since floodwaters left fish at their feet, they didn’t need to.

And the Kenya site itself is remarkable in archaeological terms. From thousands of bones, the team was able to reconstruct at least 10 individual animals that the early humans killed and carved up at the site. Says Braun:

“At sites of this age we often consider ourselves lucky if we find any bone associated with stone tools, but here we found everything from small bird bones to hippopotamus leg bones” [Times of India].

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Cooking Ourselves
DISCOVER: What Does Science Say You Should Eat?
Gene Expression: Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, review
80beats: Homo Erectus Women Had Big-Brained Babies, New Fossil Suggests

Image: David Braun

We humans have been busy lately… there are a lot of spacecraft buzzing around the solar system. Sure, you’ve heard of Cassini, and the Mars probes, but there are two very interesting spacecraft making two very interesting encounters in the next few weeks.

1) On June 27, NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft — which sent a chunk of copper smashing into a comet back in 2005, and which has now been repurposed for planetary science — will swing by the Earth, using our planet’s gravity to change its direction and speed. DI will pass at a distance of just 37,000 km (23,000 miles)! That’s around the same height above the surface as geosynchronous (i.e. weather and communication) satellites. This maneuver will send the little spacecraft on its way to an encounter with the comet Hartley 2 in November.

2) The European Space Agency’s amazing Rosetta spacecraft will fly by the asteroid 21 Lutetia on July 10. The asteroid is about 95 km across (60 miles), and the flyby distance will be about 3200 km (2000 miles). That’s pretty close, certainly near enough to provide some nice images of the rock. In 2008, Rosetta passed the smaller asteroid 2867 Steins and returned nice images, and in 2009 swung by the Earth, sending back an image so heart-achingly beautiful I chose it as one of my Top Ten images of the year.

Rosetta’s primary mission is taking it to the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, where it will drop an actual honest-to-FSM lander on the comet’s surface! This is a tremendously exciting mission, and I can’t wait to see what new wonders it will send us.

Tip o’ the Whipple Shield to Emily Lakdawalla for the Rosetta news.

NPR’s Jon Hamilton has a nice piece on Einstein’s brain, and what might have made it special. The difference doesn’t seem to have to do with its neurons, but with the other cells of the brain, the glia. I wrote about the glia–what I called the dark matter of the brain–in this Discover column last fall.

The Center for Inquiry is a great organization — their mission is to “foster a secular society based on science, reason, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values,” which sounds like a good idea to me. They sponsor a number of activities including lectures, education, conferences, and research. I’ve given talks at the local branch, and it’s a great thrill to meet with such an engaged and enthusiastic audience.

And they’re in a bit of trouble. As a non-profit, they rely on donations, and their major donor seems to have mysteriously disappeared. About $800,000 of their annual operating budget is suddenly gone.

We’re not going to make up for that with a few appeals on the internet, but we can help them adapt during a tough time. Consider donating, even if it’s just a few bucks.

Photographer Kirk Crippens created this image of the speck of light that persists after the television is turned off. After a lot of trial and error, Crippens was able to catch the speck in the middle of the frame, at at magnification of about 5x, on an RCA solid-state black-and-white television.

When the TV is on, electrons firing at its phosphor-coated screen cause the screen to emit light, creating the image. Electromagnets guide the beam and direct it to scan repeatedly across the screen. When the set is shut down, the electromagnets deactivate and the remnant beam from the electron gun defaults momentarily to the center of the screen before dying out—but not always in the same spot, as Crippens discovered. The blue and yellow colors here result from electrons exciting the two types of phosphor common in older TVs.

Crippens: “This photo is part of the ‘Pre-Pixel’ portion of Pixel Nation—it is the stepping off point to pixelization. I show magnified photographs featuring a nixie tube, an oscilloscope screen, an amber computer monitor and then this black-and-white TV as ‘Pre-Pixels’ before moving into the depth and variety of pixels created through the years.”

The way I see it, every now and again you just need to look at a beautiful image of a spiral galaxy:

Oh yes, you want to click that image.

That’s NGC 6118 as seen by the European Southern Observatory’s 8-meter wide Very Large Telescope in this newly-released image. The VLT’s 500,000 square centimeters (78,000 square inches) of mirror really suck down the light, giving us a stunning near-true-color view of this spiral. Even from 80 million light years away we can trace the positions of pinkish star factories, the dark dust lanes, and see the reddish-yellow glow of old stars in the galactic hub.

I was drawn to how tightly wound the galaxy is, and how long the arms are. Starting at the nucleus you can trace the two major arms all the way around more than once. The galaxy is tilted severely, so it’s hard to say what’s going on at the lower right; does the arm split there? That sort of thing is called a "spur", and they can form as the gas in the galaxy interacts with the arms.

All the stars you see in the picture are in the foreground, in our galaxy. It’s like looking out a dirty window at a tree outside; the spots are close by, the tree much farther. But you can also see dozens of small galaxies, too, which are not small at all, but in reality other majestic and grand objects diminished by their even greater distance.

NGC 6118 is about 100,000 light years across, making it the same size as our own galaxy. And when I see something like this, I always ask myself the same thing I did when I was just a kid: is someone else out there looking back at us, and marveling at the beauty of the Milky Way?

Image credit: ESO

It’s not often that an English professor co-authors an article in Sky and Telescope, but it’s not everyday that astronomers set out to uncover a poet’s muse. Researchers believe they have found the astronomical inspiration for the “strange huge meteor procession” in the poem “Year of Meteors. (1859-60.)” published in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

The investigators have determined that Whitman was waxing poetic about a rare event called an Earth-grazing meteor procession. An Earth-grazing meteor never hits our planet; as its name implies, it just visits, slicing through our atmosphere on its path. On this voyage, pieces of the meteor crumble off and head generally in the same direction (the “procession”), burning as they go and making a show to awe and inspire.

Texas State physics professors Donald Olson and Russell Doescher, English professor Marilynn Olson, and student Ava Pope have discounted previous suspects for the poem’s inspiration: an 1833 Leonid meteor storm, the 1858 Leonids, and a fireball in 1859. The dates are wrong for the first two and the fireball happened during the day whereas Whitman described a night event.

Instead, they found the answer in another creative work, a Fredric Church painting “The Meteor of 1860” that looked like the scene Whitman’s poem portrays. With some more sleuthing, they discovered that the painting described a meteor procession that occurred on July, 20, 1860, and found reports from newspapers describing an event sounding very similar to Whitman’s poem and Church’s painting.

As reported in a Texas State University press release:

“From all the observations in towns up and down the Hudson River Valley, we’re able to determine the meteor’s appearance down to the hour and minute,” Olson said. “Church observed it at 9:49 p.m. when the meteor passed overhead, and Walt Whitman would’ve seen it at the same time, give or take one minute.”

This is not the first time Donald Olson has tracked down a piece art using astronomy. Using similar detective work he believes he has also tracked down astronomical underpinnings in the works of Ansel Adams and Edvard Munch.

Related Content:
80beats: Solar Sleuthing Suggests When Odysseus Got Home: April 16, 1178 B.C.
80beats: The DNA of Medieval Manuscripts May Reveal Their History

Image: Judith Filenbaum Hernstadt