Very cool news: the flying infrared observatory, SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy) — which has been in the works for many years — has seen first light. What’s remarkable about this observatory is that it’s mounted in a hole in the side of a 747!

Don’t believe me? Check. This. Out:

[Click any of the images here to embiggen.]

See that ginormous square hole in the back of the plane? That’s where the telescope sits, looking out at the sky. Why put it in a plane? Because SOFIA looks in the mid to far infrared, and observations like that are impossible from the ground. Water vapor in the air absorbs the kind of infrared light seen by SOFIA, but by the time you go up to about 10 km (35,000 feet) you’re above 99% of the Earth’s water vapor. That little bit left does still absorb the light, but a telescope at that altitude receives about 80% of the IR an orbiting observatory would.

So, amazingly, they cut a big hole in the side of a modified 747 and stuck a telescope in it. A big one: SOFIA sports a 2.5 meter (8 foot) mirror, which is bigger than Hubble’s!

Here’s a sample of what it saw:

That is, of course, Jupiter. On the left is an image in visible light, and on the right the SOFIA image. It’s a composite of three infrared colors: 5.4 (colored blue in the image), 24 (green), and 37 microns (red). Your eye can see wavelengths only as long as about 0.7 microns, so these represent wavelengths well outside what we can see. See the stripe on the left that’s reddish? In the infrared it’s brighter, because the gas in that belt is transparent to infrared light and we can see deeper into Jupiter’s atmosphere where it’s warmer. Note that the other belt is still missing, in the visible and infrared. Whatever is blocking the light from that belt is opaque to both our eyes and SOFIA’s.

SOFIA also took a look at the nucleus of the nearby weird galaxy M82, which is undergoing a burst of star formation, and is lousy with thick dust that blocks visible light. SOFIA peers through that dust, revealing the star factories hard at work in the center of that galaxy.

According to preliminary reports, SOFIA is performing perfectly, and getting great observations at a far, far cheaper price tag than putting something in orbit. We still need telescopes in orbit to do other work — some IR is still absorbed even at that height — but SOFIA will make terrific achievements. It also has a robust educational arm, which includes taking as many as 200 teachers per year up on observation flights! If you’re an educator and interested in this, contact the team at SOFIA. You may just qualify to get the airplane ride of a lifetime.

Image credits: Anthony Wesley, N. A. Sharp/NOAO/AURA/NSF, NASA/Jim Ross

Obsessive-compulsive mice, which were once pulling their hair out from too much grooming, are now sitting pretty. Their cure? A bone marrow transplant. In a study published today in Cell, scientists show an unsuspected link between a psychological disorder and the immune system.

Here’s how they did it:

Step 1 – Finding the Problem

Since excessive cleaning is a behavior, scientists first thought to look for defects in the mouse brain. They noticed that mice with a mutant version of the gene Hoxb8 were the ones cleaning themselves bald. Hoxb8 is important for creating microglia–nervous system repair cells that search for damage in the brain.

Although some microglia start out in the brain, others are born in the bone marrow and move in. Overall, adult mice with faulty Hoxb8 harbored about 15% fewer microglia in the brain than normal. [ScienceNow]

Since many microglia move from bone marrow to brain, the scientists decided to give the compulsive mice, with the mutant Hoxb8 gene, a marrow transplant.

Step 2 — Treatment

They took marrow from mice with regular Hoxb8 and gave it to the compulsive mice mice. Within four weeks, the mice stopped their obsessive cleaning. Within about three months, they had a full coat of hair.

“A lot of people are going to find it amazing,” said Mario Capecchi at the University of Utah, who won the Nobel prize for medicine in 2007 for his work on mouse genetics [and was a co-author of the paper]. “That’s the surprise: bone marrow can correct a behavioral defect.” [Guardian]

Step 3 — Prognosis

Scientists aren’t sure why a gene controlling immune cells (the microglia) appears to cure a psychological disorder, but they have some suspicions.

“Why couple behavior such as grooming to the host’s immune system?” the researchers ask in [the paper's] conclusion. “From an evolutionary perspective it may make perfect sense to couple a behavior such as grooming, whose purpose is to reduce pathogen count, with the cellular machinery–the innate and adaptive immune systems–used to eliminate pathogens.” [e! Science News]

Humans have a psychological disorder that mirrors this grooming and hair loss compulsion in mice–the obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorder trichotillomania in which people pull out their own hair. But before jumping on this apparent marrow transplant cure, scientists would need to find the particular human gene responsible.

Capecchi warns that bone marrow transplants are too risky to be commonly used against, for example, OCD. Rather, a fuller understanding of the immune system-mental illness connection should produce new treatments. [Scientific American]

Related content:
80beats: Researchers Track the HIV Virus to a Hideout in the Bone Marrow
80beats: Obsessive Compulsive Sufferers May Find Relief With a “Brain Pacemaker”
Discoblog: Where Fat Makes Its Final Stand in the Anorexic Body: In the Bone Marrow
Discoblog: Want the Most Accurate OCD Diagnosis? Visit the Zoo
DISCOVER: Could an Acid Trip Cure Your OCD?

Image: flickr/Bascom Hogue

I have to say, I am a bit staggered by just how severe the forecast from NOAA is for the Atlantic hurricane year 2010. We know these predictions aren't always spot on, but they get increasingly accurate as the season nears--and now just before June 1, NOAA is calling for 14-23 named storms, 8-14 hurricanes, and 3-7 major hurricanes. In short, they're calling for a year that would almost rival the worst year on record--2005--the year of Katrina, Rita, and Wilma. And of course, it hardly helps matters that we have tons of oil in the Gulf this year. If NOAA's forecast is really correct, it's hard for me to imagine that there won't be a number of storms that get into the Gulf and threaten to disrupt clean up operations and/or to drive oil all over the place. This makes success in BP's ongoing "top kill" effort pretty crucial. If they can't get the spill stopped now, and it keeps pouring out oil well into the summer, then there will be hurricanes to contend with--and in a bad year, like 2005, the really strong ones can even come in July. For more on what would happen if a strong hurricane hit the oil ...

With hurricane season fast approaching, the official forecasts are coming out. And they’re not good. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates that between 14 and 23 storms could reach the severity level of a tropical storm—the point at which they get a name.

Of those, eight to 14 are expected to become hurricanes. From three to seven of these could become major hurricanes, with winds exceeding 111 miles an hour. This compares with a long-term average of 11 named storms per season, with six becoming hurricanes and two becoming major hurricanes [Christian Science Monitor].

The warning signs are alarming even experienced hurricane watchers.

The tropics are even warmer than the toasty waters that spurred the 2005 hurricane season into such dizzying activity, with 28 named storms including Katrina, Rita and Wilma…. “The coming season looks very active based upon the latest data we’ve seen,” said Phil Klotzbach, who along with Colorado State University scientist Bill Gray publishes a widely regarded seasonal forecast. “The tropics are super warm right now” [Houston Chronicle].

Klotzbach and Gray predict 15 major storms and eight full-on hurricanes. But they warn that these predictions are an inexact science, so just because some conditions look similar to 2005 doesn’t meant there’ll be another Katrina.

One factor of great interest this year is the BP oil spill. What happens if a hurricane tears through the Gulf of Mexico, right where all the spilt crude lingers? As DISCOVER blogger Chris Mooney wrote for Slate, it depends:

Much depends on the angle at which the storm crosses the slick. In the Northern Hemisphere, hurricanes rotate counterclockwise, with the largest storm surge occurring where the winds blow in the direction the storm as a whole is traveling—that’s in front of the eye and off to the right…. So if a powerful storm approached the slick from the southwest, say, its most potent winds would push the oil forward, instead of sweeping it off to the side and out of the storm’s path. If the storm then plowed into the Gulf Coast, you’d expect an oily landfall [Slate].

However, there’s also the possibility that things won’t be so bad: It may not come in at that angle, and a hurricane’s rage could help to disperse the oil more, which could speed up the rate at which it degrades.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Does Global Warming Really Boost Hurricanes?
The Intersection: Hurricane v. Oil Slick
Bad Astronomy: Chris Mooney, Hurricanes, and Warming the Globe
80beats: We Did the Math: BP Oil Spill Now Worse Than the Exxon Valdez

Image: NOAA (Hurricane Opal, 1995)

One of the many places I’ve been traveling to recently is a bit unusual: the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City, Missouri. For one thing, it’s a private library; like the Huntington Library in Pasadena, it’s supported almost entirely by private funds. For another, Linda Hall is completely dedicated to science, technology, and engineering. While visiting, I asked what they considered their peer institutions to be — the other science libraries they might be compared to. Nobody could think of any. It seems to be a completely unique place.

I got to tour deep into the bowels of the building, where stacks of journals and scientific reports seem to stretch for ages. The library does a brisk job lending books and articles to other institutions; when you need a technical note from 1923 that tells you how a certain bridge was put together, this is the place to go. There is also an amazing rare-book collection, some of which was being put on display as part of an exhibition entitled “Thinking Outside the Sphere: Views of the Stars from Aristotle to Herschel.” I got to leaf through a first edition of Newton’s Principia, which I have to say was pretty awesome. I didn’t find any mistakes, but my Latin is a bit rusty. Here are the three Laws of Motion, right near the beginning of the text.

The library also adds to the intellectual life of Kansas City by sponsoring public lectures. I followed Sara Seager and Seth Shostak in a series about extraterrestrial life. Not my area of expertise by any means, but they asked me to talk about time travel, which I do know something about. (At least by the standards of other human beings, for which neither “time travel” nor “extraterrestrial life” are subjects of true expertise anywhere.)

Dr. Sean Carroll – The Paradoxes of Time Travel from Linda Hall Library on Vimeo.

Of course I also had some BBQ while in KC. One does not live by the life of the mind alone.

Momma always said to pick up after yourself. Otherwise, you won’t know where your old pieces of junk will end up, and might end up confusing them with asteroids.

Astronomers have decided that a near-Earth object that passed by Earth last week is likely a rocket piece, a chunk of metal left behind in the darkness of space while some orbiter or NASA explorer zoomed off on an exciting mission.

Richard Kowalski at the Catalina Sky Survey discovered “2010 KQ,” a few-meter-wide something or other, headed for Earth on May 16. Tracked by NASA’s Near-Earth Object Observations Program, commonly called “Spaceguard,” the something made a relatively close pass to our planet (it was just a bit further out than the moon’s orbit) on May 21. Yesterday, NASA announced that the object was likely the upper-stage of a rocket.

Why the confusion? First, using spectral analysis, astronomers could see that the object’s makeup was not like any known asteroid. Second, the folks at NASA were suspicious of the object’s path, which looked a lot like our own planet’s orbit around the sun. Things that start moving with us, unless overcome by gravity or propelled by rockets, tend to want keep on going the same way.

“The orbit of this object is very similar to that of the Earth, and one would not expect an object to remain in this type of orbit for very long,” said Paul Chodas, a scientist at NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. [NASA]

This isn’t the first such asteroid identity crisis. Astronomers had a similar mix-up regarding 2010 AL30, which made a pass by Earth in January of this year. Scientists debated whether it was a piece of the Venus Express spacecraft, but decided to define it as a “Apollo class” asteroid. You can look at its orbit here.

Astronomers expect for 2010 KQ to visit our neighborhood again in 2036, but there is only a six percent chance that it will actually hit us. Even if it does, it will completely burn up in our atmosphere/trash incinerator.

Related content:
Bad Astronomy: A piece of asteroid falls to Earth in June, but in a good way
Bad Astronomy: 100 meter asteroid will pass Earth Monday!
Bad Astronomy: BAsteroid
80beats: Experts Declare War on Space Junk… So What Do We Do Now?
DISCOVER: The Asteroid Hunters

Image:  NASA/JPL

If you need a little more awesome in your weekend, then try this:

I know I’ve been posting quite a few Saturn images from Cassini, but I really like this one. It shows the big round moon Rhea, the lumpy small moon Janus, and a lovely view of the foreshortened rings. Both moons were on the far side of the rings, well over 1 million kilometers away, when Cassini took this shot. Rhea is over 1500 km (900 miles) in diameter, while Janus is only about 180 km (110 miles) across. For comparison, our own Moon’s diameter is almost 3500 km (2100 miles).

Just last year, the rings were edge-on to the Sun. In the months since, as Saturn slowly orbits our star, the Sun has begun shining down on the northern side of the rings. Cassini was just above the ring plane when it took this shot, catching the sunlight reflected off the rings. From this narrow angle, you can see the rings are divided into countless smaller ringlets, bright and dark sections carved into shape by the gravitational forces of the planet and its dozens of moons.

I love how the top of Rhea is playing hide-and-seek in the rings. And look how dark the rocky Janus is compared to the icy Rhea! Even at a glance you can see that Saturn’s environment is an amazingly rich and diverse place. Cassini’s observations will keep planetary astronomers busy for decades… and provide the rest of us with a glimpse of the beauty and awe just waiting to be uncovered.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

The bones of our ancestors do not speak across time with ultimate clarity. The fossils with which scientists reconstruct our family tree are often fragments that offer hints and clues to where we came from. So it comes as no surprise when, as part of the flow of science, researchers offer counter-interpretations to even the most famous of finds.

That’s what happening to Ardi.

Last October Ardipithecus ramidus hit the main stage when, after 17 years of study, a large team led by paleoanthropologist Tim White published its work in the journal Science. The 4.4-million-year-old find shakes up our understanding of our own history, White said—primarily the story of how and when we learned to walk.

Ardi cast doubt on the widely accepted view that our ancestors became bipeds because they left the forest and entered a flatland savanna habitat that demanded it. But Ardi appeared to be a kind of hybrid, comfortable in the trees and on the ground. And, White said, analysis of the site where the fossil was found indicated that Ardi lived in a woodland habitat. If it’s true that early humans walked in the woods, then the “savanna hypothesis” would be swept away.

But not so fast. In today’s edition of Science, two teams of scientists respond (1, 2) with doubts about the story of Ardi.

The question of Ardi’s habitat was raised by Thure E. Cerling, a geochemist at the University of Utah, and seven other geologists and anthropologists. They said they used the White team’s own data for soils and silica from ancient plants, and found it did not support an interpretation that Ardi lived in thick woods. Instead, Dr. Cerling’s group said, “We find the environmental context of Ar. ramidus at Aramis to be represented by what is commonly referred to as tree- or bush-savanna, with 25 percent or less woody canopy cover” [The New York Times].

The second paper questions whether Ardi is really an early human at all, rather than a member of the chimpanzee line.

Ardi’s age is so close to that divergence date that no unequivocal determination can be made about whether she is in the ape or human lineage, says [primatologist Esteban] Sarmiento, who conducts research from home in East Brunswick, New Jersey. But White and co-authors disagree. In their response, the group says Sarmiento’s “tortuous, nonparsimonius evolutionary pathways” are not supported by many of the fossil’s characteristics [Nature].

White and colleagues issued responses to both questions (1, 2) in the same issue, and struck back in the press, too.

If Ardi were really ancestral to chimps, certain features of its teeth, pelvis, and skull would have had to later evolve back to their more ape-like conditions, an “evolutionary reversal that’s highly unlikely,” White said in an interview [AP].

White is sticking to his guns regarding Ardi’s habitat, too. While it’s true that the fossil record seems to show grasses where Ardi lived, there are also many fossils of forest-dwelling animals that suggest a wooded area, he argues.

Related Content:
The Loom: Ardipithecus: We Meet at Last
DISCOVER: Meet Ardi, Your First Human Ancestor
DISCOVER: The 2% Difference examines what sets us apart from chimpanzees
80beats: A Fossil Named Ardi Shakes Up Humanity’s Family Tree
80beats: No Tarzans Here: Earliest Humans Quickly Lost Their Ape-Like Climbing Abilities

Image: J.H. Matternes

Some good news today: The Daily Progress is reporting that the University of Virginia will fight the state attorney general’s attacks on academic freedom.

A few weeks ago, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli started investigating noted climate scientist Michael Mann. While at UVa, Mann was researching climate change. Cuccinelli has submitted a subpoena to get documents about Mann’s research, to see if he was abusing public funds. Cuccinelli’s motivations for doing this are suspect to say the least: Mann has already been cleared of any research wrongdoing. If Cuccinelli is trying to ride the "climategate" propaganda, he’s a day late and a docket short; that whole thing has already died with a fizzle.

But the attacks continue, so the administration at UVa has filed a petition with a judge to set aside Cuccinelli’s subpoena, saying:

"Academic freedom is essential to the mission of our Nation’s institutions of higher learning and a core First Amendment concern," UVa’s petition says. "As Thomas Jefferson intended, the University of Virginia has a long and proud tradition of embracing the ‘illimitable freedom of the human mind’ by fully endorsing and supporting faculty research and scholarly pursuits. Our Nation also has a long and proud tradition of limited government framed by enumerated powers which Jefferson ardently believed was necessary for a civil society to endure."

The Jefferson quote is particularly apt; Jefferson founded the University of Virginia, and even designed much of its architecture. A lot of the principles established by him are still apparent at UVa today. I attended the University for six years to get my doctorate, and so I know first-hand that the climate there is steeped in Jeffersonia, and his love of personal and academic freedoms.

Cuccinelli’s investigation appears to me to be an attempt to slow or smear research on climate change; an attack on the freedom of academic and scientific research, and cannot stand. I’m very glad to see UVa fighting back, and I hope this case becomes a national symbol of the recent attempts to silence science.

Tip o’ the thermometer to my fellow Wahoo Noisy Astronomer, aka Nicole Gooventargenyehelfen.

Poke a snail with a stick and it remembers for a day. Poke a snail with a stick after you’ve given it methamphetamine and it remembers for much longer.

Getting gastropods hooked on meth perhaps sounds cruel, but Barbara Sorg and her team are among those scientists trying to figure out how the drug works in the brain to produce intense connections that feed the addiction cycle. In a study forthcoming in the Journal of Experimental Biology, the scientists show that, in snails at least, meth makes it hard to forget things that happened while on the drug.

Here’s the test: The snails Sorg studied can breathe two ways, through their skin underwater and also through a breathing tube they can deploy when they surface. The team kept two groups of snails—one on meth, one not—in separate tanks of shallow water. And if the snails tried to surface and breathe that way, the scientists would poke them.

By poking the snails, Sorg’s team trained them to associate using the tubes with an unpleasant experience, and so keep them shut. Only the snails on speed remembered their training the following morning, and in a separate experiment it took longer for them to “unlearn” the memory [New Scientist].

The drug induces changes in the brain that last after the chemical is out of a snail’s system.

“These drugs of abuse produce very persistent memories,” explained Dr Sorg. “It’s a learning process – drug addiction is learning unwittingly. All of these visual, environmental and odour cues are being paired with the drug” [BBC News].

Pinning down just what physical changes in the brain allow for that effect is the key to the ultimate end of this kind of research: Targeting the intense memory associations that feed addiction as a part of drug treatment. And the research on learning and forgetting could have wider implications as well, says George Kemenes of the University of Sussex, who also does mollusk research:

“Ultimately, the humble snail could help prevent and treat memory disorders or even enhance normal memory” [BBC News].

Related Content:
80beats: Can Erasing a Drug Memory Erase the Need for a Fix?
80beats: How the Brain Makes Space for New Memories: By Replacing a Few Old Ones
80beats: How Ritalin Works in the Brain: With a One-Two Dopamine Punch
DISCOVER: How to Erase a Single Memory
DISCOVER: Disremembrance of Things Past

Image: Wikimedia Commons

When other Albertans saw landfill fodder, 17-year-old Kyle Schole saw electricity. His project, “Microbial Degredation of Vehicle Tires,” which uses a strain of bacteria to harness energy from decomposing rubber tires, hasn’t yet hit the journal circuit. But it has won the farm-raised teenager a gold-prize at his national science fair.

Schole devised his plan while driving past an Alberta tire recycling plant. Though his town was already transforming tires into speed bumps and surfacing, he wanted to pop those wheelies into something more. He decided to make a few calls, and chatted up a few microbiologists from Canada, Scotland, and Australia. He then had to find the perfect rubber-munching bacteria.

His farm wasn’t equipped to deal with biohazardous materials so he spent his summer in labs at the Westlock Health Care Centre. He estimates that the project took him over 400 hours, but in the end he successfully created a microbial fuel cell that converts chemical energy released during the tire’s microbial decomposition into electricity. For his efforts, he won a $6,000 cash prize and a $10,000 scholarship to the Canadian university of his choice.

The “science fair manic” told the The Edmonton Journal:

“I’m a very curious guy–whether it’s tinkering on the farm with my dad or working on science projects,” said Schole. “So I’m often thinking, ‘What would be a neat thing to test and improve on?’”

For more warm-fuzzies, see the CTV video coverage, with interview.

Related content:
DISCOVER: Science Fair for a Better Planet
Discoblog: It’s In the Bag! Teenager Wins Science Fair, Solves Massive Environmental Problem
The Loom: Microbial Art
The Loom: I For One Welcome Our Microbial Overlords

Image: flickr/Mykl Roventine

Ralf Vandebergh, an astronomer in The Netherlands, has sent me many of his outstanding images of space vehicles in the past. But he just sent one to me that I have to admit, rather shocked me: an image of a Keyhole 11 spy satellite!

At the time Ralf took these images, the satellite was about 600 km (360 miles) away, a considerable distance for a small object. Mind you, this satellite is about 5 meters (16 feet) long, so the fact that any detail is seen at all is amazing. It would appear to be less than 2 arcseconds in length at best — that’s the same apparent size as a U.S. quarter seen at a distance of about 3 km (nearly two miles!). For comparison, the Moon is 1800 arcseconds across, or 900 times bigger, so we’re talking weensy weensy here.

The Keyhole satellites are pretty well-known in space circles, and the KH-11s have been around a while (the next-generation KH-12s have been around a while too, but not much is known about them). The 11s are pretty much like Hubble Space Telescope, but pointed down at us — well, presumably not us, but as opposed to pointed out toward the heavens. Given some basic physics, and assuming the same optics as Hubble has, it’s easy to calculate that they should be able to spot objects as small as perhaps 10 cm (4 inches) across, though this would require either some very precise tracking or very short exposures to prevent blurring. Or maybe both. It’s also possible to improve on that resolution a bit using sophisticated mathematical techniques, too.

While little or no orbital data is known for the KH-12s, the orbits of KH-11s (at least, some of them, dun dun dunnnn) are online. Ralf used that data to predict where and when to get these images. In the picture above he compares what he got to a simplified Hubble-like drawing, and with some small amount of imagination you can see the resemblance. I wouldn’t put too much stock in the exact configuration, but it does appear he got some detail on the satellite. He also has a neat animation showing the satellite; details are harder to see but he catches some hint of solar panels, as well as catching a flash of sunlight off a reflective surface.

Also note he’s done all this with a 25 cm (10″) telescope. With something bigger, higher resolution is possible. Not so much because the image can be magnified more, but because shorter exposures are possible (bigger ’scopes capture more light from an object), freezing the atmospheric distortion better. I have seen some pretty big ’scopes that are used to track satellites, which makes me wonder how much detail they capture… and who else is out there tracking our satellites as well.

Image courtesy Ralf Vandebergh

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. We like to think that murderers are psychopaths, with some kind of abnormal psychology that would never appear in us, or someone we know. And yet most of us think we would kill in certain situations, like if we were at war, or someone was about to kill a person we loved. How 'natural' is this instinct in us, and can we ever obliterate it completely? In my new book, Bonobo Handshake, I talk about lethal aggression in one of our closest relatives, chimpanzees. Chimpanzees and humans have a lot in common when it comes to killing: #1 Killers are mostly male. Though female chimpanzees can participate in killing, usually the killers are males. In humans too, the FBI reported in 2005 that 89% of killers are male . #2 Males usually attack when the ratio is 3:1. Wrangham and Wilson reported that both chimpanzees and young men in gangs attack when they outnumber their victim 3 to 1 or more. The reason for this? This is the minimum number ...

PLoS Biology has a review of Elements of Evolutionary Genetics up, Evolution Is a Quantitative Science:

But why has evolutionary genetics stood apart from biology’s resolutely qualitative, rather than quantitative, tradition? Most remarkably, while biomechanics employs the laws of physics, and biochemistry is founded on the quantitative science of chemistry, evolutionary genetics is based on axiomatic foundations that are entirely biological, and yet are capable of precise mathematical formulation. The rules of Mendelian genetics, encapsulated by unbiased inheritance and random mating in a diploid genetic system, predict Hardy-Weinberg frequencies, the binomial sampling of gametes in finite populations determines the properties of genetic drift, and, with a Poisson process of mutation, the complex theory of neutral genetic variation can be established on the basis of very simple assumptions.

A few books to get a historical perspective of the origins of modern evolutionary genetics (albeit with a pop gen focus), The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics, Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology and R.A. Fisher: The Life of a Scientist.

ABC news is reporting that the Air Force tested the X-51A scramjet yesterday, and that it successfully fired for 200 seconds, blowing away — literally — the previous record of 12 seconds.

Very cool. So screw getting your own jet pack. When do we get our own Mach 6 personal scrampacks^*?

Tip o’ the windscreen to Slashdot.

Two children, Anne and Carla, have worked together to make a cake and they have to split it between them. Anne says that she’s the bigger cake aficionado and deserves the lion’s share. But Carla demands the bigger slice since she did most of the cooking. A nosy third party, Brenda, argues that the only fair call would be for the two girls to split the cake equally. Which is the right path?

There’s no obvious right answer and different people will probably side with different viewpoints. Dilemmas like this have been the subject of much philosophical debate, and they’re a common part of everyday life. How do you allocate pay rises between your staff? How should the UK’s new government split its budget among its various departments?

According to Norwegian scientist Ingvild Almås, our attitudes to such questions change during our childhood and adolescence, as we start changing our opinions on what counts as ‘fair’. Children tend to shun any form of inequality – they’d agree with Brenda. But as they enter the turmoil of adolescence, they become more meritocratic and are happier to divide wealth according to individual achievements, as Carla suggested. As their teens draw to a close, they (like Anne) pay greater heed to efficiency, making choices of maximum benefit to the group.

Almås studied these shifts by working with 486 Norwegian children between the 5^th and 13^th grade (ages 10-11 and 18-19 respectively). She asked them to play a version of a money-sharing task called the dictator game. To begin with, the kids had 45 minutes to spend between two websites. In the first, they could earn points by spotting specific numbers among a digit-filled screen. The other was full of videos, cartoons and games but bereft of point-scoring opportunities. Afterwards, their points were traded for actual cash at either a high or low exchange rate. Their total earnings reflected their own achievements and efforts, as well as a smattering of luck.

In the next phase, the kids were paired with others from the same grade. Each one knew how long their partner had spent earning points, how well they had done, and what their exchange rate was. The pair’s winnings were pooled and one of them – the dictator – had to choose how to split the total. Overall, the children were remarkably fair. On average, dictators from all the age groups gave their partner around 45% of the total pot. However, a closer look within each age group revealed a striking difference.

The majority of 5^th-graders (around two-thirds) were egalitarians, who shared their money equally no matter the circumstance. But this philosophy became less popular with age and by the 9^th grade, just a quarter of the children held this attitude. By contrast, meritocrats, who gave more money to the child who had earned the most points, became more common with age. They accounted for just 5% of 5^th-graders but made up around 40% of 11^th and 13^th-graders. A third group – the libertarians, who were generally happy with any division of wealth, even based on luck – made up a third or so of the group at all ages.

So adolescents are happier to accept inequalities as long as they’re based on merit. What about efficiency? To study that, Almås modified the game so that the children’s points were only exchanged for cash after the dictator’s choice. They would get one krone (the Norwegian currency) for each point they kept, but their partner’s share would be multiplied by either 1, 2, 3 or 4 times. In the latter scenarios, the pair would gain the most total money if the dictator gave away all the points.

The 5^th and 7^th graders didn’t particularly care. Even when their partner’s points would be quadrupled, they only gave away slightly more points. However, the late adolescents were more swayed and parted with significantly more points as their partner’s multiplier increased. On the whole, efficiency factored into the kids’ decisions a few years after they began to give more weight to merit. And unlike merit, which influenced both boys and girls equally, boys placed greater importance upon efficiency than girls did.

Why the changes? Almås says that it’s easy to be completely egalitarian or libertarian; based on these philosophies, you can divide wealth with relative ease. It’s far more complicated to consider merit and efficiency, where you’d need to filter relevant information and make calculations. These are things that get easier as children mature.

However, this hypothesis can’t account for the fact that fewer adolescents stick to the egalitarian attitude of childhood. An alternative explanation is that as they grow up, children become increasingly exposed to competitive areas where they are rewarded based on their achievements, be they in the classroom or in a sporting ground.

Like many studies of this sort, the volunteers all come from a WEIRD country (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic), which makes them psychologically, well, weird from a global perspective. Do the same experiments in other parts of the world and you might well find different results.

Reference: Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1187300

Photo by Knut Egil Wang

More on fairness:

• Clean smells promote generosity and fair play; dark rooms and sunglasses promote deceit and selfishness
• Genes affect our likelihood to punish unfair play
• Dogs frown on unfair rewards
• The right side of fair play
• Children learn to share by age 7-8
• Selfless monkeys find personal reward in helping others

After nearly forty days of wandering in the wilderness of failure and frustration, is this the time that BP finally closes off its oil leak?

There’s a glimmer of optimism in the Gulf of Mexico right now, as the “top kill” appears to have stopped the flow of oil. But with everything that’s happened so far, people are watching nervously and holding off on any celebration until we know the leak is sealed at last.

“They’ve been able to stabilize the wellhead, they’re pumping mud down it. They’ve stopped the hydrocarbons from coming up,” said Coast Guard chief Thad Allen, who is coordinating the US government’s battle against the oil spill. He told local radio WWL First News that BP “had some success overnight” but cautioned the British energy giant was “in a period of kind of wait and see right now where they see how the well stabilizes” [Discovery News].

The likelihood of long-term success grows with the passing hours, though, for the sake of caution, it may be tomorrow before BP declares victory on this. It took a lot of pumping heavy mud just to get to this point:

At first, most of the mud was carried away by the oil and gas streaming up through the well at high pressure, but with enough mud being pumped in at a fast enough rate, it started accumulating inside the well as intended. Unless something goes wrong, at some point, enough mud — and thus enough weight — would accumulate to overcome the upward pressure of the escaping oil and gas, and seal the well [The New York Times].

Even if BP does succeed, which we greatly hope that it does, the company then will have a furious public and U.S. government to face. As we noted earlier today, the new flow rate estimates by the U.S. Geological Survey mean that, even at best, the BP spill is already worse than the Exxon Valdez.

And then there are the shortcuts. During the Congressional investigation, witnesses have said BP chose a cheaper but riskier casing that provided just a single protective seal on the system rather than two.

BP’s decision was “without a doubt a riskier way to go,” said Greg McCormack, director of the Petroleum Extension Service at the University of Texas at Austin [CNBC].

Today, the Wall Street Journal published a long investigation into what caused the explosion in the first place. Behind schedule and over budget, they say, BP skipped quality control tests on Halliburton’s cement job, didn’t complete a test to remove gas from the well, and had a project manager who wasn’t experienced in deepwater drilling. That’s not all.

There were warning signs of a valve leak nearly five hours before the deadly gulf oil rig explosion, according to an internal BP investigation, which also found that a number of equipment and system failures may have caused the Deepwater Horizon disaster [Los Angeles Times].

Recent posts on the BP 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: BP To Switch Dispersants; Will Kevin Costner Save Us All?
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 photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Ann Marie Gorden.

Do I smell a banana? Nope. It’s a blue light I’m smelling.

Fruit fly larvae made this mistake while participating in a study recently published in Frontiers in Neuroscience Behavior. By adding a light-sensitive protein to certain smell receptors in the larvae, German scientists allowed the genetically engineered bugs to essentially smell light.

The team, under the guidance of Klemens Störtkuhl at Ruhr University Bochum, is attempting to understand “olfactory coding”–how the brain transforms chemical signals into perceptible smells. Normally, a fly’s olfactory receptor neurons only send an electrical signal to its brain when the fly smells something, but by adding a protein the researchers caused a neuron to fire when the one-millimeter bug was basking in blue light.

The fly brain uses some of its 28 olfactory neurons to detect bad smells, and others for good ones. Protein puppeteers, the researchers could pick which neuron to add the light-sensing protein to. The good-smelling neurons respond to a smorgasbord of fly-friendly scents: like banana, marzipan, and glue (apparently rotting fruit gives off these scents). By attaching the light-sensitive protein to one of these neurons, researchers caused the typically light-fearing insects to crawl straight towards the blue glow.

According to a ScienceDaily article, given their successful mapping of these larvae olfactory neurons, the researchers next hope to make adult fruit flies go bananas.

Related content:
Discoblog: Neuroscientist Says We Perceive “Smounds”—Half Sound, Half Smell
80beats: A Life-Extending Coup: Flies That Can’t Smell Food Live 30 Percent Longer
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Smell a lady, shrug off flu – how female odours give male mice an immune boost
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Elephants smell the difference between human ethnic groups
DISCOVER: The Brain: The First Yardstick for Measuring Smells

Image: flickr / Jason Gulledge

It’s BMJ week (again) on NCBI ROFL! After the success of our first BMJ week, we decided to devote another week to fun articles from holiday issues of the British Medical Journal. Enjoy!

“Objective: To assess the evidence for a genetic basis to magic. Setting: Harry Potter novels of J K Rowling. Participants: Muggles, witches, wizards, and squibs. Interventions: Limited. Main outcome measures: Family and twin studies, magical ability, and specific magical skills. Results: Magic shows strong evidence of heritability, with familial aggregation and concordance in twins. Evidence suggests magical ability to be a quantitative trait. Specific magical skills, notably being able to speak to snakes, predict the future, and change hair colour, all seem heritable. Conclusions: A multilocus model with a dominant gene for magic might exist, controlled epistatically by one or more loci, possibly recessive in nature. Magical enhancers regulating gene expression may be involved, combined with mutations at specific genes implicated in speech and hair colour such as FOXP2 and MCR1.”

Bonus from the full text:

Glossary

Photo: flickr/Jodi Hebert

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Quadruple feature: Harry Potter and the curse of headache.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Accio medical degree!
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: The history of poisoning in the future: lessons from Star Trek.

WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

Indonesia, because it’s an archipelago, might not look like it has a lot of land area. But it’s home to the third largest forest area of any country, and has half the tropical peatlands in the entire world. These forested lands are home to many endangered species, and also store greenhouse gases. Now, thanks to international cooperation (and a big check), more of that area will be saved—for now.

This week, Indonesia pledged to stop giving permits for the destruction of virgin forests:

“We will conduct a moratorium for two years where we stop the conversion of peat land and of forest,” President Yudhoyono said at a joint news conference with Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg. The pledge comes ahead of Thursday’s climate and forest conference in Oslo, which is expected to be attended by officials from some 50 countries [BBC News].

Environmentalists are cheering the reprieve, noting that vast swaths of forest have already been cleared in Indonesia to provide wood for timber and paper industries, and to provide space for palm oil plantations.

While the Copenhagen conference on climate back in December was a failure in creating greenhouse gas emissions limits, it did succeed in putting a larger focus on slowing deforestation. Under a program called REDD Plus (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation), wealthier nations have agreed to provide funding to slow deforestation in tree-rich nations like Indonesia, hoping to save carbon dioxide-absorbing forests that way.

The United States, Australia, France, Japan, Britain and Norway had specifically agreed on $3.5 billion from 2010-12 to save forests, a pool of money which has now grown to $4 billion, according to Norway which chaired the climate conference [Reuters].

Once REDD Plus gets going, the organization says it will keep a close watch to make sure agreements aren’t broken. (In December, we reported that Google volunteered to help out with satellite imaging.) But more so than espionage, the money talks.

“Forests are worth more dead than alive. Today we commit to change that equation,” said Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg [AP].

Related Content:
80beats: Is Google the Guardian Angel of Rainforests?
80beats: Truce Between Green Groups And Timber Companies Could Save Canadian Forests
80beats: Saving the Rainforest Could Make Economic Sense
80beats: Drought + Warmer Temperatures = a “Double Whammy” of Tree Deaths

Image: Wikimedia Commons