How far can you beam information instantaneously? Try 10 miles, according to a study in Nature Photonics that pushes the limits of quantum teleportation to its greatest distance yet. At that distance, the scientists say, one can begin to consider the possibility of someday using quantum teleportation to communicate between the ground and a satellite in orbit.

As stories about quantum teleportation usually note, this isn’t the Starship Enterprise’s transporter: The weird quantum phenomenon makes it possible to send information, not matter, across a distance.

It works by entangling two objects, like photons or ions. The first teleportation experiments involved beams of light. Once the objects are entangled, they’re connected by an invisible wave, like a thread or umbilical cord. That means when something is done to one object, it immediately happens to the other object, too. Einstein called this “spooky action at a distance.” [Popular Science]

Previous experiments achieved this phenomenon in photons separated by a distance of hundreds of yards, connected by fiber channels. But the physicists in China blew that distance away, and with 89 percent integrity for the information.

In this particular experiment, researchers maximally entangled two photons using both spatial and polarization modes and sent the one with higher energy through a ten-mile-long free space channel. They found that the distant photon was still able to respond to changes in state of the photon they held onto even at this unprecedented distance. [Ars Technica]

More recent developments in the strange quantum world:

Cryptography: Last month researchers announced a way to make quantum cryptography, a way to encode information that relies on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, 100 times faster than previous experiments could.

Coherence: In quantum coherence, photons can enter a multi-state existence in which they simultaneously travel multiple paths, but then at the end choose only the fastest route (a counter-intuitive talent I wish I possessed). Researchers have found this happens in plants, which helps make photosynthesis so efficient.

Entanglement: This month physicists in Israel managed to entangle five separate photons. That’s not the overall record (which is six). But the scientists say their five entangled photons could only choose one of two paths, and that’s the kind of system that would someday be used in quantum communication or computing.

The quantum state: We don’t witness the oddball behaviors of the quantum world on the scale our naked eyes can see, but in March physicists put the largest object ever into a quantum state.

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Image: Jian-Wei Pan et. al

I received an email that appalled me: the Royal Ontario Museum, an otherwise excellent establishment, has invited new age nonsense guru Deepak Chopra to speak there!

Here’s part of the announcement:

World renowned teacher, author and philosopher Deepak Chopra presents his latest concepts in the field of mind-body medicine bridging the technological miracles of the West with the wisdom of the East. He will show you how your highest vision of yourself can be turned into physical reality and discuss how you can become a living cell within the body of a living universe. You don’t join the cosmic dance – you become the dance.

If that doesn’t make sense to you, there’s a good reason for it: it doesn’t make sense.

Chopra is perhaps the largest purveyor of pseudoscientific piffling pablum on the planet, and here is a museum — a science museum — paying him to speak. Non-ironically! Worse, check out how much they’re charging: $25 to $175! You can guess how much they’re lining Chopra’s pockets.

<gag>

The Center for Inquiry (Canada) has written an open letter to the museum, and I think they have handled the situation well. I hope they can distribute a lot of flyers at the event. Of course, people who pay that kind of money to hear such nonsense are unlikely to want to hear arguments against it, but we’ll see.

Here. The paper is Coordinated Punishment of Defectors Sustains Cooperation and Can Proliferate When Rare. The blog post highlighted is Punishing Cheaters Promotes the Evolution of Cooperation.

It is probably obvious that I’m not on the internet as much right now. But I’ve been thinking on the topic of this paper for a few days, and plan on putting together a post when I have something interesting to say, and nothing interesting to do off-net.

P.S. We decided to bring Kevin Zelnio back on.

No one dreams of leaving a lasting carbon footprint on the world when they depart. But if it’s a choice between that and being reduced to a brown soupy liquid and a pile of bones, which option would you take?

The California legislature is considering allowing funeral homes to provide a third alternative to burial or cremation. Instead of hauling out the backhoe or firing up an incinerator to dispose of human remains, funeral directors could offer a method called alkaline hydrolysis or “bio-cremation.” This technique uses hot water, pressure, and sodium- or potassium-hydroxide (the strongly basic chemicals often referred to as lye) to break down the body’s tissues into simple molecules in a matter of a few hours.

Proponents of bio-cremation say it’s the eco-friendly death option. They note that cremation produces air pollution and greenhouse gases, while burials use tons of wood for caskets and involve treating bodies with hazardous embalming chemicals.

Four other states have already approved bio-cremation, but before funeral homes can offer the service, they have to figure out what to do with the environmentally friendly liquid remains. Last week, an undertaking service in Minnesota asked its local city council for permission to pour it down the drain.

Out of respect for the dead, or reverence for the city’s sewer system, or maybe just gut-level disgust, the council rejected the proposal.

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Image: iStockphoto

“Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes,” American revolutionaries supposedly yelled at the Battle of Bunker Hill. Legend has it that the rebels were trying to conserve ammunition, given the inaccuracy of their 18th century guns.

But things have come a long way since 1775. With DARPA’s new “One Shot” sniper system [PDF], scheduled to be in soldier’s hands by the fall of 2011, the U.S. military will give snipers the ability to take out an enemy at a distance of .7 miles in winds around 10 to 20 miles per hour. Military brass hopes the system will give snipers a perfect shot at least six times out of ten.

The One Shot system still wouldn’t come close to matching the record for shooting accuracy: In November of last year, British Army sniper Corporal Craig Harrison made two shots at a distance of 1.53 miles in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. But Harrison modestly thanked perfect shooting conditions: no wind, great visibility, and mild weather. The DARPA program aims to give soldiers the technology to hit a target despite adverse conditions.

To meet that goal, engineers first had to figure out what to do about wind. The prototype gun can’t get rid of the wind, but it needs to correct for it. Otherwise, over long distances, the bullets will veer off course; DARPA notes that a 10 mph crosswind can produce a miss even at a distance of a quarter of a mile.

The One Shot sniper scope has a computer system that uses lasers to track not only distance, but also the wind turbulence in the path of the bullet. A set of crosshairs appears not in direct line with the gun’s barrel, but instead where the bullet will actually hit, and also displays the confidence of that shot.

US military trials have found that a laser beam shone on the target can do more than just determine the range: it can also be used to “measure the average down range crosswind profile”. The laser information can be combined with automatic readings of temperature, humidity etc and a “ballistic solution” computed. [The Register]

But there’s more work to be done on the One Shot system before it arrives in combat zones. These high-tech systems can’t require a lot of training or give off a lot of heat.

What the agency really wants is a battle-ready system that doesn’t require tricky in-field optical alignment and fiddling with lasers. Night and day accuracy also means that the laser, which is used to help calculate and subtract wind turbulence between the predator and his prey, can’t be infrared. Enemies with night-vision goggles would see that from a mile away. [Wired]

DARPA has just finished its first phases of the project, developing and testing the computer targeting system. Among other things, the next steps include making the system the right size and weight for battle, and completing some tweaks to the target crosshairs. With these improvements, according to a DARPA announcement this month, the Agency will ask for 15 “fully operational and field hardened systems” for field testing.

Related content:
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Science Not Fiction: District 9: Smart Guns That Read Your DNA

Image: flickr / The U.S. Army

Stuart Pimm, a leading conservation biologist, is turning out to be a blogger to follow. He’s down in the Delaware Bay right now, studying some of the birds that are migrating unbelievable distances (see my story in today’s Times). Unfortunately, the birds are having a rough time because we’re taking away the food they need to power their long-haul flights: horseshoe crab eggs. Check it out.

No, that title is not a typo. Here’s the galaxy:

This is an irregular galaxy about 15 million light years away that’s undergoing a "starburst" — a massive wave of star formation. I won’t go into details like I usually do (the press release for the image is pretty good, so go read that)… but I just wanted to make the joke.

The name of the galaxy? NGC 1313.

Image credit: my buddy, Travis Rector of the University of Alaska, Anchorage

Here in the United States, people are all atwitter about Craig Venter’s announcement last week of a new “synthetic cell,” and whether it constitutes creating life or simply a nifty new step in genetic engineering. Across the pond in the U.K., however, there are increasing rumblings of a more practical matter: Whether the patents that Venter is seeking to protect his work will bring a chill to genetic engineering research elsewhere.

Dr Venter’s [team] has applied for patents on the methods it used to create the new organism, nicknamed Synthia, by transferring a bacterial genome built from scratch into the shell of another bacterium. Synthia’s genetic code contains four DNA “watermarks”, including famous quotations and the names of the scientists behind the research, that could be used to detect cases of unauthorised copying [The Times].

Nobel winner John Sulston is the main man sounding the alarm (pdf); he argues that Venter is trying to obtain a “monopoly” on a range of genetic engineering techniques, which would prevent other researchers from freely experimenting with those methods. He’s also a familiar adversary to Venter. The two butted heads a decade ago when scientists were rushing to sequence the human genome.

Craig Venter led a private sector effort which was to have seen charges for access to the information. John Sulston was part of a government and charity-backed effort to make the genome freely available to all scientists [BBC News].

Venter found himself in another intellectual property vs. public domain flare-up in 2007, when a Canadian organization called the ETC Group challenged patents that Venter’s company, Synthetic Genomics, tried to file on the artificial microbe his lab had in development. After that public fight, Nature Biotechnology recognized the need for commercial biotech firms to protect their work, but called on national organizations and non-profits to continue putting as much DNA information as possible into the public domain so that research doesn’t get bogged down in a sea of legal battles.

This time around, the response from Venter’s organization is much the same as before: Relax, everybody.

In response to Sulston’s latest broadside, a spokesman for the J Craig Venter Institute told the BBC, “There are a number of companies working in the synthetic genomic/biology space and also many academic labs. Most if not all of these have likely filed some degree of patent protection on a variety of aspects of their work so it would seem unlikely that any one group, academic centre or company would be able to hold a ‘monopoly’ on anything” [Nature].

These fights will go on, and that’s a good thing: We need innovators, and we need agitators. While Venter’s work will push genetic engineering forward, and will likely make oodles of cash in the process, Sulston and others can keep questioning the balance of information power so it doesn’t all end up in once place.

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DISCOVER: The 10 Most Influential People in Science

Image: Amy Eckert

I’m at the American Society for Microbiology Annual Meeting, swimming in a lot of excellent new research. I also just learned about a disease I never heard of before, with a truly awesome name: Burning Mouth Syndrome.

When I posted this on Twitter, the writer Michael Paul Mason immediately responded with his own favorite: Smoking Stool Syndrome.

So what’s your favorite?

The Space Shuttle Atlantis is due to land — for the last time — at Kennedy Space Center on Wednesday morning at 08:48 Eastern time (12:48 UT). If she gets waved off, the next landing opportunity is at 10:22 EDT (14:22 UT). If that doesn’t happen, it’ll be Thursday at 09:13 and 10:48 (and more chances on Friday if needed as well).

This is it for Atlantis. It’ll be fixed up and kept active in case it’s needed for a rescue mission for Discovery in September, but if not, that’s the last flight. You can watch the landing live on NASA TV, follow NASA on Twitter, and get more info at the NASA shuttle website.

Image credit: NASA

I got pretty excited when Makani Power staff photographer Andrea Dunlap showed me this photograph. For my purposes, it doesn’t get much better than this: sustainable energy, technology, the future, all rolled into a beautiful photograph. Pick up our June issue for a gander at the double-page spread.

This photograph is 30-second exposure taken during a test of a 10-kilowatt-scale prototype of an airborne wind turbine in Maui, Hawaii. The mobile turbine has a span of about 16 feet and is tethered to the ground using a long, flexible cable. A computer controls the flight pattern. These tests show that a flying generator can sweep through a bigger wind window than a traditional turbine, and without the massive supporting towers. Makani Power plans to have a functional megawatt version of the tethered turbine ready by 2011. Makani Power is partially funded by Google.org as a potential source of renewable energy. Google’s server farms and the Internet in general have ever increasing demands for power, which is in turn burning ever more coal.

Photograph courtesy Makani Power

Its doom was sealed six years ago.

In 2004, UC Berkeley researchers say, this comet was tugged by Jupiter’s gravity into a path bound for destruction in the cauldron of the sun. And when its end finally came this March, astronomers captured the comet plunging deep into the sun on video (see below), watching it go farther into the light than any suicide comet seen before.

Seeing comets and other small objects approach the sun is difficult because the objects are overwhelmed by the sun’s brightness. Scientists were able to track this one closer to the sun than ever, before it it burned up in the sun’s lower atmosphere [Wired.com].

The team watched the comet with NASA’s STEREO (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory), launched in 2006 and using satellites on opposites sides of the planet to survey the sun in 3D. The comet plunged through the corona and was tough enough to survive until it crossed into the chromosphere and met its final end.

Based on the comet’s relatively short tail, about 1.9 million miles long, the researchers believe that the comet contained heavier elements that do not evaporate readily. This would also explain how it penetrated so deeply into the chromosphere, surviving the strong solar wind as well as the extreme temperatures, before evaporating [Daily Mail].

The astronomers think this now-deceased comet was a Kreutz sungrazer. This is a group of comets that are the remnants of a single large comet that broke up, and periodically they graze too close for comfort and make death dives into the sun. The teams presented the findings yesterday at the American Astronomical Meeting in Miami.

Check out DISCOVER’s page on Facebook.

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Image: NASA

Expletives and MIDI music rose from office cubicles this past Friday: Pac-Man had returned.

On May 21, Google replaced its usual blue, yellow, red, and green title with what the company calls a “doodle.” But unlike previous replacements, which have celebrated everything from Pi day to Norman Rockwell’s birthday, for Pac-Man’s special day (the 30th Anniversary of the game’s Japan release) Google pulled out the big guns, er, ghost-eaters.

This time, the doodle was an animated and playable version of the 1980s Namco video game, complete with our pie-shaped hero and his multicolored ghost foes: Blinky (red), Pinky (pink), Inky (cyan), and Clyde (orange).

But some kill-joys complain that Friday’s Pac-Man play hindered productivity, and set out to determine just how much money had been frittered away as employees avoided their work.

The BBC reports that the firm Rescue Time tracked 11,ooo users’ online activity and noticed that Pac-Man kept them on Google’s site about 36 seconds longer than usual. Multiplying those 36 seconds by Google’s 504 million users, that means over 500 years worth of work time spent playing. The firm estimates an average worker’s salary at $25 an hour for a grand total of about $120 million in lost productivity.

How Rescue Time knew that employees playing Pac-Man would have otherwise spent those 36 seconds working seems a stretch. How do they know, for example, those otherwise dreary 36 seconds wouldn’t have instead been spent tweeting or reading about animal sex? After all, humans are eminently distractable, especially on a spring Friday.

If anyone was really affected by the Pac-Man celebration, perhaps it was those caught off guard by a glitch in an original release of the doodle. To the panic of some Firefox-users, the game’s sounds started automatically, even in hidden tabs. (The final version required the click of an “insert coin” button.)

As ComputerWorld reports:

“We had a new kind of ‘virus’ attack today that people were calling in about,” said Mike Williams, a support manager with Clearwater, Fla.-based Sunbelt Software. “A few people, including an admin[istrator], called in thinking they had virus with the sound of a siren in the background of their Web browser.”

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Image: Google

Today is Towel Day, where fans around the world celebrate the works of beloved author Douglas Adams, a master of witty prose and observational humour. Consider his description of money:

“This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”

Adams was right to highlight the perceived link between money and happiness. Many people dream of the life they could lead if they won the lottery, a world of mansions, fine restaurants, and first-class travel. But few consider the costs. These fineries could lead to enjoyment overload, compromising our ability to savour life’s simpler pleasures, whether it’s a walk on a sunny day or the taste of a bar of chocolate. This idea of wealth as a double-edged sword is widely held and while it’s easy to suggest that it springs from jealousy, a new set of experiments supports the idea.

Jordi Quoidbach from the University of Liege showed that richer people aren’t as good as savouring everyday pleasures than their poorer counterparts. Even the mere thought of money can make us take mundane joys for granted. Normal people who were reminded about wealth spent less time appreciating a humble bar of chocolate and derived less enjoyment from it.

Quoidbach’s study helps to make sense of a trend in psychological research, where money has an incredibly weak effect on happiness. Once people have enough to buy basic needs and rise out of abject poverty, having extra cash has little bearing on their enjoyment of life. Perhaps this is because money both gives and takes away: it opens doors to new pleasures, while making delights that were already accessible seem less enticing. Obsessing over wealth is like being on a hedonic treadmill – continuously running to stay in the same emotional place.

To begin with, Quoidbach asked 351 university employees, from cleaners to senior staff, to complete a test that measures their ability to savour positive emotions. Each recruit was asked to put themselves in a detailed pleasant scenario, from finishing an important task to discovering an amazing waterfall on a hike. Afterwards, they were quizzed in detail about how they would react to the scenarios, to see how strongly they savoured the experiences.

Using other questionnaires, Quoidbach also assessed how happy they were, how much money it would take to live their dream life, how much money they earned and how much they had saved. And as a final twist, half of the questionnaires included picture of a large stack of euros, while the other half saw the same picture that had been blurred beyond recognition.

He found that the more money the recruits had, the worse they were at savouring their positive emotions. Of course, it’s possible that people who appreciate their lot in life are less eager to chase after wealth. But Quoidbach found that a person’s savouring ability was unrelated to their desire for money. And even suggesting the thought of money, by showing them the euro picture, had the same negative effect, dampening their to the happy imaginings.

Regardless, the recruits also tended to be slightly happier the more money they had. Other studies have found the same trend, but Quoidbach’s important result is the money would have had a far greater impact on the volunteers’ happiness were it not for its negative effect on their savouring ability.

Of course, there’s only so far you can take the results of the questionnaires. A more objective experiment would be better, and that’s exactly what Quoidbach did. He asked 40 students to volunteer for a taste test. They were given a binder that included a questionnaire about their attitudes toward chocolate. On the opposite page, marked as material for an unrelated study, was a picture of either money or a neutral object. Afterwards, all they had to do was eat a chocolate.

Two researchers kept an eye on them and not only timed their munching, but rated how much enjoyment they were showing. The results were clear – the recruits who saw the money took 32 seconds to eat the chocolate, significantly less than the 45 seconds spent by the others. And on average, their happiness rating, as judged by the observers, was 3.6 out of 7, compared to a higher score of 5 for their peers. (Incidentally, the observers didn’t know which group their subjects belonged to, and their scores strongly agreed with one another’s).

These studies are part of a growing body of research showing that the link between money and happiness is more complicated than we might imagine. Elizabeth Dunn, who also worked with Quoidback, has previously shown that money can buy happiness if it’s spent on others, but that having money reduces the odds that people will actually spend it in this way! Dunn has also found that money is better used to buy happiness if it’s spent on experiences rather than goods. And here we see that wealth can undercut the very happiness that it boosts.

In both experiments, a simple reminder of wealth undermined people’s ability to appreciate life’s little pleasures, be they imagined ones or the very physical joys of chocolate. That’s a striking result and Quoidbach explains it best himself. “One need not actually visit the pyramids of Egypt or spend a week at the legendary Banff spas in Canada for one’s savouring ability to be impaired,” he writes. “Simply knowing that these peak experiences are readily available may increase one’s tendency to take the small pleasures of daily life for granted.”

Reference: Psychological Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797610371963 or here

Image from Muffet on Flickr

More on happiness or money:

• Fake and counterfeit goods promote unethical behaviour
• Travels with dopamine – the chemical that affects how much pleasure we expect
• The peril of positive thinking – why positive messages hurt people with low self-esteem
• To predict what will make you happy, ask a stranger rather than guessing yourself
• Money can buy happiness… if you spend it on other people

When I blogged the other day about the media training I was doing at MIT, the first comment read as follows:
Frauds at work. Science is not about PR, Mooney. You and your ilk make me feel both ill, and embarassed to say I am a scientist. You should go crawl back under your rock.
To which Aileen Pincus, who also does media training, ably replied:
There’s no question that science is losing the public relations battle, so it’s interesting to me to still find scientists like the poster above who obviously believe that learning to communicate the science somehow harms the science. Yes, those who apply science commercially don’t suffer from such delusions, and they’re a good many of my clients. Others however, come to understand the real world of how science in funded only after long, losing struggles. Public support for science, essential to that funding, isn’t something to be scorned–and that can only happen when scientists learn how to talk to non-scientists.
Indeed--and that is only one of the reasons that many scientists are interested in having such trainings. I believe a lot of it has to do with the nastiness of the evolution and climate wars, and the sense that we have been ...

The folks at 3 Quarks Daily are taking nominations for their second annual Prize in Science. The judge this year will be Richard Dawkins.

Here are the details for how to nominate a blog post from the past year, written after May 23, 2009. The deadline is May 31.

Some Loom readers have already nominated some posts–thanks! Here are a few other of my favorites…

Full-Spectrum Genomes

The X-Woman’s Finger Bone

A Day Among the Genomes

Kinkiness Beyond Kinky

Skull Caps and Genomes

The Origin of Big

Ardipithecus, We Meet At Last

A group of new blogs have launched at NYU’s Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program. In my capacity as Visiting Scholar there, I helped some of the students think through how to work blogs into their training at NYU. Mainly, I urged them to think about how to not be boring. I suggested they set up blogs that they themselves would actually want to write, and that weren’t like a lot of other blogs.

And they did! Kids these days.

So check out the whole blog roll, and offer your deeply insightful and constructive critiques. They’re waiting for you.

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 investigate the risks of mild traumatic brain injury and neck injury associated with head banging, a popular dance form accompanying heavy metal music. DESIGN: Observational studies, focus group, and biomechanical analysis. PARTICIPANTS: Head bangers. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Head Injury Criterion and Neck Injury Criterion were derived for head banging styles and both popular heavy metal songs and easy listening music controls. RESULTS: An average head banging song has a tempo of about 146 beats per minute, which is predicted to cause mild head injury when the range of motion is greater than 75 degrees . At higher tempos and greater ranges of motion there is a risk of neck injury. CONCLUSION: To minimise the risk of head and neck injury, head bangers should decrease their range of head and neck motion, head bang to slower tempo songs by replacing heavy metal with adult oriented rock, only head bang to every second beat, or use personal protective equipment.”

Read the full article here.

Image: flickr/y-its-mom

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WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

That’s not cloud cover. It’s polar ice on Mars, about 600 miles across and covered with deep etchings. The dark valley on the right, named Chasma Boreale, is about the size of the Grand Canyon.

This riven Martian arctic was a mystery to scientists for over forty years. But data from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has given researchers some important clues to how the ice spirals formed. Their findings appear in two papers published in the journal Nature.

Data from Mars now points to both the canyon and spiral troughs being created and shaped primarily by wind. Rather than being cut into existing ice very recently, the features formed over millions of years as the ice sheet grew. By influencing wind patterns, the shape of underlying, older ice controlled where and how the features grew. [NASA]

This image was made using Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter data. A shaded-relief image, it shows clearly the pole’s gorges. Chasma Boreale is a mile deep in some places.

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Image1: NASA/Caltech/JPL/E. DeJong/J. Craig/M. Stetson
Image2: NASA/GSFC

After years of denial, Floyd Landis–the cyclist who was stripped of his winning title to the 2006 Tour de France after failing a drug test–admitted last week that he did take performance enhancing drugs. And his confession is causing a stir, partly because he also implicated former teammate Lance Armstrong, seven-time-winner of the Tour de France (Armstrong denies the accusation), and partly because of the particular drugs he fessed up to taking:

Mr. Landis said in [several emails to cycling officials] that during his career, he and other American riders learned how to conduct blood transfusions, take the synthetic blood booster Erythropoietin, or EPO, and use steroids. All these practices are banned in cycling. Mr. Landis said he started using testosterone patches, then progressed to blood transfusions, EPO, and a liquid steroid taken orally. [Wall Street Journal]

EPO shook the cycling community in the 1990s, when police raids during the 1998 Tour de France (dubbed the “Tour de Dopage“) found that several riders were using EPO. It looks like the drug, believed to be thwarted by drug tests, has returned.

Our kidneys produce most of our natural erythropoietin, a hormone that leads to the creation of red blood cells. Since red blood cells carry oxygen, more cells means more oxygen in the blood. More oxygen means longer, harder workouts.

Anemics, who suffer from fatigue, naturally have low levels of the hormone. Dopers, who take a synthetic version, have high levels, which can give them endurance but also lead to dangerous side effects such as blood-thickening (and thus strokes).

Regulatory agencies like the International Cycling Union and the World Anti-Doping Agency have developed tests to combat the use of such drugs in competitive sports. For example, the biological passport program, unveiled in 2007, uses repeated sampling to make an electronic record of the cyclist’s natural levels of various hormones, which become benchmarks to test against before a particular race. And since a urine test introduced in 2000 could determine EPO levels, apparent use of the drug declined over the past decade.

But Landis’s confession forces regulatory agencies to face a loophole that helped riders pass urine tests. It’s called microdosing:

“In 2003, the athletes started to use a new procedure together with blood doping,” said Francesca Rossi, the director of antidoping at the International Cycling Union, the sport’s governing body. “I know that this microdosing strategy can be difficult to detect.” Working with doctors, cyclists discovered that carefully controlled, small doses of EPO eluded the urine test while still raising their red cell count. Microdoses of EPO let athletes put in superhuman hours of training without suffering the natural consequence of fatigue. [New York Times]

The debate over how much EPO doping is going on in competitive cycling will certainly continue in the messy aftermath of Landis’s claims. In one allegation, Landis claimed that Armstrong was caught with EPO in 2001 Tour de Suisse, but that officials had covered it up.

Landis suffered another blow to his credibility. The International Cycling Union said no riders tested positive for EPO at the 2001 Tour de Suisse, disputing comments made by the disgraced cyclist. [Boston Globe]

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Image: flickr / whileseated