Sorry for the radio silence around here of late. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve been traveling like a mad person. The good news is that I just got back from UC Davis, where I had the chance to meet John Conway for the first time in person.

The bad news is: no time for blogging. But I recently received an email pointing out that some links have died in an old post, which I proceeded to update. And that gave me the idea of stooping to a classic blogospheric move in times of sparse content: reposting old stuff! So here is the post in question, from several years ago. If people don’t complain too loudly, maybe we’ll dig up some more ancient blogging and bring it back to the surface.

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Quantum mechanics, as we all know, is weird. It’s weird enough in its own right, but when some determined experimenters do tricks that really bring out the weirdness in all its glory, and the results are conveyed to us by well-intentioned but occasionally murky vulgarizations in the popular press, it can seem even weirder than usual.

Last week was a classic example: the computer that could figure out the answer without actually doing a calculation! (See Uncertain Principles, Crooked Timber, 3 Quarks Daily.) The articles refer to an experiment performed by Onur Hosten and collaborators in Paul Kwiat’s group at Urbana-Champaign, involving an ingenious series of quantum-mechanical miracles. On the surface, these results seem nearly impossible to make sense of. (Indeed, Brad DeLong has nearly given up hope.) How can you get an answer without doing a calculation? Half of the problem is that imprecise language makes the experiment seem even more fantastical than it really is — the other half is that it really is quite astonishing.

Let me make a stab at explaining, perhaps not the entire exercise in quantum computation, but at least the most surprising part of the whole story — how you can detect something without actually looking at it. The substance of everything that I will say is simply a translation of the nice explanation of quantum interrogation at Kwiat’s page, with the exception that I will forgo the typically violent metaphors of blowing up bombs and killing cats in favor of a discussion of cute little puppies.

So here is our problem: a large box lies before us, and we would like to know whether there is a sleeping puppy inside. Except that, sensitive souls that we are, it’s really important that we don’t wake up the puppy. Furthermore, due to circumstances too complicated to get into right now, we only have one technique at our disposal: the ability to pass an item of food into a small flap in the box. If the food is something uninteresting to puppies, like a salad, we will get no reaction — the puppy will just keep slumbering peacefully, oblivious to the food. But if the food is something delicious (from the canine point of view), like a nice juicy steak, the aromas will awaken the puppy, which will begin to bark like mad.

It would seem that we are stuck. If we stick a salad into the box, we don’t learn anything, as from the outside we can’t tell the difference between a sleeping puppy and no puppy at all. If we stick a steak into the box, we will definitely learn whether there is a puppy in there, but only because it will wake up and start barking if it’s there, and that would break our over-sensitive hearts. Puppies need their sleep, after all.

Fortunately, we are not only very considerate, we are also excellent experimental physicists with a keen grasp of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics, according to the conventional interpretations that are good enough for our purposes here, says three crucial and amazing things.

• First, objects can exist in “superpositions” of the characteristics we can measure about them. For example, if we have an item of food, according to old-fashioned classical mechanics it could perhaps be “salad” or “steak.” But according to quantum mechanics, the true state of the food could be a combination, known as a wavefunction, which takes the form (food) = a(salad) + b(steak), where a and b are some numerical coefficients. That is not to say (as you might get the impression) that we are not sure whether the food is salad or steak; rather, it really is a simultaneous superposition of both possibilities.
• The second amazing thing is that we can never observe the food to be in such a superposition; whenever we (or sleeping puppies) observe the food, we always find that it appears to be either salad or steak. (Eigenstates of the food operator, for you experts.) The numerical coefficients a and b tell us the probability of measuring either alternative; the chance we will observe salad is a², while the chance we will observe steak is b². (Obviously, then, we must have a² + b² = 1, since the total probability must add up to one [at least, in a world in which the only kinds of food are salad and steak, which we are assuming for simplicity].)
• Third and finally, the act of observing the food changes its state once and for all, to be purely whatever we have observed it to be. If we look and it’s salad, the state of the food item is henceforth (food) = (salad), while if we saw that it was steak we would have (food) = (steak). That’s the “collapse of the wavefunction.”

You can read all that again, it’s okay. It contains everything important you need to know about quantum mechanics; the rest is just some equations to make it look like science.

Now let’s put it to work to find some puppies without waking them up. Imagine we have our morsel of food, and that we are able to manipulate its wavefunction; that is, we can do various operations on the state described by (food) = a(salad) + b(steak). In particular, imagine that we can rotate that wavefunction, without actually observing it. In using this language, we are thinking of the state of the food as a vector in a two-dimensional space, whose axes are labeled (salad) and (steak). The components of the vector are just (a, b). And then “rotate” just means what it sounds like: rotate that vector in its two-dimensional space. A rotation by ninety degrees, for example, turns (salad) into (steak), and (steak) into -(salad); that minus sign is really there, but doesn’t affect the probabilities, since they are given by the square of the coefficients. This operation of rotating the food vector without observing it is perfectly legitimate, since, if we didn’t know the state beforehand, we still don’t know it afterwards.

So what happens? Start with some food in the (salad) state. Stick it into the box; whether there is a puppy inside or not, no barking ensues, as puppies wouldn’t be interested in salad anyway. Now rotate the state by ninety degrees, converting it into the (steak) state. We stick it into the box again; the puppy, unfortunately, observes the steak (by smelling it, most likely) and starts barking. Okay, that didn’t do us much good.

But now imagine starting with the food in the (salad) state, and rotating it by 45 degrees instead of ninety degrees. We are then in an equal superposition, (food) = a(salad) + a(steak), with a given by one over the square root of two (about 0.71). If we were to observe it (which we won’t), there would be a 50% chance (i.e., [one over the square root of two]²) that we would see salad, and a 50% chance that we would see steak. Now stick it into the box — what happens? If there is no puppy in there, nothing happens. If there is a puppy, we have a 50% chance that the puppy thinks it’s salad and stays asleep, and a 50% chance that the puppy thinks it’s steak and starts barking. Either way, the puppy has observed the food, and collapsed the wavefunction into either purely (salad) or purely (steak). So, if we don’t hear any barking, either there’s no puppy and the state is still in a 45-degree superposition, or there is a puppy in there and the food is in the pure (salad) state.

Let’s assume that we didn’t hear any barking. Next, carefully, without observing the food ourselves, take it out of the box and rotate the state by another 45 degrees. If there were no puppy in the box, all that we’ve done is two consecutive rotations by 45 degrees, which is simply a single rotation by 90 degrees; we’ve turned a pure (salad) state into a pure (steak) state. But if there is a puppy in there, and we didn’t hear it bark, the state that emerged from the box was not a superposition, but a pure (salad) state. Our rotation therefore turns it back into the state (food) = 0.71(salad) + 0.71(steak). And now we observe it ourselves. If there were no puppy in the box, after all that manipulation we have a pure (steak) state, and we observe the food to be steak with probability one. But if there is a puppy inside, even in the case that we didn’t hear it bark, our final observation has a (0.71)² = 0.5 chance of finding that the food is salad! So, if we happen to go through all that work and measure the food to be salad at the end of our procedure, we can be sure there is a puppy inside the box, even though we didn’t disturb it! The existence of the puppy affected the state, even though we didn’t (in this branch of the wavefunction, where the puppy didn’t start barking) actually interact with the puppy at all. That’s “non-destructive quantum measurement,” and it’s the truly amazing part of this whole story.

But it gets better. Note that, if there were a puppy in the box in the above story, there was a 50% chance that it would start barking, despite our wishes not to disturb it. Is there any way to detect the puppy, without worrying that we might wake it up? You know there is. Start with the food again in the (salad) state. Now rotate it by just one degree, rather than by 45 degrees. That leaves the food in a state (food) = 0.999(salad) + 0.017(steak). [Because cos(1 degree) = 0.999 and sin(1 degree) = 0.017, if you must know.] Stick the food into the box. The chance that the puppy smells steak and starts barking is 0.017² = 0.0003, a tiny number indeed. Now pull the food out, and rotate the state by another 1 degree without observing it. Stick back into the box, and repeat 90 times. If there is no puppy in there, we’ve just done a rotation by 90 degrees, and the food ends up in the purely (steak) state. If there is a puppy in there, we must accept that there is some chance of waking it up — but it’s only 90*0.0003, which is less than three percent! Meanwhile, if there is a puppy in there and it doesn’t bark, when we observe the final state there is a better than 97% chance that we will measure it to be (salad) — a sure sign there is a puppy inside! Thus, we have about a 95% chance of knowing for sure that there is a puppy in there, without waking it up. It’s obvious enough that this procedure can, in principle, be improved as much as we like, by rotating the state by arbitrarily tiny intervals and sticking the food into the box a correspondingly large number of times. This is the “quantum Zeno effect,” named after a Greek philosopher who had little idea the trouble he was causing.

So, through the miracle of quantum mechanics, we can detect whether there is a puppy in the box, even though we never disturb its state. Of course there is always some probability that we do wake it up, but by being careful we can make that probability as small as we like. We’ve taken profound advantage of the most mysterious features of quantum mechanics — superposition and collapse of the wavefunction. In a real sense, quantum mechanics allows us to arrange a system in which the existence of some feature — in our case, the puppy in the box — affects the evolution of the wavefunction, even if we don’t directly access (or disturb) that feature.

Now we simply replace “there is a puppy in the box” with “the result of the desired calculation is x.” In other words, we arrange an experiment so that the final quantum state will look a certain way if the calculation has a certain answer, even if we don’t technically “do” the calculation. That’s all there is to it, really — if I may blithely pass over the heroic efforts of some extremely talented experimenters.

Quantum mechanics is the coolest thing ever invented, ever.

Update: Be sure not to miss Paul Kwiat’s clarification of some of these issues.

Two things vacciney:

1) While it’s not due to antivaxxers, it’s still important: measles is making a comeback across the world. According to the article, the lack of funding is making vaccines hard to come by in Africa, Asia, and Europe, and measles is very opportunistic. With the antivaxxers still spreading their lies in America, Australia, and elsewhere, it’s all too easy for this awful disease to spread wildly anywhere it gets a toehold.

2) It’s a delicate task, talking about someone’s kid when it comes to autism and vaccinations. It’s a social minefield; you’re dealing with an innocent kid, but you’re also dealing with a parent who may be gravely misinformed and doing a lot of harm by spreading misinformation. Jenny McCarthy, though, put her son Evan front and center in the nonsense she spouts about autism, and is doing considerable harm to the public health. Skeptico has taken on her claims, and shows that her version of events seems to shape-shift according to her needs.

Tip o’ the syringe to my brother, Sid for the measles link.

It’s on.

Today the U.S. Coast Guard gave its approval to BP’s “top kill” plan to finally cap the oil spill, and at 2 p.m. Eastern time, the company got started. BP leaders warned that it may take a couple of days before they know for sure if it worked, but now say they will maintain the live video feed during the top kill attempt.

A successful capping of the leaking well could finally begin to mend the company’s brittle image after weeks of failed efforts, and perhaps limit the damage to wildlife and marine life from reaching catastrophic levels. A failure could mean several months more of leaking oil, devastating economic and environmental impacts across the gulf region, and mounting financial liabilities for the company. BP has already spent an estimated $760 million in fighting the spill, and two relief wells it is drilling as a last resort to seal the well may not be completed until August [The New York Times].

This procedure is no sure bet, because a top kill hasn’t been attempted 5,000 feet down in the sea before. BP’s CEO Tony Hayward estimates the percentage chance of success in the 60s.

The procedure requires an elaborate and precise orchestration among five vessels at the surface, whose duties range from housing pumping equipment to storing a total of 50,000 barrels of drilling mud, and several remote-controlled undersea robots. If all goes as planned, the dense mud will be pumped through a single 6-5/8-inch-diameter drill pipe from one vessel, which will then enter two 3-inch-diameter hoses. Those hoses will deliver the material to the sea floor, where they will intersect with the choke and kill lines of the damaged blowout preventer, which sits atop the well [Christian Science Monitor].

Whether this works may depend on whether the weight of the mud is enough to push the oil back into the well, which isn’t certain. If it fails, the junk shot option—trying to plug up the leak with tires and golf balls and other trash—is still on the table.

Recent posts on the BP oil spill:
80beats: Oil Spill Now on 65 Miles of Shoreline; BP Will Try a “Top Kill” to Stop the 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: Testimony Highlights 3 Major Failures That Caused Gulf Spill
80beats: 5 Offshore Oil Hotspots Beyond the Gulf That Could Boom—Or Go Boom

Image: BP

Remember the sunscreen speech? The Chicago Tribune column, which became an urban legend and then a bizarre spoken word hit for Baz Luhrmann, began

Wear sunscreen.

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience.

But is even this sage advice subject to the “it’ll cause cancer, no wait, it’ll cure cancer” back-and-forth that plagues medical studies? Reading some headlines today, you might think so. Don’t toss out your tube of Banana Boat just yet, though.

The non-profit Environmental Working Group released another of its reports on the sunscreen industry, coming down hard on the chemicals it uses and the claims it makes in its advertising. Some stories about the report drew headlines like “Sunscreen May Hurt, Not Help;” “Your Sunscreen May Give You Cancer: Study;” and “Study: Many Sunscreens May Be Accelerating Cancer.”

EWG’s report claims that a Vitamin A compound called retinyl palmitate, used in some 40 percent of sunscreens, breaks down and causes skin damage under exposure to sunlight. The report cites research done under the Food and Drug Administration. But, according to dermatologist Henry W. Lim of Henry Ford Hospital:

These claims, says Lim, are based on a study in mice, which are far more susceptible to skin cancer than humans. “It’s dangerous to apply a finding in mice to humans, and I’ve spoken with a number of my colleagues about this and we all agree that it’s very premature to even cast doubt about the safety of this chemical.” The EWG also flagged products with oxybenzone, which it calls a “hormone-disrupting” compound. This, too, is based on mice data, says Lim; the animals were fed significantly greater amounts of the chemical than what’s commonly applied in sunscreen. Other research found no significant changes in blood hormone levels in human volunteers who were told to apply sunscreens containing oxybenzone every day for two weeks [U.S. News & World Report].

I called up dermatologist Darrell Rigel at New York University, who argues that since Vitamin A is used in skin cancer treatment, the claim that it’s a cancer-causer is a dubious one. As the old graduation speech notes, the benefits of sunscreen have been shown for the millions of people who’ve used it to protect their skin for the last quarter-century. Rigel’s worry is that cancer fear-mongering would lead people to go without sunscreen this weekend and throughout the summer, subjecting themselves to damaging burns. “That’s what the real danger is,” he says.

Besides, the Vitamin A compound isn’t the whole story. Back to Dr. Lim:

Interestingly, the EWG gave its green or favorable rating only to products that contain zinc oxide or titanium dioxide, two blockers that don’t get absorbed into the skin and are considered pretty innocuous. But Lim says that some dermatologists have expressed concerns about the use of these compounds in people who have inflammatory skin conditions like eczema. Tiny cracks in the skin of people with eczema could allow these compounds to enter the bloodstream [U.S. News & World Report].

So do pay attention to the ingredients if you have skin conditions. And if you’d prefer find a sunscreen without the Vitamin A ingredient anyway, the EWG’s database can give you a hand with that.

Just don’t stop wearing sunscreen, please. In fact, use more: The EWG reinforces some helpful points we already knew, including that high SPF numbers can lead people into a false sense of security so they don’t use enough sunscreen, or don’t reapply it when necessary. In addition, they argue, sunscreens should come with more information about their ability to block UVA radiation, and not just UVB.

This is partially the fault of the FDA, which has promised–and failed to deliver on–regulations for sunscreen. The organization claims that regulations might be issued as soon as next October, but manufacturers will have at least a year to comply [Fast Company].

Finally, the EWG reminds the public that sunscreen shouldn’t be a primary protector—that is, don’t stay out shirtless all day in the blazing heat because you slathered on some SPF 45 in the morning.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: The Biology of Sunscreen
DISCOVER: Outrunning Melanoma
Discoblog: Sunscreen: Healthy Habit for You, Bringer of Death for Coral Reefs
Discoblog: Lather Up: New Sunscreen Could Be Inspired By Hippo Sweat

Image: flickr / Indexorama

They change their clothes frequently. They shower repeatedly, sometimes using a whole bar of soap in one go. Some even swallow perfume.

They think they smell bad, but they don’t.

Olfactory reference syndrome is a rare psychiatric disorder, but it can lead to isolation, depression, and suicide. It’s also a little-noticed, little-studied syndrome. But now a study to appear in Depression and Anxiety has looked at twenty sufferers and reviewed current literature on the disorder to determine its general characteristics.

Psychiatrists have known about the disorder’s symptoms for over a century, but treatment and diagnosis are difficult, in part because the syndrome doesn’t currently have its own classification in Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)–the handbook of mental health professionals. The manual combines the syndrome with other disorders, such as social phobia, delusional disorder, body dysmorphic disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. The new study gives recommendations for updating the next version of the manual, and suggests adding this disorder to an appendix of conditions that need further research.

As reported by HealthDay News, nineteen of the study’s twenty volunteers exhibited at least one compulsive behavior, like repeated self-sniffing or showering. On average, they spent eight hours a day thinking about their smell. Fearing social interactions, forty percent had been housebound for over a week.

Many patients thought the smell came from their mouth, but they were also concerned with their armpits, genitalia, anus, feet, and skin, according to a MedPage Today article.

Katharine Phillips, a coauthor of the study and a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University, presented these and other findings on Tuesday at the American Psychiatric Association annual meeting. She told Reuters Health:

“I think it’s a very secret and hidden disorder, because these patients tend to be very ashamed of themselves…. I have been so struck by the intense suffering that the patients experience.”

Related content:
Discoblog: Bad Breath? Body Odor? Don’t Bother Applying to China’s Space Program
Discoblog: Doctor, Is My Diabetes Medicine Supposed to Smell Like Gym Socks?
DISCOVER: Finding the Right Word Odor
DISCOVER: The Brain: The First Yardstick for Measuring Smells

Image: flickr / mysza831

Florida Today is reporting that Space X is planning to launch their first Falcon 9 rocket as early as this week, May 27 or 28! [Update: I just found out that the launch has been delayed to Jun 2/3 due to a slip in the schedule of a launch of a Delta IV.]

I am an unabashed fan of Space X, one of many commercial companies building rockets to make access to space easier, more reliable, and less expensive. They have already shown themselves to be capable of putting rockets into space, and being resilient while doing so. The Falcon 9 is the next in their series of rockets; this one capable of getting supplies to the Space Station, sending astronauts into orbit, and eventually, being able to put a 20 ton payload into geosynchronous orbit.

You can keep up-to-date with what’s what on the Space X updates page. I’ll be keeping a close watch on events as well. This is the future of space exploration, quite literally, and I’m very excited about it.

Image credit: Space X.

In the Canadian Rockies, a horde of 91 squid-like animals have risen from the depths, millions years after their demise. This isn’t the plot of a terrible B-movie; it’s the doing of Martin Smith and Jean-Bernard Caron from the University of Toronto. Together, they have solved a mystery some 500 million years in the making.

Smith and Caron have been giving a makeover to an enigmatic creature called Nectocaris. Until recently, only one specimen had ever been found. Its poor state and puzzling combination of features made it nigh impossible to classify. But not anymore – by finding a staggering 91 extra specimens, Smith and Caron have revealed that Nectocaris is the earliest known cephalopod. It’s the great-great-great-(etc)-granduncle of today’s octopuses, squids and cuttlefish.

Nectocaris pteryx or “swimming crab with wings” was first described by Simon Conway Morris in 1976. It’s one of the stars of Canada’s Burgess Shale formation, arguably the planet’s most important collection of fossils. Its rocks preserve an extraordinary diversity of animals from the Cambrian period, some 505 million years ago. It was a time of great evolutionary experimentation, when the ancestors of all of today’s animal groups mingled with bizarre creatures that have left no living descendants.

Until now, Nectocaris’s allegiances have shifted all over the place. Conway Morris himself had no idea where to place it. Some scientists suggested that it was an early arthropod, a relative of crabs, shrimp and the like. Others placed it within the chordates, the group that includes us and all other back-boned animals. But Smith and Caron think that both of these possibilities are unlikely. Their new specimens reveal a host of features that are distinctly cephalopod-like.

Around four centimetres in length, Nectocaris had a soft, flattened, kite-shaped body with two fins running down its sides. Its small head was adorned with two long tentacles and two stalked eyes. Unlike the compound eyes that were common among Cambrian animals, probably had the camera-like structure that modern cephalopods use. From its neck protruded a flexible funnel, which opened into an internal cavity containing pairs of gills.

The funnel lay behind some of the earlier confusion about Nectocaris. In the original specimen, it was flattened so that it looked like a shield-like plate behind the eyes, reminscent of a crustacean’s body armour. The new specimens put paid to that interpretation. The structure is clearly a funnel, similar to those used by modern cephalopods. Nectocaris probably used it to swim the same way, giving it an extra boost of jet propulsion to complement the beating of its large fins.

It was either a predator or a scavenger, grabbing small, soft-bodied animals with its long tentacles. And it probably spent most of its time close to the seabed; some specimens had sediment-filled gill chambers, suggesting that they were caught by a sudden fatal mudslide. The sediment helped to preserve their bodies with such quality that 500 million years later, their position in the animal tree of life has suddenly become clearer.

Nectocaris’s new status pushes back the rise of the cephalopods by 30 million years, telling us that this popular group arose far earlier in earth’s history than previously thought. Smith and Caron think that two other Burgess Shale oddities – Vetustovermis and Petalilium were also members of the same family.

The revised family tree also repaints our picture of the group’s origins. Until now, scientists had thought that the group’s first representatives – the nautiloids – evolved from a group of creeping snail-like creatures called monoplacophorans, whose backs were covered with cap-like shells. These casings were gradually modified so that the animals could float. The living nautiluses and the extinct (but frequently fossilised) ammonites belong to the same shell-bearing group.

But Nectocaris had no shell despite being the earliest known cephalopod and an active swimmer. If Smith and Caron’s interpretation is right, the cephalopods didn’t inherit hard coverings from a monoplacophoran ancestor. These shells were a later innovation all their own.

There are a few parts to the puzzle that haven’t been fitted yet. For example, did the cephalopods start off with two tentacles as in Nectocaris only to evolve more over time, or were Nectocaris’s arms formed by fusing multiple pairs? Also, all modern cephalopods have a sharp, horny beak and a nightmarish, rasping tongue called the radula; it’s unclear if Nectocaris shared these features, for its mouthparts have never been well preserved.

The radula is a particularly big deal – it’s a uniting feature of all molluscs (the group that includes cephalopods, monoplacophorans, snails and others), including some that are supposedly more primitive than Nectocaris. Finding a radula would be the clincher for Smith and Caron’s argument; failing to do so puts their analysis in a tricky position.

Reference: Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature09068

Images: reconstruction by Marianne Collins; fossil photo by Jean-Bernard Caron

More on cephalopods:

• Scientists solve millennia-old mystery about the argonaut octopus
• Glowing squid use bacterial flashlights that double as an extra pair of “eyes”
• What the stomach contents of sperm whales tell us about giant squid and octopuses
• Camouflaged communication – the secret signals of squid
• A squid’s beak is a marvel of biological engineering

Like astronomy? Like The Guild? Like Fwhil Fwheaton? Then you’ll love this:

This is the latest in a series of pretty funny videos from Spitzer Science Center called IRrelevant Astronomy. They’ve had lots of great folks on them, including Felicia Day, Sean Astin, and Betty White! Awesome.

In this one, Amy Okuda (Tinkerballa from The Guild) is the actor, and Wil voices the robot as well as a slightly more cheesy (not evil) version of himself. These are great videos, fun to watch, and also edumacational. I highly recommend them. Watch this one through all the way to the end…

Mark Gasson, at the University of Reading, just caught something. A computer virus. Gasson claims to be the first man in the world to become infected with a computer virus.

But by “caught,” we mean he gave the virus to himself, and by “virus,” we mean a program that he designed.

Gasson put the virus in an RFID tag that was then implanted in Gasson’s hand. The tag—like the microchips used to track down missing dogs and cats—had allowed Gasson to open security doors and unlock his cell phone automatically. When infected, the tag spread its virus to other devices, for example, that door-opening system. If other people then used their own hand tags to open the door they could, hypothetically, also catch the virus.

As the BBC reports , the test was meant as a “proof of principle.” Gasson wonders, given the increasing use of implanted technologies like pacemakers, if such infections could threaten our cybernetic futures.

But did Gasson really transmit a virus? Couldn’t we as accurately call his test a novel way to share data? Instead of “scientist infected with computer virus,” couldn’t we call him a cyborg bee, pollinating computer flowers? He picked up something and spread it around, in a system he designed for spreading. Instead of a virus meant to cause harm, perhaps we could call it a helpful program… meant to create, well, publicity.

The Register compares the virus to a similar experiment by Kevin Warwick, a self-proclaimed cyborg who implanted an RFID tag in his arm. From the Register article, an interview with Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at the security software company Sophos:

“The way they are presenting their research is scaremongering nonsense that doesn’t present the true nature of this, frankly, non-threat.”

Related content:
80beats: Mystery of the Conficker Worm Continues: Does It Want to Scam or Spam?
80beats: Computer Virus Travels Into Orbit, Lands on the Space Station
80beats: Sorry, Australian iPhone Users: You’ve Been Rickrolled
DISCOVER: Iris ID

Image: flickr / VanessaO

The single-mindedness that drives a swarm of locusts to rampage through the countryside and devour everything in its path might not seem like it would require a great deal of brainpower. However, biologists in Britain have found that the brain of a swarming locust swells up to 30 percent larger than the brain of its solitary counterparts.

These crazed grasshoppers aren’t geniuses, says lead researcher Swidbert Ott. According to his study forthcoming in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, swarming locusts simply need enlarged brains to cope with the assault on their senses that comes with being caught up in an insect mob:

Locust brains are quite simple: on each side of the head is an optic lobe taking in information from the eyes and performing basic processing, and these lobes feed into the central midbrain, which carries out higher-level processing.

In swarming locusts, the midbrain grew more than the optic lobes. This, and other subtle changes, suggest that because swarming locusts are constantly surrounded by wild activity, they do not need to worry about having particularly sensitive vision. However, they do need extra high-level processing power to cope with the extremely complex patterns of motion that they see [New Scientist].

Locusts need this improved brainpower to survive, because despite the fact that they travel in these legendary hordes like a plague ordered from on high, the truth is that they don’t much care for each other. In good times, locusts are solitary; they gather into swarms when they need to seek out new vegetation to survive. Says Ott:

”Their bigger and profoundly different brains may help swarming locusts to survive in the cut-throat environment of a locust swarm…. Who gets to the food first wins, and if they don’t watch out, they themselves become food for other locusts” [The Telegraph].

The suddenness with which locusts change behavior and even appearance when they go on the march has long fascinated Ott and his team.

Dr Ott and his team had previously shown that a signalling chemical in the brain, called serotonin, was crucial in this sudden change in the insects’ behaviour – causing a solitary creature to become part of this frenzied swarm. When this sudden behavioural change happens, the locusts also (much more gradually) change in colour and even body shape [BBC News].

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Cannibalism: The Animal Kingdom’s Dirty Little Secret (photo gallery)
DISCOVER: Locust Plague Sweeps Across Africa
DISCOVER: Hunger on the Wing
80beats: Serotonin Changes Locusts from Shy Loners to Swarming Pests

Image: Tom Fayle

I have two more amazing images for you! Both show the same thing — the International Space Station crossing the Sun — but in different ways.

The first is, once again, from Thierry Legault:

Wow! You can clearly see the station (with Atlantis docked on the left!) as it crosses the Sun. Here’s a slight closeup:

There’s a nice sunspot pair there in the upper right; the one on the right looks like a face, actually. Cute. This shot was taken at 1/8000th of a second, which froze the action nicely. He has higher resolution pictures on his webpage for this event.

The second picture is slightly different:

It was taken by Heiko Mehring and obviously shows a series of silhouettes as the ISS and Atlantis crossed the Sun. You can clearly see the same sunspots, but the path of the spacecraft is slightly different, and the spots look a bit different as well. The equipment Heiko used was less fancy than what Thierry has, but you can still see a lot of detail in the image. It really is amazing that we can see such detail on the station from the ground!

I suspect the atmosphere was steadier at Thierry’s observing site too; in the images on his page you can see the granulation on the surface of the Sun. Those granules are vast columns of hot gas rising to the Sun’s surface, cooling off, then sinking again. It’s a grand version of the convection that happens when you boil water in your teapot!

[Update: A third site with a great shot of the transit was pointed out in the comments below. I wonder how many more are out there?]

These kinds of shots take a lot of planning, a lot of experience, and a bit of good fortune (or whatever politically correct term skeptics are supposed to use these days). When I was younger I shot a LOT of film of the Moon, and got maybe a 10% success rate if I was doing well. Digital cameras and the Internet make it a whole lot easier to get spectacular shots like these. I’m glad to see more people tackling these difficult shots, and expect that we’ll be seeing lots more like these as time goes on.

Tip o’ the dew cap to Thierry Legault and Jan Sorg for sending these to me.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here is a look at the STS-132 (Atlantis) making it’s last launch.  Note the movement just before the shuttle leaves the ground.  Thrust makes the shuttle assembly bend a little bit and there is a slight delay for it to come back before the clamps open and set it free.  Happens on every launch so it’s not unique or anything, still the power is amazing.  This particular video is from the Left SRB (Solid Rocket Booster).  Here is a video showing the launch from the four SRB cams on the same screen.

Source for featured video.

Speaking of amazing, below is an image of the ISS and Shuttle transiting the Sun shortly before docking.  The image was taken in Spain by Thierry Legault, be sure to click on the image to see more of his outstanding work.  I’ve seen Thierry’s work before and  I’ve tried to do this and it’s not as easy as you might think.  All the preparation is for just a second or two of transit, you’d crack up watching trying to pull it off.  No matter, I’m up for another go at it and I’ll try again if the opportunity presents itself, and as you might expect that doesn’t happen very often.

Atlantis and the ISS transit the Sun before docking. Click for larger. Credit: Thierry Legault (via SpaceRef)

Oh and BE SURE (!!!!!) to try and get a look at the Shuttle/ISS passing overhead.   Atlantis is undocked from the ISS and this is going to be one of your last chances to see a shuttle and the ISS — EVER!  Check Heavens Above for viewing times for you (you have to register, but fear not, it’s free and safe.  Don’t forget to enter your location!

Actually it’s going to be one of your last chances to see ANY of NASA’s manned missions.  After the two remaining scheduled shuttle missions, it may be quite some time before an astronaut is launched from US soil.  Yes, I’ve seen the press releases with all the private interests lauding the new direction, however that is tempered by the fact they are a long ways from routine human space flight.  Oh they’ll get there, I just hope there is LOTS of information sharing so they can benefit from what we’ve achieved in the field.  They will right?

Here's the report that (I understand) airs tonight:
Climate scientist Michael Mann has received hundreds of them -- threatening e-mails and phone calls calling him a criminal, a communist or worse. "6 feet under, with the roots, is were you should be," one e-mail reads. "How know 1 one has been the livin p*ss out of you yet, i was hopin i would see the news that you commited suicide, Do it." "I've been called just about everything in the book," Mann, who runs of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, told ABC News. "It's an attempt to chill the discourse, and I think that's what's most disconcerting." Mann is not the only one. The FBI says it's seeing an uptick in threatening communications to climate scientists. Recently, a white supremacist website posted Mann's picture alongside several of his colleagues with the word "Jew" next to each image. One climate scientist, who did not wish to be identified, told ABC News he's had a dead animal left on his doorstep, and now sometimes travels with bodyguards. "Human-caused climate change is a reality," Mann said. "There are clearly some who find that message inconvenient, and unfortunately they appear willing to turn to just about ...

Nick writes, “A tattoo of Vespa crabro. I got it while I was working in the entomology department of Va Tech. I was the most hardcore nerd there.”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

Today’s mammals are facing the twin threats of a rapidly warming planet and increasingly intrusive human activity. As usual, the big species hog the limelight. The world waits on bated breath to hear about the fates of polar bears, whales and elephants, while smaller and more unobtrusive species are ignored. But smaller mammals are still vital parts of their ecosystems and it’s important to know how they will fare in a warmer world. Now, thanks to Jessica Blois from Stanford University and a hoard of new fossils, we have an idea. As they say, all this has happened before…

Around 12,000 years ago, as the Pleistocene epoch drew to a close, the mammals of North America were also dealing with multiple threats. The last Ice Age was giving way to the far warmer Holocene and at the same time, humans arrived on the scene, wiping out species after species. Some of the larger losses are familiar, such as the mammoths and ground sloths, but a new treasure trove of fossils in California’s Samwell Cave has revealed the fate of their smaller kin.

The common wisdom suggests that small mammals are relatively resistant to extinction, because they have large litters, they breed quickly and their populations grow at incredible rates (think mice and rabbits). The Samwell fossils support this idea but they also tell us that communities of small mammals were greatly affected by natural warming nonetheless. Their diversity plummeted, they became less evenly spread, and rare species became ever rarer.

Not everything suffered though – ‘weedy’ species took over this new landscape. The deer mice did particularly well, doubling in abundance between 16,000 and 13,000 years ago. These rodents aren’t fussy about their homes and they’re often the first into a new area. Opportunistic and adaptable, these generalists flourished under changing circumstances that flummoxed others. And their rise to power accounted for much of the fall in overall species evenness during this time. There are signs that deer mice are doing the same today.

To Blois, it’s clear that these changes were mainly driven by climate change. As the temperature rose, so the evenness and richness of the mammal communities fell, and the first signs of falling populations coincided neatly with the very rapid warming of the Bolling-Allerod period. Individual species supported these general trends. The Western pocket gopher and the mountain beaver both went locally extinct and today, they’re found in much cooler parts of California. Blois thinks that these rodents tracked the cooler weather to other more hospitable areas.

Meanwhile, Blois also ruled out other possible explanations. Humans invaded North America during the end of the Pleistocene, but the shifts in small mammal populations predated them by around 1,500 years. The fall of the large beasts could have altered the local vegetation, creating new landscapes for species that scurry, but these new plant communities also appeared after the small mammal communities had already started to shift. Changing climate, it seems, is the best explanation.

Blois says that since today’s climate is changing even more quickly, our current small mammals might face a similar fate to their Pleistocene counterparts. Their communities are likely to shift towards an impoverished and uneven selection of species. In this way, they could act as a colony of furry canaries, as “harbingers of imperilled ecosystems”.

Reference: Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature09077

More on climate change:

• Climate change and the mystery of the shrinking sheep
• Losing Nemo – acid oceans prevent baby clownfish from finding home
• Are emperor penguins marching to extinction?
• Climate change responsible for decline of Costa Rican amphibians and reptiles
• Climate change squeezes jumbo squid out of oxygen
• Beetles transform Canadian forest from carbon sink into carbon source

Tomorrow at MIT, I'll be giving a four hour "boot camp" on science communication to a group of graduate students and other interested parties. The session begins with an overview of the "theory" of science communication--why we must do it better, what the obstacles are, and how a changing media environment makes it much tougher than it was during the era when the dude at right was so popular (the same era when the dude at *top* right was about to deregulate the media...). Then, the session goes into a media "how to"--rules for interacting with journalists, media do's and don'ts, and an overview of various key communication "technologies," such as framing. Finally, it ends with a role playing in which the scientists get to try out their chops in a Colbert-style interview, and see if they can stay on message while traversing the very rockiest of media seas. I get the sense there is an increasing demand for this kind of training, which is often not provided in the standard science graduate curriculum. The hunger seems especially strong among the younger set of scientists. Why? Well, consider the write up for another all day sci comm boot camp I did at Princeton ...

Last year, at The Amaz!ng Meeting 7, I met a young skeptic who went by the handle Nobby Nobbs on the fora. His real name is Michael Strieb, and he has Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, also called ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease. This is the same condition Stephen Hawking has.

In Michael’s case it confined him to a wheelchair and at TAM it was very difficult for him to speak. I just read from Rebecca at Skepchick that his condition has progressed, and now it’s impossible for him to talk. His mind is healthy and sharp, but his body is making it extremely difficult to communicate.

Because of this, a group has set up a page where people can donate so that they can buy Michael an Eye Gaze System, an incredibly cool setup where a machine can measure where his eye is pointing, and use that to guide a cursor on a computer screen, allowing Michael to once again communicate. The device costs about $3200.

Update: Someone who knows Michael has let me know that this is not the only source of their financial need. As you can imagine, his situation can put a strain on anyone’s budget. So please give what you can, and help out a guy — and his family — who could use a little relief.

Michael’s one of the good guys. I just sent in my donation, so please, if you can, help him out.

The conference on science blogging at the Harvard Kennedy School from last month now has a lot of multimedia available. There are Flickr pictures, like this one, showing a panel comprised of myself, Jessica Palmer, Francesca Grifo of the Union of Concerned Scientists, and moderator Sam Evans: And there are also 35 YouTube vids of the entire event. I am going to post some of these over the course of the week with commentary, but for now, you can start from the intro, by Harvard's Sheila Jasanoff, and go from there...

Be sure to see the great interactive feature the Times put together for my piece on ultramarathon birds.

On March 29, 1912, Robert Scott and two fellow explorers huddled in a tent during a fierce Antarctic blizzard. They had landed on the edge of Antarctica five months earlier, hoping to be the first people in history to reach the South Pole. They succeeded in reaching the Pole, but it was a bitter success. They discovered that another team, led by Roald Amundsen, had gotten there first. So Scott and his team turned back and began the 800-mile journey back to the sea. They hauled sledges themselves, without the help of dogs. The plunging temperatures increased the friction of the snow, so that they had to put in as much effort as they would to haul the sledges through sand. On February 4, Edgar Evans dropped dead. On March 16, Laurence Oates, barely able to walk, simply left the camp and never came back. A blizzard on March 20 left them unable to leave their tent.

“I do not think we can hope for any better things now,” Scott wrote in his diary nine days later. “We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far.” And indeed he likely died that day. Scott and his crew were finally discovered eight months later.

Scott may not have been the first person to reach the South Pole, but he did earn a different kind of distinction: “the greatest human performances of sustained physical endurance of all time,” in the words of University of Cape Town sports scientist Timothy Noakes. All told, Scott probably burned about million calories. Each day he and his fellow explorers burned around 7,000 calories, about four times the rate of a man at rest.

Scott’s accomplishment was exceptional not just for a human, but for any animal. Animals rarely push their metabolism beyond about four times their resting rate for any length of time. A cheetah may explode into a sixty-mile-an-hour sprint, but for only a few seconds. Most animals that push themselves hard–birds racing around to find food for their chicks for days on end, for example–only push themselves about four times above their resting metabolic rate.

In 2007, however, a small bird left Scott in the dust. Scientists discovered that bar-tailed godwits could fly from Alaska to New Zealand, non-stop. Their metabolism, scientists found, rose to about eight times their resting rate. And it stayed there, 24 hours a day, for nine days. And while Scott could refuel on his journey by eating horse meat and pemmican, the bar-tailed godwits fasted for their entire 7,000 miles journey.

As I report in the lead story of the Science Times in tomorrow’s New York Times, research now shows that the bar-tailed godwit has some company. Using sophisticated new location-tracking devices, scientists have discovered other species several travel several thousand miles without a break.

I also write about the deeper significance of these new results. How do these birds achieve these awesome treks. And why? In a new paper, the Swedish biologist Anders Hederstrom argues that birds like bar-tailed godwits aren’t all that unusual. Lots of birds that go on much shorter migrations have many of the same adaptations as the champions–the ability to store up fat, an ability to navigate long distances, an efficient body shape, and so on.

Theunis Piersma, a Dutch biologist, offered up a provocative idea for the evolution of ultramarathoning birds. Their migrations may be able to shift quickly from short to long. Birds have a huge potential to work hard, without the need for long-term physical evolutionary changes coming first. All they need is a change in behavior, and their bodies will meet the challenge. Once they shift their behavior, natural selection may well favor physical changes that help them go long distances. (Piersma will write about this at length in his upcoming book, The Flexible Phenotype.)

For Piersma, what’s really interesting is why godwits and some other birds push so hard, while most other animals don’t. Piersma thinks that laziness is, for the most part, adaptive. If animals push themselves beyond about four times their resting metabolic rate, they usually have to pay dearly. They become vulnerable to predators and disease, for example. When scientists have added extra chicks to the nests of kestrel hawks, for example, the parents have to work harder to feed them. As a result, the scientists found, the parents became more likely to die. When scientists add little weights to bees that are buzzing around gathering nectar, the bees are also more likely to die. And Scott himself is a grisly illustration of Piersma’s tradeoff. His foot became infected so badly, he wrote, that “amputation is the best I can hope for.”

Flying over open seas, however, may allow some birds to escape this trade-off. Predators and parasites can’t catch them when they’re hundreds of miles from the nearest land. When bar-tailed godwits land after flying 7,000 miles, they can just take a long nap without worrying about being eaten. The very things that might make exhaustion more dangerous are missing from their migration.

For more, check out my story.

Update: And be sure to check out the great interactive maps.

[Images: Scott, Wikipedia/Godwits, Robert E. Gill]