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! Tokelau on Naboo "Tinea imbricata, a superficial fungal infection of man, has an ornate appearance composed of concentric circles and polycyclic or serpiginous scaly plaques. The condition is common in several humid tropical regions, especially in parts of Polynesia and Melanesia. It is also reported occasionally in the Amazon basin and other tropical areas in both hemispheres. The precise distribution of tinea imbricata, however, has been poorly defined ever since the disease was named by Sir Patrick Manson, the father of tropical medicine. I report the possible presence of tinea imbricata outside its previously known geographic and taxonomic distribution. Several Gungan inhabitants of Naboo, a planet of the Galactic Republic depicted in Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, have skin with the distinctive annular and polycyclic pattern of tinea imbricata. Jar Jar Binks, a Gungan who figures prominently in this movie, shows this eruption in figure ?2. Manson wrote of the infection, “Again, tinea imbricata, if it has been in existence any length of time, involves a very large surface, as ...

All it takes for some people to be a little less trusting of their fellow humans is a little more testosterone, according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers led by Jack van Honk of the Netherlands used a sample of 24 women in their study. The team showed photos of 150 strangers’ faces to the women and asked them to rate the faces for trustworthiness, using a scale from -100 to +100. The scores women gave after receiving a placebo became their “baseline” score. The women also completed a trustworthiness survey after being given an increase in testosterone instead of placebo (they weren’t told when they received which).

Scientists found that women were not so easily taken in by a stranger’s face after receiving a dose of the hormone…. Women who appeared the most trusting after receiving the “dummy” placebo reduced their scores by an average of 10 points when their testosterone was boosted [Press Association].

Why? The researchers point to the social advantages testosterone can confer:

The study also adds support to the idea that testosterone influences human behavior, not necessarily by increasing aggression, but by motivating people to raise their status in the social hierarchy or become more socially dominant. Testosterone might boost social watchfulness, making those who are most trusting a little more vigilant and better prepared for competition over rank and resources, the researchers say [LiveScience].

This sample size isn’t terribly large and the explanation is something of a just-so story, but it’s at least a plausible one. The study authors say that testosterone’s effects specifically could balance out those of oxytocin, the “love hormone,” which previous studies have suggested could increase feelings of trust, or make men want to cuddle.

One curious detail of this study, though, is that the skepticism effect showed up only in the most trusting women. The ones who scored as the least trusting after the placebo test didn’t drop their scores lower and become extremely distrusting after a testosterone dose; they just stayed the same. Why should they stand pat instead of descending into testosterone-induced misanthropy?

Related Content:
80beats: Does Testosterone Cause Greedy Behavior? Or Do We Just Think It Does?
80beats: Men With High Testosterone Levels Make Riskier Financial Decisions
Discoblog: Turn a Man Into Mush with a Nasal Spray of Pure Oxytocin
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Can a Sniff of Oxytocin Improve the Social Skills of Autistic People?

Image: flickr / luc legay

I met Ken Plume last year at Dragon*Con. Our mutual Close Personal Friend Adam Savage™ introduced us, of all things. He runs a site called ASiteCalledFred and has lots of podcast interviews with interesting people, and he decided to break that streak and talk to me.

His chats are pretty free-form; he asks questions but lets things go where they may. He learned a lesson with me, no doubt. He let me ramble about The Monkees, my daughter’s first word, NASA, constellations, NASA, and I think NASA. We really did bop around from topic to topic, making it a Faulkneresque rapids ride of skepticism and science and some mild stabs at humor (on my part). I do talk at length about where I think NASA is, was, will be, and should be, so you might get a kick out of that. Give it a listen.

He does have a long list of interviews with some pretty cool people (Stephen Colbert! Tom Kenny! Julie Gardner! John Hodgman! Dave Foley! Olivia Wilde!), so check those out as well.

What do you see in this image?

“One is a Valentine’s Day heart, and the other is a surgical heart that you have in your body,” said Ned Wright of the University of California, Los Angeles, who presented the image May 24 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. [Wired]

This infrared image is from WISE, more technically known as the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, a NASA space telescope launched on December 14, 2009. Orbiting Earth at an altitude of 326 miles, WISE snaps an infrared picture every eleven seconds. This one, of the so-called Heart and Soul nebulae, is made from 1,147 of these images stitched together.

The Heart and Soul nebulae are over 6,000 light years away, in the constellation Cassiopeia. To capture beauties like these, WISE needs to stay cool enough that its own heat doesn’t distort the infrared images. For this reason, it carries a chunk of solid hydrogen, cryogen, that keeps the on-board telescope at about 17 degrees Kelvin (minus 429 degrees Fahrenheit). With its sensitive infrared vision, WISE can see the cool and dusty crevices of nebulae, where gas and dust are beginning to clump together to form new stars.

Having already taken about 960,000 images, the mission promises more pics like these for about four more months, until its cryogen supply runs out. Though this isn’t the first time we’ve seen these nebulae, WISE certainly has a unique perspective.

“WISE is the first survey capable of observing the two clouds in a uniform way, and this will provide valuable insight into the early solar system,” said astronomer Tommy Grav of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., who presented the information at today’s meeting. [SPACE.com]

Related content:
80beats: A Hot Piece of Hardware: NASA’s New Orbiter Will Map the Entire Sky in Infrared
Bad Astronomy: A WISE flower blooms in space
Bad Astronomy: When a star struggles to be free of its chrysalis
Bad Astronomy: What does a nebula look like up close?

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

From the heroic Flipper to the charismatic Willy, dolphins and whales have made some splashy supporting actors. And since they often seem almost as smart and interesting as their human costars, perhaps it's not surprising that a new movement is afoot to grant these animals "human rights." Research on everything from whale communication to “trans-species psychology” hints that the glowing portrayals of these fictional animal friends have some basis in reality. If cetaceans—marine mammals including whales, dolphins, and porpoises—can act like humans, even using tools and recognizing themselves in a mirror, shouldn’t they have the same basic rights as people? That’s what attendees of a meeting organized by the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS) said yesterday, where a multidisciplinary panel agreed on a “Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans: Whales and Dolphins.” “We affirm that all cetaceans as persons have the right to life, liberty and well being,” says the Declaration, meant in part to stop current whaling practices. Thomas White, director of the Center for Ethics and Business at Loyola Marymount University in California, told Reuters:
"Whaling is ethically unacceptable.... They have a sense of self that we used to think that only human beings have."
This declaration conflicts with ongoing negotiations within the International Whaling ...

The Mars Phoenix lander touched down near the Red Planet’s north pole in May of 2008. It was designed to investigate the history of water on Mars, digging into the surface soil and examining the chemistry there. It had a limited design lifetime of only a few months, since the onset of Martian winter in the north made weather conditions too severe to continue operations.

The hope was that NASA would be able to revive the lander once spring had sprung. Many such attempts have failed, and we may now know why: new images show the lander may be damaged.

The image on the left was taken in July 2008 with the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and shows the lander in blue. The image on the right was taken just a few days ago, on May 7, 2010. The illumination is similar in the two shots — note the landscapes are very similar looking — but the shadow cast by the lander looks different now. My first thought was that dust built up on the lander, making it look different, but scientists have shown this not to be the case.

More likely, carbon dioxide buildup on the solar panels bent or even broke one of the panels. There were predictions that this might happen, so while this isn’t a total surprise, it’s disappointing. This means that Phoenix will not be able to soak up enough solar energy to restart its operations, which in turn, sadly, means it really is dead.

The good news is it did a tremendous job in its mission, returning important data about the properties of the Martian surface. Although it appears the mission is now over, it was a raging success and I’m happy for the team.

It’s funny: Mars missions tend to fail catastrophically before they even get there, or they get to Mars and seem to last forever. Spirit and Opportunity have long outlasted their warranties, and we have several orbiters still going strong. And even though Phoenix made it down to the surface and exceeded its planned lifetime, it’s still a little weird to find out it’s dead. It shows me that we get used to ESA, NASA, and JPL’s superhuman efforts when it comes to their missions.

Space exploration is hard, damn hard. But we continue to do it, and we continue to get better at it. So while this specific news is disappointing, it’s also a reminder that we can’t take anything for granted. My hat’s off to the scientists and engineers who made Phoenix work, and work beyond expectations.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

“There are lions and cheetahs and leopards out there, my dear. You’d be better off staying here with me.”

This is how male topi antelope lie for sex.

The area of Kenya where they live, Masai Mara National Reserve, is indeed filled with large predators that find antelopes to be just delicious, and so the topi have developed warning calls that they sound when it’s time to scurry away or else be eaten. But, according to an American Naturalist study, the devious topi males have figured out how to use their calls to fake the threat of immediate danger and keep females around, according to research leader Jakob Bro-Jørgensen.

From February to March, male topi hold small territories through which receptive females pass to assess each male’s mating potential. The authors noticed that, while a female in estrus was on a male’s territory, the male would sometimes emit alarm calls, even in the complete absence of a predator. These false alarms are acoustically indistinguishable from true alarm snorts [Ars Technica].

The motivation is easy to see: Normally, during the one day a year that a female topi is sexually receptive, she’ll have sex 11 times with four separate males, on average. However, if a male cries “wolf”—or in this case, perhaps “hyena”—she might stick around his territory, which improves his reproductive odds. Indeed, the researchers found that the males almost never made false predator calls unless there was a lady around and he didn’t want her to wander.

“In fact, males quite frequently pull the trick on females in heat and one may ask why females keep responding to alarms at all,” Bro-Jørgensen said. “The answer seems to be that females are better off erring on the side of caution, because failing to react to a true alarm could easily mean death in a place like the Masai Mara, where it’s literally crawling with large predators” [MSNBC].

The mating game is full of liars and cheaters, or course—just check out DISCOVER’s gallery of the worst offenders. Because their prevarication employs the fear of death, topi are among the most successful, too. After a fake snort of alarm the males, on average, got to have sex nearly three more times. So expect the lying to continue.

Check out DISCOVER’s page on Facebook.

Related Content:
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Eland Antelopes Click Their Heels To Prove Their Dominance
DISCOVER: The Best Ways To Sell Sex
DISCOVER: The Mating Game’s Biggest Cheaters (photo gallery)

Image: Wikimedia Commons

The World Science Festival is running a blog in conjunction with this year’s festivities. Today I’ve written a post about one of the sessions, where scientists will talk about how we can understand our own minds by studying animal minds. Check it out here or here.

Appearing more like detached bits of the Milky Way, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are irregular dwarf galaxies thought to be orbiting the Milky Way.  Members of our Local Group, the Clouds are being pulled and distorted by the Milky Way.

The Atlas of the Universe - Richard Powell

The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is about 1/10th as large as the Milky Way, and about 160,000 ly away.  It’s the fourth largest galaxy in the Local Group, and home to the Tarantula Nebula.  Visible to the unaided eye as a faint “cloud” in the southern hemisphere, it straddles the border between the constellations Dorado and Mensa.

Large Magellanic Cloud - NASA/JPL

The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), at a distance of about 200,000 ly away, is one of the most distant objects visible with the unaided eye.  Seen only from the southern hemisphere and lower latitudes of the northern hemisphere, it appears as a light “hazy” patch in the constellation Tucana.  The SMC is roughly one-half the size of the LMC.

Small Magellanic Cloud - NASA/ESA, Hubble ST

In comparison with the Milky Way, the Magellanic Cloud galaxies are gas-rich and metal-poor.  Noted for vigorous stellar growth and formation, the Clouds also host ancient objects.  The LMC was the host galaxy to SN1987a.  You remember that show-stopper:

SN1987a NASA/ESA/U. Colorado, CHANDRA/HUBBLE

The Clouds share a neutral hydrogen envelope, itself active in star formation, indicating they have been bound together by gravity for a long time.  Known as astronomical treasure-houses, the Clouds have something for everybody.

You can’t go without seeing our most famous satellite galaxies together in the night sky:

Large and Small Magellanic Clouds - ESO (great enlargement)

Last Saturday, on the United Nation’s International Day for Biodiversity, an open letter from hundreds of British organisations warned of the importance of our rapidly eroding biodiversity, while a UN report discussed the economic consequences of this erosion. The general principle of conserving biodiversity has inarguable value but there’s much more debate about how best to do it.

Take national parks and reserves –these protected areas save wildlife but they stop local people from using the land for farming and from using its resources. The argument that such limitations prioritise “cuddly animals” over “poor people” is particularly sharp in developing countries, where rural communities are said to bear the costs of protected areas without reaping their benefits.

But a new study in Costa Rica and Thailand says that such objections are unfounded. By actually comparing similar communities on a small scale, Kwaw Andam from Washington’s International Food Policy Research Institute has shown that protected areas actually help to alleviate poverty.

In 2003, the so-called Durban Accord from the World Congress on Protected Areas urged commitments to “protected area management that strives to reduce, and in no way exacerbates, poverty”. Well and easily said, but studying the link between poverty and protection is quite difficult. The two seem to go hand in hand, but protected areas are often set up in far-flung areas where poverty if rife. How can you actually tell if they worsen the situation?

Andam did it by focusing on protected areas in Costa Rica and Thailand. These developing nations have very different cultures and histories but they are both hotspots of biodiversity that set up protected areas a long time ago. And importantly, they both have good sources national statistics.

Using these data, Andam’s team compared communities where at least 10% of the land had been protected with those where less than 1% had been. This difference aside, they compared like for like, matching the various communities in terms of their forest cover, their access to transportation, the productivity of their land, and how poor they were before protected zones were set up. The analysis was very detailed, zooming in at a fine regional level and taking data about poverty from household surveys. The team also focused on protected areas that had been around for 15 years or more, to get a sense of their long-term impact.

On the surface, the link between poverty and protection seemed clear. As with many other countries, the Costa Rican and Thai communities with high levels of protected biodiversity were much poorer than those with little protection. But these areas were already among the poorest parts of the two countries before the protected zones were set up.

Taking this into account, Andam’s matched comparisons revealed that protected areas don’t exacerbate the economic shortfalls of local communities. If anything, they actually make things better. Put it another way, if the protected areas hadn’t been set up, the local people would probably be even worse off than they actually are.

Could there be other explanations? Certainly, but Andam systematically ruled them out. Andam showed that the genesis of the protected areas didn’t affect the population growth of the relevant areas, which shows that poor people weren’t being pushed out into neighbouring regions. Andam also considered the possibility that the costs of protected areas were spilling over into neighbouring communities, affecting a far wider catchment area than he suspected. But when he left out control regions that were within 10km of a protected area and re-ran his analysis, he got the same result.

This is an important study, which provides some much needed evidence in the area of conservation policy. It’s also very encouraging. Previously, Andam has shown that the networks of protected areas have slowed the pace of deforestation and his latest results show that this success hasn’t come at the cost of local development. If anything, things have improved for local people as a result. It’s not clear how, but it could be that protected areas bring opportunities from business and investments, promote tourism, or improve local infrastructure.

However, Andam is rightly cautious. He notes that his results present an average trend over several decades. In the short term, things may get worse before they get better, and not all districts would benefit equally. Poverty is also only one aspect of a community’s wellbeing and there’s no data on their ability to maintain their cultural traditions, or to feel in control of their fates.

And, obviously, Costa Rica and Thailand are but two countries. Both have enjoyed a lot of investment in their protected areas and in eco-tourism so the same trends may not apply in other parts of the world. (Andam also writes that they had “relatively stable political systems” but the current Thai situation probably doesn’t support that statement!)

Andam calls for other researchers to do a similar analysis in other parts of the world to get a global picture of the impact of protected areas. For now, we have a restricted view of this picture, albeit a positive one. As he writes, “Our results… suggest that protecting biodiversity can contribute to both environmental sustainability and poverty alleviation, two of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals.”

Reference: PNAS http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0914177107 If this link isn’t working, read why here

Image: by Haakon S. Krohn

More on conservation:

• Fish make rapid comeback in the world’s largest no-fishing zone
• Fishing bans protect coral reefs from devastating predatory starfish
• Farmed salmon decimate wild populations by exposing them to parasites
• Shark-hunting harms animals at bottom of the food chain
• Human hunters unwittingly shrink their prey species at incredible rates
• How research saved the Large Blue butterfly

Our solar system is pretty neat and orderly. Yeah, it has some issues, but in general we can make some broad statements about it: the planets all orbit the Sun in the same direction, for one thing, and they also orbit pretty much in the same plane. If you look at the system from the side, the orbits would all look flat, like a DVD seen from the side.

That’s left over from the formation of the solar system itself, which happened when a cloud of dust and gas collapsed into a disk. The planets formed from that disk, so they all orbit in roughly the same plane. We see other systems forming in the same way, so we assume that when we look at those planets, they’ll also have all their planets in a plane.

Oops. Maybe not so much. Astronomers have just announced that they’ve confirmed a system where the planets are not all aligned this way, and in fact the planets are titled relative to each other by as much as 30°!

Ironically, the parent star is Upsilon Andromedae — that made me chuckle, because it was one of the very first stars found to have planets orbiting it, back in 1996. It’s actually a binary star, two stars orbiting each other; one is a star slightly more massive and hotter than the Sun, and the other a dinky red dwarf orbiting pretty far out (well outside the frame of that illustration of the system above). Three planets (called Upsilon Andromedae b, c, and d) at least are known to orbit the primary star. The planets were initially detected by their gravitational pull on the star; as they orbit they move the star in a mutual tug-of-war. We can’t (usually) see that motion directly, but it can be detected as a Doppler shift in the star’s light.

Due to the physics of the situation, that method only gives us a minimum mass for a planet. The actual mass might be much higher. It also doesn’t tell us the tilt of the orbit of the planet, or of any of the other planets in the system.

What’s new here is that astronomers used telescopes on Hubble called the Fine Guidance Sensors, which are incredibly accurate and highly precise. The FGSs are so accurate that they could see the physical motion of the star on the sky, the wobbling as the planets tugged on it this way and that. Think of it like a harried parent at a mall with two little kids holding her hand. As the kids see one store or another they want to visit, they pull on her in different directions as she walks with them, so her path down the mall corridor shifts left and right.

Combining the new Hubble data with the older Doppler data has revealed a wealth of information about the planets in that system. For one thing, it nailed the masses. Instead of lower limits, we now have accurate masses for planets: Ups And c is 14 times the mass of Jupiter, and Ups And d is 10 times Jupiter’s mass^*. Mind you, Jupiter is a bit of a bruiser, so these are hefty planets. These masses are far larger than thought before, so the new observations really changed our thinking here.

But the amazing thing is that it looks like Ups And c and d are in wildly different orbits: instead of being almost exactly in the same plane as expected, they are tilted relative to one another by 30°! The illustration on the right compared those orbits with those of planets in our own solar system, and you can see how weird this is.

But does this mean astronomers are wrong about how planets form?

Probably not. We’re pretty sure we understand how planets form, at least in general terms. What this does mean is that something happened to the planets after they formed, something that tossed one or both of these planets into different orbits than the ones they were born in.

This isn’t a huge surprise. Pluto may or may not be a planet by your definition, but it orbits the Sun at an angle of 17° with respect to the Earth. Sedna, an object about the same size as Pluto in the outer solar system, also has a large tilt. We know there is some mechanism that can change the orbits of big objects in the solar system, so why not in other systems, too?

In the case of Upsilon Andromedae, we have some culprits. The data hint that there may be a fourth planet orbiting the star. It’s not clear if it’s there or not, but if it has an elliptical orbit it could gravitationally affect the inner planets. There’s also the red dwarf star orbiting farther out. Far more massive than a planet, its gravity may have some effect on the system as well. It’s also certainly possible that there are other influences we haven’t seen or thought of yet. [Update: I just got off the phone with the team who did this research, and Rory Barnes told me that a strong possibility as well is that there were more planets in the system initially. They would have interacted via gravity, and affected each others' orbits. A likely scenario is that a planet with about ten times the mass of Jupiter could have messed up the orbits of the other two, then been ejected out of the system. This is a common outcome when you have lots of massive objects in one system.]

The point here is that in general, our theories of how planets form is pretty good. As we study more of these systems, we’ll get more and more data under our belts that will help us catalog and understand where these systems follow our theories, and where they seem to diverge. That’s all good news! Theories only go so far in explaining everything, and as we observe more we modify those ideas, add to them, so they better represent the Universe around us. That’s how science works, and that’s how we learn.

Related posts:

Wrong way planets screw up our perfectly good theories
A tiny wobble reveals a massive planet

Image credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI)

[Note: I expect antivaxxers to flood the comments below with their typical spin and distortions. I urge everyone to read my comments policy. I also note that the article here is extensively linked to other sources backing up my claims about Wakefield and the antivax movement. The debunking of the vast majority of antivax claims can be found in those links.]

Andrew Wakefield, the man who more than anyone started the modern antivaccination movement that has led to the rise of measles, pertussis, and other preventable diseases, has been struck off the UK General Medical Council’s register. The GMC registers doctors in the UK, and oversees their conduct. To be struck off is essentially the same as being disbarred.

This is indeed good news, but forgive me if I don’t dance in the streets. It hardly makes any difference, and is years too late.

In 1998, Wakefield published a paper which led to people thinking vaccines caused autism. His research was shoddy, poorly done, unethical, and, frankly, wrong. Eventually the original paper was withdrawn by the medical journal in which it was published.

That’s all great, in that eventually truth won out. But has it, really? Sure, he’s disbarred, and reality-based people understand he’s totally wrong. But the antivax movement still rolls on. Wakefield moved to Texas where he still spreads his antivax propaganda; he was on NBC’s TODAY show just this morning — what a coincidence! — still proclaiming his innocence, and still spreading falsehoods about vaccines.

And falsehoods they are. From the NBC page:

When [host Matt] Lauer asked Wakefield whether it’s dangerous to continue promoting an MMR-autism link when it causes many families to shy away from vaccinating their children, Wakefield answered, "Matt, you’re missing the point.

"The point is that despite denying it, in the public relations campaign they’ve used against me and against the parents, they are conceding these in vaccine court."

Actually, that’s completely wrong, and he should know better. For one thing, courts have ruled over and again that there is no evidence to link vaccines and autism. What Wakefield is most likely referring to is the Hannah Poling case, which can be twisted and spun into making it sound like it connects vaccines and autism, but it doesn’t. Read Steve Novella’s entry on that case to see how once again the truth eludes Wakefield.

For another, Lauer was not missing the point at all. Wakefield was dodging the point. Lauer was precisely correct; it is dangerous to promote a link that doesn’t exist between autism and vaccines, for exactly the reason Lauer stated.

It would’ve been interesting indeed to see Matt Lauer following up that question with asking Wakefield about his huge financial conflict of interest in all this, since Wakefield was developing an alternative to vaccines when he wrote that paper. Or if he had anything to say about investigative journalist Brian Deer — a man who has been at the forefront of exposing Wakefield all along — and the evidence he found that alleges Wakefield was paid by lawyers to start a vaccine scare?

Anyway, for years Wakefield has been claiming he’s the victim here. This news won’t change that, and will in fact make him a martyr to his reality-impaired followers.

He’s not the victim here. The real victims are people who get measles, people who get rubella, people who get pertussis. Most of the time these folks recover and are fine, though miserable. But sometimes it’s not such a happy ending. Dana McCaffery, a four week old girl in Australia, died last year because the herd immunity was too low where she lived. Because people chose not to vaccinate — and the antivax movement was strong there — that little girl died.

We’re seeing outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases all over the world, and in many of those regions the voices of Wakefield and the antivaxxers are strong. I’m glad the GMC finally took action and did the right thing, but this does not mean we must rest in our fight against those zealots who believe — without any evidence, and plenty of evidence against them — that vaccines cause autism.

They don’t. But how many kids will get sick before everyone finally realizes that?

Syringe picture from ZaldyImg’s Flickr photostream, used under the Creative Commons license.

You can’t slip much past dedicated amateur astronomers. A month after the United States Air Force launched its space plane, the X-37B, under a veil of secrecy, backyard sky-watchers say they’ve found it, along with clues to its mission.

Though the military still won’t open up about what the classified X-37B actually is, officers have been insistent about what it isn’t: a space weapon. Indeed, defense experts have guessed recently that the craft is testing next-generation spy satellite tech, and the observations back that up.

The amateur sky watchers have succeeded in tracking the stealthy object for the first time and uncovering clues that could back up the surveillance theory. Ted Molczan, a team member in Toronto, said the military spacecraft was passing over the same region on the ground once every four days, a pattern he called “a common feature of U.S. imaging reconnaissance satellites.” In six sightings, the team has found that the craft orbits as far north as 40 degrees latitude, just below New York City. In theory, on a clear night, an observer in the suburbs might see the X-37B as a bright star moving across the southern sky [The New York Times].

In addition, the plane’s path would carry it over places the U.S. is interested in watching, like Iran, Pakistan, and North Korea, according to Greg Roberts, one of the astronomers to track the X-37B. More than uncovering its secret mission, he was interested in finding the plane because it was difficult. Said Roberts:

“If the data were freely available, we would probably not have bothered with it. I see little sense in tracking objects for which data is freely available. It’s like reinventing the wheel. So as long as there are missions with little or no information, I personally will be interested in the challenge of finding them” [MSNBC].

For more about the Air Force in space, check out DISCOVER blogger Phil Plait’s post at Bad Astronomy.

Related Content:
Bad Astronomy: What Is the Air Force Doing with Space?
80beats: Air Force to Launch Secret Space Plane Tomorrow—But Don’t Ask What It’s For
80beats: DARPA Loses Contact with Mach-20 “Hypersonic Glider” During Test Flight

Image: U.S. Air Force

Over four hundred years after his death, the man known for moving the sun to the center of the solar system made a move himself. On Saturday, at a medieval cathedral at Frombork on Poland’s Baltic coast, the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus—whose ideas were once declared heresy by the Vatican—was reburied with full religious honors. After a stint in city of Olsztyn, Copernicus's remains returned to his original resting location (under the cathedral’s floor), but his grave got an upgrade. After his death in 1543 he lay for centuries in an unmarked grave, but his new plot has a black tombstone with six planets orbiting a golden sun. The ceremony concluded a several week tour of a wooden casket with the astronomer’s remains. The ceremony included shows of respect from the Catholic Church, which eventually had to admit that Copernicus was right about the whole planets-moving-around-the-sun thing. According to The Times, a local archbishop praised Copernicus for his hard work and scientific genius, while Archbishop Jozef Kowalczyk, the Primate of Poland, said that he regretted the “excesses of zeal” that led the Church to brand Copernicus a heretic. But Copernicus didn’t dig himself into his former grave with his treatise De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On ...

Y’know, I see a gazillion pictures of astronomical objects all the time, and I never get tired of them. But every now and again a picture comes along that’s so wonderful I just have to share it.

This is one such piece of wonderfulness: a lunar hole in one!

And you thought the windmill at the end of putt putt golf was hard.

This picture — click to enlunanate — is from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and shows a region of the Moon inside the crater Henry Frères. Taken on March 7, 2010, the image shows an area just 500 meters (550 yards) across — if it were Earth, you could easily walk across it in less than ten minutes — and shows objects down to less than a meter in size.

And it’s just so cool! Look at the dashed trail going from left to right. See how it ends at the little crater, and even — if you look closely — can be seen to turn downwards? It suspiciously points right to the 10-meter (30+ foot) boulder sitting just inside the crater wall.

Suspicious indeed. In fact, what you’re seeing is the trail left by that boulder as it rolled and bounced downhill and stopped inside the crater! Look at the big picture. From the debris (small rocks) running up and down, you can tell that the terrain on the left side of the picture slopes down to the middle (in other words, if you started on the left side and walked to the center of the picture you’d be going downhill). The middle of the picture is relatively level ground.

In my mind’s eye, what happened here is clear. The boulder starts off at the left, and something — perhaps a minor moonquake, or a nearby impact — shakes the ground. The house-sized rock gets dislodged, and in the gentle gravity begins to roll downhill. It hits something and bounces, coming back down, skidding and rolling, only to be launched into the sky again and again. It slows a bit each time — the ruts it digs get shorter as it moves left-to-right — and by the time it gets to the end of the track it’s barely moving, just enough to feel the change of slope due to the crater wall. It even rolled past the crater a bit (you can see the last groove is actually along the path a little beyond the crater), and almost slows to a stop… but then slowwwwwwly teeters backwards, back along the path it came. Just as it’s about to come to a rest, it goes over the lip of the crater, slides into it, and lumbers to a halt halfway down the 60-meter (200 foot) crater’s wall.

I would give a lot to be able to see video of something like this happening on the Moon in real time. Wow!

And that boulder’s flight is just one of many scenes depicted here, which you can see if you let yourself explore. Just above the bouncing boulder’s path is a trail of what looks like a dustslide, a bit more brightly colored than the moonscape around it. It slid downhill to the right as well, and partially buried some of the bigger debris. Obviously, this happened after the bigger rocks already slid down, since it buried some of them. And above that in the picture you can see fainter trails from other rocks sliding down. Those trails are harder to see, meaning they’re older (millions of years of micrometeorite impacts and thermal flexing from the Moon’s day/night cycle gradually erase features like that), which again is consistent with the picture I’m painting here.

Take a look at the crater at the bottom left. It’s surrounded by a light-colored apron of ejected material. See how there’s more of that ejecta to the right than to the left? That’s what you’d expect if the slope goes downhill to the right; the material spreads out more as it falls downslope (the diagram here will help). And hmmm, there’s a small crater about 10 meters across just to the right and below the big crater with the boulder in it. That crater is fresher; it still has a light apron as well. But what’s that dark spot in the center? Beats me. Cool though, ain’t it?

There’s so much to see and investigate, and this image is only about the size of a city block! It’s a slice of a much longer 2.5 x 15 km strip, which you can interactively browse, too. WARNING: be prepared to lose a lot of your day if you click that link, but it’s worth it, just like exploring the thousands of other pictures LRO has sent back is worth it as well.

The LRO mission cost roughly $600 million. There are 300 million people living in the US right now… so play with those images for a few minutes, and then let me know if you got your two bucks’ worth out of this mission.

Image credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

This week BP will try one more time to stop its massive leak in the Gulf of Mexico. The “top kill” plan that was supposed to go into action on Sunday will now commence on Wednesday, the company says.

The process will involve pumping heavy fluids down two three-inch lines placed inside the wellhead. If successful, the fluids will temporarily stop the oil rush, which would then allow operators to seal the opening with cement. The wellhead, officials say, will never be used again for oil drilling [Christian Science Monitor].

Just like the containment dome, though, a top kill has never been attempted on a leak gushing so far below the surface of the water—5,000 feet. But with BP’s other attempts ending in failure, this looks like the best shot the company has to stop the flow in a short term.

As BP prepares this operation, the simmering anger at the company has seeped up to the higher levels of the U.S. government. Rear Admiral Mary Landry, who has been coordinating the Coast Guard’s response with BP, finally started to sound annoyed with the company’s actions—or lack thereof—as 65 miles of American shorelines have now been hit by oil, coating pelicans in Louisiana that were just removed from the endangered species list six months ago.

Landry also criticized BP for allowing some equipment that could aid in efforts to block or clean up the spreading oil slick to sit unused, even as oil is washing up onto the Gulf Coast. “There is really no excuse for not having constant activity,” Landry said [New Orleans Times-Picayune].

Other government officials, like Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, were more direct:

In a news conference on Sunday outside the BP headquarters in Houston, Mr. Salazar repeated the phrase that the government would keep its “boot on BP’s neck” for results. He also said the company had repeatedly missed deadlines and had not been open with the public. Mr. Salazar added, “If we find they’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing, we’ll push them out of the way appropriately” [The New York Times].

The AP reports that the Justice Department is gathering information about the spill, but the White House wouldn’t say this weekend whether it intended to open a criminal investigation of BP. In the meantime, anger levels continue to rise as the oil slick gets wider.

On Saturday, the tensions between BP and local authorities came to a boiling point in Jefferson Parish, when local officials declared they were going to commandeer 40 boats of fishermen who had signed up to help with the spill but had since remained idle. They had spotted oil moving past the shoreline beaches through passes into Barataria Bay, which is surrounded by wildlife-rich wetlands [The New York Times].

But what of the EPA demand we covered on Friday, that BP must find an alternative chemical dispersant and switch within a few days? It seems that wasn’t such rigid ultimatum after all. BP replied over the weekend that no, they’d just as soon keep using the worrisome dispersant they’ve been using all along. The EPA flipped again and said that it might not force the switch.

Follow DISCOVER on Twitter.

Previous Posts on the BP oil spill:
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
80beats: Gulf Oil Spill: Do Chemical Dispersants Pose Their Own Environmental Risk?

Image: International Bird Rescue Research Center

A few weeks ago I read Peter Heather’s Empires an Barbarians, but I had another book waiting in the wings which I had planned to tackle as a companion volume, Robert Ferguson’s The Vikings: A History. Heather covered the period of one thousand years between Arminius and the close of the Viking Age, but his real focus was on the three centuries between 300 and 600. It is telling that he spent more time on the rise and expansion of the domains of the Slavic speaking peoples than he did on the Viking assaults on Western civilization; an idiosyncratic take from the perspective of someone writing to an audience of English speakers. But within the larger narrative arc of Empires and Barbarians this was logical, the Slavs were far closer to the relevant action in terms of time and space than the Scandinavians who ravaged early medieval rather than post-Roman societies (where the latter bleeds into the former is up for debate). In Heather’s narrative the Viking invasions were a coda to the epoch of migration, the last efflorescence of the barbarian Europe beyond the gates of Rome before the emergence of a unified medieval Christian commonwealth. And these are the very reasons that Robert Ferguson’s narrative is a suitable complement to Peter Heather’s. Ferguson’s story begins after the central body of Heather’s, and most of its dramatic action is outside of the geographical purview of Empires and Barbarians. In The Vikings the post-Roman world has already congealed into the seeds of what we would term the Middle Ages, and it is this world which serves as the canvas upon which the Viking invasions are painted. Aside from what was Gaul the world of old Rome is on the peripheries of Ferguson’s narrative.

It was refreshing to me that the author of The Vikings makes a concerted effort toward balance (despite what I perceive to be his clear identification as a scholar of the Vikings with the Scandinavian peoples of the period in a broadly sympathetic sense). He explicitly lays out the tendency of previous scholars and commentators to lean excessively toward the Vikings or their victims in weighing the veracity of narratives, or ascribing a moral high ground to one particular vantage point. More common perhaps of the two is the tendency toward depicting the Vikings in the manner that Christians of the time viewed them, as an avaricious force of nature whose role was to punish civilization for its sins (in our era we may secularize the events, but the tendency toward viewing barbarians as deterministic elements operating upon civilized agents often remains). As a reaction against such a one-sided classic framing some scholars have reinterpreted the Vikings as well-armed traders who were simply misunderstood and libeled by their Christian antagonists. In this telling the Vikings sacked the monasteries because they were locked out of trade networks due to their status as cultural outsiders. Raiding was simply a substitute for trading. Both of these normative and simplified frames really belong in a “First Book” for children; individual humans are more complex than that, and history is more complex than individual humans. When it comes to history true objectivity is probably impossible, but admitting that past workers have had strong biases is probably a good place to start.

In The Vikings Robert Ferguson regales us with in large part is an ancient “Clash of Civilizations.” He notes that the sources invariably distinguish between Christians and Heathens as opposed to English and Norse (or Franks and Norse), and in keeping with this he lays out a dichotomy between Christian civilization and “Heathendom.” Our view of the past is colored by the reality of the victory of the former against the latter, but the slow and inexorable expansion of the arc of Christian civilization among the Scandinavians which we view in hindsight as a process which has a clear terminus actually took nearly five centuries, with most of the Christian success at the expense of the Heathens occurring within the last one hundred and fifty years (despite missionary endeavors across the whole period, mostly out of Bremen and Hamburg). Ferguson convincingly argues the Heathens had a sense of their own identity, distinctiveness, and even superiority, in relation to the Christians during this period when Scandinavia was outside of the boundaries of the West. This is actually most evident in Muslim sources, who had more distance from the pagan Scandinavian culture and so could view it with more ethnographic third party objectivity (the Muslim sources were often engaging in trade or diplomacy). They report for example the argument of one Scandinavian that his peoples’ practice of burning was far superior to the inhumation that was the norm among Christians, Muslims and Jews, because the transition to the afterlife is far faster with the rapid disintegration of the body, as opposed to decomposition and later consumption by “worms” (this critique is almost a trope from what I can tell when it comes to the perception of peoples who burn the bodies of their dead of the customs of those who bury). What we see here is not some deep philosophical sense of superiority, but the native chauvinism and ethnocentrism which most peoples have in regards to their own mores and traditions. Heathens were not simply a negation of Christian civilization, in contemporary parlance they were an indigenous folk of northern Europe resisting the expansion of an international and globalist Christian culture.

A more historically grounded rationale for Heathen sense of distinction from Christians, and their hostility toward Christian civilization generally, is the real history of forced conversion which they experienced at the hands of Christian powers. In particular the author points to the conquest and conversion of the Saxons by Charlemagne as a turning point. These German tribes were on the margins of the Scandinavian world, so word of their oppression, and ultimate destruction of their native traditions at the hands of outsiders, must have percolated to the north (Saxon warriors took refuge among the Danes). In The Vikings the author explicitly suggests that the savagery of the Norse in their assaults on Christian monasteries may be connected to the fear and hostility engendered toward the Christian religion by these instances of mass forced conversion and aggression. The analogy here may be the Boxer Rebellion, where indigenous anger at the expansion of foreign powers and their cultural mores exploded in targeted violence. The brutal nature of Christian conversion is highlighted vividly by the anecdote of Olaf Tryggvason, Norway’s first explicitly Christian king, threating to kill the three year old son of a British Norse warlord in front of his father unless he and his people submitted to immediate baptism. Ferguson observes that the Christian chronicler records this action approvingly, but certainly this sort of behavior on the part of Christians against the Heathen Scandinavians integrated over centuries may account for some of the motive for the violence of the Vikings against Christian holy sites and institutions. For the Heathen the Christian was the threatening Other, and so thoroughly dehumanized.

But the relationship of Heathendom to Christian civilization, and the local and indigenous Scandinavian tradition to global cultures, was not simply one of hostility and mutual exploitation and brutality. One of the interesting aspects of the Scandinavian expansion of the 8th to 10th centuries is its geographic range. Their presence on the northwestern fringes of Europe as Vikings is well known in the English speaking world. But Scandinavian raiders were prominent in Muslim Spain, and even broke into the Mediterranean. Of more permanence was the influence and power of a group known as the Rus across the vast swaths of land from the Baltic to the Caspian. It seems probably that Slavicized Rus were the core of the early polities of Novgorod and Kiev, which later gave rise to Russian identity. In the generation of the grandfather of Vladimir I of Kiev, credited with bringing the Russians to Christianity, the elite of the Kiev seemed invariably to possess Scandinavian names. This was an empire of war, trade and colonization along the fringe of early medieval Christendom, and sweeping down toward the margins of the world of Islam on the Caspian.

Why the expansion? A conventional explanation has been overpopulation. This doesn’t hold water, in pre-modern societies Malthusian dynamics were always at play. That is, growth was very slow because high fertility was counterbalanced by high mortality. In the event of an epidemic there may be a period when demographic expansion is possible, but these would be transient phases. There is evidence that across northern Europe in the first millennium there was underway a transition toward more productive forms of agriculture which allowed for a larger basal population, but this was a general feature of European societies, not one restricted to Scandinavia. In fact the increase in population was probably most pronounced in two regions to which the Vikings were most drawn to plunder: northern France and the Low Countries. And this may explain a cause for the Viking expansion, they sought wealth, and more wealth was to be gotten in the Christian lands than within Heathendom.

Ferguson seems to posit both push and pull dynamics. The push dynamics had to do with a restructuring of Scandinavian society in the centuries before 1000. This involved the emergence of more powerful apex leaders who marginalized the numerous figures lower down on the status hierarchy. A shift toward a more centralized political order would have concentrated power and wealth in the hands of few at the expense of the many. In this case the many in fact is going to be a minority of the population, free males who are part of the political and military class, and who collect rents from peasants and extract labor out of their human property (thralls). This dynamic is not conjecture, the migration of warlords to the British Isles in the wake of the rise of Harald I of Norway is apparently documented. The rise of a Great Man seems to invariably come at the expense of many less great men in a zero sum world. Similarly, the arrival of the reputed sons of Ragnar Lodbrok to British Isles may have had to do with political events in Denmark in the decades before the reemergence of the Jelling dynasty. But this push process can not be decoupled from wider social and historical events. In other words, the parameter is not purely endogenous. Rather, the events within Scandinavia were strongly shaped by the emergence of a global political and economic order which Heathendom was a participant, if at times a reluctant and belligerent party. Scandinavia’s political connection to other parts of Europe was clear even in the Late Antique period; Scandinavian warriors and kings were a presence at the courts of post-Roman figures such as Theodoric the Great of the Ostrogoths. Conversely, German peoples who were on the losing side in the post-Roman scramble would on occasion exercise an exit option of migration back to their homelands, which sometimes included southern Scandinavia.

So the elites of Scandinavia were aware of the wider world well before the Viking Age, and certainly had a sense of the possibilities of unitary political systems as far back as Classical Antiquity. There is also a great deal of circumstantial evidence that the elaborated nature of late Scandinavian paganism has much do with the model which Christianity presented as a complex institutional religion. The mythos around Balder has often be assumed to have been influenced by the Christian mythos around Jesus, but we need not hinge our inference on literary recollections which may have been influenced by later generations who were Christian. There is a great deal of evidence from the Wends and Lithuanians, who persisted in their paganism even longer than the Scandinavians, of the development of a pagan “anti-Christianity” around which their ethnically based polities could coalesce (there are references to a shadowy pagan equivalent to the pope among the later Lithuanians during the apogee of their empire in the 14th century). In Empires and Barbarians and Empires of the Silk Road the authors argue that the emergence of more complex and large scale political and social orders beyond the limes of settled agricultural civilizations dominated by literate elites was a reaction to developments within the ecumene. For the nomadic confederations of the east Eurasian steppe it was the unification of China under Qin Shi Huangdi. For the Germanic tribes beyond the Roman limes it was Rome itself, which periodically erupted beyond its borders to engage in punitive expeditions (archaeology has been uncovering unrecorded Roman expeditions into Germania in the century following the defeat of Varus’ legions). For the Scandinavians it seems to have been the rise of the Frankish political order, and particular the Carolingian dynasty, which annexed and Christianized the lands of the Saxons just to the south of Scandinavia which served as a spur to their social and political revolution.

With the rise of a powerful Christian state to its south bent on cultural, political and economic conquest and assimilation, there would naturally have been greater self-consciousness of the peoples of Scandinavia in regards to their indigenous traditions. Despite periodic attempts by powerful aristocrats and kings from the 9th century on there was stubborn resistance from sub-elites in acceding to the shift from their customary cults to the Christian religion. I think a little bit of Homo economicus in terms of rational behavior might allow us to explain this disjunction between the apex elites in the form of kings, and sub-elites. In societies without a tradition of autocracy under a singular individual a broad level of consent from numerous sub-elites of modest means was necessary for an individual to rise to kingship. But these sub-elites may not have been economically advanced enough to see any gains in integration into a globalized political order where their nations were part of a commonwealth of Christian monarchies. Rather, they perceived a dispossession of their traditional cultic roles under the aegis of a transnational church apparatus (albeit, one which operationally co-opted local elites rather rapidly after Christianization by assimilating them into the clerical superstructure). Put more simply, there was great gain to monarch in becoming part of the international order, but little for the population as a whole, even among the lesser nobility, who were dependent on local rents, not international trade or conquest.* In the world of the Malthusian trap the lives of the peasantry would be little changed by an ideological shift on high, so they were of no consequence (in fact, Protestant Reformers routinely complained that the Church had left the peasantry of many nations barely Christian in anything but name).

Of course there was a way for sub-elites to become wealthy rather rapidly: steal from wealthier societies instead of depending on protection money (rent) from your poor peasants. It is notable that the Viking Age spans the period which saw the decline of Charlemagne’s political system, but before the emergence of the medieval antecedents of the nation-states which would crystallize in the early modern period. It was also during this time that northern France and the Low Countries, and to a lesser extent England, saw an expansion of aggregate wealth because of improved agricultural techniques and tools such as the three field system and the mould-board plough as well as the beginning of the Medieval Climatic Optimum. The idea that one could steal wealth was not an innovation of the Vikings, Charlemagne’s campaigns were in part motivated by the need to generate plunder to satisfy his vassals. Similarly the Roman wars of conquest were magnificently lucrative for the Republic’s aristocracy, and it can be argued that the wealth stolen from the early conquests were critical in maintaining Roman dynamism. It is possible that no imperial conquest after that of Dacia in the early second century was profitable, and it is this period which saw the high water mark of the Roman civilization, the century of the Good Emperors.

Shifting back to the Vikings, the model then is rather easy to summarize. Step 1, Western civilization in the form of the Christian Frankish polities push north and east, toward the fringes of Scandinavia. Step 2, this results in a coalescence of counter-identities among the populations which are being impinged upon and destabilized. In the case of the Saxons under Widukind and his confederates resistance was futile, and they were absorbed into the new Christian order (in fact, Saxon Christian monarchs in the 10th century placed so much pressure on pagan Denmark that it probably facilitated the final absorption of the Jelling monarchy into the Christian state system as another lever to maintain their independence). But for populations further out, as in Scandinavia, or in the eastern marches which were inhabited by the West Slavs, the Frankish expansion lost its steam before it could fully absorb them. This left these populations in a stronger position in terms of the ability to engage in coordinated action than before, because they now had a common identity in the face of Christian expansion as well as more powerful military leaders who had come to the fore in the face of the threat from the alien superpower. Step 3, the collapse of the Frankish Empire into sub-states leaves the margins of Christian civilization more vulnerable as none of these polities now can bring to the fore overwhelming force against small groups of raiders. Step 4, the integrative phase within the cultures outside of Christian civilization combined with wealth differentials across civilizational boundaries produce the convulsions which result in the out-migration of militarized sub-elites. They are well aware enough of wealthier societies to understand the cost vs. benefit for them, and they lack ideological affinity with those wealthier societies, so their actions are unencumbered by any moral or ethical framework. In other words, Heathens and Christians exhibited a much less robust sense of empathy toward each other than they did those from within their own culture, so the depredation of one upon the other was particularly savage and utility maximizing (in the Middle Ages the paganism of many Baltic populations was somewhat convenient because Christians were allowed to enslave pagans, making them extremely economically profitable as tenants since they lacked human rights). Step 5, the military assault upon civilization by the barbarians eventually peters out and results in the assimilation to a great extent of the barbarians into the civilized order. Once the windfall wealth is spent the inevitable consequence is the absorption of the less numerous and organized society into the more numerous and organized one.

These steps in general seem broadly applicable to the post-Roman and post-Han dynasty periods in Europe and China as well. In the end the barbarian societies which initially have a strong aversion to the civilized societies whom they oppose, are oppressed by, and often conquer, became ideologically identified with those societies. This generally occurs through religion, but also often through other aspects of assimilation in identity (e.g., the Franks became the Latinate French, the barbarian groups in China often became Chinese speaking and switch their ethnic identity to Han). The main exception to this general trend which I can think of is the case of the Arab Muslim conquest, and in this case the barbarians brought with them an ideology which was robust and in large part mimicked that of civilized societies.**

We do not live in the world of the Vikings, where Malthusian parameters reign supreme, elites live off the toil of peasants, and religion is a matter of life and death (excepting parts of the Muslim world like Sudan or the Communist world like North Korea). But cultural identity still matters. Today when we speak of “indigenous people” we allude to relics of a bygone age, small-scale cultures on the margins. But as recently as one thousand years ago vast swaths of Europe, in particular its north and east, were populated by indigenous peoples, attempting to preserve their ancient traditions and customs in the face of Christian globalization. More broadly, in the period between 500 and 1000 numerous peoples outside of the Eurasian Rimland, to the north, east and west, contingent upon the point of reference, were affected by the expansion of ideological systems from the Rimland civilizations, which arrived through military, demographic and economic means. The Gauls of France lost almost all unique aspects of their identity, their language, their religion, even their name for themselves. Other populations, such as the Germans and the Turks retained much of their identity, and profited through integration into a broader civilization through which they channeled their cultural influence. But this process took centuries, and was not without tumult. The Viking Age was not an act of God, it was not an isolated case. It was rather an instance of a general process whereby the cultural configurations of the World Island were assigned in a manner which we would recognize today, with civilizational boundaries hardening into forms which were robust to exogenous shocks.

One interesting aesthetic observation which I will take away from The Vikings: A History is that the peoples of the north were generally tattooed and made recourse to eye shadow and other such body adornment. Christian sources point to this only in a negative fashion, that is, the practice is explicitly banned for Christians in the north, presumably because this was previously a common practice (as well as the consumption of horseflesh, which had cultic significance). But the Muslim sources describe the obsession of the northern people with aesthetic detail thoroughly, and it notable to me that Otzi the Iceman was also tattooed. These sorts of markings have obvious functional purposes, in identifying a member of one tribe from another in an indelible fashion, but they also are perhaps reflective of societies where aesthetic expression was personalized and small scale. Their Pantheons were their bodies. This is familiar to us today from small-scale societies and small indigenous groups, who maintain these traditions and this outlook. It was only 1,000 years ago that many European peoples were still vigorously adhering to these folkways, before they became Christian, and therefore white.

Note: I have avoided discussing the likely brisk trade between Scandinavia and the pre-Muslim and post-Muslim Middle East, which is vividly documented in coinage. The blockage of this trade by steppe powers such as the Khazars has been argued to be one of the major motives for the Rus exploration of the Dnieper and Volga river systems. It’s an interesting story, but takes us a bit afar, though illustrates another economic motive in the barbarian expansion.

Additionally, in keeping with the tone of the book I have exhibited some broad empathy to the Viking societies transformed beyond recognition by assimilation into European society around 1000. But I will add into the record that as a personal normative preference I believe that cultural homogeneity, in particular in language and religion, can often be beneficial in generating economic and ethical economies of scale. Though I believe that there are diminishing returns on the margin here (there is harm when police states attempt to impose one language and one religion on the whole populace through extreme tactics).

* In the late Roman Empire the aristocratic nobility remained pagan far longer than the Emperors and the service nobility dependent upon the Empire, as opposed their personal wealth.

** There is a great deal of debate as to how Islam arose, and some scholars argue that Islam is actually a relatively late development out of a sect of Arab Christians. If this is true the Islamic exception is no exception at all, but serves as an alternative history where the Goths remain Arian and assimilate their Roman subjects to their religion and language.

The military uses for space travel are legion: besides the obvious utility of being able to launch weapons much more quickly at a target, it can be used to prevent military action through advanced intelligence gathering.

The Air Force has long been in the vanguard of space based operations, but of course much of that is secret (and rightly so). I had heard of the X-37 B — aka the Flying Twinkie — for some time, but since there was so little info on it I didn’t write anything. But interestingly, through Slashdot I learned that amateur satellite spotters have seen the X-37 B from the ground. Not many people know you can spot all sorts of satellites from your front yard; all you need in most cases is knowledge of your latitude and longitude and a website with satellite listings.

Info about the X-37 B is relatively tight, so it’s unclear what it’s being tested for. Surveillance is assured, since any satellite can be used for that. The Air Force says it has no offensive capabilities — I wonder if they mean the test shot launched last month, or the X-37 B itself — but it does have a payload capability for small satellites, and can be operated in orbit for at least 9 months. Its orbit takes it from -40° to +40° latitude. Go look at a globe and see what countries lie in that range that might be of interest to the military…

Also of interest is that the Air Force is planning a test launch of a hypersonic scramjet called the X-51A, an aircraft capable of flight at speeds of at least Mach 6 — about 7000 kph! That launch may happen as soon as May 25. Scramjets are fiercely complex technologically; while technically rockets, they use oxygen from the air instead of carrying it on board. This saves a lot of mass, and has a huge range of uses; military of course, but also civilian uses for aircraft.

I saw an early version of a scramjet a few years ago, and was awed by it; Mach 6 is fast, and these things have an upper speed that may exceed that by quite a bit. When this tech tests out, it may revolutionize the whole world. Imagine getting from the US to Japan in an hour, or basically from any point in the world to any other point in just a few of hours! In a hundred years, statements like that may seem quaint, but for now, it’s the future.

Some people may knee-jerk and think the military will abuse this tech, but I understand that developing and using this sort of thing can help prevent conflicts… and may lead to a revolution as profound as the invention of the car, the airplane, and the spaceship. I hope the military can get all this working. I still have hopes that the near future will look like the one I read about when I was a kid.

X-37 B image credit: U.S. Air Force. Scramjet: Wikipedia, under the Creative Commons license.

On the left wing, there's this strange notion that geoengineering is a new corporate obsession. Scientists interested in the topic are accused of being part of a "geoengineering lobby" that wants to mess with the planet for fun and profit. Alas, there's no evidence to support this idea. In fact, as recent Point of Inquiry guest Eli Kintisch reports over at CNN Money (clarification: the article is actually from Fortune, and CNN picked it up), government regulations so far have quashed those few attempts to profit off of geoengineering that have made it to the trial stage. Kintisch's piece is called "Climate Hacking and Geoengineering: A Good Way to Go Broke." You can read it here.

Sunday morning was cool and foggy, and so we were not surprised to discover the garden full of craters and trenches. A snapping turtle the size of a manhole cover was busy laying her eggs.

This is an annual ritual in this part of New England. The first time I encountered a snapping turtle here, not long after we had moved into our house, I was terrified. Our children were toddlers, old enough to run but not old enough to know they should stay away from animals that can snap off your finger. Somehow I had to get the turtle out of my yard and back into the creek that runs behind our house. With no experience in turtle-wrangling, I decided to get a broomstick. I tapped the turtle on its shell, to signal that I wanted it to leave. It looked up at me with supreme indifference.

My helplessness made me hallucinate. I feared the turtle was going to break into the house somehow and eat our cats. I called our town’s animal control line, and ended up talking to a policeman. He gave me a suprisingly detailed lecture on the natural history of the snapping turtle. On cool, foggy mornings in late spring, he explaned, females emerge from streams and wetlands to bury their eggs in the soft earth. They take care of their business in about an hour, and then they leave. He would not be coming to my house to rescue us.

He was right. The turtle picked a lush bed of mulch and mud, near a rose bush, and laid her eggs. I stared at from the front door with my children until we got bored. When I checked back a few minutes later, it was gone. I never realized that a snapping turtle can disappear when it wants to. After a few weeks the eggs hatched. In the summer we discovred adorably vicious baby snapping turtles trying to find their way back to the water. Every spring since, the snapping turtles have returned, and we’ve gotten more comfortable with them. I don’t bother the police. Instead, we get reasonably close to the turtle to observe.

We usually get one snapping turtle visiting us each year. We’re grateful, but we also know these visits are a shadow of a former glory. One of our neighbors, who grew up in our town, remembers armies of snapping turtles swarming up out of the creek in the spring. We live in biologically impoverished times, with constipated streams, filled-in marshes, and other assaults on the habitat of turtles in New England. Snapping turtles have been wandering out of marshes for millions of years. The oldest turtle fossils are about 220 million years old, but snapping turtles evolved much later. They belong to a 90-million-year-old lineage that also gave rise to species that span the extremes of turtle biology, from tiny mud turtles to leatherback turtles, the biggest reptiles on Earth, which swim across oceans.

This morning’s visitation was particularly mesmerizing, because the snapping turtle angled her body in such a way that we could see her eggs drop into the hole she had dug. They were the size and shape of eyeballs. As the eggs eased out of her cloaca, she tapped them with her right back foot into the hole, like a soccer player giving a ball the extra kick it needed to reach the goal. One after another, the eggs tumbled out. We counted a dozen, but snapping turtles can lay dozens more at a time. They pick these nests carefully. They chose these spots for their temperatures. Like many other turtle species, snapping turtles end up male or female depending on the temperature. At low and high temperatures, they produce females; at intermediate temperatures, they make males. Snapping turtles don’t have thermometers, but they have evolved a simple rule of thumb (or claw). They seek out soft, sandy soil, which tends to be the right temperature to produce a mix of males and females.

Unfortunately, we may be setting ecological traps for the turtles. They sometimes lay eggs in yards underneath planted trees or near houses. The shadows cool the temperatures compared to sites they pick in natural habitats. On the other hand, global warming may send them in the other direction. In either case, we may cause them to make too few males. And because they live so long (they can live 40 years), they will be slow to evolve new preferences. I hope that my grandchildren will be able to come see snapping turtles rip up our garden, but I cannot be sure.