Tomorrow evening, I'll be appearing at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences for this event: "Who Will Tell the People? Science and Sustainability in the News” Scientists who study the environment and global warming warn us at every turn that dramatic changes are afoot. Why don’t media headlines convey a sense of urgency? What is the best way to get the climate change message to citizens? What obligations do the media have? What prevents them from telling the story? The May Urban Sustainability Forum will take a look at how the media covers issues of science, how shrinking budgets and disappearing science desks are impacting coverage, and how niche media sources are filling a void in sharing vital information. Beth McConnell, Executive Director of the Media and Democracy Coalition, will be speaking on the topic of media consolidation and its effects on journalism, specifically sustainability. Chris Mooney is a 2009-2010 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT and author of three books, including Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum). Mr. Mooney and Ms. Kirshenbaum also co-write The Intersection blog for Discovermagazine.com, a contributing editor to Science Progress, and a senior correspondent for The American Prospect magazine. He has been ...

Barely legal: is attraction and estimated age of young female faces disrupted by alcohol use, make up, and the sex of the observer? "One 'reasonable ground' for unlawful sex with a minor is mistaken age. Alcohol consumption and make-up are often deemed further influences on impaired perception. Two hundred and forty persons in bars and cafes rated the attractiveness of composite faces of immature and mature females with and without additional makeup, alcohol users having their concurrent blood-alcohol level measured using a breathalyser. A non-sex-specific preference for immature faces over sexually mature faces was found. Alcohol and make-up did not inflate attractiveness ratings in immature faces. While alcohol consumption significantly inflated attractiveness ratings for participants viewing made-up sexually mature faces, greater alcohol consumption itself did not lead to overestimation of age. Although alcohol limited the processing of maturity cues in female observers, it had no effect on the age perceptions of males viewing female faces, suggesting male mate preferences are not easily disrupted. Participants consistently overestimated the age of sexually immature- and sexually mature-faces by an average of 3.5 years. Our study suggests that even heavy alcohol consumption does not interfere with age-perception tasks in men, so is not of itself ...

In another step forward in the quest to create artificial life in a test tube, a team of genetic engineers led by Craig Venter has built a synthetic genome and proved that it can power up when placed inside an existing cell.

Dr. Venter calls the result a “synthetic cell” and is presenting the research as a landmark achievement that will open the way to creating useful microbes from scratch to make products like vaccines and biofuels. At a press conference Thursday, Dr. Venter described the converted cell as “the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer.” [The New York Times]

The technical achievement is worth crowing about. The researchers built on Venter’s trick from last year, in which he took the genome from one bacterium, transferred it the hollowed-out shell of a different bacterial species, and watched as the new cell “booted up” successfully. In this new step, the researchers built a genome from scratch, copying the genetic code from a bacterium that infects goats and introducing just a few changes as a “watermark”; then they transferred that synthetic genome to a cell. As the researchers report in Science, the cell functioned and replicated, creating more copies of the slightly altered goat-infecting bacterium–now nicknamed Synthia.

But the reactions to Venter’s accomplishment have been mixed–while some celebratory headlines trumpeted the creation of artificial life, many scientists said the reaction was overblown, and took issue with Venter’s claim of having created a truly synthetic cell. Here, we round up a selection of responses from all corners of the science world.

Bioethicist Arthur Caplan finds the philosophical ramifications of the work fascinating:

“Their achievement undermines a fundamental belief about the nature of life that is likely to prove as momentous to our view of ourselves and our place in the Universe as the discoveries of Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin and Einstein.” [Nature News]

But many experts say that since Venter copied a pre-existing genome, he didn’t really create a new life form.

“To my mind Craig has somewhat overplayed the importance of this,” said David Baltimore, a leading geneticist at Caltech. Dr. Baltimore described the result as “a technical tour de force” but not breakthrough science, but just a matter of scale…. “He has not created life, only mimicked it,” Dr. Baltimore said [The New York Times].

In addition, many experts note that the experimenters got a big boost by placing the synthetic genome in a preexisting cell, which was naturally inclined to make sense of the transplanted DNA and to turn genes on and off. Thus, they say, it’s not accurate to label the experiment’s product a true “synthetic cell.”

Meanwhile, physicist Freeman Dyson backed his way into paying the researchers a compliment in his own inimitable way:

This experiment, putting together a living bacterium from synthetic components, is clumsy, tedious, unoriginal. From the point of view of aesthetic and intellectual elegance, it is a bad experiment. But it is nevertheless a big discovery. It opens the way to the new world of synthetic biology. It proves that sequencing and synthesizing DNA give us all the tools we need to create new forms of life. After this, the tools will be improved and simplified, and synthesis of new creatures will become quicker and cheaper. Nobody can predict the new discoveries and surprises that the new technology will bring [The Edge].

And while some horrified environmentalists called for an immediate halt to such experiments, arguing that unnatural life forms could cause unknown disasters if released into the wild, Paul Keim of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity was quick to reassure the public.

Keim said there is no new hazard because the Venter team manufactured a genome whose structure and function were already understood. The researchers didn’t create a novel life form. “We have a long way to go before we see a totally synthetic organism that does something important or dangerous,” he said. [Washington Post]

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An image from the MODIS on NASA’s Aqua satellite on Tuesday afternoon, May 11, shows that the damaged Deepwater Horizon oil well continued to leak significant amounts of oil in the Gulf of Mexico.

Oil slicks become most visible in satellite images when they appear in a swath of the image called the sunlit region—where the mirror-like reflection of the sun is blurred by ocean waves into an area of brightness. In the bright zone of reflection, the difference between the oil-smoothed water and rougher surface of the clean water is enhanced. The slick appears as a silvery-gray patch in the center of the image. The tip of the Mississippi Delta is at upper left. Wispy clouds make it hard to determine whether any of the streamers or smaller patches of oil extend northeast of the main slick.

Image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA, GSFC

There’s that old saying about the futility of a bird and a fish falling in love. Apparently, two birds might not fair any better: Unlucky ducks from two different species are falling for the wrong women. Actually, matchmaker Michael D. Sorenson of Boston University set them up at birth. In a foreign exchange program of sorts, his team took sixteen young male redheads (Aythya Americana) and sixteen young male canvasbacks (Aythya valisineria) and switched their homes, allowing canvasbacks to raise redhead ducklings and vice versa. Sorenson wanted to study imprinting—when a young bird sees its caretaker and recognizes her as its mother. Determining what Mom looks like turns out to be important later in a bird’s life, as the duck uses its mother’s image to pick out mates. But, as anyone who knows the origins of the word “cuckold” can attest, even when scientists aren't mucking about in the nests some birds don’t raise their own offspring. Some deadbeat ducks--including the redheads--sneak their eggs into another species’ nest, a way to shove off parenting responsibilities. Sorenson wanted to find out if such an abandoned bird could imprint the wrong mother, and later pick the wrong mates. The resulting romantic comedy, published online today in ...

Craig Venter and colleagues have achieved a remarkable milestone: they designed a genome, and brought it to life. More specifically, they’ve synthesized a chromosome consisting of over a million DNA base pairs, and implanted it in a bacterial cell to replace the cell’s original genome. That cell then reproduced, giving birth to offspring that only had the synthetic genome. See the Venter Institute press release, discussion in Nature (pdf), more discussion at Edge, and some background from Carl Zimmer. Update: and here is the paper.

Who knows exactly what this means as yet — but it’s important! You can argue if you like about whether it’s really “artificial life” — that argument has already started, and already seems boring. There are also speculations about designing microorganisms to help us solve problems like global warming or (let’s say) massive oil spills. Not completely crazy speculations, either. But there’s a long way to go before anything like that is coming off a biological assembly line. And eventually we’ll be going much further than that, beyond designer microorganisms into much weirder terrain. This isn’t a culmination, it’s just a start.

Will the Florida Keys catch a break with the loop current? Most observers are now in agreement that one of the biggest ecological worries about the BP oil spill—that it could reach the Gulf of Mexico’s loop current that flows to the Keys—has begun to occur. However, The New York Times reports today via Greenwire that eddies around the edge of the current are keeping much of the oil out of it.

Clear predictions are hard to come by because the oil continues to defy expectations about which direction it will go, and so does the loop current.

The loop moves based on shifting winds and other environmental factors, so even though oil is leaking continuously it may be in the current one day, and out the next. The slick itself has defied scientists’ efforts to track it and predict its path. Instead, it has repeatedly advanced and retreated, an ominous, shape-shifting mass in the Gulf, with vast underwater lobes extending outward [AP].

And, oceanographers like Mitch Roffer say, eddies forming near the current could disrupt it and change the oil’s course.

Satellite shots this morning showed that an eddy farther south along the Florida coast is expanding in size and strength. That cyclone appears likely to destabilize or even sever the Loop Current, greatly reducing the oil threat to the Florida Keys and beyond, he said. “If it forms, it’s going to pull a lot of the oil away from Florida,” Roffer said. There are no guarantees, he added, “but it looks very likely that this is forming” [The New York Times].

While this development—if it holds—would benefit the Keys and the areas beyond, there’s still a great mass of oil dumping into the Gulf. BP said today that the siphon it successfully installed on the leak is now carrying 5,000 barrels of oil per day up to a tanker on the shore. Since lots of oil is still leaking, that’s a de facto admission that the original estimate of the spill—5,000 barrels a day—was much too low. You can now watch the live video feed of the oil online.

Another lingering fear about the spill is coming to pass as well. Oil is beginning to show up in force on the Louisiana coastline, according to Governor Bobby Jindal.

“This is serious — this is the heavy oil that everyone has been fearing. It is here now,” Jindal said Wednesday as he toured the Mississippi Delta by boat and swept a fishnet through water, holding up dark, dripping glop. The region is home to rare birds, mammals and a wide variety of marine life. “This is one of the oldest wildlife management areas here in Louisiana, and now it is covered in oil,” Jindal said [NPR].

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Image: U.S Coast Guard photo by Chief Petty Officer John Kepsimelis

Though humans cannot see light outside the visible spectrum, satellites are able to detect wavelengths into the ultraviolet and infrared. The Landsat 7 satellite uses an instrument that collects seven images at once, with each image showing a specific section of the electromagnetic spectrum, called a band. Each image highlights a different part of the electromagnetic spectrum.

The satellites original images are all acquired in black and white, so color must be assigned via computer to the black and white images. The three primary colors of light are red, green and blue, and each color is given a different band/image. Once the three images are combined, you will have what is called a “false color image.” A common band combination shows green, healthy vegetation as bright red, which is useful in forestry and agricultural applications. Landsat images are also used to gather geological and hydrological data along with other kinds of environmental monitoring. In a helpful explanation, the folks at Landsat offer this catchy formula to aid you in remembering: “One common way that primary colors are assigned to bands can be easily remembered using the mnemonic:

“RGB = NRG (Red, Green, Blue = Near Infrared, Red, Green…)
Red = Near IR (ETM+ band 4)
Green = Red (ETM+ band 3)
Blue = Green (ETM+ band 2)”

There. That should be easy to remember. My suggestion: try singing it.

All images courtesy USGS National Center for EROS and NASA Landsat Project Science Office

Ganges River Delta. The Ganges River forms an extensive delta where it empties into the Bay of Bengal.

In a move that’s been hailed as one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of the century, a group of scientists have created a synthetic bacterium that looks like Craig Venter.

The team artificially synthesised a genome in the lab and inserted it into an empty bacterial cell, which promptly remodelled its outer wall into a picture of Venter’s face.

“Before today, there had only been one genome in the world with the right sequence of nucleotides to encode my face,” said Venter, speaking from his secret volcano lair. “Now there are two, and I can’t help but think that things have greatly improved.

“Of course, the ultimate goal is to build a creature with 100 heads, not unlike the mythical hydra, but where every head is my head.

“Or, er, something about biofuels,” he added.

Other scientists warned that the ethical debates sparked by the discovery had only begun. Andrew McQueen from New York University said, “Imagine going for a walk in the park only to find that every bird in the trees has Craig’s face on it and they’re all looking at you.”

“They’re not smiling either,” he added before curling up on the floor and crying quietly.

Meanwhile, it transpired that Venter has coded a line from a James Joyce novel into his synthetic genome, a move that drew condemnation from America’s creationist groups, who didn’t understand what a novel was.

(For actual takes on this story, see a straight take in the Times, eight glowing reactions in Nature, a more reserved take in the New York Times that more closely mirrors my own feelings, and an excellent explanation of the new paper’s technical achievements, which are indeed substantial.)

If you don’t read Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, then you are a pinko commie^*. Or a socialist. I dunno; I get these political epithets mixed up.

Anyway, today’s was great, as usual. But I wonder who this Professor Thorne is…?

When Walgreens, the nation’s biggest drugstore chain, announced last week that personal genomics tests would join diet soda and pregnancy tests in its aisles, we gave some reasons that might not be such a great thing. We weren’t the only ones concerned: The Food and Drug Administration said it would investigate the tests, and now Congress is involved. It opened an investigation into personal genomics tests yesterday.

House Committee on Energy and Commerce, chaired by Rep. Henry A. Waxman, just sent out official requests for information to the big three personal genomics companies—23andMe, Navigenics, and Pathway Genomics.

Waxman’s interest was piqued by the move—quickly rescinded last week after the FDA objected—by Pathway to sell its DNA-collection kits in Walgreen’s drugstores. The letters ask the companies for information on, among other things, how they analyze test results to determine someone’s risk for any disease or drug response, and how accurately the DNA tests identify genetic risks [Newsweek].

That’s important because while sequencing someone’s genome is a rather objective task, interpreting it is not. The companies have been loath to divulge how they do the latter part, which is what Waxman’s committee wants to know. (Check out the DISCOVER Magazine feature in which our reporter has her DNA analyzed by three different companies.)

Walgreens has now delayed the introduction the Pathway tests onto its shelves. So has CVS, which planned to offer the same product beginning in August.

The kits would allow buyers to send a saliva sample to Pathway, based in San Diego, for analysis. The company’s testing fee would be based on the information the consumer wants. Pathway says its testing allows buyers to learn whether they are at risk for a range of diseases, including breast cancer and Alzheimer’s. But questions have been raised about whether most consumers would be able to interpret the results [UPI].

Meanwhile, across the country from Washington D.C., another personal DNA testing argument is in full force. On Tuesday we brought you the story that UC Berkeley will ask incoming freshmen this fall to give a DNA sample, which the university says it will use for simple tests to determine alcohol metabolism or lactose intolerance. The program is voluntary and anonymous, but the Center for Genetics and Society, also of Berkeley, cited the Walgreens case as more reason to argue the university ought to stop the program.

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Image: Pathway Genomics

Posted on HubbleSite today is the story of WASP-12b, a Hot Jupiter discovered April 1, 2008.  WASP-12b has a blistering orbital rate of just over 26 hours.  From HubbleSite:

May 20, 2010: “The Star That Ate My Planet” may sound like a B-grade science fiction movie title, but this is really happening 600 light-years away. Like a moth in a candle flame, a doomed Jupiter-sized planet has moved so close to its sunlike parent star that it is spilling its atmosphere onto the star. This happens because the planet gets so hot that its atmosphere puffs up to the point where the star’s gravity pulls it in. The planet will likely be completely devoured in 10 million years. Observations by Hubble’s new Cosmic Origins Spectrograph measured a variety of elements in the planet’s bloated atmosphere as the planet passed in front of its star. The planet, called WASP-12b, is the hottest known world ever discovered, with an atmosphere seething at 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit.

For the full story, visit HubbleSite. An interesting story about the Milky Way’s hottest known planet.

Craig Venter has taken yet another step towards his goal of creating synthetic life forms. He’s synthesized the genome of a microbe and then implanted that piece of DNA into a DNA-free cell of another species. And that…that thing…can grow and divide. It’s hard to say whether this is “life from scratch,” because the boundary between such a thing and ordinary life (and non-life) is actually blurry. For example, you could say that this is still a nature hybrid, because its DNA is based on the sequence of an existing species of bacteria. If Venter made up a sequence from scratch, maybe we’d have crossed to a new terrain.

Anyway–this news just hit the wires thanks to an embargo break, so I don’t have time to go into more detail. Joe Palca at NPR has posted his article on the subject. For background, please check out these stories I’ve written about this general area of research:

Tinker, Tailor: Can Venter Stitch Together A Genome From Scratch?

The Meaning of Life

The Six Most Important Experiments In The World

Artificial Life? Old News.

The High-Tech Search For A Cleaner Biofuel Alternative

On the Origin of Tomorrow

My Bloggingheads interview with Venter

Update: The scientists are in a live press conference that started a 1 pm.

600 light years away, in the constellation of Auriga, there is a star in some ways similar to our Sun. It’s a shade hotter (by about 800° C), more massive, and older. Oddly, it appears to be laced with heavy elements: more oxygen, aluminum, and so on, than might be expected. A puzzle.

Then, last year, it was discovered that this star had a planet orbiting it. A project called WASP – Wide Area Search for Planets, a UK telescope system that searches for exoplanets — noticed that the star underwent periodic dips in its light. This indicates that a planet circles the star, and when the planet gets between the star and us, it blocks a tiny fraction of the starlight.

The planet is a weirdo, for many reasons… but it won’t be weird for too much longer. That’s because the star is eating it.

What WASP 12b may look like.

OK, first, the planet. Called WASP 12b, it was instantly pegged as an oddball. The orbit is only 1.1 days long! Compare that to our own 365 day orbit, or even Mercury’s 88 days to circle the Sun. This incredibly short orbital period means this planet is practically touching the surface of its star as it sweeps around at over 220 km/sec (130 miles/sec)! That also means it must be very hot; models indicate that the temperature at its cloud tops would be in excess of 2200°C (4000° F).

Not only that, but other numbers were odd, too. WASP 12b was found to be a bit more massive and bigger than Jupiter; about 1.8 times its size and 1.4 times its mass. That’s too big! Models indicate that planets this massive have a funny state of matter in them; they are so compressible that if you add mass, the planet doesn’t really get bigger, it just gets denser. In other words, you could double Jupiter’s mass and its size wouldn’t increase appreciably, but since the mass goes up, so would its density.

But WASP 12b isn’t like that. In fact, it has a lower density than Jupiter, and is a lot bigger! Something must be going on… and when you see a lot of weird things all sitting in one place, it makes sense to assume they’re connected. In this case it’s true: that planet is frakking hot, and that’s at the heart of this mess. Heating a planet that much would not exactly be conducive to its well-being. When you heat a gas it expands, which would explain WASP 12b’s big size. It’s puffy! But being all bloated that close to a star turns out to be bad for your health.

Astronomers used Hubble to observe the planet in the ultraviolet and found clear signs of all sorts of heavy elements, including sodium, tin, aluminum, magnesium, and manganese, as well as, weirdly, ytterbium^*. Moreover, they could tell from the data that these elements existed in a cloud surrounding the planet, like an extended atmosphere going outward for hundreds of thousands of kilometers.

That’s a long way from the planet. Any atom of, say, manganese that far from the planet would be caught in a tug-of-war between the gravity of the planet and the star… and the star would win. The gravity of the star is drawing material off the planet in a vast stream, or, in other words, the planet is getting slowly eaten by its star. If astronomers ever get around to giving this planet an actual name, I suggest Sarlacc^†.

This explains the peculiar high abundance of heavy metals in the star I mentioned at the beginning of this post; they come from the planet! But not for long. Given the mass of the planet and the density of the stream, it looks like it has roughly ten million years left. At that point, supper’s over: there won’t be anything left for the star to eat. In reality it’s hard to say exactly what will happen; there may be a rocky/metal core to the planet that will survive. But even that is so close to the star that it will be a molten blob of goo. The way orbits work, the way the dance of gravity plays out over time, the planet itself may actually be drawn inexorably closer to its star. Remember, too, the star is old, and will soon start to expand into a red giant. So the planet is falling and the star is rising; eventually the two will meet and the planet will meet a fiery death.

All in all, it sucks to be WASP 12b.

But it’s cool to be an astronomer! Only 15 years ago we had no idea that there were other planets orbiting Sunlike stars, and now we know of over 400, and a lot of them are really, really bizarro. When I was a kid I watched Star Trek and read a lot of science fiction, and I remember thinking that the planets in them were too weird; there was no way anything like them could actually exist.

Ha! The Universe, as usual, is smarter and more clever than we are. There’s a lot of strange out there, and the more we look, the more we find.

^† Yes, I know, Star Wars fanbois, that that would be a better name for the star and not the planet, since Sarlacc was the creature that did the digesting, and was not itself digested. But if the star were Sarlacc, the planet would have to be named Boba Fett, and that’s just silly.

Artwork credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)

Large Hadron Collider physicists have heard the voice of the "god particle," the Higgs boson, and it sounds a bit like a child’s music box. Lily Asquith, a physicist searching for the Higgs boson--the elementary particle believed to give everything in the universe mass--is using more than her eyes. With artists and other physicists, she started the LHCsound project to hear subatomic particles. New Scientist reports that the idea arose from a conversation between Asquith and percussionist Eddie Real:
“I was actually doing impersonations of different particles and trying to get him to develop them on his electronic drum kit.”
They decided to use real data about particles (and theoretical data for the yet unseen Higgs) to make some noise. In the process that Asquith calls “sonification,” the researchers match, for example, the particle’s momentum and energy to pitch and volume. The project's various simulations demonstrate that Higgs won’t be auditioning for Glee anytime soon. Still, Asquith believes that physicists might use her particle music as an analysis tool, since human ears can detect small differences in a sound's direction (within around three degrees) and frequency (around 0.3 percent). The aim of the project is to combine each particle's data from the LHC’s ATLAS detector into ...

Two males red-eyed tree frogs square off over a female. Fisticuffs will soon ensue and as a final challenge to each other, the males… er… vigorously shake their bums at each other. Their quivering buttocks shake the plants they sit on, sending threatening vibrations towards their rival. This secret line of communication has just been uncovered by Michael Caldwell from Boston University. To decipher these messages, he has used a hi-tech combination of infrared cameras, saplings rigged with accelerometers and even a cybernetic Robofrog.

During mating season, male red-eyed tree frogs gather in the rainforests of Panama to compete for females with dramatic multimedia performances, involving calls and visual signals. Studying these messages can be difficult because the frogs communicate at night. A white lamp would kill their natural behaviour, prompting males to become far more restrained than usual, save in the presence of females. Instead, Caldwell watched them under an infrared light. He pitted 38 pairs of frogs against each other, on plants fitted with accelerometers.

The frogs made two types of calls (chuckles and chacks), raised their bodies off their leaves and kicked out with their legs. And in every aggressive encounter, they also rapidly shook their bums, producing vibrations with a consistent high-pitched tone. The contests would last for anywhere from a minute to an hour. If the signalling didn’t work, the time was talk was over and violence ensued. Males would wrestle with each other, sometimes for hours on end (see right).

The vibrations, or ‘tremulations’, were clearly very important and were usually the last line of negotiation before battle commenced. The victor almost always shook for more time, created longer-lasting vibrations and was more likely to have the last shake. The frequencies of the vibrations were fairly constant although victors tended to produce higher-pitched tremulations if they were smaller than their rivals or similarly sized.

Of course, the sight of a frog shaking its bum is also quite striking, but Caldwell found that a male was no more likely to tremulate when his opponent was facing him than when he was turned away. This strongly suggests that the vibrations themselves were carrying information. In fact, every part of the male’s repertoire sends distinctive tremors through the plant, including his chuckles. Even the kicking legs seem to brush past the plant stems in the style of a musician plucking a guitar string.

Caldwell’s observations had been informative but he wanted to test the frogs’ behaviour. Enter Robofrog – a model equipped with an electric shaker and a prime directive is to provoke other males. When he made his own vibrations, living males responded accordingly and aggressively. By contrast, nothing happened when he sat still, when he made visual signs without tremulating, or when Caldwell exposed the test frogs to white noise vibrations in Robofrog’s absence.

All in all, these experiments show that competing red tree frogs use a secret channel of communication that most human observers would be completely unaware of. Vibrations are an excellent way of conveying messages in the rainforest, when the combination of darkness and dense foliage might prevent the conversers from seeing each other clearly. Exactly what they say is unclear, but they could provide information about the contender’s motivation or size. And they’re undoubtedly aggressive – the tree frog’s version of smack-talk.

So far, the red-eyed tree frog is the first back-boned animal that’s been clearly shown to communicate by shaking the surface it sits on. But Caldwell suspects that it’s far from the only one, especially since many other species are highly sensitive to vibrations. Tree-dwellers are probably particularly good at this, especially ones with larger bodies that can shake their supports more strongly.

Candidates include the male veiled chameleon, which shakes the branches it sits on in the presence of a female, and the female South Asian common tree frog, which seems to attract mates by tapping her toes on the plants that encircle their breeding sites. On the ground, and on a much bigger scale, elephants could also use vibrations as a sort of ‘seismic signal’. Nature is probably full of such hidden conversations, spoken in rumbles and tremors.

Reference: Current Biology http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2010.03.069

Photos and videos by Michael Caldwell

More on frogs:

• Seven habits of highly successful toads
• South African wildlife – Foamy nest frog
• Common pesticide is good news for parasites, bad news for frogs
• ‘Wolverine’ frogs pop retractable claws from their toes
• First lungless frog discovered in Borneo

These boys are all dressed up with no place to go.

Two weeks from today, a team—made of three Russians, two Europeans, and one Chinese (with a Russian as an alternate)—will begin the longest trip to nowhere any of them has ever taken. These men will be locked in isolation for 520 days to simulate what astronauts would endure on a trip to Mars, part of a project called Mars500. It follows a 105-day test that the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems (IBMP) ran last year.

“The biggest risk of such an isolation is psychological,” said researcher Alexander Suvorov who is leading the experiment at the IBMP. “Of course relations between the crew will not always be harmonious, some will get on with others, others will not. But the priority is to be able to carry out tasks in spite of this” [AFP].

Five hundred and twenty days. By the time the team emerges from its five-module, 18,000-square foot cocoon located on the outskirts of Moscow, it’ll be early November 2011. Here in the United States, next year’s World Series will be wrapping up. The 2012 presidential candidates will be hitting the campaign trail in force. The isolation weary-crew may re-enter a world filled with high-pitched squeals as the new “Twilight” book and film come out.

The six-man crew of the Mars-500 project, which is partly funded by the European Space Agency, will spend the first 250 days in a mock spaceship to replicate the amount of time it would take to reach Mars with current technology. After reaching the [simulated] planet, three crewmembers will spend 30 days “exploring and colonizing” the planet before returning to the ship for the 240-day flight home, (deputy project leader Mark) Belakovsky said [BusinessWeek].

The simulation will introduce other difficulties expected with a Mars mission, like communication lag. The crew members can email the outside world, but they’ll experience disruptions and delays of up to 40 minutes. Even inside the complex it won’t be easy.

All crew members have a varying command of English, but not all speak Russian, another working language during the trip. “If we fail to understand each other, we will employ body language,” quipped Russian crew member Sukhrob Kamolov [ABC News].

Nevertheless, 6,000 people from 40 countries applied to be test subjects; it doesn’t hurt that the “astronauts” will all make at least $99,000 for their troubles. However, none of the participants from last year’s 105-day mission applied for this one, so perhaps being locked in the isolation of pretend space once is enough.

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Image: IBMP/Oleg Voloshin

NEXT> If you feel like Christmas keeps creeping earlier every year, consider the companies who are trying to get their products ready for the holiday season. Yesterday, May 19, many companies showed off their wares at the Holiday Gift Guide Show in Times Square. There are plenty of new gizmos to buy when the calendar turn to December, don't worry. But we wanted to bring you a few of the delightfully odd or unexpected entries now. Why wait? Some are old, some are new, some are resurrected, and one is, well, blue. Thanks to the Forever White headset by Beaming White, my dream has finally come true: I can listen to the White Stripes while I whiten my teeth, all without whitening strips. Just put the hydrogen peroxide gel on your teeth, then strap on the headset and subject the gel to blue LED. All the while you can be pumping music through the headset. NEXT>

As of this writing, the “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” Facebook page has nearly 83,000 likes and is rising steadily. Presumably, none of those fans are in the government of Pakistan, as the page prompted the conservative Muslim country to block first Facebook, but then also YouTube, parts of Wikipedia, and other Web sites—more than 450 in all.

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) keeps itself busy scanning the Internet for material that it says would offend its population, the second-largest Muslim population of any country. Two years ago it temporarily banned YouTube until the site removed cartoons of Mohammed. Typically the PTA bans particular links, but this week it complained that the amount of objectionable material on Web was increasing and decided to cut off it citizens from some of the biggest sites on the Web. The ban is said to run through the end of May, giving Web sites the chance to remove offending materials if they choose.

Social networking sites are extremely popular in Pakistan, a country of 170 million, where more than 60 percent of the population is under the age of 25. Pakistan has about 25 million Internet users, almost all of them young, according to Adnan Rehmat, a media analyst in Islamabad [The New York Times].

The Facebook page in question, which itself was prompted by the South Park controversy in which Comedy Central censored an episode that would have depicted the Muslim prophet, encourages people to draw Mohammed today in a show of free speech.

Islam strictly prohibits the depiction of any prophet as blasphemous and Muslims all over the world staged angry protests over the publication of satirical cartoons of Mohammed in European newspapers in 2006 [AFP].

Also, extremists threatened South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone over the episode. From the description on the “Everybody Draw Mohammad” Facebook page:

We simply want to show the extremists that threaten to harm people because of their Mohammed depictions, that we’re not afraid of them. That they can’t take away our right to freedom of speech by trying to scare us to silence.

If you’re over at Facebook today, check out Discover Magazine’s page.

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Image: flickr / benstein

Last week, I wrote about a second investigation clearing climate change scientists from any wrongdoing in the horrid manufactured controversy of climategate. In that post, and an earlier one, I mentioned that Virginia State Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli was starting a witch hunt, investigating the work of scientist Michael Mann while he was at the University of Virginia. Cuccinelli’s actions are transparently driven by political bias; Mann has been shown repeatedly to have worked honestly and above-board.

I’m not the only one who thinks that. Chris Mooney at The Intersection has quotes and links from a scathing Washington Post editorial, condemning Cuccinelli for his actions. And the Post doesn’t hold back, even calling UVa out, telling them to get a spine and stand up to this attack. Chris put up a second post about how scientists themselves have picked up this banner. Oh, and here’s a third post about the AAAS condemning Cuccinelli as well.

Ironically, Cuccinelli claims his investigation is because he thinks tax money was wasted or that Mann defrauded the tax payers… but it’s Cuccinelli’s investigation that’s the true waste of taxpayer money. This attack by him started after Mann was already exonerated, making Cuccinelli’s motives pretty clear. Oh, did I say "ironically"? I meant Orwellian.

On top of the Washington Post’s call, over 250 members of the National Academy of Sciences — the U.S.’s premier and most prestigious organization for science — have publicly condemned these attacks as well:

Many recent assaults on climate science and, more disturbingly, on climate scientists by climate change deniers, are typically driven by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. I urge everyone to read both the WashPo article and the full statement by the NAS.

And for you deniers who plague the comments of every blog post I make on this topic, loading it with obfuscation, noise, and distraction from the actual topic: these posts by me are not politically driven. In fact, given the opportunities for new businesses and new technology, preventing global climate change should be a major plank of the Republican Party, which claims to stand for such things.

So instead of blindly assaulting me with trivially ridiculous accusations, you might want to examine the motivations behind the political attacks on real science. Many of you claim to be skeptics. Well then, be skeptical, but be real skeptics. I am, and always have been — I’ve examined the claims, the science, and the techniques, and have come to the conclusion that global warming is real, and that humans are overwhelmingly the most likely cause of its recent acceleration.

I know I can say this all I want and it won’t help; the Noise Machine is impervious to logic and reality. But when you read those comments, you might want to keep this image in the back of your mind: