The new Carnival of Space is up! And it’s in 3D!

I love the future.

Nearly a thousand pages in length, the Senate climate and energy bill (pdf) is here. Senators John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman unveiled the revised bill today.

The carbon emissions targets are: 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, and 83 percent below 2005 levels by 2050. That’s made to match the goals in the House bill that passed in 2009. In addition, the bill proposes putting a price on carbon. Sen. Kerry says:

“The most important and unique thing this bill does is to put a price on carbon that reflects its real cost to our society and our economy,” he said. Investing in renewable energy, he continued, “becomes financially attractive once carbon is really priced at what it costs us.” Kerry added, “This is going to change the face of American energy” [CBS News].

The so-named American Power Act comes out in the shadow of the ongoing BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, something that’s painfully clear in the new text.

One of the central elements of the Senate bill — incentives to increase domestic offshore oil production — has been radically rewritten in recent days, in the aftermath of the explosion and fire on a drilling rig in the gulf on April 20, leaving an undersea well leaking oil that has yet to be stanched. Instead of providing for a broad expansion of offshore drilling, the Kerry-Lieberman measure would have the effect of drastically limiting oil operations off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts by giving states the right to veto any drilling plan that could cause environmental or economic harm [The New York Times].

That veto power would extends to 75 miles beyond the state’s shoreline, and the Interior Department would have to study how badly a leak would affect the economy or environment of a state. That’s not the only concession to the states written into the new bill.

States that go ahead with offshore drilling would retain 37.5 percent of the federal revenue generated — a shift from current policy. Now royalty revenue goes to the Treasury; states collect no royalties [AP].

President Obama praised the bill and its chances for passage. But, as the New York Times reports, it’s not clear yet whether the bill will even make it to the Senate floor this year because of the crowded schedule. We’ll keep following the story.

Related Content:
80beats: Climate Bill Passes in the House, Moves on to Senate
80beats: 5 Offshore Oil Hotspots Beyond the Gulf That Could Boom—Or Go Boom
DISCOVER: It’s Getting Hot in Here: The Big Battle Over Climate Science, interviews with Judith Curry & Michael Mann
DISCOVER: The State of the Climate—And of Climate Science
The Intersection: The Waxman-Markey Climate Bill… Tuff Enuff?

Image: flickr / cliff1066

See for yourself. It's hard to get a sense of scale, but it is still extremely dramatic--and ominous:

Domestic chicks perceive stereokinetic illusions. "Stereokinetic illusions occur when certain 2-D patterns are set in slow rotation in a plane perpendicular to the line of sight. Such phenomena have never been investigated in animal species other than our own. We used the domestic chick (Gallus gallus) to check whether these illusions are experienced by non-human species, taking advantage of filial imprinting. Newly hatched visually naive chicks were individually exposed for 4 h to 2-D stimuli producing, to a human observer, the perception of a stereokinetic cone (experiment 1) or of a stereokinetic cylinder (experiment 2). Thereafter, each chick underwent a free-choice test between a solid 3-D cone and a solid 3-D cylinder. A control group of newly hatched but not imprinted chicks underwent the same testing procedure, to check for the presence of any spontaneous preference for one or other of the two solid objects. Imprinted chicks approached the 3-D stimulus closely resembling the stimulus they had been exposed to during imprinting (the cone in experiment 1 and the cylinder in experiment 2). Non-imprinted chicks did not show any preference. These results suggest that domestic chicks experience stereokinetic illusions." Photo: flickr/Hello, I am Bruce Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Magnetic resonance temperature mapping of ...

For those people (you know who you are) who wake up, stumble to the bathroom, and look to the mirror hoping to see a species of Homo other than sapiens, you're in luck, thanks to a new app for the iPhone and Android phones. MEanderthal combines an uploaded photo of your face with an early human one created by a paleo-artist using early human fossils. LiveScience explains:
"You choose which human species you'd like to become, including: Homo floresiensis who lived between 95,000 and 17,000 years ago; Homo neanderthalensis who lived 200,000 to 28,000 years ago; and Homo heidelbergensis who lived 700,000 to 200,000 years ago."
What changes might you expect when you're Neanderthal-ized? For one thing, your schnoz will most likely expand quite a bit. This larger nasal organ helped early humans warm up and moisturize the cold, dry air during the ice age (no humidifiers back then).
"Big noses also meant sloping cheekbones compared with the flat cheekbones of modern humans. Neanderthals, especially males, also had big brow ridges and receding chins, she added. The large brow ridges are also found on chimps, gorillas and orangutans."
The app will bring today's humans in closer touch with our ancestors, some scientists say... perhaps ...

While you’re down at the drug store picking up toothpaste and sleeping pills, why not have your DNA tested? Walgreens says that this month it will become the first drug store to offer personal genomics tests in its store. For the low, low price of $20-30 you can pick up a kit to take a sample of your own saliva, which you mail off to Pathway Genomics, a company partnering with Walgreens.

Customers can then go Pathway’s Web site and order tests. Pathway says the tests — for drug response, “pre-pregnancy planning” and “health conditions” — start at $79 and run up to $249 for all three [AP].

With the personal genomics trend continuing to accelerate, this was perhaps an inevitable development. But the fact that personal tests are going into drug stores doesn’t mean that personal tests are as readily reliable or regulated as the rest of the tests and medications that fill the aisles.

1. The FDA is not pleased.

The Pathway test has not been approved by the Federal Drug Administration. In a statement after announcing this deal, Walgreens washed their hands of responsibility in this regard, saying Pathway assured them that the product didn’t require FDA approval. The FDA, however, does not agree.

In a statement, the FDA said it has regulatory authority over all lab-developed tests. “As new technologies become available and are marketed directly to consumers, FDA will consider all regulatory options,” the agency said. “Consumers should understand that the claims made by a company with an unapproved test have limitations and that they should not be making important medical and lifestyle decisions without first consulting a health care professional” [Wall Street Journal].

The FDA isn’t the only public body worried about these tests. Here in New York, where DISCOVER is located, we won’t be able to run down to Walgreens and pick up a DNA test. The state considers these to be medical tests, and medical tests require a license. When personal genomics companies first began to spring up, New York State issued nearly 40 cease-and-desist orders in 2007 and 2008. It’s still going to take some time to sort out the legality of who can look into your genome.

2. Can you actually learn anything useful?

Remember, only six years have passed since the human genome was fully sequenced. Incorporating personal genomics into medicine is moving fast, but it’s still in the early stages.

In most cases, the current level of DNA scanning technology and science is unable to offer meaningful predictions about the risk that a person will get a disease. “It is a really wonderful form of recreation,” said Scott R. Diehl, a geneticist at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. But as for applying it to health care, he said, “It’s very premature” [The New York Times].

The tests by personal genomics companies like 23andMe and Pathway look at particular point mutations that scientists think to be associated with diseases like Alzheimer’s or cystic fibrosis. Making clear predictions from a person’s DNA, though, will require not only a further understanding of what genes are linked to what diseases, but also how those genes interact with environmental factors, lifestyle choices, and each other, as our reporter found out in 2008 when having her DNA examined by several of the most prominent companies.

All that knowledge won’t come fast, or cheap.

That might take a few years and require sequencing a person’s entire genome, not just sampling selected bits, as the companies do now [The New York Times].

3. Overreaction—and mixed results

As the FDA noted in its statement quoted above, customers must understand the limitations of these tests—and not act too drastically. As DISCOVER’s own Kat McGowan wrote last year, “Another worry is that people may overreact to their results. Someone who has an elevated risk of breast cancer, for example, might take a drastic step like getting a mastectomy, not realizing that the test predicts increased risk, not a particular outcome.”

Then again, if you get curious enough to try multiple tests, you might have the opposite problem. Some curious folks who’ve tried out multiple personal genomics firms have received contradictory answers.

4. The fine print

Even if you don’t act on the information that a personal genetic test brings, it could impact you emotionally to learn about your ancestry or your family (say, if your father wasn’t your genetic father). That’s why the fine print on personal-genomics products is so extensive.

And the ramifications could do beyond the emotional realm. The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 offers some protection for personal genetic information, but how much is not terribly clear. Things are changing fast in the world of personal genomics, and it may be difficult or impossible to predict the significance, or even risk, of information you learn in 2010. As 23andMe’s terms and conditions notes:

Even if you share genetic information that has no or limited meaning today, that information could have greater meaning in the future as new discoveries are made. If you are asked by an insurance company whether you have learned genetic information about health conditions and you do not disclose this to them, this may be considered to be fraud.

5. Ready for the shelves?

Still, though, why shouldn’t you have the choice of whether to test your own genome? You get to test yourself in other health capacities:

Drug stores already carry a variety of diagnostic tests, like those for pregnancy, cholesterol and blood sugar. When some of these tests were introduced, there was controversy about whether consumers could test themselves.

Although broader in scope, Pathway’s test is not the first DNA-based analysis to be sold in drug stores. Sorenson Genomics began selling a paternity test through Rite Aid stores in late 2007. Sorenson has sold more than 100,000 tests through Rite Aid and other major pharmacy chains since then, according to Jacob Moon, a spokesman for the company [The New York Times].

But personal genomics is a different ballgame. Paternity tests and pregnancy tests bring you clear yes-or-no answers; they don’t evaluate complicated, multifactorial questions like those that personal DNA tests try to answer. And that complexity may be more than consumers bargained for.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: How Much Can You Learn from a Home DNA Test?
DISCOVER: Your Genome, Now Available for a Relative Discount
Gene Expression: Creative Destruction in Personal Genomics
Gene Expression: Personal Genomics Is Dead; Long Live Personal Genomics

Image: flickr / twodolla

Today’s Frazz comic is a good one. Of course, we all know that science isn’t faith-based, right? Right?

Also, the adult in the comic isn’t precisely right anyway. Sure, in flat Euclidean space geometry he has a point…

Tip o’ the frustum to Sara Davis.

From Emily at The Planetary Society blog comes word that one of Jupiter’s belts has disappeared… again.

This image, by the accomplished amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley, shows what’s up. Usually, the Great Red Spot is accompanied by a dark reddish belt that goes all the way around the planet, like the one in the northern hemisphere you can see in the picture. However, the Southern Equatorial Belt, as it’s called, is gone!

This has happened before, in fact. It’s not clear exactly why this sort of thing occurs, though. The belts (and their lighter-colored cousins, called zones) are weather patterns that stretch around the planet, a bit like the jet stream on Earth. They can be affected by temperature, chemical composition, and other factors. It’s possible that a belt can sink lower in the Jovian atmosphere if it cools slightly. Clouds then pour in on top of it, hiding it from view. It’s still there, just hidden; if the temperature rises it can float back up like nothing ever happened.

Jupiter is a weird place. Remember, we only see the very tops of the clouds. They go all the way down, tens of thousands of kilometers deep, where the pressure gets so great the gas just sorta gradually turns into a liquid. So having a belt sink a little bit and disappearing is perhaps less unlikely with such a freaky planet than it would be on Earth.

But there is a very cool thing about this: you can see it for yourself! It only takes a small telescope to see Jupiter, and with a modest ’scope the belts are visible. Well, usually visible; not this one so much right now, but you get my drift. If you want to see this for your very own self, you’ll have to get up early: Jupiter doesn’t rise until very early morning. Get up an hour or so before dawn and you should be able to get a good look. It’ll be the very bright starlike object in the East, brighter than anything else in the sky except the Moon, so it’s easy to spot.

But if you prefer your astronomy to be virtual, you can check out other pictures at Wesley’s site, as well as Astro Bob’s blog.

I wonder how long the belt will be gone? It could be months, or it might pop back up sooner. Either way, it’s a good reminder that we still have a lot of stuff to figure out when it comes to the Universe around us.

Think you're having a rough day? Try being a wasp larva, destined never to fully develop, but instead to sacrifice yourself to save your luckier siblings. Welcome to the twisted world of the wasp Copidosoma floridanum, a species whose bizarro reproductive strategies were recently elucidated in research out of Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology. A female wasp will lay her one or two eggs inside of the egg of a caterpillar known as a cabbage looper, according to New Scientist:
"One egg might not sound so bad, but [this wasp egg] is no ordinary egg. It is polyembryonic, meaning that the single embryo cell at its heart can repeatedly clone itself. As a result, just one egg can produce up to 2000 offspring."
The wasp larvae develop inside the caterpillar; there can be thousands of the wasp usurpers in a single caterpillar. The larvae that will later become adult wasps, known as reproductive larvae, survive by feeding on the caterpillar's blood. The other larvae are there just to fend off larvae from other wasp eggs that might have been laid in the same caterpillar egg:
"The second caste is the precocious larvae. These develop earlier than the reproductive larvae – hence their name ...

National Geographic has a trio of shows coming up on Sunday May 16, 2010 you will want to see.

The first is called “Cosmic Fire”, and airs at 8 pm ET/PT.   The episode explores solar storms and talks a great deal about the Carrington Event.  Probably the best treatment of that event I’ve seen.  If you have any interest in the aurora this is a must see.  As for the part in the middle of the show talking about lightning and cosmic rays that’s a little out there (IMHO) but interesting none-the-less.   Like they say in the episode, it’s not a matter of “if” it’s a matter of when.  What might the consequences be?  The answer is explored and it is not good and they aren’t kidding either.   By the way, they mentioned the solar storm of 1989.   I remember that one specifically.  The aurora was seen horizon to horizon and so bright I could read a newspaper by it  and yet,  it was nothing compared to the Carrington Event.

In case you couldn’t tell, I really-really like the aurora.  While I was watching the episode poor Marian was getting emails about every 5-minutes with “hey did you know….” or “oh wow”  She was a good sport about it  

“Alien Wind” follows at 9pm ET/PT.  NatGeo takes us to the outer planets and to the surreal world of Titan.  We are introduced to the exo-planet HD 80606b, a thoroughly nasty place in the binary star system of Struve 1341 and features some of the pretty cool observations that have been done.

Finally at 10pm ET/PT:  “Deadly Dust”.  I never considered dust to be all that interesting, but you know, after seeing this I have a new appreciation.  I mean, while I am complaining about the coating of “Smead Road” that appears all too regularly in my house, I can think – it could be worse.   And I’m sorry, chasing down dust devils in the desert has to be fun!  They give us a “what if” scenario of a Mars sized dust storm here on Earth, be glad it won’t happen.

Carl Zimmer asks “Will Anyone In Alabama Speak For Evolution?” The story is that a Republican candidate for governor in Alabama is being accused of not being a Creationist, and he is asserting that he is a Creationist. Some people might be surprised by this, but this is Alabama. It is famously well known that the general public tends to split down the middle in regards to evolution, and that there is a class aspect to the division. But what’s the breakdown by region? The GSS can help.

Let’s look at two variables:

SCITEST4: In your opinion, how true is this? Human beings developed from earlier species of
animals

REGION, which you can see on the Census Division map below:

And the chart below shows the responses by region:

Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky and Mississippi are in the “East South Central,” and that’s the most Creationist region of the country. To come out and support evolution in that region you need to either be a Yankee, or the president of Auburn university!

This weekend, I'm going to be teaching some science journalism at the following event hosted by Johns Hopkins and the Smithsonian: Science Writing: From Eureka Moment to Digital Publishing
All Day Seminar -- Saturday, May 15 - 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. From cells to stars, from evolution to swine flu, writing about diverse and complex scientific topics is an engaging, challenging endeavor requiring special skills. Today, well-known practitioners discuss how to find ideas, develop essential skills, and thrive in the digital age. Their ideas resonate with people currently working in the science or medical fields, writers who want to re-direct their work toward science or medicine, or anyone interested in how scientific information is communicated to the public. 9:30 to 10:45 a.m. Getting Started Challenges of science writing. How to target audiences and choose an area of concentration. Ann Finkbeiner, writer, columnist, critic, and director of the Master of Arts in Science Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University; Chris Mooney, author and Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT; Nancy Shute, contributing editor and blogger for U.S. News & World Report and vice president of the National Association of Science Writers. 11 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. Finding and Developing Ideas Writing about advances in science ...

One of the consequences of having a blog is that people occasionally offer to send you free stuff. Not out of the goodness of their hearts, for the most part; rather, because they’d like some free publicity in return. Usually it’s a book of some sort, and usually I just decline; I can’t possibly get through all the books I hope to read on my own, much less other books that people want me to read.

So when I received an email from Kimberly Moniz at SHIFT Communications asking if I’d be interested in receiving a free sample to possibly mention on the blog, I almost replied automatically in the negative. But then the nature of the product sunk in, and I paused — this wasn’t a book, this was booze! Specifically, Canadian Club whisky.

I’ll admit that I’m an occasional Scotch drinker, but not much of a Canadian whisky fan. To be honest, the mention of Canadian Club conjures images of something my grandmother would have been drinking (while smoking her Pall Malls), although that seems to be changing. I suspect the marketing people recognize that, and thought it would be good to freshen their image among a younger, hipper crowd. And what better way to do that than by reaching out to science blogs? (Especially ones that occasionally rhapsodize about the perfect martini.) This is some new-media marketing savvy I can get behind. Also, free booze.

But our honor is not sold so cheaply — we’re not going to provide free advertising just because someone sends us some loot. We have our scruples, and everything we post must adhere to the guiding principles of our Mission Statement. But then I remembered that our Mission Statement says we post about whatever we feel like posting about. Still, we like to convey at least the illusion of integrity.

So I hit upon the perfect solution: talk about the whisky, but do so through the lens of Science! That is, we would accept the free booze, but only under the understanding that we would subject it to a rigorous taste-test in comparison with other comparable whiskies, apply the time-honored techniques of the experimental method to the results, and publish whatever they might turn out to be. Kim was up for this adventure, so we set the wheels in motion. Results below the fold.

We were sent a bottle of Canadian Club’s super-special 30-year-old whisky, as well as a bottle of their slightly-special 12-year-old offering. I judged that it would make the most sense to put them up against a variety of other kinds of whisky, so we assembled a worthy array of adversaries from around the globe. (Note that the Scots and the Canadians spell it “whisky,” while the Americans and Irish use “whiskey,” so there’s no consensus choice in this case.) From left to right, we have the two Canadian Club entries; a bottle of Jim Beam Distiller’s Series, a Kentucky bourbon; Jameson, a classic Irish whiskey; and Glenlivet, a well-known single-malt scotch. I wasn’t smart enough to keep track of the prices for the different bottles, but you should imagine that the 12-year CC is about $18, the Jim Beam is about $18, the Jameson is about $23, and the Glenlivet is about $35. The 30-year CC is apparently a collector’s item that will set you back about $200.

Then, to the experimental procedure. I rounded up a few friends (8 people in all), none of whom were really whisky experts, but none of whom were really averse to the idea, either. One of them was Risa, who was passing through town for other reasons, so it was a true Cosmic Variance event. We disguised the bottles by putting them all in plain brown bags and assigning numbers to each. All of the testers were given samples of each whisky, as well as a score card where they were asked to give each entry an overall score between 1 and 5, as well as to write down more specific impressions.

And here are the results! Complete with error bars (at least, standard deviations computed from the raw data), so that makes it science, right?

And the results are — inconclusive. Well, that’s not exactly true. We learned a lot, actually. It’s true that all of the scores ended up being within the error bars of each other. So we didn’t technically learn a lot about whisky. But we learned a lot about the proper experimental protocol for conducting a whisky tasting! Mostly, I don’t think we gave people enough of it. That is, more than one person remarked that it took more than a couple of sips to really start to appreciate the merits of any individual liquor. If we were to do it again, we’d take more time, offer lots of food, and let people really enjoy each of the offerings, so that their individual ratings were more reliable. In the meantime, if you’d like useful insight into the nature of these different drinks, you’d be better off checking out Drinkhacker or similar sites. They actually know what they’re talking about.

The other thing we learned is that, despite the obvious scatter in the numerical results, people did have somewhat consistent reactions to the different whiskies. Both kinds of Canadian Club were judged as sweet, mellow, vanilla; the Jameson was lighter and thinner; the Jim Beam was a bit more harsh; and the Glenlivet was thought to be more complex but softer. It’s just that different people liked different characteristics. So perhaps there is no absolute scale of whisky achievement, but rather a subjective relationship between the liquor and the imbiber? Of course, down that road lies moral relativism and nihilism, and ultimately the Taliban will win, so we should probably avoid that path.

Most of all, we learned that we like getting sent free stuff that doesn’t require hours of our time to read and think about. Other good possibilities for this category might include: iPads, trips to Vegas, and Tesla roadsters. You know where to find us.

Finally, here’s the scientific explanation behind the production of Canadian Club whisky. Thanks to Kim Moniz for sending this, as well as the whisky, and for playing along. And apologies for my usual tardiness — it took a while to put the tasting event together, and then I went and lost the score sheets for a matter of months. But science eventually triumphs!

Production Process of Canadian Club

Canadian Club is made from a blend of corn, rye, rye malt and barley malt. Once the grain arrives at the distillery it is split up: the corn is milled and put in a premix tank where water is added to prepare it for cooking. The other grains are milled together, mixed with water and the product, called mash, is then transferred to the batch cooker. The cooked mash is moved from the batch cookers to conversion tanks where malts are added to change the starch into fermentable sugars. Once the malts are added it produces high sucrose mash, which is then transferred from the conversion tanks to the fermenters. There are 39 fermenters in the distillery, each stands over three stories high and is able to hold up to 218,000 liters. Once the fermenter is filled with the high sucrose mash, two types of yeast are added to the mix –commercial yeast is added to the corn mash, while a specially developed yeast patented in 1858 by Hirman Walker is added to the blender grains mash. After 72 hours of fermentation, the product is 11% alcohol and is referred to as “distiller’s beer”. The fermented mash is pumped into a whisky still where it flows through horizontal filtration plates. Steam is injected at the base of the still and as it rises, it causes the alcohol to evaporate out of the mash. The alcohol is then carried to the top of the still and condensed into liquid form called “new whisky”(this is the process of distillation). The “new whisky” is then run through other stills in order to remove unwanted elements, such as fusel oils. The removal of these items is what makes Canadian Club have a light, smooth flavor. The corn distillate is now 95% alcohol per volume, colorless and odorless. The blended grains are distilled through the column still, but at a lower alcohol strength in order to produce a higher grain character in the taste of the whisky. The grain mash is further refined in a copper still, enhancing the flavor of the whisky. After quality control checks, each whisky is then pumped into large blending tanks prior to aging. This process is referred to as pre-barrel blending (blending the corn and grain mash), a unique process to Canadian Club. The colorless new whisky is then pumped to drain and fill where it is tapped into the once used American oak charred barrels for its aging process.

Two spiders are walking along a track – a seemingly ordinary scene, but these are no ordinary spiders. They are molecular robots and they, like the tracks they stride over, are fashioned from DNA. One of them has four legs and marches over its DNA landscape, turning and stopping with no controls from its human creators. The other has four legs and three arms – it walks along a miniature assembly line, picking up three pieces of cargo from loading machines (also made of DNA) and attaching them to itself. All of this is happening at the nanometre scale, far beyond what the naked eye can discern. Welcome to the exciting future of nanotechnology.

The two robots are the stars of two new papers that describe the latest advances in making independent, programmable nano-scale robots out of individual molecules. Such creations have featured in science-fiction stories for decades, from Michael Crichton’s Prey to Red Dwarf, but in reality, there are many barriers to creating such machines. For a start, big robots can be loaded with masses of software that guides their actions – no such luck at the nano-level.

The two new studies have solved this problem by programming the robots’ actions into their environment rather than their bodies. Standing on the shoulders of giants, both studies fuse two of the most interesting advances in nanotechnology: the design of DNA machines, fashioned from life’s essential double helix and possessing the ability to walk about; and the invention of DNA origami, where sets of specially constructed DNA molecules can be fused together into beautiful sheets and sculptures. Combine the two and you get a robot walker and a track for it to walk upon.

At Arizona State University, Kyle Lund’s robot (which he does actually call a spider) can move about completely of its own accord. Its program is completely written into its landscape. The spider’s body is a molecule called streptavidin and each of its legs are single-stranded ‘DNAzymes’ – one half of the famous double helix, with the added ability to cut other DNA strands. In doing so, it shortens the length of any strand that it happens to walk on.

The spider walks along a sheet of DNA origami, with sequences that match the strands that make up the spider’s legs. As the spider takes a step, its leg sticks to one of these complementary strands and cuts it, shortening that bit of track. This shortened surface interacts with the spider’s legs less strongly than a full-length piece of track, and that’s the key to herding the spider in a single direction.

When the spider steps, it leaves a trail of cut, unattractive DNA behind it, with paths of fresh, enticing strands ahead of it. Its legs could land anywhere but they stay for longer on a piece of track that hasn’t already been stepped on. Even if it steps randomly, it should eventually move to new terrain and by making the track narrow enough so that it can only go in one direction, Lund could steer its steps. It’s a fiendishly clever system – the walking spider shapes its environment in a way that controls its own behaviour.

Only three of the legs are for walking. The fourth is an anchor that leashes the robot to its starting post and it takes a special short piece of DNA to unleash it. This small trigger sticks to the starting position instead, ousting the robot’s fourth leg, and freeing the other three to carry it onwards. The robot follows the curve of the track until it reaches a pre-determined finishing line, a stretch of DNA that its legs cannot cut.

Meanwhile, at New York University, Hongzhou Gu has also built a DNA robot that walks on a DNA origami landscape. His walker isn’t quite as independent as Lund’s and needs the right triggers to take its steps. But what it sacrifices in autonomy, it makes up for in complexity. This robot is part of a nano-factory, a miniature assembly line that can manufacture eight different products.

Like Lund’s spider, Gu’s triangular robot has single-stranded DNA for limbs, but his has four legs and three arms. The legs walk along a specially designed DNA landscape but they don’t cut the strands they step on. Instead, the robot needs anchor strands to link its legs to the tracks, and fuel strands to displace them. By sequentially adding these strands, Gu can make his robot walk. So far, this seems like a less impressive and elegant system than Lund’s autonomous walker.

But Gu’s robot isn’t alone. It’s accompanied by three more DNA ‘loading’ machines, each carrying a different cargo of gold particles – a small 5-nanometre one, a pair of these, and a large(r) 10-nanometre one. Each of these loaders can be set in an ‘on’ of ‘off’ position. As the robot walks, it encounters each loader in turn and those that are switched on transfer their cargo to it. By tweaking the settings of the loaders, Gu can create eight possible products, forged of a combination of the three types of gold particles.

Now this is impressive – in a related editorial, Lloyd Smith from the University of Wisconsin says, “This is the first time that systems of nanomachines, rather than individual devices, have been used to perform operations, constituting a crucial advance in the evolution of DNA nanotechnology.”

Neither robot quite scales the heady heights of science-fiction nanotechnology. One is autonomous but simple, while the other is complex but requires much in the way of human intervention. And both are quite limited in the things that they can do. But these robots are taking tiny but important steps towards greater things. They are a sign that the field of nanotechnology is set for great strides in the future.

Reference: Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature09012 and http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature09026

Image: 3D artwork by Paul Michelotti

More on nanotechnology:

• DNA sculpture and origami – a meeting of art and nanotechnology
• Carbon nanotechnology in an 17th century Damascus sword
• Carbon nanotubes could behave like asbestos

I haven’t done a contest in a while, but this one was worth the wait: I have some very cool Mythbusters swag I’m giving away!

Here’s the loot:

To wit:

• A ginormous Mythbusters swag bag from the San Diego Comic Con 2009,
• An autographed hardcopy of the cover of the September 2009 Popular Science magazine that had contributions by Jamie Hyneman and My Close Personal Friend Adam Savage™,
• A t-shirt, size medium (though it’s a bit small for me and I’m average in build, so consider it a small), from Comic Con 2008. The shirt has a drawing of Jamie on the front (with the caption "METHODICAL") and Adam on the back ("IMPULSIVE"). This shirt is also autographed by both Adam and Jamie. The sleeve has the SDCC and MB logos on it. And…
• … what the heck: I also have a lot of miscellaneous cool stuff I’ve picked up over time, and I’ll throw a pile of it into the box. Stickers, buttons, things like that.

So how do you win this fabulous prize? Here’s the deal:

0) This contest is free.

1) This contest will be held on Twitter. Unlike in previous contests, leaving comments here will not enter you in the contest.

2) On Wednesday, May 12 at 11:00 a.m. Mountain time (17:00 UT), I posted a tweet that says:

Mythbusters giveaway: pic, bag, & shirt signed by Jamie & Adam! Retweet to enter. Rules: http://is.gd/c63E9 #BAMyth

The #BAMyth hashtag is critical! See #4 below.

3) To enter the contest, you must retweet that tweet.

4) All retweets must be posted between Wednesday, May 12 at 11:00 MDT and Friday, May 14, at 12:00 MDT. After that time, I’ll pick two random numbers, and then search Twitter for all instances of the hashtag #BAMyth. The first random number will be the search page result (using 50 results per page), and the second will be the number of the retweet on the page (1 – 50). That person will then win the Mythbusters swag!

5) Anyone on Earth is eligible, except (to be fair) for people who know me in real life. I’ll leave that up to you to decide if you count or not. People who know me can certainly retweet it, but they cannot win the bounty. Those retweets will count in the random numbers I pick (in other words, if my sister retweets it, I won’t give her the prize, but her RT will be counted in the search results). Please don’t retweet it more than once. That’s a tasing.

6) Just so’s you know, this is not an official Discover Magazine or Discovery Channel or Mythbusters contest. It’s just me playing around and having some fun. I’m doing this out of pocket because I love you guys, and because I figure in some way it’ll net me followers on Twitter, solidify my übernerd status, and eventually let me rule the world. The WORLD! Mwuhahahahaha!

So retweet that tweet, tell your friends, win something cool, and support my global domination. It’s win/win!

Let’s get this straight.

An ad attacks a Republican candidate for governor in Alabama, Bradley Byrne, for the horrible crime of defending the teaching of evolution.

Byrne lashes back, stating

As a member of the Alabama Board of Education, the record clearly shows that I fought to ensure the teaching of creationism in our school textbooks. Those who attack me have distorted, twisted and misrepresented my comments and are spewing utter lies to the people of this state.

The nerve of some people to make such horrible accusations.

But wait! As Talking Points Memo observes, the ad that made that scurrilous charge that Byrne might have a bias towards reality has an important back story:

The group behind the ad and others attacking Byrne’s conservative credentials is called the True Republican PAC. Interestingly, as the Montgomery Advertiser reported last month, the PAC has gotten most of its money from the teachers’ union — or, more accurately, from a collection of other PACs heavily funded by the union.

According to the Advertiser, members of the Alabama Education Association have a beef with Byrne for his past attempts to ban the employees of two-year colleges from serving in the state legislature.

Emphasis mine. So does this mean the teachers of Alabama support an attack on a political candidate for not being a creationist (an attack that sadly is not even true)? Is anybody standing up for science in Alabama?

Male cichlid fish apparently don't like what they see in the mirror--in fact, they dislike their own reflections even more than enemy fish, according to new research published in Biology Letters. Wired writes:
"[The] fish readily attack other males as well as mirror images of themselves, posturing and lunging with the same aggression... the reflection-fighting males show heightened activity in [the amygdala] a part of the brain associated with fear and other negative reactions in vertebrates, [Stanford University researchers] have found. Tangling with a real male doesn’t stir up that response."
The researchers emphasized that the study doesn't mean fish recognize themselves in the mirror. And although the fishes' reactions to their reflections are negative, they are not necessarily "fearful" in the human sense of the word. Still, the research could change the way studies are constructed, in which mirrors are used to investigate psychological phenomena separate from self-recognition.
"Researchers may want to show a fish or other creature another of the same size and species, for example. If animals are sensing that something is off about the mirror, “I think mirrors need to be used with caution,” [lead author Julie K.] Desjardin says."
Image: Wikimedia Commons Tangling with a real male doesn’t stir up that ...

Last spring, researchers confirmed that brown fat—the kind that burns energy rather than storing it and is especially prevalent in newborns—can be found in small pockets in adults, too, and slimmer adults have more of it. This spring, a team says it might have found one of the first steps in activating that fat-burning fat in adults. Their study comes out in Science this week.

Brown fat is packed with energy-producing mitochondria, and babies have a lot of it because it helps them keep warm. Once humans begin to regulate their own body temperature they don’t need as much brown fat anymore, so it gets replaced by energy-storing white fat, which helps store energy but leads to expanded waistlines in this age of affluence.

Testing on mice, the team led by Stephan Herzig upped the use of an enzyme called cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2). While the enzyme plays a role in many physiological functions, the researchers found that pushing it in mice could induce their white fat to act more like energy-burning brown fat, and their weight dropped by around 20 percent.

“There has been a lot of excitement around brown fat, but … there wasn’t any clear indication that turning up brown fat would make animals lose weight,” says Chad Cowan, a professor in the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard Medical School who studies fat cell development. “What this paper does is make a good link to something that might be clinically beneficial [TIME].

Don’t get too excited just yet. This is a test on mice, not people, and there’s another problem: This transformation in the animals, white fat acting like brown fat, happened only when Herzig and his colleagues tricked the mice’s bodies into thinking they were at a colder temperature than they actually were:

That caveat is important because the COX-2 enzyme is present in a wide range of body tissues, and revving up its activity may lead to some serious side effects such as clotting problems, increased sensitivity to pain and even muscle abnormalities. Herzig found that manipulating the COX-2 pathway switched white fat to brown fat in the mice only when he simulated cold temperatures through metabolic tweaks — dilating small blood vessels and increasing the pumping of the heart — and made the rodents act as if they were shivering [TIME].

So Herzig’s team has only just started to figure out how humans might take advantage of our tiny brown fat deposits to battle our ever-growing white fat deposits. But, he says, if we find a way to do it that doesn’t involve the weird side effects, it might not take much brown fat to make a difference.

Scientists estimate that as little as 50 grams of brown adipose tissue in a normal adult human would be enough to increase energy consumption by 20 percent.”That’s not a lot of brown fat, but a big increase in energy burn,” said Herzig. “And this type of transplantation idea has been tried out with other types of animals and other types of cells, so in principle it works” [Reuters].

Related Content:
DISCOVER: The Fat That Can Make You Thin
DISCOVER: Killer Fat
80beats: A New Potential Weight-Loss Remedy: Fat-Burning Fat
80beats: “Baby Fat” In Adults Burns Regular Fat, May Help Prevent Diabetes

Image: Colorado State University

I was delighted to discover this morning that the journal The American Biology Teacher gives thumbs-up to The Tangled Bank. From the review:

“For students of evolution or scholars who want to know the specifics about particular evolutionary processes, this is an excellent read. The fact that it is understandable to beginners and fascinating to scientists makes this book truly unique and valuable.”

Need a refill on your cup of awesome today?

As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about astronomy and the weird stuff that happens on a daily basis in space, I see a lot of amazing things. You’d think I’d get used to the awesomeness of astronomy, but the opposite is true: I’m always spellbound by what I find.

Still, it takes a lot to seriously impress me, to really make me say Holy Frak.

Well, astronomers have just announced that they have found a massive star that has been flung out of the cluster in which it was born. The star is huge — 90 times the mass of the Sun — and is screaming away from its nursery at 400,000 kilometers per hour.

Holy Frak.

This incredible image is from the ESO’s 2.2 meter telescope in Chile. It shows an overview of the sprawling 30 Doradus star-forming cloud, located about 180,000 light years away in the satellite galaxy to the Milky Way called the Large Magellanic Cloud (or the LMC to those in the know). In the center of 30 Dor sits a vast cluster of stars called R136. The total combined mass of all the stars in R136 is unclear, but it has several that tip the cosmic scale at 100 times the mass of the Sun, which is the upper limit of how big a star can get without tearing itself apart.

The inset image is from Hubble, and shows the runaway star, named 30 Dor 016. It’s been suspected for some time of being a cannonball blasting its way across space away from the cluster, but new observations have pretty much clinched it. They’ve also pinned the mass of this star to that whopping amount of 90 times the mass of the Sun. If you don’t think that’s a big deal, I’ll note that this equals 180 octillion tons — that’s 180,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons, for those of you who have stock in the ASCII character for "0".

Yeah. Holy Frak.

The new observations, using Hubble’s new ultraviolet camera called the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, confirm that this is a single star (and not, say, a binary with two members each with 45 solar masses), making it one of the most massive stars ever seen. This kind of star is extremely rare!

The UV observations also confirm that the star is plowing through the gas that lies in interstellar space in the LMC. You can get a good idea of what’s going on in this closeup of the star:

It’s moving to the upper right in this image. You can see it’s near the edge of a curved bubble of gas, with a sharp edge delineated to the right of the star. That edge is a bow shock, a vast supersonic shock wave formed when the fierce wind of subatomic particles emitted by the star — a super solar wind – slams into the gas around it. If the star were just sitting there this bubble would be spherical with the star at the center. But you can see the bubble is actually elongated, and the star is near the edge. That’s a sure sign we’re looking at a star on the move.

Amazingly, it appears that the star is 375 light years from the cluster! A star this massive can’t live very long, a few million years at most. At 400,000 kph, it takes about a million years to travel that distance, so that fits.

How the heck can you kick a star up to such incredible speeds? There are two ways we can think of: have it tossed around by the gravity of other stars in the cluster, or have it ejected when (if it’s a binary star) its companion explodes as a supernova.

For the latter supernova scenario, it’s not the explosion that accelerates the star, it’s the slingshot effect. The two stars orbit each other at high speed, and when one blows up it loses so much mass it can’t hold onto the other star. Like an athlete spinning around for the hammer toss and then letting go, the star gets shot away at high speed. The thing is, the cluster itself is too young to have seen such a supernova a million years ago, when the star must have begun its flight. Plus, there’s no indication of the type of a mess left by such an explosion.

So the star must have been ejected when it reacted gravitationally to other stars. If you take three stars, say, and let them interact, the least massive one will get flung away. Take a few dozen and you get a beehive of activity, with several stars tossed out, some with very high speed. The thing is, this star has 90 times the Sun’s mass! That means the stars left behind are even more massive… and we do see several stars in the cluster with masses as high as 100 – 120 times that of the Sun.

Yeah again. Holy Frak.

So let me explain… no, there is too much. Let me sum up.

We have a stellar cluster with thousands of times the Sun’s mass embedded in a nebula furiously cranking out newborn stars. A lot of them are near the physical upper limit of how big a star can get. The whole thing is only a couple of million years old, a fraction of the galaxy’s lifespan. One beefy star with 90 times the Sun’s mass got too close to some other stars, which summarily flung it out of the cluster at high speed, fast enough to cross the distance from the Earth to the Moon in an hour (it took Apollo three days). The star is barreling through the flotsam in that galaxy, its violent stellar wind carving out a bubble of gas that points right back to the scene of the crime, nearly 4 quadrillion kilometers and a million years behind it.

Hmmm.

Y’know, there are days I have a hard time getting out of bed. The humdrum routine of the day yawns ahead of me… but every now and again, as I lie there mustering up the courage to throw off the blanket and face the world, I get a glimmer that maybe today the Universe will once again refill my tank, make me look above and outside me, and remind me that truly, the place is full of awesome.

Today was such a day.

Image credit: Hubble: NASA, ESA, J. Walsh (ST-ECF) Acknowledgment: Z. Levay (STScI). ESO image: ESO Acknowledgments: J. Alves (Calar Alto, Spain), B. Vandame, and Y. Beletski (ESO), processing by B. Fosbury (ST-ECF).