Astronomers have found the most distant galaxy cluster ever seen: the sexily-named SXDF-XCLJ0218-0510.

First, the picture, then the words:

Yikes! What’s all that then?

Okay, first, this picture is littered with stars and galaxies. The galaxies are so far away they’re hard to distinguish from the stars! The dots that have arrows pointing to them are the galaxies that are most likely part of the cluster. The ones with circles have had their distance measured and are known to be part of the cluster for sure. The contour lines represent the detection of very hot gas, which is a dead giveaway that we’re dealing with a cluster here; all big clusters have gas swirling around them that gives off X-rays; the lines are like a topographic map telling you where the (otherwise invisible) gas is in the picture.

"So what?", you might say. We’ve seen lots of clusters before. Ah, but this one is different: it’s a whopping 9.6 billion light years away.

Billion. With a B.

Studying clusters is important because it tells us a lot about the environment in which galaxies form. When we’re trying to figure out the overall structure of the Universe — and it’s incredible to me that we can even think about doing such a thing — clusters are the single biggest component. Understanding them means understanding the Universe itself.

But there’s more. Because clusters are so big and bright, they can be seen really far away. In space, distance means time; the farther away we see an object, the younger the Universe was when the light left that object. In the case of this newly found cluster, the light we see left it 9.6 billion years ago — making it 400 million light years farther away than the next-most distant cluster ever seen. The Universe itself is only 13.7 billion years old, so we’re seeing this structure as it was not too long after it formed.

And that’s the key issue. Clusters are so big that they take quite a bit of time to form. But how long? We’re not sure. We’re not sure exactly how long galaxies take to be born either. So every time we see one farther away we push back the time it takes to form them. Think of it this way: if it takes, say, 5 billion years to form a cluster, then we wouldn’t see any more than 13.7 – 5 = 8.7 billion light years away. This one is 9.6 billion, so we know that clusters cannot take more than 13.7 – 9.6 = 4.1 billion years to form. In reality they probably take quite a bit less time. Observations like this one will help us understand just how much less.

The reason this is important is because we don’t know the exact timeline of the Universe after the Big Bang. We know when it happened, and we know when the first stars formed, but it’s hard to say when the first galaxies and clusters of galaxies started to come together. Most likely that wasn’t a firm time, but it was spread out over hundreds of millions or billions of years. But the more we see, the better we can figure that out. As it happens, the colors of the galaxies in this image give a clue as to how old they are: young stars are blue, and old stars are red, so by looking carefully at the mix the age of the galaxies can be estimated. The galaxies in this cluster look like they formed around 11.5 billion years ago, making them already a couple of billion years old when they emitted the light we see in the picture.

Another interesting thing: you can’t really tell from this image, but in the original data it looks like there are actually two clusters here at about the same distance. One of them has that hot gas, but the other is more indistinct and the detection of gas isn’t as strong. It’s entirely possible that this other cluster isn’t quite fully formed yet. If that’s so, then that means astronomers are able to detect clusters so far away that we can now actually see them forming. The more of those we find, the better our understanding will be of just how these enormous structures came to be.

Looking at distant clusters also tells us about the early universe. You can’t build a skyscraper unless the ground can support it, and you can’t build a galaxy cluster unless the Universe has the right conditions for it. The Universe was different 10 billion years ago: smaller, denser, warmer. All of these are important parameters when you’re building something like a cluster.

So by examining the edifice we can understand the environment it sits in. In this case, the building is a thousand galaxies each with a hundred billion suns, and the environment is the cosmos itself. It’s an architectural study written across the entire sky! And every detail gets us that much closer to understanding how everything — literally — came to be.

Image credit: Subaru/XMM

Timothy Ferris, in The Science of Liberty:

In 1900 there was not a single liberal democracy in the world (since none yet had universal suffrage); by 1950 there were twenty-two.

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution has an ongoing series of posts in which he highlights “good sentences.” At first the conceit bugged me a bit, as how good can a single sentence be? It’s not like you have space to develop a sensible argument or anything.

But that’s the point, of course. A really good sentence packs a wallop because it fits an enormous amount into very few words. One technique for doing that is to exhibit an underlying assumption that is a remarkable claim in its own right. If I were to have tried to make the point that Ferris makes above, it would have been something like this:

Liberal democracies were established in fits and starts over a period of hundreds of years. The first major steps happened in countries like Britain, the United States, and France, where aristocratic systems were replaced (with different amounts of violence) by rule by popular vote. But I would argue that a true liberal democracy is one that features universal suffrage — every adult citizen has a right to participate. By that standard, there weren’t any liberal democracies in existence in the year 1900; but fifty years later, there were twenty-two.

Makes the point, but it’s a somewhat ponderous collection of mediocre sentences, rather than a single one of immense power. That’s the difference between someone who writes things, like me, and a true writer. I’m trying to learn.

Ferris’s book seems excellent, although I’ve just started reading it. It has a provocative thesis: the Enlightenment values of liberal democracy and scientific reasoning didn’t simply arise together. The emergence of science is rightfully understood as the cause of the democratic revolution. That’s the kind of thing I’d be happy to believe is true, so I’m especially skeptical, but I’m looking forward to the argument.

Telescopes have been around since the very early 17th century when Hans Lippershey, Dutch lens maker, applied for a patent in 1608.  They haven’t been around quite long enough for us to take them completely for granted, especially when we have Hubble, et al, rocking our world on a daily basis; but we do tend to look back at those first telescopes and cough politely.  What I think is almost as amazing as the fact of the telescope itself is how bright, how scary-brilliant, men like Galileo, Herschel and Newton were to see so much with so little.

1843 Refracting Telescope, Cincinnati Observatory

What I toss off as “so little” was, in fact, unadulterated genius.  The first telescopes were “refracting”, where basically a lens and eyepiece are used to gather more light than the human eye alone is capable of doing, bending the light (refracting it) so that it comes to a focal point, then giving you a brighter, cleaner magnified image.  The foundation of this science was in the manufacture of eyeglasses.  Can you imagine how boggling the concept of bending light was to the general public?

Although refracting telescopes revolutionized our understanding of astronomy, there are many flaws inherent to the design.  There is distortion of the image that can’t be corrected, for one thing.  Also, although you can place multiple refracting lenses in a line to increase magnification, you’ll quickly have a telescope so unwieldy it’s impossible to use.  Working to correct these (and other) problems, the next major advancement was the reflecting telescope.  A reflecting telescope uses a system of parabolic mirrors instead of refracting lenses.  Isaac Newton had developed a good, working reflector by 1668, but the idea was being kicked about since at least 1616.

Replica of Newton's second telescope, ca. 1672

A “catadioptric” system is one that combines refraction and reflection.  This combination has the advantage of very good error correction coupled with a wide view field.  This is what you’ll often find in telephoto lenses.

Other than optic telescopes (of which these three are examples), there are radio telescopes; infrared telescopes; ultraviolet, x-ray, solar, and space telescopes; gamma-ray, cosmic-ray, gravitational wave, and high-energy particle telescopes, just to name a few.  Seems like for everything at which you would wish to look, there’s a telescope designed for the job.

Very Large Array Radio Telescopes, USA, New Mexico, by Hajor 080804

The science of “seeing far” is really still in its infancy, and every time there’s an advancement in telescopes, there’s a shock wave through the astronomical community.  Imagine what Galileo could have accomplished with a decent, mid-priced modern telescope.  Imagine what he could have accomplished with the Hubble, Webb, or Spitzer space telescopes.

Maybe our next “Galileo” is reading this blog right now, imagining what he (or she) will see when it’s his turn to see far.

Future Astronomers - Image found published to PD on PhotoBucket

As BP built its 100-ton containment dome and slowly towed it out to the site of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, company representatives warned that it was no certainty the technique would be able to stem the flow of oil 5,000 feet below the water’s surface. Unfortunately, those warnings were correct. On Saturday, ice-like gas hydrates built up on the steel-and-concrete containment box and prevented the box from getting a seal on the leak. The big question is: Now what?

The idea behind the containment dome was that once placed on top of the leaks, it would pump oil up a pipe to a tanker on the surface and keep more oil from getting into the Gulf, BP chief operating officer Doug Suttles says.

The icy buildup on the containment box made it too buoyant and clogged it up, BP’s Suttles said. Workers who had carefully lowered the massive box over the leak nearly a mile below the surface had to lift it and move it some 600 feet to the side. If it had worked, authorities had said it would reduce the flow by about 85 percent [MSNBC].

On Sunday, after that failure, Suttles said that BP responders wouldn’t give up on the containment box idea. Raising it back up would warm the structure enough to clear off the buildup, but they need a way to stop them from reforming when the box descends again. Pumping the box with methanol or warm water to keep its temperature higher is one option. Suttles says there are a few more alternatives on the table, too:

“One is a smaller dome – we call it the ‘top hat’, and the second is to try to find a way to tap into the riser, the piece of pipe the oil is flowing through, and take it directly from that pipe up to the ship on the surface.” The smaller containment dome would theoretically be less likely to get blocked by hydrates because it would contain less water. It could be ready to deploy on Tuesday or Wednesday [BBC News].

And BP is preparing one other method to stop the leak: garbage. By injecting the leaking area with a so-called “junk shot” made of tires, golf balls, and other debris, Suttles says it’s possible to plug up the leak.

“We have some pipe work on the blowout preventer, and if we can open certain valves on that we could inject basically just rubber and other type of material into [it] to plug it up, not much different to the way you might plug up a toilet,” he said [BBC News].

Through it all, the oil company is still working on a relief well that would be a much better and more permanent solution than funneling the leak to a tanker on the surface. But that’s a three-month process, and despite the fact that it feels like the Deepwater Horizon leak has been pouring oil into the Gulf perpetually, still not three weeks have passed since the explosion that killed 11 and eventually caused the rig to sink.

Thus far fortunate weather patterns have kept the slick mostly out to sea and away from the Gulf Coast, but that luck could be changing. Tar balls—pieces of hardened oil—showed up on Alabama shores over the weekend. Responders can’t say for sure yet whether they’re from the BP oil spill, but it’s a good bet.

Previous posts on the BP oil 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?
80beats: Gulf Oil Spill: Fisheries Closed; Louisiana Wetlands Now in Jeopardy
80beats: Gulf Oil Spill Reaches U.S. Coast; New Orleans Reeks of “Pungent Fuel Smell”
80beats: Uh-Oh: Gulf Oil Spill May Be 5 Times Worse Than Previously Thought
80beats: Coast Guard’s New Plan To Contain Gulf Oil Spill: Light It on Fire

Image: NOAA, the 72-hour projection as of May 9

So it’s Elena Kagan. She’ll probably be nominated. Pointer to my earlier post why it doesn’t matter that there’s no Protestant on the court in substantive terms.

Attention, DC readers! I’ll be one of the speakers this Saturday at a meeting entitled “Science Writing: From Eureka to Digital Publishing.” I’ll be giving the “digital tools and techniques” talk. Don’t expect an html tutorial; I’ll be talking instead about how to adapt the fundamental of good science writing to new formats.

Here’s where you can register. To get the $35 member discount, use the promo code 182603.

From the meeting web site:

Co-sponsored with the Science-Medical Writing
Concentration of the Master of Arts in Writing Program, Johns Hopkins University.

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 and medicine, science policy, and the scientists themselves. Chris Mooney.

12:15 to 1:15 p.m. Lunch

Participants provide their own lunch.

1:15 to 2:30 p.m. Five Essential Skills of Science Writing

Explaining, storytelling, profiling people, establishing perspective, and using creative language. Jon Hamilton, correspondent, National Public Radio.

2:45 to 3:30 p.m. Digital Tools and Techniques

Succeeding in the online and multimedia world.Carl Zimmer, freelance writer for the New York Times, National Geographic, Scientific American, and the blog The Loom.

3:30 to 4:30 p.m. Advice from the Pros

Jon Hamilton, Nancy Shute, and Carl Zimmer give practical advice and answer questions.

The seminar is moderated by Nancy Shute.

LOCATION:
S. Dillon Ripley Center
1100 Jefferson Drive, SW
Metro: Smithsonian Mall Exit (Blue/Orange)

Herschel is a European space-based astronomical observatory. It launched last year, and the first science papers are now being published. Along with those papers, the European Space Agency released a bunch of way cool pictures.

As usual, I could use up a mole of electrons describing them, but one in particular caught my eye:

Egads! Click it to embiggen.

This shows a swath of sky in the (northern hemisphere) summer constellation of Aquila, the Eagle. Aquila lies in the plane of the Milky Way galaxy, and when you look in that direction what you see is a mess of gas clouds littered with dust, and it just so happens a lot of this junk is busily forming stars. Herschel is sensitive to the far infrared, way outside what our eyes can see, so to its eye this region is aglow with warm dust and star birth.

But take a look at the blue structure at the lower left, the part shaped like a slightly tilted U. As soon as I saw it, I knew what it was: a blowout.

When stars form, they tend to start up a wind of material blowing off their surface, like a solar wind dialed up to 11. If these stars are inside a dense cloud they’ll plow up the surrounding material, creating a cavity. If they’re near the edge of that cloud, one side of the cavity will pop, creating a blowout. That’s what you’re seeing here: a pile of stars announcing their presence to the universe by kicking a hole in the wall of their nursery.

I remember my own daughter wailing and kicking in the minutes after she was born. When a baby has a mass measuring in the octillions of tons, its kick is somewhat more substantial.

If you want to see more of what this infrared observatory has delivered, the ESA has provided a nifty map of the galaxy with some interesting observed spots indicated:

The Universe looks pretty different at hundreds of times the wavelength we can perceive with our eyes. Check it out.

Credit: ESA/Hi-GAL Consortium

As I expected, some intriguing (and potentially controversial) points emerged in the interview with Elaine Ecklund (show website here; listen here; download/subscribe here). In particular, at around minute 15:10 or so, I ask Ecklund about her finding that there are two types of atheists in her scientist sample--first generation, and second generation. First generation atheists start out in a faith tradition and then, at some point, reject it. By contrast, second generation atheists start out with atheist or non-religious parents, and so never really have to reject anything. (I don't know how many third, fourth, etcetera generation atheists there are out there.) On the air, Ecklund observed that the first generation atheists tend to be more critical of religion, and more driven in making such criticisms. After all, religion is something that is much more personal to them, and that they have rejected. We second generation atheists, though--for I am one--we tend to be more mellow. Or so Ecklund finds, anyway. But I pressed her on the point. After all, although I'm "second generation," I was pretty angry at religion when I was a college atheist activist. I was pretty driven. Yes, I mellowed with time--but I was and still remain second generation. What's ...

Peter Heather’s new book, Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe, exhibits none of the minor faults which I noted in Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. Heather manages to robustly balance the need for both breadth and depth, and I would even offer that this semi-sequel to his previous book, The Fall of the Roman Empire, is a superior piece of scholarship in relation to its predecessor (if a bit less compelling as narrative because of the weighting toward archaeology as opposed to literary sources). The author reports that he’s been working for 15 years on Empires and Barbarians, and it shows in the wide spread of sources and multidisciplinary nature of the argument. And that argument is in short an overturning the post-World War II orthodoxy among archaeologists, and a lesser extent historians, that cultural evolution occurs overwhelmingly through a process of the diffusion of memes, and is rarely accompanied by the flow or replacement of genes. This model is a counterpoint to the pre-World War II conception of the shift of language being a consequence of the shift of nations; ergo, it was once presumed that the rise of the English and the fall of the Celtic British occurred via the driving out of the latter by the former toward the maritime fringes of Wales and Cornwall. After World War II the sources were reinterpreted so that the Anglo-Saxon tribes were refashioned into very small compact bands of warriors who toppled the old Roman-British elite, and imposed their own language and cultural forms on the local populace (Norman Davies’ takes this model as the default in The Isles). If this was the outlook when it came to Britain, which became England and witnessed the extinction of the Celtic and Latin languages as well as the Christian religion with the arrival of the Germans, then naturally an even more skeptical take on mass migration would hold for the post-Roman German states of the Franks, Visigoths and Lombards who had a far more marginal cultural affect on the local Roman population (in late antiquity and the early Dark Ages the sources distinguish between the indigenous Romans and the various Germanic tribes decades after the fall of the Western Empire). In Empires and Barbarians Peter Heather reiterates that the view that the German tribes replacing the Roman era populations is false. But, he also objects strongly to the post-World War II consensus which would tend to minimize the extent of migration, population movement, and demographic displacement. In short, Heather wishes to rehabilitate the Völkerwanderung.

In previous posts I have outlined a theoretical framework which implies non-trivial migration of peoples, so I am amenable to Heather’s revisionism. In fact, I was a bit surprised that Heather outlines a process very similar to what I envisage in its broad sociohistorical parameters, though his knowledge of the particular instantiations of the general processes in the context of post-Roman Central Europe naturally surpasses what little I knew. But before I get to that, I would like to enter into the record a major objection I have to the argument in Empires and Barbarians. Many times within the text Peter Heather contends that the centuries long linguistic continuity of particular Germanic tribes, for instance the Burgundians, necessarily entails that the barbarians had to have brought women on their migrations. He marshals plenty of other literary and archaeological data to support this contention. For example, literary sources and analysis of burial grounds of the Goths from this period in the Balkans attest to the existence of a wagon train of women (and children) who followed the barbarian warbands along the Roman roads. But the argument from linguistics seems very weak. We have copious cases where native-speaking women are not necessary, at least in preponderance, to perpetuate a language. Heather gives one example within the text itself, he notes that the current data seem to imply that the majority of the women whom the Norse brought to Iceland were not of Norse origin. Rather, they were likely to be Irish to British. And yet no one doubts Icelandic’s Scandinavian affinity as a language. Similarly, across much of Latin America the vast majority of the population derives from the unions of Spanish men with indigenous women. The offspring, and the societies they created, are Spanish-speaking (excluding the Guarani bilingualism in Paraguay). Someone with a better grasp of the details of sociolinguistics can enlighten us on the exact details of how language is transmitted, but I’m rather sure that women are not a necessary precondition for linguistic continuity. In fact, parts of Latin America, such as Argentina, offer up an example where a continuous flow of men could have resulted in a post-Roman Germanic society where most of the ancestry was German, even if all the female ancestors during the founding generation were Romans (Heather observes that in some cases such as England and northern Gaul it looks as if there was a continuous migration of Germans for decades, if not centuries).

But that is a minor quibble in a book which is dense with data and rich with analysis. Heather’s argument is eminently reasonable and moderate. Many of the more extreme advocates of a post-modern understanding of ancient tribal identity presume that groups such as the “Goths” could emerge almost spontaneously from a welter of infinitely diverse populations (you know someone has lots of method but little knowledge when they constantly use quotations around the most banal and unproblematic terms). Examples of Roman senators raising their sons wearing trousers and speaking in Gothic can be offered up as the norm, so that a Gothic elite could emerge from the local population almost immediately. All that was required was a tiny elite of warriors to trigger the emulation from below. In this way cultural forms of the Vandals, Goths, and Anglo-Saxons swept across Europe with only trivial flows of people. It also dovetails with the revision that the Roman Empire did not fall, that it was not invaded, rather, it evolved and transformed. Heather is not convinced that the persistence of tribal identities such as that of the Goths for centuries in an environment where they were heavily outnumbered by Latin speaking natives could have persisted if their original identity was so tenuous, fluid and open. Rather, he seems to argue that there was an ethic core, to which some could assimilate, but which had at its heart an original demographic pulse from Central Europe. I find this persuasive because I have become convinced that cultural ideas move across societies far less quickly, at least in the pre-modern past, than we had long assumed. The Goths and other barbarians brought a suite of particular, distinctive, linguistic, religious and sartorial characteristics as an integrated unit, and persisted in their distinctiveness for generations, and sometimes centuries. In the post-Roman world of continental Western Europe they were eventually assimilated by the Roman substrate, and I see little evidence of their genetic impact. They were truly dwarfed by the local populations, but that can remain true even if a whole Central European tribe moves en masse into the Roman Empire. A tribe of 50,000 is a drop in the bucket demographically in many Roman provinces, but if 10,000 of those were men under arms, in the late Roman period this entailed significant capability of projecting and enforcing force. In Britain the case is somewhat different, there are genetic data which imply that some substantial replacement did occur, in particular on the “Saxon Shore.” These data are perfectly understandable when one considers the near total abolition of Romano-British norms and forms from the lowlands of what became England by the 7th century, at sharp variance with the dominance of Romanitas among the Franks, Lombards and Visigoths.

To me the falsity of the post-World War II archaeological consensus in the case of the fall of Roman Empire is so probable that Heather’s debunking is not of particular interest. Rather, I was more curious as to the underlying rationale or causes he provides of the migration. His argument is complex and multi-layered, but one aspect which I found congenial was his contention that the relatively low intensity form of agriculture practiced in German Central Europe did not produce sufficient surplus to satisfy the demand for luxury goods by the free class of German males. The taste for luxury goods emerged due to proximity to the Roman Empire, which exported them in return for region-specific luxuries (amber) or commodities. The migration of adventurers and soldiers from beyond the limes into the Roman Empire, often in military service, predates the barbarian migrations. Rather, Heather argues that the push of the Huns in the late 4rd and early 5th century, combined with the economic pull of the wealth of the Roman Empire, caused mass simultaneous movement of warrior elites from the German heartland during this period. A movement of peoples, not a band of brothers. While the Roman state could have handled one or two tribes, as it had in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, the simultaneous push from the mouth of the Rhine down to the mouth of the Danube was too much. Though some of the German groups were defeated, others were not, and once the initial breakthrough occurred there was a positive feedback loop as other tribes rushed in to take advantage of the weakness of the Empire.

The selective migration of warrior elites and their families during this period had major long-term effects. Heather suggests that it was during this period that one saw the transition of much of East-Central Europe, from Poland down to Bohemia and the north Balkans, from being one of Germanic speech to Slavic speech. German peasants no doubt remained after the emigration of their elites after the collapse of the Roman limes. And Heather does not believe they were exterminated, rather, he points to literary and archaeological evidence which suggest that there was a set of norms among Slavic migratory bands to absorb and assimilate other marginalized groups (interestingly, this was definitely the case with the Russian expansion into Siberia, where many Muslim Turkic groups were absorbed into a Russian Orthodox identity and became Cossacks). Heather implies that part of the Slavic expansion was fueled by a change in mode of production, a switch to more intensive farming techniques which produced population growth and demic diffusion in all directions, in particular toward Poland and the Baltic more generally. Because of the relative lack of literary evidence this section of the book is not totally persuasive, but the fact remains that much of what was German in 500 was Slavic in 1000.

Empires and Barbarians concludes at the year 1000. By this time intensive farming and urban civilization, at least in fragments, had reached most of Europe. Local elites were no longer transitory in their expectations, so a mass migration of a whole ethnic group was no longer in anyone’s interest (much to gain, but much to lose!). The non-Mediterranean farming system of three-fields, as well as improved plowing technologies, had shifted the demographic center of gravity north. Extreme gradients of elite wealth and social complexity which had characterized the Europe of the Pax Romana were no longer operative. Without gradients there would naturally be less flow. The great chaotic demographic transient between the rise of Rome and the emergence of medieval Europe was over.

Note: Empires of the Silk Road and The Horse, the Wheel, and Language are excellent complements to Empires and Barbarians .

Image Credit: Wikipedia:

Simon & Schuster has a new book out on its Free Press label by Maceleo Gleiser, A Tear At The Edge Of Creation.

Dr. Gleiser, long a believer and researcher for the String Theory, has given up his ideals of a unified, universal “answer” to the origins of matter and the universe and takes off in an entirely new direction.  His book, “A radical new vision for life in an imperfect universe”, stems from his new belief that life, as complex organisms, is extremely rare.  So rare, in fact, that we are virtually “alone” in the universe.  Dr. Gleiser then believes that we have an overwhelming mission to preserve life here on Earth, and even to spread our version of it further out into the universe.

In his book, Dr. Gleiser puts forth the idea that nature and the universe are basically asymmetrical and imperfect, and that we all stem from these imperfections.  That there is no “final theory” (as in the String Theory).

A Tear At The Edge Of Creation is an engaging and interesting read.  Dr. Gleiser presents his ideas cleanly, and his position is well-thought and well-researched.  The book is logically presented and easily followed.  At about 255 pages of text (hardback), it is a great “rainy day” book to keep you awake and alert.  I think it’s a good selection for your home library.   I certainly enjoyed it, especially the “We Are All Mutants” chapter.

Dr. Gleiser is a professor at Dartmouth College, and the author of three other books:  The Prophet and the Astronomer, The Dancing Universe, and A Harmonia Do Mundo.  He has been featured in several TV documentaries, including Stephen Hawking’s Universe, and The History Channel’s Beyond the Big Bang.

Evulvalution: The Portrayal of Women's External Genitalia and Physique Across Time and the Current Barbie Doll Ideals. "Media images of the female body commonly represent reigning appearance ideals of the era in which they are published. To date, limited documentation of the genital appearance ideals in mainstream media exists. Analysis 1 sought to describe genital appearance ideals (i.e., mons pubis and labia majora visibility, labia minora size and color, and pubic hair style) and general physique ideals (i.e., hip, waist, and bust size, height, weight, and body mass index [BMI]) across time based on 647 Playboy Magazine centerfolds published between 1953 and 2007. Analysis 2 focused exclusively on the genital appearance ideals embodied by models in 185 Playboy photographs published between 2007 and 2008. Taken together, results suggest the perpetuation of a "Barbie Doll" ideal characterized by a low BMI, narrow hips, a prominent bust, and hairless, undefined genitalia resembling those of a prepubescent female." Image: flickr/SantaRosa OLD SKOOL Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: You might want to put a condom on that symbolic penis.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: What kind of erotic film clips should we use in female sex research? An exploratory study.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: If Vladimir Nabokov did primary research... WTF is NCBI ROFL? ...

Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth may have had the right idea when she scrubbed her hands following the murder of King Duncan. An odd new study suggests that hand washing may help people deal with the emotional consequences of decisions–and not just big decisions, like whether or not to participate in regicide, but also minor calls, like which free CD to take home.

[Psychology researcher Spike W. S. Lee] and a colleague named Norbert Schwarz decided to test hand washing’s effect on one kind of bad feeling: the lingering tension we feel after being forced to choose between two attractive options, because picking one option makes us feel that we’ve lost the other. Psychologists know that people usually try to soothe this inner conflict by later exaggerating the positive aspects of their choice. “In other words, after they make the choice, they will like the chosen option more than before the choice,” Lee explains [NPR].

For the study, published in Science, the researchers told students they were evaluating products for a consumer survey. The students first ranked 10 CDs in order of preference, and were then told they could take home either their fifth- or sixth-ranked CD as a token of appreciation. After they made their choices, they were told it was time to evaluate a liquid soap–but some students washed with the soap, while others only looked at its packaging. Finally, the students were asked to rank the same set of CDs again.

When the two groups re-ranked their ten CDs, students that did not wash their hands ranked the CD they chose higher, as if to indicate to themselves that they wanted that CD anyway. Students that did wash their hands, though, ranked their chosen CD about the same, showing that hand-washing somehow dispensed with the need to justify a choice [Ars Technica].

The results suggest that hand washing “wiped the slate clean,” Lee says, and removed the emotional baggage and rationalizations associated with the students’ choices. In another version of the experiment, researchers got the same results when students cleaned their hands with an antiseptic wipe after choosing a jam, which implies that a traditional scrub down with soap and water isn’t required.

While this is a neat trick, Lee notes that the typical mental processes that surround decision making have served humans well.

“Justification has a purpose, it makes people feel good. Washing away the need to justify past decisions also washes away the cognitive good.” It’s possible that those who washed their hands won’t enjoy the CD or jam as much as their unwashed counterparts will, he says [New Scientist].

Related Content:
Discoblog: Does Washing Your Hands Make You Less Judgmental?
80beats: Warm Hands Give People a Friendly, Generous Outlook
DISCOVER: The Biology of …Hand-Washing

Image: flickr / Arlington County

Who needs big silicon panels? MIT scientists just coated paper with solar cells, reportedly the first team to ever do that. Vladimir Bulovic, director of the Eni-MIT Solar Frontiers Research Center, unveiled them this week, and said the design was being submitted for peer review.

The printed solar cells, which Bulovic showed at a press conference Tuesday, are still in the research phase and are years from being commercialized. However, the technique, in which paper is coated with organic semiconductor material using a process similar to an inkjet printer, is a promising way to lower the weight of solar panels. “If you could use a staple gun to install a solar panel, there could be a lot of value,” Bulovic said [CNN].

Right now the solar cells on paper get just 1 to 2 percent efficiency at converting sunlight to electricity (some cells have achieved 40 percent or more in lab trials). But they carry the advantages of being flexible, and Bulovic says he could potentially use a number of different materials, not just the carbon-based dye used in these first attempts. And they’re tunable:

MIT is focusing much of its effort on quantum dots, or tiny crystals that are only a few nanometers in size. A human hair is about 50,000 to 100,000 nanometers thick. By using different materials and sizes, researchers can fine-tune the colors of light that quantum dots can absorb, a way of isolating good candidates for quantum dot solar cells [CNN].

Bulovic gives the standard warning about new technologies—it could be a decade before it’s ready for commercial development.

And once it is? There’s no telling how it could revolutionize the home solar industry, which currently relies on pricey professional installers to set up panels [Inhabitat].

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Image: Martin LaMonica at CNET

Yesterday, a government entity called the President’s Cancer Panel released an alarming report declaring that environmental toxins are causing “grievous harm” to Americans. The authors of the report (pdf) went on to say that while much more research needs to be done to determine the long-term effects of exposure, they believe that the “true burden of environmentally induced cancer has been grossly underestimated.”

But no sooner had they released the report than other cancer experts came forward to say that it wasn’t alarming, but rather alarmist.

First, the panel’s findings. In the 240-page report, the advisory panel noted that Americans are exposed to chemicals whose safety hasn’t yet been definitively established–like the chemical BPA that’s found in some everyday plastics, pesticides, and the substances found in industrial pollution. They write:

“With nearly 80,000 chemicals on the market in the United States, many of which are used by millions of Americans in their daily lives and are un- or understudied and largely unregulated, exposure to potential environmental carcinogens is widespread” [TIME].

The authors go on to suggest a more precautionary approach to approving new chemicals, and argue that under the current regulatory system the government doesn’t act until there’s some proof of harm. They write that cancers could be prevented if the government required more proof of safety from companies before approving a new chemical.

But the report’s release brought an immediate rebuttal from an authoritative source: the American Cancer Society.

Dr. Michael Thun, an epidemiologist from the cancer society, said in an online statement that the report was “unbalanced by its implication that pollution is the major cause of cancer,” and had presented an unproven theory — that environmentally caused cases are grossly underestimated — as if it were a fact. The cancer society estimates that about 6 percent of all cancers in the United States — 34,000 cases a year — are related to environmental causes (4 percent from occupational exposures, 2 percent from the community or other settings) [The New York Times].

Thun went on to say that the report does a disservice to the public by suggesting that the risk of environmentally caused cancer is much higher than 6 percent, thus diverting attention from the real top cancer causes, like smoking and obesity.

“If we could get rid of tobacco, we could get rid of 30 percent of cancer deaths,” he said [The New York Times].

The report’s authors maintain that their findings were balanced and judicious, so the spat doesn’t seem likely to end anytime soon. But the opponents do all agree on one thing: More research on the effects of exposure to everyday chemicals would be tremendously useful.

I assume by now that everyone has read A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome. It’s free to all, so you should. At least look at the figures. Also, if you haven’t at least skimmed the supplement, you should do that as well. It’s nearly 200 pages, and basically feels more like a collection of minimally edited papers than anything else. There’s no point in me reviewing the paper, since you can read it, and plenty of others have hit the relevant ground already.

Since there seem to be three main segments of the paper, here are a few minimal thoughts on each.

First, the draft genome. What would you have said if someone came up to you ten years ago and told you that you’d live to to see this? Svante Paabo himself admitted he didn’t think he’d see something like this in his lifetime. There was a lot of hard work that went into figuring out how to get at the genetic material, purify it, and confirm that it was actually from the samples in question and not handler contamination and such (remember that there was a problem with contamination a few years back). To a great extent the focus on the results, instead of the methods, is like critiquing a set of landscape photographs taken from a very high peak. We can’t forget the effort and energy that went into scaling the peak itself. A lot of labor input obviously went into this, but additionally we can thank the fact that we live in a technological society where progress is not only expected, but often can’t be accounted for in our projections of future possibilities. I think that’s a very hopeful thing which makes me a little less pessimistic about the possibility of the magic carpet economy.

Second, the are the comparisons between Neandertals, modern humans, and chimpanzees. As Carl Zimmer noted there are an alphabet soup of genes thrown at you in the results. It is hard to make sense of it all, though I did note that genes involved in skin function and phenotype seem to have been the subject of differential evolution between Neandertals and modern humans (i.e., SNP differences in regards to substitutions in the lineages). We already know that there are suggestive signs that Neandertals lost function on pigmentation independently from modern humans. That shouldn’t be too surprising, given that it seems that West and East Eurasians evolved light skin independently. There are some uncertainties about the timing of this, but the different genetic architecture implies that it was unlikely to have occurred immediately after the Out-of-Africa event, and in fact some of the loci imply that depigmentation may have occurred in the Holocene. Skin is famously our biggest organ, so it shouldn’t be that shocking that it is possibly a target of selection, but curious nonetheless (recall that it seems that humans evolved darker skin from a paler ancestor as we lost our fur in the tropics).

Additionally, I think the finding that Neandertals and modern humans seem to share most of the same HARs, regions of the genome where our human lineage seems to differ from other mammals in exhibiting a lot of evolutionary change, is of great interest, though not necessarily surprising. When pointing to Luke Jostins’ post on rates of encephalization, I observed that in some ways it seems like there was a very powerful and consistent lineage specific trend toward greater cranial capacity which had incredible time depth. In The Dawn of Human Culture Richard Klein puts the emphasis on the sharp break between those populations before ~50 thousand years ago, and after. This period is marked by the shift toward behavioral, as opposed to just anatomical, modernity (there were anatomically modern humans in Africa ~200 thousand years ago). Klein’s thesis is that some mutation triggered a radical biocultural change, and was responsible for the Great Leap Forward, the efflorescence of creative symbolic culture which we truly consider the sin qua non of culture. The sharing of HARs between Neandertals and pure humans, and the consistent trend toward encephalization (aside from the post-Ice Age reversal), makes me shift the priors a touch more toward inevitable continuity and away from contingency. I find much of the politics of Robert J. Sawyer’s Neanderthal Parallax series a bit heavy-handed, but his depiction of Neandertals as fundamentally intelligent creatures who differ only on the margins seems a lot more plausible to me now than it was when I first read it in the early to mid-aughts.

Third, and finally, there’s the story of admixture and sex. This is getting all the press, but of course this is the most uncertain, inferential, and speculative aspect of the paper. It’s impressive, but it should open to skepticism, especially after the Out-of-Africa totalism which was ascendant until recently. John Hawks accepts the thrust of the findings, but obviously has his own ideas as to modifications, extensions and qualifications. Dienekes Pontikos favors an alternative interpretation of the data, which the authors point to in the text but dismiss as less parsimonious. My own inclination is to favor the authors in their interpretation of parsimony, but I will admit that this assertion is disputable. Dienekes and others would suggest that it is just as, or more, plausible that the shared variants between non-Africans and Neandertals arise from their common northeast African ancestral population (or some ancestral population of non-Africans and Neandertals). He rightly points out that there may be ancient population substructure within Africa, and using a particular African group as a “reference” for the whole continent may lead to false inferences. The main issue is that the probability of retrieving ancient DNA from northeast African samples in the near future seems low because the conditions for preservation are not optimal (tropical climates famously degrade and recycle biological material more efficiently than temperate or boreal climates). Additionally, using modern northeast African populations is somewhat problematic because there has clearly been some back-migration from the nearby Arabian populations into this area in the medium-term past (the languages of the Ethiopian highlands are Semitic). One supposes that one could differentiate between the African and Arabian components of the genome of Ethiopians and Somalis, but if the admixture event was two to three thousand years ago I presume it would be technically more challenging than an African American, where very few generations have passed since admixture for recombination to fragment long genomic regions attributable to one ancestral population. In other words, how do you distinguish Neandertal variants which arrived back from Eurasia from ancient African ones? (I suppose that the haplotypes would differ so that the genuinely African ones would be more diverse)

But even if you reject the top-line finding, that most of us are not pure human, I think the paper is a game-changer in terms of shifting your priors in relation to evaluating the plausibility of a result which suggests admixture from an ancient non-African population. I found out about the high likelihood of this paper just before the UNM results were presented at the American Anthropological Society meeting, and it is clear in hindsight with the large author list that many people knew what was coming down the pipepline and had recalibrated their assessment of results which indicated admixture. It is perhaps time to go back and take a second look at papers which you skipped over before because it seemed that they may have been spurious or reporting a statistical quirk because they lay outside of the orthodox paradigm. This is clearly a case where it is good to live in interesting times.

Citation: Green, R., Krause, J., Briggs, A., Maricic, T., Stenzel, U., Kircher, M., Patterson, N., Li, H., Zhai, W., Fritz, M., Hansen, N., Durand, E., Malaspinas, A., Jensen, J., Marques-Bonet, T., Alkan, C., Prufer, K., Meyer, M., Burbano, H., Good, J., Schultz, R., Aximu-Petri, A., Butthof, A., Hober, B., Hoffner, B., Siegemund, M., Weihmann, A., Nusbaum, C., Lander, E., Russ, C., Novod, N., Affourtit, J., Egholm, M., Verna, C., Rudan, P., Brajkovic, D., Kucan, Z., Gusic, I., Doronichev, V., Golovanova, L., Lalueza-Fox, C., de la Rasilla, M., Fortea, J., Rosas, A., Schmitz, R., Johnson, P., Eichler, E., Falush, D., Birney, E., Mullikin, J., Slatkin, M., Nielsen, R., Kelso, J., Lachmann, M., Reich, D., & Paabo, S. (2010). A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome Science, 328 (5979), 710-722 DOI: 10.1126/science.1188021

The show website is here; you can listen here and download/subscribe here. Here is the description of the program:
It’s hard to think of an issue more contentious these days than the relationship between faith and science. If you have any doubt, just flip over to the science blogosphere: You’ll see the argument everywhere.
In the scholarly arena, meanwhile, the topic has been approached from a number of angles: by historians of science, for example, and philosophers. However, relatively little data from the social sciences has been available concerning what today’s scientists actually think about faith.
Today’s Point of Inquiry guest, sociologist Dr. Elaine Ecklund of Rice University, is changing that. Over the past four years, she has undertaken a massive survey of the religious beliefs of elite American scientists at 21 top universities. It’s all reported in her new book Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think.
Ecklund’s findings are pretty surprising. The scientists in her survey are much less religious than the American public, of course—but they’re also much more religious, and more “spiritual,” than you might expect. For those interested in debating the relationship between science and religion, it seems safe to say that her new data will be hard to ignore. Once ...

Taking pictures at a Vancouver airport long-time BABloggee Michael Lonergan was, when spotted this odd cloud he did.

When 30,000 feet you reach, look as good you will not.

Too bad this didn’t come out on May the 4th. Of course, the dark side clouds everything…

It’s big, it’s loud, it’s Iron Man 2, and it opens today.

Like a lot of summer blockbusters, this sequel stretches the laws of physics and the capabilities of modern technology. But, admirably, a lot of the tech in Iron Man 2 is grounded in fact.

Spoiler Alert! Read on at your own risk.

Palladium and particle colliders

Being Iron Man is killing Tony Stark. As this sequel begins, the palladium core that powers the suit and keeps Stark alive is raising toxicity levels in his bloodstream to alarming highs. It’s not hard to see why Iron Man would try palladium—the now-infamous cold fusion experiments that created a storm of hype in 1989 relied on the metal. And it’s true that palladium does have some toxicity, though it’s been used in alloys for dentistry and jewelry-making.

Having exhausted the known elements in the search for a better power source, Stark, ever the DIY enthusiast, builds a particle collider in his workshop. This is actually not crazy: Physicist Todd Satogata of Brookhaven National Lab says you can build tiny particle colliders; even whiz-kid teenagers do it.

Powering the accelerator, however, might be an issue. 2.5 miles long, Brookhaven’s superconducting collider needs 10 to 15 megawatts of power—enough for 10,000 or 15,000 homes. “For Stark to run his accelerator, he’s gotta make a deal with his power company or he’s gotta have some sort of serious power plant in his backyard,” Satogata says [Popular Mechanics].

In addition, Stark doesn’t appear to have the magnets needed to focus a beam as tightly as he does in the film, where it shreds his shop before he gets it focused in the right place. And, as we covered with the recent discovery of element 117, the ultra-heavy lab-created elements that Stark could have created in his accelerator don’t last long. However, back in 1994 when only 106 elements dotted the periodic table, DISCOVER discussed the idea some physicists have of an “island of stability” where elements we’ve yet to discover/create might be able to exist in a stable way. Perhaps Tony found it.

The guts of the suit

After a long quest, the U.S. military gets its hands on Stark’s most magnificent piece of technology, the Iron Man suit. What they saw when they looked inside was the work of special effect wiz Clark Schaffer.

The silvery suit, originally seen in the first “Iron Man,” is shown again in the new movie in an “autopsy” scene in which the government begins tearing it apart to see how it works. “[The filmmakers] wanted it to look like what you see under the skin of a jet,” said Schaffer, who, along with friend and modeler Randy Cooper, worked on the suit in Los Angeles for six weeks. “There’s an aesthetic to it. I try to make it look as functional and practical as possible but also something that has beauty to it. That was my baby” [Salt Lake Tribune].

But how might the Iron Man suit be able to stand up to the punishment Stark continually receives? Tech News Daily proposes that he took advantage of something scientists are developing now: carbon nanotube foam with great cushioning power.

Plasma weaponry

Iron Man’s nemesis in this second installment is Ivan Vanko, played by the villainous and murky Mickey Rourke, who you might have seen in previews stalking around a racetrack with seemingly electrified prostheses attached to his arms. The explanation in the film is hand-waved a bit, but it seems Vanko’s weapons rely on plasma.

Scientists actually are developing weapons based on plasma, such as the StunStrike, which essentially fires a bolt of lightning, creating an electrical charge through a stream of plasma. Researchers have recently even created what appears to be ball lightning in microwave ovens, which Iron Man’s “repulsor blasts” resemble [Tech News Daily].

Drones and hacking

Vanko isn’t happy with just amazing plasma tentacles, though. Working for Stark’s rival military-industrialist Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell), he develops a horde of ghastly humanoid drones for each branch of the military. That, of course, is straight out of science fact—our military relies increasing on robots, be they unmanned aerial vehicles, bots on the ground that investigate roadside bombs, or even unmanned subs currently under development.

He’s a hacker, too, seizing control of an Iron Man suit worn by Don Cheadle as Stark sidekick James Rhodes. As DISCOVER covered in December, that’s a real-life worry, too. Hackers figured out how to steal the video feeds from our Predator drones because of an encryption lapse at one step in the process.

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I have no problems with people being religious per se. I think that people have the right to believe in whatever they want. If they happen to believe in something that is demonstrably wrong, well then, they should be prepared to suffer the slings and arrows of reality.

The problem tends to come in when some religious people try to impose their religion on others. If you go through my posts on religion, you’ll find that this is where I tend to step in. Want to teach creationism in the classroom? Uh uh. Want to oppress women? Sorry, fella. Think abstinence-only education works and you should get government grants to teach it? Keep it in your own pants, please.

The problem is amplified by the fact that pretty much every religion tends to think of itself as the One True Belief. And when they get some political clout, things get very itchy indeed. Or have we already forgotten what the Taliban did to the Buddhas of Bamyan?

That’s why I worry when I hear politicians in the U.S. saying we’re a Christian nation. We’re not. We’re a nation of mostly Christians, to be sure, but there are other religions here as well, and a bunch of non-believers too.

When confronted with this, most of these politicians tend to say the Founding Fathers were Christians, and based this country on Christian beliefs. But that’s not true either: the basis of our country’s law is the Constitution, and the Founders took a great deal of care making sure it kept religion at arm’s length (despite what some politicians believe).

With the far-right going apoplectic every time someone mentions non-believers or religions other than Christianity (remember this?), I imagine the 2012 Presidential election will be one where every candidate tries to out-religious the next. But we have the 2010 midterms coming up, and it’ll be an issue there too.

That’s why I like very much what the Freedom From Religion Foundation is doing: they’ve created wonderful ads with quotes from the Founding Fathers showing precisely how they felt on this issue. The one above of JFK is cool, because his candidacy was attacked for him being a Catholic, of all things. The thing is, he was a religious man, and still understood that religion must be kept away from politics.

But far and away, I love this one the most:

Not a lot of wiggle room in that, is there? Sarah Palin, of course, disagrees (read that link; Barry Lynn’s — sorry, I mean the Reverend Barry Lynn’s — comment there is wonderful). But I suspect that her grasp of the actual history of this nation is somewhat tenuous, given her many inaccurate statements about it and about reality in general.

Anyway, these banners (seven in total) will run on buses, and it’ll be interesting to see how the far-right religious folks will react. I’ll note that the FFRF ran a full-page ad in the New York Times yesterday about how the National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional, which I agree with. Strongly.

What strikes me as funny is how the über-religious in the US fight to tear down the wall of separation, not realizing that they are weakening themselves. What stands between their religion being dominant and, say, Muslims? This is one of the many problems with having religion intertwined with government. As long as it’s your religion, hurray. But see those guys over there praying in a place of worship with slightly different architecture from yours? They feel exactly the same way about their religion as you do about yours. The only way to protect your own freedom of religion is to protect your freedom from theirs.

There are two ways to do that. You can either emulate the Taliban… or you can make sure that laws, politics, and government are kept wholly and, I dare say, fundamentally separated from religion.

The choice is ours.

Penn State's college football team has a new trick in its playbook--courtesy of acoustical science.
Penn State graduate student Andrew Barnard's acoustic mapping research illustrates how the relocation of 20,000 student-fans in Penn State's Beaver Stadium could lead to more wins for the Nittany Lions football team.
Last year, during three homes games, Barnard recorded and measured crowd noise at the stadium using a series of strategically placed acoustic meters. He found when the Nittany Lions had the ball, the crowd noise reached 75 decibels on the field. But when the opposing team played offense, the noise climbed to 110 decibels. As a result, the visiting quarterback's calls could only be heard within about 18 inches from him.
Barnard wondered whether he could make it even tougher for visiting QBs. So when the stadium was empty, he used a loudspeaker to create noise in various seating locations and measured the sound intensity on the field. According to Gizmodo, Barnard zeroed in on the stadium's acoustical sweet spot, where the loudest fans could be the most effective against opposing teams:
When the stadium was empty, he searched for the best spots for an audible assault by carrying a noisy speaker around to 45 different seats ...