When we last reported on the Deepwater Horizon, the oil rig had sunk in the Gulf of Mexico, but at least the Coast Guard saw no new oil leakage happening. Over the weekend, though, things went from bad to worse as response teams began to see crude oil leaking into the Gulf. Now, the Coast Guard says, 42,000 gallons per day are leaking into the sea, and it may be 45 to 90 days before the leak can be stopped.

Deepwater Horizon, under lease by BP, had been drilling into an oil reserve 5,000 feet below the surface of the water. When the burning rig sank, its 5,000-foot pipeline crumbled like a giant broken straw. The biggest leak has been found at the first crook. The well valve is holding for now but there’s at least one more leak [ABC News]. The Coast Guard couldn’t see the oil so deep under sea right away, which is why the initial assessment wasn’t this bad.

Cleanup teams have now deployed undersea robots to try to stem the oil spill. The best hope is that the remote-operated submarines—at least four are deployed at the scene–would be able to activate a huge device on the sea floor called a “blow-out protector,” a series of valves meant to control pressure in the well. “This is a highly complex operation,” said Doug Suttles, chief operating officer for BP’s exploration and production division. “And it may not be successful” [National Geographic]. If that doesn’t work, the next option would be to drill a relief well to ease the pressure. BP has brought in ships for such an operation, but it would require months to complete.

As we noted on Friday, the spill occurred dangerously close to the United States’ Gulf Coast—within 50 miles. The Coast Guard said the oil spill was expected to stay 30 miles off the coast for the next several days [CBS News]. But as of yesterday, the surface spill had already spread to cover 600 square miles. Whether it gets closer to U.S. shores depends on how the weather changes. Louisiana is already taking precautions, deploying containment booms around particularly sensitive areas along its coast. The oil spill is reportedly edging closer to the Chandeleur Islands, which are part of a wildlife refuge for pelicans and other seabirds; the fish and shrimp that live in Louisiana’s rich coastal ecosystems could also be threatened.

Related Content:
80beats: Ships Race To Contain the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill
80beats: Obama Proposes Oil & Gas Drilling in Vast Swaths of U.S. Waters
80beats: 21 Years After Spill, Exxon Valdez Oil Is *Still* Stuck in Alaska’s Beaches
80beats: 20 Years After Valdez Spill, Eagles Are Healthy; 7 Other Species Still Hurting
80beats: “Nanosponge” Could Soak Up Oil Spills

Image: United States Coast Guard

I heard an interview on the radio by the author of No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life. The study focused on elite universities. I decided to poke around and see what I could find. The chart on probability of acceptance by SAT score broken down by race has no surprises.

Equalizing standardized test scores I assume everyone knows that at elite universities there’s an Asian penalty, and blacks and Hispanics tend to get a bonus, with whites as a reference population in the middle. The author warned though that looking at standardized test scores may not indicate any discrimination against Asians, as it didn’t include in other “soft” aspects of the application such as leadership, which Asians naturally must lack because of their conformist and collectivist nature (OK, I added the last part!). But the class chart was more interesting to me….

It looks like you better not be too dumb if you’re middle class. Lower class people get a nice handicap, while presumably the low scoring upper class types are stereotypical legacies. But at elite universities if you’re of middle socioeconomic status I guess all the leadership and exceptional talents can’t help; acceptance rates ~0 once your SAT scores approach the national norm.

But is this a matter of the confounds? In other words is this is a real signal of class based discrimination, or are there differences in the makeup of each class demographically skewing this? Here’s a regression model which seems to suggest there isn’t much to class, but more to race. The blacks in this case are broken down between descendants of slaves, and those who are presumably the children of immigrants or immigrants from the West Indies and Africa.

The racial effects are the ones which are statistically significant. It’s interesting that black Americans who don’t have any recent immigrant ancestry get a very significant boost vis-a-vis West Indians, etc.

Several people have pointed me to Stephen Hawking’s warning about ‘First Contact’ with aliens. Specifically that we’d be on the short end of the stick. His worry reminded me of something I read as a child which shocked me somewhat when I encountered it, as I was conditioned by a post-Cosmos optimism. Here’s the author:

…I find it mind-boggling that the astronomers now eager to spend a hundred million dollars on the search for extraterrestrial life never thought seriously about the most obvious question: what would happen if we found it, or if it found us. The astronomers tacitly assume that we and the little green monsters would welcome each other and settle down to fascinating conversations. Here again, our own experience on Earth offers useful guidance. We’ve already discovered two species that are very itnelligent but less technically advanced than we are-the common chimpanzee and pygmy chimpanzee. Has our response been to sit down and try to communicate with them? Of course not. Instead we shoot them, dissect them, cut off their hands for trophies, put them on exhibit in cages, inject them with AIDS virus as a medical experiment, and estroy or take over their habitats. That response was predictable, because human explorers who discvered technically less advanced humans also regularly responded by shooting them, decimating their popualtiosn with new diseases, and destroything or taking over their habitats.

Any advanced extraterrestrials who discovered us would surely treat us in the same way….

That was Jared Diamond in The Third Chimpanzee. In terms of this particular concern I have to admit that my attitude is encapsulated by Arthur C. Clarke’s third law of prediction. An advanced alien race is basically going to have magical powers in relation to humanity, and I doubt anything we do will matter either way (i.e., I don’t think we could hide, or, get their attention). But my main question is why haven’t the von Neumann machines already co-opted all the matter and energy in the universe? The Fermi paradox is a real issue. There are still big questions that we have no idea or clue about.

The actual cleavage that causes earthquakes.

If you are a geek, a skeptic, or a man, then you’ve probably heard that today is Boobquake: a day for women around the world to show off their cleavage in an attempt to debunk a fundamentalist Iranian cleric who blames natural seismic events on women dressing immodestly.

In other words, all that shaking and jiggling in the ground is caused by… well, I don’t need to belabor the point.

To be clear, I happily endorse both of these things (the cleavage and the debunking). But I do have one niggling doubt. Bear with me here…

First, last week an Islamic cleric in Iran said that all the earthquakes occurring in that country are caused by women dressing "immodestly". Yes, this same screwed-up thinking that brought us the Taliban and the idea that burning, throwing acid upon, and beheading women is all their own fault for being, y’know, women, gives us this:

"Many women who do not dress modestly … lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes… What can we do to avoid being buried under the rubble?" Sedighi [the cleric] asked during a prayer sermon Friday. "There is no other solution but to take refuge in religion and to adapt our lives to Islam’s moral codes."

I got news for you, Sedighi: if I were God, I’d be throwing more earthquakes your way for the way you treat women. In fact, I’d send a few thousand mini ones that open the Earth and just swallow up the twinkie clerics who say such profoundly horrid things.

Serious note: I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: not all cultures are created equal. Any culture that sweepingly and maniacally oppresses half their population is what I would call evil. Moral relativism be damned: that kind of crap is wrong, plain and simple.

Now, the response on the skeptical and science blogs was pretty good; mockery, for the most part, which is what this kind of insanity deserves (Maria at Skepchick, for example, took this opportunity to debunk myths about breasts). But Blag Hag, a female blogger, came up with an interesting idea: Boobquake. The idea is for women around the world to show off their assets today, Monday, April 26, in an attempt to debunk the cleric. When there is no earthquake today, it will show the cleric for what he is: a sexist jerk^* mired in an ancient and ridiculous mode of thinking.

I like the idea of Boobquake for many reasons. It’s an excellent display of physical mockery, which is a great way to raise awareness. It also resonates in American culture because we have so many people who are so twisted up about such things morally; I support poking them in the eye with this kind of thing as well. Also, I’m unapologetically a heterosexual man, so c’mon.

But I have a major reservation with this idea as well, and it has to do with the number of earthquakes around the world. Here is a table from the USGS giving the number of earthquakes per year listed by magnitude:

As you’d expect, there are very few huge quakes, and a lot of little ones. We expect to rack up maybe one quake more powerful than magnitude 8 in a year, but on average we get one in the magnitude 6 – 6.9 range every couple of days somewhere in the world, and one in the 5 – 5.9 range something like three to five times every day. That’s every few hours!

And there’s the weakness in the Boobquake plan. The idea of Boobquake is to debunk the cleric by saying that women can reveal their boobs and not start a seismic event (ignoring perhaps the tremors caused by geek guys habitually running to their computers every few minutes and checking for updates). But without defining the time period, the earthquake size, and the region in advance, this can actually reinforce the cleric’s claims! Given the huge tracts of land involved, no matter when women of the world unveil their decolletage, there is bound to be a magnitude 5 quake within an hour or so of the event, and a mag 6 quake within a day.

We also know that supernatural thinking makes people see correlations where none exist, and to also retroactively assign credit after an event to something that happened before it. They cling desperately to such measures like a drowning man to a life preserver. And when the parameters (like time and size) aren’t defined in advance, that makes uncritical thinking easier. If there is even a modest earthquake today, then that cleric can declare victory. If there’s a big quake, then it’s more like sending that drowning man a motorboat!

Still and all, this is perhaps a minor complaint given the positive nature of the cause itself. I really like the idea of web-based activism, especially when it comes to rallying a lot of people to make a clear statement… and in this case, the more people who see that cleric for the fool he is, the better.

So I stand with my XX-oriented friends against the neolithic thinking of gender-oppressing religions. As Ben Franklin would say were he here today:

We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang lifted and separated.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch has a post up, The Age Of Facebook. Facebook having superseded Google having superseded Microsoft. Unstated that Microsoft superseded IBM as a firm which defines an age through reach, power and influence. Two thoughts that come to mind:

1) It seems that each “age” has been shorter than the previous. IBM was computing for decades. Microsoft probably ten years or so depending on how you define it (I put the second derivate maximum at 1995). Google’s real ascent seems to date to around 2000, but its monopolistic plateau of the mindshare didn’t seem to last for very long as Facebook was already generating a lot of buzz by 2007 (the same principle operates across human history, the civilization of Pharaonic Egypt spanned 2,000 years, the same length as from Augustus to our own time!)

2) It also seems that the extent of a definite age of ascendancy for a particular firm is more muddled now, as creative destruction and innovation allow for many domains of excellence and supremacy, as well as the resurrection of bygone brands. Consider the revival of Apple’s fortunes. And if we are on the verge of the Age of Facebook does anyone believe that Google’s brand will collapse? Arrington notes that Microsoft is perceived to be passed its peak, but it has many years left of its cash cow products, perhaps at least another decade. IBM has reemerged as a software services company. And so on. On a relative scale Arrington’s argument seems to have some merit, but secure domination doesn’t seem to be what it used to be (also, one might need to distinguish between buzz and influence, and concrete metrics).

As everyone in the tech-savvy world knows, Gizmodo scored a major media coup earlier this month when it obtained a prototype of Apple's next-generation iPhone 4. The fancy piece of hardware had been left behind in a bar by a hapless Apple engineer (his last Facebook post before his fateful memory lapse: “I underestimated how good German beer is”), and Gizmodo paid $5,000 to the person who found the phone. Apple officially reclaimed its phone last week, but that may not be the end of the story. Now reports have surfaced that Silicon Valley police are investigating the incident, as purchasing the lost property may have violated criminal statutes. CNET heard it from an a law enforcement official:
Apple has spoken to local police about the incident and the investigation is believed to be headed by a computer crime task force led by the Santa Clara County district attorney's office, the source said.
Since the phone wasn't stolen, it isn't immediately obvious what laws may have been violated. But CNET reports that several old state laws may give prosecutors the grounds they need:
Under a California law dating back to 1872, any person who finds lost property and knows who the owner is likely to ...

Brendan Nyhan has a great post about Charles Krauthammer and his claims about the mental illness of some of his political opponents. This is notable, and somewhat more than standard political misbehavior, in that Krauthammer is actually a psychiatrist. Some examples:
-"Now, I cannot testify to Howard Dean's sanity before this campaign, but five terms as governor by a man with no visible tics and no history of involuntary confinement is pretty good evidence of a normal mental status. When he avers, however, that 'the most interesting' theory as to why the president is 'suppressing' the Sept. 11 report is that Bush knew about Sept. 11 in advance, it's time to check on thorazine supplies." (Washington Post, 12/5/03)
-"Well, it looks as if Al Gore has gone off his lithium again." (Fox Special Report, 5/25/04) And yet at other times, Krauthammer has disavowed precisely this sort of stuff, writing:
As a former psychiatrist, I know how difficult it is to try to understand the soul of even someone you have spent hundreds of hours alone with in therapy. To think that one can decipher the inner life of some distant public figure is folly. Even the experts haven't a clue. Remember that group of psychiatrists, ...

On the 7^th of December, 2008, in the heart of Scotland, a chimpanzee called Pansy died peacefully. She was over 50 years old and lived on an island in Blair Drummond Safari Park with three other chimps – her daughter Rosie, another adult female called Blossom, and Blossom’s son Chippie.

Their reaction to her passing was recorded by the park’s cameras (see video above) and many of their actions seem remarkably human. The others seemed to care for Pansy in her final minutes, examine her body for signs of life, and avoid the place where she died. Rosie even conducted the equivalent of an all-night vigil.

This footage provides a rare glimpse into how one of our closest relatives deal with death, and it’s one of two such examples that have been published today. The second took place several thousand miles away in the forests of Bossou, Guinea. In 2003, a respiratory epidemic killed five of the local chimps, including two babies called Jimato and Veve.

Their mothers, Jire and Vuavua, carried their babies’ lifeless bodies around for 68 and 19 days respectively. They groomed the dead youngsters and chased away the flies that circled them (see image and video below). Even after both babies had completely mummified into dry, leathery husk, the mothers still carried them, and other groups members investigated them.

These examples of quiet, calm behaviour are incredibly different from previous anecdotes. At Gombe National Park in Tanzania, the death of a male who fell from a tree was greeted by an eruption of noise. The others made alarm calls and aggressive displays, and they touched and held each other. They stared and sniffed at the corpse, but no one touched it and after four hours, the group left.

Elsewhere, in the Tai Forest, a leopard fatally mauled a young female and the same mass excitement ensued. This time, the others frequently touched the body and some males even dragged it for short distances before abandoning it. And in other cases, chimps have been shown to attack or even cannibalise the corpses of dead infants, despite the protestations of their mothers.

In stark contrast, Pansy’s peers were calm and restrained. When studying animal behaviour, it is always important to avoid the trap of anthropomorphism, but one cannot help but draw comparisons between Rosie, Blossom and Chippie’s actions and the responses of humans to peaceful death.

Pansy’s final hours were documented by Alasdair Gillies, head keeper at Blair Drummond. She started becoming lethargic in November and started receiving veterinary care. Her fellow chimps seemed to know that something was up. Instead, of sleeping on their usual platforms, they nested near her. At 4pm on December 7th, she started breathing erratically and laboriously and Gillies let the others join her.

They groomed her with unusual frequency in the 10 minutes before her death and afterwards, they seemed to test for life by inspecting her mouth and lifting her limbs. More unusually, Chippie attacked Pansy’s corpse on no less than three occasions (see video below); Gillies thinks that he may have been trying to rouse her or expressing frustration or anger. Blossom groomed her son for an extraordinary amount of time, perhaps an act of consolation or social support.

Rosie, meanwhile, stayed with her mother’s body throughout the night, on a platform that she had never previously slept on. All the three surviving chimps slept restlessly and the next morning, they were all subdued. They removed straw from Pansy’s body, ate less than normal, and watched silently as the keepers took Pansy away. When they were allowed to return to the sleeping area, Blossom and Rosie did so hesistantly, but Chippy refused. His alarm calls drew the other two back to the day area, where the trio spent the night. For the following week, none of the chimps nested on the platform where Pansy died, even though all of them had frequently done so before.

Legendary primate researcher Frans de Waal says, “I have seen chimpanzees die in captive colonies, sometimes unexpectedly and sometimes after a long illness, and the reactions described here correspond with my experiences. There is even a dramatic photograph that reached cyberspace.”

The tale of the African chimps, told by Dora Biro from the University of Oxford, differs in its details but has many parallels. Vuavua paid such care to her dead baby that by the time she abandoned him, his body was largely intact albeit mummified. Jire did the same, although she carried Jimato along for so long that his facial features were largely unrecognisable. Did Jire and Vuavua know that their babies were dead? It’s hard to say. Certainly, they seemed to treat the corpses like live babies, at least for a few days. Towards the end, they started carrying them in positions that they never use for healthy youngsters.

Other chimps touched, poked and sniffed the bodies, and lifted their immobile limbs. Some of the other youngsters even carried them in bouts of play. Even though the bodies’ were starting to deform and smell intensely, only one of the chimps ever reacted in a way that looked like repulsion (see video below). Biro never saw a single act of aggression.

This is hardly the first time that a chimp mother has been seen carrying the mummified corpse of her baby; the first such sighting was made in 1992 and was very similar to the latest ones. De Waal says, “The carrying of dead infants by chimpanzee mothers is well known, and has also been reported for other primates, although never of such long duration. 68 days is longer than any previous report that I have seen!” He says that ape physiology drives an enormous attachment between mother and infant, that doesn’t rapidly shut down when the infant dies. For example, a chimp’s reproductive cycle grinds to a halt for four years after giving birth.

“It would also not be adaptive to abandon an infant every time it gets sick,” says de Waal. “The best option is for mothers to keep hope and keep caring. A rapid shutting down of attachment would be maladaptive: it might lead mothers of near-dead infants to abandon them prematurely.” Why did Jire and Vuavua eventually let go? As their reproductive cycle restarted and all the associated hormonal changes kicked in, the mums could have been psychologically prepped to raise another generation. The fact that Jire carried her dead child for longer than Vuavua may be because she had already had 7 previous children, while Vuavua was a first-time mother.

Both of these examples suggest that chimpanzees have a better awareness of death and dying that people have previously thought. In many ways, this shouldn’t be surprising – these animals are self-aware and empathetic towards each other. Another intellgent animal, the African elephant, also shows remarkably sophisticated behaviour on the death of their peers. De Waal says, “I don’t think this is the same as what elephants do, which visit burial sites long after the death of a companion. But I wouldn’t be surprised if elephants also showed reactions like these (minus the aggressive displays, which seem typically chimp) to the actual death of another.”

Do chimps truly understand the concept of death? Based on the stories of Pansy, Jire and Vuavua, de Waal says, “Definitely, they seem to recognize the death of another, and perhaps realize that this is a permanent change, and a permanent loss. This by itself is already very significant, and reports like these help us understand the depth of their understanding.” But he also adds that we can’t draw any conclusions about whether they understand their own mortality. “To understand one’s own mortality would require extrapolating from what happens to others to one’s own situation. We cannot rule this out, of course, but it would require another big mental jump and for the moment we have no way of knowing if species other than us have made this jump.”

In the meantime, James Anderson, who led the Scottish study, says that the work could affect the way that elderly chimps in zoos and research facilities are cared for. It might, for example, be more humane to let the old-timers die naturally, surrounded by peers and familiar surroundings, than to resort to isolated treatment or euthanasia.

Reference: Current Biology, references unavailable at time of writing

• More on chimp behaviour:
• Culture shapes the tools that chimps use to get honey
• Scientists tickle apes to reveal evolutionary origins of human laughter
• Chimps use Swiss army toolkit to rob beehives
• Altruistic chimpanzees clearly help each other out
• Male chimps trade meat for sex
• Cultured chimps pass on new traditions between groups

Battered, drained of fuel, and travel-weary, Japan’s asteroid-sampler is almost home. The Hayabusa, which the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched in 2003, is scheduled to drop its sample canister in the Australian outback in June. But, the project leaders warn, there’s still a chance than the beleaguered sojourner won’t make it. And even if it does successfully return to Earth, it’s possible that the sample capsule may not contain extraterrestrial rock.

Hayabusa spent three months exploring the Itokawa asteroid in late 2005, even making an unplanned landing on the asteroid’s surface. The probe spent up to a half-hour on Itokawa, making it the first spacecraft to lift off from an asteroid [Space.com]. The craft also took 1,600 pictures and more than 100,000 infrared images.

But things soon turned sour. Hayabusa’s instruments for collecting asteroid samples didn’t deploy as expected, leaving the Japanese research team uncertain how much, if any, material the probe will have on board when it comes back home. While telemetry showed that Hayabusa likely did not fire its projectile as planned while on Itokawa’s surface, scientists are hoping that bits of dust or pebbles traveled through the probe’s funnel and into its sample return capsule [Space.com].

There have been plenty of other difficulties, too. Since its launch in 2003, Hayabusa has lost three of its four ion engines, leaked out all of its chemical propellant and is down to a single reaction wheel. The trouble delayed Hayabusa’s departure from Itokawa, which forced JAXA to postpone the craft’s return to Earth from 2007 until 2010 [Spaceflight Now]. In November JAXA nearly conceded that Hayabusa would never come home. Then, in a stroke of innovation combined with good fortune, the engineers managed to combine the parts that still worked from two of the thrusters to propel the craft. Now it just might make it back.

The saga of the Hayabusa outlines the ambitious nature of President Obama’s newly revised space plan for the United States; on Thursday DISCOVER covered the difficulty of a daring manned mission to an asteroid that he proposed. But for a journey of far more than a thousand miles, the successful return of the Hayabusa would be a terrific first step.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Japan Stakes Its Claim in Space, on Hayabusa mission
DISCOVER: One Giant Step for a Small, Crowded Country, on Japan’s moon aspirations
80beats: Danger, President Obama! Visiting an Asteroid Is Exciting, But Difficult
80beats: Will NASA’s Next Step Be an Astronaut Rendezvous with an Asteroid?

Image: JAXA

Alan Templeton, whose text Population Genetics and Microevolutionary Theory is right below Hartl & Clark in my book, recently published a strongly worded paper, Coherent and incoherent inference in phylogeography and human evolution. The possibility of statistical errors in published work is not shocking, I have heard that when statisticians are asked to sort through papers in medical genetics journals there are elementary errors in ~3/4 of those which have made it beyond peer review. That being said Templeton seems to be making a stronger case than simple refutation of basic errors, in particular he is suggesting that the “ABC” method which lay at the heart of the paper I reviewed last week is incoherent at the root. Here’s Templeton’s abstract:

A hypothesis is nested within a more general hypothesis when it is a special case of the more general hypothesis. Composite hypotheses consist of more than one component, and in many cases different composite hypotheses can share some but not all of these components and hence are overlapping. In statistics, coherent measures of fit of nested and overlapping composite hypotheses are technically those measures that are consistent with the constraints of formal logic. For example, the probability of the nested special case must be less than or equal to the probability of the general model within which the special case is nested. Any statistic that assigns greater probability to the special case is said to be incoherent. An example of incoherence is shown in human evolution, for which the approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) method assigned a probability to a model of human evolution that was a thousand-fold larger than a more general model within which the first model was fully nested. Possible causes of this incoherence are identified, and corrections and restrictions are suggested to make ABC and similar methods coherent. Another coalescent-based method, nested clade phylogeographic analysis, is coherent and also allows the testing of individual components of composite hypotheses, another attribute lacking in ABC and other coalescent-simulation approaches. Incoherence is a highly undesirable property because it means that the inference is mathematically incorrect and formally illogical, and the published incoherent inferences on human evolution that favor the out-of-Africa replacement hypothesis have no statistical or logical validity.

The method which Templeton favors is naturally one which he has pushed in the past. In any case, I don’t know the statistical details well enough to comment with much knowledge, but I see that a statistician has responded to Templeton already, so I would recommend checking that out. I immediately went looking for responses because the paper uses really strong and dismissive language, and I am somewhat wary of that sort of thing when attempting to tear down the fundamentals of a whole field of research (I want to emphasize that overall I enjoy Templeton’s work, but the paper reminded me a bit too much of Jerry Fodor). His citation of Popper in particular seems an appeal to authority that aims to convince the non-statisticians in the audience, and I don’t see the point of that besides rhetorical utility. I do tend to accept somewhat Templeton’s critique of models which assume very little gene flow between hominin populations before the Out-of-Africa migration, though from what I can tell it does seem that Africa has had relatively little back-migration south of the Sahara over the past 50,000 years, so perhaps this is an older dynamic as well. I am cautiously optimistic that DNA extraction from fossils themselves may put to bed some of these arguments over the dance of parameters, though naturally interpretation is always an issue outside of pure mathematics.

For what it’s worth, here’s the model which Templeton’s method favors:

The thin lines represent continuous gene flow between populations, and the thick lines extremely strong demographic & genetic pulses which overwhelm the genetic structure status quo periodically. I have implied something similar as operative on the smaller scale of H. sapiens sapiens.

Citation: Coherent and incoherent inference in phylogeography and human evolution, PNAS 2010 107 (14) 6376-6381; doi:10.1073/pnas.0910647107

My latest POI guest, Deb Blum, avers that her book sales on Amazon went up appreciably after our show aired (download here and stream here). Like, wow. Didn't know we had that power. Of course, it may be because I framed Blum's book, The Poisoner's Handbook, as a kind of ideal case study in how to communicate science. But, well, it is. If I give the book an endorsement during the show, it's because it is richly deserved. Blum does a fantastic job of embedding science within a narrative driven by characters and human drama (in this case, the 1920s scientific quest to catch poisoners, who were previously operating with relative impunity). As an author, she thereby ensures that she will both educate readers about chemistry--on the show, for instance, we discuss the crucial difference between ethyl and methyl alcohol, which had no small policy and human health import during Prohibition--and also intrigue and entertain them. There are many, many would-be science communicators who should take a lesson from Blum's success. And indeed, in one part of the show that was cut, she told me that Hollywood may be interested in the story she's created. Once again, if you haven't heard the show yet, ...

In a half-century of hunting, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has turned up nary a whisper from E.T. But for renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, the non-success of SETI and others who hope to contact alien life might be for the best: Aliens, he says, might not like us.

Hawking caused waves with this suggestion in his new Discovery Channel special, which debuted last night. He has long believed that extraterrestrial life exists, simply because of the sheer vastness of the universe. While much of what’s out there might be simple microbial life, there may indeed be new civilizations far more advanced than our own. But that doesn’t mean they’ll be friendly.

Said Hawking: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach” [The Times].

Should aliens decide to drop in on our pale blue dot, he predicts they may come not in a spirit of peace and understanding, but more likely in the spirit with which Europeans conquered Native Americans and colonized what’s now the United States. These alien wanderers similarly might see human society as primitive and unimportant, and attack our planet for its resources, he says.

While Hawking contends that contacting E.T. would be quite risky for us, he also considers the possibility that we’ll never get the chance, even if there are advanced civilizations on distant worlds. “Perhaps they all blow themselves up soon after they discover that E=mc2. If civilizations take billions of years to evolve, only to vanish virtually overnight, then sadly we’ve next to no chance of hearing from them” [MSNBC].

The four-part TV special, which DISCOVER previewed in our April issue, took Hawking and the producers three years to create. Besides the alien menace, Hawking also had a little fun with time travel last night, throwing a party for time travelers and sending out invitations after the party (nobody from the future comes). The third and fourth parts, covering the life and death of the universe, air this coming Sunday, May 2.

For another take on Hawking’s comments, head to Bad Astronomy where Phil Plait takes a more skeptical view of the potential for doom-wielding alien visitors.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Stephen Hawking Is Making His Comeback
DISCOVER: Inside the World of Stephen Hawking
DISCOVER: Hawking’s Exit Strategy
DISCOVER: The Best in Science Culture This Month
Cosmic Variance: Hawking: Beware the Alien Menace!
Bad Astronomy: In Which I Disagree With Stephen Hawking

Image: “Independence Day” / Centropolis Entertainment

Well, so much for getting a new piece of climate legislation introduced today. As ClimateWire reports:
The Senate climate bill sits on the brink of collapse today after the lead Republican ally threatened to abandon negotiations because of a White House push to simultaneously overhaul the nation's immigration policies.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has been under fire from conservatives for months for helping to shepherd a Democrat-led bid to tackle global warming via a "grand compromise" on energy. But on Saturday afternoon, he signaled the partnership could soon be over.
Graham promised to leave President Obama and Senate Democrats standing at the altar after they started pushing last week for a comprehensive immigration reform bill that he called "nothing more than a cynical political ploy" headed into the 2010 midterm elections. Oh boy. Need I say that this flap augurs extremely poorly for the chances of getting a bill passed any time soon? The politics of this are hard enough already, and now we're stopping before we even got started. Quoted in the ClimateWire piece, I think Tom Friedman puts it best:
"The result is, right now ... in Beijing, they are high-fiving each other," Friedman added. "Oh yeah baby. This means the Americans are ...

Apparently Stephen Hawking read my book, but not very carefully, because he thinks aliens will come here ala "Independence Day"* and eat up all our resources and move on.

I disagree with him. I think in fact it’s more likely that an aggressive alien race would create self-replicating robot probes that will disperse through the galaxy and destroy all life that way.

But more likely still doesn’t equate to likely. I’ve been thinking about this on and off for a few days, in fact, and I suspect a likely answer to Fermi’s Paradox — "Where are they?" — is simply that intelligent life that is capable of interstellar flight doesn’t last long enough to colonize other stars. That would neatly explain why, if stars with planets are common (which we know is almost certainly true), and the conditions for life to arise are relatively common (again, that seems very likely), the galaxy isn’t overrun with life. It should be by now; it’s had billions of years to have space-faring races evolve and colonize the whole shebang.

So in reality, Hawking’s idea and the one I go over in my book are probably wrong. But I’m an optimist, and I can hope that the reason the galaxy isn’t softly humming with life (that’s Carl Sagan’s poetic phrase) is that we’re the first, or at least the first in a while. That would mean we still get our chance. It’s a big responsibility, really.

And to be clear, that’s not snark, even if this post started out a bit snarky. I’m serious. We may be utterly, entirely alone in a galaxy filled with planets that outnumber people on our own planet 50 to 1. That idea gives me the creeps more than the idea of hostile aliens bent on sterilizing each of those planets. But at least it gives us a good chance to spread and see the place a bit. I’d like to think that in a hundred generations, this arm of the Milky Way will boast a thousand human planets. It’s a nice thought.

[Note added after I wrote this: I see Sean at Cosmic Variance has weighed in on this as well. But I heard it first from that man about town Josh Cagan.]

I attended SkeptiCal 2010 on Saturday, a conference on science and skepticism organized by Bay Area Skeptics. The conference sold out all 200 slots, and the audience is a pretty lively bunch. I was invited here to speak at a breakout session in the afternoon on “Myths and Facts about the LHC” which I trust was entertaining, given all the media attention to the possibility that the LHC will destroy the world by producing a black hole, that the Higgs boson is coming back from the future to prevent its discovery, and the various notions about CERN in Angels and Demons such as that the lab is using the LHC to create an antimatter superweapon. All relatively standard topics for the skeptics…

The opening talk, but Eugenie Scott, addressed the rather deep question of how skepticism relates to science: is one included in the other? Do they overlap? Her conclusion, arrived at with humor, grace, and thoughtful examples, was that science is contained within skepticism, that the general approach to knowing we call skepticism is applied in the case of science to understanding the natural world. As a physicist, I need to continually put myself in the mindset of the (mostly) non-physicists in the audience. Skepticism is to a physicist as natural as breathing…this is not true of everyone in the world!

David Morrison, senior scientist at NASA Ames’ Astrobiology institute, gave a truly mind-boggling talk about the rapidly increasing end-of-the-world-in-2012 phenomenon. It all started with Nibiru, the planet that the Zetas told a Wisconsin woman, Nancy Lieder, would crash into the earth round about then. Of course the thing snowballed and led to the movie 2012 (actually the movie appropriated the 2012 meme a few years into prouction). Morrison has received over 3500 emails about the phenomenon, ranging from death threats against him (because, natch, NASA is covering it all up) to suicide threats (who wants to live to see the end of the world?) and everything in between. He made a youtube video trying to allay fears of the world’s imminent demise. (Of course I told my session that the LHC was scheduled to resume at full energy on Dec. 21, 2012, the particular date in question.)

I had a difficult choice of parallel sessions to attend, but chose the one on psychics by Karen Stollznow. And, of all things, I learned something very interesting about quantum physics that I had been blissfully unaware of. Watch for a future post once I read up on that.

In the afternoon, Brian Dunning, creator and host of Skeptoid.com, delivered a devastating blow to the myth of the origins of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the most pervasive symbol of Catholicism in Mexico. What becomes clear is that this was another example of the Catholic church appropriating the symbols of the indigenous population it was attempting (ultimately successfully) to convert. In the beginning, though, he lamented the failure of the skeptical movement as a movement. He pointed out that all that skepticism can offer is negative: we kill sacred cows and remove the scales from peoples’ eyes. But how will we save critical thinking?

All in all I found the conference quite eye-opening, and I have realized that we have a long way to go to counter the rising tide of ignorance of science and what it means to adopt a skeptical world view. Even once-respectable types like Bill Nye and Michio Kaku are starting to fall to the dark side. Too many think of skepticism as simply disbelief, when all it means is to place rationality at the base of our intellectual foundation. Help!

A star forming region in the Carina Nebula called Mystic Mountain. Click for larger. Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Livio and the Hubble 20th Anniversary Team (STScI).

Twenty years ago tomorrow the Hubble Space Telescope was launched. I can hardly believe the telescope has been in space twenty years already.  Along with this remarkable image, the Hubble folks have a whole series of other things lined up to mark the occasion.  Be SURE to read the press release below OR just click the link and read it on Hubblesite and see more images!

The press release from Hubblesite:

NASA’s best-recognized, longest-lived, and most prolific space observatory zooms past a threshold of 20 years of operation this month. On April 24, 1990, the space shuttle and crew of STS-31 were launched to deploy the Hubble Space Telescope into a low Earth orbit. What followed was one of the most remarkable sagas of the space age. Hubble’s unprecedented capabilities made it one of the most powerful science instruments ever conceived by humans, and certainly the one most embraced by the public. Hubble discoveries revolutionized nearly all areas of current astronomical research, from planetary science to cosmology. And, its pictures were unmistakably out of this world.

At times Hubble’s starry odyssey played out like a space soap opera, with broken equipment, a bleary-eyed primary mirror, and even a space shuttle rescue/repair mission cancellation. But the ingenuity and dedication of Hubble scientists, engineers, and NASA astronauts have allowed the observatory to rebound time and time again. Its crisp vision continues to challenge scientists with exciting new surprises and to enthrall the public with ever more evocative color images.

NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) are celebrating Hubble’s journey of exploration with a stunning new picture, online educational activities, an opportunity for people to explore galaxies as armchair scientists, and an opportunity for astronomy enthusiasts to send in their own personal greetings to Hubble for posterity.

NASA is releasing today a brand new Hubble photo of a small portion of one of the largest seen star-birth regions in the galaxy, the Carina Nebula. Towers of cool hydrogen laced with dust rise from the wall of the nebula. The scene is reminiscent of Hubble’s classic “Pillars of Creation” photo from 1995, but is even more striking in appearance. The image captures the top of a three-light-year-tall pillar of gas and dust that is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright stars. The pillar is also being pushed apart from within, as infant stars buried inside it fire off jets of gas that can be seen streaming from towering peaks like arrows sailing through the air.

Hubble fans worldwide are being invited to share the ways the telescope has affected them. They can send an e-mail, post a Facebook message, use the Twitter hashtag #hst20, or send a cell phone text message. Or, they can visit the “Messages to Hubble” page on http://hubblesite.org, type in their entry, and read selections from other messages that have been received. Fan messages will be stored in the Hubble data archive along with the telescope’s many terabytes of science data. Someday, future researchers will be able to read these messages and understand how Hubble had such an impact on the world.

The public will also have an opportunity to be at-home scientists by helping astronomers sort out the thousands of galaxies seen in a deep Hubble observation. STScI is partnering with the Galaxy Zoo consortium of scientists to launch an Internet-based astronomy project (http://hubble.galaxyzoo.org) where amateur astronomers can peruse and sort galaxies from Hubble’s deepest view of the universe into their classic shapes: spiral, elliptical, and irregular. Dividing the galaxies into categories will allow astronomers to study how they relate to one another and provide clues that might help scientists understand how they formed.

For students, STScI is opening an education portal called “Celebrating Hubble’s 20th Anniversary” (http://amazing-space.stsci.edu/hubble_20/). It offers links to “fun facts” and trivia about Hubble, a news story that chronicles the Earth-orbiting observatory’s life and discoveries, and the IMAX “Hubble 3D” educator guide. An anniversary poster containing Hubble’s “hall-of-fame” images, including the Eagle Nebula and Saturn, is also being offered with downloadable classroom activity information.

To date, Hubble has looked at over 30,000 celestial objects and amassed over one-half million pictures in its archive. The last heroic astronaut servicing mission to Hubble in May 2009 made it 100 times more powerful than when it was launched. In addition to its irreplaceable scientific importance, Hubble brings cosmic wonders into millions of homes and schools every day. For the past 20 years the public has become co-explorers with this wondrous observatory.

Extremophiles microbes: They’re tougher than you. Scientists have found microorganisms living in the ultra-dry Atacama desert, Antarctica, volcanic hot springs, and now, lakes of asphalt.

Trinidad, the larger island of the Caribbean duo Trinidad and Tobago, is home to Pitch Lake. This 100-acre pool of hot liquid asphalt is the largest of its kind on our planet, but microbiologist Steven Hallam thought it could tell us something about another world: the Saturnian moon of Titan. If anything could live in the toxic stew of Lake Pitch, he thought, perhaps there’s hope for the hydrocarbon lakes and rivers of that distant moon. He found that the earthly lake teems with life. “Water is scarce in the lake and certainly below the levels normally thought of as a threshold for life to exist,” he says. “Yet on average, each gram of ‘goo’ in the lake contains tens of millions of living cells” [Australian Broadcasting Corporation].

As you might imagine, studying samples of an asphalt lake is, well, unpleasant. The molasses-like goop got all over the lab, Hallam says, and because oil and water don’t mix, water couldn’t wash it off. “It’s somewhat nasty,” says astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch of Washington State University in Pullman, who led the field study. If the thick gunk gets on your clothes, he says, you might as well just toss them out [Science News]. Yet the team slogged through it, and submitted the findings to the journal Astrobiology. The researchers say that 30 percent of the organisms they found in Lake Pitch were previously unknown.

However, not all the mysteries around these microbes have been solved. The issue of unexpectedly low water activity still remains a question mark, Schulze-Makuch acknowledges. It is possible that the organisms whose genetic material they recovered could inhabit tiny reservoirs of water trapped in the asphalt samples [Christian Science Monitor]. For some scientists, then, the Lake Pitch inhabitants may not have as much to say about Titan as Hallam hopes. If the organisms feed on the hydrocarbons but live in tiny amounts of water, that would appear to be a much different situation than hypothetical life on Titan. There, presumably, life would have no water in which to reside.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: A Moon Full of Smust (Smust being the smog/dust combo that covers Titan)
DISCOVER: The Search For Aliens Gets Harder—But More Encouraging
80beats: New Evidence for Ice-Spewing Volcanoes on Saturn’s Moon Titan
80beats: Hydrocarbon Lake on Saturnian Moon May Be a Hotspot for Alien Life
80beats: New Takes on Titan Hints at More Fuel for Potential Life
80beats: Antarctica’s “Blood Falls” Shows How Aliens Might Live on Ice Worlds

Image: Dirk Schulze-Makuch,Washington State University

It's a common nutritional fail--you pledge to make a nice, fresh home-cooked meal, but get impatient and opt for fast food instead. Now, new research suggests that 'we are how we eat' and that the mere thought of fast food can result in general impatience. Researchers from the University of Toronto conducted a series of experiments in which they showed volunteers logos from several fast-food chains or asked them to recall the last time they'd visited, writes Scientific American.
And they found that folks who had thought about fast food would then read faster, even though no one told them to hurry. And they also expressed a preference for time-saving products, like shampoo plus conditioner. And they tended to opt for immediate rewards, like getting a small cash payment right away rather than waiting a week for a larger sum.
Looking at the results, the researchers conclude that a fast-food lifestyle may not only impacts people's waistlines, but may also have a far-reaching and often unconscious impact on their behavior. In other fast-food news, over the last couple of days the American people have been simultaneously horrified and fascinated by KFCs new Double Down sandwich--which is two pieces of fried chicken sandwiching a bunch ...

What is the impact of strict population control? Unintended consequences. Note the convergence in fertility between South Korea and the People’s Republic of China. Coercion or no, some things are inevitable.

Beating Obesity. Marc Ambinder went from 235 to 150 in a year after surgery.

For ancient hominids, thumbs up on precision grip. Many things which we perceive to be derived may be more ancestral than we’d thought.

New Genetic Framework Could Help Explain Drug Side Effects. Medicine is a crap shoot, so you want to load the die in your favor as much as you can.

Chimpanzees Prefer Fair Play To Reaping An Unjust Reward. Not too surprising, but there’s a lot of “complex behavior” whose building blocks are probably pretty ancient. The fact that humans can “socialize” with dogs and cats are somewhat suggestive to me of common mammalian cognitive furniture.

"AIM: The objective was to determine if appropriately trained sexologists could infer women's history of vaginal orgasm from observing only their gait. METHODS: Women with known histories of either vaginal orgasm or vaginal anorgasmia were videotaped walking on the street, and their orgasmic status was judged by sexologists blind to their history... ...RESULTS: In the sample of healthy young Belgian women (half of whom were vaginally orgasmic), history of vaginal orgasm (triggered solely by penile-vaginal intercourse) was diagnosable at far better than chance level (81.25% correct, Fisher's Exact Test P < 0.05) by appropriately trained sexologists... ...CONCLUSIONS: The discerning observer may infer women's experience of vaginal orgasm from a gait that comprises fluidity, energy, sensuality, freedom, and absence of both flaccid and locked muscles." [Originally posted 9/1/09] Photo: flickr/loop_oh Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Distinguishing between new and slightly worn underwear: a case study.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Is that a ruthenium polypyridine complex in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Does this outfit make me look like I want to get laid? WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!