And we’ve reached the final installment of the From Eternity to Here book club. Chapter Fifteen is entitled “The Past Through Tomorrow,” in an oblique allusion to Robert Heinlein, my favorite author when I was younger. We’re going to throw in the Epilogue for good measure.

Excerpt:

What we’ve done is given the universe a way that it can increase its entropy without limit. In a de Sitter universe, space grows without bound, but the part of space that is visible to any one observer remains finite, and has a finite entropy—the area of the cosmological horizon. Within that space, the fields fluctuate at a fixed temperature that never changes. It’s an equilibrium configuration, with every process occurring equally as often as its time-reverse. Once baby universes are added to the game, the system is no longer in equilibrium, for the simple reason that there is no such thing as equilibrium. In the presence of a positive vacuum energy (according to this story), the entropy of the universe never reaches a maximum value and stays there, because there is no maximum value for the entropy of the universe—it can always increase, by creating new universes.

This is the chapter where we attempt to put it all together. The idea was that we had been so careful and thorough in the previous chapters that in this one we could be fairly terse, setting up ideas and knocking them down with our meticulously-prepared bludgeon of Science. I’m not sure if it actually worked that way; one could argue that it would have been more effective to linger lovingly over the implications of some of these scenarios. But there was already a lot of repetition throughout the book (intentionally, so that ideas remained clear), and I didn’t want to add to it.

Of course my own current favorite idea involves baby universes pinching off from a multiverse, and I’m certainly happy to explain my reasons in favor of it. But there are also good reasons to be skeptical, especially when it comes to our lack of knowledge concerning whether baby universes actually are formed in de Sitter space. What I hope comes across is the more generic scenario: a multiverse where entropy is increasing locally because it can always increase, and does so both toward the far past and the far future. While there’s obviously a lot of work to be done in filling in the details, I haven’t heard any other broad-stroke idea that sounds like a sensible dynamical origin for the arrow of time. (Which isn’t to say that one won’t come along tomorrow.)

Chapter 16 is the Epilogue, where I reflect on where we’ve been and what it all means. I talk a little about why thinking about the multiverse is a very respectable part of the scientific endeavor, and how we should think about the fact that we are a very tiny part of a very big cosmos. Finally, I wanted to quote the very last paragraph of text in the book, at the end of the Acknowledgments:

I’m the kind of person who grows restless working at home or in the office for too long, so I frequently gather up my physics books and papers and bring them to a restaurant or coffee shop for a change of venue. Almost inevitably, a stranger will ask me what it is I’m reading, and—rather than being repulsed by all the forbidding math and science—follow up with more questions about cosmology, quantum mechanics, the universe. At a pub in London, a bartender scribbled down the ISBN number of Scott Dodelson’s Modern Cosmology; at the Green Mill jazz club in Chicago, I got a free drink for explaining dark energy. I would like to thank every person who is not a scientist but maintains a sincere fascination with the inner workings of nature, and is willing to ask questions and mull over the answers. Thinking about the nature of time might not help us build better TV sets or lose weight without exercising, but we all share the same universe, and the urge to understand it is part of what makes us human.

Among those people who share a fascination with the inner workings of nature, I of course include people who regularly read this blog. So — thanks!

The Carnival of Space # 149 is up at Starry Critters, and you can catch up with the best astronomy and space bloggy goodness of the past week there. And if you go now, you’ll win a pony^*.

When you first look at it, you think it might be a flaw in the image.  After studying it for a while, you realize it proves the existence of black holes, dark matter, and the warping of the fabric of space.

Light Warping Around Mass - NASA/ESA

The ring-like distortion effect on an image you see in gravitational lensing is referred to as Einstein Rings, mostly because Einstein predicted and quantified their existence in 1912.  We’ve talked about gravitational lensing before, specifically in this post discussion on gravitational lensing used to prove the existence of dark matter.

What basically happens is that as light travels toward you, if there is something of respectable mass between you and the light source, the light will bend around it in response to its gravity.  Science realized that sometimes they were looking at light bending around something they couldn’t see.  Something of extremely large mass.

Light waves, left alone, will travel in a straight path away from its source.  It doesn’t bend and warp on its own, but it will warp around a body of mass large enough to act on it. We see that as a distortion in the image.  There are several different types of distortion we will see, and an Einstein Ring is just one.  The Ring occurs when the mass source lines up “perfectly” between us and the light source.  The more complete the Ring, the more “perfect” the line up.  The Hubble Space Telescope found the first complete Ring in 1998.

If you like it mathematically, this is what it looks like geometrically:

Image released to public domain - author discourages attribution

It’s been almost a century since Einstein first predicted this effect.  Using the Hubble ST to map the known Rings, science has reached a clearer understanding of the distribution of dark matter and energy around us, the nature of galaxies as distant as 11 bly, and the curvature of the known universe.  I think that’s pretty amazing.

Kate and Miriam brought this terrific young explorer to my attention--and I have a hunch we'll hear more from Fairy Scientist Lydia in another decade or so! The details:
The Fairy Scientist was one of 9 finalists in the annual Project Reason Video contest. Voting is now closed and our little scientist did not win any of the three grand prizes. Oh well, the Nobel is still up for grabs. Children are natural scientists - filled with wonder and curiosity, they yearn to know about the world around them. Join Fairy Scientist, Lydia as she sets out to discover the secret world of Fairies. Lydia comes from a family of accomplished scientists; her grandfather is a PhD Oceanographer with NOAA and her great-grandfather is professor emeritus of Horticulture at Oregon State University. Lydia's father is an Electrical Engineer with Hewlett-Packard with numerous patents to his credit. Scientist, Lydia, is the granddaughter of "Andrus" producer/director, Robert Neary. Though she took a little direction from her director grandfather, her comments and observations are completely unscripted and entirely her own. Lydia's academic studies has her currently in the First Grade, but her inquisitiveness and curiosity show great promise in her achieving a notable scientific career.

A quantum-encrypted future is a step closer this week after researchers announced a great advancement in speed: from fast enough to encrypt voice transmissions to fast enough to encrypt video.

For decades now scientists have tried to develop reliable quantum cryptography systems that take advantage of the quirks of quantum mechanics. Thanks to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, for example, we know that you can’t measure a photon of light without altering it. Thus, the thinking goes, if you encode information into photons of light, no hacker could intercept the information without giving themselves away. In 2008, we covered the scientists who orchestrated a secure video conference by using a quantum key, a security key derived from the patterns of arriving photons. Now, the Toshiba Research Lab in Cambridge [England] has reported a secure bit rate of 1 MB/sec, which is over 100 times better than previously achieved, making it suitable for commercial application [Nature]. The team outlines this research in Applied Physics Letters.

Research leader Andrew Shields says the key to this advance in quantum key distribution (QKD) is the marvelously named “semiconductor avalanche photodiodes,” in which a photon hits a bit of semiconductor to trigger an “avalanche” of electric charge. It takes time for that avalanche to build and pass, which limits the detector’s rate. New photodiodes can sense smaller avalanches and, hence, run faster, Shields says [ScienceNOW]. There’s also a stabilization system to adjust for the fiber-optic cables heating up.

The encryption method is considered to be perfect because it uses extremely long encryption keys only once and so cannot be cracked using crypto-analysis [Computer Weekly]. That big claim will be put to the test in October in Japan, when a quantum key distribution demonstrator will test the secure key across a wider “metropolitan network”, which may ultimately lead to the technology becoming commercially available [Wired.co.uk]. Someday many scientists hope to expand to an entire computer network employing quantum mechanics, including the possibility of messages encrypted with quantum entanglement. But now that researchers are surmounting some of the technical challenges, the next problem is, naturally, cost.

Related Content:
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DISCOVER: Future Tech: The quantum cryptography race is on

Image: iStockphoto

In today’s not-shocking news, researchers have determined that teenagers like to text–a lot.

The new study by the Pew Center shows that the mobile phone has become the preferred mode of communication for American teens, with one in three teens sending more than 100 texts a day. Also in the category of not-shocking, the researchers found that older teenage girls are the most enthusiastic texters.

Some of the key findings:

• The study points out that cell phone ownership among 12- to 17-year-olds has spiked, going up from 45 percent in 2004 to 75 percent this year.
• With cell phones at their disposal, the teens were also more likely to text than call, although the majority still turned to an old-fashioned phone call when it came time to communicate with mom and dad.
• Half of the teens send 50 or more text messages a day, or 1,500 texts a month, and one in three sends more than 100 texts a day, or more than 3,000 texts a month.
• Older girls who text are the most active, with 14- to 17-year-old girls typically sending 100 or more messages a day or more than 3,000 texts a month.

When the teens aren’t texting, they report using their cell phones to listen to music and to take and share pictures with their friends. A whopping 83 percent used their phones’ cameras, but a relatively small number of teens said they sent and received sexually suggestive images by text (”sexts”). Just 4 percent of teens say they have sent a sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude image of themselves via text message, with older teens more like to receive “sexts” than younger ones.

If this study is making your nervous about your teen’s texting behavior–then you’re not alone. The study found that 64 percent of all parents snoop around on their kids’ cell phones and more than half have taken the device away to punish a child.

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Image: Wikipedia

Cultural innovation, Pleistocene environments and demographic change. Gene-culture coevolution gurus Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd argue that climatic fluctuations may work to the advantage of humans because of the adaptive flexibility inherent in a cultural species.

Common versus rare variants, again. Some skepticism of the new exhortation to look for rare variants of large effect instead of common variants of more modest effect. This sort of posturing by biologists strikes me as similar to what happens in social science (to a great extent all of what falls under the rubric of sociology seems to be posturing with doctorates). Does this happen in the physical sciences?

Sean Carroll Talks School Science and Time Travel. I wonder when he’s going to stop being asked about how he got together with Jennifer Ouellette. People meet up through internet. Via blogs. It happens.

Media to Tea Partiers: Can You be More Racist? Mind-reading is hard. Conservatives are racists and liberals are crypto-Leninists. Meanwhile, there’s life to be lived.

Neural Correlates of Being a Total Bad-Ass. Psychology with fMRI = telling you stuff you already know with a pretty picture to boot.

Tom Lowe has done it again: another jaw-dropping astronomy timelapse.

Timescapes: “Death is the Road to Awe” from Tom Lowe @ Timescapes on Vimeo.

Wow, that’s simply stunning. The music is beautiful and driving, too; it’s from "The Fountain", a movie I quite enjoyed.

My favorite was the cactus with the Pleiades, Orion, and Sirius behind it. But the whole thing is devastatingly beautiful. You should watch the other short films he’s made, too!

Six days after ash from Iceland’s volcano paralyzed European airspace, aviation experts and academics are arguing over whether the entire mess could have been avoided.

Ash from Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano started to spread across North European skies last week, grounding thousands of domestic and long-haul flights and causing an estimated $1 billion in losses. Today the European Union attempted to get the continent moving again and reopened certain routes, giving millions of stranded passengers a chance to head home and throwing a lifeline to airlines that were hemorrhaging an estimated $250 million a day.

However, this grounding of flights drew sharp rebuke from Giovanni Bisignani, director general of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), who argued that the entire mess could have been avoided had the airlines focused on facts and figures on actual damage caused to jet engines by volcanic ash, saying: “Europe was using a theoretical mathematical approach and this is not what you need. We needed some test flights to go into the atmosphere and assess the level of ashes and take decisions” [Reuters]. Unsurprisingly, the European Union’s transit officials have replied that they’re not willing to compromise on passenger safety.

Airlines canceled flights to and from Europe because the silicate particles in volcanic ash are known to create a glass-like coating inside airline engines when they fly through ash clouds. In 1982, almost 800 passengers on a British Airways flight had a narrow escape when the plane lost power in all four engines after flying though an ash cloud over the Indian Ocean. Not willing to risk a repeat of that terrifying incident, the European Union shut down flight routes last Thursday. NATO also limited military exercises after volcanic glass built up in fighter engines.

However, British Airways and Air France-KLM say they have both operated test flights in the region since the eruption, and they report that they encountered no problems due to the ash. Bisgnani argues that this proves that the governments made a mistake imposing a “blanket ban” on air travel in northern Europe. He said decision-makers should consider setting up “corridors” to repatriate the estimated 7 million passengers stranded across the globe [Reuters].

But atmospheric scientists explain that volcanic ash clouds pose a very tricky threat to pilots, who can’t see the clouds of tiny particles. They say that instruments could be installed on airplanes to help pilots detect large concentrations of ash as they fly–the instrument’s warnings would prompt the pilot to drop down to a lower altitude to steer clear of the ash. However, not many of these expensive, specialty detectors currently exist.

Experts add that there’s no guarantee that switching altitudes would give the pilot the all-clear, as changing wind conditions could move the ash to lower altitudes, too. Says aviation engineer Stewart John: “You could think that you’re safe flying along at 20,000 feet rather than up at 40,000 where the ash is, only to find that the wind has suddenly dropped and the ash is now at 20,000 feet” [Reuters].

Bisignani, meanwhile, argues that there needs to be consensus on what constitutes a safe concentration of ash. Aviation consultant Chris Yates says the volcanic ash guidelines were drawn up by a UN body, the International Civil Aviation Organization. Regulations for grounding the flights to protect them from volcanic ash, Yates says, were based on “experience gained from over 80 incidents between 1980 and 2000 and computer modeling (or) best guestimate” [Reuters].

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80beats: Volcanic Eruption in Iceland Causes Floods, Shuts Down European Air Travel
Bad Astronomy: Iceland Volcano Eruption Making an Ash of Itself
DISCOVER: Disaster! The Most Destructive Volcanic Eruptions in History (photo gallery)

Image: Wikimedia

A reminder to everyone: tomorrow I moderate a really cool panel of astronomers, where we’ll be discussing the search for Earths orbiting other stars. The original post is below. You can submit questions to the panelists, too!

I am very pleased and excited to announce that I will be moderating a fascinating panel in Pasadena California on Wednesday, April 21. The topic is "The Quest for a Living World": how modern astronomy is edging closer to finding another Earth orbiting a distant star.

[Click for a higher-res version.]

The panelists are all-stars in the field: Caltech astronomy professor John Johnson, Berkeley astronomer Gibor Basri, MIT planetary astronomer Sara Seager, and NASA Ames Research Center’s Tori Hoehler. We’ll be talking about how we’re looking for these new worlds, what the state of the art is, and perhaps toss around some of the philosophy of why we’re looking for them. You might think the answer is obvious, but I’ve found that astronomers have lots of intriguing reasons for why they do the work they do.

The event is sponsored by Discover Magazine, the Thirty Meter Telescope (yes, a project to build a telescope with a 30 meter mirror!), and Caltech. It will be at 7:30 p.m. at Caltech’s Beckman auditorium. It’s also free! Send an email to exoplanets@tmt.org if you want to attend.

We’ll be taking questions from the audience, and if you have a question you’d like to submit in advance then we have an online form where you can send it.

Last year’s panel on astronomy frontiers was a lot of fun, and very well-attended. If you’re in the LA area, then I highly recommend you come! I know you’ll have a great time, and you’ll get a taste for some of the astronomical adventures in store for us in the next couple of years.

The book that caused all the ruckus--relentlessly bashed by New Atheists, praised by the president's science adviser and the National Science Teachers Association--is set for its second run, this time with a new introduction that responds to critics and extends the argument. In paperback, Unscientific America officially comes out June 8, and can be preordered online now. So if you missed the hardback, here's your second chance. We'll have more soon about the book, but we wanted to let you know now...to get ready.

You don’t have to look very far to find a multi-million pound industry supported by the scantiest of scientific evidence. Take “brain-training”, for example. This fledgling market purports to improve the brain’s abilities through the medium of number problems, Sudoku, anagrams and the like. The idea seems plausible and it has certainly made bestsellers out of games like Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training and Big Brain Academy. But a new study by Adrian Owen from Cambridge University casts doubt on the claims that these games can boost general mental abilities.

Owen recruited 11,430 volunteers through a popular science programme on the BBC called “Bang Goes the Theory”. He asked them to play several online games intended to improve an individual skill, be it reasoning, memory, planning, attention or spatial awareness. After six weeks, with each player training their brains on the games several times per week, Owen found that the games improved performance in the specific task, but not in any others.

That may seem like a victory but it’s a very shallow one. You would naturally expect people who repeatedly practice the same types of tests to eventually become whizzes at them. Indeed, previous studies have found that such improvements do happen. But becoming the Yoda of Sudoku doesn’t necessarily translate into better all-round mental agility and that’s exactly the sort of boost that the brain-training industry purports to provide. According to Owen’s research, it fails.

All of his recruits sat through a quartet of “benchmarking” tests to assess their overall mental skills before the experiment began. The recruits were then split into three groups who spent the next six weeks doing different brain-training tests on the BBC Lab UK website, for at least 10 minutes a day, three times a week. For any UK readers, the results of this study will be shown on BBC One tomorrow night (21 April) on Can You Train Your Brain?

The first group faced tasks that taxed their reasoning, planning and problem-solving abilities. The second group’s tasks focused on short-term memory, attention, visual and spatial abilities and maths (a set that were closest in scope to those found in common brain-training games). Finally, the third group didn’t have any specific tasks; instead, their job was to search the internet for the answers to a set of obscure questions, a habit that should be all too familiar to readers of this blog. In each case, the tasks became more difficult as the volunteers improved, so that they presented a constantly shifting challenge.

After their trials, all of the volunteers redid the four benchmarking tests. If their six weeks of training had improved their general mental abilities, their scores in these tests should have gone up. They did, but the rises were unspectacular to say the least. The effects were tiny and the third group who merely browsed for online information “improved” just as much as those who did the brain-training exercises (click here for raw data tables).

By contrast, all of the recruits showed far greater improvements on the tasks they were actually trained in. They could have just become better through repetition or they could have developed new strategies. Either way, their improvements didn’t transfer to the benchmarking tests, even when those were very similar to the training tasks. For example, the first group were well practised at reasoning tasks, but they didn’t do any better at the benchmarking test that involved reasoning skills. Instead, it was the second group, whose training regimen didn’t explicitly involve any reasoning practice, who ended up doing better in this area.

Owen chose the four benchmarking tests because they’ve been widely used in previous studies and they are very sensitive. People achieve noticeably different scores after even slight degrees of brain damage or low doses of brain-stimulating drugs. If the brain-training tests were improving the volunteers’ abilities, the tests should have reflected these improvements.

You could argue that the recruits weren’t trained enough to make much progress, but Owen didn’t find that the number of training sessions affected the benchmarking test scores (even though it did correlate with their training task scores). Consider this – one of the memory tasks was designed to train volunteers to remember larger strings of numbers. At the rate they were going, they would have taken four years of training to remember just one extra digit!

You could also argue that the third group who “trained” by searching the internet were also using a wide variety of skills. Comparing the others against this group might mask the effects of brain training. However, the first and second groups did show improvements in the specific skills they trained in; they just didn’t become generally sharper. And Owen says that the effects in all three groups were so small that even if the control group had sat around doing nothing, the brain-training effects still would have looked feeble by comparison.

These results are pretty damning for the brain-training industry. As Owen neatly puts, “Six weeks of regular computerized brain training confers no greater benefit than simply answering general knowledge questions using the internet.”

Is this the death knell for brain training? Not quite. Last year, Susanne Jaeggi from the University of Michigan found that a training programme could improve overall fluid intelligence if it focused on improving working memory – our ability to hold and manipulate information in a mental notepad, such as adding prices on a bill. People who practiced this task did better at tests that had nothing to do with the training task itself.

So some studies have certainly produced the across-the-board improvements that Owen failed to find. An obvious next step would be to try and identify the differences between the tasks used in the two studies and why one succeeded where the other failed.

Reference: Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature09042

A furious Apple has sent tech website Gizmodo a terse letter demanding the return of an iPhone prototype which the site procured. The device was found on a barstool in a pub in Redwood City, California, and was sold by the finder to Gizmodo for a reported sum of $5,000.

As Discoblog reported yesterday, the site immediately declared that the phone was the prototype for the 2010 model of the new iPhone 4G and wrote an in-depth article detailing all its new features. The article, accompanied by photos and video, drew an estimated 3 million viewers to the Web page in just 12 hours online. Some of those viewers must have been Apple’s lawyers.

In the letter dated yesterday, Apple’s senior counsel wrote: “It has come to our attention that Gizmodo is in possession of a device that belongs to Apple. This letter constitutes a formal request that you return the device to Apple. Please let me know where to pick up the unit.”

The phone, Gizmodo revealed, was found in a bar, camouflaged to look like a regular iPhone 3GS. But when the finder switched on the device, he found that the mobile Facebook app was logged in to the account of Gray Powell, an Apple software engineer whose last post on the social networking site was reportedly “I underestimated how good German beer is” [ABC News]. The guy who found the phone reportedly tried to get in touch with the person who lost it, to no avail. That is when the finder is reported to have started shopping the phone around; selling pictures of the phone first to Engadget and then selling the device to rival Gizmodo for $5,000.

Gizmodo’s subsequent blog post on the phone drew massive traffic, with paidcontent.org estimating that just one post generated more than 3.7 million page views, over 28,000 tweets and more than 1,870 comments [Fortune]. That’s when Apple swung into action, getting in touch with the site and asking for it to cough up the prototype. Gizmodo says it has since returned the phone to Apple on the condition that the company “take it easy on the kid who lost it.” Gizmodo’s editorial director Brian Lam added, “I don’t think he loves anything more than Apple.”

For a sneak peak at the new features of Apple’s next generation iPhone, go to Discoblog’s post: So, a Guy Walks Into a Bar… and Discovers Apple’s Latest iPhone.

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Image: Gizmodo

The final book club installment is still percolating, don’t worry. I’ve been traveling like a crazy person, which has pushed blogging into the background. In the meantime, here are a couple of interviews elsewhere in the infosphere.

First is a New York Times interview with me. It’s very short, but we cover a lot of ground — science education, time travel, entropy, the movies, and my love life. Such plenitude of topics in a tiny piece will necessarily lead to compression, and Jerry Coyne is already complaining that I give short shrift to the complicated reality of aging — and he’s right!

Second and more fun, in Wired I am on the other side of the interviewer’s table, talking to Lost creators Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. How cool is that? That was a great time, as we chatted excitedly about time, narrative, wormholes, fate and determinism, the role of science in television, and so on. These guys have given an incredible amount of thought into their show at every level — the characters, the mythology, and what it all means. And they wanted to ask me questions about cosmology and how scientists think, which I’m always happy to talk about. I got hooked on the show only after participating in Lost University, but now Tuesdays at 9:00 p.m. is the high point of my week. Only a few more episodes to go — which means that people who haven’t seen it can finally order the complete DVD selection, which is really the way to see it. (Just note that Season Three drags a bit, especially near the beginning.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Source

Jared Diamond famously argued in Guns, Germs and Steel that only a small set of organisms have the characteristics which make them viable domesticates. Diamond’s thesis is that the distribution of these organisms congenial to a mutualistic relationship with man shaped the arc of our species’ history and the variation in wealth that we see (though his a human-centric tale, we may enslave them, eat and use them as beasts of burden, but these are also species which have spread across the world with our expansion). This thesis has been challenged, but the bigger point of putting a focus on how humans relate to their domesticated animals, and the complex co-evolutionary path between the two, is something that we need to consider. In a plain biological and physical sense animals have utility; we eat them, and for thousands of years they were critical to our transportation networks. Some have argued that the rise of Islam, Arab monotheism, was contingent on the domestication of the camel (which opened up interior trade networks previously unaccessible). In The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World the argument is made that the distribution of the Indo-European languages has to do with the facility of Central Eurasian plainsmen with their steeds. And of course there is the domestic dog, arguably the one creature which is able to read our emotions as if they were a con-specific.

I suspect that the evolution and ethology of domesticated animals will offer a window into our own evolution and ethology. Konrad Lorenz famously believed that humans were going through their own process of domestication all the while that they were selecting organisms suited to their own needs. More pliable, less intelligent, faster growing and maturing, and so forth. Know thy companions, and know thyself, so to speak.

What about an animal as intelligent as a dog, but famously tasty? (the combination of the two characters causing some ethical tension in the minds of many) I speak here of the pig. A few years ago research came out which showed that pig-culture was introduced to Europe from the Middle East. That is, Middle Eastern pigs came with Middle Eastern people in all likelihood. But modern European pigs do not derive from these lineages, rather, by comparing modern genetic variation with ancient DNA the authors showed that the Neolithic pigs had been replaced by local breeds. Just as pigs can go feral and fend for themselves rather easily, it seems that their basic morph can be derived from wild boar populations easily as well (by contrast, it will perhaps take some effort to derive a pekingese from wolf populations, offering a reason for why small dogs seem to have emerged once). A new paper explores the evolutionary history and phylogeography of the pigs of the swine-loving societies par excellence, those of East Asia. Patterns of East Asian pig domestication, migration, and turnover revealed by modern and ancient DNA:

The establishment of agricultural economies based upon domestic animals began independently in many parts of the world and led to both increases in human population size and the migration of people carrying domestic plants and animals. The precise circumstances of the earliest phases of these events remain mysterious given their antiquity and the fact that subsequent waves of migrants have often replaced the first. Through the use of more than 1,500 modern (including 151 previously uncharacterized specimens) and 18 ancient (representing six East Asian archeological sites) pig (Sus scrofa) DNA sequences sampled across East Asia, we provide evidence for the long-term genetic continuity between modern and ancient Chinese domestic pigs. Although the Chinese case for independent pig domestication is supported by both genetic and archaeological evidence, we discuss five additional (and possibly) independent domestications of indigenous wild boar populations: one in India, three in peninsular Southeast Asia, and one off the coast of Taiwan. Collectively, we refer to these instances as “cryptic domestication,” given the current lack of corroborating archaeological evidence. In addition, we demonstrate the existence of numerous populations of genetically distinct and widespread wild boar populations that have not contributed maternal genetic material to modern domestic stocks. The overall findings provide the most complete picture yet of pig evolution and domestication in East Asia, and generate testable hypotheses regarding the development and spread of early farmers in the Far East.

They used conventional phylogeographic techniques to catalog the variation in modern populations, as well as supplementing their data set with ancient samples. Here the genetic variance they’re looking at is the mtDNA, the maternal lineage. Easy to get at, and easy to analyze (lots of it, and non-recombinant). In general they seem to have found that there is a common genetic heritage of East Asian domestic pigs, who are embedded geographically among varieties of wild pig who exhibit localized genetic variants. Additionally, there are other varieties of domestic pig in Southeast and South Asia who seem to have arisen from their own boar populations (though there is a Pacific pig variant which seems to have been from mainland Southeast Asia, but that original source population has now been replaced by East Asian pigs). Finallythey find a strong continuity between ancient domestic East Asian pigs and the modern populations. This is a contrast with the findings in European which exhibited disjunction between past and present. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that East Asian pigs are more genuinely indigenous, derived from local wild lineages with regional adaptations, while the Middle Eastern pigs brought to Europe were short-term kludges easily superseded by domesticates derived from European boar populations.

This figure shows the nature of haplotype sharing between wild and ancient & contemporary domestic pigs. The larger the pie, the more frequent the haplotype. The slices of the pie by color show wild (black), ancient (red) and modern domestic (white) shares of that haplotype. The line across the networks show the putative separation between the genetic variants relatively private to the wild populations, and those which lean toward a mix of wild & domesticates. The wild populations seem more diverse. 45 haplotypes out of 167 samples are found only in wild specimens, 92 haplotypes out of 339 samples are found only in domestic specimens, and 21 haplotypes are found in both 87 wild and 582 domestic pigs. One assumes that the domesticates are derived from a small subset of wild pigs, and that population underwent demographic expansion within the last 10,000 years. That’s not too different from our species, we’re descended from a small subset of H. sapiens, and we’ve undergone major demographic expansion. Our “wild” cousins among the great apes tend to have a lot more genetic variation even within their small populations because their demographic history has presumably been a bit more staid. As man was, so shall he turn his domesticates. And yet a major difference between the domestic pig and man seems to be that some variant of multiregionalism, the evolution of modern pigs from local lineages, and their subsequent hybridization to produce a genetically unified species, has been operative. One major caution with these studies is that they’re looking at mtDNA. The dog genomics work has been modified and overturned when they shifted from the mtDNA that most phylogeographers focus on to the total genome. One does not know the evolutionary history of an organism by one locus alone.

The pig is a peculiar beast, retaining its feral nature as evident by the periodic reemergence of morphs from released domestic populations which have no difficulty in going “wild.” There are 4 million feral hogs in the United States, and they can get quite large indeed. What would the pekingese do in a world without man? Probably be some other creature’s meal. But generalists like the pigs would no doubt flourish. The story of the pig is a story of piggybacking, so to speak, on the success of the upright ape and spreading across the world on the backs of the other white meat.

Let me finish from the author’s conclusion:

The evidence presented here suggests the following evolutionary history of pigs in East Asia. Having originally evolved in ISEA [Island Southeast Asia], wild Sus scrofa migrated (without human assistance) across the Kra Isthmus on the MalayPeninsula into Mainland Asia. From here, they spread across the landscape and, after traveling over land bridges, onto the islands of Japan, the Ryukyu chain, Taiwan, and Lanyu where they evolved unique mitochondrial signatures. After millennia of hunting and gathering, a major biocultural transition occurred early in the Holocene during which human populations in East Asia domesticated a variety of plants and animals, including pigs. This process took place at least once in the Yellow River drainage basin wheremilletmay have been first domesticated as early as 10,000 B.P…and may have also taken place independently in the downstream Yangtze River region where rice may have been domesticated…Two things are clear from the ancient DNA evidence presented here. First, unlike Europe, modern Chinese domestic pigs are the direct descendants of the first domestic pigs in this region. Second, despite the occurrence of a genetically distinct population of wild boar throughout modern China, this population has neither been incorporated into domestic stocks nor exterminated.

Citation: Larson, G., Liu, R., Zhao, X., Yuan, J., Fuller, D., Barton, L., Dobney, K., Fan, Q., Gu, Z., Liu, X., Luo, Y., Lv, P., Andersson, L., & Li, N. (2010). Patterns of East Asian pig domestication, migration, and turnover revealed by modern and ancient DNA Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0912264107

Image credit: NASA

Yesterday came the announcement of an unprecedented collaboration to create climate change journalism. Meet The Climate Desk:
The Climate Desk is a journalistic collaboration dedicated to exploring the impact—human, environmental, economic, political—of a changing climate. The partners are The Atlantic, Center for Investigative Reporting, Grist, Mother Jones, Slate, Wired, and PBS's new public-affairs show Need To Know. There has never been a joining of forces like this...but there is every reason to expect it will produce much valuable content. Moreover, The Climate Desk's expressed raison d'etre makes four points that I heartily agree with:
1) Climate change is slow-moving, vast, and overwhelming for news organizations to grapple with. 2) What coverage there is tends to be fractured and compartmentalized—science, technology, politics, and business aspects are covered by different teams, or "desks" of reporters, despite the intrinsic connections. 3) Coverage is too often fixated on imperiled wildlife, political gamesmanship, or the "debate" over the existence of climate change, all at the expense of advancing the bigger story—how we're going to address, mitigate, or adapt to it. 4) Cuts to news organizations are making matters worse. Yes, indeed, yes. So go check out The Climate Desk, and become a follower. We need all the help we ...

I love me some comets.

I’ve seen quite a few in my time. Some were faint smudges in a big telescope’s eyepiece, some seen only in distant spacecraft images, and some so bright they were obvious and awesome to my naked eye.

They used to be considered harbingers, omens up for interpretation by mystics and people looking for reasons things happened the way they do. In reality, comets are just a class of objects in our solar system along with planets, asteroids, dust, and one biggish star.

Hmm. Did I say "just"? That’s unfair. They are gorgeous, interesting objects, worthy of study. And 100 years ago today — April 20, 1910 — we got a pretty good look at the most famous of them all, Comet Halley, as it passed the Earth at a distance of just 23 million km (14 million miles). It got so bright that it was obvious even when seen from cities. As geometry would have it, the Earth even passed through the comet’s tail, sparking fears of widespread death (cyanogen was detected in the comet, making people think it would poison them). It was the talk of the planet, featured in magazines and papers across the globe. For your history enjoyment, here is one of those articles from the 1910, transcribed by James Brooks. It gives a great flavor of the times.

To celebrate this remarkable centennial anniversary, I have put together Ten Things You Don’t Know About Comets. I imagine some readers will know some of these, and some will know all ten, but if you do you can still enjoy the pretty pictures — and make sure you click on them to embiggen ‘em. And if you like this, I have several others, too (Ten Things You Don’t Know About… the Earth, Black Holes, Hubble, the Sun, Pluto, and the Milky Way), so check ‘em all out and see how many things you don’t know.

ENTER TEN THINGS YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT COMETS

This is a quick announcement to say that you might experience a slightly reduced service on this blog in terms of not responding to comments or fixing errors. I am currently in Perth and stranded by the continued eruption of Eyshsknaahskkehallyffelejokull. I have a roof and somewhere to work during the day, but everything’s a bit surreal and disjointed with no real word as to when the homeward flight will happen.

There’ll still be posts though. Probably.

E

UPDATE: Picture perfect landing, welcome home!

Deorbit burn complete. Discovery to land at Kennedy Space Center at 09:08 ET.

It’s all but a sure bet the landing will be today, the question is: where is it going to land?

The first Kennedy Space Center opportunity was waved off due to weather constraints.  It sounds like the next orbit will probably see a deorbit burn and a return.  This one is interesting because they can choose either Edwards (landing at 09:01 ET) or Kennedy (09:08 ET) with just a few changes in flight logistics.

The training aircraft are up taking air-data for landing at both locations.

As of 06:57 am it appears KSC is going to be the spot.  Deorbit burn to occur at just after 8 am ET.

Below are the groundtracks for orbit 238 landing:

Orbit 238 groundtrack. Credit: NASA

Orbit 238 groundtrack. Credit: NASA