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Thousands of people have applied to with NASA to be astronauts since 1959, but less than 400 have been chosen. The lucky few must complete about four years of training before getting launched into space. This training includes miles of sustained running in 120-pound space suits while holding weights, enduring extreme temperatures, and being plunged into frigid water, dropped from airplanes, and flung about in motion simulators. All this punishment makes for great pictures, allowing the rest of us to simply watch and perhaps feel a little better about being earthbound.

All images courtesy NASA

1957: The Gimbal Rig was engineered to simulate the tumbling and rolling motions of a space capsule and train the Mercury astronauts to control roll, pitch and yaw by activating nitrogen jets, used as brakes and bring the vehicle back into control. This facility was built at the Lewis Research Center, now John H. Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field.

It’s up. This time we discuss lactose intolerance in ancient Swedes. Dave has submitted it to iTunes, so I’ll put a notice up when that’s ready.

Ever wonder what might be the perfect vehicle to get around from point A to point B without getting out of your seat?

Introducing Honda’s U3-X Personal Mobility Vehicle–a vehicle that looks like a cross between a Segway and an electric wheelchair. Shaped like a figure 8, the device is omni-directional—it can move forwards, backwards, or even sideways. All you have to do is plop yourself on the device’s cushioned leather seat and then as PC Mag’s Lance Ulanoff describes, some smart tech does the rest:

Since the U3-X balances itself (a trick learned from Honda’s ASIMO robot), you can simply hold the handle and roll it along. Its lithium-ion battery holds an hour charge and features a rather unique omni-directional wheel system (called an Omni Traction Drive System) that can roll forward on the full-size wheel or sideways on dozens of little wheels that sit inside the larger wheel. Balancing is provided by accelerometers and sensors that detect the rider’s center of gravity and make constant adjustments to keep the U3-X and rider in perfect balance. Riding is simply a matter of leaning, slightly, in the direction you want to go.

It’s also a portable fella, weighing 22 pounds, which can be packed up neatly and stowed away in a car or under the desk.

But don’t expect to see the Personal Mobility Vehicle zipping across offices anytime soon, as it is still in prototype stage and not available in the market.

Bloggers, meanwhile, have already jumped on the prototype, pointing out that Ducktales’ fans would recognize Honda’s offering to be similar to GizmoDuck’s armor.

Here’s Honda’s own, more extensive, and sort of odd, video teaser (which is just begging for some spoof captioning):

My post on the religious make up of the Supreme Court is getting a bit of traffic spike due to current events. Specifically, John Paul Stevens, the high court’s lone Protestant, is set to retire, and two out of the three front runners are Jewish. Let’s assume that the future nominee is not Protestant (Elena Kagan, who is Jewish, is arguably the first choice). Statistically this is curious because ~50% of the the American population is Protestant. Assuming that a a Supreme Court justice is randomly drawn from the population you have a 0.20% probability that this would occur in a sequence of nine draws. Of course if Kagan is the nominee and confirmed all of the justices will be graduates of Ivy League universities, so there’s nothing random about the selection process.

Some of the commenters on the first post observed that the pipeline is probably going to shape the demographics of the high court. That is, elite law schools may simply have fewer Protestants than Jews or Catholics. I don’t know about that, but let’s look at Harvard University’s total demographic balance. I don’t see Catholic or Protestant breakdowns, but ethnic breakdown is public:

69% white
16% Asian
8% black
7% Hispanic

Hillel estimates that ~25% of Harvard’s undergraduate student body is Jewish. This means that no more than 44% of student body are white Christians (lower than the national average interestingly). Let’s use the American Religious Identification Survey to estimate Protestant/Catholic numbers according to proportions by each ethnic group. I get 47% Protestant and 17% Catholic at Harvard. This is probably an overestimate for both since I suspect that the irreligious would be a higher proportion within the Harvard student body than the general population, but the ratio between proportions may be more accurate. There are major caveats here, as I think the Catholic numbers are probably somewhat higher because of regional biases and such.

Why there are two, and possibly soon three, Jews on the high court doesn’t require much thinking to understand. There are a lot of Jews at elite academic institutions which produce future justices. With the filters we know of two or three Jews seems entirely reasonable, even expected. But I doubt there’s an enormous dearth of Protestants coming out of elite law schools. Rather, if there is a reason that we see so many Catholics, I think has to do with what some commenters were pointing out in regards to George W. Bush wanting to make sure he nominated people who had the “right” attitudes on abortion and the like. There of course plenty of Protestants with conservative attitudes, but they’re evangelical Christians who are underrepresented at elite institutions.

Which brings me to the point of this post, and the reason for the title: the exact numbers of Protestants, Catholics and Jews is pretty much irrelevant today in the United States. That is because Americans who are Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and even irreligious, have a fundamentally Protestant understand of how one “does” religion. To understand how and why I say American Catholics and Jews have a Protestant understanding of religion I recommend In Search of an American Catholicism: A History of Religion and Culture in Tension and American Judaism: A History. In Catholicism and American Freedom: A History John T. McGreevy outlines the realignment in the 1950s of Jews with elite east coast Protestants in the culture wars against traditional Catholicism, a reversal of the historical white ethnic coalitions within the Democratic party which emerged in the wake of the Civil War. In The Impossibility of Religious Freedom Winnifred Sullivan argues that American jurisprudence in the domain of church-state separation and accommodation is rooted in Protestant presuppositions. Finally, in The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, Civil Warfare, And The Triumph Of Anglo-America Kevin Phillips asserts that American Protestantism is fundamentally a dissenting faith which was aligned with the Whig party. I believe that this is most precisely the influence which frames how Americans of all faiths and no faiths understand religion.

And that is why it doesn’t matter if there’s a Protestant in name on the high court, Americans view religion through a lens which dissenting Protestants of the English speaking world pioneered in the 18th and 19th century. Recall that the Baptists of Virginia were aligned with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in their drive to disentangle the state from the church.

This means that on the coarse level you can’t tell much about a person when you find out they are Protestant or Catholic. Their views range across the full arc of American public opinion, and their conception of what their religious tradition entails is going to be strongly inflected by their politics. Social justice Protestants and Catholics arguably share much more with each other than with their more conservative or traditionalist co-religionists.

I’ll make this concrete and quantitative. The General Social Survey has a range of questions it asks. I looked at four of them which are “hot button”, constrained the time period from 1990-2008, and examined a range of religious groups and how they shook out. I combined some categories, so for Protestants the Evangelical includes Fundamentalists and Mainline includes Liberals (these two categories are for Protestants only). For Methodists, Presbyterians and Lutherans I threw all of the various sub-denominations into the same pot. I do know that there’s a lot of division between conservatives and liberals by sub-denomination in these groups, but I wanted a general sense of denominational diversity at a coarser scale.

The variables are:

ABANY- “Please tell me whether or not you think it should be possible for a pregnant woman to obtain a legal abortion if the woman wants it for any reason?”

HOMOSEX – “What about sexual relations between two adults of the same sex?” [Always wrong to not wrong at all]

PRAYER – “The United States Supreme Court has ruled that no state or local government may require the reading of the Lor’s Prayer or Bible verses in public schools. What are your views on this – do you approve or disapprove of the court ruling?”

SPKATH – “There are always some people whose ideas are considered bad or dangerous by other people. For instance, somebody who is against churches and religion….if such a person wanted to make a speech in your (city/town/community) against churches and religion, should he be allowed to speak, or not?”

Below all the proportions are for the more liberal response. Some of them, such HOMOSEX, have a wide range of potential responses and I simply picked out the most extreme liberal one (in that case, that homosexual sex is not wrong at all).

Here are the raw percentages:

The variables are strongly correlated with each other, as is evident in this correlation matrix:

I took each variable and simply averaged them out into a “Social issues index.” The higher the index, the more liberal.

There are two big take aways from this chart:

1) The group “Protestant” has a huge range of views contingent on denomination or theological conservatism

2) The group “Catholic” is solidly in the middle of the distribution between very liberal groups (Jews) and very conservative ones (Evangelicals)

As a point of fact it is obviously not correct to say that all Catholics are moderates. Rather, the class “Catholic” includes many different viewpoints, from those presumably as conservative as Evangelicals to as liberal as Jews. Similarly, though Jews are very liberal, the small orthodox minority is often very conservative (Eric Cantor, who is minority whip in the House is an example of this). And, unless one is a member of Opus Dei, a Hasidic Jew or Theonomist, arguably the vast majority of Catholics, Jews and Protestants in the United States share common presuppositions about the outer bounds of what is religion in a pluralistic society.

Addendum: Just so readers know, I’m really not the type too concerned about the race, religion or sex of Supreme Court nominees personally. As a straight atheist brown libertarianish man with a “Muslim name” I’ve never gotten into the habit of wishing for mentors, colleagues or friends were people who I could “identify with,” because frankly I’m a very special person with a unique perspective and experience which is unlikely to be replicated. This doesn’t change the structure of my argument above, but I thought I would head off any bidding war as to the relevance of diversity X or Y in the comments under the preconception that the person writing the post here actually cares about such things. My main concern is intelligence, curiosity, and frankly in the case of something with political importance, ideological affinity. That’s it. The rest are accidents. Though broader American society disagrees with my own viewpoint on this issue.

Astronomers keep turning up new exoplanets, and as the count rises, they keep edging closer to finding worlds like our own pale blue dot. Astronomer Jay Farihi thinks Earth-like worlds might be even more common in the universe than previously expected, based on evidence from rocky planets few astronomers are studying: The ones that don’t exist anymore.

Farihi’s research subjects are white dwarfs. In our galaxy, about 90 percent of stars will end their lives in this incredibly dense state once the star sheds its outer material and only the core remains. This is the fate of our sun. White dwarfs usually have atmospheres composed of the light elements helium and hydrogen, as the heavy elements have settled to the core. But about 20 percent of white dwarfs are different, showing heavy elements—what astronomers call “metals”—in their atmospheres. For decades, astronomers attributed this metallic pollution to the interstellar medium, the thin gas that permeates the space between stars. The idea was that white dwarfs were old stars that had been on several orbits around the Milky Way and had picked up bits of the interstellar medium as they went around [Space.com]. But Farihi thinks those elements are evidence of something else.

His hypothesis: the heavy elements came not from the interstellar medium, but rather from the remains of rocky planets that once orbited the stars back in their younger days. For a study he presented at the Royal Astronomical Society meeting in Scotland this week, he looked at 146 white dwarfs that showed calcium pollution in their atmosphere, and which haven’t hung around near the interstellar medium anytime in the recent past. If the heavy elements in these stars had come from the medium, he argues, it would’ve sunk to the core long ago—it wouldn’t be dancing around with the light elements in the upper atmosphere. Ruling out the interstellar medium, Farihi says there are two possibilities: the debris could come from an asteroid belt similar to our own, which essential represents a planet that didn’t form, or the pieces of a shattered planet [Space.com].

If he’s right it could be further evidence that rocky planets are rather common around stars like our sun. The proportion could be even greater than 20 per cent, as some planetary systems might be entirely destroyed and leave no trace rather than leaving behind a debris ring to pollute their parent star [New Scientist].

Farihi also argues that white dwarfs could hold secrets about long-gone watery planets, too. He saw a lot of stars with atmospheres of nearly pure helium. But atmospheres that showed hydrogen traces also tended to contain the heavier elements. If the two are connected, he surmises, then the hydrogen would have come on board the same rocks as the metals, and that means the rocks could have carried water as well.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Burnout, a preview of the sun’s death
DISCOVER: Sliced: Inside a Supernova
DISCOVER: One Spectacular Stellar Death
80beats: Detoured Light from Tycho’s Supernova Finally Makes It To Earth

Image: NASA / Casey Reed

Stupid reality, always mucking about with our ideas. How dare it!

In this case, reality is interfering with how we think planets form around stars. And the monkey in the wrench belongs to a handful of newly discovered planets that go around their stars the wrong way.

That’s an artist’s illustration of one of these planets. As you can see in the diagram, the star rotates left-to-right, but the planet orbits right-to-left. That’s a bit of a puzzler, and here’s why.

First, how do we think planets form? If you look at my last post, you’ll see a giant cloud of gas and dust collapsing in places to form stars. The stars form from little knots of overdense regions in the cloud. As the material collapses, any slight amount of rotation it has — from eddies and vortices in the gas, say — get amplified (think ice skater as she draws her arms in and spins faster). Random collisions of particles inside the cloud tend to drop more of the matter toward the center, along the equator of the spin, forming a flat disk there.

The disk spins, rotating around its center like a DVD (though stuff toward the center goes around faster than stuff near the outer edge). The middle of the disk is where the star forms. Farther out, local eddies and vortices can form planets. But the important thing to note is that in this scenario, everything spins in the same way. If the disk appears to be spinning clockwise, say, then the star will spin that same way, the planets will orbit that same way, and the planets will spin that same way. We’re pretty sure this is how things work because that’s pretty much what’s happening in our own solar system.

This theory has been tested by observation and by increasingly complex modeling. Sometimes there are problems with it, but in general new ideas have been added that fix those problems, and over time we’ve been pretty happy overall with the idea that stars and planets form this way.

However, a bunch of newly discovered planets have messed this nice idea up. They orbit their stars the wrong way!

How do we know? That part is pretty cool. First, these are transiting planets. As the illustration above shows, from our point of view the planets pass directly in front of their stars every time they make an orbit. When that happens, they block a fraction (usually around 1%) of the star, and we see that as a slight dip in the light detected from the star. A lot of planets have been found this way, and it’s a pretty good method of finding planets.

Now picture the star in the image above. It’s spinning, so the left side of the star in the diagram appears to be headed toward us, and the right side moving away from us. But that means there’s a Doppler shift, a slight change in the color of the light from the star. Just like a car roaring past you makes that "EEEEEEeoooooooow!" sound, light changes pitch if the source is moving toward or away from us, and that change in pitch is seen as a shift in color.

The light from the part of the star rotating toward us shifts a bit to the blue, and the side moving away shifts a bit to the red. That shift is very small, but measurable.

But the planet messes that up. As it transits (moves in front of) the star, it blocks first one side, and then the other. If it orbits the star in the same direction as the star spins, it will first block the blueshifted side, and then a bit later the redshifted side. That change in the starlight can be seen and measured.

But for some of these planets just discovered, it’s all backwards! The redshifted side gets blocked first, and then the blueshifted side. That means the planet is going around the star the wrong way. The press release about this discovery has a nice video which makes this a bit more clear.

Does this mean our theory is wrong? Well, not exactly. It probably means that overall the theory is solid, but that there are exceptions, modifications, we don’t understand. Most likely the planets that form around other stars start off revolving around the star the same way, but then some sort of gravitational interaction with other forming planets knocks them off course. Some of these newly discovered systems do appear to have outer planets that could do the trick; the tug-of-war resulting from a close encounter could slingshot one of the planets into a retrograde (backwards) orbit.

This would play hell with the system. The planet knocked backwards would migrate in close to the star, tossing other smaller planets either into the star or out of the system entirely. If that’s true, then it means these weird planet systems won’t have many planets, just the one backwards-revolving one and one or two outer planets. That’s a nice prediction, in fact, and one that can be confirmed or falsified with more observations.

And it’s not like this is a rare event: fully 6 out of 27 systems appear to have these backwards-moving planets! That means that however these planets get knocked about, it has to happen fairly often. Obviously, we need to observe a lot more of these systems so we can get better statistics, and be able to see what similarities and differences they have with each other. That’s the best way to figure out what the heck is going on.

What does all this mean? Well, it means, as usual, that Nature is a bit more clever than we are, thinking up all sorts of ways of forming planets and systems of planets that didn’t initially occur to us. But that’s how science works. Things get complicated, so the first thing to do is simplify. Make your idea general. Then start adding complexity to it to explain what you actually see. As observation techniques get better, the idea has to get modified to account for new data.

In this case, it’s a pretty big modification, but that’s not surprising: we’re new at this planet finding thing. We’re bound to get plenty of surprises for a while, until we have a better grasp of the situation. Surprises are good: they help us test the theory, they help us understand reality a little better, and they help us learn a little bit more.

But they’re also fun. Who wants a Universe we understand completely and utterly? How boring that would be! Science is all about peeking around the next corner and seeing what’s there. And there are always more corners. Always.

ESO/L. Calçada

Since Twitter blew up into the mainstream last year, it’s become rife with teenybopper types who join the microblogging service just to follow their favorite airheaded celebrities. Which raises the question: Which airheaded celebrity has the, uh, most unsophisticated teenybopper followers?

Comedian and geek Tom Scott got his creative juices cranking to create Stupid Fight–a website that lets you compare whose Twitter followers are dumber. This is great, in case you’ve ever wondered what sort of a person would follow actor Ashton Kutcher or all-around diva Kim Kardashian and try to send them messages.

Scott proclaims on his website:

FACT: A lot of people on Twitter are stupid. Many of these people follow celebrities and try to send them messages. But which celebrity’s fans are most stupid? It’s time to find out.

The idea itself is pretty simple. Scott explains:

Stupid Fight can’t go out and administer an intelligence test to each person that’s sending messages to a celebrity. So instead, it estimates based on several stupid indicators. Are they using twenty exclamation marks in a row? Do they endlessly use the abbreviation ‘OMG’? Do they seem incapable of working out where their Shift key is? These indicators have a strong correlation with the message, and its sender, being stupid.

Just go to the site, plug in the names of two people you want to compare and bam! The indicator tells you whose followers are dumber. Of course, the caveat is that this is not a scientific process and Scott himself says, it’s a lot like calculating your Body Mass Index: It works perfectly for some and not at all for a few others.

So, when we plugged in Glenn Beck to compare his followers with Rachel Maddow’s, here’s what we found.

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Image: Stupid Fight

Last week, Lee Berger unveiled for the world the stunningly intact fossil finds (that his 9-year-old son actually made while with his dad in South Africa) from what he is calling a new hominid species, Australopithecus sediba. Yesterday, he announced another surprise: Berger says that brain scans just finished in France show that insects that might have feasted on the person after death, and even possibly a piece of the hominid’s brain, may be preserved inside the recovered skull.

Experts at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in France have been analyzing the find. The ESRF uses a technique known as micro-tomography to assemble its images. This involves taking a series of a high-contrast, high-resolution X-ray radiographs of the target fossil in rotation to build up a 3D representation [BBC News]. The scientists were trying to study the teeth; the skull comes from a young boy, Berger says, and they hoped tooth analysis could help them pin down his exact age at death. But the 3-D representation revealed these other unexpected finds, including a low-density cavity in the skull that could—could—represent a brain remnant.

Soft tissue like the brain, of course, does not usually fossilize. But in this unusual case, ESRF examiner Paul Tafforeau suggests that perhaps the brain shrank after being decayed by bacteria, leaving the odd cavity that his scanners picked up. “One way to explain that cavity is that when this individual died, it was mummified, and the mummification made the brain shrink by losing water, leading to an odd shape,” Tafforeau said. “Later you had water with sediment come up, fossilizing the individual and filling the brain case, but you still had that brain remnant inside” [LiveScience]. If it’s true, the brain remnant is only one-twentieth the size of the original brain, and wouldn’t prove particularly helpful in reconstructing the structure, and unfortunately it’s unlikely DNA would be preserved.

And then there are the insects. Three fossilized insect eggs, each about a tenth of an inch (two or three millimeters) large, were seen within the skull, potentially hatching larvae that fed on the flesh of the hominid after death, researchers added. Two eggs belonged to wasps and apparently had already hatched, while the third, a fly egg, remained unopened [LiveScience]. While Tafforeau says the density would suggest fossil insects, he can’t rule out that they are modern insects that sneaked in until all the data comes in. Both he and Berger are giving few details as their work continues to go through the peer-review process.

Berger also found some fossils from a female Australopithecus sediba he’d like to study in the same way. But for now, the two are traveling separately for security reasons.

Related Content:
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Image: European Synchrotron Radiation Facility

Last night I was at a bar with my new friend Adam discussing emo music and whether it emerged out of Seattle grunge or something else altogether. Personally I can appreciate Bright Eyes once in a while, but on the whole I just don't get it. After shifting to 70s punk--which I can really get into--it happened...
"So I googled you. Science, eh?" Adam grins. Here we go again. "Uh, yeah." "I gotta ask. Climate change. Prove yourself. Make me believe."
And it starts... You see, I'm used to this challenge. Climate change might as well be the Yankees vs the Sox. It's a pub conversation about who's 'winning' when everyone is really loses unless we act. And I can already tell Adam's a bright guy. He's a skeptical thinker who doesn't have access to journal articles, but does hear the news media fallout. He's got a lot of questions about so-called email conspiracies, but at least he's interested in a discussion. So we have another drink and I tell him a little more about what's going on in oceans, on land, and in the atmosphere. He listens politely, and soon we're back to Kurt Cobain.

Welcome to this week’s installment of the From Eternity to Here book club. We’re on to Chapter Fourteen, “Inflation and the Multiverse.” Only one more episode to go! It’s like the upcoming finale of Lost, with a slightly lower level of message-board frenzy.

Excerpt:

There is a lot to say about eternal inflation, but let’s just focus on one consequence: While the universe we see looks very smooth on large scales, on even larger (unobservable) scales the universe would be very far from smooth. The large-scale uniformity of our observed universe sometimes tempts cosmologists into assuming that it must keep going like that infinitely far in every direction. But that was always an assumption that made our lives easier, not a conclusion from any rigorous chain of reasoning. The scenario of eternal inflation predicts that the universe does not continue on smoothly as far as it goes; far beyond our observable horizon, things eventually begin to look very different. Indeed, somewhere out there, inflation is still going on. This scenario is obviously very speculative at this point, but it’s important to keep in mind that the universe on ultra-large scales is, if anything, likely to be very different than the tiny patch of universe to which we have immediate access.

This is a fairly straightforward chapter, trying to explain how inflation works. Given that by this point the reader already is familiar with dark energy making the universe accelerate, and with the fine-tuning problem represented by the low entropy of the early universe, the basic case isn’t that hard to put together. Of course we have an additional non-traditional goal as well: to illuminate the tension between the usual story we tell about inflation and the “information-conserving evolution of our comoving patch” story we told in the last chapter. Here’s where I argue that inflation is not the panacea it’s sometimes presented as, primarily because it’s not that easy to take all the degrees of freedom within the universe we observe and pack them delicately into a tiny patch dominated by false vacuum energy. Put that way, it doesn’t seem all that surprising, but too many people don’t want to get the message.

This is also the chapter where we first introduce the idea of the multiverse. (The multiverse occupies less than 15 pages or so in the entire book, but to read some reactions you would think it was the dominant theme. The publicists and I must share some of the blame for that perspective, as it is an irresistible thing to mention when talking about the book.) Mostly I wanted to demystify the idea of the multiverse, presenting it as a perfectly natural outgrowth of the idea of inflation. What we’re supposed to make of it is of course a different story.

Looking back, I think the chapter is a mixed success. I like the gripping narrative of the opening pages. But the actual explanation of inflation is kind of workmanlike and uninspiring. I really put a lot of effort into coming up with novel explanations of entropy and quantum mechanics, which didn’t simply rehash the expositions found in other books; but for inflation I didn’t try as hard. Partly simply because of looming deadlines, partly because I was eager to get to the rest of the book. Hopefully the basic points are more or less clear.

A few years ago I was hearing a lot about mirror neurons. There was a hyped up article on The Edge website about them, MIRROR NEURONS and imitation learning as the driving force behind “the great leap forward” in human evolution. But I haven’t heard much since then, though I’m not neuro nerd so perhaps I’m out of the loop. So I pass on this link with interest, Single-Neuron Responses in Humans during Execution and Observation of Actions:

Direct recordings in monkeys have demonstrated that neurons in frontal and parietal areas discharge during execution and perception of actions…Because these discharges “reflect” the perceptual aspects of actions of others onto the motor repertoire of the perceiver, these cells have been called mirror neurons. Their overlapping sensory-motor representations have been implicated in observational learning and imitation, two important forms of learning [9]. In humans, indirect measures of neural activity support the existence of sensory-motor mirroring mechanisms in homolog frontal and parietal areas…other motor regions…and also the existence of multisensory mirroring mechanisms in nonmotor region…We recorded extracellular activity from 1177 cells in human medial frontal and temporal cortices while patients executed or observed hand grasping actions and facial emotional expressions. A significant proportion of neurons in supplementary motor area, and hippocampus and environs, responded to both observation and execution of these actions. A subset of these neurons demonstrated excitation during action-execution and inhibition during action-observation. These findings suggest that multiple systems in humans may be endowed with neural mechanisms of mirroring for both the integration and differentiation of perceptual and motor aspects of actions performed by self and others.

ScienceDaily has a hyped-up headline, First Direct Recording Made of Mirror Neurons in Human Brain.

Update: Neuroskepticcritic has much more.

As discussed on the latest episode of Point of Inquiry (stream, download), Eli Kintisch's Hack the Planet isn't the only book just out on this subject. There is also How to Cool the Planet by Jeff Goodell, author of Big Coal and a writer for Rolling Stone. This in and of itself is a phenomenon--the two books were clearly racing each other and ended up coming out at about the same time. The question is, is that timing right? I have no doubt we are going to have a big public debate about geoengineering at some point in the future. At that time, one or both of these books could be considered essential reading. However, thus far, neither seems to be having its big publishing breakout moment. Indeed, neither has any reviews yet on Amazon. I myself can't speak to the books' comparative quality: I was only sent, and have only read, Kintisch's, and it's excellent. For all I know, Goodell's is equally worthy. If you're interested, I recommend that you buy both of them. But you are not the general public. And as we've learned, 97 percent of Americans have no clue what geoengineering even is. They all ought to be reading these ...

Every now and again a new picture from a space telescope comes down the pipe^* that’s a little bit different, a little bit of a step to the left. I think this image counts:

Kewwwwl. That’s the Rosette Nebula as seen by the Herschel far infrared observatory. The Rosette is a huge star forming region, and one that’s been around a while. In optical images its name is obvious; it resembles a huge flower in space. The central region looks empty, and that’s because it mainly is: fierce winds from newborn stars have excavated a giant bubble in the center of the nebula. Acting like a snowplow, they have pushed the material from the middle of the gas cloud out to the edges, where it piles up.

That’s what you’re seeing here; the inner wall of the nebula. This image is a long walk from the optical, though. It’s false color, where blue, green, and red represent the light from the nebula at 70, 160, and 250 microns. For comparison, the reddest light your eye can see is less than one micron in wavelength, so this is way far out in the IR. The reddest light in the image is coming from dust that’s only a few degrees above absolute zero!

The bright spots you see peppering the image are cocoons of gas and dust surrounding stars in the process of birth. They’re not alone; see the finger-like tendrils all pointing off to the right? Those are regions of slightly denser dust which have resisted the winds from the central stars of the nebula (off the edge of this image to the right). Like sandbars forming behind rocks in a stream, these fingers indicate that the tips are denser, and are probably where stars are forming as well.

What I can’t get over is how three-dimensional this image looks! It’s like the mouth to Hell from Poltergeist. Well, a little bit. If the mouth were 5000 light years away, 100 light years (a quadrillion km, or 600 trillion miles!) across, and kept at a chilly -260° C.

That’s a big, cold, far away mouth.

And the analogy isn’t fair, anyway. In the movie, that mouth was where you went after you die, but in reality, this cavernous cloud is where life gets started. Maybe our own Sun was born in a nebula like this; some research indicates it may have been. So while this picture may look a little bit frightening, to me it’s comforting. Even sweet.

After all, who can resist a nursery full of babies?

Image Credit: ESA/PACS & SPIRE Consortium/HOBYS Key Programme Consortia

For those of you in Wisconsin, apparently there was a heckuva meteor that lit up the skies there around 10:00 p.m. local time April 14, an hour ago as I write this. WKOW has reports and some great shots of it. It was terrifically bright, and there are reports of sonic booms being heard. Some reports are saying that was the sound of impact, but I doubt it; it’s far more likely to have been from the supersonic passage of the rock through the air.

If you have links, reports, or pictures, feel free to leave a comment. If you have good measurements of it (including where it was on the sky with some precision) then report it to the International Meteor Organization, which can help lead scientists to find meteorites if there are any. It also allows scientists to estimate the orbit of the object, which can help tie it to known objects like asteroids or comets.

I have to add this: I found out about it because an old post of mine about a fireball over Wisconsin in 2007 suddenly was getting a lot of traffic and new comments. Someone must have linked to it (currently I don’t have the stats so I’m not sure who did, but thanks whoever it was!) and people are leaving great reports about it.

Anyway, hopefully folks’ll find this post and leave comments here. Welcome!

“BACKGROUND: The Arts are replete with examples of presaged events of the future. Since a unique glimpse of the 23rd century is afforded by the television series Star Trek, a survey of the toxin-related events as chronicled by the crew of the USS Starship Enterprise may provide insight to prepare toxicologists for the future. METHODS: An investigation of the logs of the Enterprise was undertaken for the years 2266 to 2269 which were part of its first 5-year mission. Internet sites, published databases, and selected recorded episodes from the original Star Trek television series were searched for poisonings or toxin-related incidents. RESULTS: Out of the 79 Star Trek episodes, 28 (35%) involved toxin-related incidents. A total of 31 poisoning incidents were documented with 13 environmental, 9 intentional, 5 unintentional, and 4 homicidal circumstances. Biotoxins (10 incidents) were the most frequently involved toxin followed by neurotoxins (9), radiation (3), cytotoxins (3), temporal toxins (3), acids (2), and phytotoxins (1). Of these cases, 2 involved hazardous materials incidents, 1 was contamination of food, and 3 involved therapeutic misadventures. CONCLUSIONS: Many of the circumstances encountered in poisonings of the future will likely be similar to contemporary reasons, but the nature of the toxins will differ. Clinical toxicologists should prepare for the future by increasing their study of molecular biology, comparative medicine, physics, and history.”

Image: flickr/hunterseakerhk

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When it comes to religion, I’m more interested in scientific and philosophical questions — Does God exist? Can science say anything about the supernatural? — than in sociological or political ones — Is religion good and or evil?, etc. So there was not much temptation to wade in on Pope Benedict’s recent troubles, or the wider issue of sex scandals in the Catholic Church.

Now, happily, that temptation has dipped to zero, since Phil Plait has done such a good job. Read the whole thing, as they say. Roughly, Phil notes that the Pope seems to be responsible for some very bad things; that he should be brought to justice for any wrong-doings; that there is some relevance to concerns of the skeptical community, insofar as the Church invokes supernatural explanations; but finally, that the strategy should not be simply one of proclaiming superiority and tarring religion as evil and demanding heads on plates. Catholics and other believers, whether we disagree with them or not, are human beings who will understandably be upset and troubled at the recent news. We don’t help to convert them to atheism or naturalism or skepticism by shoving the shortcomings of their leaders in their faces in the midst of a crisis; reason and rational discourse should be more our style. It’s a nuanced argument, which means it’s guaranteed to be misunderstood and caricatured, since even God can’t control the natural impulses of the internet.

Let’s be clear: I want religion to vanish. I think that religious beliefs are wrong, and that the world would be a better place if everyone accepted the real world for what it is. And I believe that many of the actions of the Church when it comes to pedophilia certainly deserve the label “evil,” whatever one might think of the people who perpetrated them.

So the question is, how to bring about the rationalist utopia in which people’s actions are based on reason and reflection rather than faith and hierarchy? I agree with Phil’s answers, as I’ve argued in other contexts. One of the primary tenets of a rationalist philosophy should be that we should be especially skeptical about claims that we want to be true. Our personal preferences don’t have any effect on the truth, so we need to guard against confirmation bias and lazy acceptance of ideas that make us happy. One great example is the idea that we’re going to make the world a better and more rational place by telling everyone how much smarter we are than everyone else, and how evil and stupid our enemies are. The Pope’s recent actions, it seems clear, are some combination of evil and stupid. But now is just not the time for patting ourselves on the back. A lot of people have been deeply hurt, directly or indirectly, and we should be able to show just a modicum of restraint. Not giving up or keeping quiet, but picking our spots. After all, we don’t have to win by being obnoxious — we can win by being right.

In 1935, Australia introduced the cane toad to its sugar cane fields to battle beetle infestations–and the ecosystem has never been the same. The toxic toads took a liking to Australia and began spreading through the northeast, killing the native predators like crocodiles, snakes, and lizards that dined on them. A small cat-like marsupial, the quoll, was no exception. In the decades after the toads’ introduction, quoll populations in northern Australia have dipped precipitously. This year, ahead of the toads’ march into the quolls’ last stronghold, the Kimberly region, scientists have found a clever way to save the endangered marsupial: training it to detest the taste of toad so it won’t get poisoned [Los Angeles Times]. And the success of the experiment has suggested a bizarre conservation campaign.

In their research, scientists from the University of Sydney found that other predators like crocodiles and snakes can learn to avoid trouble, because one experience of snacking on a sickening poison toad is usually enough to teach them a lesson. But because the smaller quoll will die from eating a single large toad, it never learns to make that association. So the researchers decided to train the marsupials to avoid the toads using a method known as conditioned taste aversion.

In their experiments, quolls in the lab were fed small dead toads laced with a nausea-inducing drug. The animals would gobble up the toads and then feel mildly sick. After a while, they began to associate sickness with eating the toads and started avoiding them, according to results published in the Journal of Applied Ecology. The scientists speculated that the memory of the stomach-churning snack would stick with the marsupials, just as bad experiences with food can stick with humans for years [Los Angeles Times].

The researchers later released 31 “toad-smart” quolls and 31 “toad-naive” quolls into the wild and soon found that the conditioned female quolls survived nearly twice as long as their unconditioned counterparts and the conditioned male quolls lived five times longer than the clueless ones [Los Angeles Times]. Jonathan Webb, an ecologist at the University of Sydney, who led the study, remarked: “If you can teach a predator that cane toads make you sick, then that predator will leave them alone afterwards. As a result, animals like quolls can survive in the wild even in a toad infested landscape” [Times Online].

The researchers suggest that, if the quoll’s learned aversion to the toads proves to be long-lasting, the next step might be to bring the lessons to toads in the wild–via aerial toad-bombing exercises. Study coauthor Rick Shine says they may want “to refine our delivery methods – for example, perhaps wildlife agencies could aerially deploy ‘toad baits’ ahead of the cane toad invasion front to educate quolls to avoid attacking cane toads before the toads invade” [LiveScience].

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Image: Perth Zoo

They say there’s no such thing as a free lunch, but a hotel in Copenhagen lets you get closer to that goal–it just asks for sweat equity.

The Crowne Plaza Copenhagen Towers wants its guests to hit the gym, pedal on special bikes, and generate power for the hotel to help it reduce its carbon footprint. If a guest generates a certain amount of energy via pedal-power, she’ll be rewarded with a free meal.

The eco-friendly hotel is already a carbon-neutral building that’s cooled and heated by Denmark’s first ground water-based cooling and heating system, and which has a facade covered with high-tech solar panels. And starting next week, The Guardian reports, the 366-room hotel will encourage guests to help out the environment by working on on new electricity-generating exercise bikes:

The bikes have iPhones mounted on the handlebars which monitor how much power is being produced and fed into the mains supply of the hotel. Any guest producing 10 watt hours or more will be rewarded with a free meal.

Getting the free meal appears to be surprisingly easy. According to the hotel’s calculations, pedaling the bike for an hour would produce 100 watt hours–that’s enough power to fire up a 100-watt bulb for an hour. That means that just six minutes would produce the 10 watt hours that would qualify the guest for a free meal.

Some critics have scoffed that a guest who produces 100 watts of power won’t make a dent in the energy consumption of this huge hotel. Supporters counter that the effort that goes into producing 100 watts of power would make people more conscious of how difficult it is to produce energy, with Alex Randall, a spokesman for the Centre for Alternative Technology telling The Guardian:

“Realistically, this isn’t a practical way of generating a useful amount of energy, but I certainly wouldn’t criticize it…. As a lesson, and a means of public engagement, it’s excellent – if you sit someone on a bike, pedaling hard, and show them they are only generating enough to power one light bulb or TV, is makes them appreciate how difficult energy is to produce, and therefore why we should be careful not to waste it.”

The bike-for-energy program is a pilot project due to run for a year. If it’s a hit, the program will be rolled out to all 21 Crowne Plaza hotels in Britain.

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Image:Wikimedia

Not Exactly Pocket Science is a set of shorter write-ups on new stories with, where possible, links to more detailed takes elsewhere. It is meant to complement the usual fare of detailed pieces that are typical for this blog.

Tyrant leech king – a new T.rex found in the nose of a Peruvian girl

Three years ago, a nine-year-old girl was admitted to La Merced hospital in Peru with a headache that had lasted for two weeks and a strange “sliding sensation” in her nose. Her parents quickly discovered the source of the problem – a sizeable black worm lodged up her right nostril. They quickly sought medical help and it came in the form of Dr Renzo Arauco-Brown, who “with some effort” removed a seven-centimetre leech from the girl’s nose. Brown sent the animal to leech guru Mark Siddall from the American Museum of Natural History, who immediately recognised it as a new species. Uniquely among leeches, the bloodsucker had a single jaw (most have three) but it was lined with eight enormous sharp teeth. For this reason, the Siddall gave it the fanciful name of Tyrannobdella rex, or “tyrant leech king”. A new T.rex had arrived.

It turns out that T.rex has a history of feeding on humans. After describing the new species, Siddall found two other specimens. Both had been removed from the nostrils of young boys in 1997. Like the most recent case, these children had also been bathing in local lakes and streams, which is almost certainly how they picked up their tyrant vampire.

While most leeches are found on the skin, Tyrannobdella is a member of the praobdellid group, which have a disturbing propensity for entering human orifices. They have specialised at feeding on mucous membranes, such as those found in the nose, eye, vagina, anus and urethra (don’t click on these links if you’re squeamish). These bloodsuckers can stay inside for days or weeks on end. They lead to a condition called “orificial hirudiniasis” and they could be potentially life-threatening, especially if secondary infections kick in. It’s likely that many more members of this group are awaiting discovery, although finding them may be a tricky business. As Siddall slyly writes, “Our standard methods of attracting leeches to our exposed selves may prove awkward given their established propensity for particular anatomical feeding sites.”

Reference: PLoS ONE http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0010057

Why losers ejaculate more

Not every male is a fighter and, as a result, many don’t become lovers either. But for these losers, there’s another option for passing on their genes to the next generation – make sure that you ejaculate copiously when you get the chance.

The male flour beetle has to battle other males over the right to mate with a female. Kensuke Okada from Okayama University found that males who lose these fights become less aggressive and avoid fighting again. However, they make up for avoiding combat by doubling the amount of sperm they produce when they ejaculate. This extra investment is a temporary one; after five days, things were back to normal.

These results show that males can fine-tune their sexual strategies according to the competition they face. Males who triumphed in combat didn’t feel the need to produce more sperm. They are strong enough to guard females they mate with and can stop other males from displacing his sperm with their own. Losers have to move about into new territories and when they do get to mate, they run the risk that a stronger male will just flush their sperm out with his own afterwards. For those who lose physical fights, contributing to the next generation means winning the sperm wars, and doing that means producing more sperm.

Reference: Biology Letters http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2010.0225

More on sperm competition: sperm wars of ants and bees, glowing sperm races, spiky penises, traumatic insemination and frigid echidnas

Could cuttlefish “see” with their skin?

Cuttlefish and their cephalopod relatives, squid and octopuses, are capable of nature’s most spectacular acts of camouflage. They can change the colour of their skin on a whim, send moving waves of stripes down their body, and send messages to one another in shifting hues. This ability is even more incredible when you consider that, according to all evidence to date, cuttlefish are colour-blind. If they can’t actually see colour, how can they mimic it so accurately?

Now, cephalopod specialists Lydia Mäthger and Roger Hanlon have made an intriguing discovery that could potentially answer this question. They found that a gene called opsin is active all over a cuttlefish’s skin; opsin proteins are sensitive to light and an essential part of the visual system. It’s possible that these animals can sense light using their entire skin, and that their colour-changing skill is based on this distributed “sight”.

The idea isn’t without precedent. Some squid have organs on their skin that double as an extra pair of “eyes”. But so far, Mäthger and Hanlon’s idea is still a hypothesis. The skin opsins may have no significance at all and the duo has some work ahead to them to show that they actually play an important role. For a start, there’s some evidence that opsin-like genes are active in the skin of humans, and we certainly change colour without a significant amount of make-up. And the opsins in a cuttlefish’s fin, underside and retina are all the same, so it’s unlikely that they could discriminate between different colours.

However, Mäthger and Hanlon suggest that the opsins may be useful in matching brightness and contrast. They could also interact with chromatophores – the tiny, expandable sacs of pigment that underlie a cuttlefish’s colour-changing ability. Chromatophores come in different colours and they could act as filters for the opsins. Light passing through these sacs could provide information on different wavelengths of light coming in from the environment.

Reference: Biology Letters http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2010.0223

More on cephalopods: the squid with living, seeing flashlights, coconut-armoured octopuses, the mimic octopus, clever cuttlefish, and the secret signals of squid

The good news: By combining the DNA of parents with genetic material from a third person, scientists might have developed a way for women with rare genetic disorders to have healthy children. The bad news: The ethical complications involved are so messy that it might be a long time coming.

The researchers outline their work in a study in this week’s Nature. On the surface, the idea is fairly simple. They took the nuclei out of the father’s sperm and the mother’s egg, and transplanted them into a donor’s egg cell that had its nucleus removed, but whose mitochondria remained in the cell’s cytoplasm. What you get is the genetics of both parents, plus the mitochondrial DNA of the host. This technique was pioneered in monkeys last summer, but researchers have now done a proof-of-principle study with human cells.

Mitochondria are often called cellular power plants, because they provide most of the cell’s energy. They also contain their own batch of so-called mitochondrial DNA that can, when mutated, give rise to disease. “What we’ve done is like changing the battery on a laptop,” said lead author Professor Doug Turnbull. “The energy supply now works properly, but none of the information on the hard drive has been changed. A child born using this method would have correctly functioning mitochondria, but in every other respect would get all their genetic information from their father and mother” [BBC News].

In the study, which used eggs that had been fertilized abnormally and so were not usable for in-vitro fertilization, Turnbull transferred 80 nuclei and found that 18 continued to grow beyond the eight-cell stage of division, suggesting that the manipulated embryos were viable.

Only 2 percent of mitochondrial DNA transferred over to the new host, which is a big deal. People need about half of their mitochondrial DNA to be mutated to see the sorts of muscle and heart diseases the researchers are worried about. About one in 250 live births see some kind of pathogenic mutation in the mitochondrial DNA, which is passed from mother to child (that’s why scientists often use it to trace back the maternal line). “We’ve proved in principle that this sort of technique can be used to prevent transmission of mitochondrial diseases in humans,” says Turnbull [Nature News].

This Nature paper is just that, though: proof of principle. IVF clinic are not authorized to perform the procedure, and some scientists aren’t as optimistic as Turnbull, saying the procedure may never be approved. The resulting embryo would carry DNA from three parents, and to prove the technique could work in the clinic, scientists would have to try the technique in healthy human embryos — a task that would be “impossible” due to the associated ethical issues [The Scientist], argues researcher Jun-Ichi Hayashi, who wasn’t part of the project.

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Image: Turnbull et. al./ Nature