Study Finds a 1.2 Percent Increase in Faculty Pay, the Smallest in 50 Years:

Over all, salaries for this academic year are 1.2 percent higher than last year, the smallest increase recorded in the survey’s 50 years — and well below the 2.7 percent inflation rate from December 2008 to December 2009.

…

“A lot of faculty are losing ground, and the data probably underestimate the seriousness of the problems with faculty salary this year, because we’re only looking at full-time faculty and, as we’ve seen for several years, there’s an increasing number of part-time faculty, who are not included,” Mr. Curtis said. “Also, the survey doesn’t capture the effect of the unpaid furloughs a lot of faculty were forced to take this year, because the numbers we have are the base salaries agreed on at the beginning of the year, not the actual payroll results.”

Over all, the average salary for a full professor was $109,843, compared with $76,566 for an associate professor, $64,433 for an assistant professor, $47,592 for an instructor and $53,112 for a lecturer. At every type of institution in almost every class of faculty, men were paid substantially more, on average, than women.

Generally, administrative salaries at colleges and universities have been increasing far more quickly than pay for faculty members.

…

Ms. Wellman pointed out that because the costs of benefits, especially health care, are rising so rapidly, total compensation is not slowing as much as salary growth. “Unless we get control over the growth in spending on benefits,” she said, “we’re going to continue to crowd out the resources necessary to get faculty in the classroom.”

There is a distinction between salaries and total compensation. Additionally, I am a bit confused as to what’s going on with administrative costs. You can find the original report online, along with a lot of tables. Tables aren’t so informative at first glance, so I took table 9B and turned it into a line graph. The horizontal axis represents the academic rank, the vertical the average total compenstation within the rank. Each line represents the percentile that the institution is at in terms of average compensation. So that the top line represents the institutions at the 95th percentile in average compensation, and the bottom line the institutions at the 10th percentile. Finally, I added the values for the top and bottom percentiles so you could compare those more easily.

It looks like you’re seeing “winner-take-all” dynamics more at the elite institutions where the pay is high, as the dispersion across institutions increases at the level of full professors (the effect disappears if I do a log-transformation).

“It has been observed at least since the time of Aristotle that people cannot tickle themselves, but the reason remains elusive. Two sorts of explanations have been suggested. The interpersonal explanation suggests that tickling is fundamentally interpersonal and thus requires another person as the source of the touch. The reflex explanation suggests that tickle simply requires an element of unpredictability or uncontrollability and is more like a reflex or some other stereotyped motor pattern. To test these explanations, we manipulated the perceived source of tickling. Thirty-five subjects were tickled twice–once by the experimenter, and once, they believed, by an automated machine. The reflex view predicts that our “tickle machine” should be as effective as a person in producing laughter, whereas the interpersonal view predicts significantly attenuated responses. Supporting the reflex view, subjects smiled, laughed, and wiggled just as often in response to the machine as to the experimenter. Self-reports of ticklishness were also virtually identical in the two conditions. Ticklish laughter evidently does not require that the stimulation be attributed to another person, as interpersonal accounts imply.”

Image: flickr/battywing

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Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: rated G

Are the racial stereotypes that each of us holds rooted in social fear? That’s the question behind a study out in Current Biology in which researchers investigated children with Williams’ syndrome. This genetic disorder comes from the loss of 26 genes and is marked by, among other things, a lack of social fear in patients: Meeting strangers for the first time, they’ll treat them like old friends.

According to research by Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg and colleagues, those children seemed less given to racial stereotyping than the children without the condition they studied, and the researchers attribute that to the lack of social fear in the kids with Williams’. This result may jibe with previous brain-scanning studies of people with Williams’ syndrome which found unusual activity in their amygdalas, a brain center associated with fear. Interestingly, the children with Williams’ syndrome showed a similar gender bias as the other children, suggesting a different neurological cause for gender and race bias.

However, some scientists point to problems with the study. The sample size is quite small, which is difficult to avoid when studying a rare condition, but still casts doubt on the findings. For instance, 64 percent of the time the children with Williams’ syndrome gave answers that could indicate racial stereotyping, but the margin for error was so large that the researchers concluded 64 percent was not significantly different from 50 percent, a set of perfectly color-blind answers.

For deeper analysis, check out Ed Yong’s post at Not Exactly Rocket Science.

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Not Exactly Rocket Science: Williams syndrome children show no racial stereotypes or social fear
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DISCOVER: How Not To Be a Racist

Image: Current Biology

With the scourge of Internet addiction growing ever more fearsome, a Boston-based company has designed a clever way to entice such addicts to once again join the outside world. The trick is allowing them to keep their eyes firmly glued to the screens of their iPhones.

The company’s app, called Walking Cinema: Murder on Beacon Hill, is built for a walking tour of that old neighborhood in Boston, kind of like a museum audio tour. But instead of hearing someone drone on drily about the various numbered stops, you follow the map and watch the place’s history unfold in a series of videos corresponding to their locations. The app has been so well-received that its videos are going to be screened on April 18th at the Boston International Film Festival–the first-ever app to make it to a film festival.

This particular app tells the story of the Parkman murder, in which wealthy Bostonian George Parkman is killed and his dismembered body is discovered under a dissecting vault at Harvard Medical School. Harvard instructor John Webster, who owed Parkman money, was convicted of the murder after a sensational trial and publicly hanged.

The app, with its tightly produced videos tells the story of the Parkman murder and, according to the creators, is a “page-turner mystery powered by your feet.”

Xconomy writes:

Normally, viewers experience the story of the murder as they travel a mapped route around Boston’s Beacon Hill, watching sections from the video at eight different stops. At the film festival, though, audiences will stay firmly in their seats, watching all 33 parts of the video in continuous order. “We were just blown away at how watchable the story is in a theatrical setting,” BIFF director Patrick Jerome said in a statement. “It’s quick-paced, full of juicy details, and, to our knowledge, it’s the first location-based application to screen at a film festival.”

The creators hope that this new app, with its high-quality videos will set the pace for development of other apps that can be used for enhanced walking and audio tours. The company is one of the many startups that is focusing on “mobile documentaries” and the creation of software that will force its users to look outward and learn about the world around them.

Related Content:
Discoblog: Weird iPhone Apps, a compendium

Image: Walking Cinema

Did you have to memorize that 16th century nursery rhyme when you were a child?  I did, and it has proven surprisingly helpful to me as an adult.  I did find, however, that you only needed to know the first line, “Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November” to be able to know immediately how many days are in any particular month.  You know if it doesn’t have 30 days, it has 31, except February, of course.  Knowing if it was a leap year came later, because if a year can be evenly divisible by 4, it’s a leap year and February has 29 days.

La mojarra inscription - Mayan calendar

That’s simple stuff, right?  You’ve probably known it all your life… although come to think of it, the old rhymes and tricks aren’t taught anymore.  Seems now there’s a whole generation of people who have to see a calendar to know how many days May contains, while flipping frantically around for February to see if it’s a leap year.  In our technological age, rhymes and tricks like this seem terribly outdated and simplistic.  Still, as smart as we are we must  remember that not everybody is literate, or has access to a computer, calculator, or calendar.  For them, this is magic.  You see, even if you spend your life in a cave, squatting around a campfire, you need some form of calendar.  You need to know when the weather will change; when the fruits will ripen; when the herds will move; when the winter will come.  The easiest way to do this originally was to look at the phases of the Moon; count the days in each lunar cycle, split it down to bite-sized chunks you can remember.  Now you know if you’re using your winter stores too fast, and need to ration your food out so nobody starves to death.  That’s the origins of the lunar calendar, and that’s when knowing the basics of astronomy would save your life.

Stonehenge, Image by Frederic Vincent, some rights reserved

The lunar cycle doesn’t correspond exactly with the solar cycle, as we all know.  There is an approximate 11-day difference there (the solar cycle is the longer), so if you use a lunar calendar every year you would have to tweak your calculations to factor in the solar gain.  While the lunar calendar does survive in modern times as more than a footnote (the Islamic calendar is lunar), almost all modern calendars are either solar/lunar hybrids (the Hebrew calendar), or purely solar calendars (the Gregorian calendar).

In Western culture, you’re probably most likely to use the Gregorian calendar, which is a standardized solar calendar.  It divides the tropical year into regular, predictable blocks of time called months, weeks, and days.  Every four years it adds a day in February.  Without even paying much attention to it, you probably divide your time using three or four different systems; you have a calendar year, a fiscal year, a year dividing religious observances (if practiced), and a school year, just to name four.  As we become more an more familiar with different cultures through the Internet, you’ll find yourself thinking in more and more calendar divisions.

Astronomical Clock, Prague - Image Maros M r a z, some rights reserved

As familiar as we all are with overlaying cultural, religious, and social issues onto a calendar, at rock-bottom it is still all based on the orderly progression of our planet and its moon through the solar system and the galaxy.  As long as we plan on eating, we need to know when the food will be available.  We need to know when it’s going to be cold.  So, what does astronomy have to do with a calendar?

Everything.

This week marks three related anniversaries.

April 12, 1961: Yuri Gagarin becomes the first man in space. That was 49 years ago today.

April 14, 1970: An oxygen tank disrupts on Apollo 13, causing a series of catastrophic malfunctions that nearly leads to the deaths of the three astronauts. That was 40 years ago this week.

April 12, 1981: The first Space Shuttle, Columbia, launches into space. That was 29 years ago today.

I wasn’t yet born when Gagarin flew, and I was still too young to appreciate what was happening on board Apollo as it flew helplessly around the Moon instead of landing on it. But I do remember breathlessly awaiting the Shuttle launch, and I remember thinking it would be the next phase in our exploration of space. I was still pretty young, and hadn’t thought it through, but I’m sure had you asked me I’d have said that this would lead to cheap, easy, and fast access to space, and by the time the 21st century rolled around we’d have space stations, more missions to the Moon, and maybe even to Mars.

Yeah, I hadn’t thought it through. Of all these anniversaries, that one is the least of the three we should celebrate.

Don’t get me wrong; the Shuttle is a magnificent machine. But it’s also a symbol of a political disaster for NASA. It was claimed that it would be cheap way to get payloads to space, and could launch every couple of weeks. Instead, it became frightfully expensive and couldn’t launch more than a few times a year.

This was a political problem. Once it became clear that NASA was building the Shuttle Transport System, it became a feeding trough. It never had a chance to be the lean space machine it should’ve been, and instead became bloated, weighted down with administrative bureaucracy and red tape.

More than that, though, to me it symbolizes a radical shift in the vision of NASA. We had gone to the Moon six times — seven, if you include Apollo 13 — and even before the launch of Apollo 17 that grand adventure had been canceled by Congress, with NASA being forced to look to the Shuttle. Ever since then, since December 1972, we’ve gone around in circles.

Now, there’s a lot to be said for low Earth orbit. It is a fantastic resource for science, and I strongly think we should be exploiting it even more. But it’s not the goal. It’s like walking halfway up a staircase, standing on your tiptoes, and admiring the view of the top landing.

We need to keep walking up those stairs. In 1961, the effects of space travel were largely unknown, but Yuri Gagarin took that chance. He was followed by many others in rapid succession. Extrapolating from his travels, by now there should be a business making money selling tours of the mountain chains around Oceanus Procellarum by now. Of the three anniversaries, looking at it now, Gagarin’s is bittersweet.

In 1970 Apollo 13 became our nation’s "successful failure". A simple error had led to a near tragedy, saved only by the experience, training, guts, and clever thinking on their feet of a few dozen engineers. They turned catastrophe into triumph, and now, four decades later, we can’t repeat what they did. Think on this: when the disaster struck their ship, the crew of Apollo 13 were over 300,000 kilometers from Earth. Apollo 13 may have been a successful failure, but it’s a failure we can’t even repeat today if we tried.

I’ve written quite a bit about NASA’s future, including my support of Obama’s decision to cancel Constellation, the program that includes the next series of big rockets to take people into space. That may seem contradictory on its surface, but I support the decision because, in my opinion, Constellation was over budget, behind schedule, and had no clear purpose. The idea of going back to the Moon is one I very much strongly support, but I get the impression that the plan itself is not well-thought out by NASA. The engineering, sure, but not the political side of it. And it’s the politics that will always and forever be NASA’s burden.

It was a political decision to cancel Apollo. It was a political decision to turn the Shuttle from a space plane to the top-heavy system it is. It was a political decision to cancel the Shuttle with no replacement planned at all (that was done before Obama took office, I’ll note). It was a political decision that turned the space station from a scientific lab capable of teaching us how to live and explore space into the hugely expensive and bloated construction it is now.

NASA needs a clear vision, and it needs one that is sturdy enough to resist the changing gusts of political winds. I’m hoping that Obama’s plan will streamline NASA, giving away the expensive and "routine" duties it needs not do so that private industry can pick them up. The added money to go to science, again in my hopes, will spur more innovation in engineering.

And NASA needs a goal. It needs to put its foot down and say "This is our next giant step." And this has to be done hand in hand with the politics. I understand that is almost impossible given today’s political climate, where statesmanship and compromise has turned into small-minded meanness and childish name-calling on the Congress floor.

But I’m old enough to remember when NASA could do the impossible. That was practically their motto. Beating the Soviets was impossible. Landing on the Moon was impossible. Getting Apollo 13 back safely was impossible.

Of the three anniversaries, Apollo 13 is the one we should be celebrating. I’ll gently correct what Gene Kranz said that day: failure really was an option, but not an acceptable one.

Right now, at this very moment, those feats are all impossible once again. But for a time, they were not only possible, we made them happen.

It’s time to do the impossible once again.

Does liquid water still flow on Mars?

We know that in the distant past — like, a billion years ago — liquid water was abundant on Mars. We also know that water currently exists on Mars in the form of ice, sometimes just below the surface (where even small meteor impacts can reveal it). But can there still be liquid water flowing on Mars, even if only for a very, very short time?

Maybe. Just maybe.

This HiRISE image shows a small region of a Martian crater named Russel (click to access much bigger versions of it). There are a lot of sand dunes in it, and as you can see in the lower left, many gullies as well. These gullies were obviously carved by something moving downslope. Sometimes, these gullies can form due to the presence of dry ice: frozen carbon dioxide, which is abundant on Mars. In the summer, as temperatures warm, the dry ice turns into a gas, dislodging material and letting it roll downhill. It’s thought that quite a few gullies on Mars are formed this way (as well as very dramatic avalanches).

But these Russell Crater gullies are different. They do seem to form at higher elevations, near the tops of dunes, as you’d expect. But there are also weird dark spots near these locations, which are poorly understood. The gullies seem to be constrained in their width; they don’t get broader downslope. Mind you, these are super-hi-res images; the gullies shown here are only a few meters across, if even that! You could easily hop across them if you were strolling across the Red Planet’s surface.

The gullies do widen where two tributaries meet, which is exactly as you’d expect from flowing material. That’s probably clearer in this picture of the same region but taken at a different time:

But the really weird thing is how the gullies end. If this were just sand flowing because it was disrupted by dry ice evaporating, you’d expect to see a fan-shaped formation where the gullies terminate downslope. That’s the natural way flowing sand comes to a halt, by spreading out and forming those big triangles. But these gullies don’t do that. Instead, they just kinda stop. The gullies suddenly end in an abrupt narrowing of the trench, as if the material that’s moving is being reabsorbed by the surface underneath it.

That is certainly not what you expect from solid material like sand flowing downhill. It’s far more like the way an actual flowing liquid behaves. Because of this a team of German scientists studying this data think this may be more evidence that water can exist as a liquid on the surface of Mars, at least for short periods, time enough to flow downhill a bit. So we’re talking seconds or minutes here, not years, but still. Holy Haleakala.

Liquid water on the surface of Mars can’t stick around long; even at those low temperatures it will boil away from the low atmospheric pressure, or freeze rapidly. So having any liquid at all is really pretty amazing. But it raises lots of other questions, not the least of which are where does it come from, and why the heck is it liquid at all? You’d expect the water under the surface, if that’s what’s causing this, to be frozen; we see lots of that on Mars. So why is this liquid? Did something happen to liquify it (and it’s a pretty short list of what could do that), or is it liquid already (like in an underground aquifer or a hot spring) and just happened to break through the surface to flow for a short, glorious time?

The only way to know for sure is to keep looking. These images are a red flag for scientists, an alarm raised that we need to keep digging around, to keep our eyes open, and to pay attention to what we’re seeing. There’s a whole lot that Mars is trying to tell us. All we have to do is listen.

Thousands of onlookers gathered on Sunday to watch and film the planned implosion of the Texas Stadium in Dallas. The 65,000-seat-stadium was home to the Dallas Cowboys for 38 years and was witness to some thrilling football moments–but all good things must come to an end. The stadium was demolished because the team moved to the new billion-dollar, state-of-the-art Cowboys Stadium last season.

An 11-year-old named Casey Rogers, the winner of a local essay-writing contest, pushed the button that triggered the implosion, and thus set off 1.5 tons of explosives that brought down the stadium in a systematic manner. In the end, just three pillars stood leaning, leading Herbert Gears, mayor of the Dallas suburb of Irving where the stadium was located, to joke to AFP: “Now we’ve got Stonehenge.”

Not only were curious onlookers on hand to observe the implosion, but so were a group of seismologists. In a project nicknamed “Demolicious,” a team led by Jay Pulliam of Baylor University in Waco, Texas used seismometers around the stadium to try and get a clearer picture of the region’s geological features.

Nature News reports:

Pulliam and his team hope that seismic waves from the planned explosion can help to image Earth’s crust in the region, an area of interest to seismologists because it is where the Ouachita deformation was created when a supercontinent of Africa and South America crashed into North America about 300 million years ago. The team also hopes to improve understanding of why small earthquakes occurred in the region in 2008–09 after waste water was pumped deep underground in the process of extracting natural gas from shale.

Earlier last month, Pulliam and his team set up their instruments–a seismometer, an accelerometer, and a clock linked to a GPS–near the stadium. The instruments were set up to record the exact timing of the implosion and the rate at which the seismic waves traveled through the ground. However, Pulliam wasn’t quite sure what to expect from the implosion’s seismic waves. Speaking to Nature News before the big event, he called the process a “terrific experiment.”

Meanwhile, here’s a video of the implosion:

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Image: Dallas Morning Observer

People with Williams syndrome are some of the friendliest people you’ll ever meet. They are incredibly sociable, almost unnervingly so, and they approach strangers with the openness that most people reserve for close friends.

Their sociable streak is the result of a genetic disorder caused by the loss of around 26 genes. This missing chunk of chromosome leaves people with a distinctive elfin face, a risk of heart problems, and a characteristic lack of social fear. They don’t experience the same worries or concerns that most of us face when meeting new people. And now, Andreia Santos from the University of Heidelberg has suggested that they have an even more unique trait – they seem to lack racial bias.

Typically, children start overtly gravitating towards their own ethnic groups from the tender age of three. Groups of people from all over the globe and all sorts of cultures show these biases. Even autistic children, who can have severe difficulties with social relationships, show signs of racial stereotypes. But Santos says that the Williams syndrome kids are the first group of humans devoid of such racial bias, although, as we’ll see, not everyone agrees.

Santos compared the behaviour of 20 white children with Williams syndrome, aged 7 to 16, and 20 typical white children of similar backgrounds and mental ages. To do so, she used a test called the Preschool Racial Attitude Measure (PRAM-II), which is designed to tease out traces of gender or racial biases in young children.

PRAM-II consists of a picture book where every page includes a pair of people of different genders or skin types. The researcher tells a selection of stories to accompany the images and the children have to point to the person whom they think the story is about. As they hear positive or negative adjectives, they reveal any underlying racial bias if they point to light-skinned or dark-skinned people, or men or women, more frequently.

The typical children showed a strong tendency to view light-skinned people well and dark-skinned people poorly. Out of their responses, 83% were consistent with a pro-white bias. In contrast, the children with Williams syndrome only showed such responses 64% of the time, which wasn’t significantly different from chance.

Santos suggests that children with Williams syndrome don’t develop the same biases that their peers do, because they don’t experience social fear. Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, who led the study, says, “There are hyper-social, very empathetic, very friendly, and do not get danger signals.” And because they’ll freely interact with anyone, they are less likely to cultivate a preference for people of their own ethnic groups. Alternatively, it could be that because they don’t fall prey to stereotypes, they’re more likely to socialise with everyone.

Santos is quick to rule out alternative explanations for this result. Some of the children with Williams syndrome were more intelligent or mentally advanced than the others, but they behaved in the same way. Nor could it be that they suffered from a general inability to assess people’s features, for both groups of children showed a bias towards their own gender.

But not everyone is convinced. Aliya Saperstein from the University of Oregon praised the study’s “clever research design” and said that it shows the Williams Syndrome children are clearly less biased than normal ones. That is interesting in itself, but Saperstein is sceptical that they lack racial bias entirely. In the PRAM-II test, Santos claims that children without any biases should make pro-white responses half of the time, but she showed that the Williams syndrome children did so 64% of the time. This wasn’t significantly different from a chance result but the estimate was based on a very small sample size. Given larger numbers, those extra fourteen percentage points might indicate an important difference.

Robert Livingston from Northwestern University agrees. He says, “I think that it’s problematic to make strong conclusions on the basis of null findings, particularly with a sample as small as 20 WS children.”

It’s also worth noting that the PRAM-II test doesn’t give children the option of a truly unbiased response. They can’t say that the story could fit either image equally – they can only give fewer pro-white answers. As Saperstein says, “The results don’t demonstrate or prove an absence of bias. And like all similar tests, the study may tap partly into one’s knowledge of social stereotypes not just one’s personal biases.”

Livingston also notes that when we’re talking about racial bias, there is a difference between stereotypes, which are based on our beliefs, and prejudices, which are based on our feelings and evaluations of other people. The Williams Syndrome children may not show prejudice, but Livingston says, “Very few if any people who do not show stereotypes.”

Regardless of whether the Williams Syndrome children lack racial bias altogether, it’s clear that they aren’t affected by it to the same extent as normal children. Santos’s results also suggest that racial and gender biases have different origins. The former is borne at least partly out of social fear while the latter has different roots.

The link between social fear and racial stereotypes fits with the results of previous brain-scanning studies. In people with Williams syndrome, the amygdala, a part of the brain involved in processing emotional memories, is far less reactive to threatening social situations. The connections between the amygdala and the fusiform face area, which is specialised for recognising faces, are also unusually weak.

The same areas might play a role in understanding information about people’s race: the fusiform face area tends to be more active when we look at people from the same ethnic group; and one study found that the amygdala is more active when both white and black people look at black faces. This will, of course, need to be tested in more experiments.

Reference: Current Biology; citation unavailable at time of writing

More on race:

• Even on mute, TV can perpetuate racial bias
• Social status shapes racial identity
• People overestimate their reactions to racism
• They don’t all look the same – could better facial discrimination lead to less racial discrimination?
• Simple writing exercise helps break vicious cycle that holds back black students

Astronomers have discovered the closest new star to us that’s been spotted in 63 years. Though “star” might be a stretch, depending upon whom you ask.

The new find, UGPS 0722-05, is less than 10 light years from here. But sky-watchers missed it for so long because it’s a brown dwarf, a member of the murky class of celestial objects that linger between gas giant planets and low-mass stars. Brown dwarfs have so little mass that they never get hot enough to sustain the nuclear fusion reactions that power stars like the sun. Still, they do shine, because they glow from the heat of their formation, then cool and fade [New Scientist]. This dwarf’s temperature is somewhere between 266 and 446 degrees Fahrenheit, making it the coldest scientists have even seen. With its minimal activity, the brown dwarf gives off just 0.000026 percent the amount of light that our sun does.

Like dwarf planets, which cast aside the 9-planet solar system of our childhoods and riled Pluto-philes everywhere, brown dwarfs don’t lend themselves to simple scientific definitions. The International Astronomical Union sets the planet–brown dwarf boundary at 13 times the mass of Jupiter. But that mass limit is an imperfect definition—what of brown dwarf–size bodies that orbit stars, behaving themselves like supersized planets [Scientific American]? The nomenclature could get even messier when the details of this new find are confirmed. Study leader Philip Lucas and his colleagues suggest that the newly discovered brown dwarf is so cool that it might be the first member of a new class of ultralow temperature dwarfs. Although one fingerprint of such a new class, absorption of infrared light by ammonia, appears to be missing, only “time will tell” if the discovery merits a new classification, the researchers note [Science News].

Lucas’ team’s paper is currently being submitted to the journal Nature, where the peer-review process should help to verify how close the team was with its parallax measurement of the brown dwarf’s distance. If they’re correct, UGPS 0722-05 will not only beat out the previous record-holders for proximity to Earth—a binary set of brown dwarfs in the Epsilon Indi system, about 11.8 light-years away—it would also suggest that perhaps more of these shadowy celestial objects linger even closer to us.

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Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC/Caltech)

The bottom of the sea is a strange and marvelous frontier, as we were reminded last week by the discovery of the first known animals to live without oxygen. Today a team of British researchers say their undersea robotic explorers have found something new down in the depths of the Caribbean Sea: the deepest hydrothermal vents ever seen.

The black smokers, named for how they spew out an iron sulfide compound that’s black, sit 3.1 miles deep in the Cayman Trough in the Caribbean [FoxNews]. They beat out the previous record holders, which were located 2.6 miles below the surface in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. As the National Oceanography Centre team sailed across the sea in its research vessel, the James Cook, the scientists deployed their robot explorers down to the inhospitable depths. One, called Autosub6000, mapped the seafloor while another, HyBIS, carried high-resolution cameras to capture these images.

Marine biologist Dr Jon Copley said: “Seeing the world’s deepest black-smoker vents looming out of the darkness was awe-inspiring.” He added: “Super-heated water was gushing out of their two-storey-high mineral spires, more than three miles beneath the waves” [BBC News]. The heat record held by the vents in the mid-Atlantic is a scorching 867 degrees Fahrenheit, but Copley and the other researchers say they don’t know yet whether this one is hotter. Geologist Bramley Murton reports mats of microbes covering the vents, but the team is conferring with other scientists before they announce exactly what they found. Whatever lives down there, it’s certainly got grit. The pressure at the bottom of the trough, which is 500 times normal atmospheric pressure, would be the equivalent to the weight of a large family car pushing down on every square inch of the creatures that live there, the researchers say [FoxNews].

You can keep up with the voyage of the James Cook on the team’s Web site. They’ll be cruising the Cayman Trough until the 20th of this month.

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80beats: NASA’s New Underwater Robot Chugs Along Indefinitely on Ocean Power

Image: National Oceanography Centre

Once again: If you haven't yet, I encourage you to download or stream my fourth (and so far, I think, best) Point of Inquiry program--with Eli Kintisch on the subject of geoengineering. All this week on the blog, I'm going to be discussing issues raised on the show--so having heard it will be kind of an essential baseline. I'm always trying to become a better interviewer, so with this next post, I want to zoom in on an area where I failed to press my interview subject as I probably should have. And that is the relationship between religious beliefs and opposition to geoengineering. At around minute 9:15, I asked Eli about religious opposition to geoengineering--basically, about the folks who say that we shouldn't "play God." He gave a very detailed answer, essentially signaling that, hey, yeah, this is a lot like genetically modified foods--some people think the impulse to interfere with "nature," to remake it in the way that only "God" is supposed to do, is wrong. I have no doubt this impulse is out there. But I don't find it to be at all a rational argument, or a sound basis for public policy. When it comes to the genetics of ...

In January through April of 2002, the Larsen B ice shelf collapsed in the Antarctic.

This was a huge sheet of ice, about 3250 square kilometers (1250 square miles) in area, roughly equal to a square 57 km (34 miles) on a side. There had been a series of warm summers that weakened the shelf, and then the very warm summer of 2002 spelled doom for it.

The Landsat 7 satellite took many images of the collapse, but the Earth Observatory Image of the Day just released two dramatic shots of its impact:

The top image was taken on April 6, 2002 — about two months after the shelf collapsed — and the bottom one on February 20, 2003. What you’re seeing is the Crane glacier which flowed out into the ice shelf. See how the end of the glacier has retreated so far back into the bay? The Larsen B ice shelf helped stabilize the glacier, but with the shelf gone, the glacier was free to break off as well. The end result is the glacier edge effectively retreating up the channel. You can see icebergs floating in the bay, some hundreds of meters across.

It’s hard not to wonder about climate change when looking at this. As we reality-based folks are fond of saying, weather (short-term, local environment) is not climate (long-term, larger environment). On the other hand, how many episodes of weather over how large a region does it take to add up to climate?

One of the great things about evolutionary theory is that it is a formal abstraction of specific concrete aspects of reality and dynamics. It allows us to squeeze inferential juice from incomplete prior knowledge of the state of nature. In other words, you can make predictions and models instead of having to observe every last detail of the natural world. But abstractions, models and formalisms often leave out extraneous details. Sometimes those details turn out not to be so extraneous. Charles Darwin’s original theory of evolution had no coherent or plausible mechanism of inheritance. R. A. Fisher and others imported the empirical reality of Mendelism into the logic of evolutionary theory, to produce the framework of 20th century population genetics. Though accepting the genetic inheritance process of Mendelism this is original synthesis was not informed by molecular biology, because it pre-dated molecular biology. After James Watson and Francis Crick uncovered the biophysical basis for Mendelism molecular evolution came to the fore, and neutral theory emerged as a response to the particular patterns of genetic variation which new molecular techniques were uncovering. And yet through this much of R. A. Fisher’s image of an abstract genetic variant floating against a statistical soup of background noise variation persisted, sometimes dismissed as “bean bag genetics”.

We’ve come a long way from the first initial wave of discussions which were prompted by the molecular genetic revolution. We have epigenetics, evo-devo and variation in gene regulation. None of these processes “overthrow” evolutionary biology, though in some ways they may revolutionize aspects of it. Science is over the long haul after all an eternal revolution, as the boundaries of comprehension keep getting pushed outward. A few days ago I pointed to Sean Carroll’s recent work, which emphasizes that one must think beyond the sequence level, and focus on particular features such as cis-regulartory elements. Here we’ve been tunneling down to the level of the gene, but what about the traits, the phenotypes, which are affected by genetic variation?

It is well known that the sparest abstraction of genotypic-phenotypic relationship can be illustrated like so:

genetic variation ? phenetic variation

But each element of this relation has to be examined greater detail. What type of genetic variation? Sequence level variation? Epigenetic variation? The second component is perhaps the most fraught, with the arrow waving away the myriad details and interactions which no doubt lurk between genotype and phenotype. And finally you have the phenotype itself. Are they all created alike in quality so that we can ascribe to them dichotomous values and quantities?

A new paper in PNAS examines the particulars of morphological phenotypes and physiological phenotypes, and their genetic control, as well as rates of evolution. Contrasting genetic paths to morphological and physiological evolution:

The relative importance of protein function change and gene expression change in phenotypic evolution is a contentious, yet central topic in evolutionary biology. Analyzing 5,199 mouse genes with recorded mutant phenotypes, we find that genes exclusively affecting morphological traits when mutated (dubbed “morphogenes”) are grossly enriched with transcriptional regulators, whereas those exclusively affecting physiological traits (dubbed “physiogenes”) are enriched with channels, transporters, receptors, and enzymes. Compared to physiogenes, morphogenes are more likely to be essential and pleiotropic and less likely to be tissue specific. Morphogenes evolve faster in expression profile, but slower in protein sequence and gene gain/loss than physiogenes. Thus, morphological and physiological changes have a differential molecular basis; separating them helps discern the genetic mechanisms of phenotypic evolution.

Morphology here refers to gross anatomical features. The sort of traits and characteristics which a paleontologist or anatomist might take interest in. Physiology is more about function, and the physical structures which enable that function. It is naturally closer to the scale of molecular biology as physiology melts into biochemistry. Of course at the other end physiology also merges with anatomy as physiology occurs within features of interest to the anatomist. By way of generalization perhaps physiology may be considered more granular, while morphology more gross, in the context of this paper.

They used the mouse because it’s a species which has long served as a model organism, and there are a host of well known and characterized mutations for both physiology and morphology. Utilization of mice in these fields in the context of evolutionary research dates back to the early 20th century. So systems biologists have a lot of research that’s already been done to work with. They found 5199 mouse genes with known phenotypes in the Mouse Genome Informatics database. 821 affected only morphological traits and 912 affected only physiological traits.

Figure 1 shows the breakdown by Gene Ontology:

Going by what little I know about these topics the second to the fourth panels aren’t surprising. Morphological traits are built from molecular structures, while the transporter activity classes are a more cellular scale, and so would seem to be below the threshold of salience for morphological traits. The first panel is not something I’d expected, but it makes sense after the fact. Figure 2 clarifies. The right panels have proportions, the left counts.

The primary point is this: morphogenes seem to affect more traits than physiogenes, and, their affect is less tissue specific when it comes to a particular trait. When this pattern is highlighted the enrichment toward transcriptional regulation makes more sense to me it is transcriptional regulation might allows for more trait by trait level control of variation. If there is a relationship of many traits to one gene that would probably impose a constraint on the sequence level to a greater extent than if the gene was implicated in variation on one trait. The gap in pleiotropy is closed somewhat when you constrain to essential genes, those whose mutation results in decrease of fitness to zero (through death or lack of ability to reproduce). Pleiotropy presumably is constraining the genetic landscape toward particular fitness peaks. Tissue specificity seems understandable when you consider the localization of many physiological processes, and their biochemical complexities (I’m thinking of the vagaries of gene expression in the liver here).

But they looked at more than how the traits and genes distribute now, they tried to sniff out if there were differences in the rate of evolution of morphogenes and physiogenes contingent upon the class of genetic variants. Remember that you have sequent level changes on exons which can alter proteins. You have cis-acting elements as critical cogs in gene regulation. And you have more gross genomic features such as gene duplication or deletion.

Figure 3 shows the differences between mice and humans on particular genes in relation to sequence level substitutions as well as gene expression profiles. Specifically in the case of the former you want to know the rate of nonsynonymous substitution, those substitutions at base pairs which change the amino acid translated, standardized by the overall mutation rate. So panel C is the one to focus on. Note that physiogenes seem to have evolved more since the last divergence between human and mice lineages than morphogenes. Why might this be? An immediate thought that comes to mind is that tissue-specific expressing physiological processes are liable to be modulated more often than gross morphology, which might be controlled by genes with a lot of pleiotropic effects and so constrained. Even when you control to tissue-specificity the pattern remains, as evident in panel D. The pattern seems somewhat inverted in relation to rate of evolution when it comes to gene expression profiles, as you can see in the last three panels. Evolution happens, but by somewhat different genetic means in these cases. The authors finger pleiotropy in particular as the problem for sequence level evolution in morphogenes, as changes in proteins are much more likely to be problematic if those proteins are upstream from many more traits.

In a way these results show that evolution has to be a versatile designer. When it comes to physiogenes the illustrator is in charge, creating new traits from the most basic genetic raw material, changes in a base pair here and a base pair there. But for morphogenes evolution has to use the tools and tricks of photoshopping, making recourse to extant elements and rearranging or tweaking things here and there so as not to upset the complex applecart while modulating on the margins.

What about cis-acting regulatory elements? In the paper they allude to the argument of Sean Carroll that cis-acting regulatory elements are critical for the evolution of morphological traits. That would imply that morphogenes should be enriched vis-a-vis physiogenes for changes on these elements. They didn’t find that in figure 4. On the contrary.

But I don’t think they perceive their result as a rock-solid refutation of Carroll because it was somewhat indirect. I’ll quote from the paper:

…Because experimentally confirmed mammalian cis elements are few, are likely to have been confirmed in only one species, and are potentially biased toward certain classes of genes,we tested the above hypothesis by using cis-elements that were predicted exclusively by motif sequence conservation among a set of vertebrate genome sequences and recorded in the cisRED database (20). In cisRED, 8,440 predicted mouse cis-elements and 7,688 predicted human cis-elements were found to be in the proximity of 586 mouse morphogenes and their human orthologs, respectively. Similarly, 7,082 mouse cis-elements and 7,215 human cis-elements were predicted for 621 physiogenes….

I’m inclined to accept this result and its generalizability, but there’s a layer of analysis and modeling in this case which doesn’t exist in the others. Additionally, Carroll’s thesis is about the whole animal kingdom and a mouse-human comparison may be atypical.

Finally they wanted to look at gene duplication. They found:

Together with the D_fam result, our analyses show that, whereas physiogene families expand/contract faster than morphogene families, the rate of expansion/contraction is relatively constant across lineages for a given family.

I wonder if the duplication here might have something to do with modulating dosages of various substrates in biochemical processes. This may have more direct relevance to physiological processes.

It is important to note as they did that the category “morphogene” and “physiogene” is somewhat artificial, as is the distinction between morphology and physiology. Nature is fundamentally one, and we break it apart as particular joints for ease of our own abstractions and categorizations. Additionally all genes presumably have some effect on morphology and physiology, and though this exploration looks under the hood a bit more than some of the older abstractions it too is a simplification. The key is that the argument here seems to be that these breaking apart of categories and processes gives us useful marginal return in comprehension of evolutionary dynamics. A trait is not always just a trait. Different classes of phenotypes may have different evolutionary genetic implications by their very nature. Some of this is common sense, those traits which are less functionally significant will exhibit more genic variation. But distinctions in terms of form and function themselves are at a further level of detail. And, I presume that generalizations that we make from mouse-human comparisons as here have some limitations across the tree of life.

Citation: Liao BY, Weng MP, & Zhang J (2010). Contrasting genetic paths to morphological and physiological evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America PMID: 20368429

The masked birch caterpillar creates its own home by weaving leaves together with silk. Once built, it vigorously defends its territory but, like many animals, it prefers to intimidate its rivals before resorting to blows. To display its strength and claim its territory, it drums and scrapes its jaws against the leaf. It also drags its anus across the surface to create a complex scratching noise. This “anal scraping” message seems utterly bizarre, but its origins lie in a far more familiar activity – walking.

Warding a rival off with your anus might seem unseemly to us, but caterpillars that do this turn out to be rather civilised species. The scraping is based on the same walking movements that their ancestors used to chase after rivals. The other parts of their signalling repertoire – drumming and scraping jaws – are ritualised versions of fighting moves like biting, butting and hitting. While their earlier cousins might resort to such fisticuffs, the anal-scrapers conduct their rivalries with all the restraint of Victorian gentlemen.

These signals and their evolution have been decoded by Jaclyn Scott from Carleton University. They a great examples of how ritualised animal communiqués evolve from much simpler actions that have little if anything to do with communication – walking, breathing, hunting and the like. Crickets, for example, sing by rubbing their wings together, which may originally have been done to release pheromones or to prep the wings for flight. The whistling of wind through the feathers of crested pigeons has turned into an alarm. The competitive knee-clicks of eland antelopes are made by tendons that slide as a natural part of their gait.

Often, these origins are hard to test and scientists need to be careful if they aren’t to rely on fanciful just-so stories. To avoid that, Scott analysed 36 species of caterpillars from two different families. Some of them had simple struts called “pro-legs” on their end segment, which they use to inch their way along. Other species lacked these structures and in their place, they had a pair of “anal oars” – thicker, harder, spatula-shaped versions of the caterpillar’s normal hairs. These are the instruments that the larvae use to scrape their leaves.

These two groups of caterpillars put their bums to different uses – walking and talking – but the movements they make are the same. They lift the anal segment forward, place it on the leaf and their push backwards against it. The big difference is that in the walkers, the end stays put and the front half launches forward, while in the talkers, the front stays attached and the bum moves backwards. When the masked birch caterpillar makes its anal scrapes, it is essentially talking by walking on the spot.

To confirm this analogy, Scott sequenced DNA from her three dozen species and built a family tree that charted their evolutionary relationships. She found that the species with the pro-legs – the walkers – came first. They solve their conflicts with violence, crawling towards intruders and physically attacking them.

Those with anal oars – the talkers – are an offshoot that descended from this larger group and lost their anal pro-legs. In this group, all the aggressive movements on their cousins have become ritualised into signals. Instead of a confrontational crawl, they do an anal scrape. Instead of biting, hitting and butting, they scratch and drum the leaves with their jaws instead.

Scott also found that the original movements already had the foundations of a good signal. The crawling and pushing movements of a defensive caterpillar produce vibrations that you can pick up over background noise. As these movements became ritualised into signals, they became simpler too, so that caterpillars that send messages by anal scraping produce much larger and more repetitive vibrations using fewer body movements. This is exactly what you’d expect to happen over time – as messy but informative behaviour evolves for use in communication, it becomes clearer and less ambiguous.

Reference: Nature Communications http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms1002

More on animal communication:

• Bee-ware – bees use warning buzz to refute the waggle dance
• Boom-boom-krak-oo – Campbell’s monkeys combine just six ‘words’ into rich vocabulary
• Orang-utans use leaves to lie about their size
• Cats manipulate their owners with a cry embedded in a purr
• Camouflaged communication – the secret signals of squid
• Singing fish reveal shared origins of vertebrate vocals

Click here to view the embedded video.

Another Hubble post, but just have a look at the video. I’ve viewed M66 a number of times but not this good of course. I am amazed at the gravitational distortion. WOW!

You may also see the group called Leo’s Triplett, either way works.

More about M66 from SEDS

Source

Chris Mooney points me to some data on scientific knowledge indicators published by the NSF. There’s a controversy whereby evolution and Big Bang related questions seem to have been removed because American religious Fundamentalism tended to produce a rejection of sane consensus in these areas. Science pointed to the unedited chapters which have some international comparisons. I’ve reformatted a figure from page 103 below. No surprise that American comes out badly on evolution and the Big Bang, but what always strikes me when Russia is included in the list is how skeptical citizens are to conventional science. If you poke around the World Values Survey you don’t find the Russians to be a particularly religious nation, at least compared to Poland or the United States, despite a general shift back toward nominal Orthodox Christian affiliation after the fall of Communism. Rather, I suspect Russian rejection of mainstream science probably has its roots more in a broader skepticism of institutional elite knowledge. After all, the Marxist ideology under which they were tyrannized for 70 years made the pretense of being scientific and positivistic.

The line in the middle of the bar graph is 50%, and all the bars represent correct responses.

“Erotic stimulation by the use of vacuum cleaners or electric brooms appears to be a common form of masturbation. Unfortunately, and contrary to apparent public appreciation, injury due to this form of autostimulation may not be unusual. Five cases of significant penile trauma resulting from this form of masturbation are presented, with a spectrum of severe injuries, including loss of the glans penis.”

Image: flickr/Nevada Tumbleweed

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Many children have a “bug period”–a time of life when bugs and creepy crawlies are a source of endless fascination and learning. Naturalist Edward O. Wilson jokes that unlike other kids, he never grew out of his bug period.

Luckily for this biologist, his lifelong passion for ants has yielded a career rich in accomplishment and accolades. He is not just the world’s preeminent expert on the social behavior of ants, but also the recipient of the National Medal of Science and two Pulitzer Prizes for nonfiction. Now, at the age of 80, Wilson has taken a stab at fiction. His first novel, Anthill, combines two of his greatest loves–his childhood home, Alabama, and the ants that have been his lifelong friends.

Described as an “six-legged Iliad,” Wilson’s Anthill draws parallels between human and ant societies. Though there are no ant symphony orchestras, secret police, or schools of philosophy, both ants and men conduct wars, divide into specialized castes of workers, build cities, maintain infant nurseries and cemeteries, take slaves, practice agriculture, and indulge in occasional cannibalism, though ant societies are more energetic, altruistic, and efficient than human ones [The New York Review of Books].

The book’s first and third sections deal with the adventures of an Alabama boy named Raphael Semmes Cody, called Raff. The boy grows up poking around the lush pine savanna of the Nokobee Tract; he’s drawn to its natural wonders, and uses the forest to escape from his parents’ toxic marriage. In this pristine woodland he literally leaves no stone unturned as he discovers the forest’s rich flora and fauna. Raff grows up and heads to Harvard to study law, returning later in life to protect the Nokobee from feckless developers. But fans of Wilson’s science will be most interested in the book’s middle section, where the author inserts a mini-novella describing the trials and tribulations of the ants living in the endangered forest.

In this second section, “The Anthill Chronicles,” the reader embarks on an epic entomological journey that’s told from the ants’ point of view. In an ant colony called Trailhead, the worker ants realize that their queen dead. She has been dead for several days, but the ants don’t realize it until they smell the death chemicals; this is one of the many ways Wilson shows how pheromones drive behavior and life in the colony. Without a queen at its head, the colony faces its next trial–an attack from the neighboring colony of Streamside. Luckily for the Trailhead colony, nature steps in, producing a genetic mutation that results in the birth of many queens or queenlets. Without giving much of the plot away, suffice to say that what ensues is Wilson’s depiction of how balance is restored to the natural order.

Reviews of the book have been mixed. Writing for the The New York Review of Books, Margaret Atwood praised Wilson for his first novel, saying that his love for his subject shows in the exuberance of the prose, and in the inventiveness of the plot. And—with the exception of small stretches of awkwardness and preachiness—the reader will have a great time reading it [The New York Review of Books].

The Washington Post stomped on the book, calling it clumsy, heavy on exposition, and full of digressions. However, that reviewer suggested that Wilson might have produced a masterpiece had he just stuck to writing about the ants, and declared that in “The Anthill Chronicles” section almost everything we learn of the ants’ enemies and friends, their memories and emotions and ways of communicating, their divisions of labor mirroring our own, is oddly engaging, even riveting [Washington Post].

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Image: W.W. Norton and Co.

“Memristors” are four decades in the making, but it turns out that this fourth kind of circuit element (beyond the inductor, capacitor, and resistor) might have more potential to change computing than even its creators first believed.

In a study this week in Nature, researchers with Hewlett-Packard report that they’ve achieved “stateful logic” with their memristor, whose name derives from a mashup of “memory” and “resistor.” In a nutshell, stateful logic means that the ’state’ of the memristor acts as both the computer and the memory. That’s a pretty big change from current computers, which typically load data from memory, perform operations on it, and then send it back [Nature]. In addition, memristors can store information even in the absence of electrical current.

While an engineer named Leon O. Chua theorized memristors back in 1971, they remained strictly theoretical until HP researchers created the first one two years ago. But while the researchers previously thought of it as just another kind of memory, this study’s find—that they themselves can perform logic—suggests memristors could go much further than that. Such a discovery can pave the way for chips that can both perform calculations and hold data, potentially eliminating the need for a traditional core CPU [CNET].

The H.P. technology is based on the ability to use an electrical current to move atoms within an ultrathin film of titanium dioxide. After the location of an atom has been shifted, even by as little as a nanometer, the result can be read as a change in the resistance of the material. That change persists even after the current is switched off, making it possible to build an extremely low-power device [The New York Times]. And the device’s speed is equally impressive: Stan Williams of HP, one of the lead authors, says they can turn on and off in a nanosecond.

Memristor development currently isn’t close to competing with ordinary silicon, but the ever-confident Williams and this team argue that they could overtake flash memory within three years, and someday surpass the phase-change memory of their competitors. For Chua, the dream goes further. “Our brains are made of memristors,” he said, referring to the function of biological synapses. “We have the right stuff now to build real brains” [The New York Times].

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Image: Stan Williams / Nature