In the hot desert kingdom of Saudi Arabia, finding fresh drinking water has always been a great challenge. For decades now, the state has been providing clean water by converting millions of gallons of seawater via desalination plants that remove salts and minerals from the water. Now the country plans to use one of its most abundant resources to counter its fresh-water shortage: sunshine [Technology Review].

Working on a joint project with IBM, Saudi Arabia’s national research group King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) has announced that it will open the world’s largest solar-powered desalination plant by 2012 in the city of Al-Khafji. The pilot plant will not just supply 30,000 cubic meters of clean water per day to 100,000 people, but will also reduce operating costs in the long run by harvesting energy from sunshine. Saudi Arabia, the top desalinated water producer in the world, uses 1.5 million barrels of oil per day at its plants, according to Arab News [Technology Review].

In the new desalination plant, the Saudis hope to slash energy costs by deploying a new kind of concentrated photovoltaic technology, which uses lenses or mirrors to focus the sun’s rays onto solar panels. The technology will concentrate the sun 1,500 times on a solar cell to boost efficiency. That’s about three times the solar concentration of most concentrating photovoltaic panels currently in operation [The New York Times]. The system’s upgrade is due to a device that IBM came up with back when the company was designing mainframe computers and trying to ensure that they didn’t overheat. The device, called a liquid metal thermal interface, uses a highly conductive liquid metal to transfer heat away. In the desalination plant, the devices will serve as heat sinks to prevent the photovoltaics from breaking down under such extreme, concentrated heat.

The energy generated by these solar arrays would then power the plant’s desalination process, which will be accomplished via reverse osmosis. In this technique, seawater is forced through a polymer membrane at high pressure, which filters out salt and contaminants. The Al-Khafji plant will use an advanced nano-membrane that IBM and KACST developed, which researchers say allows water to flow through 25 to 50 percent faster than conventional membranes used in desalination plants.

The Al-Khafji desalination plant is the first of three steps in a solar-energy program launched by KACST to reduce desalination costs. The second step will be a 300,000-cubic-meter facility, and the third phase will involve several more solar-power desalination plants at various locations [Technology Review].

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Image: IBM

Hubble's look at a brown dwarf and mystery companion. Click for larger. Credit: Hubblesite

Everybody remembers the shock of the news when Pluto was demoted from being a planet into becoming a hapless minor planet. The IAU hardly saw the ensuing furor coming. You don’t just go messing with the planets for any old reason. What they really did was underestimate the value of public relations. In the eyes of the public they “demoted” a perfectly good planet to MINOR planet status…minor indeed! Hmmph!

I for one do understand why the IAU did what they did. All they really needed to do was to use better salesmanship, maybe something like mini-planet or maybe dainty-planet or something along those lines, but never minor. It seems pretty obvious the public will toss out a tried and true anything for a pig-in-a-poke if it is marketed correctly, we do it all the time. Heck sometimes all we have to do is be told we will like it, and that’s good enough until we unwrap the package to see what really awaits us and by then it’s too late one way or the other.

Now enter Hubble and the image above of a Brown Dwarf Star and a mystery companion.  Is it a planet?  Is it a star?  Where is the dividing line?  Somehow if when the discussion is reversed on the Pluto topic I don’t think we would have the same problem.

Background from Hubblesite:

As our telescopes grow more powerful, astronomers are uncovering objects that defy conventional wisdom. This latest example is the discovery of a planet-like object circling a brown dwarf. It’s the right size for a planet, estimated to be 5-10 times the mass of Jupiter. There has been a lot of discussion in the context of the Pluto debate over how small an object can be and still be called a planet. This new observation addresses the question at the other end of the size spectrum: How small can an object be and still be a brown dwarf rather than a planet? This new companion is within the range of masses observed for planets around stars — less than 15 Jupiter masses. But should it be called a planet? The answer is strongly connected to the mechanism by which the companion most likely formed. What’s even more puzzling is that the object formed in just 1 million years, a very short time to make a planet according to conventional theory.

Read the full story and see more images at Hubblesite.

The Cassini spacecraft just had a few close encounters with some of the odder moons in the Saturn system… and given how weird Saturn is, that’s saying something. I was particularly enthralled with these two small worlds:

On the left is the moon Janus and on the right is Epimetheus. The scales are not quite the same; Janus is roughly half again as big as Epimetheus’ size of 135 x 110 x 105 km (81 x 66 x 63 miles). Cassini was a little over 100,000 km from Epimetheus and 75,000 km from Janus when these images a were taken.

These are raw images, so they haven’t been processed yet to remove cosmic ray hits, brightness variations, and so on. But they are still fascinating. Epimetheus looks to me exactly how I picture a big asteroid; beaten, battered, looming. The low angle of sunlight on the side accentuates the craters there, making this almost a caricature of what an asteroid looks like. Technically it’s not an asteroid; it’s a moon. And even if it weren’t orbiting Saturn we might not call it an asteroid; it has a high reflectivity indicating a lot of ice on the surface (and a low density consistent with that too). If it orbited the Sun on an elliptical path, we might very well call it a comet!

But there’s more to these moons. Amazingly, Janus and Epimetheus are on almost — but not quite — the same orbit around Saturn! Currently, Janus is a bit closer to Saturn than Epimetheus.

I say "currently", because every four years these moons swap orbits! Since Janus has an orbit slightly closer to Saturn, it is moving faster around the planet than Epimetheus. It slowly but eventually catches up to the outer moon. As they approach, Janus pulls back slightly on Epimetheus, and Epimetheus pulls Janus forward. In other words, Janus steals orbital energy Epimetheus! This means Epimetheus drops into a slightly lower orbit, and Janus gets boosted into a slightly higher one, effectively swapping the orbits of the two moons. Although the two orbital paths are separated by only about 50 km (30 miles) — smaller than the radii of either moon — they never collide. The swap takes place when the moons are still more than 10,000 km apart, so they never get a chance to bump uglies.

How did this weird situation arise? Perhaps, in the distant past, there was one bigger moon orbiting Saturn, and it got whacked by an interloper. The moon disrupted, breaking into two big pieces and lots of littler ones. The debris got cleaned up by the gravity of the two big pieces and other gravitational effects, leaving these two square-dancing satellites on slightly different but still interacting paths.

However, the actual cause of this still isn’t known for sure. Cassini observations like this one may help astronomers figure out how it is these two little moons came to be, and why it is that although they can always approach each other, they can never actually touch.

Over the years of our addiction to the great idiot box, television, we’ve gradually learned to block out the pesky commercials that interrupt and interfere with our viewing pleasure with their yammering attempts to sell us things. Unfortunately, this has only led marketers to wonder how they could influence our buying decisions in more subtle ways, ushering in a new era of creepy ideas that smack of brainwashing.

The first idea was product placement, where the stars of TV shows drank a certain brand of fizzy soda or typed on a certain brand of computer. But now that most viewers are hip to these product placements, the marketers and networks have stepped it up a notch to reclaim our attention again. NBC has introduced “behavior placement,” wherein certain behaviors are written into the show’s narrative in order to foist a more nebulous kind of marketing on us.

For a week in April, NBC will use its shows to convince viewers to “get green,” compost, or otherwise save the planet. The benefits for advertisers are two-fold. Some companies simply want to link their brand to a feel-good and socially aware show, while other companies–like those that sell energy-efficient lightbulbs or organic household cleaning products–think advertising on these shows will directly boost sales.

In an in-depth article, The Wall Street Journal writes of an earlier marketing push:

In just one week on NBC, the detectives on “Law and Order” investigated a cash-for-clunkers scam, a nurse on “Mercy” organized a group bike ride, Al Gore made a guest appearance on “30 Rock,” and “The Office” turned Dwight Schrute into a cape-wearing superhero obsessed with recycling.

The marketers say they don’t want to come across as being too pushy or preachy, so getting characters in a show to plug for certain behaviors is a safer bet. NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker told The Wall Street Journal:

“People don’t want to be hit over the head with it…. Putting it in programming is what makes it resonate with viewers.”

Since fall 2007, NBC executives have asked producers of almost every prime-time and daytime show to incorporate a green storyline at least once a year. Show producers, like Tim Kring of “Heroes,” told The Journal that behavior placement was easier than incorporating a specific brand. This past fall, he said, members of a carnival in the show loaded a pickup truck with recyclables as one of the characters talked about giving back to the Earth.

“Someone has to pay for our big, expensive television shows,” Mr. Kring says.

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Image: iStockphoto

When I was 9 years old I desperately wanted to be a paleontologist, but sadly, daydreams of unearthing dinosaurs led to no significant fossil finds in my backyard. So I must confess unending respect for Matthew Berger, who, at age 9, quite by accident made a stunning scientific find. In the journal Science this week, Matthew’s father paleoanthropologist Lee Berger describes the fossils of a brand-new hominid species that they turned up in South Africa: Australopithecus sediba, which dates back to between 1.78 and 1.95 million years and could offer new hints about that era of human evolution.

Matthew was chasing his dog near a site where his father had long hunted for fossils when he tripped over the find. The bones belong to a pre-teenage boy and a woman estimated to be in her late 20s or early 30s; the individuals died at about the same time, and before their remains had fully decomposed, they were entombed in an avalanche of sediment and nearly perfectly preserved deep in the Malapa cave north of Johannesburg, South Africa [TIME]. As a result, Lee Berger says, the bones are in an astonishing state for their nearly 2-million-year age.

While such a find was bound to bring out the “missing link” cliches, we don’t know for sure where Australopithecus sediba would belong on the evolutionary tree with respect to us. “There’s no compelling evidence that this newly proposed species was ancestral to Homo,” remarks Bernard Wood of George Washington University in Washington, D.C. [Science News]. These bones date to a time when the genus Australopithecus was beginning to give way to Homo, our own. The New York Times reports, however, that while Berger’s team places its find within Australopithecus, not all anthropologists are sure it can be so easily classified.

For instance, the Australopithecus sediba arms are long like an ape’s, suggesting these hominids were competent tree climbers. But the hands are smaller, like ours. The boy’s skull is small, like Australopithecus. But his nose and cheekbones more closely resemble Homo. “They are a fascinating mosaic of features,” said Rick Potts, director of the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian Institution. “It reminds us of the combining and recombining of characteristics, the tinkering and experimentation, that go on in evolution” [The New York Times]. Donald Johanson, the discoverer of Lucy (which is classified under Australopithecus), praised the find but says Berger’s interpretation is way off. He think the fossil is a variety of Homo.

The debate over these bones will go on and on. But while Lee Berger reaps his kudos, there’s one person who’s not receiving due respect: Matthew. In an insult to 9-year-old scientists everywhere, Science reportedly shot down Lee Berger’s request to list his son as a co-author. But the younger Berger is still left with good stories to tell. On Aug. 15, 2008, when Matthew called his father to look at the bones he had found, Dr. Berger began cursing wildly as he neared his son. The boy mistook his father’s profanity for anger…. “I couldn’t believe it,” Dr. Berger giddily recalled. “I took the rock, and I turned it” and “sticking out of the back of the rock was a mandible with a tooth, a canine, sticking out. And I almost died,” he said, adding “What are the odds?” [The New York Times].

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Image: Brett Eloff

In Slate today, I take a look at the newly unveiled fossils of a strange new hominin, Australopithecus sediba. I try to separate the hype from the significance of this long-legged, long-armed, tiny-brained beast. My conclusion: let’s not turn this into another Darwinius affair!

Check it out.

[Photo by Brett Eloff courtesy of Lee Berger and University of Witwatersrand]

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

[Click for a higher-res version.]

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

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

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

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

There's an intriguing geoengineering discussion going on here: PRI has brought in the economist Scott Barrett of Columbia, who thinks the economics of geoengineering are just going to be irresistable to most countries, especially when compared with the economics of carbon emissions cuts. That's a scary thought, although not exactly a surprising one. You can read Barrett's academic paper on the topic here, and head over here to join in the dialogue it has occasioned. Meanwhile, we're finishing up the next Point of Inquiry, and I promise my intro isn't as soapbox long this time. (Hey, I'm learning.) Eli Kintisch was a great guest, so tune in tomorrow....

I’ve got a feature in the latest issue of New Scientist. It’s sort of a four-step guide to interpreting studies looking at genes and behaviour, using one particular gene as a case study. The piece is out today, but it harkens back to lines of thinking that began over a century ago.

Italy, 1876. The criminologist and physician Cesare Lombroso has just published L’uomo delinquente (The Criminal Man), a work that will define European understanding of criminal behaviour for several decades. Lombroso believed that some people were born criminals, whose penchant for crime was set from birth and who had diminished responsibility for their own misdeeds.

Skip forward 133 years, and Lombroso’s theories seem antiquated, even distasteful. Our modern understanding of biology has put paid to simplistic ideas about the origins of criminality and violence. Discoveries from the growing field of ‘behavioural genetics’ show us how nature and nurture conspire to influence our actions. But because of these same discoveries, the idea of the born criminal has resurfaced in modern Italy under a different guise, a century after Lombroso’s death.

Last year, Italian courts cut the sentence of a convicted murderer by one year, on the basis that his genetic make-up supposedly predisposed him to violence. The man, Abdelmalek Bayout, carried a version of a gene called monoamine oxidase A, or MAOA, which has been linked to aggression and violence. The gene has a history of controversy. It has been linked to gang membership and psychological disorders, and it has been used to define an entire ethnic group as warriors.

The story of MAOA is the perfect case study for how gradual revelations about the tango between genes and environment can be translated into unconvincing applications and overplayed interpretations. There is no better example of the dangerous state of modern behavioural genetics, no better poster child for how to miscommunicate, misinterpret and misuse genetic discoveries.

The feature takes the form of four lessons, each covering a different area of research or controversy around MAOA:

1. A catchy name is bound to be misleading
2. Nature and nurture are inextricably linked
3. Beware of reinforcing stereotypes
4. Genes do not dictate behaviour

Go read the article to find out more.

When the topic of flying saucers comes up, someone inevitably talks about the government’s secret installation in the Nevada desert called Area 51. The base has been public knowledge for a long time, though I suspect a lot of folks heard about it through the movie "Independence Day". The idea is that the alien spaceships that crashed at Roswell New Mexico and other sites were carted off to Area 51, and the technology there examined and reverse engineered to create a lot of modern tech today.

You can just guess what I think of this theory.

But I’ll spell it out: it’s nonsense. Yes, Area 51 exists, but the idea that we keep alien tech there is pretty silly. First, all our technology has a clear line of antecedents; the transistor, velcro, smart metals, and so on didn’t just pop up ex nihilo as some UFO enthusiasts claim.

Second, we have a simpler and more logical line of reasoning here. We know that the military has a black budget to create advanced tech. They don’t want our enemies to know what’s going on, and the Nevada desert is pretty isolated. When the news came out that a base was out there, of course the government’s first line of defense is to deny it. When the rumors and evidence pile up, they admit it exists, but won’t say what it’s for. Of course they don’t! That’s kinda the point of it being a secret.

And we know that advanced tech comes from the military; the SR 71 Blackbird is an incredible piece of engineering, and it was designed in the 1960s. Stealth tech can be thought of in a similar way, and it’s decades old as well. They are clearly designing amazing stuff at Area 51 and perhaps other locations, and this is exactly the sort of hardware that we need to keep secret. Like it or not, there are bad guys out there who would love to see America fall, and this kind of technology helps prevent that from happening.

Jumping from that to harboring aliens and their flying saucers is a wee bit of jump of logic. Of course, I have said for years that I’m sure the government loves the UFO rumors, since it takes the pressure off the real secrets there.

And so it goes: an article in the Statesman corroborates that view. Several Area 51 vets have come out and discussed recently declassified information. My favorite bit is at the very end:

[Area 51 radar specialist] Barnes thinks the Air Force and the CIA didn’t mind the stories about alien spacecraft. They helped cover up the real secret planes that were being tested.

Ya think? Anyway, while I may not be happy with everything that supposedly goes on at Area 51, I can be reasonably — stress the word reasonably — sure that it involves stuff developed right here on good old planet Earth.

Tip o’ the tin foil beanie to James Oberg.

New York City has been attacked by all manner of monsters and alien invaders, but never before have its assailants been so, well, low-res.

A magnificent new video from Patrick Jean and One More Production shows an assault on the city that begins when a stream of pixels explode out of TV screen. Soon, the unwary streets of Manhattan are under attack from pixellated Space Invaders. Pac-Man runs amok in the subway stations, Tetris blocks slam down on skyscrapers, and Donkey Kong stands atop the Empire State Building.

For anyone whose childhood dreams were invaded by these crude villains, the video is pure nostalgic delight. Watch and enjoy.

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Dr. Daniel MacArthur points to a long article by Edmund Yong, Dangerous DNA: The truth about the ‘warrior gene’. Dr. MacArthur notes on his twitter account: “Nice piece on behavioural genetics…but should emphasize MOST behav. gene assocs are actually false.” I think he’s pointing to the winner’s curse; there are lots of people studying various topics, but only a subset of studies pass which yield appropriate effect sizes and p-values actually get published. A sequence of such may give a false sense of certitude as to the strength of the association between a locus and a trait, as negative results are not usually published. I hope David Dobbs keeps this in mind in relation to his new book on the ‘orchid hypothesis’. We have decades of research which suggest that a lot of human behavior is due to variation in genes within the population. In other words, many psychological traits and predispositions are heritable. But both the earlier linkage studies and now the associations which try and establish a particular gene as the primary causal factor are much more provisional, and like much of science wrong or ultimately of marginal long term value.

The incredible amount of press which genetics and genomics research with behavioral implications receive in the press is more about our psychology than the state of science as it is now. Similarly, consider the enormous swell of neuroimaging research within the past decade. Both genetics and neuroscience offer up the possibility of establishing a sturdier biophysical grounding for the human sciences, but we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves. Finally, the fact that we know that psychological traits are heritable is useful in and of itself, whether we know the underlying genetic architecture of the trait or the neurobiology mediating between the genetic and behavioral level. Look to the parents, and you shall know a great deal.

Microorganisms can live the far reaches of the planet, in extreme temperatures and pressures, and in some cases even without oxygen. But now scientists say they have found the first multicellular organisms inhabiting an anoxic environment. In other words: They’ve found the first animals living without oxygen.

They belong to the group called loriciferans, a phylum of creatures that live in marine sediment. About a millimeter long, they look something like a half-jellyfish, half-crab. The beasts live in conditions that would kill every other known animal. As well as lacking oxygen, the sediments are choked with salt and swamped with hydrogen sulphide gas [New Scientist].

Roberto Danovaro and his colleagues, who documented this find in BMC Biology, had been searching the salty, oxygen-free depths of the Mediterranean Sea down below 10,000 feet for life. When previous searches turned up animal bodies, he says, researchers wrote them off, thinking they had fallen to those depths from oxygenated waters closer to the surface. But Danovaro says his team recovered living loriciferans from the area, including ones with eggs.

Unlike plants, all previously discovered animals, and fungi, the newly discovered animal species don’t use mitochondria, the cellular organelle that converts sugar and oxygen into water, CO2 and, energy, to power their cells [Popular Science]. Instead, the animals pack the hydrogenosome organelle, a feature common among the miccoorganisms that live in oxygen-free zones.

Danovaro’s find should lead other life-hunters to start seeking animal life in locations that had been labeled inhospitable to animals, like subduction zones, hydrothermal vents, and other places only simpler organisms had been discovered. And every time we push back the preconceived limits of life on our own planet, it excites those seeking life on others. Says oceanographer Lisa Levin: “Are there metazoans on other planets with atmospheres different from our own?” Levin added. “Our ability to answer this question would be strengthened considerably by more intensive studies of animal-microbe interactions in extreme settings of our own inner space — the deep ocean” [LiveScience].

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Image: Roberto Danovaro

It’s tough work raising teenagers. As if worrying about their studies, drinking, partying, driving, and raging hormones wasn’t all-consuming enough, parents have recently had to fret about their Facebook usage. But one mom in Arkansas may have taken her parental concern too far.

A 16-year-old boy in the town of Arkadelphia is suing his mom, claiming that she hacked into his Facebook account and posted slanderous stuff about him on his page. The teen, Lane New, also alleges that his mom changed his email and Facebook passwords to lock him out of his accounts.

The mom, Denise New, is flabbergasted by the harrassment lawsuit. She says that like any other parent, she was just looking out for her son, and adds that her actions weren’t driven by any malicious intent. She told local TV station KATV:

“I read things on his Facebook about how he had gone to Hot Springs one night and was driving 95 m.p.h. home because he was upset with a girl and it was his friend that called me and told me about all this that prompted me to even actually start really going through his Facebook to see what was going on.”

Denise says she was so upset at what she read on Lane’s profile that she had to post some response on his page–though the specifics of the posts she left haven’t been revealed. Denise New told Associated Press:

“The things he was posting in Facebook would make any decent parent’s eyes pop out and his jaw drop…. He had been warned before about things he had been posting.”

Like any teenager, when Lane found out his mom was snooping around his profile, he wasn’t pleased. But instead of storming off to his bedroom to sulk, Lane slapped mom with a lawsuit. The suit alleges that Denise’s posts contained untrue material, and that they damaged his reputation.

PC World reports that Denise admits to changing the passwords on Lane’s accounts, but denies hacking into his Facebook page; she says the page was left open on her computer.

She also admits to making “maybe three, maybe four actual postings,” but says the rest of it was a “conversation” between her, her son, and his friends.

The teenager has been living with his grandmother over the last five years and Denise says, despite the current suit, she and Lane share a “great relationship.” Denise also issued a warning to parents worldwide via the Associated Press: “If I’m found guilty on this it is going to be open season on parents.”

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Image:Facebook

Duke's celebrating more than just the return of this season's NCAA champions... While we're on the subject of bonobos, it's worth mentioning that readers in Durham, NC are in for a treat from April 14-17 as the Blue Devils host 'Primate Palooza'--an initiative to raise awareness for primates. Internationally renowned conservationist Claudine André will be speaking at the university. From the press release: André founded and runs the world’s only sanctuary and release program for orphaned bonobos in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Bonobos, like chimpanzees, are our closest living relative and are highly endangered. However, unlike chimpanzees and humans, bonobos are the only ape that has found a way to maintain peace in their groups. -- "Having Claudine here at Duke is a wonderful opportunity to share with students and the general public the difference a single individual can make," says Duke researcher Brian Hare. "Claudine has done more for bonobo conservation than anyone else in the world. If you want to meet a conservation heroine this is your chance."
These events are open to the public:
Primate Symposium: Why you need to know you are a primate
5-8 p.m., Wednesday, April 14 Duke faculty studying primates will discuss how knowing you’re ...

When you see a flock of birds flying in formation, it might seem like their group dynamics are fairly simple: The one out front leads the way. But does the same birds always take the lead in a group? And do the birds in the back follow the overall leader, or rather the middle managers in front of them?

To find out, Tamás Vicsek and colleagues strapped backpacks equipped with GPS sensors to pigeons for a study out this week in Nature. The lightweight trackers recorded the birds on both solo flights and group flight and measured their positions five times per second. Indeed, Vicsek found, birds fly according to the group pecking order, with the leader out front. When it changed direction, its direct followers would do the same in less than a second, and then the more junior members of the group would respond to the direction of those middle managers.

But there were surprises, too. Sometimes the lead bird wouldn’t fly out front; it may have been tired from leading the pack and needed some time off. So perhaps birds are like cycling teams, occasionally trading off who carries the taxing burden of leading the group.

For more details about the study—including why it’s not as obvious as you might think that the leading bird flies in the front of the group, and why left and right matter so much to pigeons—check out DISCOVER blogger Ed Yong’s post at Not Exactly Rocket Science.

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Image: Zsuzsa Ákos

“Boom”, indeed.

When we think of the Big Bang, we tend to think of it as an explosion in space.  That’s only natural; it fits in with what is familiar to us – what we know and can visualize.  But the Big Bang wasn’t an explosion IN space, it was an explosion OF space.  It is the origin of reality, the beginning of time and space.  It began about 13.3 to 13.9 billion years ago, and some scientists believe it continues to this day in the ever-expanding universe.  And of course, we know the expansion is still accelerating.

Big Bang Timeline, Image: NASA/JPL PD-USGov

While we cannot yet know for sure what occurred at the beginning of time and space, there has been some compelling evidence to support the Big Bang model.  Most scientists now agree that some form of “Big Bang” must have occurred.  If nothing else, hearts and minds were won over when spectral analysis of the cosmic microwave background radiation showed a blackbody curve.

While scientists cannot be sure of exactly what happened in the very early stages of the universe, they know something happened, and that it happened fast.  The current time line shows the Event occurring around 10(e)-35, and by 10(e)-6 the universe is shaped.  Now that’s 10(e)-35 and 10(e)-6 of a second.  That’s a tiny, tiny amount of time.  The basic elements formed within 3 seconds.  Within about 400 million years, stars and galaxies start to form.

Across Space and Time, Hubble ST Ultra Deep Field - NASA/JPL Hubble

There has been some discussion that on the “other side” of a black hole is a “white hole”, something that erupts out with matter and energy which has been consumed by the black hole.  This, in theory, creates “new” universes.  This is an interesting idea, but that’s about all it is at this stage.  While it seems to answer some questions, it asks more than it answers.

Scientist are now trying to answer the question of what came before the Big Bang.  According to Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, the Big Bang alone is mathematically nonsensical.  Enter Loop Quantum Gravity, which combines Einstein’s theory with quantum physics (equations which did not exist in Einstein’s day) to produce the Big Bounce Theory.  This is interesting, and considers the existence of a universe before ours.  Which collapses… causing a rebound… which gives rise to our universe.

It was once thought that the universe would expand until it slowly came to a stop, then either slowly come back on itself (the Big Crunch), or stay flung out in the far reaches of the universe until all the stars died (the Big Freeze).

There’s no computer program which can backtrack to show the location in space of the Big Bang, because before the Event, there was no space in which it could take place.

I have a hard time wrapping my head around the whole concept.  As I’ve said before, I’m suspicious of nice, simple scenarios which seem to answer *all* the questions.  I think that in a few thousand years (if we don’t bomb ourselves into Kibbles n Bits) we’ll find that the “final answer” is a combination of all the theories… working together.

Any ideas?

Mission/Orbiter: STS-131 / Discovery

Crew: Commander: Alan Poindexter, Pilot: James P. Dutton Jr, Mission Specialists: Rick Mastracchio, Stephanie Wilson, Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger, Naoko Yamazaki and Clayton Anderson. Crew bios here.

Note: There are only three scheduled shuttle missions remaining. For you near the launch site, you will see the ISS fly over about 15 minutes before the launch.

Current Status: Go Launched

Launch Date: Monday April 5, 2010 06:21 EDT (10 minute window)

Odds of Launch: >80 percent.

Launch Pad 39A — Webcam Image courtesy: NASA/Kennedy Space Center

NOAA’s Forecast:

Tonight: Mostly clear, with a low around 66. East wind between 5 and 10 mph.

Monday: Sunny, with a high near 78. East wind between 5 and 10 mph.

To keep current with the news about the launch, take a look at NASA’s Launch Blog. Anna Heiney will be giving updates from inside Firing Room 3 at Launch Control. The launch blog will be live at 01:15 EDT. Be sure to refresh your browser to get the latest from that site.

You can catch the launch at NASA-TV

If you are still subscribed to:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/scienceblogs/gnxp

You are receiving updates from the new RSS feed. But at some point these updates will cease. You will need to switch to the new RSS feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/GeneExpressionBlog

It’s been a week since I first mentioned this issue, and the old feed still has over twice as many subscribers as the new feed. I’m sure many of them are evil people who are subscribed but no longer read the blog, but for those of you who are good please switch feeds. It is a mitzvah.

Danke.

ScienceBlogs^TM just put out a release on their traffic growth. The trend is interesting because after a period of flattening out, 2008-2010 seems to have seen some robust growth again. As I said when I left I do wish SB and many of their bloggers well, and I continue to subscribe to several of their blogs in my RSS as well as the select feed. The network’s robust growth is a positive sign when it comes to the transition of science communication from dead tree to the internet. I know that there’s been a lot of stress on the part of science journalists as to the sustainability of their enterprise, though that is really just a domain-specific instantiation of the issues in journalism as a whole, but until that works itself out the growth and persistence of science blogging and science-related websites is a good thing. There is a calm after the storm of creative-destruction, and the current science blogosphere is laying the seedbed for future renewal. The outcome may be sub-optimal from the viewpoint of labor, but the consumer will benefit.

The growth of internet based science communication means that the pie is growing, and the tide is rising. It isn’t a zero-sum game between SB, Nature Networks, Scientific Blogging, Discover Blogs, etc. My main concern personally is that my readership is still strongly Anglospheric, literally hundreds of millions of Chinese have started using the internet while I’ve been blogging, but very few of them do and can read my content. Due to language constraints this may be a long term structural issue, though the utilization of Google translate + chart heavy posts may be a way to push beyond the Anglosphere a bit. If you want to see the geographic skew, sitemeter is sufficient even with a sample size of the last 100 visitors.

Note: Also, please note that the growth can’t be attributed only to non-science content. Obviously I can’t lay out specific numbers, but blogs which focus on science such as Tetrapod Zoology and Frontal Cortex draw lots of traffic.

(via DM)