With the passage of health care reform, and the shift of the medical profession away from private practice and toward large institutions already, I wanted to revisit some data about the political orientation of medical students and recent graduates surveyed in the mid-aughts. One of the major issues among American elites has been the occupational bifurcation politically between liberals and conservatives, with the former concentrated in the professions which are often affiliated with the managerial state, and the latter within the business sector. Until recently I had assumed that medical doctors were an example of a profession which tended toward conservatism because of the bias toward private practice and the general lack of direct state involvement (as opposed to regulation) in their occupation, but this seems an older model. Political Self-characterization of U.S. Medical Students shows that medical students actually tend toward liberalism vis-a-vis the general population, and even young adults in their primary age group. No doubt this may change as they age, but I am skeptical of this because it looks as if medicine is going to resemble a public sector occupation more, not less, as we proceed. I reformatted table 1, removing a few rows which I felt were extraneous. Additionally, I added columns which show the proportions of medical students by ethnicity and religion (where they received close to 100% response) and the general population ~2008 (from the American Community Survey & Religious Landscape Survey).

There were a few religion categories which don’t seem to map well between what was asked in the survey of medical students and the general population, so I omitted them. Specifically, it seems that many medical students are nominal Christians who simply selected “Other Christian,” while in the general population this class consists mostly of heterodox groups such as Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christian scientists. The “Other” religious segment also seems inordinately large, and I suspect that they would be “Unaffiliated” in the Pew survey (if the question is asked so that “Atheist” is part of the category that will scare away a substantial subset of those who aren’t members of organized religions but have some vague supernatural beliefs). Finally, it seems strange to me that they clumped “Native” and “Other” races together in the medical student survey, as it seems likely that many who didn’t want to respond or were mixed-race are in this group, so I didn’t compare it to anything in general population.

No great surprise that pediatricians are more liberal than surgeons. Perhaps I’m employing stereotypes that people may find scurrilous, but I don’t particularly care. Some of the trends among specialties are confounded with the fact that there are differences in sex ratio across them; specialists or those who wish to be specialists are more likely to be male than female, and females are more likely to be liberal than male. Correlations are not necessarily transitive, but I think that’s what you’re seeing here. The liberalism of Asian Americans is not that surprising, but notice that Hindus and Buddhists are even more liberal. The majority of young Asian Americans are now of non-Christian religions, or irreligious, but a significant minority are Christians, and often conservative ones at that. The higher proportion of conservatives among the whole Asian American group is probably a function of the fact that Christians are more comfortable with the conservative movement than non-Christians. If you are a racial minority being a non-Christian makes it very difficult to identify with the modern Republican movement; being a white person at least allows for racial solidarity, while being a conservative Christian allows for ideological solidarity. No matter the “family values” or high incomes of Asian Americans, those who are non-Christian are going to be deeply alienated from the party for reasons of identity for the foreseeable future (yes, I know there are secular libertarian Asian Americans who are Republican. When I was more politically engaged I was in that category).

Interestingly, non-Hispanic whites are represented in proportion to their numbers in the general population among young doctors and medical students, though a bit overrepresented in proportion to their age bracket. As older individuals are more likely to need medical care, and these are more often non-Hispanic white, it will be common for non-white doctors to interact with older patients who grew up at a time when America was an explicitly biracial, and implicitly white, country. I have talked to young Asian American friends who recount experiences with very elderly patients whereby it is difficult for these individuals to grok that they were born and raised in the United States because these patients have an image of America which is derived from their youth.

The prominence of ethnically Asian software engineers, or in scientific institutes, is a well known feature of the American landscape. But these are not occupations which require a great deal of interface with the general American public. Professions like medicine do require that interface, that is one reason that there is focus on getting underrepresented minorities into medicine, so that they can better serve their communities. When it comes to elderly white patients who are going through chronic illnesses at the end of their lives I think it is probably not practical or appropriate to expect too much consciousness raising in regards intercultural dynamics and sensitivity. Rather, I think the onus is going to be on young Asian American doctors to try and understand the perspectives of their patients and the America from which they came, an America which they and their parents have changed in fundamental ways by their very presence.

Humans have travelled all over the planet but many uncharted regions of the globe still hide unknown animal species waiting to be discovered. With some exceptions, these new finds are largely small creatures that are hard to spot amid the bustle of a tropical forest. So imagine Luke Welton’s surprise when he came across an entirely new species of giant monitor lizard in the forests of northern Philippines.

At two metres in length, it’s not quite as large as its close relative the Komodo dragon, but it’s hardly inconspicuous either. It’s also brightly and beautifully coloured with intricate golden spots running down its otherwise black back. As is often the case, the lizard may be new to science but the local tribespeople – the Agta and Ilongot – have known about it for centuries. It’s actually one of their main sources of protein. Their name for the monitor, bitatawa, is now part of its official species name – Varanus bitatawa

Rafe Brown, who leads Welton’s group, says, “Clues to its existence had filtered in over the last ten years.” Photos of the mysterious animal had been circulating since 2001, but the clincher came when Welton and another student, Cameron Siler, salvaged a specimen that had been brought to them by a hunter. “They knew it was something special, either a rare colour pattern or a new species,” says Brown.

The dead lizard went on a round-the world trip from the Philippines to Kansas. There, Brown’s team counted its scales, examined its internal organs and sequenced its DNA. Their meticulous examination revealed that the animal was closely related to the Gray’s monitor (Varanus olivaceus), which also lives on the same island. But it was distinct enough to count as a species in its own right. “The team in the field were very celebratory,” says Brown.

V.bitatawa has an unusual habit that separates it from all but two other monitor species – it mostly eats fruit. Even before the animal had been discovered, the field team had suspected that a fruit-eating monitor lizard was prowling the forests, based on scratch marks all over the local fruiting Pandanus trees. The final bit of evidence came when Welton opened up the stomach of the specimen he recovered. Inside, he found Pandanus fruits, figs and pili nut fruit, with no trace of a single insect, rodent or bird. Snail shells were the only sign that the lizard occasionally eats other animals.

So far, the team have recovered three specimens of the new lizard and it seems that V.bitawawa only lives in a small band of mountainous forests in the Philippine island of Luzon. It shares the island with the Gray’s monitor, but the two animals are separated by over 150km that includes three river valleys. They’re unlikely to mingle.

How could such a large and conspicuous animal have gone unnoticed by the many biologists who have studied the northern Philippines? Welton admits that it’s an “astonishing set of circumstances”. He suggests that few scientists have tried to survey the reptile life of the area. And if the new species is anything like the Gray’s monitor, it is a secretive animal that almost never leaves the forests to cross open areas.

The discovery of such an eye-catching new animal cements the Philippines’ reputation as one of the planet’s most important hotspots of biodiversity. In the past decade, scientists searching the islands have found new species of lobsters, meat-eating pitcher plants, rails, flying foxes, parrots, mice, shrews, snakes, frogs and orchids.

You get the feeling that we’ve only just started scratching the surface of the islands’ wildlife secrets. Indeed, if the northern and southern parts of Luzon could harbour two distinct species of monitors, separated by physical barriers, there will probably be other pairs of sister species waiting to be found.

Sadly, as with many new discoveries, the animal’s future is being called into question just as it is unveiled to the world at large. Luzon Island has a thriving human population who have cut down much of its forests. The Gray’s monitor is classified as vulnerable due to the loss of its habitat, and V.bitawawa may be similarly endangered. Welton hopes that the new animal will be beautiful and charismatic enough to act as a “flagship species” for the local area, promoting the need to conserve this most bountiful of habitats.

Reference: Biology Letters http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2010.0119

Images: by Joseph Brown and Luke Welton

More on lizards:

• Venomous Komodo dragons kill prey with wound-and-poison tactics
• The pink Galapagos iguana that Darwin never saw
• Virgin birth by Komodo dragons
• Running dragon lizards do wheelies
• Mayfly-like chameleon lives mostly as an egg

A little square that has been left blank on the periodic table for all these years might finally be filled in. A team of American and Russian scientists have just reported the synthesis of a brand new element–element 117. Says study coauthor Dawn Shaughnessy: “For a chemist, it’s so fundamentally cool” to fill a square in that table [The New York Times].

If other scientists confirm the discovery, the still-unnamed element will take its place between elements 116 and 118, both of which have already been tracked down. A paper about element 117 will soon be published in Physical Review Letters, and scientists say the new element appears to point the way toward a brew of still more massive elements with chemical properties no one can predict [The New York Times].

Element 117 was born in a particle accelerator in Russia, where the scientists smashed together calcium-48 — an isotope with 20 protons and 28 neutrons — and berkelium-249, which has 97 protons and 152 neutrons. The collisions spit out either three or four neutrons, creating two different isotopes of an element with 117 protons [Science News].

The new element 117, takes it place between two superheavy elements that scientists know to be very radioactive and that decay almost instantly. But many researchers think it is possible that even heavier elements may occupy an “island of stability” in which superheavy atoms stick around for a while [Science News]. If this theory holds up, scientists say, the work could generate an array of strange new materials with as yet unimagined scientific and practical uses [New York Times].

The excitement continues for the scientists who toiled to synthesize the new element, as they wait to hear what it will be named. Usually, a new element is named after someone or someplace involved in the research. The element berekelium, which was used in the experiment, was named after the University of California at Berkeley, where it was first synthesized, while element 112 was just recently named Copernicium in honor of the 16th century scientist Nicholas Copernicus.

So far, the scientists have been exceptionally mum about what the element might be called. Yuri Oganessian, a nuclear physicist at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia and the lead author on the paper, said in an e-mail message: “Naming elements is a serious question; in fact…This takes years” [New York Times]. His silence is reinforced by team member Shaughnessy, who was equally cagey about possible names for the new element: “We’ve never discussed names because it’s sort of like bad karma…It’s like talking about a no hitter during the no hitter. We’ve never spoken of it aloud” [New York Times].

Till the element is confirmed and it takes its formal place on the periodic table, scientists say it shall simply be referred to as element 117–or by the Latin reference to its number, ununseptium.

Related Content:
80beats: Zinc + Lead = New, Superheavy Addition to the Periodic Table
DISCOVER: Physicists Extend the Periodic Table
DISCOVER: 19: Two New Elements Discovered
DISCOVER: 10 Obscure Elements That Are More Important Than You’d Think

Image:Wikimedia

The West Virginia coal mining accident yesterday killed at least 25, and hope is starting to fade for finding the four missing miners alive. It’s the deadliest mining accident in the United States in more than a quarter-century.

A methane explosion appears to be the cause. Normally when DISCOVER covers methane scares, it has to do with the potent greenhouse gas leaking from permafrost or the ocean. But for coal miners, methane represents a more clear and present danger: Underground mines can fill up with the flammable gas, and a stray spark can light it and cause an explosion. As a result, mines are required to have giant fans that blow methane out of the working area.

Methane not only appears to have caused the accident, it also held up the rescue effort. Operations had to be suspended because of a build-up of methane in the mine. It’s hoped that they can resume later today — but it will require drilling about 1,000 feet, through two coal seams, to get to where the men might have been able to find shelter [NPR].

Methane is ubiquitous in coal mines. The gas, like coal, is a molecule made of hydrogen and carbon, and it is produced from the same raw material as coal, ancient piles of biological material, by the same processes. Much of the natural gas sold in the United States is drawn from coal seams. In undisturbed coal deposits, the methane is kept loosely attached to the coal molecules by compression; when the area is opened up by miners, the pressure is reduced and the methane bubbles out [The New York Times].

Coal mining is an unavoidably dangerous occupation, but it seems Massey Energy, owner of the mine, was far behind where it should have been in safety compliance. The U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration cited the mine for 1,342 safety violations from 2005 through Monday for a total of $1.89 million in proposed fines, according to federal records. The company has contested 422 of those violations [Washington Post]. The citations at West Virginia’s Upper Big Branch mine included some for the improper ventilation of methane.

Just why Upper Big Branch suffered such a catastrophe at this particular time remains unknown. After the incident, geologists noticed that there had been two recent episodes of small seismic activities in the area—a 3.4 magnitude earthquake on Sunday and some surface blasting on Saturday that initially registered as a 2.9 quake. USGS geophysicist Julie Dutton says that the 3.4 quake could have been strong enough to dislodge methane pockets and contribute to the accident—but only if it were closer than its distance of 100 miles. “There’s the definite possibility that that’s what could have happened, but not from this earthquake,” Dutton said. “This one was too far away and days separated. That makes a big difference” [FoxNews.com].

And from the other side of the world, some slightly better news. Yesterday rescuers saved 115 people trapped underground for eight days at the Wangjialing mine in China. The rescue was rare good news for China’s mining industry, the deadliest in the world, where accidents killed 2,631 coal miners last year. That’s down from 6,995 deaths in 2002, the most dangerous year on record [AP]. However, 32 remain stuck underground, and gas buildups are hindering the operations there, too.

Related Content:
80beats: Isn’t It Ironic: Green Tech Relies on Dirty Mining in China
80beats: New EPA Rules Clamp Down on Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining
80beats: After Massive Tennessee Ash Spill, Authorities Try to Assess the Damage
80beats: Obama & Chu Push Ahead with Clean Coal Projects Despite the Cost

Image: flickr / NIOSH

Hand motion segmentation against skin colour background in breast awareness applications.

“A hand is an essential tool used in breast self-examination, which needs to be detected and analysed during the process of breast palpation. However, the background of a woman’s moving hand is her breast that has the same or similar colour as the hand. Additionally, colour images recorded by a web camera are strongly affected by the lighting or brightness conditions. Hence, it is a challenging task to segment and track the hand against the breast without utilising any artificial markers, such as coloured nail polish. In this paper, a two-dimensional Gaussian skin colour model is employed in a particular way to identify a breast but not a hand. First, an input image is transformed to YCbCr colour space, which is less sensitive to the lighting conditions and more tolerant of skin tone. The breast, thus detected by the Gaussian skin model, is used as the baseline or framework for the hand motion.”

Photo: flickr/briser50

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Eye Tracking of Men’s Preferences for Female Breast Size and Areola Pigmentation.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: scientist…or perv?
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: wtf?

It’s a little tardy– my first book came out in 2002, after all — but Barrel of Monkeys just reviewed Bad Astronomy.

The conclusion?

In fact, I move that Bad Astronomy be a recommended text book at secondary schools everywhere, or even primary schools, for that matter. Scratch that. Everyone in the world should read this book. Phil Plait manages to break things down to an easily understandable level, so that people without a background in physics or astronomy* can grasp the core concepts.

I agree. In fact, I’d be happy to reduce my royalty to a mere one penny per book if that would make what he wishes come true. I suspect $60M would be a sufficient and acceptable paycheck. You can start now if you’d like, and if it does sell six billion copies, I’ll send you a refund for the difference^*.

Dave Weigel is up & running at The Washington Post, covering conservative politics.

Archaeologists Uncover Land Before Wheel; Site Untouched for 6,000 Years. Of course the New World civilizations ~1492 were also pre-wheel.

Realty Check: ‘Extreme Makeover’ Downsizes Its Dream Homes. Mo money = mo problems (remember, home equal = $).

The Science of Kissing COVER! Sheril has a cover. Nice.

Today’s Social Liberal Is Tomorrow’s Social Conservative. Looking at the GSS I’ve found that conservatives of all ages tend to agree when it comes to issues like homosexuality, while liberals exhibit a split between old & young. Don’t know whether this is transitory, or a general feature of social change in the United States.

Discovery takes flight. Image credit: NASA

The crew of STS-131 have been pretty busy with the inspection of the heat shield and getting ready for docking with the ISS.  I was hoping to hear something this morning because I believe I saw a piece of ice hit the, lemme think…the lower starboard side, just after the external tank separated. The ice appeared to change directions abruptly upon impact and I don’t mean to infer damage just curious is all.

Turns out there was a Ku-band radio anomaly so the inspection results were not sent to the ground.  Instead last I heard the images will be digitized and sent to the ground after docking tomorrow and everything is set for that to happen.

NASA didn’t elaborate on the Ku-band anomaly, probably just something normal.   However there has been a uptick in solar activity since the launch took place and we’ve been in an geomagnetic storm.  While it is true a geomagnetic storm can interfere with radio signals, I tend to doubt the current storm has anything to do with the radio anomaly, the frequency is just too high.

Oh the other hand — , the aurora is back!  The Boulder K hit 7, which it hasn’t done in a long time.  The activity has been tapering off some, but there have been a few further surges.  The Boulder K was at 5 this morning, I went running outside to find clouds over the northern sky.  It appears the new solar cycle is kicking in.  Normally at a Boulder K of 5 I can see a little of the aurora  and 6 or higher is usually a pretty nice show.

The Space Weather Prediction Center has a great page on viewing the aurora and you can check a chart (and map) to see what level of Planetary K index it take to produce a visible aurora at a given latitude.  You will note I am using two scales the Boulder K (K_B) and Planetary K (K_P) indices.  I use the Boulder K because I am more used to it.

You can get a quick look at what is going on from the SWPC in a variety of scales here.

Imagine a day in the future when a soldier could just roll out of bed, pull on a cotton T-shirt, and head out into a combat zone, without worrying about taking a bullet through the chest.

An international team of scientists from Switzerland, China, and the United States have moved one step closer towards the goal of a bulletproof T-shirt by combining cotton with boron carbide–the third hardest material known on earth and the stuff used to armor battle tanks.

Chemistry World reports:

Modern military forces use plates of boron carbide (B₄C) as ceramic inserts for bulletproof clothing but these can restrict mobility, so the design of a nanocomposite — where B₄C is used to reinforce another material — could provide the perfect balance of strength and flexibility.

The scientists created the new bulletproof material by cutting squares from a pure cotton T-shirt and soaking them in a solution containing boron powder and a nickel-based catalyst. Then they heated the cloth patches to 2012 degrees Fahrenheit under a stream of argon that prevented the material from burning. In the process, the cotton fibers changed to carbon fibers, which reacted with the boron powder to form “nanowires” of boron carbide. The researchers describe their breakthrough in the journal Advanced Materials.

The cloth changed color from white to black after the reaction, but remained remarkably strong, lightweight, and flexible. But cops and soldiers won’t be sporting these bulletproof T-shirts anytime soon, Chemistry World adds:

But despite the dramatic change in their properties, this type of ‘armored cotton’ is not yet ready to replace conventional bulletproof materials, such as Kevlar.

Related Content:
80beats: New Latex & Plastic Soundproofing Could Stop Even Rumbling Bass Sound
80beats: Could a Deep-Sea Snail’s Shell Inspire Next-Gen Body-Armor?
80beats: Self-Healing Coating Could Make Scratch-Proof Cars
80beats: Super-Strong Ceramic Mimics Seashells’ Tough Mother-of-Pearl Coating

Image: Xiaoding Li. The image shows the nanowire arrays in the cotton fabric, and a cross-section diagram of the carbon microfiber coated with boron carbide nanowires.

When it comes to generating clean energy, the strong offshore winds that blow in from the ocean are a great source. But while these sea breezes are often stronger than land winds, they’re not consistent; instead their force tends to ebb and flow like the tides. Wind turbines that use offshore winds to produce energy can therefore have a tough time maintaining a steady supply of power, but now scientists from the University of Delaware have proposed a novel idea on how to keep the power supply steady.

In a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Willet Kempton and his team suggest that by connecting offshore wind farms in a long network running along the entire Eastern Seaboard, power fluctuations could be cut down, as electricity from interconnected farms would be easier to manage and more valuable than from wind at a single location [BusinessWeek]. The researchers suggest that by creating a 1,550-mile-long network of wind turbines, the network could provide power from Massachusetts to North Carolina.

Kempton says linking the turbines would also help eliminate the possibility of a complete power outage should wind speeds drop in any one location. If the wind drops in North Carolina, say, power could be rerouted from somewhere else in the network where the winds are blowing strongly, scientists explain. The concept is simple: If you spread out wind stations far enough, each one will experience a different weather pattern. So it’s very unlikely that a slackening of the wind would affect all stations at once. The result is steadier power [Wired.com].

Kempton’s team proposed the idea after studying five years of offshore wind data from Florida to Maine. Simulating a series of underwater transmission cables that stretched about 1,550 miles and connected 11 stations, which they called the “Atlantic transmission grid,” scientists found that although individual stations showed erratic power supplies, the aggregate power output changed very little. Not once during the five year period studied did the overall power output drop to zero. “We took an intermittent resource and made it not intermittent anymore,” Kempton said [Wired.com].

Though the United States is the world’s largest producer of wind power, no commercial offshore wind farms are up and running yet here; Kempton’s research may provide support for the various offshore wind projects in the planning stages along the Atlantic coast. Mark Jacobson, a civil and environmental engineer at Standford University comments: “The technology’s there, the materials are there, we have the willpower to reduce carbon emissions, we have a reliable power supply that doesn’t lead to fuel shortage…. The next step is really to start implementing this on a large scale” [Wired.com]. However, installing cables like those Kempton used in his study to hypothetically connect the different turbines could cost as much as $1.4 billion.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: High-Flying Windmills Blow Away Their Ground-Based Cousins
80beats: Windmills on NYC Skyscrapers Sound Cool, but Wouldn’t Work
80beats: Wind Turbines Could Theoretically Power the Entire World, and Then Some
80beats: Will New York City Harness Wind Power?

Image: iStockphoto

It has been brought to my attention that some legitimate comments without copious linkage seem to have gotten caught in the spam filter. If your comment is legit and it isn’t showing up after a day (or, if you’ve already been approved for comments and it doesn’t show up immediately), email me.

The Space Shuttle Discovery launched successfully yesterday, and it’s on its way to the International Space Station. It will dock with ISS tomorrow, April 7.

Until then, the Orbiter has to play catch up, slowly changing its orbit until it matches the station’s. The thing is, you may be able to watch this unfold! Both the Orbiter and the ISS are easily visible to the unaided eye, and in fact the station is potentially the fourth brightest object in the sky (after the Sun, Moon, and Venus). As they approach each other, you can see them as bright(ish) stars moving rapidly across the sky.

You can find out if they are visible to you by going to a site like Heavens-Above. Enter your latitude and longitude (try Google maps to get that) and it will put you on a page that gives you times, directions, and brightnesses (in magnitudes, so a more negative number is brighter) of a lot of different satellites. Click on ISS or STS-131 to get the station or Orbiter times.

All the good passes for the next week in Boulder, for example, are in the early morning. I suspect I’ll miss them. But check your local times and see if you can catch them! It’s an amazing sight. The picture here is one I took myself using nothing more than a digital camera on a tripod — click to embiggen it. It shows a time exposure of Atlantis and the ISS from 2007, and you can see how they are on very slightly different orbits. The two were separated by a small amount; you can tell by the different end points of the trails.

There aren’t many Shuttle flights left, so get out there and observe this while you can!

Despite burning curiosity, I have no idea what the Dalai Lama writes in his personal emails. But somewhere in China, hackers know.

China-based hacking operations have moved from murmurs to the front page since the fracas between the Chinese government and Google flared up three months ago. Besides the communist government’s flagrant and unapologetic Internet censorship, the search giant also accused China of harboring hackers who were behind politically motivated cyber attacks, like the targeting of Chinese human rights activists’ Gmail accounts. This week, computer security experts at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto announced that they’ve been trailing a group of China-based attackers they dub the “Shadow Network” for eight months. And they say they can show that those hackers have stolen a plethora of politically sensitive materials.

The intruders breached the systems of independent analysts, taking reports on several Indian missile systems. They also obtained a year’s worth of the Dalai Lama’s personal e-mail messages. The intruders even stole documents related to the travel of NATO forces in Afghanistan [The New York Times]. They also took political documents that outlined India’s concerns about its relations with Africa, Russia, and the Middle East. The core servers for the operation seem to be based in the city of Chengdu in southwest China.

The report said it has no evidence of involvement by the Chinese government, but it again put Beijing on the defensive [Los Angeles Times]. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu bemoaned the widespread coverage of this, and insisted that the government has nothing to do with the attacks. But while the researchers behind the report, “Shadows in the Cloud,” don’t explicitly blame the Chinese government, they say they are watching to see whether the government takes any action to shut down these hackers.

Meanwhile, Google’s spats with governments aren’t over. As we reported last week, the company says that opponents to a bauxite mining project in Vietnam have been inadvertently downloading malware, and McAfee, the company that discovered the attack, says the malware created a botnet whose command-and-control systems were located within IP (Internet Protocol) address blocks assigned to Vietnam. “We believe that the perpetrators may have political motivations and may have some allegiance to the government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,” wrote McAfee CTO George Kurtz [PC World]. Like the Chinese government, Vietnam’s denies these allegations and calls them “groundless.”

Related Content:
80beats: Google Exposes a Cyber Attack on Vietnamese Activists
80beats: Google Defies China’s Censorship Rules; China Quickly Strikes Back
80beats: Iran Blocks Gmail; Will Offer Surveillance-Friendly National Email Instead
80beats: Hillary Clinton to China: Internet Censorship Is an “Information Curtain”
80beats: Google to China: No More Internet Censorship, or We Leave

Image: flickr / abhikrama

Welcome to this week’s installment of the From Eternity to Here book club. Today we have a look at Chapter Thirteen, “The Life of the Universe.”

Excerpt:

If our comoving patch defines an approximately closed system, the next step is to think about its space of states. General relativity tells us that space itself, the stage on which particles and matter move and interact, evolves over time. Because of this, the definition of the space of states becomes more subtle than it would have been in if spacetime were absolute. Most physicists would agree that information is conserved as the universe evolves, but the way that works is quite unclear in a cosmological context. The essential problem is that more and more things can fit into the universe as it expands, so—naively, anyway—it looks as if the space of states is getting bigger. That would be in flagrant contradiction to the usual rules of reversible, information-conserving physics, where the space of states is fixed once and for all.

Of course we’ve already looked a bit at the life of the universe, way back in Chapter Three. The difference is that we’re now focusing on how entropy evolves, given our hard-acquired understanding of what entropy is and how it works for black holes. This is where we review Roger Penrose’s well-known-yet-still-widely-ignored argument that the low entropy of the early universe is something that needs to be explained.

In a sense, this is pretty straightforward stuff, following directly from what we’ve already done in the book. But it’s also somewhat controversial among professional cosmologists. The reason why can be found in the slightly technical digression that begins on page 292, “Conservation of information in an expanding universe.”

The point is that physicists often think of “the space of states in a region of spacetime” as being equal to “the space of states we can describe by quantum field theory.” They know that’s not right, because gravity doesn’t fit into that description, but these are the states they know how to deal with. This collection of states isn’t fixed; it grows with time as the universe expands. You will therefore sometimes hear cosmologists talk about the high entropy of the early universe, under the misguided assumption that there were fewer states that could “fit” into the universe at that time. (Equivalently, that gravity can be ignored.) This approach has, in my opinion anyway, done great damage to how cosmologists think about fine-tuning problems. One of the major motivations for writing the book was to explain these issues, not only to the general reader but also to my scientist friends.

At the end of the chapter I deviate from Penrose’s argument a bit. He believes that a high-entropy state of the universe would be one that was highly inhomogeneous, full of black holes and white holes and what have you. I think that’s right if you are thinking about a very dense configuration of matter. But matter doesn’t have to be dense — the expansion of the universe can dilute it away. So I argue that the truly highest-entropy configuration is one where space is essentially empty, with nothing but vacuum energy. This is also very far from being widely accepted, and certainly relies on a bit of hand-waving. But again, I think the failure to appreciate this point has distorted how cosmologists think about the problems presented by the early universe. So hopefully they read this far in the book!

A commenter takes a microbe-lover to task. It’s on! Jonathan Eisen, we await your flying scissor kick!

[Link to comment fixed]

Over the last few days, questions surrounding the iPad have normally been along the lines of: When will I get my paws on one? What apps should I get? What if I break it? But the question over at the blender company Blendtec has been more straightforward as everyone wondered, “Will it blend?”

Over the last few years, the company has been producing videos that showcase the industrial strength of their commercial blenders. In this video, they set out to find if Apple’s tablet can be blended into an iPad smoothie by chucking it into the “Total Blender” and turning in on. Needless to say, we gripped the edges of our table and wept a little (ok, a lot) as the brand-new iPad was smashed to smithereens.

Past “Will it Blend” videos have shown objects like glow sticks or an iPhone being demolished by the roaring blender. Blendec’s website proudly states:

The Total Blender two jar package includes both the standard 2-quart BPA-free jar, as well as the new BPA-free 3-quart jar featuring a precision tuned 4” blade and a patented fifth side. This larger five sided jar / 4″ blade combination creates a more powerful blending vortex, allowing you to power through tougher blending tasks with ease in less time.

Are you ready? Then watch what happens here.

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Image: Apple

Doctors already use concentrated sound waves to see through solid tissue and take a look inside the body, as with ultrasound scans. But in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Caltech scientists say they’ve developed a metamaterial that focuses sound to such a high concentration that it could go on the offensive, targeting cancers or kidney stones while leaving the surrounding tissues alone. Oh, and one other thing: The military could use it to make weapons.

“The beauty of this system is that it’s just a bunch of ball bearings that we control with weights,” said Chiara Daraio [Discovery News], a member of the research team. Caltech’s acoustic lens relies on the same principle as Newton’s cradle—that toy your high school science teacher probably kept on his or her desk with metal balls on strings that demonstrated the conservation of energy. In this design, 21 parallel chains each contain 21 bearings. When the team strikes one end, it starts a compression wave that carries through the system. But instead of having the last ball swing out like a pendulum and bring the momentum back into the system, like the toy does, the acoustic lens focuses all the energy at the end of the system onto one spot, just a few inches away from the metamaterial.

Researcher Alessandro Spadoni says the team had medical uses in mind when they designed this acoustic lens. “In particular, tissue temperature at the focal point can be increased with high acoustic-energy density, which results from a compact focal volume and high pressure induced by sound bullets,” Spadoni adds [Scientific American]. Thus, he says, you could potentially target and heat up cancerous tissue without affecting surrounding healthy tissue. Or, if they modulated the system a different way, the researchers say it could be used to see inside the body without the possible risks related to radiation-based imaging. The paper also hints at use in defense systems, though it leaves the implications of that to the imaginations of others. Sound bullets could be used by the military to create submarine melting waves of pressure or shock waves powerful enough to destroy caves otherwise untouchable by conventional weapons [Discovery News].

The Caltech scientists are far from the first to tinker with acoustic lenses, but the simplicity of their design makes it appealing. The research model currently works in two dimensions and hasn’t been tested on living cells. But, researchers says, scaling up to 3D could focus sound waves even better, and the applications of such a technology will depend on how much sound wave intensity the team can focus into one spot.

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Image: PNAS

I wish I had thought of the title of this post, but I have to give credit to the wonderful Rachel Maddow. I happened to catch a few minutes of her show while on the road the other day, and although it made my blood boil, I watched the entire segment, which is now online:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

In her segment, Ms. Maddow talks about the out-and-out lying being done by so many right-wing media outlets, in this case about ACORN and Climategate. As I have been saying many times, the far right in this country have been beating the pulpit to a bloody mess with their distortions and noise-making. They will do or say just about anything to distract people from the real issues. As long as people are scared to death by this noise, they won’t think about issues, they’ll react to them.

Elizabeth Kolbert — gotta love that name — has an article in The New Yorker on a similar theme, saying how the sturm und drang over Climategate is much ado about nothing, an overtrumped, overhyped, and breathlessly hyperbolied mountain crafted entirely out of molehills. I have said exactly that myself. Twice. And as I expected when I posted those articles, there was a huge amount of noise, but the points I was making — the ones I was actually making, and not the ones denialists tried play up — still stand. The hacked emails did not show widespread conspiracy by climatologists, and in fact a parliamentary committee that convened to investigate the hacked emails cleared scientists of all wrongdoing.

I’ll note that the far right doesn’t own the copyright on this; the far left has its share of antireality. The alternative medicine movement is a fine example of this. But the right is the one currently making the most noise. I agree with some of the basic tenets of Republicanism — I’d prefer a small government over a bloated bureaucracy, and I believe in fiscal responsibility — but the GOP as it stands now is a far cry from the roots of its party. I think the unholy (so to speak) alliance it curried with fundamental religion a few decades ago has led it to the antireality stance it has today. And either way, and from whatever direction, the noise machines are in full swing.

We’ve seen this over and over again, and it will continue for as long as the media allow it, and we allow the media to allow it. I’m really glad Ms. Maddow and The New Yorker called them out on it. The blogosphere does what it can, but until the main stream media take this issue on, I fear that most people won’t see the man behind the curtain.

Global warming is real. Evolution is real. Vaccines do not cause autism. Homeopathy doesn’t work. These are facts, and they don’t care whether or not denialists spin, fold, and mutilate them. Until we face up to reality, however, they will spin, fold, and mutilate us.

So what do you think?! The Science of Kissing will be out next January and is already available for pre-order on Amazon. Here's the description: From a noted science journalist comes a wonderfully witty and fascinating exploration of how and why we kiss. When did humans begin to kiss? Why is kissing integral to some cultures and alien to others? Do good kissers make the best lovers? And is that expensive lip-plumping gloss worth it? Sheril Kirshenbaum, a biologist and science journalist, tackles these questions and more in THE SCIENCE OF KISSING. It's everything you always wanted to know about kissing but either haven't asked, couldn't find out, or didn't realize you should understand. The book is informed by the latest studies and theories, but Kirshenbaum's engaging voice gives the information a light touch. Topics range from the kind of kissing men like to do (as distinct from women) to what animals can teach us about the kiss to whether or not the true art of kissing was lost sometime in the Dark Ages. Drawing upon classical history, evolutionary biology, psychology, popular culture, and more, Kirshenbaum's winning book will appeal to romantics and armchair scientists alike.

UPDATE:  SOLVED at 12:13 CDT by George

*yawn*  Is everybody up and ready for the riddle today?  I’m not so sure I am.  It’s been an interesting week, for certain.

Okay.  Time to get your name in for the next bonus riddle.  It’s been a while since I’ve gone over the game rules, so for anybody joining us in the middle of the saga, here they are:

The subject is always either an object or an event with which you will have been familiar since childhood (or since  discovery, if it’s contemporary).
The winner chooses the subject of my next post (must be about astronomy; must be researchable).
Each weekly winner becomes eligible to compete in the bonus riddle.

That’s it in a nutshell, and now that you’re all fired up and ready to go (okay, mildly interested and ready to go), here are the clues:

Yippee Emoticons - Doing the Wave

Today’s subject is an object.

It is a single object.

It was known to ancient man.

Although not the smallest of it’s kind everywhere, within it’s “local group”, it is the smallest.

An Atom Encased in its Electrons

Although relatively close to us, it’s not easy to see.

This object is well represented in modern fiction.

Modern observation of this object has revealed some surprises.

Image credit: Mila Zinkova; Sunspot #923

Okay – that’s it for today.  Any ideas?  It’s another easy one, so get your guesses in quickly.  Rob shot down last week’s riddle in ten minutes, so let’s see if you can solve this one in less time.  You know where to find me…

DON'T LOOK, TRUDY!