We silly humans tend to think of rain just in our own terms, the falling water tainted with various toxins that draws out our umbrellas and cancels our baseball games. But across the solar system, it rains on other worlds with thick atmospheres–it’s just not rain we would recognize. On Saturn’s moon Titan, for instance, it rains methane. And now, a group of scientists says in Physical Review Letters, computer simulations have confirmed that it rains helium on Jupiter.

The term “rain” applies loosely here, because the hellfire precipitation happening on Jupiter isn’t much like a pleasant afternoon shower here on Earth. Droplets of helium form thousands of miles below the tops of hydrogen clouds, at temperatures around 9,000 degrees Fahrenheit–the helium stays in its liquid phase because of the planet’s high atmospheric pressure. Pressures and temperatures on Jupiter are so high that the droplets of liquid helium are falling through a fluid of metallic hydrogen [Space.com].

Curiously, the key to figuring out Jupiter’s helium rain was the mystery surrounding the element neon. Since neon is a noble gas that doesn’t react much with other elements, researchers expected to see concentrations of it in the gas giant planet’s atmosphere. But the Galileo probe that plunged into Jupiter’s upper atmosphere Dec. 7, 1995, found only about one-ninth the amount of neon that should have been there. There was also less helium than expected, even though helium and hydrogen are the two main constituents of the planet [Los Angeles Times]. Hugh Wilson and colleagues had suspected that the answer to this puzzle might be helium rain falling out of the atmosphere to the lower depths of the planet, carrying neon with it. And, they say, their simulation of the mixing of gases inside our solar system’s largest planet showed a layer of helium would be formed that would cause this “rain” effect.

That explains the dearth of helium and neon. Unlike rain, fog and other weather systems on Earth, helium droplets on Jupiter don’t cycle through the atmosphere, but instead are being deposited deep into the planet [Discovery News]. The scientists say the effect might not be limited to Jupiter, either. Because Saturn is smaller and colder than Jupiter, the physics suggest that helium rain could be even more widespread there. However, despite Cassini’s continued surveillance of the planet, no probe has dived into Saturn’s atmosphere to take the kind of measurements Galileo took of Jupiter.

Train was wrong, then. Rather than “Drops of Jupiter,” the band should have written “Drops on Jupiter.”

Related Content:
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80beats: Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Reveals Its Stormy Secrets
80beats: Cassini Sends Back Ravishing New Photos of Saturn’s Rings
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80beats: Mysterious Smash on Jupiter Leaves an Earth-Sized Scar

Image: NASA; Hugh F. Wilson and Burkhard Militzer, University of California, Berkeley

We're big fans here of Eli Kintisch's new book Hack the Planet...and now you can read some of it, thanks to an exclusive online excerpt over at Wired.com. A brief excerpt of the excerpt: The idea of deliberately manipulating the weather or the climate is an especially powerful notion. We equate weather with mood because our bodies are so affected by temperature and moisture and light. Storms trouble our minds as well as threaten our coasts. Climate is our experience of the weather over time and space, the way weather shapes our summers or our neighborhoods. To control climate — especially now, at a time when it seems so unpredictable — promises stability and peace for us and our children. The seductive idea of weather and climate control has been a constant trope in the human imagination. The sorcerer Prospero in Shakespeare’s Tempest conjures bad weather to drive his enemy’s boat ashore. In the 1985 film Brewster’s Millions, Montgomery Brewster, played by Richard Pryor, invests in a scheme to haul icebergs to the Middle East to provide water. Advanced societies control the weather as a matter of course in the worlds of Star Trek and Dune. When it comes to our air ...

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is perhaps its most iconic feature. It’s a vast storm, a bloody-colored hurricane that is at least four centuries old, and larger in size than several Earths. It can be seen easily even in a small telescope, and is one of the most studied features in the solar system.

Yet for all that, it’s still poorly understood. How has it lasted so long? What is going on inside of it? How did it form in the first place?

New observations using the Very Large Telescope (together with data from the Gemini, Subaru, and IRTF observatories) have taken us a step closer to finding the answers:

Cooooool. On top is an infrared view of the Spot (as well as its little brother, Oval BA, on the left) from the VLT taken in 2008, and on bottom, for comparison, is the same view from Hubble taken just days earlier. The VLT image was taken at a wavelength of 10.8 microns, about 14 times the wavelength our eye can see. Objects at just about the freezing point of water emit IR at that wavelength. On Jupiter, the atmosphere at a pressure about half of Earth’s pressure at sea level emits at that temperature and wavelength.

What these images show is how Jupiter’s atmosphere circulates up and down in the Spot. The core of the Spot, which appears red to our eye, is warm, and dark lanes are where the gas is being drawn down into Jupiter’s depths. Because the center is warmer — by just a few degrees — it provides an upwelling in the middle of the Spot. This upwelling creates a weak clockwise flow of air, despite the storm’s general counter-clockwise rotation.

More importantly, these observations link the color of the Spot to temperature, even if the exact mechanism for this link is unknown. But any clues we can find will help us understand this incredible hurricane bigger than some planets. Mind you, studying them on Jupiter gives us insight into how storms behave on Earth as well. Scientific observations thrive on diversity, on comparing one set of conditions to another, and seeing how the outcome changes.

Jupiter is vastly different than Earth, but by gazing at it we gaze back at ourselves. That’s the way science works.

Another great review of the Tangled Bank, this time from Bioscience, the journal of the American Institute of Biological Sciences:

“In the best of all worlds, every educated American could and should read this book, and as a result, would have a much richer understanding of evolution as a force directly affecting our lives.”

(NB–Even if you don’t live in the U.S., you may want to check it out!)

In a cave in Siberia, scientists have found a 40,000-year old pinky bone that could belong to an entirely new species of hominid. Or it may be yet another example of how hard it is to figure where one species stops and another begins–even when one of those species is our own. Big news, perhaps, or ambiguous news.

In Nature today, Svante Paabo and his colleagues published a paper describing how their work in a place known as the Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia. There are lots of hominid bones and tools indicating people lived in the cave, off and on, for 125,000 years. There’s good evidence of Homo sapiens in the region for at least 40,000 years, and Paabo and his colleagues have also isolated 30,000-year old DNA from Siberian sites that is similar to the DNA from Neanderthals in Europe.

The scientists succeeded in fishing out human-like DNA from the pinky bone, and so far they’ve sequenced its mitochondrial DNA–that is, the DNA that is housed in mitochondria, sausage-shaped, fuel-producing structures in our cells. The majority of our DNA, which sits in the nucleus of cells, comes from both our mother and father. But mitochondrial DNA comes all from Mom. When the scientists compared the pinky DNA to DNA of humans and Neanderthals, they got something of a shock. If you line up the mitochondrial DNA from any given living human to any other living human, you might expect to find a few dozen points at which they are different. Compare human mtDNA to Neanderthal DNA, and you’ll find about 200 differences. But when the scientists compared the Denisova DNA to a group of human mitochondrial genomes, they found nearly 400 differences. In other words, their DNA was about twice as different from ours than Neanderthal DNA.

The scientists then used the DNA to draw a family tree. Here’s the figure from the paper, which you can also see here for full-size viewing.

The Denisova mitochondrial DNA has been passed down, mother to child, on a lineage of hominids that’s separate from the one that produced mitochondria in Neanderthals and in living humans. Paabo and his colleagues estimated the age of common ancestor from which all the mitochondria evolved, based on the mutations in each branch. They concluded that common ancestor lived 1 million years ago. Below is a simple tree that shows the timing more clearly, from an accompanying commentary in Nature.

No matter how you slice it, this is very exciting. All the mitochondrial DNA from living humans is believed to date back just 150,ooo years. That doesn’t mean that we all descend from a single “Eve.” There were other woman around at the time, and they passed down their own mitochondria. But those lineages eventually hit dead ends. In some cases, women only had sons. In others, they never had children. Eventually, all the mitochondrial DNA in the human population could be traced to only one of the women alive at the time.

All the Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA also shares a relatively recent common ancestor of its own–probably thanks to the same process. And now, for the first time, scientists have found hominid mitochondrial DNA that comes from a far more ancient split.

So–how to explain this? A couple possibilities present themselves.

1. The DNA belongs to a species of hominid that’s neither human nor Neanderthal.

This is the most interesting, most science-fictionish possibility.

Our hominid ancestors evolved into upright apes in Africa some six million years ago. By about 1.9 million years ago, some of those hominids had made their way out of Africa and strolled all the way to Indonesia. They go by the name of Homo erectus, and they stuck around Asia for quite a long time–some would argue they were still around 40,000 years ago. Neanderthals appear to have evolved from another wave out of Africa, which spread to Europe and Siberia several hundred thousand years ago. Meanwhile, our own ancestors appear to have stayed put in Africa. The oldest fossils of anatomically modern humans come from Africa 200,000 years ago, for example, and studies on human DNA find that African lineages are the oldest.

The Denisova DNA split too recently from our own to have been carried by H. erectus, the first globe-trotting hominids. But paleoanthropologists have found a fair number of other hominid fossils in Europe and Asia that might belong to more recent waves out of Africa. (Here, for example, is a report on hominids in Europe 1.2 million years ago.) So perhaps there was at least one other wave aside from H. erectus, the expansion of Neanderthals, and the spread of modern humans. If that’s true, this new discovery also means that this wave produced a long lineage of hominids that survived long enough to live alongside humans. We coexisted with yet another species of hominid–along with Neanderthals, H. erectus, and those lovable hobbits, Homo floresiensis–for thousands of years. Our current solitude is a recent fluke.

If #1 turns out to be true, then this DNA deserves a species name of its own. But for now, Paabo and his colleagues have refrained from giving it one. Instead, they’ve nicknamed the source of the DNA “X-woman.” Why the reticence? Probably because of possibility #2…

2. The DNA comes from the finger of a Neanderthal or a human–thanks to a love that dare not speak its name. Imagine, if you will, that an early Neanderthal male takes a morning constitutional in search of woolly rhinos when, gadzooks, he meets up with a fetching X-woman hominid. For whatever reason, the two of them decide to have an interspecies tryst, and X-woman gets pregnant. She gives birth to a girl carrying Neanderthal and X-woman DNA in her nucleus–and nothing but X-woman DNA in her mitochondria. Somehow this girl becomes a part of Neanderthal society; she has Neanderthal children of her own, and they continue to carry the X-woman mitochondrial DNA.

Remember that in every generation, nuclear DNA gets mixed up. Half of the DNA a child carries in the nucleus comes from its father, half from its mother. And with the generation of new eggs and sperm, chromosomes from each parent get chopped up and shuffled back into new combinations. So over generations, the X-woman DNA might gradually dwindle away from the Neanderthal gene pool–but some Neanderthals might still carry X-woman mitochondria, handed down from mother to daughter to grand-daughter.

(It’s also possible that the interbreeding male in this scenario was a human–although just in terms of timing, that’s less likely, since Neanderthals were out of Africa sooner than we were.)

One reason to take this possibility seriously is the fact that other primate species regularly mix up their DNA in just this way. Mongoose lemurs expanded into the range of brown lemurs, for example, and mitochondrial DNA ended up jumping the species barrier. In many cases, the species were separated by a million years or so, just like the Denisov DNA and human/Neanderthal DNA. (This is why it’s hard to use DNA-barcoding to tell closely related primates apart.) Another reason to take this possibility serious is lies in our own genomes. Some scientists have made a forceful case for the presence of ancient non-human DNA in the gene pool of living humans.

Still, even if this scenario turned out to be right, it would mean that a previously unknown X-woman hominid line expanded out of Africa and lived in Asia until relatively recently. Whether that lineage could be rightly considered a separate species of its own is tricky. (For more on that trickiness, see my article, “What is a Species?” from Scientific American.)

I can imagine other possible interpretations, but I’m not sure how plausible they really are. I’ve sent out some queries to some experts, and will add anything interesting I get back [Update: See the end of the post]. Fortunately, it may be possible to rule some possibilities out in just a few months. Paabo and company are busily churning out the sequence of the nuclear DNA from the Denisova pinky. It’s conceivable that the nuclear DNA will be a lot more like human DNA, or a lot more like Neanderthal DNA–making it likely that the fossil belongs to a hybrid. But if the nuclear DNA is just as exotic as the mitochondria, then perhaps the finger bone really does belong to a distinct species that lived 40,000 years ago–a species, it’s worth pointing out, that left its bones behind in the same layer of sediment where Russian scientists have dug up tools and ornaments made of stone and antler.

The possibility of a highly intelligent Siberian Other will have to dance in our heads until more studies come out.

Update: After I posted this, the paleoanthropologist John Hawks offers an alternative explanation on his blog. I followed up with a few questions via email, and based on his post and his reply, here’s my quick distillation:

Maybe the X-woman was not a separate species at all.

Wind back the clock to a million years ago. In Africa, there’s a population of hominids that will eventually give rise to Neanderthals and humans. The Neanderthal lineage expands out across Europe and Asia. They take with them a wide diversity of mitochondria. Most of the studies on Neanderthal DNA have focused on European Neanderthals–and have thus only captured a limited sample of that diversity. Now, in Siberia, Paabo and his colleagues have moved so far from the areas they had studied before that they’re finally getting to other branches of Neanderthal mitochondria.

In this scenario, Neanderthals play a role similar to that of Africans in the diversity of living humans. In Africa, you can find people with genes belonging to very old lineages. The Khoisan bushmen of southern Africa, for example, have genes that branched off from all other human lineages long ago. In other words, the genes of other Africans share a closer ancestor with genes from people out of Africa. Likewise, some Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA is more like human DNA than it is to the Neanderthal DNA found in the Denisova pinky.

I’ll post more replies as they come in.

Reference: Krause et al., “The complete mitochondrial DNA genome of an unknown hominin from southern Siberia” Nature, doi:10.1038/nature08976

Are the blue patches evidence of a ring around Rhea? Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute/Universities Space Research Association/Lunar & Planetary Institute

Does Saturn’s second largest moon Rhea really have a ring?   A ring has never been actually seen, but there is a narrow 10 km wide band of bluish patches straddling the moon’s equator.

The picture above was produced by Dr. Paul Schenk of the Lunar and Planetary Institute using stereo topography from Cassini imaging data in 2008.

The idea is the bluish material is fresh ice exposed when debris from “the ring” struck the moon.

There was a close flyby of Rhea the day after this image was released.  Since I’m a skeptical sort,  I am waiting for that data.  If blue patches go all the way around the moon, they could be on to something.  Rhea is phase locked to Saturn the same way our moon is to Earth.  So it presents the same face towards the planet.  It would seem to me that if the blue patches go all the way around the moon, they aren’t simply the moon plowing through stray bits of debris from Saturn’s rings.

A moon with a ring….

See the original press release here.

As if living in Hawaii weren’t a great enough life, scientists have found a kind of caterpillar there that lives the best of both worlds—in water and on land. In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Daniel Rubinoff’s team found that 12 species in the Hawaiian moth genus Hyposmocoma are amphibious in their caterpillar stage, the first amphibious insects ever found.

While most caterpillars are terrestrial (living on land), there are a few—0.5 percent—that are aquatic. However, all of the caterpillars seen before preferred either one or the other. Even classical amphibians, like the toad, often live mainly in one environment and seldom return to the other, perhaps just to lay eggs. But the Hyposmocoma caterpillars seem to have adopted a chilled-out Hawaiian way of life, comfortable with whatever environment they might be in. “They can stay underwater for an indeterminate period of time, or out of the water,” said Rubinoff, an entomologist. “There’s no other animal that I’m aware of that can do that” [Honolulu Advertiser].

Rubinoff was actually studying the moth because of a different quirk: In its caterpillar stage, the insect builds a sort of container for itself from silk and whatever base material might happen to be lying around. Researchers have also found cases in the shapes of cigars, candy wrappers, oyster shells, dog bones and bowties. “We’re running out of names to describe them,” Rubinoff says [Science News]. During an excursion to document this weirdness, a surprise shoved him in a different direction: Rubinoff saw caterpillars he previously thought to be landlubbers living happily in water.

So he brought a bunch of specimens to the lab, first testing how they took to water. When the insects flourished, he stranded them in petri dishes with only a bit of carrot and no water. The caterpillars seemed equally at ease in both situations. Whether they’re under water or without a drop of moisture for the duration of their adolescence, “these guys don’t care,” says Rubinoff [ScienceNOW]. They do have a preference for faster-moving water rather than still pools, however. Rubinoff says the caterpillars don’t have gills, but rather breathe through their skins while underwater. Thus, a rushing, oxygen-laden stream in their best friend, and their strong silk anchors them against the current.

You can always count on the isolation of islands to spur weird and cool examples of evolution. Hyposmocoma doesn’t disappoint. Rubinoff guesses from his genetic analysis that they’ve been evolving in Hawaii for 20 million years, and he guesses there are actually twice as many species as the 400 already discovered. In 2005, Rubinoff described a caterpillar that hunts down and eats snails. Other caterpillars in this genus feed mostly on rotting wood in the manner of termites, which are relative newcomers to Hawaii [Science News].

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Image: Patrick Schmitz and Daniel Rubinoff

With all the religious nutbaggery going on in the US of A, it’s sometime easy to forget that there’s a whole planet of wackiness out there.

The outspoken and hard-working Indian rationalist Sanal Edamaruku had enough. When the "guru" Pandit Surender Sharma claimed he could kill a man using nothing but magic powers, Edamaruku challenged Sharma to kill him on live TV in India.

For some reason, Sharma eventually agreed, and what played out on the air is pretty funny to watch:

Gee, this would’ve looked silly without the dramatic music. If any BABloggees in India would post a transcript in the comments, I’d be grateful!

My favorite part is Edamaruku constantly smiling and shaking his head, giving Sharma exactly what he deserves: derision. Still, millions of people in India follow gurus like this purveyor of nonsense, so it’s serious business. I imagine that Sharma will lose exactly zero followers after this, given people’s ability to rationalize failure (not to be confused over being rational about failure).

I’m very glad that this guy was exposed on national TV in India, but I have to think that Mr. Edamaruku could’ve saved quite a bit of time and effort had he pointed out one simple thing:

If this guy is so powerful, why does he wear glasses?

Tip o’ the turban to Mike Wagner.

Welcome to this week’s installment of the From Eternity to Here book club. Part Three of the book concludes with Chapter Eleven, “Quantum Time.”

Excerpt:

This distinction between “incomplete knowledge” and “intrinsic quantum indeterminacy” is worth dwelling on. If the wave function tells us there is a 75 percent chance of observing the cat under the table and a 25 percent chance of observing her on the sofa, that does not mean there is a 75 percent chance that the cat is under the table and a 25 percent chance that she is on the sofa. There is no such thing as “where the cat is.” Her quantum state is described by a superposition of the two distinct possibilities we would have in classical mechanics. It’s not even that “they are both true at once”; it’s that there is no “true” place where the cat is. The wave function is the best description we have of the reality of the cat.

It’s clear why this is hard to accept at first blush. To put it bluntly, the world doesn’t look anything like that. We see cats and planets and even electrons in particular positions when we look at them, not in superpositions of different possibilities described by wave functions. But that’s the true magic of quantum mechanics: What we see is not what there is. The wave function really exists, but we don’t see it when we look; we see things as if they were in particular ordinary classical configurations.

Title notwithstanding, the point of the chapter is not that there’s some “quantum” version of time that we have to understand. Some people labor under the impression that the transition from classical mechanics to quantum mechanics ends up “quantizing” everything, and turning continuous parameters into discrete ones, perhaps even including time. It doesn’t work that way; the conventional formalism of quantum mechanics (such as the Schrödinger equation) implies that time should be a continuous parameter. Things could conceivably change when we eventually understand quantum gravity, but they just as conceivably might not. In fact, I’d argue that the smart money is on time remaining continuous once all is said and done. (As a small piece of evidence, the context in which we understand quantum gravity the best is probably the AdS/CFT correspondence, where the Schrödinger equation is completely conventional and time is perfectly continuous.)

However, we still need to talk about quantum mechanics for the purposes of this book, for one very good reason: we’ve been making a big deal about how the fundamental laws of physics are reversible, but wave function collapse (under the textbook Copenhagen interpretation) is an apparent counterexample. Whether it’s a real counterexample, or simply an artifact of an inadequate interpretation of quantum mechanics, is a matter of much debate. I personally come down on the side that believes that there’s no fundamental irreversibility, only apparent irreversibility, in quantum mechanics. That’s basically the many-worlds interpretation, so I felt the book needed a chapter on what that was all about.

Along the way, I get to give my own perspective on what quantum mechanics really means. Unlike certain parts of the book, I’m pretty happy with how this one came out — feel free to correct me if you don’t completely agree. Quantum mechanics can certainly be tricky to understand, for the basic reason that what we see isn’t the same as what there is. I’m firmly convinced that most expositions of the subject make it seem even more difficult than it should be, by speaking as if “what we see” really does reflect “what there is,” even if we should know better.

So I present a number of colorful examples of two-state systems involving cats and dogs. Experts will recognize very standard treatments of the two-slit experiment and the EPR experiment, but in very different words. Things that seem very forbidding when phrased in terms of interference fringes and electron spins hopefully become a bit more accessible when we’re asking whether the cat is on the sofa or under the table. I did have to treat complicated macroscopic objects with many moving parts as if they could be described as very simple systems, but I judged that to be a worthwhile compromise in the interests of pedagogy. And no animals were harmed in the writing of this chapter! Let me know how you think the strategy worked.

At the foot of an active volcano 900 miles from the South Pole, Tom Leard leads a fearless band of men and women over a battlefield of frozen sea, beneath a relentless sun. Ash billows out from the peak behind them as they approach their enemies, who stand staggered across the barren stretch of ice, clad in black from head to toe.

“Don’t let them in your heads,” Leard tells his motley crew of carpenters, engineers, and service workers. “We’re the underdogs, but if we support each other, we can win.”

Here, on a January day in Antarctica’s frozen McMurdo Sound, Leard and company have come for the latest installment of a decades-long tradition: A rugby match, played between the American and New Zealand research bases, on a field of sea ice 10 feet thick.

Just a few miles away, scientists lead some of the world’s most exotic research projects, taking advantage of the extreme conditions on Earth’s coldest, driest and iciest continent. After a long week studying cold-adapted bacteria or the diving physiology of elephant seals, the scientists and staff take Sunday off to relax. But this is no ordinary Sunday.

Today’s match is the 26th in the series—which New Zealand leads, 25-0. Zero is also the number of ‘tries’—rugby’s equivalent of touchdowns—the Americans have scored in the history of the rivalry, which is the southernmost rugby game in the world.

Nearby McMurdo Station, operated by the United States, is home to over 1,000 summertime residents, a few dozen of whom have donned red, white and blue uniforms in support of their country. McMurdo is the largest station on the continent, far larger than neighboring Scott Base, which houses fewer than 100 New Zealanders—but that doesn’t stop New Zealand from fielding a winning team year after year.

Text and photos by Chaz Firestone. Click through for more photos and the rest of the story.

In the latest episode of the ongoing Google-Beijing dispute, Google’s attempt to bypass Chinese censors by sending Chinese users of its search engine to an uncensored Hong Kong-based site seems to have failed.

Within 24 hours of the rerouting, Beijing has clamped down, restricting mainland users’ access to the uncensored content on the Hong Kong site. Mainland Chinese users on Tuesday could not see uncensored Hong Kong content because government computers either disabled searches for objectionable content completely or blocked links to certain results [The New York Times]. Earlier, the Chinese government described Google’s move to redirect users to the Hong Kong site as “totally wrong.”

The clash comes two months after Google and China began a bitter standoff over internet censorship on the mainland. Instead of exiting the country entirely, Google has taken on Beijing by defying its censorship controls and sending mainland users to its Hong Kong site, where censorship rules are more lenient.

While the move seemed provocative, Google’s founders at first seemed to think that this redirection would be acceptable to the Chinese government. “We got reasonable indications that this was O.K.,” Sergey Brin, a Google founder and its president of technology, said. “We can’t be completely confident” [The New York Times]. Google said that while the search operations were being redirected to Hong Kong, it would continue to host its maps and music search service in China. However, it now seems that the company misjudged the Chinese government’s mood.

After Google’s big move yesterday, people visiting Google.cn were immediately rerouted to Google.hk. Within the Hong Kong site, there were links to Google’s search engine in simplified Chinese, most commonly used by mainland Chinese Internet users, as well as links in traditional Chinese, which is commonly used in Hong Kong. The simplified-Chinese service viewable in Hong Kong looked much like Google.cn, with links to products Google only offers in the mainland, such as its free music search service [The Wall Street Journal].

Google’s current gamble is risky. Despite its size and global popularity, in China the search site is second in popularity to local search engine Baidu, whose stock has soared in the aftermath of the dispute. Google also has to consider whether it would be willing to run afoul of the Chinese authorities completely and turn its back on 400 million internet users and potentially billions of dollars in advertising revenue. Finally, analysts hope this tussle between a corporation fighting for its own interests and an authoritarian government doesn’t endanger already strained diplomatic relations between China and the United States.

Governments on both sides chimed in on the latest developments. The White House said it was disappointed that China and Google could not agree on how to do business together, while Beijing rushed to declare that despite the current spat, China still welcomes foreign investors and businesses. Within Google’s China offices, employees said they were confident that the research and development office wasn’t going to be shut down anytime soon. However, they did say they were worried that the Chinese government would block Google.cn entirely, which would keep mainland Internet users from accessing features like Google video, music, and maps which all use that address.

Beijing Internet entrepreneur and author of the technology blog digicha.com, Bill Bishop, called those fears well founded. He said on Tuesday that Google’s withdrawal amounted to “an amazing public slap in the face to the Chinese government.” “The Chinese are very serious about pushing their soft-power agenda,” he said. “Google just put a big hole in that sales pitch, and I think they know that. So the idea that Google can take out its search business and leave everything else, and China will just forgive and forget — that’s very much not how the Chinese government works” [The New York Times].

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Image: Flickr/ pamhule

Here at MIT, we're doing a science journalism boot camp this week on food. And I've already picked up my first troublesome factoid: Hamburgers that look well done, observes J. Glenn Morris, Director of the Emerging Pathogens Institute at the University of Florida, aren't necessarily safe. In his lecture this morning, Morris observed that while cooking meat at a temperature of 160 degrees kills pathogens like the dangerous E. coli 0157:H7, 25 percent of hamburger patties will appear cooked at lower temperatures than that. Therefore, not only are rare or medium rare patties not necessarily safe to eat, but even a brown color shouldn't inspire full confidence. In truth, you need a food thermometer to be sure you've got a well cooked hamburger. And nobody whips those out before digging in at a fast food or pubby food restaurant. I know I don't, and I eat a lot of hamburgers. Or at least, I used to. More technical details here.

To chart the rise in obesity over the last 1,000 years, look no further than artists’ depictions of the Last Supper.

Researchers from Cornell University have found that as people began consuming more food over the centuries, more items have been added to the menu at the Last Supper. While the Bible says that Jesus and his disciples ate bread and drank wine, paintings of the meal over the last 1,000 years have varied wildly and have featured fruits, fish, and even a head of lamb in one case.

And painters haven’t just added food items over the years; they’ve also increased the sizes of the plates and loaves of bread. Researchers say this points to a growing problem with portion size, which has contributed to the current obesity epidemic.

The researchers arrived at their conclusions by studying 52 famous paintings depicting the Last Supper in the 2000 book Last Supper from Phaidon Press. The book includes works by such masters as El Greco, Leonardo da Vinci, Lucas Cranach the Elder, and Peter Paul Rubens.

They then used computer-aided technology to analyze the size of the main meals, bread, and the plates relative to the average size of the disciples’ heads. Reuters reports on the results:

The study found that, over the past 1,000 years, the size of the main meal has progressively grown 69 percent; plate size has increased 66 percent and bread size by about 23 percent.

The study was published in the International Journey of Obesity. Lead researcher Brian Wansink told The Guardian that the heftier portions shown in the paintings in more recent centuries are congruent with the increased availability of food:

“The last thousand years have witnessed dramatic increases in the production, availability, safety, abundance and affordability of food…. We think that as art imitates life, these changes have been reflected in paintings of history’s most famous dinner.”

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Image: Wikimedia

Virgin Galactic’s newest spacecraft has taken to the skies in its first successful test flight. Billionaire founder Richard Branson unveiled and christened the VSS Enterprise (previously called SpaceShipTwo) in December, and yesterday it soared 45,000 feet for about three hours above the Mojave Desert in California.

That altitude pales in comparison to Branson’s goal. When Virgin Galactic is ready for a true flight, the Enterprise and its carrier vehicle will fly to even higher heights, where the Enterprise will separate and blast off on its own. The craft will climb to about 60 miles above the Earth’s surface. At that suborbital altitude, passengers will experience weightlessness and see the curvature of the Earth. The price for the experience: $200,000 [Los Angeles Times]. Despite the steep price tag, more than 300 people have already signed up for their chance to reach space. CNN reports that 80,000 are on the waiting list, so even if you consider 200 grand a pittance, you might have to wait.

Enterprise was designed and built by Burt Rutan, founder of Mojave-based Scaled Composites, now a wholly owned subsidiary of Northrop Grumman [Reuters]. Test flights continue through next year, and Branson wants to begin commercial operations in 2012.

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Image: Virgin Galactic/Mark Greenberg

I freely admit my headline is misleading, but I had to throw in a little Cold War propaganda given the pictures below. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has spotted Soviet lunar robots on the Moon, relics from the original Space Race.

On the left is the LRO image of the Luna 17 lander, which touched down on the Moon’s surface in late 1970, delivering the Lunakhod 1 rover (which eventually traveled over 10 km (6 miles) across the Moon’s surface). The image on the right is of Luna 21, which set the Lunakhod 2 rover down in 1973. Note the higher scale, which clearly shows the tracks of the rover as it moved around its base station.

That is so cool! And if you go to those links, there are closeups from the Soviet landers showing what the view looked like from the surface of the Moon all those decades ago.

And for an added bit of coolness, Universe Today’s Nancy Atkinson dug up the story that both rovers were used by the Soviets to celebrate International Women’s Day. I’m old enough to remember how the Soviets were vilified by the American government… and while some of it may have been deserved, they were not the monsters they were portrayed as. I think Nancy’s story is an important one. We may have been opponents in the race to the Moon, and deadly enemies back on Earth, but we’re also all humans. At least in that respect, nothing has changed.

I'm back in Durham packing the house, office, and preparing for our move. This afternoon I'm also delighted to be speaking to the Duke Retirement Community about Unscientific America. Tomorrow, David and I are off to Austin, Texas for good. For the time being, I must concentrate on boxing up life in North Carolina, but you bet I'll have a lot more to say about the American Physical Society conference and the terrific four other speakers on my panel--Jon Miller, Murray Peshkin, Judith Scotchmoor, and Art Hobson--who are involved in extremely interesting initiatives. And of course, I'll begin addressing energy over the coming weeks too, so stay tuned!

In tomorrow’s New York Times I have an essay about the art of seeing Nature’s unseen–from the bestiaries of the Middle Ages to today’s images of feathered dinosaurs and upright apes. Check it out, and also check out the accompanying slide show about Conrad Gessner, a Renaissance naturalist who assembled the greatest zoological encyclopedia of his day–which included unicorns.

“In this study, we examine the identity exploration possibilities presented by online multiplayer games in which players use graphics tools and character-creation software to construct an avatar, or character. We predicted World of Warcraft players would create their main character more similar to their ideal self than the players themselves were. Our results support this idea; a sample of players rated their character as having more favorable attributes that were more favorable than their own self-rated attributes. This trend was stronger among those with lower psychological well-being, who rated themselves comparatively lower than they rated their character. Our results suggest that the game world allows players the freedom to create successful virtual selves regardless of the constraints of their actual situation.”

Photo: flickr/CavinB

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Astronomy has been with us for a long time; since around 3300 BCE, when Western astronomy was developing in Summer, Assyria, and Babylon.  Probably there the first astronomers were priests, and their practice and understanding of the science was seen as magical and divine.   Even so, very early in the game astronomy became a science, while astrology became a philosophy.

Replica of Earliest Surviving Telescope; Image Michael Dunn

Initially, astronomy was tied closely with astrology as the two disciplines grew and matured.  The mathematical roots of astronomy were expressed early in the precise positioning of temples, and you can see what technical skill they obtained by the orientation of the pyramids.  A yearly calendar was fixed by studying the movements and positions of the sun, moon, and stars.

The invention of the telescope in 1608 was, of course, of major importance to the science.  Even before the telescope, however, early astronomers were experimenting with lenses in magnification and bending of light waves.  As early as 3rd century BCE, Euclid was writing about reflection and refraction of light.

Replica of Newton's Reflecting Telescope; Image Andrew Dunn

We fortunately have a wealth of artifacts to examine relating to early astronomy.  The temples and observatories themselves, the paintings, tapestry, remnants and stonework keep archaeoastronomers busy.  It wasn’t all gods, goddesses, heroes and legends.  The Antikythera mechanism alone kept scientists guessing for decades.  Some people still believe it is evidence of Earth’s visitation by extra terrestrials.

Antikythera mechanism, National Archaeological Museum, Athens

We always think of the 20th century as the period of most growth in the sciences, and so it may have been.  Still, we need to stop and consider what our ancestors were able to deduce having only their eyes and their minds with which to work.  Amazing…

Imagine dropping a few hundred dollars for a bottle of “premium wine” only to discover it tastes like plonk! For years, collectors of fine wines have gone to great lengths to ensure that the wine they buy is indeed of the advertised quality and age. From tamper-proof caps to prevent the dilution of a premium wine with cheap stuff to an electric tongue that can distinguish fine wines, connoisseurs have tried their best not to get ripped off. Now, they have another trick at their disposal, and this one involves an atom bomb.

According to new research, collectors can avoid purchasing a faked bottle of an old vintage by running the wine through a “bomb pulse” test, which uses the radioactive material present in air to date the wine. The system is accurate enough, say scientists, to date your wine’s vintage up to a year of its production–so that a collector can be certain, for example, that a Chateau Lafite Rothschild 1982 isn’t actually a child of the aughts.

Speaking at the American Chemical Society meeting in San Francisco, chemist Graham Jones said that prior to the 1940s, all the carbon-14 in the Earth’s biosphere was produced by cosmic rays and nitrogen in the upper atmosphere. However, from the late 1940s to 1963, atomic bomb tests released radioactive material and significantly increased the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere. Ever since the atomic tests stopped in ‘63, this “bomb-pulse” C-14 has been gradually diluted by the CO2 formed by the burning of fossil fuels.

What’s all this got to do with vino? Well, when the grapes on the vine took in this CO2, they also ingested the bomb pulse C-14 and in the process, transferred minute, harmless qualities of the radioactive carbon to their wine.

PhysOrg explains:

The scientists used a highly-sensitive analytical device called an accelerator mass spectrometer to determine the C-14 levels in the alcohol components of 20 Australian red wines with vintages from 1958 to 1997 and then compared these measurements to the radioactivity levels of known atmospheric samples. They found that the method could reliably determine the vintage of wines to within the vintage year.

So much like carbon dating helps determine the age of prehistoric fossils and artifacts, the lingering traces of bomb-pulse C-14 present in wine could help determine its vintage. The scientists are hopeful that this technique will help prevent fraud in the $3 billion global wine market.

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Image:Wikimedia