I recently attended a conference in Boulder, and I have to admit that before I went I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Now I do, and I’m very glad I went.

The meeting was the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference 2010 (NSRC2010), and its goal was to figure out how best to exploit an upcoming revolution in space travel: private companies making suborbital launches to the very edge of space.

Space, in this case, is defined as being 100 km (62 miles) above the Earth’s surface. There, the atmosphere is incredibly thin, which has obvious benefits for astronomical observations (less turbulence blurring images, darker skies to see faint objects, less air to absorb ultraviolet and infrared light). But perhaps just as importantly, the planned flights will have up to three full minutes of microgravity — what is popularly but inaccurately called weightlessness or "zero g".

That’s where my initial skepticism came in. What can you do with only a few minutes of free fall? Well, it turns out you can do a lot. There are a host of biological, engineering, and astronomical experiments that can be run in this environment, ones that would be far too prohibitively expensive to do on, for example, a Shuttle mission.

But this next generation of rockets from Virgin Galactic (Richard Branson’s effort with Space Ship 2, a model of which is pictured above), Blue Origin (Jeff Bezos from Amazon.com), and others will reach a height making a lot of this science possible. The region up to 100 km is too high to reach by balloon, and too low for orbital rockets, which is why it’s been dubbed "the ignorosphere". But it has its uses…

Observations of the Sun, for example, may not need much time to do because (you may have noticed) the Sun is pretty bright, so a three or four minute flight is enough to get some good data. The way incoming energy from the Sun couples with the Earth’s atmosphere is not hugely well understood, and a lot of it happens in this region high above the planet’s surface. Effects of low gravity on the human body can be tested, as well as on plants and other biological systems.

In fact, enough science can be done on these trips that the conference itself brought in 250 people interested in the topic. I was surprised at how many people came, as were the conference planners themselves: they were expecting half that many.

But there’s a lot of confidence here. Lori Garver, NASA Deputy Administrator, gave a keynote talk, saying that NASA will pledge $15 million per year to this new field of research in the new budget (pending approval by Congress). Alan Stern, an astronomer and conference organizer, announced that Southwest Research Institute, for whom he works, will put up $1 million of its own money for researchers to fly into space, too!

Given that each flight will cost something like $200,000, this is a pretty decent pool of money to investigate the ignorosphere. That may sound like a lot, but in fact a lot of scientific grants are in this range; a few years back I had my own personal research grant on Hubble that was for more than $40,000, and while I was at Sonoma State University our small team routinely applied for educational grants for $50k and more. Getting $200k for a flight is well within the reach of a lot of researchers. Of course, they’ll need more to cover equipment and such, but compare that to the millions upon millions needed for an orbital flight, or even several million for a sounding rocket, and you start to see that this is a pretty good deal.

NASA itself can use this sort of thing as well, testing equipment and new technology to see how it behaves. This is a whole lot cheaper than putting something up on the Space Shuttle (or on the next generation of orbital rockets).

It was exciting to sit and listen to all the buzz about this new, intermediate frontier. But as interesting as the science was, there was something more important going on at this conference. Something that, I suspect very strongly, will change the way we look at space travel.

And that will be the topic of my next post on this. Stay tuned.

You never know who is checking out your Facebook profile, reading your tweets, or looking at your MySpace messages. But if you broke the law or are under scrutiny from the feds, then the FBI may already be “following” your online activities on different social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn.

A new internal Justice Department document obtained by San Francisco-based civil liberties group, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), details how federal agencies like the IRS and the FBI are now using social media to monitor suspects’ online activities and also track down their whereabouts. The document, obtained in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, makes clear that U.S. agents are already logging on surreptitiously to exchange messages with suspects, identify a target’s friends or relatives and browse private information such as postings, personal photographs and video clips [AP].

The investigators are also using the sites to check suspects’ alibis with details of their whereabouts posted on Facebook and Twitter. And online photos from a suspicious spending spree — people posing with jewelry, guns or fancy cars — can link suspects or their friends to robberies or burglaries [AP].

The document also describes a bank fraud case, wherein federal authorities were able to nab a suspect who had fled to Mexico based on his Facebook updates about all the fun he was having in that country. The suspect’s page was private but some of his friends’ pages weren’t–allowing easy access to information related to the man on the run.

Using online sources to catch suspects isn’t really new: In the early days of the Internet, investigating authorities used text-heavy AOL and chat rooms to gather evidence and arrest wrongdoers. But enormously popular sites like Facebook can serve as a clearinghouse for information. While the changing nature of online activities has served the feds well, the Justice Department document (which was part of a presentation given in August by top cybercrime officials) doesn’t detail how to prevent abuse of available content. While most social networking sites expressly prohibit people from creating profiles under false identities the feds have ignored that rule and created profiles to monitor suspects. “This new situation presents a need for careful oversight so that law enforcement does not use social networking to intrude on some of our most personal relationships,” said [Marc] Zwillinger, whose firm does legal work for Yahoo and MySpace [AP].

While the document portrayed Facebook primarily as a useful tool, the government did note a few ways in which social media could interfere with legal proceedings. The Justice Department document warned prosecutors to advise their witness not to reveal details of their ongoing cases on their public posts. It also cautioned federal law enforcement officials to think prudently before adding judges or defense counsel as “friends” on these services. “Social networking and the courtroom can be a dangerous combination,” the government said [AP].

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Image: iStockphoto

The 145thhththth Carnival of Space is up now at Crowlspace! Lots of fun space and astronomy blog posts, and, for a first, it may be slightly NSFW (thanks to Amanda, who is saucier than I knew!).

The other Zimmer at the Times: On On Point.

This one, talking about the secret life of plants, carnivorous and otherwise on WNPR’s Colin McEnroe Show.

This is very cool: a guy got a grant to comb through satellite imagery to look for terrestrial craters, and found one hidden in plain sight! The Planetary Society has all the details. The man who found it studied geology in college, but is now a systems analyst!

This is a perfect example of citizen science. There’s too much real estate — on Earth and in the sky — for what we normally think of as geologists and astronomers to examine carefully. And this shows there’s plenty of room for "amateurs" to help out… and that word always makes me laugh. I know a lot of amateur astronomers who know far more than I do about pointing a telescope. You’ll almost always find that at their borders, most definitions are pretty fuzzy.

Tip o’ the Whipple shield to David Kessler.

Cross-cultural comparisons of Irish and American adolescent drinking practices and beliefs.

“The drinking behavior and alcohol expectancies of 168 Irish adolescents aged 15-18 were compared with those of a group of American adolescents matched on age and sex. The Irish adolescents reported less frequent social drinking and less problematic drinking. However, unlike American adolescents, those Irish youth who did drink in a social, frequent manner also reported drinking-related problems. Irish adolescents expect less social benefit, less improvement of cognitive and motor functioning and less sexual enhancement, but greater increase in aggression as a consequence of drinking. These findings are discussed as possible etiological clues to established differences between Irish adult drinking and drinking by adults in other countries.”

Photo: flickr/greyloch

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Girls Gone Wild: science edition!
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Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: ethanol

It’s the size of Jupiter, orbits at about the distance of Mercury, and isn’t too far from the temperature range of Earth. Meet Corot-9b, the newest find in the cavalcade of exoplanets and the one its discoverers say is most like the worlds of our own solar system.

“Like our own giant planets, Jupiter and Saturn, the planet is mostly made of hydrogen and helium,” said team member Tristan Guillot of the Côte d’Azure Observatory in Nice, France. “And it may contain up to 20 Earth masses of other elements, including water and rock at high temperatures and pressures” [Space.com]. The large group of astronomers reporting the find in Nature estimate the planet’s temperature at a range between just below zero and slightly above 300 degrees Fahrenheit. It completes an orbit in 95 days, though it’s about 1,500 light years away.

The new exoplanet draws its name from the French space agency’s Corot (Convection, Rotation and planetary Transits) satellite, which first spotted it by noticing its star dim as the planet passed in front. Actually confirming a planetary cause of that dimming takes painstaking follow-up work at telescopes on the ground. Most often the researchers look for Doppler shifts in the host star’s light as the planet’s gravity regularly tugs the star nearer to and then farther from Earth [Scientific American]. Back in September, the Corot satellite also was the first to find Corot-7b, which was the first exoplanet discovered to be close to the Earth in size.

Determining Corot-9b’s distance from its star and the type of that star allowed the team, led by Hans Deeg, to hypothesize that the planet’s temperature range is close to that of Earth’s. But is it a pale blue dot like our own home world? “We don’t know the colour. It’s likely that it has high atmosphere water clouds which might make it blue but that depends on the mixture of gases which we really do not know” [BBC News], Deeg says.

Related Content:
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80beats: New Super-Earth: Hot, Watery, and Nearby
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DISCOVER: How Long Until We Find a Second Earth?

Image: Ilustration courtesy Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias

The week of the new moon in April is National Dark Sky Week, a movement started by Virginia teenager Jennifer Barlow in 2003.  Last year, IYA2009 endorsed National Dark Sky Week and pushed it global, to be International Dark Sky Week.

This grass-roots movement highlights the effects of light pollution not only on our health, but the impact to the environment as a whole.  It also attempts to bring back the full, gorgeous spread of the night sky to all observers.

How many of us can walk outside our front door at night and see this:

Perseid Meteor Shower 08/12/07, Image by WikiPedia User Mila

I lived in a small town growing up, and I can remember seeing the full spread of the night sky.  Now, this feels like a lost heritage.

Orion, seen from dark skies (left) and from Orem, UT. Image: Jeremy Stanly 01/09

Looking at this comparison, you can see what a difference it makes.
There are alternatives to having an area illuminated so much as to cause light pollution.  One is a type of light that is designed to not shed light upwards and to the side.  This site explains lighting regulations some areas are placing in an attempt to regain their starry night skies.  It saves energy, too.

I know our cities are illuminated to protect life and property.  In fact, I agree with it on that basis.  I wouldn’t want to live in a city that completely blacked-out at night;  you just have to see what happens during a power outage to know that’s not an answer.  I do think we can find a middle-ground (like regulated lighting) where we preserve our safety and can still have our starry, starry nights.

How times have changed. Used to be, if I wanted to figure out what people were reading, I’d ask a few friends. This week, I got replies from 761 people.

On Monday I asked you to help me get a better sense of the science reader–how the science reader gets a science fix, what the science reader values, and what the science reader expects from the future. Thanks to everyone who responded–both directly to the survey questions and indirectly in the comments. Not surprisingly, commenters revealed to me some shortcomings of the survey itself–most glaringly, leaving podcasts, radio, and public libraries off the list of venues where you get your science fix. Despite these shortcomings, I still ended up thinking the survey was very useful. The picture it paints is pretty clear, and, in some ways, surprising.

And, of course, you generously donated your time and thoughts. I am no professional market analyst, but I’ve had a delightful time poring over the survey, as well as the comments of those who did not feel satisfied by the choices I offered. It wrecked a number of assumptions I had carried into the survey, and makes me think differently about where science writing is headed from here.

Here’s what I see in the results. (If you want to make your own interpretations in the comment thread, you can download the raw numbers in the survey report (pdf).)

First off, it’s clear that most of you no longer get science from print newspapers.

My first question was, “Where do you get your science fix, and how often?” I offered some formats; the choices for each ranged from avidly down to never. Of those who responded, 58% said they rarely or never read newspapers in print. A grand total of 17 of you–2%–said you read them avidly, and 7% said you read them occasionally. The rest said you read science in print newspapers only occasionally (22%).

Print magazines fared (somewhat) better in the survey. 31% responded rarely or never. 55% said you read science in newspapers occasionally or frequently.

News web sites and blogs scored big. 27% read news sites avidly for science, and 40% read them frequently. Only 1% said never.

Blogs did even better, with 50% responding with avidly and 36% frequently.

This does not mean that you love all things digital. Few of you get your science fix on TV more than occasionally; 23% said you never do so. I can’t report on podcasts, radio, and audio books, because I left them off the survey [d'oh!].

But the biggest surprise to me was ebooks. I assumed you were already riding the ebook wave. Nope. 64% of you said you never read them. Less than 2% said you read them avidly.

By contrast, you love old-fashioned paper books. Only 9% of you said you never bought science books. 67% of you said you bought three or more a year. About half of you subscribe to one or more print magazines for science.

I then asked about your digital habits in particular.

Most of you (67%) still use a computer for your digital fix. Only 15% use an Iphone. Only 5% use a Kindle–about the same number of you who are waiting for an Ipad to change the laws of physics.

You also proved to have a lot of stamina while reading on line. 62% of you said you click through long features to get to the end.

Ebooks have not yet cast their spell on you. 59% of you said you buy no ebooks a year because you’re waiting for them to get better; 19% said you don’t buy them because you just don’t like ebooks.

I rephrased the questions, asking about how you felt about ebooks: 70% of you said that ebooks were an interesting concept but not yet worth buying an ereader for. Another 7% said you can’t stand them. Only 3% of you have abandoned old books for the ebook future we’ve all been hearing about.

The last few questions of the survey dealt with getting stuff for free versus paying. And here’s where things got interesting in a glass-half-empty-or-half-full kind of way. 40% of you said you would no longer pay for reading about science, because you can get so much for free. Only 20% of you said you’d pay to get past paywalls.

Then I described a couple possible pieces of science writing. In one case, I described an anthology of articles nicely designed in an ebook. Only 18% of you said you would not be willing to pay for that. 29% of you said you’d pay $10. 68% of you said you’d pay a price $4 or higher.

I also asked how much you’d pay for a hybrid article, with a short summary for free and an in-depth version for a payment. 63% of you said you would be willing to pay for such an article. 21% were willing to pay a buck, and 7% would pay two bucks, the highest price I put on the question.

The science reader that emerges from this survey is very comfortable online, getting a science fix from blogs and news sites. (And judging from the comments, a fair number listen to podcasts and radio, too.) But the science reader also reads a lot of books. Books made of paper, that is, not electronic ink. That pattern may change if e-readers get better, but probably not anytime soon.

The typical science reader will not be dropping a lot of money to get past paywalls. Some readers won’t pay anything online at all, but an appreciable fraction will pay for ebooks and individual articles–if they’re interesting.

It goes without saying that this survey is utterly unscientific and downright peculiar. But if it does reflect broader trends, it means that there are opportunities for small-scale, money-making experiments in new kinds of digital genres–including ones carried out by individual writers.

The comments are well worth checking out. A couple readers challenged my approach as being hopelessly twentieth-century, demonstrating my unwillingness to accept that information is too cheap to meter now. I’ve been skeptical about the alternatives, but Morgan Wirthlin made a passionate argument to turn away from ebooks and follow the lead of musicians:

I think you should consider taking your next microcosm (an /excellent/ book, by the way) and trying this model. Maybe you offer 2,000 copies of the “signature edition” on your website, which is just the normal book with your personal signature inside the cover, priced at maybe 10% above list price. Then offer 500 “subscriber editions,” which include a personalized memo and a big poster of one Carl Buell’s excellent illustrations to this hypothetical book. Finally, 50 extra special $100 “Zimmerfan editions” are sent to your most diehard readers ahead of the publication date, and include the poster, a hand-written letter of thanks, a polaroid you took, and a fossil (or even just a cool rock) you found outside. Etc., etc. It may sound ridiculous, but these are the sorts of things that people crave in the digital age. I can absolutely guarantee that you would sell out of all of these editions, and part of the reason is that your readers absolutely /want/ to support *you,* but they don’t want to feel cheated paying for something that they know they could get for free. An ‘art object’ with a personalized, cottage-industry touch is something that you cannot get for free.

And Scott Sigler, who started a novel-writing career by podcasting each chapter of his manuscripts, had this to say in my skepticism about podcasts:

Carl, podcasts DO generate revenue via advertising. I run an ad on most podcasts at scottsigler.com, and on my archived audiobooks (the back list) I have up at podiobooks.com. It took several years to generate a large enough audience, but now that I have it, I give away content for free and make money with advertising. This is nothing new — same model radio and TV have used for decades.

It’s all about the eyeballs (or earballs, whatever). If you create solid, free science podcast content, and that content resonates with an audience allowing you to consistently generate large numbers, you can earn revenue with advertising. Yes, you can still drive traffic to a site, and urge your listeners to buy print products, but the podcast itself becomes the primary revenue generator.

I’m inspired to go off to do some scheming. Meanwhile, what do you think of these results?

Actually, science is important in any language, but in this case, Paolo Navaretti took my video about why I think science is important (I originally wrote about it here) and added Italian subtitles. I assume what he did is correct, since the only Italian I know is how to say "I am wounded," which I learned from my dad’s WWII phrase books he had.

Anyway, if you’re Italian or know an Italian or play one on TV, then you may enjoy me making faces with Italian words flashing by underneath.

Skepticamps are terrific events where the audience participates in the fun: instead of just inviting speakers, attendees give talks and help out. On Saturday, March 20 from 10:00 to 6:00 p.m., there will be a (free) Skepticamp in Vancouver, BC. I know a few of the skeptics from around there, and as you’d expect of Canadians they are warm, fun, and very polite. If you’re in that area, I suggest you go; Skepticamps are a great way to meet new like-minded folks and also hear some great talks about topics you might not hear about otherwise. I’ve been to one and had a great time, so go!

Oh, St. Patrick’s Day! Somehow it has become the day of binge drinking, day of doing shots, and the day before contemplating why you spent the last 24 hours drinking your head off. Nonetheless, St. Paddy must be honored, and honor him we shall—with alcohol and some science.

We decided to reach into the past and pull out the wondrous mystery of the Guinness beer bubbles. For years, the mysterious downward flowing Guinness bubbles have confounded both professional scientists and drinkers. When the bartender pulls a pint of most any beer, the bubbles can clearly be seen gushing to the top. When a pint of Guinness is poured, however, the bubbles slyly cascade down the sides of the glass, while the beer mysteriously maintains its frothy layer on top.

So in 2004, scientists Andy Alexander from the Royal Society of Chemistry and Dick Zare of Stanford University decided to find out why the bubbles act the way they do. After preliminary research trips to the local pub proved unfruitful, they decided to move the scene to a lab where they rigged a high-speed camera to take pictures of the Guinness being poured. The camera could zoom in and magnify the images ten times.

The scientists found that the drink’s dynamics can be likened to a mini-tornado. When Guinness is poured into a glass, the bubbles dip downwards as they experience drag–similar to what would happen should you run your finger along a glass surface. When they reach the center of the glass, the bubbles rise to the top, setting up a circulating current.

The Telegraph explains:

Flowing outwards from the surface, the frothy ”head”, the current hit the glass edge and was pushed down. Bubbles held back by dragging on the side of the glass were caught in the circulation and forced to go with the flow – the wrong way, for a bubble.

A spokesman for the Royal Society says:

“Guinness bubbles are small, due to being released at high pressure by the widget and therefore easily pushed around. Also, in lager the gas is carbon dioxide, which is easily dissolved. The gas in Guinness bubbles is nitrogen – not so easily dissolved. Finally, the contrast between the dark liquid and the light bubbles makes them easier to see.”

There! Mystery solved.

And if you’re recovering from an early St. Pat’s day celebration, here’s a video explaining the chemistry of alcohol and hangovers. Enjoy.

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Image: Guinness

Here’s one benefit of a storm so ferocious that it rages on for centuries–scientists have plenty of time to observe it, and to wait for technology to improve so they can get an even better look.

The solar system’s biggest storm swirls on the giant gas planet Jupiter; it’s a tempest that goes by the name the Great Red Spot. Now, for the first time, scientists have constructed a detailed interior weather map of the giant storm system using thermal images from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope and other powerful ground telescopes.

Peering into the Great Red Spot, scientists found that there were surprising weather and temperature variations within the spot and that the dark red area in the spot’s center is actually a warm patch in the storm. The observations are detailed in the journal Icarus, and give researchers a better understanding of circulation patterns within this Jovian storm. Says Glenn Orton, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory astronomer who led the study: “We once thought the Great Red Spot was a plain old oval without much structure, but these new results show that it is, in fact, extremely complicated” [Wired].

For centuries, astronomers have observed Jupiter’s Red Spot, which is as wide as three Earths lined up side-by-side. Orton says that if you had seen the spot in the 17th century, when it was first discovered, you would have been “tempted to call it the great red sausage,” adding that it has slowly been shrinking in size since then. It is only in recent decades that scientists have been able to understand weather patterns around the spot, and exactly what was happening inside the storm was largely mysterious until now.

The new images have revealed that the red in the Red Spot is actually a warm patch. “Warm” in this case translates to -250 degrees Fahrenheit while cold is an even frostier -256 degrees F [Wired]. This temperature difference might not seem like a lot, but it is enough to allow the storm circulation, usually counter-clockwise, to shift to a weak clockwise circulation in the very middle of the storm [ANI].This slight temperature difference also alters wind velocity and cloud formation in other belts.

Scientists are also trying to figure why the spot is red in color. Orton thinks that answer may lie in what happened with another Jovian storm–the Oval BA. The Oval BA started off as a white spot and gradually turned red as it increased in power, leading Orton to theorize that it presumably put down deeper roots in Jupiter’s atmosphere, bringing up more sulfur-bearing material from the lower levels. When that material rose to the top of the clouds and was exposed to the sun’s ultraviolet radiation, a chemical reaction could have brought out the reddish color [MSNBC].

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DISCOVER: #99: Jupiter Grows (and Loses) a New Spot

Image: L Fletcher/ESO/NASA/JPL/ESA

There was a time when seahorses meant little to me. They were pleasant to look at in an aquarium. They seemed to show up a lot on the walls of restaurants near beaches. But as is so often the case in nature, there’s bizarre biology lurking under the surface. Specifically, inside the male seahorses. When it’s time to make new seahorses, the male seahorses get pregnant.

Their pregnancy seems bizarre because it is rare. In most species that keep their young inside a parent, the job goes to the mother. But there is a deep symmetry to these two ways of reproducing. That’s a general rule when it comes to evolution: time and again, biologists find the same underlying principles driving the evolution of both the familiar and the bizarre.

The specifics of an animal’s sex life have their ultimate origin in the time and effort each sex have to put into reproducing. Very often, there’s a wild imbalance between the sexes. Just take a look at a human sperm and egg. One’s tiny and one’s big. Women may produce a few hundred viable eggs in a lifetime. Men make hundreds of new sperm a second.

The imbalance between the sexes means that they face different limits to how many offspring they can have. Females are not limited by a scarce supply of sperm. It would be possible, in theory, for every woman on Earth to have children fathered by a single man. Instead, what limits the reproductive success of females in many species is how many eggs they can successfully produce and rear to adulthood. Individuals that do better at that job will spread their genes over the generations. This selection drives females to put even more effort into rearing their young. Eggs can become enormous, for example–take the Kiwi bird, whose eggs can equal a quarter of the mother’s weight. Females typically put more effort into finding shelters for their young. In a number of species as varied as cockroaches and humans, females carry their young inside their body, where they can feed them and protect them at the same time.

For males, the limits to reproductive success are usually very different. They don’t have to worry about nurturing their sperm, since they’re so cheap to make. Instead, in many species, they are limited by the number of females they can mate with. The fact that females spend so much time provisioning their young makes this limit even more intense. And so in many species, males compete with one another for the opportunity to mate with females. In some cases, they fight over territory where the females will show up in search of food. In other cases, they show off to females with fancy songs or feathers. In the end, some males manage to mate with more females and have more offspring.

This arrangement gives females in some species the chance to be choosy about their mates. In many species, females will tend to mate with some males over others–in some species of fireflies, for example, the females prefer males with faster flashes over ones that flash slowly. But females face a quandary in making their choice. If they have the prospect of mating with one particular male today, who’s to say that they might not find a more attractive male tomorrow? If they fertilize their eggs with the sperm of today’s male, they won’t have the chance to upgrade later. And sometimes males make this quandary even worse, by guarding them so they can’t mate with other males.

So females in many species have evolved some elaborate systems to keep their options open. Female ducks, for example, have lots of little pouches along their reproductive tract where they may be able to store sperm from different males, selecting the sperm they want to use to fertilize their eggs. Hens will squeeze out the sperm from a previous mating if they see an attractive rooster.

Darwin first recognized what he dubbed sexual selection, and in the past couple decades scientists have expanded the theory and used it to make sense of the specific details of the sex lives of particular species. Sexual selection theory is not based on some mystical essence of being male or female, however. It simply takes into consideration the costs and benefits that each sex faces in a given species. Under some conditions, the benefit that males get from competing for lots of females may be offset by the need that their young have for care. In these cases, males that help provide for their offspring after they’re born may fare better than males that don’t.

As a result, there are some species in which both males and females provide care. And there are also some cases in which the common pattern is entirely reversed: the male does most of the work.

Such is the case with seahorses and their close relatives, pipefishes and seadragons. In all of these species males undergo a sort of pregnancy. When they mate, the female transfers unfertilized eggs to the male. The male stores the eggs, sometimes inside a fleshy pouch, where he fertilizes them with his sperm. While sperm in other animals may be heroic swimmers that can travel a female’s reproductive tract, the sperm of these fish barely move at all.

The eggs then develop in the male. The eggs get some of their energy from the yolk their mother provided them, but the males help out too. The pouch of some species of seahorses and their relatives changes shape, taking on a very complex anatomy. Each fish embryo ends up in intimate contact with the father’s blood supply, so that he can give them nutrients. Eventually the baby fish wiggle out of dad and are ready for life on their own.

So now think about how this system can drive the evolution of the fish. The females still produce the eggs, but they don’t have to put the time and effort into rearing them. Sexual selection theory suggests that they would be better off looking for lots of males to take their eggs. And with all those females swimming around in search of males, they’re going to face some fierce competition.

Adam Jones of Texas A & M University and his colleagues have studied Gulf Pipefish to see whether this in fact occurs. (The picture above is of a male [left] and female Gulf Pipefish.) In one experiment, they found that most females failed to find any mates at all, while a small proportion of the females managed to mate with four males. Most of the males in that experiment, on the other hand, mated once. The pattern, in other words, is flipped from what you’d normally expect.

Because males can’t mate and run, they are not limited by the number of females they can fertilize. As a result, there’s less of a benefit to making lots of sperm. And that explains the remarkably scant supply of sperm these fish produce. Instead of making millions of sperm every day, a male seahorse’s testes may carry just 150 sperm in total.

The competition of females opens up the opportunity for males to be picky, rather than the females. And Jones and other scientists have found that, indeed, the females that mate the most have certain traits in common. They tend to be bigger than other females, and they have fancier fins and brighter color patterns. It’s no surprise, then, that female Gulf Pipefish females are bigger than males.

But why do the males go for the big flashy females? Today in Nature, Jones and his colleagues have published an experiment that offers some answers. Big females transfer more eggs into the pouches of males than small females. And the bigger the female, the more likely each egg was to survive. By being picky, males can have more kids.

But the reversal does not stop there. Jones and his colleagues wondered if males controlled the amount of investment they put into rearing eggs from different females. They had males mate one female, and then another. They discovered that the survival of the second brood depended on the first. If the first brood came from a big female, fewer of the eggs from the second brood survived. The opposite also held true. Jones and his colleagues concluded that the males are likely giving more resources to the eggs from big females, leaving less for small females they might later encounter. And they do end up mating with smaller females, they give the eggs fewer resources, so that they’re in a better position should they encounter a big female next time around.

I had left seahorses and their kin out of the sex chapter in The Tangled Bank, but when it comes time to update it, they will definitely be making a cameo appearance. Their mirror-image sex life has turned out to be just too amazing to ignore.

“Post-copulatory sexual selection and sexual conflict in the evolution of male pregnancy.” Kimberly A. Paczolt1 & Adam G. Jones. Nature, http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature08861

[Image: Nick Ratterman, Texas A & M]

When vervet monkeys play follow the leader, they prefer to follow a female. That was the conclusion of Erica van de Waal, whose lengthy study of these primates in South Africa will be published this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. When her team presented them with a tricky contraption they had to open to reach a tasty snack, the monkeys learned better if they watched a female from their group demonstrate the solution rather than a male.

Seeking some answers to how social learning works in monkeys, van de Waal and her colleagues headed to Loskop Dam Nature Reserve. It took four months, they say, just to acclimate the wild animals to the presence of humans. Once the monkeys were comfortable having scientists around, Van de Waal gave each group a wooden box containing a slice of apple. To get to the apple, the monkeys had to either pull open the door at one end or slide aside a door at the other. Half the box was painted black to differentiate the two ends [ScienceNOW].

In vervet groups there’s a dominant male and a dominant female, so the researchers say it’s no surprise that one of those individuals stepped forward to accept the challenge of opening the box. In three groups it was the male, and in three the female took command. “The models learned by trial and error how to open the box,” explained Ms van de Waal. “Once they understood how to pull or slide the door open we let them perform 25 demonstrations” [BBC News].

The scientists saw that other monkeys paid more attention when the dominant female was solving the puzzle as opposed to the dominant male. Later, the team passed out the same kind of box to other members of the groups. If those monkeys were among the groups that had watched the male, they didn’t show a preference for which side of the box to open, which suggested they hadn’t learned much during their spectating days. In fact, van de Waal says, they didn’t even show a preference toward attempting to open the box. But, in the groups that watched their dominant female, 80 percent went for the side of the container they’d seen her open before.

So were the monkeys just sucking up to the dominant male, trying to make him feel smart? That’s not the answer at which van de Waal’s team arrived. The key, they say, is that males grow up and then run off to find another group, while females stay with their groups for life, giving them stronger bonds with the group and also a better knowledge of the resources in a particular territory. So it makes sense that other group members look to them for guidance, Van de Waal says [ScienceNOW]. If it’s true, it could also mean that vervet “culture” is hyper-local. The team writes, “Our findings imply that migration does not necessarily lead to an exchange of socially acquired information within populations, potentially causing highly localized traditions.”

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Image: Erica van de Waal

Scotland is getting ready to capitalize on something the country has plenty of: fierce, stormy waves.

About 750,000 Scottish homes expect to be powered by ocean technology by 2020, as the Scottish Government announced that 10 wave and tide power schemes capable of generating up to 1.2GW in total would be built around the Orkney islands and on the Pentland Firth on the northern coast of the Scottish mainland [Guardian]. The 10 projects will comprise the world’s first commercial-scale wave and tidal power scheme. With this project, Scotland plans to produce the same amount of clean energy as a small nuclear power station, and hopes to start on a path to becoming the “Saudi Arabia of marine energy.”

Some of the strongest tidal currents in the world race around UK shores and there’s some of the highest energy in the waves that roll in from the Atlantic. And while wave power is, to an extent, dependent on the weather, tidal power has the tremendous advantage of being totally predictable [Channel 4].

It will cost about $7.6 billion in total to install and maintain the structures used to generate power from the strong waves and tides, and to transmit the energy back to land. The bulk of the work will be done by three major power firms: E.ON, Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) Renewables, which already operates the UK’s largest hydro schemes, and Scottish Power Renewables, a heavy investor in windfarms, in joint ventures with four of the UK’s leading marine energy firms [Guardian].

Click through the photo gallery to see the wave and tidal devices that will soon get their try-outs in the cold, turbulent waters off the Scottish coast.

Image: flickr / jack_spellingbacon

There is no escape.

If you thought you spent a lot of time tweeting and reading tweets before, that number could get even higher thanks to “@anywhere,” the site’s new feature announced at Austin’s South by Southwest festival (SXSW) this week. The platform is intended to allow third-party sites to integrate Twitter more deeply and smoothly than they currently can. The idea is to offer a more seamless experience to Twitter users navigating third party sites like the Huffington Post and the New York Times, giving them Twitter content without forcing them to jump off the page they’re currently viewing [TechCrunch].

Twitter CEO Evan Williams went fairly light on the specifics of the new system, and gave no release date, during his keynote Q&A at SXSW, but some details have come out. The way Twitter has described it, @anywhere will allow readers of articles at The New York Times and other sites to click and follow writers directly from their bylines, and—judging by what Evan Williams told Anil Dash on Twitter—will also let them click and see information about popular Twitter users who are mentioned on a participating site [BusinessWeek]. By expanding the microblogging site’s reach, @anywhere appears to be Twitter’s answer to Facebook Connect, but BusinessWeek complains that the feature—at least based on what people know about it right now—isn’t much to write home about.

We love Twitter at DISCOVER (follow us here), but it’s easy to see why not everyone would be so excited about allowing the Wild West cavalcade of information that is the Twitterverse to encroach onto their digital turf. According to ComputerWorld, branded Web sites that aren’t accustomed to reader feedback probably won’t be so keen to allow a sudden burst of it, especially if they’d seen a blast of negative publicity (like, say, Toyota).

Lastly, there’s was one particular group that wasn’t too taken with the Twitter CEO’s talk: Twitter users. Maya Baratz, a product manager at MTV, wrote: “There are hundreds of people in the room. Someone. Anyone. Kanye this keynote and ask Evan a good question.” Another Twitter user posted this report: “The guy behind us is snoring. Literally” [The New York Times]. Back on his home field, however, Williams tweeted that people could ask him tougher questions there.

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Image: Twitter

The primary goal of the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite is to provide a map of the cosmic microwave background with unprecedented precision. But along the way, you have to take into account that there is stuff in between us and the farthest edges of the universe — in particular, there’s all sorts of dust here in our home galaxy. You can even become famous just studying dust; one of the most highly cited papers in all of astrophysics is a 1997 map of galactic dust.

Dust isn’t only an annoyance — it’s also pretty. Planck hasn’t released any data about the CMB yet, but they just released a map of the cold dust in our local vicinity, looking for all the world like an abstract expressionist painting. (I want to suggest a particular artist, but my mind is blanking.) Click to embiggen.

It’s a false-color image, of course; the dust is very cold (tens of degrees above absolute zero), and the image is constructed from microwaves, not from visible light. You can see the plane of the galaxy, and the filamentary structures arising from all the churning of the interstellar medium from supernovae, star formation, magnetic fields, and so on.

Okay, pretty time is over. Let’s see the CMB.

Astrology doesn’t work.

Shocker, I know. I’ve written on this topic extensively, but of course astrologers send me email — seriously — saying how their flavor of magic works, or that I wasn’t fair, or that if only I faced the right way and triantrilated my fibbertygibbet, astrology would be correct, despite my article very carefully showing that no matter how you slice it, astrology doesn’t work.

Obviously, astrology’s horse isn’t quite dead yet, so beating it isn’t such a bad idea. My friend Moriel Schottlender wrote up a nice dissection of astrology walking through the steps showing (despite many astrologers’ claims) that gravity clearly is not the force behind astrology. She even includes math.

Of course, those of us in the reality-based Universe knew this, since when tested properly astrology fails tests devised even by astrologers themselves (see my article linked above). So there is no force behind astrology, except that of the human mind to fool itself. Because of that, we’ll always be debunking bunk like this. I guess that’s one thing astronomers and astrologers really do have in common: there will always be work for us.

Men diagnosed with erectile dysfunction probably wouldn’t be too keen to hear that they might have bigger problems, but a new study in the journal Circulation reinforces that unfortunate idea. Given that both ED and heart attacks can result from restricted arteries that prevent blood from flowing freely, doctors have long suspected that they might be connected. Now, the study says, there’s evidence that one precedes the other. From The Los Angeles Times:

The results are probably not too surprising, added Dr. Robert Kloner, a cardiologist at USC’s Keck School of Medicine, “because arteries in the penis are smaller, so atherosclerosis shows up there sooner,” perhaps three to four years before the onset of cardiovascular disease.

The take-home message, both experts said, is that when a patient seeks treatment for ED, typically from a general practitioner, he should be given a full physical work-up to look for heart disease and referred to a cardiologist.

The guidelines for treating men with ED already state that they should be examined for cardiac problems. Kloner says updated guidelines in a few years could make that recommendation more forceful, so doctors can make sure a penis attack doesn’t become a heart attack.

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Image: iStockphoto