A quick note: I’ll be closing the survey on science reading habits at 1 pm EST Wednesday. The turnout has been great, and people are still joining in tonight. But I don’t want to let too much time go by before crunching the numbers and putting them back out for you again. So please have your say.

P.S. I know, I know–why are podcasts and public libraries not in the survey? I don’t know why I blanked on them. Register complaints in the comment thread.

“Computer mediated communication (CMC) plays a rapidly growing role in our social lives. Within this domain, e-mail addresses represent the thinnest slice of information that people receive from one another. Using 599 e-mail addresses of young adults, their self-reported personality scores and the personality judgments of 100 independent observers, it was shown that personality impressions based solely on e-mail addresses were consensually shared by observers. Moreover, these impressions contained some degree of validity. This was true for neuroticism, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and narcissism but not for extraversion. Level of accuracy was explained using lens model analyses: Lay observers made broad use of perceivable e-mail address features in their personality judgments, features were slightly valid and observers were sensitive to subtle differences in validity between cues. Altogether, even the thinnest slice of CMC—the mere e-mail address—contains valid information about the personality of its owner.”

Thanks to Robert for today’s ROFL!
Photo: flickr/Perfecto Insecto

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At the AAAS meeting in San Diego last month, I spoke with EarthSky’s Lindsay Patterson, and the resultant podcast just went up. You can listen here, or by playing the embedded audio below, and I’ve also pasted some transcribed sections below:

And now, the write-up:

Chris Mooney: The science has been coming in saying that global warming is real, human-caused, and it keeps getting stronger scientifically.

Chris Mooney is a journalist and the author of the 2009 book, Unscientific America. Mooney spoke about the reasons behind what he calls American inaction on climate change.

Chris Mooney: It’s a problem of politics plus media leading to inability to function on this issue. We’re a divided country and we handle science issues according to politicization and divisiveness, rather than according to what the science actually says.

Mooney pointed to the decline of print media, and the rise of political blogs. He believes good communication of science may now rest with scientists, themselves.

Chris Mooney: The scientific community is going to have to find new ways of getting that information out. Or else it may be the case that we can’t get society to act on the best scientific knowledge that we have. And that may be catastrophic.

He said that scientists have learned a powerful lesson about the need to communicate what they know with the public.

Chris Mooney: I think the scientific community is ready to change -in fundamental ways – how it engages with the public. That means one key part of the equation is going to be functioning better. Hopefully that will create a more scientific America, slowly.

In addition to his concern about the declining quality and quantity of vetted science news, Mooney talked about his belief that science media has suffered at the hands of a number of popular conservative blogs that he termed, ‘anti-science.’

Chris Mooney: It’s the kind of tactics being brought against science I haven’t seen before. It’s staggeringly frightening to watch how much of a revolt against science you can have in this country on an issue that’s politicized like that.

He said that at the same time, scientists have not reacted properly to the attacks against them.

Chris Mooney: Scientists are so worried about the fact that climate research and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are coming under brutal attack. There have been some mistakes made but nothing justifying the kinds of attacks that have come. My point is okay, the situation’s bad. What are you going to do about it? Because this is a new media world. You need to adapt to it.

Mooney spoke about “ClimateGate,” in which emails between climate scientists were hacked and made public.

Chris Mooney: Scientists needed to realize that capacity was there to create a semblance of scandal. They needed to respond immediately, loudly, and with one voice, saying, ‘Okay, we’re looking into these things, but these things are not fundamental to what we know. The science rests on many foundations.’
Written by Lindsay Patterson

Once again, the original podcast is here.

If you thought that fingerprints or DNA fragments were the only bits of forensic evidence that could pin you to a scene of a crime, then think again. Researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder have found preliminary evidence suggesting that you can be identified from the unique mix of bacteria that lives on you.

Each person, they say, is a teeming petri dish of bacteria, but the composition varies from person to person. Every place a person goes and each thing he touches is smudged with his unique “microbial fingerprint.” The bacterial mixes are so specific to individuals that researchers found that they could pair up individual computer keyboards with their owners–just by matching the bacteria found on the keyboard to the bacteria found on the person’s fingertips. Describing their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists write that that if this bacterial fingerprint technique is refined, it could one day help in forensic investigations.

The Human Microbiome Project has already found that different body parts harbor different kinds of microbes. Study coauthors Noah Fierer and Rob Knight note that these colonies don’t change much over time. No amount of hand-washing will change a person’s microbial make-up, they say.

For their experiment with computer keyboards, scientists extracted bacterial DNA from three different keyboards and sequenced more than 1,400 copies of bacterial ribosomal gene from each sample to identify the individual species of bacteria each sample contained [Technology Review]. With this information in hand, the scientists were able to pair each keyboard with its user.

In another test, scientists took samples from nine computer mice and were also able to determine their users based on the similarities between hand bacteria and the colonies on each mouse. The scientists also found that there was a very clear difference between bacterial samples taken from the mouse users and 270 samples from a database. Hand bacteria, they found, can survive at room temperatures for up to two weeks and the bugs could be identified even when fingerprints were smudged, or there was not enough DNA to obtain a profile [BBC]. The researchers also note that identical twins, who share the same DNA, have different bacterial compositions living and growing on their hands.

However, scientists warn that while the “microbial fingerprinting” technique seems largely accurate so far, it’s too early to say if it will ever be used in courtrooms. Forensics expert David Foran argues that it’s “utility in a forensic context is doubtful”. It’s unlikely to ever meet the high standards of certainty needed for a criminal investigation, although that probably won’t stop it from appearing in a future episode of CSI [Not Exactly Rocket Science].

Other experts, like microbiologist David Relman, says the idea of this “signature” is not entirely new. For decades, researchers have wondered whether it may be possible to identify individuals based on, say, the unique strains of Escherichia coli harbored in their gut. Until recently, though, “all the ideas that were floating around couldn’t really be explored in a really detailed and methodical way,” Relman says [Technology Review].

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Image: flickr / Andrew*

Welcome to this week’s installment of the From Eternity to Here book club. This is a fun but crucial part of the book: Chapter Ten, “Recurrent Nightmares.”

Excerpt:

Fortunately, we (and Boltzmann) only need a judicious medium-strength version of the anthropic principle. Namely, imagine that the real universe is much bigger (in space, or in time, or both) than the part we directly observe. And imagine further that different parts of this bigger universe exist in very different conditions. Perhaps the density of matter is different, or even something as dramatic as different local laws of physics. We can label each distinct region a “universe,” and the whole collection is the “multiverse.” The different universes within the multiverse may or may not be physically connected; for our present purposes it doesn’t matter. Finally, imagine that some of these different regions are hospitable to the existence of life, and some are not. (That part is inevitably a bit fuzzy, given how little we know about “life” in a wider context.) Then—and this part is pretty much unimpeachable—we will always find ourselves existing in one of the parts of the universe where life is allowed to exist, and not in the other parts. That sounds completely empty, but it’s not. It represents a selection effect that distorts our view of the universe as a whole—we don’t see the entire thing, we only see one of the parts, and that part might not be representative. Boltzmann appeals to exactly this logic.

After the amusing diversions of the last chapter, here we resume again the main thread of argument. In Chapter Eight we talked a bit about the “reversibility objection” of Lohschmidt to Boltzmann’s attempts to derive the Second Law from kinetic theory in the 1870’s; now we pick up the historical thread in the 1890’s, when a similar controversy broke out over Zermelo’s “recurrence objection.” The underlying ideas are similar, but people have become a bit more sophisticated over the ensuing 20 years, and the arguments have become a bit more pointed. More importantly, they are still haunting us today.

One of the fun things about this chapter is the extent to which it is driven by direct quotations from great thinkers — Boltzmann, of course, but also Poincare, Nietzsche, Lucretius, Eddington, Feynman. That’s because the arguments they were making seem perfectly relevant to our present concerns, which isn’t always the case. Boltzmann tried very hard to defend his derivation of the Second Law, but by now it had sunk in that some additional ingredient was going to be needed — here we’re calling it the Past Hypothesis, but certainly you need something. He was driven to float the idea that the universe we see around us (which, to him, would have been our galaxy) was not representative of the wider whole, but was simply a local fluctuation away from equilibrium. It’s very educational to learn that ideas like “the multiverse” and “the anthropic principle” aren’t recent inventions of a new generation of postmodern physicists, but in fact have been part of respectable scientific discourse for over a century.

It’s in this chapter that we get to bring up the haunting idea of Boltzmann Brains — observers that fluctuate randomly out of thermal equilibrium, rather than arising naturally in the course of a gradual increase of entropy over billions of years. I tried my best to explain how such monstrosities would be the correct prediction of a model of an eternal universe with thermal fluctuations, but certainly are not observers like ourselves, which lets us conclude that that’s not the kind of world we live in. Hopefully the arguments made sense. One question people often ask is “how do we know we’re not Boltzmann Brains?” The realistic answer is that we can never prove that we’re not; but there is no reliable chain of argument that could ever convince us that we are, so the only sensible way to act is as if we are not. That’s the kind of radical foundational uncertainty that has been with us since Descartes, but most of us manage to get through the day without being overwhelmed by existential anxiety.

For those people seeking some long-term postmortem respect, you could always go the route of the Royal Tenenbaum epitaph and have your hyperbolic greatness engraved upon a headstone. But we all know weather eventually gets the better of those words, and besides: Why settle for one measly sentence when you could speak directly to your descendants from beyond the grave?

The Objecs company has the answer: RosettaStone “technology enhanced memorial products,” which, preloaded with your autobiographical information, will attach to your grave. From Discovery News:

When your great-great-great granddaughter stops by sometime in the next century and wants to know who you were, she’ll touch her NFC-RFID enabled cellphone (or whatever device we’re using by then) to one of those symbols on the granite iPod-looking device on your headstone and she’ll get your note.

NFC stands for “near-field communication” which is a subset of RFID – “radio frequency identification.” You’re probably using this technology already. RFID is what allows you to pay a toll while driving 30 mph by way of the little box stuck to your rearview mirror.

As the above passage notes, the practicality of RosettaStone depends on it working with the cellphone technology of the future that will probably be directly implanted in your head, or perhaps that someone will care enough after you’re gone to drop by the cemetery and upgrade your headstone.

Still, it could work. So please, no stupid text abbreviations in your autobiography. This is for posterity.

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Image: Objecs LLC

A few months ago, I wrote about an art exhibit in NYC based on my book Death from the Skies! Brian George, one of the artists who put this exhibit together, just posted a very cool blog entry about it too.

He posted some great picture on Picasa, which you can see in the slideshow below or on Picasa directly.

I am totally blown away by the sculpture Solar Flares and CMEs. In the book, I describe how the tangling of the Sun’s magnetic field lines is like a bag full of springs under tension. How I pictured that in my head is almost exactly duplicated by that piece.

I could not get to NYC for the exhibit, but I really wish I had. The artwork is amazing, almost as amazing as the feeling I get thinking that a book I wrote for my own nefarious purposes actually inspired a group of artists to create such wonderful and astonishing pieces. My thanks to all of them for swelling my head just a little bit more.

There’s a lot more going on beneath those huge sheets of Antarctic ice than you might think. NASA researchers say they uncovered a major surprise in December: The team drilled an eight-inch hole and stuck a video camera 600 feet down, hoping to observe the underbelly of the thick ice sheet. To their amazement, a curious critter swam into view and clung to the video camera’s cable [Washington Post]. The three-inch crustacean in their video (and pictured in the image here) is a Lyssianasid amphipod, a relative of a shrimp. The team also retrieved what they believe to be a tentacle from a jellyfish.

“We were operating on the presumption that nothing’s there,” said NASA ice scientist Robert Bindschadler, who will be presenting the initial findings and a video at an American Geophysical Union meeting Wednesday. “It was a shrimp you’d enjoy having on your plate” [AP]. Indeed, researchers previously believed that nothing more complex than microbes could live in such a hostile place, beneath an ice sheet in total darkness. While complex organisms have shown up before in retreating glaciers, this seems to be the first time any have been found 600 feet down below an intact sheet of ice.

The sheer unlikeliness of the find (what would these creatures eat, after all?) cast doubt in the minds of some scientists that this is the organisms’ true habitat. The site is connected to the open sea, says Cynan Ellis-Evans of the British Antarctic Survey. But given the distance to that open sea—12 miles–study coauthor Stacy Kim says it’s highly unlikely such small creatures made such a journey under an ice sheet. In addition, the hole NASA drilled measured only eight inches across. That means it’s unlikely that that two critters swam from great distances and were captured randomly in that small of an area, she said [AP].

If crustaceans really can tough it out buried beneath the ice, perhaps complex organisms can live in more places than we give them credit for. Astrobiology enthusiasts are probably already thinking of the ice-covered moons in our solar system, like the Jovian moon Europa and the Saturnian moon Enceladus, and wondering whether extraterrestrial critters could be lurking beneath those frozen surfaces. First, though, there’s a lot left to sort out about this intriguing puzzle.

Become a fan of Discover Magazine on Facebook

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Image: NASA

I had fun sampling Rush Limbaugh in the latest Point of Inquiry (around minute 3:30), as he stunningly suggests to Andy Revkin: “Why don’t you just go kill yourself, and help the planet by dying?”

First, for the original clip of Rush’s extremism in all its glory, listen here:

I couldn’t resist asking for Revkin’s response to Limbaugh, which came at around minute 13:00 of the show. Revkin first set the stage for Rush’s performance as follows:

I was speaking about three very tricky things: population growth, United States consumer habits, and climate–in one riff. I was participating via video hookup with a Wilson Center event, and basically I said, “Look, if you’re going to go with the whole carbon-centric meme, and we’ll have carbon credits for this, that, and the other, and you live in America, where we’re heading from 300 million to 400 million people in the next 30 or 40 years, why shouldn’t a family get carbon credits for having fewer kids?”

It was what I would call a thought experiment. And that got picked up by some right wing blog, and that got picked up by Rush Limbaugh, who I’m sure never saw the original video thing….Just hearing the audio [of Limbaugh] is amazing. And of course I wrote a thorough critique of what he had said on DotEarth, and then he spent the next week nibbling, almost apologizing. Suicide is a realm you don’t go into, without having to draw a lot of ire from a lot of people who have actually experienced the loss of family members. So he almost apologized, but not quite.

Hey, why apologize when you’re Rush Limbaugh?

[For more Point of Inquiry, listen here, or subscribe here via iTunes.]

Today I’m off to Portland, OR for the 2010 American Physical Society’s March meeting to participate in this panel:

Science Literacy, the Nature of Science and Religion

Jon Miller: The Development of Civic Scientific Literacy in the United States

Sheril Kirshenbaum: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future

Murray Peshkin: Addressing the Public About Science and Religion

Judith Scotchmoor: Increasing our understanding of how science really works

Art Hobson: Physics Literacy for All Students

Our session will be moderated by Lawrence Woolf and you can read the abstracts online. I’m really looking forward to what I’m certain will be a very interesting discussion.

Please be sure to fill out my quick survey on how you get your science fix! Thanks.

Two-alarm Zimmer family radio alert!

My brother Ben will be on On Point today (Tuesday) at 11 am, talking about taking over as the language maven at the Times. Then, at 1 pm, I’ll be talking on the Colin McEnroe show on WNPR about my article on carnivorous plants in National Geographic. You can listen live or get a podcast after the show on the show page.

Measles looks to be 1000 years old. It jumped from cattle. And you can read more about it here.

The Universe is a big place; we have that idea down pretty tight.  Even with all that room, sometimes moving bodies run into each other.  In about 4.5 billion (with a “b”) years, that may happen to the Milky Way and M31; the Andromeda Galaxy.

This is a CGI visual of the Andromeda/Milky Way collision, by HubbleSite:

Andromeda and Milky Way collide

We know that Andromeda is getting closer to the Milky Way by about 120 km/s (by Doppler redshift, which you know about), but we don’t have a way yet to measure its transverse velocity.  That may change in 2012 with the ESA’s Gaia Mission (read about that here).

From a distance (and over time), the force of the two galaxies colliding will be impressive.  Close up, it probably won’t be much to shout about because galaxies are diffuse things.  For perspective, if our sun where the size of a quarter (small American coin), the next closest “quarter” would be about 475 miles away.  Of course, when our galaxy cores merge, with our supermassive black holes, that will likely cause some shock waves.

Scientists are saying there is a 12% probability that our solar system will be ejected from the galaxy in the collision.  That might be fairly impressive to witness – but we won’t.  We will be long gone from the Earth by then, either through relocating our species or through extinction.  Remember, in about a billion years the sun will be too hot for there to be liquid water on the Earth.

4.5 billion years is a long time for any species, but maybe there will still be humanity somewhere to witness the collision.

In tomorrow’s New York Times I write about the afterlife of the greatest medical disaster in history. Thalidomide, a drug women took for morning sickness in the late 1950s, caused thousands of devastating birth defects, such as the failure of limbs to develop. Even after the drug was banned, scientists had no idea how it interfered with growing arms and legs. In fact, fifty years later, they’re only just starting to figure it out.

This was a particularly interesting story to write coming after a piece I wrote for the Times last year about normal limb development. Now thalidomide is revealing a new player in the limb development game, a protein that no one knew about when I wrote my 2009 article. In science, very often the only way to understand how something works is to see what happens when it goes wrong.

PS: On Google Books, you can see a 1962 issue of Life with some stunning pictures from the Thalidomide years.

[Image: Science Museum (Thalidomide is currently legal for sale for leprosy and other diseases)]

Response of brown tree snakes (Boiga irregularis) to human blood

“Ten specimens of Boiga irregularis were presented with clean or bloody tampons. The latter were used by women during menses. Trial duration was 60 sec, intertrial interval was 24 hr, and the dependent variable was rate of tongue flicking (a measure of chemosensory investigation). Bloody tampons elicited significantly more tongue flicking than did control tampons. An additional snake is shown attacking and ingesting a soiled tampon, confirming that chemosensory interest was associated with predatory behavior.”

Bonus figure legend from the main text of the paper (we decided to spare you the actual figure):

“FIG. 1. (A) A brown tree snake investigates a soiled tampon suspended into its cage.
(B) Seconds later the snake bites the tampon. (C) About 2 min following the bite, the
snake is shown with only the string remaining unswallowed. This snake then struck and
swallowed a second soiled tampon.”

Thanks to Aaron for today’s ROFL!

Photo: flickr/jurvetson

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This.

Is.

AWESOME!!!

That is a model of the USS Enterprise-D from Star Trek: The Next Generation, created using an ion beam that guides vaporized chemicals and deposits them into a given shape. The amazing thing is that this model of the Big Little-E is only 8.8 microns (millionths of a meter) long! For comparison, a human hair is about 50-100 microns across. This image is magnified 5000 times.

I wonder if it comes with a tiny Wil Wheaton, too?

Tip o’ the VISOR to Digg.

Sushi chefs in Japan are keeping a close eye on Doha, Qatar this week as delegates at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) debate the future of their beloved bluefin tuna. The fish, a delicacy in Japan that can sell for more than $100,000 apiece, is being overfished, and convention delegates aim to prevent the tuna from becoming extinct altogether. The proposal on the table: A complete ban on international trade of the fish to allow stocks to regenerate.

The bluefin tuna ban was proposed by Monaco, and the vote will probably come up next week. Japan has already dispatched a delegation to Doha with the message that Japan won’t comply with a total ban, and would instead prefer a fishing quota. But quotas have failed to help the depleted bluefin tuna stocks thus far. Japan last year pledged to help meet an accord to slash the total catch in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean by 40 percent, although environmental groups charge that such quotas are routinely exceeded [AFP].

The European Union and the United States have come out in support of a total ban, since decades of overfishing has caused the number of bluefin in the Atlantic and Mediterranean to crash by more than two-thirds. Japan, meanwhile, hopes to fend off the ban by enlisting the support of developing nations in Africa and Latin America. Tokyo said that even if a ban is implemented, it could use a treaty technicality to opt out of the agreement by expressing “reservations,” and would then continue to import from other countries.

Meanwhile, at the world’s largest fishing market in Tokyo’s Tsukiji district, bluefish tuna fishermen began collecting signatures to oppose the ban. They said measures to prevent overfishing of the tuna should be implemented instead [The Asahi Shimbun]. Traders also fear a steep price hike for the bluefin, known as “kuro maguro” or black tuna in Japan. A piece of “otoro” or fatty underbelly now costs 2,000 yen (22 dollars) at high-end Tokyo restaurants [AFP].

The other bitter battle being played out at the CITES meeting is Zambia’s and Tanzania’s proposal for a one-time sale of ivory, so that they may clean out their stockpiles of ivory–collected, they say, from elephants who died natural deaths. So far, the proposal has been resisted by countries like Kenya that argue that such sales give cover to poachers who engage in “ivory-laundering,” and would increase poaching in the region.

Zambia and Tanzania both insist that they will funnel the $18.5 million they expect to earn from the sale into conservation efforts, but that claim has been met with skepticism. A recent report in the journal Science revealed a sharp increase in poaching in recent years–with much of the ivory trafficking running through Zambia and Tanzania.

Kenya and its allies have proposed supporting a bluefin tuna ban in exchange for greater protection for the elephants. However, this horse trading is viewed as controversial: Conservationists argue that every proposal should rise or fall on the basic of scientific evidence detailing the possible extinction of individual species, not as part of a political deal [The New York Times].

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Image: Wikimedia

As I promised a little while back, the European Space Agency has released new extremely high-res pictures of Phobos, one of the moons of Mars! Check this out:

Yegads. Click to embiggen, and see this in all its glory. This image, taken by the Mars Express spacecraft, has a resolution of 4.4 meters per pixel, meaning objects about the size of a two-car garage can be seen on the surface of Phobos. For comparison, this lumpy, battered moon (named for the Greek word for fear, a companion to Mars) is 27×22x19 kilometers (16×13x11 miles), so even though it’s on the tiny side, this is still a fantastic map of the surface.

And an important one as well: next year, Russia will be launching a probe called Phobos-Grunt (Phobos soil) that will attempt to land on the moon, collect a sample of its surface, and send it back to Earth! These images of Phobos will help the Russians figure out the best place to land.

On the ESA page linked above, you’ll also find a cool 3D anaglyph of Phobos, and if you want to stay up to date on all this, check out the Mars Express blog, too.

Image credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)

The European Space Agency has released the latest pictures of the Martian moon Phobos, taken by the European Mars Express (MEX) probe during its recent flybys. On one flyby, MEX skimmed just 42 miles above the surface of Phobos, which is the closest any manmade object has ever gotten to the little Martian moon.

The image above is from a flyby that brought MEX within 63 miles of the surface; its High Resolution Stereo Camera took photographs that have a resolution of 14 feet per pixel. The images are being scrutinized by the Russian space agency as it tries to settle on a landing site for its ambitious Phobos-Grunt mission next year–the two potential landing sites are marked by red dots in the picture above. The Phobos-Grunt mission aims to collect a soil sample from Phobos, and then to return the sample to Earth for analysis.

Phobos is an odd little moon: it’s a potato-shaped rock measuring only 12 miles by 17 miles. Scientists believe the moon is relatively porous, but say its origin is still open to debate. Researchers suspect the moon is simply a collection of planetary rubble that coalesced around the Red Planet sometime after its formation. Another explanation is that it is a captured asteroid [BBC News]. Scientists believe that Phobos is being slowly pulled towards Mars, and tidal forces are expected to tear it apart one day.

The moon has drawn more attention lately, because it’s increasingly seen as a steppingstone for Mars-bound astronauts. Last month, NASA shifted its focus from sending humans back to the moon to a “flexible path” that includes the moons of Mars as potential destinations. The idea is that low-gravity locales such as Phobos (and Mars’ other moon, Deimos) should be easier to get to because they’re more accommodating for landing and ascent [MSNBC].

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DISCOVER: Russia’s Dark Horse Plan to Get to Mars describes the Phobos-Grunt mission

Image: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)