As the deadly facial cancer that has drastically reduced the population of Tasmanian devils continues to spread through the species, the main hope for scientists trying to save them from extinction has been to hunt for devils that might be resistant to the disease, and to try to take advantage of that immunity. Reporting in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Kathy Belov and her team say they may finally have done just that: Some devils from northwest Tasmania, they say, are genetically distinct from the rest and could be resistant to the disease.

Belov says that most Tasmanian devils have immune systems so closely related that they’re all susceptible to the disease, which spreads when the devils bite each other on the face and leave behind tumor cells. The bitten devils’ immune systems don’t recognize the tumor cells as foreign, allowing them to take hold. Scientists have given the iconic marsupial as little as 25 years left if efforts are not made to solve the cancer riddle. The population has dwindled by a whopping 70 per cent since the first reported case of devil facial tumour disease in 1996 [Sydney Morning Herald]. Previous research showed that the marsupials are more socially linked that researchers initially believed, which is bad news for those trying to contain the disease.

However, Belov’s findings provide some hope. While earlier studies had looked at devils in eastern Tasmania, this time they took a wider sampling of 400 devils across the state. Twenty percent of those were found to be genetically different from the eastern devils, and so far have not caught the disease [AP]. Belov believes these resistant devils may be able to identify the cancer cells as foreign, which triggers their immune systems to mount a defense. She notes that the situation is still dire, but adds that “now we can say that we’ve got a glimmer of hope. There may be some animals that may survive this epidemic” [AP].

Hopefully those findings will hold true; a few years ago researchers thought they’d found the first disease-resistant devil, which they named Cedric, but it didn’t pan out. Cedric caught the disease in December of 2008.

Related Content:
80beats: Tasmanian Devils Have Precocious Sex to Beat Cancer
80beats: Can a New Blood Test Save Tasmanian Devils From Extinction?
80beats: Tasmanian Superdevil, Hope of the Species, Is All Too Mortal
80beats: Tasmanian Devils’ Social Networking May Spell Doom for the Species
The Loom: Saving Tasmanian Devils from a New Form of Life—Themselves

Image: flickr/JLplusAL

The South by Southwest Interactive festival is about to roar into gear down in Austin, and DISCOVER just couldn’t miss out on the chance to mix and mingle with the leet ranks of hackers, gamers, geeks, and entrepreneurs.

So tomorrow (that’s Friday) at 5 pm, DISCOVER’s own Web editor extraordinaire, Amos Zeeberg, will moderate a panel discussion titled, “With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: The Future of Video Games.”

Video games are more popular than ever, and new games are delivering all kinds of social benefits, from video-game therapy for treating PTSD, to sims for train surgeons, to alternate-reality games that actually bring people together in real life. Will video games be a positive force for people and society in the future?

The panelists:

Lucy Bradshaw, with the video game giant Electronic Arts, worked as an executive producer for blockbuster games like Spore and The Sims 2. Spore was a favorite with science geeks, since the game characters evolve from microorganisms to complex animals before building societies and taking to space.

Tiffany Barnes, a professor of computer science, builds video games that teach introductory computer science. She’s interested in “harnessing the inherent motivation in video games” for more constructive purposes–like getting students to do their homework.

Neuroscience prof James Bower will explain why he started Whyville, a massively popular virtual world for kids. The educational site reportedly has a player base of more than 5 million users, who learn about everything from science to business to geography.

Anne Collins McLaughlin investigates how video games (including World of Warcraft and Wii Boom Box) can improve elder cognition at the Gains Through Gaming Lab.

If you’re at SXSW, stop by for insights on whether gaming can save the world!

DISCOVER hit the airwaves yesterday. First, Editor-in-Chief Corey Powell appeared on Fox News to talk NASA and Mars—specifically the agency’s idea for “Tumbleweeds,” or inexpensive round explorers that could bound around the surface of the Red Planet, tossed by the wind. Given the uncertain state of NASA funding, Powell says, the future of exploration could look a lot like these intrepid little bots:

Secondly, if you stayed up late enough to catch the end of “The Colbert Report,” you saw Sean Carroll—who writes for the DISCOVER blog Cosmic Variance—talking time, the multiverse, and his new book From Eternity to Here. Besides surviving the cauldron that is talking to Colbert while still hitting some key scientific points, Carroll also accidentally thinks up a great title for an album:

Check out Carroll’s cover story for the March issue of DISCOVER, “The Real Rules for Time Travelers.”

Related Content:
Cosmic Variance: Report from Colbert, Carroll’s account of visiting the show
Cosmic Variance: From Eternity to Here Book Club

The technical way to explain this odd-looking fowl is that it’s “gynandromorphous.” But if you just want to call it “one seriously confused chicken,” that works, too.

For a new study in Nature, Michael Clinton and colleagues investigated a few of these half-male, half-female chickens they obtained from chicken farms. Gynandropmorphs show up now and then not just in chickens, but also in parrots, pigeons, and some other kinds of animals. But scientists weren’t sure how the mix-up happens, since the standard idea for sex differentiation is that the sex hormones released by the gonads either masculinize or feminize the embryo. Clinton’s team discovered that bird cells don’t need to be programmed by hormones. Instead they are inherently male or female, and remain so even if they end up mixed together in the same chicken [BBC News].

The researchers had first assumed that the half-and-half chickens followed the hormone pattern, and that they were females with some sort of chromosomal problem on the male side (the lighter half of the bird in the image, which also sports a large wattle, sturdy breast musculature, and a leg spur on its male side). Instead, they found the chickens to be almost perfectly split between male and female. The hen half was, for the most part, made up of normal female cells with female chromosomes, whereas the cockerel side contained mostly normal male cells with male chromosomes [Nature News].

Since both sides experienced the same hormone exposure, that couldn’t explain what was happening. In addition, once the team believed that cell identity was at work here, and not hormones, further experiments seemed to confirm this idea. When the researchers transplanted tissues from genetically female embryos into what would become the gonads of genetically male ones and vice versa, the transplanted cells didn’t start expressing opposite-sex characteristics [Science News].

Clinton’s study is buttressed by others that suggest the standard explanation for sex determination doesn’t apply as widely as previously thought, or at least needs some tweaking. Besides the other birds mentioned previously, some marsupials and invertebrates stray from the pattern. “These funky chickens, oddities of nature that they are, will provide new perspectives on questions of sexual identity long thought to have been resolved,” wrote Duke University cell biologists Lindsey Barske and Blanche Capel in a Nature commentary accompanying the findings [Wired.com].

Become a fan of DISCOVER on Facebook.

Related Content:
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Discoblog: Sex Hormones in the Brain: Wimps Rejoice

Image: The Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh

The following recent comments on the “Pharyngula” blog have been brought to my attention via multple emails from readers–some of them victims of rape and sexual abuse:

Fuck them [my co-blogger, our commenters, and I] all sideways with a rusty fucking knife.

Later:

The commenters are basically wetting themselves hoping Kirshenbaum comes down hard because people are saying she should be raped with a rusty knife, and Myers “likes it that way”.

I am a big proponent of free speech, however, this thread crosses the line by advocating sexual and physical violence. I have become accustomed to ignoring much of the ridicule I receive online, but keeping silent on this particular issue, is, in my mind, acceptance. Those who contacted me do not have a platform to publicly express their disgust, but I can. Rape is not a joke or game and the fact that these remarks were not removed perpetuates the notion that they’re okay.

Adam Bly and I shared a panel in 2008 at the AAAS Forum on Science and Technology Policy where he discussed the values of Seed Media Group. Further, as a former Seed blogger with many friends still on the network, I’m quite familiar with their stated mission:

Seed Media Group is committed to strengthening public interest in science and improving public understanding of science around the world.

I cannot see how the tone of commentary contributes to this goal. However, given the volume of emails I’ve already received, I’m certain it reflects poorly on Seed, science blogging, and science broadly.

The Cassini spacecraft recently passed very near the tiny moon Helene and returned amazing pictures of it.

Helene is a dinky iceball, only about 36×32x30 km (22×19x18 miles) in size (this picture has an incredible resolution of about 113 meters (123 yards) per pixel). It circles Saturn in the same orbit as the much larger Dione, and is in fact in the larger moon’s leading Trojan point: a peculiar artifact of gravity when an object orbits another. It’s a gravitational stable point, like a valley between two mountains.

Clearly battered, Helene has an oddly smooth appearance, which may be due to the feeble gravity of the moon collecting dust also trapped in the Trojan point. At The Planetary Society Blog, Emily has more info on Helene and speculates about its appearance. She also has a good description of how the Trojan points work.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

The magnitude 8.8 earthquake that rocked Chile on February 27th didn’t just move the Earth’s axis, thereby shortening the day by 1.26 microseconds, but it also caused entire cities to shift their geographical location.

Studying precise GPS images of the area struck by the quake, a team led by earth scientist Mike Bevis discovered that the Chilean city of Concepción had moved 10 feet to the west. The epicenter of the quake was 71 miles northeast of Concepción, which is Chile’s second largest city.

The effect was widespread: The capital city, Santiago, was wrenched 11 inches west-southwest, while Beunos Aires, located nearly 800 miles from the epicenter, jumped an inch to the west. The earthquake was the fifth largest ever to be recorded by seismographs and even caused far-off areas like Fortaleza, Brazil and the Falkland Islands to change location slightly. The changes were detected by teams from The Ohio State University, the University of Hawaii, the University of Memphis and the California Institute of Technology, as well as agencies across South America [CNN].

The area where the quake hit is of particular interest to geoscientists because it is an active subduction zone, where an oceanic plate is colliding with a continental plate and being pushed into the Earth’s molten mantle below [Wired]. The world’s five largest quakes since 1900, including the largest quake ever recorded (a Chilean quake measuring 9.5), have all occurred in subduction zones. Earth scientist Ben Brooks of the University of Hawaii declared that this “earthquake will arguably become one of the, if not the most important, great earthquakes yet studied….We now have modern, precise instruments to evaluate this event” [CNN].

Related Content:
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80beats: Why Chile’s Massive Earthquake Could Have Been Much Worse
80beats: NASA Jet Studies Haiti’s Fault Lines For Signs of Further Trouble
80beats: Where in the World Will the Next Big Earthquake Strike?
80beats: Satellite Images Show the Extent of Haiti’s Devastation
80beats: Haiti Earthquake May Have Released 250 Years of Seismic Stress
80beats: Science Via Twitter: Post-Earthquake Tweets Can Provide Seismic Data

Image: University of Hawaii

When researchers rack up the carbon emitted across the world, the standard trends emerge: Europeans put less CO2 into the atmosphere than Americans, but China’s rapid ascent is sending its emissions shooting past those of the United States. However, this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Stanford University researchers attempt to rejigger the numbers to reflect not just where the emissions are produced, but who is responsible for them—who’s buying and consuming the products that cause those emissions.

After study global trade databases, Steven Davis and Ken Caldiera say that in 2004, 23 per cent of global CO2 emissions – some 6.2 gigatonnes – went in making products that were traded internationally. Most of these products were exported from China and other relatively poor countries to consumers in richer countries [New Scientist]. The researchers say that developed countries outsource about a third of the carbon dioxide emissions connected to their consumption.

When you look at the numbers this way, the per capita emissions in Europe don’t look quite as good: If those emissions were tallied on the other side of the balance sheet, it would add more than four tons of CO2 per person in several European nations [TIME]. The United States saw a lesser increase of 2.4 tons per person, though that’s not really a cause for celebration. Part of the reason is that the country has more carbon-intensive exports than Europe, the study says, and under the new accounting those emissions are going on somebody else’s books. The United States also takes in the lion’s share of China’s: 22.5% of China’s emissions are generated during production of goods and services consumed overseas, and 7.8% are embodied in exports to the US alone [BBC News].

This isn’t the first time that climate change experts have raised the question of how much responsibility consumers bear for carbon emissions produced on the other side of the globe. Other studies are trying to crack this same problem, tracking “consumption” emissions rather than just the “territorial” emissions produced inside a country’s borders. What they find could shake up how the world goes about trying to reduce emissions. The U.N. system is built around the idea of capping carbon emissions from individual nations. But which country is responsible for the carbon emitted in global trade? The buyer or the seller? [TIME]

Related Content:
80beats: CO2 Emissions Are Rising. Or Falling. Actually, It’s Both
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80beats: Would You Turn Vegetarian to Slow Global Warming?

Image: iStockphoto

Welcome to this week’s installment of the From Eternity to Here book club. Now for something of a palate-cleanser, in the form of Chapter Nine, “Information and Life.”

Excerpt:

Schrödinger’s idea captures something important about what distinguishes life from non-life. In the back of his mind, he was certainly thinking of Clausius’s version of the Second Law: objects in thermal contact evolve toward a common temperature (thermal equilibrium). If we put an ice cube in a glass of warm water, the ice cube melts fairly quickly. Even if the two objects are made of very different substances—say, if we put a plastic “ice cube” in a glass of water—they will still come to the same temperature. More generally, nonliving physical objects tend to wind down and come to rest. A rock may roll down a hill during an avalanche, but before too long it will reach the bottom, dissipate energy through the creation of noise and heat, and come to a complete halt before very long.

Schrödinger’s point is simply that, for living organisms, this process of coming to rest can take much longer, or even be put off indefinitely. Imagine that, instead of an ice cube, we put a goldfish into our glass of water. Unlike the ice cube (whether water or plastic), the goldfish will not simply equilibrate with the water—at least, not within a few minutes or even hours. It will stay alive, doing something, swimming, exchanging material with its environment. If it’s put into a lake or a fish tank where food is available, it will keep going for much longer.

This chapter starts with something very important: the relationship between entropy and memory. Namely, the reason why we can “remember” the past and not the future is that the past features a low-entropy boundary condition, while the future does not. I don’t go into great detail about this, and we certainly don’t talk very specifically about how real memories are formed in the brain, or even in a computer. But when we get to the next chapter, about recurrences and Boltzmann brains, it will be crucial to understand how the assumption of a low-entropy boundary condition enables us to reconstruct the past. It’s hard for people to wrap their brains around the fact that, without such an assumption, our “memories” or records of the past will generally be unreliable — knowledge of the current macrostate wouldn’t allow us to reconstruct the past any better than it allows us to predict the future. (Which is only logical, since it’s only this hypothesis that breaks time-reversal symmetry.)

The rest of the chapter, meanwhile, is more about having fun and mentioning some ideas that are not directly related to our story, but certainly play a part in understanding the arrow of time. Information theory, life, complexity. I’m not an expert in any of these fields, but it was a lot of fun reading about them to pick out some things that fit into the broader narrative. The Maxwell’s Demon story, in particular, is one that every physicist should know (up through it’s relatively modern resolution), but relatively few do. And I think Jason Torchinsky did a great job with the illustrations of the Demon.

A lot of big ideas here, of course, and much of this stuff is still very much in the working-out stage, not the settled-understanding stage. We’re still arguing about basic things like the definition of “complexity” and “life.” It’s relatively easy to state the Second Law and explain how the arrow of time is related to the growth of entropy, but there’s a tremendous amount of work still to be done before we completely understand the way in which the universe actually evolves from low entropy to high.

We gave the BBC a hard time this morning for going a little overboard in declaring the Large Hadron Collider a broken-down mess. But here’s something cool: In a new documentary, a team simulated the blast that “Underwear Bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to create on Christmas Day last year. Their finding: Even if he had blown up the bomb successfully, it wouldn’t have been enough to take down flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit.

Dr John Wyatt, an international terrorism and explosives adviser to the UN, replicated the conditions on board the Detroit flight on a decommissioned Boeing 747 at an aircraft graveyard in Gloucestershire, England [BBC News]. Wyatt used the same amount of the explosive pentaerythritol that the bomber carried, about 80 grams, which packs about the punch of a hand grenade. They put it on the same seat and lit off a controlled explosion, which sent a shock wave through the aluminum exterior.

The metal was permanently bowed out, and a handful of rivets were punched out, but no gaping holes appeared. The pressurized air inside the cabin would have slowly leaked out [Discovery News]. Wyatt and his cohorts say that wouldn’t have been life-threatening, and it wouldn’t have brought down the plane. However, the blast would probably have killed the bomber and the person next to him. And things wouldn’t have been all sunshine and roses for the survivors, either. Team member Captain J. Joseph said the noise and the smoke would have been awful, “not to mention the parts of the bodies that were disintegrated as part of the explosion” [BBC News]. Their eardrums could have ruptured, too.

This wasn’t a perfect simulation: Wyatt tested a 747, while the actual bomber flew aboard an Airbus 330. And the conditions inside were normal atmospheric pressure, not the pressurized state of a plane in flight. But Wyatt argues that the Airbus’ stronger composite materials mean it would have fared even better than his test aircraft. As for the pressure? “It’s over so quickly that the difference in pressure wouldn’t make a difference,” said Wyatt. “By the time the shock wave got to the door the pressure would have normalized” [Discovery News].

In Britain, the documentary (called “How Safe Are Our Skies?”) aired on BBC Two. You can still see it on their iPlayer. For those of us here in the United States, the Discovery Channel broadcasts it tomorrow night (Thursday) at 10 PM EST.

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You can’t cancel an enormous federal program without hitting pushback, and President Obama is hitting plenty of it over his proposal to end NASA’s Constellation program. In January his budget proposal put forth no funding for Constellation, the space shuttle successor program that included the Ares rockets, Orion crew capsule, and plans to send astronauts back to the moon by 2020. Instead, NASA would become more reliant on private companies to ferry its astronauts to the space station, and would explore new ideas for visiting Mars or nearby asteroids. But the proposal has already ruffled lots of feathers, prompting the President to say he will hold a conference to further outline his plan.

First, many high-profile space experts balked at the proposal. Former astronaut Tom Jones said Obama was surrendering human spaceflight, and Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt, one of the last men to walk on the moon, was equally displeased. “It’s bad for the country,” Schmitt said. “This administration really does not believe in American exceptionalism” [Washington Post]. Dissent wasn’t universal; DISCOVER blogger Phil Plait, for one, praised the possibilities for commercial space-faring.

But even getting the new plan in place will take plenty of political wrangling. Last week reports surfaced saying that NASA chief Charles Bolden and others inside the agency were quietly preparing a Plan B, with compromise options for the members of Congress who have objected to the President’s plan. When the news reports came out, however, Bolden flatly denied them. “The president’s budget for NASA is my budget,” General Bolden said. “I strongly support the priorities and the direction for NASA that he has put forward” [The New York Times].

One of the unhappy members of Congress is Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas. Hutchison, whose home state is one that stands to lose jobs when NASA’s space shuttle program ends, tried to thwart the Obama plan last week by introducing a bill to extend the shuttle for two more years (It’s currently due to retire this year). The bill, dubbed the Human Space Flight Capability Assurance and Enhancement Act, calls for spending an additional $3.4 billion between 2010 and 2012 to keep the space shuttle flying. It would require NASA to spread out its four remaining shuttle missions, now slated to wrap up by October, and potentially add additional flights [MSNBC]. Yesterday, shuttle program manager John Shannon said it could be done—if the country is willing to spend the money. It currently takes $200 million every month to maintain the shuttles.

Not everyone greeted the President’s proposal with sour grapes. Private space companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX, for whom the move would mean more opportunities, are understandably excited. “It’s a huge move, and in the face of a lot of congressional opposition,” Musk said when DISCOVER spoke to him for a piece in the upcoming May magazine issue. Constellation, he argues, was never going to to reach it goals. It was already vastly underfunded, and would have required an infusion of cash that Americans would never give, especially in the current economic climate. “The people that are really hardcore against the cancellation of Constellation are people who, either from a political standpoint, have a ton of money being spent in their district and they don’t really care whether this succeeds or not,” he says.

Trying to get back on top in the public relations war, Obama announced this week that he would give a conference on April 15 in Florida to spell out more of his NASA vision. Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, said he hoped Mr. Obama would use the meeting to lay out a goal and a timetable for sending astronauts to Mars [The New York Times]. Nelson, who flew on a space shuttle mission in the 1980s, is a political ally of the President’s, but represents Florida, where so much of NASA’s human spaceflight program is based. The key to political victory for Obama, he says, may be overturning the idea that the end of Constellation equals the end of ambitious manned spaceflight.

Related Content:
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Bad Astronomy: Give Space a Chance
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Image: NASA

Every time a psychic gets surprised by something, the world gets a little smarter. I hope.

If that’s true, then our collective IQ went up a solid 8 points when the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a suit against "America’s Prophet" Sean David Morton on claims he’s a big ol’ phony.

If only he had spelled it "profit" instead, then he wouldn’t have been falsely advertising. And given that he made a cool $6 million off of gullible dupes, that moniker would certainly fit better.

Now, of course this doesn’t mean all psychics are knowing frauds any more than a scientist who perpetrates knowing fraud indicts all other scientists.

However, science has given us spaceflight, agriculture, computers, medicine, telescopes, and a deeper and quantitative understanding of the Universe from the quantum level out to its observable edge.

Psychics have given us, well… y’know… um… oh! They make it easier for non-critical people to carry their now much-lighter wallets around.

Right. Well, to paraphrase Philip J. Fry: psychics 0, regular science a billion.

Tip o’ the crystal ball to Dale Martin.

Over the last year, scientists have discovered that the moon isn’t a bone-dry place, as we previously imagined. Water ice has been spotted not just at the lunar south pole but also the north pole, and scientists have noted that the north pole deposits contain enough water ice to sustain a human lunar base. Now, scientists studying hundreds of pounds of moon rocks brought back by Apollo astronauts have found that samples containing the mineral apatite have minute traces of water.

The new analyses of the samples, revealed last week at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas, show that the evidence of the moon’s water was right under scientists’ noses for almost 40 years–they just didn’t have sensitive enough instruments to detect it. The water levels detected in Apollo moon rocks and volcanic glasses are in the thousands of parts per million, at most—which explains why analyses of the samples in the late 1960s and early 1970s concluded that the moon was absolutely arid [National Geographic].

Three different research teams found traces of water in apatite samples. Using a technique called secondary ion mass spectrometry, which bombards a sample with ions and then weighs the ejected secondary ions in a mass spectrometer to determine their atomic masses and abundances [New Scientist], scientists found water in minuscule quantities in the apatite–up to 6,000 parts per million. The apatite examined by one team was taken from one of the moon’s mares–the dark regions that are believed to have been formed by ancient magma oceans. This is the first time that water has been found in lunar magmatic material.

One of the research teams also found that the ratio of hydrogen isotopes in the apatite’s water differed greatly from the isotope mix found in earthly water, leading scientists to question where the water on the moon came from. Researcher James Greenwood believes comets may have crashed into the infant moon before its magma ocean crystallised, supplying the water. Or it may have come from a Mars-sized planet, dubbed Theia, that slammed into Earth 4.5 billion years ago to make the moon [New Scientist]. Another possibility proposed by geoscientist Francis McCubbin is that when that collission happened, not quite all the water was driven off when chunks of Earth were flung spaceward to form the moon—in other words, the water may be from an ancient version Earth [National Geographic].

Related Content:
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Bad Astronomy: NASA Finds Reservoir of Water Ice on the Moon!
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Image: NASA/ Lunar and Planetary Institute and G. Bacon (STScI)

The Cosmic Bat in Orion. Click for a larger version. Image credit: ESO

From ESO:

The Cosmic Bat The delicate nebula NGC 1788, located in a dark and often neglected corner of the Orion constellation, is revealed in a new and finely nuanced image that ESO is releasing today. Although this ghostly cloud is rather isolated from Orion’s bright stars, the latter’s powerful winds and light have had a strong impact on the nebula, forging its shape and making it home to a multitude of infant suns.

As the caption says NGC 1788 is in the constellation or Orion. If you were to neglect the Great Orion Nebula, Orion is still a fabulous place to poke around with a telescope.

I’ve spent many hours cruising around. The number of double and triple star systems is pretty amazing. I will admit to never seeing this particular feature, it’s rather small and not actually “inside” the figure of Orion, besides the brightest star in nebula is a magnitude 10, not exactly dim for a telescope but it doesn’t stand out like a triple hot blue star system either.

I may try and find it though and it’s really pretty easy to find. Just go from Rigel not quite half way to the lowest star in the shield, and to the right of 28-Eta Orionis.  Yeah, that’s right, just above the Witchhead nebula (another reflection nebula).

Want a desktop of this? Head on over to the ESO site.

Don’t forget to participate in the GAN project (click the GAN banner to the right).

An international team of researchers has discovered how to extract DNA from fossilized bird eggs–including the eggshell of the enormous elephant bird that went extinct four centuries ago.

In a research breakthrough, scientists were able to isolate DNA from the eggshells of not just the extinct giant moa bird from New Zealand, but also a 19,000-year-old emu from Australia and the extinct elephant bird of Madagascar. The elephant bird’s egg is the largest known bird egg, with 160 times the volume of a chicken’s egg [New Scientist].

The discovery of these birds’ DNA could help scientists understand how they lived, and why they became extinct. The DNA was extracted from desiccated inner membranes in fossil eggshells, found in 13 locations in Australia, Madagascar and New Zealand [PhysOrg], and the work was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

For years scientists have been trying to extract DNA from old eggshells without success, because their approach, scientists admit, was faulty. Charlotte Oskam and Michael Bunce of Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia, who isolated the DNA, say researchers (including themselves) were using techniques designed to extract DNA from bone, not eggshells. They even threw out the most DNA-hardy bits of eggshell [New Scientist]. Bunce explains that extracting DNA from bone involves sucking out the bone’s calcium and discarding it.

In the new study, the researchers figured out that the DNA was stuck in the eggshell’s calcium carbonate matrix–which they then proceeded to draw out. Because eggshells attract fewer bacteria than bone, researchers say their DNA samples from ancient eggs are less likely to be contaminated.

With this new method of extracting bird DNA in hand, scientists are hopeful that they can piece together the story of how these ancient birds lived, evolved, and went extinct. For example, the elephant bird, which weighed about 900 pounds and stood ten feet tall, became extinct at the same time that humans colonized the island of Madagascar, but there have been no signs that the birds were hunted by humans. Says archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson: “There’s not even evidence that they ate the eggs — even though each one could make omelets for 30 people” [BBC]. By studying the elephant bird’s genetics, scientists can look for clues about the bird’s physiology and diet that may help them understand what made the giant avian go the way of the dodo. But the researchers caution that so far, the new technique allows for the extraction of only a tiny amount of DNA–just 250 base pairs, the “rungs” on the ladder-like genetic code, and this is less than a fraction of one percent of the bird’s genome [PhysOrg].

So can we expect these extinct birds to be brought back to life like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park? Says Bunce: “We can reassemble the genome to get an idea of what an extinct species looked like. But (resurrecting it) is still in the realm of science fiction. It’s completely hypothetical, and frankly not a debate I really want to have.” [PhysOrg].

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DISCOVER: Jack Horner’s Plan to Bring Dinosaurs Back to Life

Image: PhysOrg

When we think about the “meaning of life,” we tend to conjure ideas such as love, or self-actualization, or justice, or human progress. It’s an anthropocentric view; try to convince blue-green algae that self-actualization is some sort of virtue. Let’s ask instead why “life,” as a biological concept, actually exists. That is to say: we know that entropy increases as the universe evolves. But why, on the road from the simple and low-entropy early universe to the simple and high-entropy late universe, do we pass through our present era of marvelous complexity and organization, culminating in the intricate chemical reactions we know as life?

Yesterday’s book club post referred to a somewhat-whimsical vision of Maxwell’s Demon as a paradigm for life. The Demon takes in free energy and uses it to maintain a separation between hot and cold sides of a box of gas — a sustained departure from thermal equilibrium. But what if we reversed the story? Instead of thinking that the Demon takes advantage free energy to help advance its nefarious anti-thermodynamic agenda, what if we imagine that the free energy is simply using the Demon — that is, the out-of-equilibrium configurations labeled “life” — for its own pro-thermodynamic purposes?

Energy is conserved, if we put aside some subtleties associated with general relativity. But there’s useful energy, and useless energy. When you burn gasoline in your car engine, the amount of energy doesn’t really change; some of it gets converted into the motion of your car, while some gets dissipated into useless forms such as noise, heat, and exhaust, increasing entropy along the way. That’s why it’s helpful to invent the concept of “free energy” to keep track of how much energy is actually available for doing useful work, like accelerating a car. Roughly speaking, the free energy is the total energy minus entropy times temperature, so free energy is used up as entropy increases.

Because the Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that entropy increases, the history of the universe is the story of dissipation of free energy. Energy wants to be converted from useful forms to useless forms. But it might not happen automatically; sometimes a configuration with excess free energy can last a long time before something comes along to nudge it into a higher-entropy form. Gasoline and oxygen are a combustible mixture, but you still need a spark to set the fire.

This is where life comes in, at least according to one view. Apparently (I’m certainly not an expert in this stuff) there are two competing theories that attempt to explain the first steps taken toward life on Earth. One is a “replicator-first” picture, in which the key jump from chemistry to life was taken by a molecule such as RNA that was able to reproduce itself, passing information on to subsequent generations. The competitor is a “metabolism-first” picture, where the important step was a set of interactions that helped release free energy in the atmosphere of the young Earth. You can read some background about these two options in this profile of Mike Russell (pdf), one of the leading advocates of the metabolism-first view.

I was reading a bit about this stuff because I wanted to move beyond the fairly simplistic sketch I presented in my book about the relationship between entropy and life. So I did a little research and found some papers by Eric Smith at the Santa Fe Institute. Smith has taken quite an academic path; his Ph.D. was in string theory, working with Joe Polchinski, and now he applies ideas from complexity to questions as diverse as economics and the origin of life.

On Saturday I was on a long plane ride from LA to Bozeman, Montana, via Denver. So I had pulled out one of Smith’s papers and started to read it. A couple sat down next to me, and the husband said “Oh yes, Eric Smith. I know his work well.” This well-read person turned out to be none other than Mike Russell, featured in the profile above. Here I was trying to learn about entropy and the origin of life, and one of the world’s experts sits down right next to me. (Not completely a coincidence; Russell is at JPL, and we were both headed to give plenary talks at the annual IEEE Aerospace Conference.)

So I explained a little to Mike (now we are buddies) what I was trying to understand, and he immediately said “Ah, that’s easy. The purpose of life is to hydrogenate carbon dioxide.” (See figure above, taken from one of Eric Smith’s talks.)

That might be something of a colorful exaggeration, but there’s something fascinating and provocative behind the idea. An extremely simplified version of the story is that the Earth was quite a bit hotter in its early days than it is today, and the atmosphere was full of carbon dioxide. At high temperatures that’s a stable situation; but once the Earth cools, it would be energetically favorable for that CO₂ to react with hydrogen to make methane (and other hydrocarbons) and water. That is to say, there is a lot of free energy in that CO₂, just waiting to be released.

The problem is that there is a chemical barrier to actually releasing the energy. In physicist-speak: the Earth’s atmosphere was caught in a false vacuum. There’s no reaction that takes you directly from CO₂ and hydrogen to methane (CH₄) and water; you have to go through a series of reactions to get there. And the first steps along the way constitute a potential barrier: they consume energy rather than releasing it. Here’s a plot from one of Russell’s talks of the free energy per carbon atom of various steps along the way; it looks for all the world like a particle physicist’s plot of the potential energy of a field caught in a metastable vacuum. (Different curves represent different environments.)

Here is the bold hypothesis: life is Nature’s way of opening up a chemical channel to release all of that free energy bottled up in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of the young Earth. My own understanding gets a little fuzzy at this point, but the basic idea seems intelligible. While there is no simple reaction that takes CO₂ directly to hydrocarbons, there are complicated series of reactions that do so. Some sort of membrane (e.g. a cell wall) helps to segregate out the relevant chemicals; various inorganic compounds act as enzymes to speed the reactions along. The reason for the complexity of life, which is low entropy considered all by itself, is that it helps the bigger picture increase in entropy.

In ordinary statistical mechanics, we say that high-entropy configurations are more likely than low-entropy ones because there are simply more of them. But that logic doesn’t quite go through if you can’t get to the high-entropy configurations in any straightforward way. Nevertheless, a sufficiently complicated system can bounce around in configuration space, trying various different possibilities, until it hits on something that looks quite complex and unlikely, but is in fact very useful in helping the system as a whole evolve to a higher-entropy state. That’s life (as it were). It’s not so different from other cases like hurricanes or turbulence where apparent complexity arises in the natural course of events; it’s all about using up that free energy.

Obviously there is a lot missing to this story, and much of it is an absence of complete understanding on my part, although some of it is that we simply don’t know everything about life as yet. For one thing, even if you are a metabolism-first sympathizer, at some point you have to explain the origin of replication and information processing, which plays a crucial role how we think about life. For another, it’s a long road from explaining the origin of life to getting to the present day. It’s true that we know of very primitive organisms whose goal in life seems to be the conversion of CO₂ into methane and acetate — methanogens and acetogens, respectively. But animals tend to produce CO₂ rather than consume it, so it’s obviously not the whole story.

No surprise, really; whatever the story of life might be, there’s no question it’s a complicated one. But it all comes down to the elementary building blocks of Nature doing their best to fulfill the Second Law.

The tobacco plant is considered a villain of the plant world because of the harmful effects of smoking it. But now a genetically engineered tobacco plant is enjoying a moment of redemption, as scientists have discovered that tweaking a certain gene in one tobacco plant strain allows the plant to produce antibodies that disarm toxic pond scum.

Treehugger reports:

The pond scum in question is microcystin-LR (MC-LR), which makes water unsafe for drinking, swimming and fishing in many parts of the world. Upon ingestion it can cause serious liver damage, with some studies indicating a connection to causing liver and colorectal cancers.

To counter this harmful algae, lead scientist Pascal Drake inserted genes into the tobacco plants to produce an antibody to the algae. The antibody was produced in the tobacco plant’s leaves and secreted from its roots into the growth medium. When the toxin from the algae was added to the medium, the antibody immediately latched on to it.

Discovery News reports:

“Binding to the pollutant might reduce its bioavailability,” Drake said. “It might make it less dangerous and less likely to be taken up by animals and humans.”

The scientists say this is the first example of a transgenic plant making an antibody that can fight an environmental toxin. But they note that for this research to be useful in the field, they would have to genetically tweak aquatic plants instead of tobacco plants.

Related Content:
80beats: Tobacco Plants Can “Grow” a Vaccine to Fight Lymphoma
80beats: Study: “Third-Hand Smoke” Sticks Around & Produces New Carcinogens
80beats: Electronic Cigarettes Not a Safe Alternative to Conventional Cigs
DISCOVER: Smoking and Ethnicity
DISCOVER: By The Numbers: Smoke Gets in Your Hair

Image: Flickr/Christian Haugen

It sounded again today like the Large Hadron Collider—previously the victim of technical failure, hackers, and avian sabateurs—was cursed. The BBC reported that the world’s largest particle collider would have to shut down at the end of 2011, possibly for an entire year, to address its mechanical problems, according to LHC director Steven Myers. The report states that the faults will delay the machine reaching its full potential for two years [BBC News].

Just one problem, though: While the information came out as another “LHC is broken” news break, Myers actually put forth the intended schedule more than a month ago. The LHC team announced that it would actually extend the physics run through until December 2011, before shutting the accelerator down for a year. The only real delay here has been to the reporting of the story [The Times]. Brian Cox, one of the project scientists, spent the morning tweeting up a storm in protest to the news handling of what he says is just a scheduled shutdown. (A typical tweet reads: “For the very last time – the #lhc story is a pile of merde, as we say at CERN. Scheduled maintenance stops are not bloody news!”)

The LHC will keep running until late next year at 7 trillion electron volts (TeV), as planned. The engineers will go in after that to carry out the planned maintenance on systems in the tunnel that have proven problematic so far; their improvements should allow the LHC to approach what was the goal from the start, doing physics at 14 TeV. In any case, the machine’s upcoming resting time isn’t an emergency shutdown. Particle accelerators are regularly shut down for re-engineering. They are huge, complex instruments, and it’s just impossible to run them full-time like a domestic boiler [The Times].

Related Content:
80beats: LHC Beam Zooms Past 1 Trillion Electron Volts, Sets World Record
80beats: Baguettes and Sabateurs from the Future Defeated: LHC Smashes Particles
DISCOVER: A Tumultuous Year at the LHC
Discoblog: LHC Shut Down By Wayward Baguette, Dropped By Bird Saboteur

Image: Claudia Marcelloni / CERN

The website called Today I Found Out has an interesting post on Sun factoids, including its color as designated in hex code: #FFF5F2. That code is actually taken from the site vendian.org, put together by Mitchell Charity. He has other star colors listed as well. I found the codes for different stellar types interesting.

The star type is listed, along with the RGB and hex values. The stars go from hottest at the top to coolest at the bottom, and the Sun is roughly a G2V.

The colors are relatively good, in that they are blue at the top and reddish at the bottom. But I was surprised at the lack of color saturation, and that the cooler stars aren’t as red as I would think.

I have spent a lot of time at the eyepiece. Vega, an A0 dwarf star, is distinctly and brilliantly blue, almost a sapphire to the eye. Betelgeuse, an M1 supergiant, is a ruddy orange. I’ve seen a handful of cooler red giants, and to the eye they are very red, not the pastel orangey thing seen here.

Why is this? There are lots of reasons that come to my mind. One is that the way stars shine is inherently different than the way colors are represented on your screen. Stars are hot balls of luminous plasma, glowing like a blackbody. Unless you heat your monitor to that same temperature, you can only approximate the way a star shines, and the colors will be off.

Our eye perceives color oddly, too. Seeing a star against a black sky will give you a different sense of its color than if you see it on your monitor. Even putting a differently colored star in the same field wrecks your color sense. I’ll note that Charity’s star color page has a hex code for the color of planetary nebulae, and that’s a whole nuther can o’ worms.

In my opinion, doing this is an interesting exercise, and a wonderful "teaching moment" on how stars emit light and how we perceive color. But as an exercise in actually trying to mimic star colors, it’s a whole lot tougher than you might think. I’m not saying Charity’s colors are wrong, but I am saying that trying to get hex codes for star colors is like writing down the notes to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on paper. It’s a code, and has the right information in it, but it’s not the same as hearing the orchestra.

I’ll also note that the whole point of the first site’s article is that the Sun is white. This is actually an extremely difficult topic to understand — it’s not just scattered blue light that makes the Sun look yellow to us, and I’m still not convinced the Sun does look yellow to us. Charity links to a page about the Sun’s color written by my friend the astronomer Andrew Hamilton, which has some more info on it.

I think the real lesson here is that something we think of as simple — color — is not at all simple! The way colors are emitted by an object, the way our eyes detect color, and most importantly the way our brains interpret that signal, are actually extraordinarily complex processes. I think that’s a very important concept to keep in mind when pondering pretty much any issue: what we take for granted as simple is almost never any such thing.

Tip o’ the artist’s beret to Philippe Hamel.

Rick Piltz of Climate Science Watch has taken the time to transcribe what may be the most important and revealing part of my Michael Mann Point of Inquiry interview–the end. It’s the part where, among other things, Mann refers to the “asymmetric warfare” between trained skeptics and scientists as “literally like a battle between a Marine and a Cub Scout.” And there is much more there. For those who enjoy reading rather than listening, check it out.