Emotional fluctuations in Bob Dylan’s lyrics measured by the dictionary of affect accompany events and phases in his life.

“Lyrics for Bob Dylan’s songs between 1962 and 2001 (close to 100,000 words) were scored with the help of the Dictionary of Affect in Language (Whissell, 2006). Means for Pleasantness, Activation, and Imagery are reported for 22 Blocks characterizing this time span. Significant but weak differences across Blocks were found for all three measures at the level of individual words. Emotional fluctuations in words included in Bob Dylan’s lyrics accompanied events and phases in his life, although they were not entirely dictated by these events. Dylan used more highly Imaged and more Active words at times when his work was critically acclaimed. More Passive word choices characterized times of prolonged stress, and more Pleasant choices times of experimentation. Dylan’s three popularity peaks were used to divide the singer’s career into three stages (rhetor, poet, sage) which differed in terms of pronouns used.”

Thanks to Heather for today’s ROFL!

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Contagiousness: It’s contagious! Happiness was contagious in 2008, then loneliness last year, and don’t forget being fat. Now it’s generosity that spreads like the flu across social networks, according to James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis (who were both behind the happiness study). Their new study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

To test out whether generosity spreads, the scientists devised a game. In groups of four, each person had 20 “credits,” some of which they could decide to toss into a common fund for all the players. The scoring was set up so that giving to the fund was costly unless the other players did it too: If everyone kept their money, they’d have the 20 credits, but if everyone put all they could into the fund, each player would end up with 32. However, the players had no way to know how generous the others were being. The best payoff would come if everyone gave all their money — but without knowing what others were doing, it always made sense to keep one’s money and skim from the generosity of others [Wired.com].

The researchers found that if a person was particularly generous, the people he or she played with were more likely to be generous during the next round, when they were shuffled into groups with different people. Ultimately, the initial person’s contribution was multiplied up to three times—a result in keeping with earlier findings on social contagion suggesting that this sort of ripple effect continues for three degrees of separation [TIME]. However, while kindness and generosity spread through the network of players, selfishness did too.

Certainly, these studies have their doubters. Commenters on one of our last “contagious” posts pointed to a 2008 BMJ study noting that if social networking studies weren’t careful in looking at correlations, one could plausibly find that traits like height, acne, and headaches are similarly contagious. Though Fowler and Christakis designed their experiment to try to see cause-and-effect links, not just correlation, they say the study is a general model for group behavior, and how well it fits the more convoluted real world remains to be seen.

But we talking apes are impressionable social creatures, after all, so perhaps we really do spread behaviors—and not just disgusting infectious diseases—amongst ourselves. Says Fowler, “When people benefit from kindness they ‘pay it forward’ by helping others who were not originally involved, and this creates a cascade of co-operation that influences dozens more in a social network” [The Telegraph].

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Image: flickr / Woodleywonderworks

College students holed up in the library or cramming for an exam have always relied on stimulants like coffee, but recently they’ve been increasingly turning to the off-label use of drugs like Ritalin and Modafinil to help them stay focused. Now scientists have found how Ritalin, a drug normally prescribed for children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), helps boost learning.

In a new study of rats published online in Nature Neuroscience, scientists found that Ritalin appears to boost both attention and enhance the speed of learning by increasing the activity of the chemical messenger dopamine [Technology Review]. The study also found that one type of dopamine receptor aids the ability to focus, and another type improves the learning itself [DNA].

In their study, scientists observed that rats on Ritalin learned faster than those not given the drug; the Ritalin-drugged rats understood more quickly that a flash of light and sound meant sugary treats for them. However, when the researchers used drugs to block the dopamine D1 receptors in the rats’ brains, they found Ritalin did not aid learning speed. When another dopamine receptor, D2, was blocked, the drug failed to improve focus. The scientists concluded that both receptors play a distinct role in helping Ritalin improve cognitive performance. Said lead researcher Antonello Bonci: “Since we now know that Ritalin improves behavior through two specific types of neurotransmitter receptors, the finding could help in the development of better targeted drugs, with fewer side effects, to increase focus and learning” [Technology Review].

The researchers also observed that the drug strengthened the connections between nerve cells in the brain region called the amygdala, which plays an important role in learning and emotional memory. Strengthened connections increase the efficiency of neural transmissions, which allows for faster learning.

The findings come at a time when doctors are paying more attention to the trend of using pharmaceuticals as “smart pills.” Some doctors have warned that drugs like Ritalin and Modafinil shouldn’t be abused to get a “brain boost” ahead of exams or in stressful situations, while other scientists have provocatively suggested that such medications should be available to anyone who wants a cognitive pick-me-up.

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Image: iStockphoto

Coming up on the 15th, we have the bonus riddle.  Tom and I are working on that now, but we have the prize ready to ship out to the winner.

The Universe, Season 4 DVD collector’s set will be sure to keep you glued to your seat.  The episodes are interesting, with appeal to a wide range of educational backgrounds and age groups.  The graphics are well done; I didn’t once roll my eyes and mutter, “Yeah, right.”  The 12 episodes are divided 3 per disc, with extra’s on the 4th disc.

The episodes deal with a good mix of subjects, some close to home (“10 Ways To Destroy The Earth”), and some not (“Death Stars”).  They are easy to follow, even when dealing with some complex topics (Pulsars & Quasars”).

I can see these DVDs working equally well in the home or classroom.  The 4 DVDs are in individual cases, so it’s easy to find a specific episode and go right to it.  I think you’ll find it hard not to sit and watch all 12 episodes at once.  I did.

So, get ready to rumble on March 15th, and solve the bonus riddle.  We have one more “regular” riddle to go (on the 13th); one last chance to be eligible for the bonus riddle and a shot at winning The Universe Season 4 DVD set.

By the way, the set I reviewed is NOT the set we’ll be mailing out as a prize!

How often do you go outside and look up? I mean really, just look up at the sky and stars?

With more and more people living in cities, and light pollution still a major problem, it seems that a smaller percentage of people actually get to see the stars. That’s why the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) started the GLOBE at night program, an effort to get folks outside and get them to appreciate the night sky.

The program is actually pretty simple: all you have to do is go outside and look at Orion, and compare the stars in the constellation you can see with maps showing progressively fainter stars. This tells you your "magnitude limit" which in turn s tells you how bad light pollution is in your area. You can then submit your findings on the GLOBE at Night website, where they are compiled and mapped.

It doesn’t matter if you live in the middle of the Sahara or in downtown NYC. In fact, the more people who submit their results the better, so that the GaN folks can get really good coverage of the planet. Not only does this help you get a feel for the sky and for light pollution, but it helps astronomers keep track of wasted light as well.

Light pollution destroys our view of the sky, but it also represents a lot of energy totally wasted. Cities, towns, everyone can save a lot of money by installing more efficient lighting — you can find out more at the Dark Sky Rangers site. Projects like GLOBE at Night will help a lot of people realize that, too.

The project goes from now until March 16, and the website has everything you need to get started, including resources for teachers, parents, and students. Give it a shot!

Pandora on Earth

If you’re a big Avatar fan, then James Cameron’s Oscar loss may have left your eyes swollen and your popcorn soggy. But if Avatar grabbed your attention with its story of greedy humans ravaging the alien moon Pandora for a mineral that Earth needs, then here are a handful of real-life stories, from good ol’ planet Earth, that might make the plight of Pandora’s native Na’vi seem eerily familiar.

First we have members of the Dongria Kondh tribe from Orissa, India, talking to the tribal-rights group Survival International about their quest to save their sacred mountain from a large mining company. The company wants to raze a huge part of their lush, bountiful, holy mountain to mine not “unobtanium,” but bauxite. Wait, James… are you getting this down?

Survival International took out an ad in the film industry magazine Variety to appeal directly to Cameron for help. Says Survival International director Stephen Corry: “Just as the Na’vi describe the forest of Pandora as ‘their everything,’ for the Dongria Kondh, life and land have always been deeply connected. The fundamental story of Avatar – if you take away the multi-coloured lemurs, the long-trunked horses and warring androids – is being played out today in the hills of Niyamgiri in Orissa, India.”

You are what you eat, and perhaps in some ways, what your mother ate. Back in 2003, Cheryl Rosenfeld’s team found that the diet they fed to pregnant mice caused a “striking variation” in the sex ratios of the offspring: High fat favored males, low fat favored females. Now Rosenfeld has a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that says the mother’s diet can also affect the very way genes are expressed in the placenta.

To figure this out, Rosenfeld’s team studied the placentas attached to fetal mice 12 and a half days after conception, when the mice were midway through gestation but had yet to produce sex hormones like estrogen or testosterone (those can also alter gene expression, which would have confounded the study). They found that gene activity in the placentas differed significantly depending on whether the mom was fed a high- or low-fat diet. The biggest differences were found when comparing the high- and low-fat placentas linked to female fetal mice, suggesting that placentas nourishing females do a better job of responding to diet—and potentially protecting the fetus from harmful ingredients—than do those connected to males [ScienceNOW]. Specifically, of the 700 genes that they saw behave differently between the sexes, 651 were expressed more in females than males. In all, their study saw changes in the expression of nearly 2,000 genes.

The team can’t say for sure why diet affects either sex ratio or gene expression. Indeed, the analysis turned up changes in genes that affect things like kidney function and smell, which the scientists were not expecting to see. Whatever the reason these changes happen, they say, diet during pregnancy could have long-term health effects on children. Sons and daughters are also at different risk for conditions such as obesity or diabetes later in life, apparently related to either the mother’s diet or body condition while pregnant [The Times].

Biologist Jared Friedman, who didn’t work on the current study, says this will be an interesting area for future studies, but he’s not totally sold on the conclusion of Rosenfeld’s team yet. Males, he says, seem to lag behind females in all stages of development. Maybe those olfactory genes become more active in the male placenta as the pregnancy continues, he says. “Instead of 12.5 days, go to 19.5 and see if the differences are magnified or if the males catch up” [ScienceNOW].

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Image: flickr / dizznbonn

Last year, I attended the NASA-sponsored Launch Pad Workshop, a week-long camp in Laramie, Wyoming, to help science fiction authors learn astronomy. That way, they can get ideas and write more accurate stories! It was a lot of fun, and I had a fantastic time.

Registration is open again for Launch Pad 2010, with guest speaker Kevin Grazier, who is a planetary scientist and science advisor for TV shows, including Battlestar Galactica.

Launch Pad will be from July 11 – 18, 2010, and if you’re a science fiction author you can apply to attend from now until March 31. And if you are an author, I urge you to go. It’s more than just getting the science right; it’s about inspiration, and there’s plenty to be had in astronomy. Launch Pad is a great way to meet it head on.

“Malaria and alcohol consumption both represent major public health problems. Alcohol consumption is rising in developing countries and, as efforts to manage malaria are expanded, understanding the links between malaria and alcohol consumption becomes crucial. Our aim was to ascertain the effect of beer consumption on human attractiveness to malaria mosquitoes in semi field conditions in Burkina Faso. We used a Y tube-olfactometer designed to take advantage of the whole body odour (breath and skin emanations) as a stimulus to gauge human attractiveness to Anopheles gambiae (the primary African malaria vector) before and after volunteers consumed either beer (n = 25 volunteers and a total of 2500 mosquitoes tested) or water (n = 18 volunteers and a total of 1800 mosquitoes). Water consumption had no effect on human attractiveness to An. gambiae mosquitoes, but beer consumption increased volunteer attractiveness. Body odours of volunteers who consumed beer increased mosquito activation (proportion of mosquitoes engaging in take-off and up-wind flight) and orientation (proportion of mosquitoes flying towards volunteers’ odours). The level of exhaled carbon dioxide and body temperature had no effect on human attractiveness to mosquitoes. Despite individual volunteer variation, beer consumption consistently increased attractiveness to mosquitoes. These results suggest that beer consumption is a risk factor for malaria and needs to be integrated into public health policies for the design of control measures.”

Thanks to Amy for today’s ROFL!

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Hot, cold, in between, it doesn’t really matter to chameleons: They’re going to snare their prey anyway, according to findings in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That’s because their elastic tongues are designed like ballistic weapons.

Chameleons fire their tongues at breakneck speed, says study leader Christopher Anderson. “A chameleon’s tongue travels at accelerations exceeding 400 meters (1,312 feet) per second squared, or about 41 Gs of force,” he added. To put that into perspective, a space shuttle only develops about three Gs of force when it takes off [Discovery News]. Given that muscle performance diminishes when it gets colder, and that these lizards are ectothermic (cold-blooded), one might think their tongue prowess would trial off sharply as temperatures drop.

Not so, Anderson says. He and his team filmed veiled chameleons (Chamaeleo calyptratus) eating crickets, and controlled the temperature as they watched. For other cold-blooded creatures, the researchers say, an 18-degree Fahrenheit drop in the temperature causes a 33 percent decrease in muscle speed, and an even more dramatic drop-off in the speed of tongue movements. But the chameleons had tongue snaps that only slowed by about 10 to 19 percent … with the same temperature decrease [Scientific American]. The chameleons’ tongues also extended to their full glory despite the temperature change.

The key is how the chameleon launches its collagen assassin. Measuring twice the creature’s body length, the tongue stays coiled inside until needed. While a muscle must initiate the tongue’s unfurling, momentum takes over after that impetus. “This ‘bow and arrow’ mechanism decouples muscle contraction temporally from tongue launch and thereby allows kinetic energy to be imparted to the tongue at a rate far exceeding that possible via direct muscle contraction,” the team writes. That also explains why the chameleons’ tongue recoil speed, which depends on muscle contraction, was much slower when the temperature dropped, slowing between 42 and 63 percent.

According to the study authors, such a flexible feature helps chameleons thrive in a variety of environments. There are more than 100 different chameleon species on Earth, some of which inhabit locations where temperatures climb above 39 degrees Celsius [102.2 F] or dip below freezing [Scientific American]. Since these creatures all eat in a similarly sly manner, Anderson says his study’s findings should apply across the board, to chameleons living in the desert and those residing in rather frostier locales. Salamanders and toads, too, have ballistic tongues that may be similarly resistant to fluctuating temperature.

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Images: Christopher V. Anderson

Carbon nanotubes have shown the potential to help us take better x-ray images, make cheaper hydrogen fuel cells, and replace silicon in computer chips. Add another possibility onto the pile: MIT researchers report this week in Nature Materials that they’ve used carbon nanotubes to create thermopower waves, a system they say could put out 100 times more energy than a lithium-ion battery.

Michael Strano’s team coated the tubes, which are only billionths of a meter across, with a fuel. This fuel was then ignited at one end of the nanotube using either a laser beam or a high-voltage spark, and the result was a fast-moving thermal wave traveling along the length of the carbon nanotube like a flame speeding along the length of a lit fuse [Environmental News Service]. That wave travels 10,000 times the typical speed of this chemical reaction, and the heat blasts electrons down the tubes. Voila, electric current.

This previously unknown phenomenon opens up an entirely new area of energy research, Strano says, and the technology’s potential applications are exciting. Strano envisions thermopower waves that could enable ultra-small electronic devices, no larger than a grain of rice, perhaps a sensor or treatment device that could be injected into the body. Or they might be used in “environmental sensors that could be scattered like dust in the air,” he says [Environmental News Service].

In Strano’s experiments, the process actually created more electricity than their calculations predicted, probably because the system creates the phenomenon called electron entrainment. The thermal wave, he explains, appears to be entraining the electrical charge carriers, either electrons or electron holes, just as an ocean wave can pick up and carry a collection of debris along the surface [Environmental News Service].

That could make thermopower waves extremely useful in the future. Densely packed nanotubes could also lead to ultracapacitors capable of storing far more power than today’s capacitors [Greentech Media]. Strano says it might also be possible to make the wave oscillate, producing the kind of alternating current used in so many modern technologies. For now, though, the team is focused on making the waves more efficient by reducing the amount of energy lost as heat and light.

Related Content:
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Image: iStockphoto

You hear the terms “redshift” and “blue shift” in astronomy talking about the velocity and direction of travel of celestial bodies.  This isn’t a difficult basic concept to understand, but it’s a little bulky to explain.  Also, like everything else in science, it gets more difficult as you go along.  The least difficult is the Doppler redshift.

You know about the Doppler shift in sound as an object approaches you or moves away from you.  The pitch of a train whistle seems to change as it approaches and passes you.  You know the sound doesn’t actually change in pitch at the source (the train), but due to the movement of the train the sound waves are compressed or lengthened, changing the pitch you hear.  In Doppler redshift, the visible light waves are compressed or lengthened depending on the velocity and direction of the source relative to you.  I say “relative to you” because if the source is moving away from you, the visible light shifts to red.  If it’s moving toward you, the visible light shifts to blue.

Doppler redshift - Image Ales Tosovsky, All Rights Reserved

That, in a nutshell, is Doppler redshift.

From there it gets more complicated and bulkier to explain.  For example, you have cosmological redshift (or Hubble redshift) which deals with the expansion of the universe; the relativistic Doppler effect, which deals with time dilation of objects traveling at near light speed; the gravitational redshift (or Einstein redshift) which handles redshift in a gravitational well (i.e., near a black hole).  Each “complication” tells you something new, exciting, and different.  For example, the Hubble redshift applies to objects far, far away – in the neighborhood of 13 billion light years away.  That’s creeping up on the time of the Big Bang.  Anyway, scientists know these objects are that far away because the Hubble redshift tells us that the further away an object is, the larger the redshift.

Red and Blue Shifting - Image, WikiPedia user Anynobody, All Rights Reserved

Redshifting tells us how far away an object is, how fast it’s moving, in what direction it’s moving.  It gives us ideas about what the object is and how old it is.  We get information about black holes, exoplanets, and the nature of the universe itself.

Pretty great, right?  Also, when you get caught speeding on radar… you can blame Doppler redshift.

Between the beautiful scenery and legally mandated good treatment, animals have it pretty good in Switzerland. They could have had it even better, but over the weekend the country’s people decided that the country’s animals didn’t need their own state-funded lawyers.

Yes, Switzerland is so animal-friendly that this question actually came to a vote. The courts in Zurich already have a representative, Antoine Goetschel, who is responsible for taking up the cases of cats and horses and sheep. And this weekend the Swiss voted on a referendum that would have expanded this system to cover the entire nation. However, 70 percent of people voted no.

It seems that worries over costs to taxpayers, as well as the objections from farmers, convinced the Swiss that their existing animal rights laws were good enough. From BBC News:

Switzerland already has some of the strictest animal welfare legislation in the world.

Pigs, budgies, goldfish and other social animals cannot be kept alone; horses and cows must have regular exercise outside in summer and winter; and dog owners have to take training courses to learn how to care for their pets.

And let’s not forget that the Alpine nation recently mandated that researchers who want to work with genetically engineered plants must first explain to an ethics panel why the work won’t destroy the plants’ dignity.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons / Chris Hartford

Am I a Geek Dad? Well, I’m a geek, and a dad.

But in this case, I’m talking about the cool website Geek Dad. To celebrate their third anniversary they’re opening up voting for their Geek Dad Awards, with categories like Best Actor/Actress, Best Gadget, and so on.

Of particular interest to me are the categories of Best Social Media Star and Best Geek Celebrity (overall). That’s because, for some reason, they put me on those lists.

Now, I love Geek Dad, don’t get me wrong! But I’m up against folks like My Close Personal Friend Adam Savage™ and My Not Quite As Close But Still A Friend Felicia Day, so my odds of winning are smaller than the gap between the time a tribble is born and when it gets pregnant.

See what I did there? Yeah, I deserve to win a geek award, but I’m guessing it won’t be this one given the competition. And worse, Fwhil Fwheaton is in both categories, and I can’t in good conscience ask you to vote for me thousands of times at the expense of my mancrush. No-names like Neil Gaimon and J. J. Abrams, sure. But Wil?

So if you care to, go to Geek Dad and vote your own conscience. And I won’t ask the couple of folks I know at GD to send me the lists of IP addresses of the voters so that I can exact my revenge as necessary. Seriously. I won’t. At all.

But hurry! Voting ends at 8:00 p.m. EST on March 14th. If I win, I’ll give everyone who voted for me a unicorn^*.

As I get started writing about energy, I’m interested to get a sense of what readers are most interested to discuss…

Wind?
Solar?
Hydrogen Fuel Cells?
Cellulosic Biofuels?
Nuclear?
Oil?
Algae?
Tidal Power?
Corn Ethanol?
Coal?
Fossil Fuels?
Natural Gas?
Offshore Drilling?
The relationship to climate change?
The economy?
Jobs?
Water?

The list could go on and on, so let’s start a thread of your questions and get the ball rolling… Which technologies do you think hold the most promise?

In honor of the Oscars, I spent last night watching a movie. It was set on another world, populated by exotic flora and fauna (e.g., a blue creature with a long tail). The good inhabitants of this world live as one with all nature, and refuse to kill or do harm. A caucasian human shows up, and saves the world from disaster by being brave enough to kill. The movie was in 3-D, creatively combining real-action and animation, and was lushly filmed with dramatic scenes of waterfalls and forests and mountains. The movie’s title starts with the letter “A”.

Of course, I’m talking about Alice in Wonderland. What, is there some other movie you were thinking of? Spoilers follow (although it’s not the type of movie that gets spoiled), so if you’re hyper-sensitive about such things (as I am), cease reading now.

Alice and Avatar make an excellent study in contrasts. They both use the same canvas, and there are remarkable superficial similarities between the two. However, I found Alice to be much more interesting and satisfying as a film. Avatar, as the entire world seems to have noted, has a completely mundane and predictable story, with a sound-byte message. Within about ten minutes of the film, you know more-or-less the full arc. It’s a reasonable story, with lots of visual candy, and I can’t say I was bored (which is saying a lot for a three hour film). But, at least for me, it left little mark. To go to such great lengths to build up an entire world, you’d think you’d have something profoundly new and interesting to say. Sean does a nice job of summarizing some of Avatar’s failings.

I found Alice, on the other hand, to be much more entertaining. For any self-respecting science geek, having a movie which revolves around a vorpal sword has to warm the cockles of your heart. But there’s substance behind all of the talking flowers and Jabberwocks. For example, consider the good and bad queens. They had interesting, quirky personalities, and didn’t play directly to stereotype. In Avatar, these roles would have been completely one dimensional. In Alice, the Red Queen has moments of doubt, and seems genuinely surprised that she is not loved. Images of hearts proliferate, to no avail. The White Queen, meanwhile, swats at “dragonflies” while professing her love for all creatures. She seems somewhat annoyed that she’s not allowed to wreak mayhem on her rival, as if she’s struggling within the bounds of the “good queen” convention. There are subtle physical manifestations as well: her snow white hair is dark underneath, and she has slightly dark circles about her eyes. The distance between the two queens (and sisters) is not as great as it initially appears. These satisfying levels of grey give the characters more depth and nuance (something that is completely absent in Avatar). Alice demands that the viewer do some work; the movie does not present everything neatly wrapped with a bow. The moral of the film is left a bit hazy. It has something to do with letting your imagination run wild. Resisting convention. Living in the world you want, rather than the one you find. At the end of Avatar, the main character remains on Pandora. Alice, on the other hand, chooses to leave Wonderland and return to London. Which film is more courageous?

Will we ever get a solid answer on what killed the dinosaurs? According to a new “K-T Boundary Dream Team” comprising of 41 international experts, including geophysicists and paleontologists, yes, the question has been settled: An asteroid is indeed to blame.

For years, scientists have argued over different theories of what killed the dinos–including one hypothesis that has gained ground recently, which suggests that massive volcanic activity in India’s Deccan Traps wiped them out 65 million years ago. However, the latest expert panel stuck to the asteroid theory, saying a massive impact wiped out the dinos and more than half of the Earth’s other species. The panel’s review was published in the journal Science.

After studying all the available data on the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) mass extinction, the panel concluded that the catastrophic event was caused by a 6-mile-wide asteroid that struck Earth at an angle of 90 degrees and a speed of about 12.4 miles per second – about 20 times faster than a speeding bullet [Guardian]. The asteroid hit Chicxulub, Mexico, with a force one billion times more powerful than the atomic bomb at Hiroshima [Science Daily News].

The impact of the crash would have triggered large scale fires, landslides, earthquakes that measured 10 on the Richter scale, and subsequent tsunamis, scientists said. Debris loosened by the impact would have shrouded the planet, clouding the skies, causing a global darkness, and “killing off many species that couldn’t adapt to this hellish environment” [Science Daily News], according to study coauthor Joanna Morgan.

The scientists noted that the asteroid put an end to dinosaurs, the bird-like pterosaurs, and large marine reptiles, but it also marked a new beginning. Said study coauthor Gareth Collins: “Ironically, while this hellish day signalled the end of the 160 million year reign of the dinosaurs, it turned out to be a great day for mammals, who had lived in the shadow of the dinosaurs prior to this event. The KT extinction was a pivotal moment in Earth’s history, which ultimately paved the way for humans to become the dominant species on Earth” [Science Daily News].

The asteroid theory is far from new. The idea was first proposed by the father-son duo of Luis and Walter Alvarez three decades ago, when they found high levels of iridium in geological samples around the world. The element iridium is rare in the Earth’s crust but is common in asteroids, and can be found at asteroid impact sites. The current panel analyzed soil samples to find that immediately after the iridium layer, there is a dramatic decline in fossil abundance and species, indicating that the KT extinction followed very soon after the asteroid hit [Science Daily News].

The team also based their conclusions on “shocked” quartz. Quartz is shocked when it is hit very quickly by a huge force; shocked quartz is found only at asteroid impact locations and nuclear explosion sites. The abundance of shocked quartz in the rock layers associated with the KT boundary add further weight to the asteroid impact theory, the team declared.

Study coauthor Kirk Johnson says the team discarded the theory that large-scale volcanism made the dinosaurs extinct because the eruptions at the Deccan traps site started at least 400,000 years before the Chicxulub impact with no effect on life. The team traces the extinctions to within plus-or-minus 10,000 years of the impact 65.5 million years ago. “So we are back to where we started with the Alvarez hypothesis, a single, large, (6-mile-wide) impact,” Johnson says [USA Today].

Related Content:
80beats: Forget “The Asteroid”: Could Supervolcanoes Have Killed the Dinosaurs?
80beats: In the Permian Period, Erupting Super-Volcanoes May Have Killed Half the Planet
80beats: Dinosaurs Ruled the World Because They “Got Lucky,” Say Scientists
DISCOVER: Did an Asteroid Really Dust the Dinosaurs?
DISCOVER: When North America Burned explains how the asteroid could have set our continent on fire

Image: Nasa

We’ve been studied. Bora points to a new paper by Inna Kouper in the Journal of Science Communication. The title is “Science blogs and public engagement with science: Practices, challenges, and opportunities,” which pretty much explains what it’s about. The author picks out a collection of eleven blogs — Pure Pedantry, Synthesis, MicrobiologyBytes, Bioethics, Wired Science, DrugMonkey, Scientific Activist, Pharyngula, Panda’s Thumb, and our own humble offering — and analyzes posts and comments to judge how effective these sites are at promoting science communication.

The list of blogs chosen is — okay, I guess. I have no idea how it was constructed, and the paper doesn’t seem to provide much guidance. Bora has a critique of the methodology that wonders about that, and about exactly how objective the study is. It’s very hard to assign numbers to things like “ratio of informative posts vs. rants,” or “degree to which the cause of collegial communication was harmed by use of intemperate language.” The paper reads like someone read a bunch of blogs and typed up their personal impressions.

For the most part I don’t disagree too strongly with the impressions, with the obvious caveat that it’s almost completely useless to study “science blogs” as a group. People don’t read randomly chosen collections of blogs; they read very intentionally chosen subsets that appeal to their own interests, and different reading lists will lead to wildly divergent impressions about what blogs are really like.

More significantly, though, I can’t really agree with the moral that the author draws from these experiences. Here is the telling quote from the paper:

The blogs employ a variety of writing and authoring models, and no signs of emerging or stabilizing genre conventions could be observed. Even though all blogs mentioned science or a particular scientific discipline in their descriptions, they differed in their voice representations, points of view, and content orientation.

It’s hard to disagree with that, but I think it’s a good thing, and the author clearly does not. Blogs differ in many ways, and happily avoid the encroachment of stabilizing genre conventions. That’s one of the biggest benefits of opening up communication channels to a tremendous variety of content providers, rather than restricting things to just a few mainstream outlets; writers can have their voices, and readers can choose who to read, and everyone is happy.

It’s clear that a lot of people want blogs to be just like some pre-existing communication medium, just with comments and occasional expertise. And there are blogs like that, if that’s what you’re into. And there are blogs that aren’t, likewise. I hope it stays that way.

For a study this week in the journal Nature Medicine, Kathleen Collins and her team have uncovered another of HIV’s dirty tricks: the virus can hide out in bone marrow cells and lie in wait for the right time to strike.

In recent years, drugs have reduced AIDS deaths sharply, but patients need to keep taking the medicines for life or the infection comes back, she said. That’s an indication that while the drugs battle the active virus, some of the disease remains hidden away to flare up once the therapy is stopped [AP]. One place the researchers already knew HIV could hide was inside resting T cells. However, Collins says, she thought T cells alone didn’t offer a complete picture of the virus’ ability to play hide-and-seek.

So she and her team took hematopoietic progenitor cells (HPCs) from bone marrow cells—so called because they eventually turn into blood cells—and exposed them to HIV. The infection killed some cells right away. But when the team forced the others to differentiate, becoming blood cells, they say, they saw a dramatic increase in viral activity triggered by the differentiation. In short, HPCs represented another HIV reservoir. “To my knowledge, we are the first to find another real reservoir beyond the resting T cell,” Collins said [The Scientist]. When the scientists then studied HIV patients who’d had undetectable viral loads for six months or more, they found HIV infecting the bone marrow of about 40 percent.

The study is an important step for scientists trying to track how HIV behaves over an infected person’s lifetime, and why it’s able to come back with a vengeance even after a long latent period. But it also presents new challenges because killing off bone marrow cells is a dicey proposition [BusinessWeek]. Killing all the infected bone marrow cells would also kill the patient, Collins says. However, “maybe we could find ways of targeting only the latently infected bone marrow cells,” she added [BusinessWeek].

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Image: iStockphoto

Struggling for a gift idea? How about gifting a rat through “Adopt-a-HeroRat.” These are no regular New York City-type rats, creepily scampering across train tracks or spreading disease; these so-called HeroRats help save lives by sniffing out unexploded landmines in Mozambique. For just six dollars a month, you can choose to support the good work of “Allan,” “Kim,” “Tyson,” or “The Chosen One.”

The rats being used in Mozambique’s mine-sweeping operations are African pouched rats; they’re small, lightweight (weighing about 3 pounds), and, according to the BBC, surprisingly cute. Traditionally, mine-detection has been carried out by metal detectors and sniffer-dogs, but the rats are the latest workers to join the team. However, the mine-removal process is still dangerous and labor-intensive: Once a rat discovers a mine it has to be dismantled by a human.

A bunch of these rats have been trained by APOPO, a joint Belgian/Tanzanian organization that taught the rodents to associate the smell of TNT in unexploded explosives with food. So, much like the dogs that Igor Pavlov taught to associate a certain stimuli with a particular response, the rats associate mines with delicious snacks, and are highly motivated to find them.

APOPO’s rats aren’t deployed in the field without proper training, of course. First, they must attend a grueling boot camp in Tanzania, where, much like sniffer dogs, they work with individual human trainers. Each rat works in a training box and is fastened to a search line, which is strung between its two trainers. The rat sniffs up and down the box, moving through different lanes, systematically. When it smells an explosive, it starts scratching the top soil. The trainer clicks a clicker, the rat steps aside and gets his reward–a piece of banana. APOPO trainers say they’re proud that the HeroRats are helping to find and eliminate the three million unexploded mines that still clutter Mozambique in the aftermath of a deadly civil war.

But the HeroRats’ life is not all sniffing and bananas, they have had their share of criticism too. British Army vet Andy Smith, who works with de-mining groups worldwide, told the online magazine Miller-McCune that while mine-detecting rats are “media-sexy” and attract a lot of money, they’re highly inefficient:

Their legs are too small to walk regular patterns in overgrown fields, so vegetation must be trimmed, and the rats attached to a string to literally keep them in line. “You need to spend so much time clearing space, you’re better off doing it manually,” Smith says.

But maybe mine detecting personnel who are working through the painstaking process of defusing deadly landmines across 70 countries need all the help they can get. And maybe “The Chosen One” can, in some small way, contribute to this effort.

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Image: HeroRat.org