The Tangled Bank just got a great review in CBE-Life Sciences Education, a journal from the American Society for Cell Biology about teaching science. Scientific journals roll out their reviews a lot more slowly than newspapers and magazines, but in this case, it was worth the wait. Randy Moore, a University of Minnesota biologist who has done great work in defense of the teaching of evolution, leaves me trying to decide which line I want to drop, blurb-like, onto my web site…

“The best textbook I’ve seen for a nonmajors introductory biology course about evolution.”

…or maybe–

“The Tangled Bank is well-produced, up-to-date, readable, and exceptionally well illustrated. At no point does it falter.”

or maybe the last line of the review…

“Read The Tangled Bank. You won’t be disappointed.”

Thanks for the embarrassment of riches.

Do cannibals have friends? I imagine some must… unless they have them over for dinner.

Just like the giant elliptical galaxy ESO 306-17, which you can see in this gorgeous Hubble picture:

[Click to embiggen, or grab the monster 3800 x 3800 pixel version. They have wallpapers, too.]

ESO 306-17 sits about a billion light years from Earth. In this picture it looks like it’s surrounded by other galaxies, but that’s an illusion: all the other galaxies you see here are either much closer to us or much farther away. ESO 306-17 is actually a loner, sitting all by itself in space.[Update: Or almost all alone; Michael West, who led the team that took these images, tells me the little elliptical at the bottom left of ESO 306-17 may be interacting with it. It's difficult to tell; but what is certain is that there are very few galaxies near the big one, far fewer than you'd expect.]

How can a galaxy get this big and yet be sitting in a giant void? Easy. It ate all the neighbors. We know this is how galaxies grow in size, and is even why the Milky Way is a giant among galaxies. Like our galaxy, ESO 306-17 has a lot of globular clusters around it, just as you’d expect if it ate a bunch of other galaxies.

When I downloaded the bigger image, I noticed this weird galaxy on the left:

Wow. I’m guessing that long stretched-out junk is a small galaxy that got shredded, maybe after a close pass to that spiral. I thought for a moment the spiral might be active — that is, the black hole in its core was actively eating matter and ejecting long jets of gas and light — but the core itself is not bright, as you’d expect. Plus, the material is lumpy and irregular, more indicative of a cosmic collision in progress. It’s unrelated to the elliptical, but still very cool.

I really urge you to download the big image and take a nice, long look at it. There’s a lot to see, and it’s all really beautiful.

Image credit: NASA, ESA and Michael West (ESO)

UPDATE:  SOLVED by Bill at 12:32 CDT

Is everybody ready for this today?  Remember, there is only this riddle and the one on the 13th left for a chance to qualify for the bonus riddle (on March 15th).  Good luck!

Museum of Anthropology - Calendar Stone

Today’s riddle subject is an object.

It is composed of many parts, only a few of which are commonly known or visible to the unaided eye.

This was well known to ancient man; in every civilization.

Very well represented in literature, today’s object is not only in the Iliad and the Odyssey, but also the Bible and possibly the Qur’an.

PhotoBucket - Home Library

Often discovered by accident, you are likely to mistake it for something else when you first see it.

There is usually something tremendously beautiful seen very close to it.

On a cosmic time scale, this is very young.

Venus de Milo

Well?  What do you think?  In case you’re wondering, these are the people who have solved a riddle up to today:  Bruce, Adrianus V, Jim, Patricia, Doug, Dwight Decker, Rob, Alejandro, Stuart, Jim Hammill, Nick, Stephen, Jerry Thornton, and Roger.

I sure would like to add your name to the list!

(you know I’m lurking… don’t you, Trudy)

I'm SO cute!

Thanks in no small part to my beloved BABloggees and Tweeps, Rachael Dunlop won a Shorty Award in the Health category!

Yay!

It’s nice that she gets some recognition for her debunking of quackery, hoaxery, and quite a bit of alt-meddery, but the real schadenfreudeliciousness comes from knowing that she’s helping Mike Adams’ and Joe Mercola’s heads that much more explodey. Go read her link for all the sordid, but oh-so-satisfying details.

For those of you who helped out, my sincere thanks. Ya done good.

Todd Disotell of New York University writes,

As an evolutionary primatologist, I had a tattoo of Charles Darwin’s first drawing of an evolutionary tree put on my forearm to commemorate his birthday last year. This year for my birthday, I had Carolus Linnaeus‘ original 1735 definition of the order Primates tattooed onto my other forearm.

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

Reader Luke Vogel first suggested inviting everyone to submit photos to the Science of Kissing Gallery, so this morning I’m especially pleased to feature his contribution. Here’s Luke giving a first kiss to his beautiful niece, Jaylee.

Submit your photograph or artwork for consideration and remember to include relevant links.

Starting tonight on the BBC, a new series premiers called "Wonders of the Solar System". The host is some guy named Brian Cox. He’s a particle physicist! I don’t see the BBC hiring me to do a show on the Large Hadron Collider, so this doesn’t seem fair. And I’m a little concerned about how much Brian knows about the LHC, anyway.

Still, it looks cool. Here’s the trailer:

Seriously, this will be awesome. I can’t wait to see it!

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s going to be another nice day here, I’m going to hoe out the observatory.  Skies are starting to show promise from the “normal” cloudy state. Since I just fixed some electrical issues the scope is back in business and after doing a calibration etc., I want to try and get a look at the little asteroid in the video, not sure if I can but the fun is in the trying.

Looks like my bees came through the winter in fine shape.  Spring can’t possibly get here fast enough!

Video

I did my graduate work at the University of Chicago, and lived in Hyde Park. On occasion I would take the bus (the #6 Jeffery Express) to downtown. Although the buses were scheduled to run every 15 minutes, I would invariably end up waiting a half hour. Sometimes more. Often in the freezing cold, or the sweltering heat. Most infuriatingly, when the bus finally arrived, there was always another one immediately behind it! The buses inevitably came in pairs. Sometimes even in triples or quads.

Let’s assume that the buses are supposed to arrive every 15 minutes. If the buses adhered to their schedule, and I showed up at a random time, I should generally have to wait roughly half the mean bus arrival time: 7.5 minutes. If the buses were totally random, then I would have to wait the average time between bus arrivals: 15 minutes (if you haven’t thought about this before, this statement should sound crazy; perhaps I’ll do a future post on it). So the question is: why did I always end up waiting roughly 30 minutes or more?

I always assumed that the Universe was conspiring against me. This is a common feeling in graduate school. However….

I just stumbled across a blog post of a friend of mine from graduate school, Alex Lobkovsky. In it, he discusses precisely this problem, and presents various reasons for the bunching of buses. I have no doubt that he was inspired from similar suffering. Perhaps at the very same bus stop.

At the end of the day, there’s a fairly straightforward solution. Imagine all of the buses are roughly on time. Now imagine that one bus (call it bus S) happens to fall behind. Because S is running behind, more time has elapsed since the previous bus has passed. This means that more waiting passengers have accumulated, at more bus stops. This in turn means that bus S has to stop more often, and has to pick up more people at each stop. Hence, bus S falls even farther behind. Which means even more people accumulate at each stop. Which means the bus falls even farther behind. And so on. In short: a slow bus gets slower and slower.

Now let us consider the bus behind bus S; we’ll call it bus F. Bus F starts out roughly on schedule. But because bus S is running late, less time than average has elapsed between when bus S last passed and when bus F arrives. This means fewer people have accumulated, at fewer stops. Which means bus F makes fewer stops, and picks up fewer people. Which means that it starts to run faster than average. Which means even fewer people accumulate. Which means it runs even faster. And so on. In short: a fast bus gets faster and faster.

Putting this all together: if a random fluctuation creates a slow bus, then it will get slower and slower, and the bus behind it will get faster and faster, until the two buses meet up. At this point, the buses stick together, and are essentially incapable of separating. Thus, in general, buses will bunch up. This will usually happen in pairs, though on occasion triples and even quads may occur. This argument predicts that the arrival of buses will be random, with pairs of buses arriving more often than not, being separated by on average double the mean bus separation. And this is precisely what I discovered, the hard way, shivering at the corner of 55th St. and Hyde Park Boulevard. (N.B. I spent a year in Berlin. There, the buses are fermions, and always arrive exactly on time. It’s the stereotype, but it turns out to be true.)

After writing this post, I found that wikipedia has already figured it all out. Regardless, it’s nice to know that my suffering was due to statistics, and not because the Universe is out to get me.

The New York Times has an article about stand-up paddleboarding. I guess that means it’s now officially mainstream? It’s weird to have seen a sport arise completely from scratch, over a period of just a few years. Five years ago paddleboarders were basically freaks. Now every break is teeming with them, and there’s a whole industry specifically for stand-up. Even the gray lady herself is in on the game.

For the uninitiated: imagine an oversized longboard (over 10 feet long), with extra width and stability. You stand up on the board, and use a long-handled paddle to propel yourself through the water. Sort of like a canoe, only standing up. It’s good exercise. It’s also really fun. You can really cruise. And you can enjoy it even if it’s totally flat (although the real fun is to take the big boards into the surf).

The rapid rise in popularity is almost certainly due to the fact that the learning curve for stand-up paddleboarding is shallow. The average person can be up and going in about 10 minutes. And it’s almost like they’re surfing. After all, they’re standing on a surfboard, moving through the water. However, this is a pale imitation. Until you actually get the board out in the surf, and feel the acceleration of a drop, and the exhilaration as you glide down a wall of water, you have no idea what it’s all about. Good paddleboarders can go out in big surf. But that part of the learning curve is Jaws steep.

I was in Maui this past January, and my favorite break (Kanaha) was overrun by paddleboards. At least half the people out there were doing stand-up. For a “conventional” surfer it’s a bummer, since the paddleboards catch waves early, and there’s no room to drop in, even if you wanted to. But if you can’t beat ‘em….

About a year ago I had my initiation, doing a down-winder from past Ho’okipa to Spreckelsville. It took a while to get the balance down, but eventually you figure out where to stand, and how to use the paddle for stability. And then you’re cruising. You can paddle into reasonable breaking surf, since the board has a tendency to keep going and remain unperturbed. You cut right through waves that would have tossed a longboard. However, I can tell you from painful experience that it really sucks to get Maytagged while doing stand-up. I have a nice fin-shaped scar to prove it.

Stardust just can’t seem to stay out of the news. NASA’s comet chaser, named Stardust, returned a sample of celestial material to Earth in 2006 that has produced numerous fascinating findings. Those include the study we covered last week, in which scientists showed that materials that formed near our sun made it out to the far reaches of the solar system to collect on comets. This week, it’s not NASA astronomers making the headlines, but rather citizen scientists who appear to have found the first evidence of interstellar dust in the Stardust samples.

Stardust’s main mission was to gather material from the comet called Wild 2. But on the way, the team deployed a secondary panel of aerogel to try to catch interstellar dust. The researchers hoped to catch 100 or so interstellar grains from the weak but continuous flux in open space. The elements in these grains were forged in stars, but coalesced into grains in the empty space between stars [Nature News]. However, there’s much less dust in interstellar space than there is in a comet tail, and it moves faster, making it harder to catch. When scientists started looking at the sample dropped down to the Utah desert in 2006, it wasn’t clear if Stardust had nabbed any interstellar dust at all.

So NASA called in reinforcements, starting the Stardust@Home project in 2006. Over the last four years, “dusters” scanned millions of tracks in the sample looking for these grains. The first winner was Canadian Bruce Hudson, who named his grain “Orion.” Hudson suffered a stroke in 2003, and he turned to the Stardust@Home project in 2006 as a productive way of passing the time. For a year or so, he spent as much as 15 hours a day scanning thousands of pictures, five seconds per slide [Nature News]. Two probable dust particles have been found thus far.

Orion, say the Stardust researchers who checked it out, is glassy and rich in aluminum. Andrew Westphal of the University of California, Berkeley who announced the find, said the project leaders would use the discovery to try to fine-tune the search for more. “The interstellar dust is fundamentally the stuff we’re made of” [Nature News], he says.

Related Content:
80beats: Spacecraft-Collected Comet Dust Reveals Surprises from the Solar System’s Boondocks
80beats: Dust Collected From Comet Contains a Key Ingredient For Life
80beats: Meteorite, Maybe Older Than The Sun, Shows Chemistry of Ancient Solar System
DISCOVER: NASA Takes a Wild Comet Ride
DISCOVER: 14 Ways to Use Your Computer’s Spare Time
Bad Astronomy: Stardust@home Starts NOW

Image: NASA

It’s not easy to find a material that’s both stretchy and hard. Neither is it to find a glue that will stick underwater. But this week researchers said that the solutions aquatic animals have created for those problems could inspire new materials in the lab.

Mussles have solved the hard-but-still-stretchy problem with their “beards.” The beards are actually made of 50 to 100 so-called byssal threads, and they are what anchor a mussel to a rock or other stable structure. According to study author Matthew Harrington, “they’re not only facing these huge wave forces which are trying to, you know, rip them off the rocks, but also they’re being blasted with debris like small pieces of sand and other debris in the water that are basically acting like sandblasting” [NPR]. If the mussels are blasted off the rocks, they’d likely be eaten or killed.

To avoid that fate, the mussels developed those byssal threads with dual layers. About 95 percent of the inner layer of these fibers is composed of a smooth, stretchy material, while the outer layer is made up of collagen laced with iron. No other known material on Earth exhibits this kind of soft and stretchy inside, and hard, flexible and protective outside [Discovery News]. Looking at the structure and chemical composition through a microscope, Harrington says that threads look like sandpaper, with the harder “granules” coating a softer surface. While the researchers are far off from developing a synthetic version of the material, the byssal threads could eventually inspire new types of body armor for soldiers and police. Safer, longer-lasting medical implants could also result, since new materials developed from the mussels’ fibers could help to anchor such devices in the human body [Discovery News]. The research team documents its work in Science.

Also this week, scientists from Utah looked at a species of caddisfly called Brachycentrus echo; its larva depends on its ability to weave sticky silk underwater to create structures for protection and storing food. Studying the silk in depth, bioengineer Russell Stewart found that it was made of fibroin protein and phosphates, which people already use as an adhesive in products like dentures. Stewart hopes that stealing the caddisfly’s secrets could lead to products like a bandage that doctors could use on wet surfaces during surgery. He says, “Gluing things together underwater is not easy. Have you ever tried to put a Band-Aid on in the shower? This insect has been doing this for 150 million to 200 million years”[Salt Lake Tribune].

Related Content:
80beats: Dew-Spangled Spider Webs Could Inspire High-Tech Water Collection
80beats: Metal Injections Make a Spider Silk That Superman Would Envy
80beats: Spider Ancestor Made Silk—Possibly Using it for Sex—But Couldn’t Spin a Web
DISCOVER: Unraveling Spider Silk
DISCOVER: 8 Lessons Medicine Is Learning from Mother Nature (photo gallery)

Image: Matthew Harrington

China will soon have an outpost in space. The government has announced that its first unmanned space module, the Tiangong-1 (or “The Heavenly Palace”), will be launched next year.

The module will serve as a docking station for other aircraft before being transformed into a permanent taikonaut residence and space lab within two years of the launch [Nature blog]. It was originally due to launch this year, but now will see flight only late in 2011, due to technical reasons, Chinese officials said. The Tiangong-1 is expected to be 30 feet long and capable of housing three taikonauts; future missions will add other modules to construct a larger Chinese space station.

The Tiangong-1 design, unveiled in a nationally televised broadcast on last year’s Chinese New Year, includes a large module with docking system making up the forward half of the vehicle and a service module section with solar arrays and propellant tanks making up the aft [SPACE.com]. The Tiangong-1 is expected to dock the unmanned Shenzhou 8 spacecraft first to test the robotic docking systems before hosting the manned Shenzhou 9 and 10 spacecraft, which are both expected to carry two or three taikonauts into space.

China’s other space plans include launching a second lunar probe in October in preparation for an unmanned moon landing by the end of 2012. A possible manned lunar mission has also been proposed — with a target date of 2017 — putting China in the forefront of a tightening Asian space race involving India, Japan and South Korea [Associated Press].

China has insisted that its space programs are for peaceful purposes only. However, the head of the Chinese Air Force, Gen. Xu Qiliang, appeared to have gone off-message when he said in November that international “military competition has shifted towards space” [The New York Times].

Related Content:
DISCOVER: #13: China Takes Its First Space Walk
DISCOVER: China’s Long March to Space
DISCOVER: One Giant Step for a Small, Crowded Country
80beats: A Smashing Finale: China’s Lunar Probe Crashes Into the Moon
80beats: After a Successful Spacewalk, Chinese Astronauts Return Home

Image: CNSA

I am pleased to write that the creationist and generally anti-reality Don McLeroy has lost his bid for re-election to the Texas State Board of Education!

Yay!

The man who ousted him is Thomas Ratliff, who is — gasp! — an actual educator who has vowed to try to remove the politicization of the board and also to actually – gasp again! — listen to educators when it comes to, y’know, educational topics. You may remember McLeroy is the goofball who infamously said, "Someone has to stand up to the experts!"

However, mitigating the good news somewhat are some things to consider:

1) McLeroy is still on the BoE for the next seven months before his term runs out. He can do a vast amount of damage to Texas schoolchildren’s education in that time.

2) Ratliff only won by a very narrow margin, meaning a whole lot of Texas citizens either didn’t know about McLeroy’s maniacal attempts at derailing the Lone Star State’s educational system, didn’t care, or actually supported him.

3) McLeroy and his crew of revisionist creationists have already done so much damage that it cannot be easily repaired. There is a cycle to the way standards and such are reviewed and updated in Texas, so it could be years before things are straightened out, if at all.

Still, this is good news, and so I won’t use the "Texas: Doomed" graphic. Instead, I’ll remind you not to rest:

Tip o’ the ten gallon hat to Robert Estes and the many other BABloggees who emailed me about this.

Artist's Rendition of the Kepler spacecraft. Credit: JPL/NASA

First, we are into the time period for the GLOBE at Night project.  If you have clear skies please participate.  You need no special equipment and if you don’t know a star from a stone, don’t worry, just click on the GAN banner in the sidebar to the right and they will tell you everything you need to know.  I think I will get the chance tonight!  Last year I noted a drop in the number of stars I could see from the year before.   Do it, it’s simple.

Will the shuttle missions be extended? They could be, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson (TX) is either going to, or already has introduced legislation to do just that.  If you are tempted to comment that “ah that money could be used for <insert social program here>”  don’t,  social programs are ok, but   NASA’s budget is only one half of one percent of the 3 -TRILLION dollar budget.  IMHO we get a lot more goodness for our money with NASA than we do in some other areas – just saying.

The Kepler spacecraft started its search for earthlike planets, one year ago this week.  Wow, hardly seems possible.  The first of the discoveries have been announced, you can see a table of them here.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has set a record.  MRO is going to complete its fourth year at Mars.  During that time the MRO has passed 100 terabits of data!  NASA is saying that is more than all other deep-space missions combined – that’s every mission that has flow past the orbit of the moon.  Here’s the story.

And finally:

The New Horizons probe is now a little better than half way to Pluto.  New Horizons is speeding along at 16.35 km/sec and still won’t arrive until July 2015.  Wondering about that speed?  16.35 km/sec is 36,574 miles per hour!  So I could fly from New York to the UK in less than six minutes and New York to LA in four!

By the way if you know of anybody born on January 19, 1996 you might be interested in the New Horizons Kids Club.  It also occurs to me they really ought to change that name.  Anybody born on that date will soon not be kids anymore.

Over at the Point of Inquiry forums, I’ve just opened a thread to announce my next guest: Andrew Revkin, the prominent author of the New York Times’ Dot Earth blog, science and environment reporter for the Times from 1995 until last year, and now a Senior Fellow for Environmental Understanding at Pace University’s Academy for Applied Environmental Studies.

Revkin has covered a multitude of science-related topics during his career, ranging from climate change and energy to politics and science in the Bush administration. But he has also traveled the globe covering numerous natural disasters, including earthquakes, hurricanes, and beyond. At a time when we’ve seen two devastating earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, one thing I want to discuss with Revkin is why human societies, and even wealthy countries, seem to have such a hard time preparing for and protecting against these types of extreme risks. We’ll also inquire about which kinds of natural disasters most threaten the U.S., and why we’re not doing much of anything to increase our resiliency to them.

You might think of the intended show as a kind of real life version of the movie 2012.

But the conversation will be much more wide ranging, and I’d be very interested to hear what else you folks think I ought to be asking of Andy Revkin….so please, head over to the forums and pose any questions in the next two days, so that I can read them before the interview is recorded on Sunday. And thanks!

Zach Weiner is a shrewd, shrewd man. He does stuff like this just because he knows I’ll link to it.

Click through to see why (NSFW-ish). But he should know better. I got my revenge years ago by failing all those jocks in my astronomy class^*.

Also: Zach is 28 today, that whippersnapper. Get off my lawn^**!

Here we are drinking coffee and tweeting and otherwise going about our lives, generally not giving much thought to the protection that the Earth’s magnetic field affords us from the solar wind. But that magnetic field is crucial for our existence. Now, new findings in Science say that this protective shield originated even 200 million years earlier than scientists had previously thought, perhaps protecting the planet’s water from evaporating away and aiding the rise of life on the early Earth.

To know about the planet’s magnetic field three and a half billion years ago, you need iron, which records not only the direction but also the strength of the magnetic field when it forms. In South Africa, study leader John Tarduno and his team found quartz with iron tucked inside that had remained unchanged in all those years. Using a specially designed magnetometer and improved lab techniques, the team detected a magnetic signal in 3.45-billion-year-old rocks that was between 50 and 70 percent the strength of the present-day field, Tarduno says [Science News]. Three years ago he made a similar find in rocks 3.2 billion years old; thus, this find pushes back the Earth’s magnetic field at least another 200 million years.

Still, you or I wouldn’t find the Earth of that era to be terribly hospitable. In the sun’s more turbulent youth, it likely spun faster and unleashed a greater barrage of radiation. Not only was the Earth’s magnetic field strength quite a bit less than it is today, but also the magnetopause—the furthest extent of the field, where it meets the incoming solar wind—stretched only half as far out from the planet as it does today. With the magnetopause so close to Earth, the planet would not have been totally shielded from the solar wind and may have lost much of its water early on, the researchers say [Scientific American].

Pushing the existence of Earth’s magnetic field back further into the planet’s history helps fill in the picture of how life arose, the researchers argue, and it also has implications for those hunting extraterrestrial life. Life as we know it, they say, requires not only liquid water, but also the right magnetic field strength for that water to last over the long term, says Tarduno. Mars may be dry today because it lost its magnetic field early on, he adds [Science News].

There’s a lot left to learn about the protective layer that makes our lives possible. For a separate study this week in Geophysical Research Letters, another team ran simulations of the activity in the Earth’s core and concluded that they could predict a flip in the field’s polarity—which has happened now and then during the planet’s history—with no more warning than a few decades. Some models suggest that a flip would be completed in a year or two, but if, as others predict, it lasted decades or longer we would be left exposed to space radiation. This could short-circuit satellites, pose a risk to aircraft passengers and play havoc with electrical equipment on the ground [New Scientist].

Related Content:
80beats: Dust Collected From Comet Contains a Key Ingredient of Life
80beats: Chemicals That Evolve in the Lab May Simulate Earth’s Earliest Life
80beats: Devastating Meteorite Strikes May Have Created Earth’s First Organic Molecules
80beats: Cutting-Edge Science Reveals: World Won’t End on December 21, 2012
DISCOVER: The Rigorous Study of the Ancient Mariners, looking into the magnetic field’s history through the logs of sailors

Image: John Tarduno and Rory Cottrell

The next time you come across a loudmouth yammering away into a cell phone at top volume, be comforted by the fact that researchers are working on a mobile phone that could put an end to “volume-control challenged” people. The lip-reading phone would allow people to silently mouth their words–but the electrode-heavy prototype seems unlikely to catch on anytime soon.

The BBC reports:

The device, on show at the Cebit electronics fair in Germany, relies on a technique called electromyography which detects the electrical signals from muscles. It is commonly used to diagnose certain diseases, including those that involve nerve damage.

Professor Tanja Shultz of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany explained that the device requires attaching nine sensors to the face. As the user mouths words, the electrodes capture the electric impulses created by the muscle movement. These impulses are transferred to a device that records and amplifies them, before passing them onto a laptop via wireless. Software in the laptop translates the signals, converting them into words which can then be read out by a synthesizer in handset and sent over the wire to the person on the other end of the phone call.

The whole process is pretty cumbersome and the creators agree that this phone might not be meant for the mass market. But Shultz says all this tech could one day be packed into a mobile phone. The device could also be a a good option for people who have lost the ability to speak, putting in their hands a device that can allow them communicate clearly. The phone also has a translation option, wherein a person can speak in their mother tongue and have the text communicated in English or any other language.

The BBC’s report points out that this is not the first time that this technology for silent communication has been used.

The US space agency Nasa has investigated the technique for communicating in noisy environments such as the Space Station. It has also used the technique to explore advanced flight control systems that do away with joysticks and other interfaces.

Related Content:
Discoblog: iPhone Translator App Speaks for You, Using Your Mouth
Discoblog: Speaking French? Your Computer Can Tell
Discoblog: Can an iPhone App Decipher Your Baby’s Cries?
DISCOVER: The Physiology of . . . Facial Expressions

Image: BBC/ Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

It has been brought to my attention that a number of readers and science bloggers seem to be wondering if Monday’s post means I am retiring from the blogosphere. I’m not, but am glad to see that reflection on the devolving state of science blogs–and their tendency to be more sport and spectacle than science–seems to have resonated broadly with over 400 comments and counting. I will have more to say on science blogging shortly, but first a few words on why I’m posting less frequently…

Foremost, blogging should not be a daily requirement. For me, it began in 2006 when I lost a bet with students–as Cornelia Dean explained in her terrific book. I found I enjoyed the interactive exchange and the way it helped me to make sense of all of the endless ideas spinning around in my head everyday. But a good blog post is the result of inspiration, and over time it started to feel like homework. I’d work a full day at Duke, or edit my book for hours, and scramble for something to get on the blog as an afterthought. Blogging stopped feeling cathartic and became more burdensome while juggling work, travel, talks, some semblance of a social life, and wedding planning. So I’ve decided it’s time to change the way I contribute. From now on, I’ll write only when inspired. This may happen a few times a week or a few times a day. We’ll see how it goes.

And more importantly, I’m busier than usual this month because David and I are headed to Austin, Texas! I’ll be very sad to leave the incredible Pimm Group at Duke, but I’m also so excited about what’s coming next! While I’ll always stay connected to the marine realm, there’s another crucial area I’ve been growing more and more interested to pursue and there’s no better place to do so than Texas. So here’s the big–related–announcement:

The Intersection is about to become an energy blog. I’ll have more to say on that soon so keep watching… you ain’t seen nothing yet!