Monogamy isn’t popular in the amphibian world. From frogs to salamanders, life in cold blood is all about meeting new ladies and hitting the road once the kids are born. So the male of a species of Peruvian poison frog (Ranitomeya imitator) stands out by proving that he is quite the keeper. He’s not only the first monogamous frog ever found, he also stays home and makes sure the tadpoles are fed.

Scientists studying these frogs say this unusual behavior–monogamy and co-operative parenting–could be directly attributed to the limited resources available to the frogs. They note that a broad study of 404 frog species show that species that deal with reduced food availability and greater difficulty in tadpole-rearing are more likely to have frog couples that work together to raise the young.

These findings could possibly shed some light on the way our hunter-gatherer ancestors approached monogamy. Details of the findings are to be published in the April issue of The American Naturalist.

Scientists studying the mating and parenting habits of R. imitator frogs found that the female frog lays her eggs on leaves for the male to fertilize. When the fertilized eggs hatch into tadpoles, males of other frog species like Ranitomeya vairabilis normally hop away, thinking their job is done. But the R.imitator male sticks around to carry the tadpoles on his back to individual pools of water where they can grow in safety, under dad’s watchful eye. The female frog stays behind, but is summoned to service by the male once a week for a few months; she hops to the tadpole-rearing pools to lay unfertilized eggs for the hungry tadpoles to eat.

Evolutionary ecologist Kyle Summers was studying the frogs, and wondered if the size of the pool had anything to with the way the frogs approached joint parenting. R. variabilis favors larger pools, whereas R. imitator frogs place their young in less than 2 tablespoons of nutrient-poor water, perhaps because R. variabilis as a species snagged the prime pools first [ScienceNow Daily News]. Using available data on 404 frog species, scientists observed that frog species that raised their tadpoles in small pools were likely to be more doting parents; the findings suggest that if the pools were bigger, the frogs wouldn’t have to remain faithful, as they wouldn’t be tied by their need to work together to raise their brood [BBC].

To make sure that the frogs were truly being faithful to their partners, the researchers took DNA from the toes of parent frogs and the tails of their tadpoles and found that 11 out of the 12 seemingly monogamous couples they monitored over the mating season had been sexually faithful making R. variabilis the first known monogamous amphibian [ScienceNow Daily News].

The scientists say that studying the frogs could give us insight into the role that resources play in monogamy, and suggest that when human hunter-gatherers had to scramble for food and warmth, they were less likely to stray.

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DISCOVER: Sex and the Female Agenda
DISCOVER: Sex and Control
DISCOVER: Mating Like an Animal: The Real Story

Image: Flickr/Phrakt

Chinese citizens hoping to share dirty jokes or flirtation via text message will now be subject to Beijing’s all-seeing eyes. After policing the Internet and censoring online dissent, the Chinese government has stepped up its monitoring of cell phone messages in the country. The government is encouraging people to be mindful of the texts they send, and is asking them to refrain from writing or forwarding any smutty messages or pornographic content.

State controlled-media has reported on the new effort to clean up cell phone messages. Mobile service providers in Guangzhou, Beijing, and Shanghai are reportedly trying a text-filtering system, looking for porn or sexual content in short messages–which the Chinese refer to as “yellow texts.”

The Economist reports on the new message-filtering initiative:

Those caught sending yellow ones risked having their phone’s text function blocked. Restoring it would require a visit to the police and a written pledge not to text smut again.

The move is provoking howls of protest among texters and online users. The Economist writes that one popular blogger said he would continue sending text messages until he found out what words caught the attention of the administration’s censors. A newspaper article complained that the filtering was unconstitutional, prompting one official in Guangzhou to clarify only those who send an estimated 300 smutty messages an hour were likely to be penalized (huh, huh).

Beijing has also decided to fight back against the profusion of “yellow texts” by launching a “red text” campaign–encouraging texters to send politically correct “red texts,” which normally consist of Mao’s sayings or party propaganda.

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Image: Flickr/Madhatrk

Water, water everywhere. Another pass of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, made by the Cassini spacecraft last November, shows at least 30 geysers blasting water from the moon’s south pole. That’s 20 more than were previously known at that location. In addition, the most detailed infrared map of one of the south pole’s fissures, where jets emanate, indicates that the surface temperature there might be as high as 200 kelvins (-73º Celsius), or about 20 kelvins warmer than previously estimated [Discovery News]. Cassini drew to within about 1,000 miles of Enceladus to measure this geological feature, which is a fracture–one of the moon’s so-called “tiger stripes”–about a quarter-mile deep officially called Baghdad Sulcus.

While 200 kelvins is still a frigid temperature for we humans, research team member John Spencer said it could make a big difference on Enceladus. “The huge amount of heat pouring out of the tiger stripe fractures may be enough to melt the ice underground,” Spencer said. ”Results like this make Enceladus one of the most exciting places we’ve found in the solar system” [Wired.com].

For more info (and some spectacular photos), check out DISCOVER blogger Phil Plait’s post at Bad Astronomy. And see 80beats’ previous coverage of Enceladus below:

Bad Astronomy: Enceladus Is Erupting!
80beats: Cassini Probe Finds “Ingredients For Life” on Saturn’s Moon Enceladus
80beats: Antifreeze Might Allow For Oceans—And Life—On Enceladus
80beats: Does Enceladus, Saturn’s Geyser-Spouting Moon, Have Liquid Oceans?
80beats: New Evidence of Hospitable Conditions for Life on Saturn’s Moons
80beats: Geysers From Saturn’s Moon May Indicate Liquid Lakes, and a Chance for Life
80beats: Cassini Spacecraft Snaps Pictures of Saturn’s Geyser-Spouting Moon

Image: NASA/JPL/GSFC/SWRI/SSI

I have no idea why I converted the number of this week’s Carnival of Space into binary, except that I did a ternary conversion on Twitter recently and it was fun.

Yes, I’m a dork. But you laughed, so you are too.

In summer 2008, DISCOVER set sail for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, that Texas-sized soup of tiny plastic bits that might now be an intractable mess in the middle of the ocean. With appearances in newspapers, magazines, and even “Good Morning America,” the Pacific patch became the newest target for environmental hand-wringing, and raised questions over whether it would even be possible to clean up. However, the ocean currents that cause the Pacific gyre don’t just happen in the North Pacific. Scientists at the Sea Education Association just finished a two-decade-long study of the North Atlantic and found similarly sad results.

The team dragged nets half-in and half-out of the water to take a trash census. The researchers carried out 6,100 tows in areas of the Caribbean and the North Atlantic — off the coast of the U.S. More than half of these expeditions revealed floating pieces of plastic on the water surface [BBC News]. Like the Pacific gyre, the Atlantic one—located mostly between 22 and 38 degrees north latitude—contains a dizzying number of small plastic pieces that used to be bags, bottles, and other consumer products. Lead researcher Kara Lavendar Law says it’s difficult to compare the two, but researchers in both places collected more than 1,000 pieces during a single tow of a net [The New York Times].

This similarity is no surprise, according to ocean researchers Marcus Eriksen and Anna Cummins. Both gyres are areas of little to no ocean currents, surrounded by strong ocean currents that prevent trash from escaping once it arrives. Worldwide, there exist five major oceanic gyres and it is hypothesized by Eriksen and Cummins that all of these gyres will collect marine debris, much in the same way that the North Pacific does [Huffington Post]. You can see the locations in the above image. The North Atlantic gyre that SEA studied also contains the Sargasso Sea, so the plastic is mixed up with the seaweed that grows there.

Most depressingly, reports from the Pacific gyre indicate that fish are beginning to ingest the plastic as pieces get smaller and smaller. And Captain Charles Moore, who discovered the Pacific patch in the 1990s, says cleaning up so many pieces spread out so far would be an impossibly difficult and expensive task. Besides, if people don’t stop throwing away plastic, it wouldn’t do much good.

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DISCOVER: The Dirty Truth About Plastic
DISCOVER: Think You Can Live Without Plastic?

Image: NOAA

An Italian court in Milan has just convicted three Google executives of criminal charges. The court found them liable for an online video that they did not appear it, film, or have any role in posting, and which the company promptly removed when complaints about it were raised. The Italian court, however, still held them responsible for the video and sentenced them to suspended six-month sentences. Experts say the case sets a dangerous precedent, and could dramatically restrict online content in Italy.

Thousands of people post videos each hour on YouTube and Google Video, and various court cases have questioned whether Google, which owns YouTube, is liable for every video that infringes on someone’s copyright or is deemed offensive to its viewers. Google has argued that it’s only liable if offensive material stays up on its site despite complaints against it, and says that if the company takes complained-about videos down, it has no legal liability–like the rules it faces under U.S. law. Italy apparently disagrees.

The case pertains to a video that was posted to Google Video in 2006 showing four youths in Turin bulling a 17-year old who suffers either from Down Syndrome or autism (reports vary). The video received 12,000 views before the Italian police brought it to Google’s notice. The company immediately took it down, and Google then helped the cops find the person who uploaded it, resulting in the identification (and school expulsion) of the four bullies. But the Google executives, who include David Drummond, Google’s senior vice president and chief legal officer, and George Reyes, Google’s former chief financial officer, were charged and convicted for criminal defamation and a failure to protect the privacy of the bullied teen.

Google plans to appeal the conviction but worries that it sets a bad legal precedent–none of the accused directly handled the video, and the video had been removed after Google received complaints; however, the prosecutors claim that Google should never have allowed the video to be posted in the first place [Mashable].

In a post on its corporate blog, Google wrote that this conviction attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built, and argued that the person who uploaded the offensive video was responsible for its content. The company declared: If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear [The Official Google Blog].

Internet analysts say the Italy conviction implies that Google must start pre-screening all videos uploaded to YouTube before allowing them to go live–or at least it must start doing so in Italy if the convinction stands. That site sees more than 20 hours of video being posted every minute worldwide, which would make the screening process if not entirely impossible, then extremely cumbersome and expensive.

This isn’t the first time Italy has cracked down severely on a tech company. Its tax authorities have demanded that eBay should hand over information about its customers relating to goods sold on the site between 2004 and 2007; Yahoo was fined €12,000 last year after Milan’s public prosecutor demanded information about private emails sent by suspected criminals; and the Italian interior ministry has required Facebook to hand over personal information about users who created groups said to “glorify” Mafia bosses, and again last October over a group said to promote the violent death of Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister [Guardian].

Related Content:
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DISCOVER: Google Taught Me How to Cut My Own Hair
DISCOVER: How Google Is Making Us Smarter

Image: Flickr/Manfrys

Here is a question for the ages: who would win in a Treknobabble fight, Wil Wheaton or Sheldon Cooper?

My first thought was that Sheldon might trip up because he is so well-versed in physics that it might actually impede his ability to analyze Trek science. However, we know that his analysis of comic books is fearsome in its depth and grasp of minutiae.

Wil, on the other hand, ate my lunch when I attacked him over Trek physics. In fact, I still haven’t forgiven him. So I should add the obligatory CURSE YOU WIL WHEATON!

Which makes me think that perhaps I should side with Sheldon, if only because we have both been bested by Wil. But sadly, in this case, my skepticism has me at an impasse. I simply don’t know.

So, BABloggees, what say you? Would the Enterprising young Wheaton outmaneuver the Big Banger Sheldon? Perhaps we’ll find out soon enough.

Tip o’ the nacelle to Francis Fletcher.

Augmented reality, the blending of real-life environments with computer generated imagery, has provided a bunch of creative applications, including a virtual tattoo. Now, the same technology can be used to identify virtual strangers.

A new app called Recognizr, developed by the Swedish mobile software firm The Astonishing Tribe, lets you find out more about a person–including what social networks they are on and in some cases their phone numbers–simply by pointing your camera-phone at them (see video below). The app works by mashing up the latest in facial recognition software, cloud computing, and augmented reality.

But before privacy advocates storm the offices of The Astonishing Tribe, we should note that the app only works on people who have opted in to the system. People have to sign onto this service, submit a profile, and upload a picture to be picked up by Recognizr. So you needn’t scramble to delete all your pictures on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, since Recognizr works only by mining information off its own database.

Describing how the app works, PopSci writes:

Face recognition software creates a 3-D model of the person’s mug and sends it across a server where it’s matched with an identity in the database. A cloud server conducts the facial recognition … and sends back the subject’s name as well as links to any social networking sites the person has provided access to.

The app will work with iPhones and phones running on the Android operating system.

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Science, Not Fiction: Seeing The Future, Literally
Discoblog: One Small Step Closer to Superhuman Cyborg Vision
Discoblog: Will the Laptops of the Future Be a Pair of Eye Glasses?

Image: Recognizer

Dinosaurs and explosives—science stories don’t get much cooler than this.

Researchers in Utah have excavated two complete and two partial skulls of a dino called Abydosaurus mcintoshi, a 105-million-year-old sauropod, which the scientists think might have descended from the brachiosaurus family. “It is amazing. You can hold the skull in your hands and look into the eyes of something that lived a very long time ago” [USA Today], says paleontologist Brooks Britt, co-author of the study that appeared in the journal Naturwissenschaften.

Click through the photo gallery for more pictures from the dig, and for the whole story.

Image: Brigham Young University

A new website by NASA features videos, images, and articles about climate change. A Warming World has been designed to help all of us understand what warming means and how it impacts our world. Here’s a sample:

Each year, scientists at NASA’S Goddard Institute for Space Studies analyze global temperature data. The past year, 2009, tied as the second warmest year since global instrumental temperature records began 130 years ago. Worldwide, the mean temperature was 0.57°C (1.03°F) warmer than the 1951-1980 base period. And January 2000 to December 2009 came out as the warmest decade on record.

Everyone is linking to this Guardian article collecting advice from fiction writers. My favorite list comes from Richard Ford — not that I necessarily agree with every rule:

1 Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer’s a good idea.

2 Don’t have children.

3 Don’t read your reviews.

4 Don’t write reviews. (Your judgment’s always tainted.)

5 Don’t have arguments with your wife in the morning, or late at night.

6 Don’t drink and write at the same time.

7 Don’t write letters to the editor. (No one cares.)

8 Don’t wish ill on your colleagues.

9 Try to think of others’ good luck as encouragement to yourself.

10 Don’t take any shit if you can ­possibly help it.

There’s an entire blog devoted to listing the daily routines of writers. It’s a funny business — the people who do it can’t imagine doing anything else, but they still rely on all sorts of gimmicks to keep their work flowing smoothly. Maybe that’s part of the difference between styling one’s self as a writer and actually writing.

Late last year, a Belgian man in his mid-forties created a media stir when doctors announced that he had been misdiagnosed as being in a coma for 23 years. Rom Houben, the victim of a horrific car-crash in the eighties, was incorrectly diagnosed as being in a “persistently vegetative state.” But by using new diagnostic tests and brain scans that were unavailable in the eighties, scientists revealed that Houben was actually conscious.

Reports then breathlessly announced that Houben could also finally “communicate,” expressing his thoughts by having his hand supported by his therapist who reportedly helped him tap out his messages on a touch-screen computer. “I shall never forget the day when they discovered what was truly wrong with me,” Houben apparently tapped. “It was my second birth. I want to read, talk with my friends via the computer and enjoy my life now that people know I am not dead” [The Guardian].

But now one of Houben’s doctors, neuroscientist Steven Laureys, has declared the Belgian hasn’t been communicating after all.

When the story first broke, DISCOVER and other discerning publications noted that this type of communication, called “facilitated communication,” is very controversial, and has repeatedly failed under conditions of rigorous testing. [Psychology Today]. Skeptics argued that the facilitated communication therapist brought in by Houben’s family was really guiding the man’s hand and choosing which letters to press herself. Skeptics who read Houben’s messages were also amazed that someone who was in a minimally-conscious state for more than two decades was so lucid, articulate, and forgiving of the medical staff. Laureys wanted to study the case further to determine if Houben could indeed communicate.

He set forth by studying a group of minimally conscious patients, including Houben, and three facilitators. The patients were presented with words and objects while their facilitators were out of the room. When the therapists returned, the patients were asked to type out what they saw. Two out of the three facilitators, included Houbens’, failed–leading Laureys to conclude that the Belgian man wasn’t communicating in the first place.

Presenting his findings at a neuropsychiatry meeting in London, Laureys said: “To me, it’s enough to say this method (facilitated communication) doesn’t work” [MSNBC]. He added that the new findings don’t change the fact that Houben was misdiagnosed, but noted that Houben’s previous words could not rightly be attributed to him. Said Laureys: “The story of Rom is about the diagnosis of consciousness, not communication” [BBC].

The findings have vindicated skeptics. “It’s like using an Ouija board,” Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, said Friday. “It was too good to be true and we shouldn’t have believed it” [MSNBC]. Other experts have suggested that facilitated communication could be used on some paralyzed patients but not on patients like Houben, who have suffered severe brain injuries.

However, there may be other methods that Houben could use to communicate; several weeks ago, a fascinating study showed a way to communicate with some vegetative patients by reading their brain scans as they focused their thoughts on different activities or places.

Related Post:
80beats: MRI Brain Scans Show Signs of Consciousness in Some “Vegetative” Patients
80beats: A Silent Hell: For 23 Years, Man Was Misdiagnosed as a Coma Patient
80beats: Vegetative Coma Patients Can Still Learn–a Tiny Bit

Image: iStockphoto

“BACKGROUND: In the United States, religious commitment, as measured by service attendance, has an inverse relationship with alcohol consumption, heavy use, and problem use. This association, however, has not been found consistently in Jewish Americans. The present study examined the relationship between religious variables and binge drinking in Jewish and non-Jewish white college students. In addition, the association among genetic, cultural, and religious variables and binge drinking was examined in the Jewish sample alone. …RESULTS: As hypothesized, more frequent religious service attendance related to lower rates of binge drinking in non-Jews but was not related to binge drinking in Jews. Within the Jewish sample, individuals who were religiously affiliated had approximately one third the risk of binge drinking as those who were secularly affiliated, but identification with Jewish culture was not related to binge drinking. In the total sample, individuals who possessed a variant alcohol dehydrogenase allele ADH2*2 were approximately half as likely to binge drink as those who did not possess this allele. CONCLUSIONS: These results are consistent with previous studies that find an inverse relationship between religious service attendance and heavy alcohol use in Christian but not Jewish college students. Findings within the Jewish sample support theories that suggest religious, not just cultural, Jewish affiliation relates to lower levels of alcohol behavior. More research is needed to identify additional factors, including other religious, cultural, genetic, and biological influences, that protect Jewish Americans from heavy drinking.”

Photo: flickr/infowidget

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Many animals have evolved camouflage, but nobody quite pulls it off as beautifully as the octopus and its tentacled cousin the cuttlefish. These invertebrates, which belong to a group called cephalopods, are covered in microscopic pigment organs that they can squeeze and stretch to take on the patterns around them. They can curl their tentacles to assume different shapes, and they can even change the texture of their skin to bumpy or smooth, as necessity demands.

Nobody knows the tricks of cephalopods better than Roger Hanlon, a biologist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. As I wrote in this New York Times profile of Hanlon, he has documented their powers of disguise both in the wild and in his lab. You can see some of the cephalopods in action in this Times video I narrated, as well as in these videos at Hanlon’s web site. Hanlon has carefully documented how cephalopods can melt away into their backgrounds; he’s also shown that male cuttlefishes can disguise themselves as females to sneak past bigger males to get a chance to mate. There’s still a lot Hanlon has yet to study about cephalopod camouflage, though; many of the most spectacular displays of shape-shifting are one-offs that Hanlon or a wildlife videographer happened to catch on a few seconds of video.

The video shown here is the latest addition to the repertoire of cepahlopod camouflage. As Hanlon and his colleagues write in a paper to be published in Biological Bulletin, the Atlantic longarm octopus (Macrotritopus defilippi) does an uncanny impression of a flounder.

Hanlon first saw this trick before he actually knew what it was. In the early 1980s, he captured a young Atlantic longarm octopus and reared it in a tank at Texas A&M University. It was the first time anyone had ever paid close attention to the biology of this obscure creature, which lives on sandy expanses of the Caribbean sea floor. While observing the octopus, Hanlon noticed that sometimes it would flatten out its tentacles and swim close to the bottom of the tank. At the time he didn’t know what to make of it.

In 2000 wildlife photographers took pictures of Atlantic shortarm octopuses in their natural habitat and suggested that they took on the strange shape to mimic flounders. Four years later, Hanlon took another picture that showed the octopus not just flat against the sea floor, but assuming the pattern of the surrounding sand–a trick that flounder use as well. The next year Hanlon and his colleagues spent 51 hours diving of the coast of the island of Saba searching for the octopuses on the sand plains. They managed to film one animal apparently pretending to be a flounder. And since then, professional photographers have supplied Hanlon with still more videos.

Hanlon and his colleagues have compared the footage of the octopus to footage of the peacock flounder, which lives in the same waters. The similarities are uncanny. Flounders hug the sandy bottom as they swim, even following the sand’s ripples. So do octopuses. The octopuses swim in the same short bouts as the flounder, and at about the same speed. They form their tentacles into a sheet-like mass with the same body outline as the flounder. The big difference between the octopus and the flounder is the way they blend into the background. The flounder are relatively slow at matching their surroundings, while the octopuses can change their skin quickly and with great precision. If there are white rocks scattered around on the sandy plain, Hanlon has noticed, a stationary octopus will produce a white spot on its body as well.

The Atlantic longarm octopus is not the only octopus to pretend to be a flounder. On the other side of the world, off the coast of Indonesia, Hanlon and his colleagues have documented two other species that pull off the same trick. (Here’s a video of one of the Indonesian species.) Pretending to be a flounder is such a useful strategy that three distantly related species of octopus have independently evolved it.

With flounder-mimicking octopuses now firmly established in the Atlantic Ocean as well as the Pacific, it’s high time to ask what is so great about flounders? Sandy plains are dangerous places for soft-bodied octopuses. Predators can spot them as they move across the open expanses. It’s possible that octopuses are not mimicking flounders per se, but are just taking advantage of the same kind of camouflage. But it’s also possible that small fish that do spot the octopus may leave it alone because it looks like a flounder. While a small fish could easily take a bite out of a soft, fleshy octopus tentacle, a tough, scaly flounder would pose a threat.

Oh, FFSMS. After countless tests showing them useless, articles about them being useless, challenges from Randi and others to prove they are not useless, and the company head arrested for suspicion of fraud because they’re useless, Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki has ordered that the (useless) magic wand dowsing rod bomb-sniffers should still be utilized.

FFSMS.

At least al-Maliki wanted them tested. Still. This angers me:

The survey, ordered by Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, found the British device, known as ADE651, generally worked. However some of the gadgets, found to be ineff­ective, would be replaced.

A government spokesman later said only 50% of the devices worked.

"Replaced?" With what, fairy dust? Unicorn horns? And I’d love to know how those tests were done. I bet it would’ve been cheaper to send a dozen of the wands to Randi and let him take a look. And if they did work, not only would Iraq get the wands back, but Randi would include a check for a million bucks which they could use to buy more of the kits.

I have to say, it’s been a good year for skeptics, but we clearly have a long way to go. Thailand and Iraq are both relying on provably worthless junk to find bombs, and what will happen instead is that those bombs will find people. Hundreds of them, thousands. That’s what happens when we turn their backs on reality and instead rely on superstition and antiscience. It’s way too late in this world to do such a thing, and when people in power do it, a lot of lives will be lost.

“We would like to report our observations upon a new gastrointestinal syndrome, which we shall refer to by the acronym HAFE (high altitude flatus expulsion). This phenomenon was most recently witnessed by us during an expedition in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado, with similar experiences during excursions past. The syndrome is strictly associated with ascent, and is characterized by an increase in both the volume and the frequency of the passage of flatus, which spontaneously occurs while climbing to altitudes of 11,000 feet or greater. The eructations (known to veteran back-packers as “Rocky Mountain barking spiders”) do not appear to vary with exercise, but may well be closely linked to diet. The fact that the syndrome invariably abated on descent leads us to postulate a mechanism whereby the victim is afflicted by the expansion of colonic gas at the decreased atmospheric pressure of high altitude. This is somewhat analogous to the rapid intravascular expansion of nitrogen which afflicts deep-sea divers and triggers decompression illness. While not as catastrophic as barotrauma nor as debilitating as HAPE (high altitude pulmonary edema), HAFE nonetheless represents a significant inconvenience to those who prefer to hike in company.”

Thanks to John for today’s ROFL!

Photo: flickr/.hln.

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Skeptic and journalist Simon Singh appeared before the High Court today in a hearing about accusations of libel. This case is critical for journalism, medicine, science, and skepticism, and you can get the background info on it in an earlier post I wrote. But basically, Simon was sued by the British Chiropractic Association over an article he wrote in The Guardian, and Simon has appealed, which is what today’s case was about.

His lawyer and that of the BCA presented their cases in front of three judges. According to reports by Jack of Kent and Crispian Jago (NSFW language in the latter), things went pretty well, though of course we can’t know until the judges actually rule. According to both reports, though, the judges seemed far more sympathetic to Simon’s arguments than to the BCA’s.

However, as Jack of Kent wrote:

Nonetheless, Simon may still lose: the Court of Appeal may decide that even if the High Court ruling is incorrect, it is not so incorrect that they should disturb the judgment.

In other words, it seems that they may disagree with the original ruling, but may feel it wasn’t so wrong that it’s worth the effort to overturn.

I of course hope they do. And once this case is won, we can then move on to the far, far bigger picture: reforming the UK’s horrible and draconian libel laws, which are unfair, and I think reasonable to characterize as backward and medieval. The way it’s set up, the burden of proof is on the accused to show what they said was not libel, rather than on the accuser to show that it is libel. That’s ridiculous, and what it winds up doing is making it hard for journalists to fairly write about many issues, because they may be scared of being sued and having to spend literally millions of dollars in defense.

That’s why I strongly support the reform effort.

I’ll be keeping my eyes on this, and you can stay on it as well by checking in on the blogs of Jack of Kent and Crispian Jago as well.

Forgetting an umbrella or the location of a parking spot may be annoying, but scientists have suggested that for healthy brains to function well, they need to forget. By forgetting, scientists say, the brain makes space for new memories. In an intriguing breakthrough, researchers from the United States and China have identified the protein responsible for forgetting in fruit flies. By tweaking a protein called Rac, researchers were able to speed up and slow down the erasure of painful memories [New Scientist]. The findings were published in the journal Cell.

Scientists have been unable to pinpoint why people forget. Some have suggested that new memories are ephemeral and vanish over time, while others thought that interference caused earlier short-term memories to be overridden as new information comes in [Science Daily]. While both of these notions seem to suggest that forgetting is a passive mechanism, the new study suggests that forgetting is far more active, and that Rac works to inhibit the formation of more long-term memories.

The scientists studied fruit flies that were exposed to two fly-repellent odors, the second of which came with an electric shock. The flies quickly learned to head to the odor that didn’t cause them pain. Then the scientists switched the set-up, linking the first odor to the shock instead. Regular flies quickly noted the change, discarding the old memory of which odor came with a shock and learning to head towards the now-safe second odor. But when the experiment was repeated after the memory-eroding protein [Rac] was blocked, there was utter confusion. The flies had not erased their first memory, and had made a second memory. Unable to pick which odor to fly toward, they zigzagged back and forth [The New York Times].

The researchers determined that when Rac was switched on, newly formed memories faded fast, allowing new memories to come in and solidify. When Rac was switched off in the fruit flies, new memories lingered longer, extending from the normal limit of just a few hours to more than a day.

The scientists next hope to test the effects of meddling with the proteins in mice. If this mechanism holds true in mammals, it could shed light on the molecular basis of forgetting in humans [New Scientist], as humans also have the Rac protein. The researchers suggest that the identification of this protein could potentially help create techniques to enhance cherished memories or to forget painful episodes, which could be a boon to those who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Until now approaches to erasing unwanted memories have largely focused on interfering with the laying-down of memories, rather than our natural ability to forget [New Scientist].

Related Content:
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DISCOVER: 33. How to Erase a Single Memory
DISCOVER:How Much of Your Memory Is True?
DISCOVER: Disremembrance of Things Past

Image: flickr / Image Editor

Light pollution map. I snarfed it from Urban Ecoist

It’s almost time for the 5th Annual Globe at Night project.  Five years already!!  If you have not participated in this past oh, you just have to give it a go.  Super simple, you need only to follow some easy steps and you too can contribute to map light pollution.  Basically you go out and look up at the sky.  There is two week window so you have a good chance at clear skies.

I am really looking forward to this, last year I could see a difference from the year before.  The Globe at Night folks do such a great job at this too.  You can go the GAN site and get all the information you need including star charts (don’t worry it’s EASY) and they even have a Family Activity Packet.  If you are a teacher at ANY LEVEL you can make a great class project out of this and yes instructions for doing so are on the site too.

I am giving you plenty of heads up and I hope to put a banner for the side bar to remind you.  Last year there were over 15,000 observations, so let’s try and get that number up if we can.

PLEASE TRY AND PARTICIPATE IN THIS GREAT PROJECT!!!

Here’s the scoop:

The 5th Annual Globe at Night Campaign: 3-16 March 2010

What: The Globe at Night Campaign
When: 8pm to 10pm local time, March 3-16, 2010
Where: Everywhere
Who: You! (Everyone!)
How: See http://www.globeatnight.org

Why:
With half of the world’s population now living in cities, many urban dwellers have never experienced the wonderment of pristinely dark skies and maybe never will. This loss, caused by light pollution, is a concern on many fronts: safety, energy conservation, cost, health and effects on wildlife, as well as our ability to view the stars. Even though light pollution is a serious and growing global concern, it is one of the easiest environmental problems you can address on local levels.

Globe at Night is an annual 2-week campaign in March that helps to address the light pollution issue locally as well as globally. This year the campaign is March 3-16, 2010. You are invited along with everyone all over the world to record the brightness of your night sky by matching its appearance toward the constellation Orion with star maps of progressively fainter stars found at http://www.globeatnight.org/observe_magnitude.html. You then submit your measurements on-line at http://www.globeatnight.org/report.html with your date, time and location. A few weeks later, organizers release a map of light-pollution levels worldwide. Over the last four 2-week Globe at Night campaigns, volunteers from over 100 nations have contributed 35,000 measurements.

To learn the five easy steps to participate in the Globe at Night program, see the Globe at Night website at http://www.globeatnight.org. You can listen to our 10-minute audio podcast on light pollution and Globe at Night at http://365daysofastronomy.org/2010/02/03/february-3rd-the-globe-at-night-campaign-our-light-or-starlight/

For activities that have children explore what light pollution is, what its effects are on wildlife and how to prepare for participating in the Globe at Night campaign, see the new activities at http://www.darkskiesawareness.org/DarkSkiesRangers.

Monitoring our environment will allow us as citizen-scientists to identify and preserve the dark sky oases in cities and locate areas where light pollution is increasing. All it takes is a few minutes during the March 2010 campaign to measure sky brightness and contribute those observations on-line. Help us exceed the 15,000 observations contributed last year. Your measurements will make a world of difference.

On November 21, 2009, the Cassini spacecraft sliced past Saturn’s moon Enceladus, shaving the iceball at a distance of 1600 km (1000 miles). From that distance, the view was astonishing…

It’s been known for some time that the south pole of Enceladus is lousy with geysers, erupting water into space (though the ultimate source of the water is still a bit of a mystery). But this new pass shows 30 geysers, 20 more than were previously seen! One major geyser also appears to have waned a bit since the last pass, showing that not only is stuff going on, but things are changing, too.

This mosaic of the surface of Enceladus overlays a high-res optical image with thermal hot-spots. You can see that the hottest parts — which are actually at -90° C (-140° F), so I guess "hot" is in the (frozen) eye of the beholder — line up along a huge fracture in the moon’s surface. The fracture is called Baghdad Sulcus and is one of the places on the moon erupting water geysers. The fracture is about 500 meters (roughly 1/4 mile) deep, and this image shows about a 40 km (25 mile) swath along it. There’s evidence of particles from the geysers re-falling here, and also house-sized icy blocks that may be rubble that has been seismically shaken and settled downslope.

There’s a lot of science in those images, and in the others returned from that close pass. But I think my favorite from these is one that may also have scientific value, but, like almost everything Cassini sends back, is perhaps more striking for its artistry.

That’s a crescent Enceladus, replete with geysers, and its parent planet Saturn in the foreground. Wow, that’s pretty. I love how gray Enceladus looks and how much brighter Saturn is. I was thrown for a moment; Enceladus has a reflectivity of nearly 100%, meaning it reflects nearly all the light hitting it, while Saturn only reflects 30-50% of the light that hits it (depending on how you measure it). But this depends on the viewing geometry! Enceladus is thin crescent, so the light is hitting it at a very low angle. A lot of the light hitting the moon is sent straight back toward the source (the Sun), so not much of that light gets sent off in other directions. It’s not that Enceladus is intrinsically fainter than Saturn, it’s just that the light is reflected off in another direction, and not towards Cassini in this image.

As in life, sometimes what you see depends on how you look.

Cassini has been orbiting Saturn since 2004, and in all that time it has not disappointed. It continues to return a veritable bounty of information about Saturn and its fleet of moons. If you want to stay on top of Cassini news, subscribe to the email list, and follow imaging team leader Carolyn Porco on Twitter!