Plush Alien Facehugger out of stock and not back until mid-2010?? This is an outrage–let’s get to work, people!

2010 may very well be the best year skeptics have ever had, and we’re only two months in!

Why, you ask? Because the Ministers of Parliament in the UK have decided that homeopathy is a waste of the National Health Service’s money.

W

0

0

t

!!!

Homeopaths get taxpayer support in the UK to the tune of £4M per year (and probably more), money which goes to prescriptions and four homeopathic hospitals — hospitals which I assume are incredibly tiny, so that their cures are stronger.

Ha! See what I did there?

Anyway, the taxpayers’ money is being wasted because homeopathy is pseudoscientific nonsense. It’s water, pure (ha!) and simple, and has no efficacy beyond that of a placebo. Myriads of tests have shown this beyond any reasonable doubt. And, in fact, homeopathy is dangerous because it can divert people away from taking real medicine, which can have very serious repercussions.

I am thrilled with this news! Now, this does not mean homeopathy will promptly be defunded. It looks like there will be more reports and such, and the NHS will have a response to the MPs in a couple of months. But it’s a major step, and a good one.

I’ve been meaning to link to this post at the arXiv blog, which is a great source of quirky and interesting new papers. In this case they are pointing to a speculative but interesting paper by Martin Perl and Holger Mueller, which suggests an experimental search for gradients in dark energy by way of atom interferometry.

But I’m unable to get past this part of the blog post:

The notion of dark energy is peculiar, even by cosmological standards.

Cosmologists have foisted the idea upon us to explain the apparent accelerating expansion of the Universe. They say that this acceleration is caused by energy that fills space at a density of 10^-10 joules per cubic metre.

What’s strange about this idea is that as space expands, so too does the amount of energy. If you’ve spotted the flaw in this argument, you’re not alone. Forgetting the law of conservation of energy is no small oversight.

I like to think that, if I were not a professional cosmologist, I would still find it hard to believe that hundreds of cosmologists around the world have latched on to an idea that violates a bedrock principle of physics, simply because they “forgot” it. If the idea of dark energy were in conflict with some other much more fundamental principle, I suspect the theory would be a lot less popular.

But many people have just this reaction. It’s clear that cosmologists have not done a very good job of spreading the word about something that’s been well-understood since at least the 1920’s: energy is not conserved in general relativity. (With caveats to be explained below.)

The point is pretty simple: back when you thought energy was conserved, there was a reason why you thought that, namely time-translation invariance. A fancy way of saying “the background on which particles and forces evolve, as well as the dynamical rules governing their motions, are fixed, not changing with time.” But in general relativity that’s simply no longer true. Einstein tells us that space and time are dynamical, and in particular that they can evolve with time. When the space through which particles move is changing, the total energy of those particles is not conserved.

It’s not that all hell has broken loose; it’s just that we’re considering a more general context than was necessary under Newtonian rules. There is still a single important equation, which is indeed often called “energy-momentum conservation.” It looks like this:

The details aren’t important, but the meaning of this equation is straightforward enough: energy and momentum evolve in a precisely specified way in response to the behavior of spacetime around them. If that spacetime is standing completely still, the total energy is constant; if it’s evolving, the energy changes in a completely unambiguous way.

In the case of dark energy, that evolution is pretty simple: the density of vacuum energy in empty space is absolute constant, even as the volume of a region of space (comoving along with galaxies and other particles) grows as the universe expands. So the total energy, density times volume, goes up.

This bothers some people, but it’s nothing newfangled that has been pushed in our face by the idea of dark energy. It’s just as true for “radiation” — particles like photons that move at or near the speed of light. The thing about photons is that they redshift, losing energy as space expands. If we keep track of a certain fixed number of photons, the number stays constant while the energy per photon decreases, so the total energy decreases. A decrease in energy is just as much a “violation of energy conservation” as an increase in energy, but it doesn’t seem to bother people as much. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter how bothersome it is, of course — it’s a crystal-clear prediction of general relativity.

And one that has been experimentally verified! The success of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis depends on the fact that we understand how fast the universe was expanding in the first three minutes, which in turn depends on how fast the energy density is changing. And that energy density is almost all radiation, so the fact that energy is not conserved in an expanding universe is absolutely central to getting the predictions of primordial nucleosynthesis correct. (Some of us have even explored the very tight constraints on other possibilities.)

Having said all that, it would be irresponsible of me not to mention that plenty of experts in cosmology or GR would not put it in these terms. We all agree on the science; there are just divergent views on what words to attach to the science. In particular, a lot of folks would want to say “energy is conserved in general relativity, it’s just that you have to include the energy of the gravitational field along with the energy of matter and radiation and so on.” Which seems pretty sensible at face value.

There’s nothing incorrect about that way of thinking about it; it’s a choice that one can make or not, as long as your clear on what your definitions are. I personally think it’s better to forget about the so-called “energy of the gravitational field” and just admit that energy is not conserved, for two reasons.

First, unlike with ordinary matter fields, there is no such thing as the density of gravitational energy. The thing you would like to define as the energy associated with the curvature of spacetime is not uniquely defined at every point in space. So the best you can rigorously do is define the energy of the whole universe all at once, rather than talking about the energy of each separate piece. (You can sometimes talk approximately about the energy of different pieces, by imagining that they are isolated from the rest of the universe.) Even if you can define such a quantity, it’s much less useful than the notion of energy we have for matter fields.

The second reason is that the entire point of this exercise is to explain what’s going on in GR to people who aren’t familiar with the mathematical details of the theory. All of the experts agree on what’s happening; this is an issue of translation, not of physics. And in my experience, saying “there’s energy in the gravitational field, but it’s negative, so it exactly cancels the energy you think is being gained in the matter fields” does not actually increase anyone’s understanding — it just quiets them down. Whereas if you say “in general relativity spacetime can give energy to matter, or absorb it from matter, so that the total energy simply isn’t conserved,” they might be surprised but I think most people do actually gain some understanding thereby.

Energy isn’t conserved; it changes because spacetime does. See, that wasn’t so hard, was it?

President Obama may have nixed the idea of returning astronauts to the moon anytime soon due to budgetary constraints, but that hasn’t stopped NASA from doling out a gift to its lunar fans.

The space agency has released its first iPhone game, which is called the “NASA Lunar Electric Rover Simulator.” The free app, available on iTunes, puts you in the driver’s seat of a lunar rover. The release might serve as a kind of homage to Spirit, NASA’s real-life Mars rover that recently became immobilized. (Opportunity continues chugging along.)

Nasawatch.com describes the idea of the game:

“Drive your Lunar Electric Rover (LER) over the lunar surface to conduct missions. Rescue stranded crew members, transport crewmembers, and launch and recover other Landers. Avoid being caught on the surface unprotected during Solar Particle Events (SPEs).”

The game also shows the ascent and descent of the moon lander, and aims to give players a first-hand feel for what the lunar surface looks like and how a rover works. The game is based on NASA data and file footage of actual lunar rovers, and it mimics the approximate conditions of one of the lunar base sites.

The new game is part of the space agency’s efforts to gin up more interest in its activities via trendy technology like smart phones. And the moon was not its first stop. Earlier this month, NASA released a new iPhone app that allowed users to get live updates from the surface of the sun. NASA says that app lets users “fly around the star, zoom in on active regions, and monitor solar activity.”

Related Content:
80beats: Photo Gallery: The Best Views From Spirit’s 6 Years of Mars Roving
80beats: Obama’s NASA Budget: So Long, Moon Missions; Hello, Private Spaceflight
80beats: NASA Invites You to “Be a Martian” & Explore the Red Planet’s Terrain
Bad Astronomy: Give Space A Chance
Discoblog: Is Apple Taking Sexy Back? Raunchy Apps Vanish From the App Store
Discoblog: California Lays Claim to Astronaut Garbage Left Behind on the Moon

Image: Apple

When we last left the Lower Merion School District, its officials had circled the wagons and refused to openly discuss the lawsuit charging school administrators with remotely accessing the webcams in the laptops loaned out to students, and doing so without the students’ or their parents’ knowledge. The school stayed pretty quiet about it over the weekend, but spokesman Doug Young says that the district has suspended the practice amid the lawsuit and the accompanying protests by students, the community and privacy advocates [The New York Times].

That might not be enough to quell the swell of anger over Lower Merion’s policy. The district, which loans out Apple laptops to all it students, admits remotely activating the webcams 42 times over the course of the last 14 months, but says all of those instances were attempts to find missing or stolen computers. However, this whole fracas started after school administrators tried to use a photo taken of student Blake Robbins as evidence to corroborate charges that the young man had engaged in some sort of mischief. Robbins told CBS News that the school accused him of selling drugs and tried to back up the charge with images from the webcam.

Robbins’ parents filed suit in U.S. District Court, but that won’t be the end of Lower Merion’s legal troubles. The FBI has launched a query into the incident. Risa Vetri Ferman, the Montgomery County district attorney, said Friday that she might also investigate [ABC News].

Related Content:
80beats: Lawsuit: Webcams in School-Issued Laptops Used to Spy on Students at Home
80beats: Facebook CEO: People Don’t Really Want Privacy Nowadays, Anyway
80beats: Should Online Advertisers Be Allowed To Track Your Bedroom Habits?

Image: Wikimedia Commons / Andrew Plumb

Years ago, I visited the Grand Canyon with my family. The beauty of it was overwhelming, and everything they say about it is true. It’s magnificent.

That grandeur is only amplified by the obvious scientific significance of it. The layers of sedimentary rock, exposed by the eons-long patient erosion of the Colorado river, are a dramatic open textbook of the geological history of our planet, as if the Earth itself is saying "Look here, and learn of the past!"

Learn we have. And the Earth, as we have also learned, is not entirely unique. From millions of kilometers away, another canyon beckons us to uncover a planet’s past.

[Click to engrandcanyonate.]

What you’re seeing here is a topographical model of a small part of a crater floor on Mars: Gale Crater, to be precise, a monster 150 km (90 miles) wide impact located nearly on the equator of Mars. In its center rises a mountain, a central peak common in large impact craters. Surrounding this central peak is an enormous mound of material, rising kilometers above the crater’s floor (see the topographic image below; the ellipse represents an old potential landing site of the Spirit rover). It’s not entirely clear how this mound formed; however, it’s likely that the entire crater was once filled with material laid down as periodic deposits, and that most of it has eroded away, leaving just that lopsided mound.

If that sounds familiar, it may be because the Grand Canyon has a similar history (without the crater, of course).

And like its terrestrial counterpart, the exposed layers tell a history of Mars’s geologic past. Scientists studying those layers using images from the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have uncovered a startling feature: while sulfates (deposited by salty water) are seen throughout the layers, clays are only seen lower down, deeper into the past. Clays are only seen where water is abundant, but sulfates alone indicate conditions where water evaporated away.

What the floor of Gale Crater appears to be telling us is that standing water, at least locally, existed long ago on Mars, but later evaporated away. This is consistent with what we have seen in other parts of Mars, of course. Ever since the rovers landed on Mars we’ve seen one piece of evidence after another of standing water in the Red Planet’s distant past.

But there’s something about this news that appeals to me, that touches more than the scientist part of my brain. If I hadn’t told you that first image was from Mars, you might very well think that it was from the Grand Canyon or some other Earthly feature. And it really is a canyon, as you can see from this HiRISE image of the same area:

This image shows the very lower left of the oblique view shown above. It’s upside-down, making features difficult to compare (check out the full HiRISE image of the area to see the whole thing), but the crater floor is at the top of this false-color image, and the mound begins to rise toward the bottom. You can see the canyon carved right into the floor, with sand dunes rippling across it.

Whatever carved this canyon, perhaps hundreds of millions of years ago, perhaps more, tore away the deposited material and revealed all those layers of rock. These layers can be read like a history book written in reverse chronological order, showing us the deep past of Mars, and telling the sad tale of how an entire planet lost its water.

Mars was once more like the Earth is now, though just how much is anyone’s guess at the moment. I doubt it was exactly like Earth; the evidence of water we see indicates it was incredibly salty, far saltier than we have here at home. But still, Mars is a brilliant ochre cautionary tale in our sky. There but for the grace of water go we…

Following this discussion thread at the CFI/Point of Inquiry forums, I’ve decided to announce my show’s guest a week early from now on, and call for audience questions for him/her. I’ll take a sampling from those questions that appear on the forums, and ask them on the air.

The guest for Friday is going to be Penn State University climatologist Michael Mann, and we’ll be talking about the unprecedented wave of recent attacks on climate research–and climate scientists. So I am sure there will be many, many questions that folks will come up with. Don’t leave them in comments here–although comments are open. Leave them on this CFI forum thread if you want me to consider them. (Note that I believe you’ll be required to register over there.)

Michael E. Mann is Director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State, and author of the famous “hockey stick” study, as well as dozens of other peer reviewed papers. He’s also a contributor to RealClimate.org, and is the author, with Lee R. Kump, of Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming:

So any questions for Michael Mann? If so, leave them here–and they may just make their way into the interview!

Also, compose your questions sooner rather than later, as we’ll be recording fairly early on this week…..

A year ago this month, George Will wrote a howler of a column in the Washington Post about global warming, loaded with scientific errors and profoundly illogical arguments. It would not have survived even the most perfunctory fact-checking–despite claims from the Washington Post that his columns go through a “multi-layered fact checking process.” In subsequent months, Will has continued to offer new climate howlers, and this Sunday he provided us all with a dubious one-year birthday gift.

In Will’s latest piece, he yet again declares global warming a construction of hysterical climate scientists who, in his words, “compound their delusions of intellectual adequacy with messiah complexes.” This time, he claims that climate scientists themselves are finally confessing that it’s all been a whole lot of hooey.

Will backs up this claim with a link to a BBC interview last week with Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia. A BBC journalist asked Jones questions, some of which had been submitted by unnamed climate skeptics, including this one:

Q: Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?

A: Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.

This statement then got run through a sausage grinder run by journalists who are apparently both innumerate and illiterate. The Daily Mail declared,

“This week the unit’s former head Professor Phil Jones, performed a majot [sic] u-turn and admitted there had been no ’statistically significant’ global warming in the last 15 years.”

This version of the story, which makes Jones sound like he was making a confession under enhanced interrogation techniques, ended up on the Wall Street Journal editorial page and today in George Will’s column:

Global warming skeptics, too, have erred. They have said there has been no statistically significant warming for 10 years. Phil Jones, former director of Britain’s Climatic Research Unit, source of the leaked documents, admits it has been 15 years.

Will doesn’t tell us exactly who these skeptics are who claimed there had been no “statistically significant warming” for 10 years. I have no way of knowing if they in fact exist. Will himself has been loudly beating the “no-warming-for-a-long-time” drum over the past year. But he has backed up this claim simply by searching for the hottest single year in recent history. “According to statistics published by the World Meteorological Organization, there has not been a warmer year on record than 1998,” he wrote in April. Will continued to claim that global warming has stopped since 1998 even after the secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization wrote into the Post to explain why Will was wrong.

In his latest column, Will added the fancy, shiny new term “statistically significant” to his claim that there has been no global warming. But in doing so, he misleads his readers about what statistical significance actually means.

To see why, take a look at this graph. NASA scientists have been building it for years now, using weather records from around the world. Other graphs built by other teams of scientists have produced similar patterns. If you only look at a small vertical slice of the graph, you’ll see the temperature jump up and down and up again. That’s the sort of pattern you’d expect from a system as big and noisy as the planet’s climate. There are lots of sources of variations in the average global temperature, such as El Nino, a natural oscillation in the movement of heat in the oceans.

Sometimes these hopping temperatures don’t seem to go anywhere in particular. In other cases, there appear to be trends lurking under the noise. To test a hypothesis like this, scientists estimate how likely it would be for an apparent trend to be nothing more than the noise in the climate system. They then set a threshold for those odds.

In many branches of science, researchers set that threshold at 5%. In other words, if there’s only a 5% chance that a particular pattern of temperatures was the result of pure noise, scientists will call the trend “statistically significant.” If, on the other hand, the probability turns out to be 5.1%, the trend is still likely not to be the result of noise, but it’s not officially statistically significant.

“The boundary of .05 should be seen as a guide to interpretation, not as a clear boundary between truth and fiction,” Michael Whitlock and Dolph Schluter write in their book, The Analysis of Biological Data.

Just because a trend over a particular stretch of time doesn’t quite meet the 5% cutoff doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not real. It just means that scientists cannot reject the null hypothesis that noise is the cause. One way scientists can deal with this challenge is to look at longer sets of records. In the case of climate, looking at longer stretches of time reveals that there is indeed a real trend of warming temperatures. Just because the BBC’s questioner arbitrarily set the cutoff for analyzing the climate at 1995 doesn’t change that fact. Jones openly addressed this fact, but George Will conveniently omitted it.

Significance is one of the basic concepts of statistics that everybody should learn about. We rely on these concepts to judge not just the state of the climate, but also the meaning of clinical trials of drugs, the conclusions of psychology experiments that help reveal the inner workings of the mind, and all manner of other discoveries. In today’s column, George Will isn’t just making misleading statements in the service of trying to foster doubt about climate change. He’s also helping to muddle our collective scientific literacy. Why the editors of the Washington Post’s editorial page want to be a party to this is a mystery to me.

[See Skeptical Science and Tamino for more.]

GC/MS based identification of skunk spray maliciously deployed as “biological weapon” to harm civilians.

“Our laboratory has been asked to elucidate the origin of a strong “toxic smell” present in a prominent politician’s office, private house and motorcar. This stinky and pungent atmosphere has caused serious nausea and vomiting to several individuals. Urine samples were collected from the persons presenting symptoms of nausea for toxicological analysis. Drops, paper and cotton swabs of an oily liquid found at the implicated places were submitted by police to our laboratory for investigation… Several volatile sulphur-containing compounds have been identified with the HS-GC/MS system. Detailed examination of the spectra as well as GC/MS analysis of commercially available skunk secret allowed us to relate the identified compounds to those present in the defence spray of skunks. No health sequels were observed for any of the persons implicated in this case.”

Photo: flickr/artindeepkoma

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Molten gold was poured down his throat until his bowels burst.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Phase 1: Build army of alligators that can run on land. Phase 2: Take over the world!

This week’s submission to the Science of Kissing Gallery features a special story that makes me smile. Steve Silberman is a science writer for Wired and other magazines, and his husband Keith is a middle-school science teacher in the Bay Area. This kiss took place during their marriage, which Steve describes in his piece Happily Ever After featured in the Shambhala Sun. Here’s an excerpt:

Suddenly Keith and I found ourselves at the flash point of a raging culture war. Did we have to call it marriage? Wasn’t that an unnecessary provocation for those who take that word to mean getting to the church on time? What about framing our commitment with a less confrontational term like “civil union?”

Certain words, however, have alchemical power. A humble noun or verb can become a transformative mantra. Embracing the word “marriage” had a subtle but profound effect on our relationship, like unlocking a door to a secret garden that only other married people know about. Now our job was to care for that garden together—to nourish it, weed it when necessary, and give it the compassion and space it needs to grow and flourish.

Read the full piece–and happy ending–here. Congratulations Steve and Keith!

Submit your photograph or artwork to the Science of Kissing Gallery and remember to include relevant links.

If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to hang out near the Cassini Saturn spacecraft and get the same view it does, then put on your red/green glasses and check out this anaglyph of the moon Prometheus:

Mmmm, threedeealicious. Click to enjovianate.

Prometheus is a bit weird. OK, it’s a lot weird. It’s an irregularly-shaped elongated spud of a moon, measuring about 119 x 87 x 61 km (71 x 52 x 37 miles) in size. The long axis always points toward Saturn due to tides; basically the change in Saturn’s gravity from the front end of Prometheus to the back end acts like a stretching force on the moon, keeping it aligned. The tip on the right always points toward Saturn, and the long side we see in the image is the leading half of the moon, always facing ahead into the direction it orbits. Think of it as facing into the wind if that helps any.

Prometheus is a shepherd satellite, meaning its orbit gets it near Saturn’s F ring, where it helps keep the ring particles in place. It does this along with Pandora, another smallish moon. Prometheus orbits Saturn inside the F ring. When it gets close to the ring, it gives a little bit of its orbital energy to any ring particles that are on the inside edge of the ring, which boosts them to a slightly higher, slower orbit. Pandora does the opposite; it orbits outside the ring, and it steals energy from ring particles on the outside edge, which drops them into a slightly lower, faster orbit. Together, the two moons shepherd the F ring particles, corralling them and keeping the ring narrow. The animation shows the effects of Prometheus on the inner edge of the ring.

Just so you know, I think this is one of the coolest things ever. Shepherding moons were theoretically discussed for a long time, but we didn’t have any evidence of them until Voyager swept past Saturn a few decades ago, and now Cassini has the chance to study them in detail. It’s such a weird thing, and there it is playing out in the solar system for us to examine! It’s a good reminder that Nature is sneaky, and a lot more clever than we are. I’m glad we’re clever enough to catch up with it, too.

Cecilia writes, “I am working on my PhD in wildlife population genetics, and I can trace my passion for my research to a moment when I was in elementary school and we learned about the extinct dodo bird from Mauritius Island. At first, I could not understand what “extinct” meant, but as the concept sunk in that I would never see this bird, and no one else would ever see it again, I felt a deep sadness and sense of loss. Recently, as I was slogging through field and lab work and my ambition started sagging, I decided to get a dodo tattoo to remind myself why I chose this path. Extinction is forever, and we never know what we’ve lost until it’s gone. Some researchers believe that the dodo was the prime seed disperser for the tambalacoque tree that is declining in numbers because there hasn’t been a dodo around for over 300 years to abrade the seeds. If this is true, it would be a succinct example of how extinctions reverberate through ecosystems. I hope that my work will help prevent future extinctions of wildlife.”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

The teaser trailer for the upcoming Doctor Who Series 5 is now online (there’s an ad first for about 30 seconds). Spoilers ahoy, of course!

Well, it’s not subtle! I like the other trailer better, to be honest, but taken as a whole I have to admit the upcoming series looks pretty good. Mind you, I was unhappy when David Tennant took over for Christopher Eccleston, and that turned out pretty well, so I’ll be a good skeptic and make up my mind when the show actually airs. This looks promising!

No word on the actual air date for the first episode, but it’ll be in the spring.

UPDATE:  SOLVED… ALREADY!

Here we are; another Saturday, another riddle.  Are you ready for this one?  Are you alert?  You are?  Great… we need more lerts.

Today’s answer is an object.

It is a single object, although there are many others like it.

It is visible to the unaided eye.

This object was well-known to our ancestors.

It has been very well represented in literature, both fiction and non-fiction.

In spite of almost constant study and surveillance since prehistory, this object remains mysterious.

Although it has figured prominently in human culture, this object has no official name.

Once thought to be fairly pedestrian, this object is now known to go through rapid periods of furious upheaval.

Clouds over Active Volcano - USGS

Do you have it?  I’m lurking… don’t worry, Trudy.  No spider pictures today.

Maybe.

Okay… ONE spider.  Just one.  A little one.  A cute one.

BOO!!

This is one of the main stories here at the AAAS meeting in San Diego:

SAN DIEGO—A symposium organized here at the last minute by two of the world’s most prominent scientific organizations addressed recent attacks on an increasingly beleaguered climate science community. The panel met in the uncertain aftermath of the release of e-mails stolen from prominent climate scientists and critiques of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The panel of academics was convened by National Academy of Science President Ralph Cicerone, in conjunction with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (which publishes ScienceNOW), which is holding its annual meeting here. At a time when the biggest headlines on science have been over the flaws or legitimacy of climate science, said Cicerone, recent skirmishes over climate research “have really shaken the confidence of the public in the conduct of science [overall].” He cited a number of recent polls, which show a “degradation” in the respect of the public for science in general.

Climate researchers have taken the biggest hit. They are feeling the brunt of what IPCC author Chris Field has described as a “feeding frenzy” since the November e-mail release. “The situation is completely out of hand,” said Texas A&M climate scientist Gerald North. “One guy e-mailed me to say I’m a ‘whore for the global warming crowd.’ ” His PowerPoint presentation included a slide quoting conservative talk show host Glenn Beck: “If the IPCC had been done by Japanese scientists, there’s not enough knives on planet Earth for hara-kiri that should have occurred.”

I get the sense that scientists and their institutions are so concerned over what has occurred in the past few months that there are going to be very real changes made, so as to ensure that better defenses of science are mounted in the future. It will be very interesting to watch what develops on this front…

Recently the UK paper The Guardian posted an article stating — without a shred of skepticism — that Noah’s Ark may have been round.

Sigh. OK, fine. But it gets better.

The Institute for Creation Research — given just their name, you might guess they haven’t found a scientific fact they couldn’t spin, fold, or mutilate… and you’d be right — claims the article is wrong.

Why?

Because a round ark makes no sense.

And…

BANG!

There goes my irony gland again. Luckily it grows back quickly, because in this line of work I seem to need it a lot.

[Update: Without any comment, I'll just add this link here. The connection should be obvious enough.]

Paleontologists can make spectacular discoveries in remote badlands and deserts. But there are also things waiting to be found–or at least recognized–in the back rooms of museums. Things like giant filter-feeding fish.

The giant filter-feeding fish in this painting was discovered by Matt Friedman, a paleontologist at the University of Oxford. Friedman knows a thing or two about the treasures lurking in museum drawers. As I wrote in 2008, he showed that previously neglected fossils were actually transitional forms that track the evolution of the bizarre bodies of flatfish. Recently Friedman took a trip to the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center in Colorado to check out some other fish fossils. While he was there, the center paleontologists asked him to take a look at a massive slab of rock they had just brought in. They knew it contained a fish that dated back to some time between 89 and 66 million years ago, but they couldn’t tell quite what sort of fish.

Clearly, the fish was big. The bony shells that encased its eyes were the size of grapefruits. The slab contained huge scimitar fins. On closer inspection, Friedman recognized that the fish belonged to an extinct lineage of fish called pachycormids. Pachycormids branched off early from other ray-finned fish and evolved into tuna-like predators. As Friedman examined the fossil, though, he found something very strange. Its jaws were toothless. Instead, Friedman found a loose set of rods, each measuring over four feet long. The fish, which Friedman dubbed Bonnerichthys, did not bite its prey. Instead, it opened its mouth wide and trapped tiny animals in bony filters in its mouth.

Today, a number of big filter feeders swim in the oceans. Among sharks and their relatives, filter feeding has evolved a few times, in forms such as manta rays and whale sharks. Baleen whales evolved filter feeding as well, and have evolved into the biggest animals ever–perhaps the biggest animals possible.

Filter-feeding sharks and whales are relative new on the scene, only appearing after the end of the Mesozoic Era 65 million years ago. During the 150-million-year Mesozoic, the oceans were home to many giant marine reptiles. Yet none of them appear to have evolved into filter feeders. Scientists have puzzled why none of them evolved to take advantage of that particular niche. Perhaps there was some constraint that blocked them from that way of life.

Bonnerichthys hinted at a different explanation. Paleontologists had previously found a few filter-feeding pachycormid dating back to a narrow time range around 160 million years. They generally dismissed these fish as a fleeting evolutionary experiment. But Bonnerichthys was another filter-feeding pachycormid living 100 million years later. Friedman began to scour museum collections for similar fish. As Friedman and his colleagues report today in Science, they found a number of new species spanning those 100 million years, which had gone unnoticed before. Instead of a dead-end experiment, the filter feeders enjoyed a 100-million year dynasty.

In other words, the filter-feeding niche wasn’t empty through the Mesozoic. It was occupied by bizarre fishes that no one had noticed before, even as their bones sat for decades in museum drawers. At the end of the Mesozoic, the pachycormids died off in the same pulse of extinctions that wiped out the big dinosaurs on land. And only then did other animals–sharks and whales–take over the filter-feeding way of life. Friedman won’t speculate further about these remarkable animals for now. He’s going to hunt through some museum collections instead.

[Update 7 pm: Deep apologies for leaving off the painting credit! Image courtesy of Robert Nicholls, http://www.paleocreations.com]

Thanks to a little technological ingenuity, we may soon get a look at what exactly is happening in the flying brain. In the journal Nature Neuroscience, Caltech researchers document how they managed to monitor the brain activity of fruit fly in flight.

“The challenge was to be able to gain access to the brain in a way that didn’t compromise the animal’s ability to fly, or to perform behavior,” said study researcher Michael Dickinson of Caltech. “We couldn’t just rip the brain out of the body and put it into a dish” [LiveScience]. Researchers have previously studied activity in the tiny brain of a living fruit fly, but only when it was restrained. Dickinson’s team created a way to look inside while the bug was flying around.

First they tethered a fly, clamping its head in place but leaving its wings free, and then they cut away a part of the brain’s covering so they could attach electrodes to neurons. Finally they induced the fly to flap its wings with a startling puff of air, and tracked it with digital cameras while the electrodes collected data.

Dickinson said the work, conducted with postdoctoral scholars Gaby Maimon and Andrew Straw, suggests at least part of the brain of the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) is in a different and more sensitive state during flight than when the fly is quiescent [UPI]. And, he says, they saw double the normal activity in the visual neurons. Having achieved this basic step, the team hopes to further figure out how the extra activity helps the flies see and steer while aloft.

Related Content:
80beats: Scientists Glean Secrets of Flight From Birds, Bats, and Bugs
80beats: Alcoholic Fruit Flies Don’t Know When To Say When
80beats: Model Suggests 4-Winged Dino Glided Like a Flying Squirrel
80beats: Researchers Flip Brain Cells On And Off With Light Pulses

Image: Caltech

Is Paul Bethune a pirate? Bethune is an anti-whaling activist who boarded a Japanese whaling vessel on Monday, demanding to make a citizen’s arrest of the skipper; he reportedly planned to charge the skipper with attempted murder due to the collision between the whaling boat and the activists’ powerboat, the Ady Gil, last month. Not just that, he also slapped a bill on the captain, seeking $3 million dollars for the damage caused to the Ady Gil.

Bethune is now being held in the whalers’ custody, and may be tried in a Japanese court for charges of trespassing and assault. But one expert suggests that he also faces the possibility of being viewed as a pirate–for not just boarding a vessel illegally, but also making demands for money.

This incident is the latest in an escalating series of skirmishes on the high seas between anti-whaling activists of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, of which Bethune is a member, and the Japanese whaling industry. The whaling wars have also intensified a diplomatic tussle between Japan and Australian and New Zealand, with the Kiwis demanding a halt to the hunting and the Australian government saying it hasn’t ruled out the prospect of taking legal action against the whalers after gathering evidence that it’s presenting to the International Whaling Commission [BusinessWeek].

The International Whaling Commission placed a global moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986 but whales can still be killed for research purposes–a technical loophole that allows Japanese whalers to kill an estimated 1000 whales each year. The boats hunt hundreds of mostly minke whales, which are not an endangered species. Whale meat not used for study is sold for consumption in Japan, which critics say is the real reason for the hunts [Associated Press]. DISCOVER has documented complaints by American scientists that killing whales isn’t necessary for the research Japanese scientists are conducting. The International Whaling Commission continues to try to figure out how to amend its rules to contain Japan’s whaling efforts, thus far without success.

Japan now has six whaling ships in Antarctic waters for “scientific purposes.” The Sea Shepherd sends vessels to confront the fleet each year, trying to block the whalers from firing harpoons and dangling ropes in the water to try to snarl the Japanese ships’ propellers. The whalers have responded by firing water cannons and sonar devices meant to disorient the activists [Associated Press].

In recent days, activists have tried to one-up the whalers by throwing butyric bombs on board the vessels. These harmless bombs emit a foul odor similar to that of butter gone bad or vomit, making it hard for crew members to stay focused on work. For his part, if Bethune is charged with crimes by Japanese prosecutors he will stand trial in a Japanese criminal justice system that apparently has a 99.8 per cent conviction rate [The Australian].

Related Content:
80beats: Videos Show Collision Between Japanese Whaling Ship & Protesters
80beats: Is the Whaling Ban Really the Best Way to Save the Whales?
80beats: Controversial Deal Could Allow Japan To Hunt More Whales
80beats: Commando Filmmakers Expose Secret Dolphin Slaughter in Japan
Discoblog: Japan Whaling Redux: American Scientists Say Slaughter Was Unnecessary
Discoblog: Say What? Japanese Whaling Ships Accuse Animal Planet of Eco-Terrorism

Image: Flickr/ Rene Ehrhardt

I met Baba Brinkman at TAM London, and wasn’t sure what to make of him. He’s a big guy, noticeably white, and raps. About evolution.

OK then. Well, being a skeptic I had to wait for the evidence. So when he performed on stage I was attentive, and my scientific curiosity was quickly satisfied: he’s the real deal. He’s a great rapper, spontaneous, funny, and very intelligent. He had everyone in the audience rapping with him, which was awesome to behold.

And, via Hemant Mehta’s The Friendly Atheist blog, you can see for yourself:

Cool. If you get a chance to see him perform, take it.

Word^*.