UPDATE: Kevin Trudeau has been cited with contempt of court and must serve time in jail for it.

I love how that article describes Trudeau as "deeply tanned". That’s awesome.

For those unaware, Trudeau is not one of the good guys. In fact, to describe him in the terms I want, I’d have to violate my own rules on this blog.

The bad part of this? He’s only getting 30 days. Once he’s out he’ll still have all his books and a radio show on which to shill them. But I still have hope the system will prevail. There is a limit to free speech, and fraud breeches that limit. As Trudeau should have learned the first time he was convicted of it.

Tip o’ the coral calcium to Chris Babarskas once again.

A precious case from Middle Earth.

“Sméagol (Gollum) is a single, 587 year old, hobbit-like male of no fixed abode. He has presented with antisocial behaviour, increasing aggression, and preoccupation with the “one ring.”… …His forensic history consists of Deagol’s murder and the attempted murder of Samwise Gamgee. He has no history of substance misuse, although like many young hobbits he smoked “pipe weed” in adolescence. Sméagol has forgotten many memories of his childhood, and we have limited collateral history on his premorbid personality. Before obtaining the ring he was an inquisitive child with odd interests, who enjoyed causing mischief and solitary activities such as burrowing under trees to look at roots. He dislikes himself, stale raw fish, and “hobbitses.”

Several differential diagnoses need to be considered, and we should exclude organic causes for his symptoms. A space occupying lesion such as a brain tumour is unlikely as his symptoms are long standing. Gollum’s diet is extremely limited, consisting only of raw fish. Vitamin B-12 deficiency may cause irritability, delusions, and paranoia. His reduced appetite and loss of hair and weight may be associated with iron deficiency anaemia. He is hypervigilant and does not seem to need much sleep. This, accompanied by his bulging eyes and weight loss, suggests hyperthyroidism. Gollum’s dislike of sunlight may be due to the photosensitivity of porphyria. Attacks may be induced by starvation and accompanied by paranoid psychosis.

An internet search found over 1300 sites discussing the nature of Gollum’s “mental illness.” We asked 30 randomly selected medical students if they thought Gollum had a mental illness. Schizophrenia was the most common diagnosis (25 students), followed by multiple personality disorder (three). On initial consideration schizophrenia seems a reasonable diagnosis. However, in the context of the culture at the time it is unlikely. Delusions are false, unshakeable beliefs, not in keeping with the patient’s culture. In Middle Earth, the power of the ring is a reality. The passivity phenomena Gollum experiences are caused by the ring, and these symptoms occur in all ring bearers. Gollum does not fulfil the ICD-10 criteria for the diagnosis of schizophrenia…

…Gollum displays pervasive maladaptive behaviour that has been present since childhood with a persistent disease course. His odd interests and spiteful behaviour have led to difficulty in forming friendships and have caused distress to others. He fulfils seven of the nine criteria for schizoid personality disorder (ICD F60.1), and, if we must label Gollum’s problems, we believe that this is the most likely diagnosis.”

Read the full article here.

Thanks to Ann for today’s ROFL!

Image: flickr/Memekiller

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Perched on top of an Atlas V rocket, on February 11 the Solar Dynamics Observatory launched into space. About a minute after leaving the Earth, the rocket did two things: it passed the speed of sound, and screamed past a sundog, a rainbow-colored optical effect in the sky caused by ice crystals.

And when it did, well, it was incredible. What’s below is just about the coolest video I have ever seen. And I mean that seriously. Click the "720" button and pay close attention at the 1:50 mark. You won’t miss it, the crowd in the audio will alert you…

Wow! I’m quite sure the footage shown here is legit and not a hoax. Several people I know said they saw the same thing, and there are photos of it as well. Those ripples were caused by the shockwave of the rocket going through the cloud, which quickly dispersed. Since the cloud had ice crystals in it, the sundog got literally blown away.

I love the digital revolution. There are so many video cameras out there that stuff no one would’ve believed before are becoming more and more common. Bright meteor fireballs, rocket launches like this, clear footage of flying saucers… oh, wait.

Anyway, awesome. If you ever get a chance to watch a rocket launch, take it. You never know what you might see!

Tip o’ the nosecone to jhumbug on Twitter.

In a bid to go green, British Airways has announced that come 2014, part of its fleet would be powered by biofuel derived from household trash. The airlines announced Monday that it has inked a deal with U.S. company Solena Group to set up Europe’s “first sustainable jet-fuel plant.”

The plant will be located in east London, and it will take food and plant waste from the city’s homes and businesses and convert it to bio-fuel. The airline said in a statement that the plant “will convert 500,000 tonnes of waste per year into 16 million gallons of green jet fuel through a process that offers lifecycle greenhouse gas savings of up to 95 percent compared to fossil-fuel derived jet kerosene.” The aviation fuel will be produced from gasification of the waste into a so-called syngas which is then converted by the Fischer Tropsch process into liquid fuel [Reuters]. The biofuel would power part of the British Airways fleet flying out of London. The airline also says that diverting waste from landfills will curb the production of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that is generated when garbage decomposes.

The move is part of a larger push by British Airways to get biofuels into the fuel tanks of its planes. BA plans to have biofuels make up 10 per cent of its total fuel usage by 2050, but not all will be derived from the Solena plant. Willie Walsh, BA chief executive, said the Solena partnership would pave the way for BA to cut net carbon emissions by 50 per cent by 2050 [Financial Times].

But aviation authorities haven’t yet signed off on British Airways’ bid to use biofuel for its fleet. Officials want further tests to make sure aircraft safety and performance are not compromised by engines running on biojet fuel, rather than conventional 100% crude oil-based kerosene [The Guardian] Some experts think that using pure biofuel won’t work for planes, as planes require high operational performance at all times and because of the extremely cold temperatures in which airline engines must operate [The Guardian]. In the United States there is just one plant producing biofuel similar to the type Solena will produce in London, and U.S. safety authorities allow planes to only mix in 50 percent of the green fuel with the conventional kerosene jet fuel.

Activists also note that biofuel is expected to power only 2 percent of British Airlines’ total flights, barely impacting the fleet’s greenhouse emissions. They say that if the aviation industry in Britain is serious about reducing its carbon footprint, it must reconsider plans of building a third runway at Heathrow International Airport.

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Image: British Airways

Mimas "The Death Star". Click for a really closer look (see text). Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

On February 13, 2010 the Cassini spacecraft made a close pass at the Saturn moon Mimas.  The image above was taken from about 70,600 km (~ 43,680 miles).

The main feature that just sticks out is the huge impact crater called Hershel, so named for William Herschel the discoverer of Mimas (on September 17, 1789).  Mimas is not a very big moon and the crater Hershel is some 130 km (nearly 81 miles!) across.   It’s easy to see where the “Death Star” analogy comes from.

The Cassini site had a raw image of a portion of Hershel from just 18,017 km (11,195 mi), I did some processing on it and you can see it by clicking the image above.

Tonight, the 530 km (320 mile) wide asteroid Vesta is at opposition. That means that it’s opposite the Sun in the sky, so it rises when the Sun sets. That makes it easier to observe since you have literally all night to go out.

But it also means it’s at the point in its orbit when it’s closest to Earth. Since it orbits the Sun in the main asteroid belt, about twice the distance of the Earth to the Sun, it’s at perigee (closest to Earth) when the Sun, Earth, and Vesta are all in a line. The diagram above I made using my awesome Photoshop skillz should help.

Objects that are closer are brighter (and at opposition we’re looking straight down the beams of sunlight shining on Vesta’s surface, so it’s like a full moon effect too), so tonight is just about picture perfect to look for the asteroid.

Even better, it’s the brightest asteroid in the sky! It’ll be shining at about magnitude 6.1 tonight, which is just barely visible to the human eye without aid, though binoculars will help. It’s in Leo, not far from the bright star Regulus. Go to Sky and Telescope for a map.

And if you happen to spot the tiny world, take a moment and think about this: the NASA mission Dawn will settle into orbit around Vesta next year, in 2011. The image I posted above is from Hubble, and is pretty much the best one we have from here on Earth. In late 2011 we’ll have images of it that will be sharp and clear, and, I’m quite sure, jaw-dropping. But until then, go out and take a look for yourself! If not tonight, then sometime in the next week or two.

Astronomy is really cool, but what makes it so fantastic, to me, is that you can go out and do it yourself. Go.

Image credit: Ben Zellner (Georgia Southern University), Peter Thomas (Cornell University) and NASA

Four decades later, the Murchison meteorite is still full of surprises. When this extraterrestrial hunk fell to Earth near its namesake town in Australia in 1969, people managed to salvage more than 200 pounds of it. And now a new analysis of the meteorite, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that it could hold millions of carbon-containing compounds. Researchers say the findings provide insight into the complex chemistry present when the chunk of space-rock formed, back when our solar system was young.

Back in 1969, researchers found amino acids and many other molecules in the carbon-rich rock. Many researchers have analyzed the chondritic meteorite for amino acids and other possible precursors to life, because some theories hold that life on Earth began with the delivery of prebiotic organic compounds from space via asteroids or comets [Scientific American]. But scanning techniques have advanced since then, so the new team used tools like ultra-high-resolution mass spectrometry to take a fresh look at the meteorite.

In the tiny sample they crushed to study, the team turned up at least 14,000 unique organic (carbon-containing) compounds. They say that is actually conservative guess; the somewhat limited scope of their tool could have missed some, and the true number could be as high as 50,000. And because each collection of atoms can be arranged in numerous ways, the authors estimate that there may be millions of distinct organic compounds in the meteorite [Scientific American].

Not only is Murchison rich in organic compounds, it’s old. Scientists believe the Murchison meteorite could have originated before the Sun was formed, 4.65 billion years ago. The researchers say it probably passed through primordial clouds in the early Solar System, picking up organic chemicals [BBC News]. As a result, the researchers say the meteorite could have something to say about the origin of life and our solar system as it continues to let go of its secrets. It was only two years ago, after all, that scientists confirmed that the presence of subunits of DNA and RNA on Murchison were genuine, and not the result of soil contamination.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

In my new brain column for Discover, I take a look at recent research on fear. As dread turns to terror, our brains look an awful lot like the brain of a mouse as it realizes the feline end is nigh. Check it out.

If you’ve been dying to get a kick-ass dragon tattoo but feel like it might not go over well with prospective employers or your mom, then here’s a sneaky, roundabout way to satisfy your yearning. You can get the tattoo using augmented reality–and for an extra dose of kick-ass, the dragon will flap its leathery wings.

The concept was developed by a Buenos Aires-based software company called ThinkAnApp. In the video below, you’ll see a guy’s arm tattooed with what looks like a plain rectangular box. But that box is essentially a barcode. The company has devised a camera with special software that reads this barcode, and then superimposes an animated image.

Dvice reports:

When viewed through a specially equipped camera, the seemingly plain box design suddenly displays a three-dimension dragon. The possibilities for art projects, information distribution, and social engineering via body art inherent in this idea are fascinating.

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Image: ThinkAnApp

It’s been nearly ten years since President Bill Clinton stood on the White House lawn with a team of scientists to announce the completion of the first survey of the human genome. “Today, we celebrate the revelation of the first draft of the human book of life,” he said. It’s a pleasing metaphor, but it’s deeply flawed. There is not a single Human Book of Life. If there were, after all, Clinton and the scientists and all the rest of us would all be identical clones.

There is a vast amount of genetic variation from person to person, and from one continent to another. The survey that Clinton was announcing was a cobbling-together of DNA from several individuals. Since then, researchers have produced much higher-quality reads of the genomes of actual people. They’ve learned a lot from those studies, but, in the scope of human genetic diversity, these studies have been timid ventures. If you compare someone from South Korea to someone of northern European descent, you’re only capturing a small sliver of the variation in our species. If you really want to get into the thick of it, there’s really one place to go: Africa.

This chart helps to illustrate why. If you trace the origins of the genetic material in our species, you end up in Africa. One reason we know this is that human populations outside of Africa share some genetic markers that Africans lack. That’s consistent with the hypothesis that Homo sapiens evolved in Africa, and then a small group of Africans migrated off the continent and gave rise to all the other populations of humans alive today. Another clue is in the genetic diversity of Africans themselves. Looking at relatively small collections of DNA, scientists have found much more genetic diversity in Africa than elsewhere. That would make sense if African populations have existed longer than populations elsewhere, giving them more time to accrue new mutations.

Africa is, of course, a huge continent, with a billion people and 2000 distinct ethno-linguistic groups. Some of those groups, including some of the most populous ones, are relatively young. In some cases, they expanded over large areas as they developed agriculture. Some smaller ethnic groups are only distantly related to other Africans, since their ancestors split off a long time ago. Those groups are crucial to a full-spectrum picture not just of African diversity, but the diversity of all humanity.

So it’s heartening to find that today scientists are publishing a genome of a man from one of those deeply diverging groups–the Khoisan of southern Africa, also known as the Bushmen of the Kalahari.

The Khoisan are not a single group of Africans, but a large number of small groups. They originally probably spanned much of southern Africa, making a living by hunting and foraging for food. Bantu farmers moved into southern Africa much later, taking up a lot of the arable land. Most Khoisan live now in Botswana and Namibia, eking out a precarious existence.

A team of scientists from the United States, Australia, and Africa sequenced the complete genome of a Khoisan named !Gubi (far left in the top photos). They also sequenced portions of the genomes of three other Khoisans from Namibia to gauge the diversity within the group. And, for comparison, they also sequenced the genome of a Bantu from South Africa. Not just any Bantu, mind you, but none other than Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

The survey confirmed the conclusion of earlier studies: Khoisans have a lot of genetic diversity. On average, each pair of the Khoisans differed at 1.2 out of every 1000 nucleotides (the “letters” of DNA). On average, a European and an Asian differ at 1 out of every 1000.

Khoisans lack some key adaptations that arose in Africans who have taken up agriculture. For example, they lack a mutation that allows adults to digest milk. They also lack a common mutation that provides resistance to malaria–a disease that took off when parasite-carrying mosquitoes could lay eggs in farm fields and bite farmers sleeping in nearby huts. But these absences don’t mean that Khoisans are primitive cavemen, or that their genomes are a time capsule from antiquity. Most of the distinctive features of their genomes arose only after their ancestors split off from the ancestors of other humans. A number of those new mutations show some indications of being adaptations for life in the desert, such as controlling levels of salt in the blood.

Understanding the genome of Khoisans is not just interesting in itself, but important to the well-being of all people on Earth. To figure out the effects of genes on our health, scientists scan DNA from lots of people, looking for variations that are strongly linked to certain diseases. As I wrote last year in Newsweek, it’s been a struggle. One reason is that the list of genetic variations we’ve been using has, until now, been too short. In the new study, the scientists found 1.3 million differences between Khosians and the reference human genome against which all human DNA is compared. Just as intriguing are some of the variants that Khoisans have that are found in other populations. Some of these familiar variants have been linked to serious diseases. Yet all the Khoisans who were tested in the new study were around 80 years old and in excellent physical shape. The effect of these variants may actually depend on variations in other genes. To figure out what any one human genome means for a person’s health, scientists need to look at a full spectrum of human genomes. The Book of Life is not enough. We need to read the Library of Life.

[Images: Schuster et al, "Complete Khoisan and Bantu genomes from Southern Africa," Nature, doi: 10.1038/nature08795, Campell and Tishkoff]

Are these the first steps to a nuclear renaissance? Yesterday the White House said it would give more than $8 billion in loan guarantees to make sure that construction of two new nuclear power plants gets under way in Georgia. If these plants go ahead, they would be the first new nuclear plants built in the country in more than three decades.

The loan guarantee is conditional. It hinges on the utility, the Southern Co., receiving a license from the US Nuclear Regulatory Agency to build and operate the new reactors. Based on the current timeline, the utility expects to receive its license during the second half of 2011, says David Ratcliffe, its chairman and chief executive officer [Christian Science Monitor]. The two reactors would each produce more than 1,000 megawatts, and would work with two existing reactors at a site near Waynesboro, Georgia.

The loan guarantees will allow Southern Co. to get massive construction loans from its bankers without assuming the risk; if the power plants aren’t profitable and if the company defaults on its loans, the federal government will pay back the money to the banks instead. Despite the government support, the new Georgia reactors are far from a done deal: their design has not yet been fully approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, whose staff has raised questions about whether changes made to harden the plant against aircraft attack had made it more vulnerable to earthquakes [The New York Times].

The loan guarantees are a provision in the 2005 Energy Policy Act, installed because nuclear power backers say new projects would be too great a financial risk to go forward without government support. Energy secretary Steven Chu announced that there’s more of this to come: The administration will ask for $36 billion in nuclear loan guarantees for 2011. However, ramping up the money could end up pouring good money after bad, skeptics argue. The guarantees represent money for “a limited set of reactors from a small number of first-movers,” says Ellen Vankco, a specialist on energy issues with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington [Christian Science Monitor].

The announcement garnered the expected political reaction. Republicans and nuclear power advocates praised the move, while many environmentalists balked at expanding nuclear power and free-market activists balked at the spending, saying taxpayers could get stuck with the bill if projects fail. However, green groups haven’t complained as loudly as one might expect, because of the political reality: Many large conservation groups appear to be tacitly accepting the need to increase federal nuclear support — along with offshore oil and gas drilling, another environmentalist anathema — to attract Republican votes for a measure to limit greenhouse gas emissions [Los Angeles Times].

And then there’s the issue the Obama Administration would probably rather not talk about as it makes this nuclear push: waste. Given the litany of the problems with the proposed Yucca Mountain waste storage site in Nevada—transporting waste across the country, the possibility of a fault line running underneath it, and so on—Obama axed the idea of using it. With no viable alternatives, all that’s left is continuing to store on site. Currently, 70,000 tons of radioactive waste are stored at more than 100 nuclear sites around the country, and 2,000 tons are added every year [CNN].

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Image: iStockphoto

We’ve collected enough data in our What Got You Interested in Science? poll to draw some conclusions. Not very firm conclusions, of course, as the whole process was wildly non-scientific, and there’s no reason to expect that the respondents were a representative sample in any sense. (The numbers were not bad; the smallest category, “the internet,” received 62 votes so far.) But conclusions, nonetheless!

And the main conclusion is: there are many different things that get young proto-scientists interested in the field. Books, both non-fiction and fiction, play an important role, but no one thing really stands out.

That’s interesting, and not really what I would have expected. Given that there certainly are many things that could get someone interested in science, I wouldn’t have been surprised if there was a dominant source for the pipeline, but instead it’s quite a diverse porfolio.

If we think getting people interested in science is a good thing, the lesson is: there aren’t any magic bullets. A broad-based strategy seems appropriate. Interesting books, educational classes, encouraging relatives, engrossing hobbies and school activities, inspiring movies and TV shows. I approve.

NASA’s fledgling Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) opened its eyes a few weeks ago, and astronomers have just released the first of a torrent of spectacular images from it.

Since its launch last December, WISE has been surveying the sky, taking data continuously as it spins on its axis and orbits the Earth. A few images have been released before, but these new ones are fully processed, scientifically-calibrated, and gorgeous.

I have to start with this one, because it’s just so pretty! Behold Comet C/2007 Q3, aka Siding Spring:

Holy dirty snowballs! That’s gorgeous, a classic comet. When this image was taken, on January 10, 2010, the comet was 340 million kilometers (200 million miles) from Earth. That’s a good ways off, so I’m impressed with the detail of this image! It’s actually a four-color image: blue is 3.6 microns (about 5 times the reddest wavelength the human eye can see, so well out into the infrared), green is 4.6, orange is 12, and red is 22 microns.

Since the temperature of an objects determines the kind of light it emits, we can estimate the temperature of the comet just by eyeballing this picture. It’s mostly orange, meaning the comet is pouring out light at 12 microns. A human being radiates infrared from about 7 to 14 microns, so this means the parts of the comet emitting IR (and therefore seen by WISE in this image) are around the same temperature as a person! Well, in physics terms; in human terms it’s pretty cold, about -40 Celsius. And it’ll get even colder now since it’s on its way out of the inner solar system, away from the Sun’s warmth. It’ll dim as it cools, too, returning back to invisibility once again.

WISE is expected to see quite a few comets, and in fact discovered its first just a few days ago. I wonder how many it’ll find, and if they’ll all be this pretty…?

Let’s take a step farther out for the next WISE image:

Recognize that galaxy? I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t, but it’s Andromeda! That’s the nearest large spiral to our Milky Way. It’s roughly 2.9 million light years away (estimates vary) and can be seen by the naked eye from a dark site. This stunning photo really accentuates how amazing WISE is: the field of view is 5 degrees across, the width of ten full Moons. The Hubble camera I used to work with would barely cover a pixel in this image!

Remember, this image is all infrared. What looks blue here is actually cold stuff compared to what we’re used to: old red stars, for example. The colors are a little different than in the comet image, but red is still the coolest material: dust. These complex molecules are created when massive stars are born and when they die. Since massive stars don’t live long, they tend to die near where they were born, so you see the dust constrained to very narrow areas where star formation occurs. Less hefty stars (like the Sun) live long enough to drift away from their nursery over billions of years, so they fill the galaxy’s disk (in blue). That’s why the dust is so vivid and tightly defined in this image.

If you look closely, you can see the left side of the galaxy is a bit distorted. That’s called a warp, and is probably caused by a nearby pass of another galaxy, or one Andromeda actually absorbed. The fuzzy blob just below the main galaxy is a dwarf elliptical companion to Andromeda, orbiting it like the Moon orbits the Earth. It’s mostly composed of old stars that look red to our eye, so again it’s blue in this false color image.

OK, one more. I like this one a lot: NGC 3603, a star-forming region about 20,000 light years from Earth:

It may not look familiar, but if you’ve been reading my blog for more than a couple of weeks, you’ve seen it: I wrote about a Hubble image of this very nebula. Now, if you’re like me, you’ll click that link, look at the Hubble image, and then try to figure out where it fits in this WISE shot. Pbbbt. Don’t bother. The Hubble image is only a tiny portion of this vast vista, a blip right in the middle of the brightest part of the WISE image. The S in WISE is for "Survey", which means it takes pictures of ginormous swaths of sky, far more than Hubble can do. In fact, Hubble could take picture after picture for weeks and not get a view of the sky as large as WISE does in a few minutes (of course, the Hubble image would be a whole lot more detailed…).

In this image, as before, red is warm dust, and blue is hotter material like stars. The green is what gets me though: at 12 microns, that reveals PAHs, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. These complex organic compounds form in cool conditions in nebulae, which are lousy with them. They’re everywhere where the temperature isn’t too high to disintegrate them. They can form even larger molecules, and some people think they may be important in creating the molecules necessary for life on Earth. That’s not to say those molecules form in nebulae like NGC 3603 and then somehow get here; they most likely form right here as well. The point is, they look like they’re pretty easy to make if conditions are right… on Earth as it is in the heavens.

And the sheer size and breadth of the nebula is simply stunning! I’m so used to narrow fields of view that I forget sometimes just how large these objects are. This nebula is dozens of light years across, forming thousands upon thousands of stars. It’s among the biggest such star factories in our galaxy, and is certainly easily visible from other galaxies as well. Even from 20,000 light years away — 1/5 of the way across our entire galaxy — it’s clearly a formidable object.

And that’s the strength of WISE. It can see large objects, investigate the bigger picture of the sky, and do it in the longest regions of the infrared spectrum, light that we simply cannot explore from the ground — our air absorbs it, and all the warm objects around us glow fiercely at those energies. It would be like trying to find a firefly against the Sun! So we must launch observatories into space to peer at the far infrared light from cosmic objects, and WISE will be our eyes to do just that.

And from these images it looks like it’ll do a fine job. I’m impressed with these images. I’ve seen a few early release observations in my time — I’ve made a few myself! — and these are excellent. The whole mission is only supposed to last a few months; there is coolant on board for the detectors that can only go so far. In that short time it has a whole sky to observe, and that’s a lot of space. But that also means there’s a lot to see: galaxies, asteroids, comets, nebulae… maybe even a gamma-ray burst or two. The next few months will be very exciting for infrared astronomy!

Related posts:
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Images credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

Once again, to the bane of myth-makers and fans of historical intrigue, the simplest explanation may be the best: Scientists analyzing the DNA of the world-famous mummy of Tutankhamen say that he wasn’t done in by murder nor any of the exotic diseases put forth as explanations for his death at the age of 19. Rather, they say in the Journal of the American Medical Association, it was likely complications of malaria that killed King Tut, who was already frail thanks to royal inbreeding.

The team led by Egypt’s top archaeologist, Zahi Hawass, spent years taking CT scans and conducting genetic tests on mummies from the royal tombs. They say they confirmed that Tut was the son of Akhenaten, which is what scholars have long believed, but it hints at something else: It also identifies some of his grandparents and great-grandparents for the first time and suggests that his mother was Akhenaten’s sister [The Times]. A brother-sister pair wasn’t unusual during this period in ancient Egypt, medical historian Howard Markel says. Pharaohs were thought of as deities, so it makes sense that the only prospective mates who’d pass muster would be other deities [AP].

Unfortunately for King Tut, that incestuous tradition made him more susceptible to degenerative bone diseases. He may have had Koehler’s disease, as well as a club foot. Earlier discoveries had hinted at Tutankhamen’s frailty, including the 100-plus walking sticks that Howard Carter found when he unearthed the tomb in 1922. “This is confirmed by images that show him sitting while shooting an arrow, which normally would have been done standing up,” says Hawass. “He cannot stand” [TIME].

The researchers also found that Tut and his family were infected by a parasite that often brought with it a virulent form of malaria. If the young Tut was already frail and had a weakened immune system, a malarial infection could have been life-threatening, the team hypothesizes. Not everyone buys the parasite bit, however, including parasite scientist Sanjeev Krishna. “If you have the parasite and you get to the age of 19, the chances are you’ve developed some kind of immunity,” he said [The Times].

But while a sickly minor king who could barely walk isn’t exactly as romantic as the King Tut of popular culture, James Phillips of Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History says we shouldn’t expect the emerging facts to crush the myth. “Reality is reality, but it’s not going to change his place in the folk heroism of popular culture,” Phillips said. “The way he was found, what was found in his grave — even though he was a minor king, it has excited the imagination of people since 1922″ [AP].

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Image: flickr / Steve Evans

The next time, you’re taking shots straight out of a bottle of mezcal, the potent Mexican alcohol made from the agave or a maguey plant, remember what you’re drinking. Swirling in your mouth is not just the strong smoky alcohol guaranteed to knock you out, but also caterpillar DNA from the “worm” that is often found at the bottom of the bottle.

The worm is actually the larval form of the moth Hypopta agavis that lives on the agave plant and really has no business being in the bottle except to serve as a marketing gimmick. Still, many a drinker has set out to prove his iron will and iron stomach by swallowing the booze-soaked insect at the bottom. Turns out there’s no need for such dramatic gestures. Researchers have found that DNA from the caterpillar can be extracted from the alcohol it’s preserved in.

Ars technica reports on the scientists findings:

“We hypothesized that DNA from a preserved specimen can leak into its preservative medium, allowing the medium itself to be directly PCR amplified” the authors write. “We successfully tested this idea on mezcal—the alcoholic beverage famous for the ‘worm’ (a caterpillar) that is placed in the bottle of many brands—and indeed obtained amplifiable quantities of caterpillar DNA.”

This is great news for researchers trying to extract DNA samples from old specimens preserved in alcohol. Now, they don’t have to take pieces from a crumbling specimen and risk destroying it in the bargain, but can instead use the preservative liquid to obtain and sequence DNA. The scientists, however, warned that different specimens should not be placed in the same jar, as residual DNA would all swirl together.

So no mixing worms, snakes, and scorpions.

Related Content:
Discoblog: Caterpillars Beware: Parasitic Wasps Come in a Wide Variety
NCBI ROFL: NCBI ROFL: Lost in the sauce: the effects of alcohol on mind wandering

Image: Wikimedia

Around this time last year, an unexpected trip to the hospital led to an anesthesia mistake giving me aspiration pneumonia. Although I recognized how serious the situation was, I was also very sad to miss my favorite annual science event: The 2009 AAAS meeting in Chicago–including The Science of Kissing symposium I had helped organize for Valentine’s Day.

As you can imagine, one year later I’m extremely grateful to be healthy, fully recovered, and on my way to attend the 2010 meeting with David. And I’m also delighted to be joining the AAAS program committee. Most of all, I’m looking forward to catching up with friends in science, journalism, policy–and especially, a few former Sea Grant Fellows. And CM too of course.

Blogging may be light during the conference, but expect some upcoming posts on what’s happening in San Diego…

This is beyond brilliant. It is head-asplodey meta-hyper geekariffic.

If you aren’t familiar with the Hitler parody videos you can catch up here, but you really have to watch a few before seeing this, the transformative end-of-the-meme bringer. Anyone making a Downfall parody after this is basically an SEO professional getting a Twitter account now.

Ausgezeichnet.

[Update: The comments for this post have been... interesting. Opinions are all over the place on this. I know the Humor tag is small and easy to overlook, but I pretty much figured the tone of this post made it clear I was just being silly. Either I missed the mark, or I have a lot of commenters who did. Given that choice, I'll just assume I'm funny. Actually, rereading it, the skydiver I mentioned threw off the vibe of the post, so I removed it. Hopefully that'll bring the tone more to where I wanted it to be, and I certainly hope no one was offended.

Anyway, to be clear, I was kidding. This sounds like a fun sport, and it would be awesome to watch. However, I stand by the whole I'd-never-do-it-in-a-million-years thing. It takes a special kind of crazy to load a rocket motor onto the back of a plane. I'm happy it's being done, and a lot happier people other than me are doing it!]

I just received a very odd press release: the Tulsa Air and Space Museum is partnering with something called the Rocket Racing League to create — get this — a rocket racing show. Like an air show, but with rocket-powered vehicles. They have a poster and everything:

Now, as soon as I read this press release I had three thoughts barrel through my brain, willy-nilly, right on top of each other. They were, in order:

1) This must be a hoax.
2) No, I think this is real, and we live in THE FUTURE.
3) This is a really bad idea.

I’ve been to a few air shows. They make me nervous, not the least reason for which is all the footage you ever see of air shows on TV is when two planes slam into each other or the ground or the spectators or some other obstacle like a goose, the main feature of all these being the slamming.

So, doing this with a rocket motor strapped to your backside just strikes me as being, well, a terrible, terrible idea. Apparently they have some sort of course the rocketeers must go through — ostensibly without the circa 1991 Jennifer Connelly waiting for them when they land^* — and the audience at the show can follow along on giant TV screens using some sort of augmented reality system. People watching on TV can, according to the press release, "have the unique sensation of riding right alongside famed Rocket Racing League pilots."

Yeah, not so much for me. I think I’ll watch Spongebob reruns. Much safer. And that way I can just wait for the highlights on "America’s Funniest Rockets Slamming into Things Way Faster Than a Plane Can".

(If you haven’t yet heard the first episode of the new Point of Inquiry, you can listen here, and I also strongly encourage you to subscribe via iTunes from the same page.)

Perhaps the most alarming part of my conversation with Paul Offit came when he argued we’re already seeing many scary diseases return, thanks to reduced vaccination rates in certain communities around the U.S. I wasn’t sure whether there was clear evidence of this yet (save the obvious case of the measles in the UK). But Offit certainly sounded sure. I asked him the following question, “The public health fear is that diseases that were once vanquished or rare will return. How much evidence is there that that’s happening?” Here is his reply around minute 25:30:

Abundant evidence. I would have said ten years ago it was theoretical. And certainly, if we had immunization rates that dropped from 98 percent to 95 percent, or 94 percent, you wouldn’t see what we’re seeing now.

And frankly, just to take a step back, if you look at nationwide immunization rates, they’re excellent. And I think our country frankly asks a lot of its citizens when it asks children to receive vaccines against 14 different diseases in the first few years of life, which can mean 26 inoculations in the first few years, and as many as five shots at one time. I think that’s a lot to ask of parents, and for the most part, our immunization rates are excellent.

The problem is, there are certain communities or districts where the immunization rates are quite low: Ashland, Oregon; Vashon Island off Washington State; Southern California; Hasidic Jews in New York state. And so what you’re starting to see now is outbreaks of infectious diseases. Specifically, we had a measles epidemic in 2008 that was bigger than anything we’ve seen in more than a decade. We have outbreaks of pertussis now, or whooping cough, one of which occurred in Delaware in 2006, where the epidemiological pattern was exactly like one would see in the pre-vaccine era, meaning primarily 5 to 9 year olds. And we’ve had cases of bacterial meningitis, one particular type that is perfectly preventable by vaccines, that has caused deaths–one in Minnesota, three in the Philadelphia era.

I used to say that I think that the tide will turn when people start to see children die of these diseases. They’re seeing children die of these diseases. And so now I’ve changed to, “when enough children die.” But I think it is perfectly possible for diseases like polio to come back in the United States. Because it still occurs in the world, and only about 1 of every 200 to 500 people with polio actually becomes paralyzed with it, most people have no symptoms, but still are contagious. So let enough people stop getting vaccinated against polio, and there is every reason to believe it will come back.

Scary, scary stuff.

Again, you can listen to the podcast and subscribe here. And don’t forget to buy Paul Offit’s book Autism’s False Prophets if you don’t already own it…

Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials.

“OBJECTIVES: To determine whether parachutes are effective in preventing major trauma related to gravitational challenge. DESIGN: Systematic review of randomised controlled trials. DATA SOURCES: Medline, Web of Science, Embase, and the Cochrane Library databases; appropriate internet sites and citation lists. STUDY SELECTION: Studies showing the effects of using a parachute during free fall. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE: Death or major trauma, defined as an injury severity score > 15. RESULTS: We were unable to identify any randomised controlled trials of parachute intervention. CONCLUSIONS: As with many interventions intended to prevent ill health, the effectiveness of parachutes has not been subjected to rigorous evaluation by using randomised controlled trials. Advocates of evidence based medicine have criticised the adoption of interventions evaluated by using only observational data. We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute.”

Read the full article here.

Thanks to Janneke, Eugene, Andy, Christy, and Ann for today’s ROFL!

Image: flickr/The U.S. Army

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Hijacking a plane flown by euthanized pigs: a beginner’s manual.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: BMJ week.