I like my iPhone, kinda. It’s not that great as a phone, but it does have lots of fun apps. The maps hardly ever tell me to take a wrong turn at the last second, and I rather enjoy taking fuzzy red photos in low light levels.

Snark aside, there are a lot of good science and entertainment apps for the iPhone. But because I am so stubbornly reality-based, it didn’t occur to me that there would be some apps that border — if not flounce solidly into — alt-med nonsensery.

That is, until I received an email from BABLoggee Cameron Carr, who told me about an app that cures headaches.

Hmmm.

Called, oddly enough, "Headache", it uses "… principles of Traditional Chinese Medicine [that] teach that energy imbalances in the body often contribute to headache symptoms, and these imbalances can be corrected with pressure to specific points on the body."

Energy balances! Wow, that sure sounds sciencey! Except whenever you talk to people who believe in this, they can never really tell you what energy is, or how it flows, or what precisely it does. I guess it only sounds sciencey.

So basically, this app embraces both the ancient and the modern, but with a slippery grip on both.

My favorite line in the app description is, "Selected by licensed acupuncturists, these points may bring you safe, natural, effective relief." Hmm, just "may"? And c’mon, "natural"? The app can make your phone emit sounds or vibrate, which it claims "may" relieve your headache if you hold the phone against these imagined points. How is that "natural"? Even Steve Jobs wouldn’t claim that.

Having this stuff supported by acupuncturists doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence either. Acupuncture is the idea that sticking needles at certain locations in your body can restore the balance of this energy flow. If that’s true, acupuncture can be tested to see if it works. Surprise! It has been, and it doesn’t. Or, to be more precise, it doesn’t work any better than the placebo effect.

The thing about headaches is, they can have lots of causes. Sometimes they go away by themselves, sometimes they don’t. Certainly the placebo effect will help some percentage of the time, as might a gentle vibration (just as a gentle neck massage might relieve some symptoms as well). So testing a product like this isn’t easy… and there are approximately a bajillion other products like it, so they’ll never all get tested. There are a hundred ridiculous products — no, probably ten thousand — for every person actually willing to do a proper scientific test of its efficacy. There’ll never be an end to them.

I cannot say whether this app really works, or is thinly disguised quackery. Given the description on the app’s page, I suspect it’s just another alt-med claim with little or no evidence in support of it, just as I suspect it’ll do quite well. Just as the company’s Aulterra cell phone EM neutralizer probably does quite well (and you have to read that page to believe — or disbelieve — it) despite there being no credible evidence that cell phones cause any harm… unless you’re using one while driving, or skydiving.

Science pays in the long run, but stuff you just make up pays off really well in the short run. And since it’ll never, ever, go away, nonsense pays off in the long run too.

I wish there were an app to cure that.

This optical illusion is so cool, you’ll swear you’ve just damaged your brain. From Michael Bach’s peerless collection.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Stephen Colbert is the twenty-first century Mister Wizard. He’s had guests on to talk about great experiments in physics and shock their fingers, addressed the thorny issue of species delimitation, reveled in microbes, and even screamed in horror at the sight of tongue-eating parasites. If you still doubt me, look at the list of videos at Colbert Nation tagged “science.”

What? You think science is a thing of the past on the show? Well, consider this: Sean Carroll of Cosmic Variance will be on March 3, and Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, will be on in the second week of March. Tune in.

There have been some reports of a possible meteorite in Mexico — here is one news report translated into English.

[UPDATE (16:00 Mountain Time): A new article is saying this may be a piece of space junk, specifically the remains of a Russian Cosmos 2421 satellite, re-entering. The reports of a crater may be wrong; I heard from someone who knows a reporter in the area (I know, this is uncredited and FOAF so take it with a grain of salt) that no crater has been found. Bear in mind the early report of a crater was totally without any citations at all; no picture, no witnesses, no names, nothing. So it's looking now that it was a bright fireball from space junk, but no actual impact -- but we don't have definitive answers yet. Again, I'll report more as I find it out.]

Reports are a bit sketchy right now, but apparently a bright flaming object was seen coming down about 100 miles northeast of Mexico City on Wednesday around 18:30 local time. There was a roar that was loud enough to shake buildings. Another news article is reporting a crater 30 meters in diameter was found.

At the moment this is all I know. It’s not clear if this was actually an impact event from a meteorite or some terrestrial event. In 2007 a small meteorite struck in Peru, causing a lot of confusion (with me at least!) over the source of the event; there was a lot of speculation before an actual meteorite impact was confirmed. Before that impact, it was not considered likely that a small meteorite could actually hit the ground fast enough to make a crater in the ten-meter size range (they slow down or break up high in the atmosphere), so the Peru event was a surprise. It’s still not completely understood how the meteoroid survived to hit the ground.

So it’s possible this Mexico event is a meteorite, but we don’t know yet. I’ll post more information as I find it.

For the first time, the genome of an ancient man has been analyzed, providing clues about what humans were up to 4,000 years ago. As reported in Nature, Danish researchers were able to study the preserved swatch of a Greenlander’s hair that had been first excavated in 1986–suspected to have been discarded after a trim.

From just this small sample sealed in hair keratin, scientists obtained clues about the way he looked and his susceptibility to certain diseases. For example, they expect he had thick hair, brown eyes, dry earwax, and was at risk for baldness. By employing advanced DNA sequencing technology, the hair provides us a more revealing glimpse into our past than ever before possible. But perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this research is that we have new evidence for a migration of ancient humans about 5,500 years ago from Siberia to Greenland. Check out the editor’s summary here and listen to the Nature Podcast for details.

I have a hunch we’ll be hearing a lot more about the DNA of much older humans very soon…

Every scientist who writes a popular-level book harbors a secret (or maybe not-so-secret) ambition: to be invited on the Colbert Report. Not only because Stephen Colbert is a funny guy, and it’s a good way to sell books — although there is that. The truth is that Colbert (and the Daily Show) love talking to scientists. The sad part of that truth is that more people are exposed to real scientists doing cutting-edge research by watching Comedy Central than by watching, shall we say, certain channels you might have thought more appropriate venues for such conversations. But the happy part is that Colbert and Jon Stewart help bring some fun to science, and expose it to an audience it might not otherwise reach.

So, mark your calendars: I’m going to be on Colbert on Wednesday, March 3. (Scheduled to be, anyway — updates as events warrant.) I have a book to sell, not that I would have turned down the opportunity otherwise.

The precedents are pretty formidable — below the fold I’ve put some of Colbert’s recent interviews with some famous physics/astronomy types. Two things seem immediately obvious: (1) for scientists, these folks are very good at doing entertaining interviews, and (2) Stephen Colbert is an amazingly good interviewer, managing to mix topical jokes and his usual schtick with some really good questions, and more than a bit of real background knowledge. I think this is going to take some preparation.

Anyone want to venture some guesses as to what questions he might ask? Every little bit of anticipation helps.

(Note on above link to the Onion: “Punkin Chunkin,” “Manhunter,” and “Heavy Metal Taskforce” are all real Science Channel shows. “Extreme Gravity” is, as far as I can tell, not.)

Brian Greene

Janna Levin

Mark Devlin

Lisa Randall

Brian Cox

George Johnson

Neil deGrasse Tyson

The Iranian government announced yesterday that Google’s email service, Gmail, will be permanently shut down in the country, and will be replaced by a new state-run email service.

The announcement from the Iranian telecommunications agency came on the eve of the 31st anniversary of the Islamic Republic, when anti-government protesters were expected to take to the streets. Less than a year ago, thousands of protesters came out in huge rallies protesting the disputed June presidential election. The protests plunged Iran into its biggest internal crisis since the victory of Islamic revolution in 1979 which toppled the Shah [Reuters]. The opposition rallies were watched across the world on YouTube videos, and protesters not only blogged about the events but were also very vocal on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Tehran insists locking down Gmail is meant to boost local development of Internet technology and to build trust between people and the government [Wall Street Journal]. Meanwhile, Google confirmed a sharp drop in traffic in Iran and announced that many Iranians appeared to be having trouble accessing Gmail. The company added that Google strongly believes that people everywhere should be able to communicate freely online.

Internet experts have warned that Tehran’s latest move is yet another attempt to manipulate the flow of information within the country. The government already has control over Iranian TV, radio and newspapers. Richard Stiennon, founder of the Internet security firm IT-Harvest, said, “If the government can induce the population to use a state-controlled email service, it would have access to the content of all of those emails” [Wall Street Journal].

Tehran’s blocking of Gmail is yet another blow to the Internet giant’s global ambitions–Google recently announced that it will pull out of China after a cyber attack and concerns over censorship. The current suspension of services in Iran also pulls Google into a discussion about online freedom; Internet experts now wonder if Google will try to find new ways to make its services available in places where it is banned.

Iran’s move has also drawn concerns that Venezuela might take a cue from the authoritarian regime and be the next country to ban Gmail. President [Hugo] Chavez continues to crack down on the [opposition] protests, announcing that anyone using Twitter was guilty of an act of terrorism against the government [ZDNet].

Related Content:
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80beats: Google to China: No More Internet Censorship, or We Leave
80beats: Is Google the Guardian Angel of Rainforests?
80beats: Googlefest Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: 3 New Ways Google Will Take Over Your Life
80beats: China’s Internet Users Force Government to Back Down on Censorship

Image: Flickr/ Manfrys

Have you seen this man? Probably not: He lived 4,000 years ago.

The image to the left is not a wanted poster, but rather an artist’s impression of Inuk, the name given to him by the scientists who sequenced his genome. It’s the first time the genetic code of an ancient human has been deciphered this completely, and the researchers published their results this week in Nature.

Inuk died on an island off Greenland called Qeqertasussuk. Researchers don’t know the cause of death, but they do know he left bits of hair and bone that the permafrost preserved. Scientists found the thick clumps of hair—which could be the remnants of a 4,000-year-old haircut—in the 1980s, and stored them in the National Museum of Denmark. Today’s DNA sequencing technology allowed them to look back in time at what he may have been like. Inuk’s genes reveal he was a fairly young man, robustly built to exist in a frigid climate, with A-positive blood, dark skin, brown eyes, and thick, black hair on a scalp genetically susceptible to baldness [San Francisco Chronicle].

And, as DISCOVER covered the last time ancient hair from Greenland was in the news, Inuk’s genome also injected a surprise into the contentious debate over which groups of early peoples migrated to the Americas, and when. Inuk’s people, the Saqqaq, are the first known humans to have lived in Greenland. The origins of the culture are hotly debated by scientists, though most believe the Saqqaq’s ancestors were migrants from neighbouring populations, such as the Na-Dene of North America or the Inuit of the New World Arctic [The Guardian]. Not so, say the Inuk researchers. They say he was more closely related to people of eastern Siberia. However, since the Bering land bridge was long gone by the time Inuk’s people split from the Siberians 5,500 years ago, the researchers suggest they may have moved via boat or winter ice first to Alaska, and then across the Arctic to Greenland.

Since Inuk seems to have had plenty of hair despite his genome containing the codes for baldness, the researchers propose that he died young. Ancient hair is hard to find, but when scientists do unearth samples, they’re extremely helpful. Unlike the DNA found in ancient skin or bone, genes housed in hair can be recovered relatively free of contamination from the genes of fungi or bacteria [National Geographic]. Thus, the Inuk team says it was able to accurately decode about 80 percent of his genome.

Related Content:
80beats: We May Soon Be Able To Clone Neanderthals. But Should We?
80beats: Was Europe Occupied By Cannibals 7,000 Years Ago?
80beats: Ancient Hair Reveals Origin of Early Greenlanders
80beats: A Woolly Mammoth Evolutionary Smackdown

Image: Nuka Godfredsen

Shuttle Endeavour (STS-130) launches on Feb 8, 2010. Image credit: NASA/Ben Cooper

It’s been a long time since I changed out my desktop background and this picture was too good to pass up.

A quick shuttle update, experts on the ground are going over images of the shuttle looking for damage.  So far as far as

I’ve heard things look good.  Currently the shuttle is chasing down the ISS and should catch up Wednesday just after midnight.

There will be further inspections at that time as there always is, but like I said, things look good.

This is the next to the last scheduled flight of Endeavour.  The final flight is scheduled for July 29, 2010 as STS-134 and that flight will be the next to the last scheduled shuttle flight ever.  After that, well I’m not going there.

Grab a desktop below if you are so inclined (you can also get standard sizes at the NASA site).

The great French biologist Jacques Monod would have turned 100 today. I am personally fond of him for having said, “What is true for E. coli is true for the elephant,” but he did much more than coin lovely phrases about microbes. His work on how genes switch on and off earned him a Nobel in 1965, and he also gave deep thought to the philosophy of biology, seeing it as the interplay of chance and necessity. Here’s a blog post from Larry Moran with more, and here’s Monod’s 1971 book, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology

[Thanks to Jim Hu for pointing out this auspicious day!]

Steve Newton of the wonderful National Center for Science Education has written another article promoting science in the Huffington Post, this time about asteroid impacts. And special bonus; he gives your loyal host here a shout-out.

Specifically, he mentions that I have said that the Hale-Bopp comet was larger than what wiped out the dinosaurs. It’s true: the object that created the Chicxulub crater off the coast of the Yucatan was something like 10 km (6 miles) across. The nucleus of Hale-Bopp was roughly 60 km (36 miles) across, meaning it would have had something like 100 times the mass of the dinosaur killer. I have vivid nightmares about asteroid impacts, and one 100x the size of the K-T extinction event is beyond scary.

Right now we lack the capability to stop such a comet impact; Hale-Bopp was discovered less than two years before it sailed by the Earth. It missed us by a huge margin, but had it been aimed at us things would look a lot different around here right now. We may be years away from being able to stop such an event, but as I’ve written before, people like Rusty Schweikart and Dan Durda are seriously considering what we can do, and have even started the B612 Foundation to look into it.

If we’re serious about such threats, were just a few years away from being able to prevent them. Given that statistically big impacts are very rare and only happen every few hundred thousand years or so, I’m rather liking where we stand right now. But that’s if we actually do something now. We need to start working on mitigation techniques, and rockets to carry them. I’m glad the B612 Foundation is working on it.

Related articles: A Pro-science article on HuffPo?

You would think this bit of news would be coming out of Paris, but Britain has moved a step ahead of the French sartorially by giving their hospital gowns a designer makeover.

No more shifty, drafty paper gowns with bits of anatomy barely covered (there’s another reason why it’s called the I.C.U.); the new gown design aims to retain patients’ modesty and make their hospital stays a little less revealing.

The Design Council of Britain is all set to unveil the new designer gowns made by Ben de Lisi, who has dressed the likes of Kate Winslet. The new gowns are part of a project to improve dignity across the National Health Service.

Ben de Lisi told the BBC comfort was top of his mind when he designed the outfits.

“The old hospital gown was hideous, embarrassing, ill-fitting and probably ill-making too. You are away from home, ill, and in hospital and you have to wear this horrific garment with your arse hanging out. Give me a break. I wanted the new gowns to feel fabulous and aspirational.” De Lisi’s NHS collection, in his signature printed fabric, also includes pajama bottoms, nightwear and slippers.

Unlike many designer clothes, these gowns are a clever mix of functional and practical, says de Lisi–they allow patients to retain their modesty, but also give doctors access to the patient’s body via convenient “entrance points” in the gown. De Lisi stresses that these gowns do not tie in the back, to avoid the aforementioned arse issue.

However, the hospital gowns won’t be introduced to NHS facilities till 2011, which means patients who want hospital haute couture will have to wait a bit.

Related Content:
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Image: Ben de Lisi

Sure, Botox can banish crows feet, smooth those wrinkles, and lift those frown lines, making the client look more youthful–and somewhat expressionless. But the treatment may have effects that are more than skin deep. A new study suggests that by paralyzing the frown muscles that ordinarily are engaged when we feel angry, Botox short-circuits the emotion itself [Newsweek]. 

In the now-common cosmetic treatment, a doctor injects botulinum toxin, sold under the brand name Botox, under the skin. The toxin kicks in, temporarily paralyzing facial muscles, smoothing skin out, and making a person look less wrinkly as a result. That paralysis, however, seems to interfere with a known feedback loop, in which smiling adds to your happiness and frowning multiplies your sadness [LiveScience]. And tamping down a person’s emotions seems to interfere with the ability to read emotions in others. Says study leader David Havas: “Botox [also] induces a kind of mild, temporary cognitive blindness to information in the world, social information about the emotions of other people” [Discovery News].

Havas studied 40 first-time Botox patients before and after their treatments, and both times had them read happy, sad, or angry statements. They then had to push a button, indicating they had understood what emotion the text elicited. The results showed that the patients who had undergone the treatment still understood happy sentences as quickly as they had before; but when it came to angry or sad sentences, they took a little bit more time to comprehend the emotion. Psychologist Arthur Glenberg explained, “Normally, the brain would be sending signals to the periphery to frown, and the extent of the frown would be sent back to the brain. But here, that loop is disrupted, and the intensity of the emotion and of our ability to understand it when embodied in language is disrupted” [Newsweek].

Even though the delay was less than a second, the researchers say that could be long enough to prevent you from picking up subtle emotional cues when you’re talking to a person. As Glenberg said, “If you are slightly slower reacting as I tell you about something that made me really angry, that could signal to me that you did not pick up my message” [Newsweek].

The findings were discussed at the recent meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the study will soon be published in the journal Psychological Science.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Why Darwin Would Have Loved Botox
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DISCOVER: The Physics of…Wrinkles

Image: iStockphoto

Utah is only one state over, so when I see a website that tells me a fragment of a comet will hit it on March 1 of this year, I sit up and take notice.

Then I see the flashing text. The multiple colors. The GIANT FONT. The URL: satansrapture.com. Well, still. It can’t be all wrong can it? And then I see the title: "BIBLE CODE PREDICTIONS 2010".

Oh. I guess it can be all wrong.

OK, Utah, you can rest easy. I’m guessing March 1 will come and go with no comet impact, fragment or otherwise. The Bible code is a long debunked piece of antiscience garbage, basically just people looking at random patterns until they find one that kinda sorta if you squint your eyes and plug up your ears and yell LALALALALALA looks like it might say something sorta correct.

Maybe.

Anyway, I wouldn’t normally link to such low-level and obvious nonsense, but no matter how silly a doomsday claim is, there will always be people out there who take it seriously. So just in case, here you go: there are no scientific predictions that a comet piece will hit Utah, and the Bible Code is total 100% fictitious nonsense.

Unless… hmmm. The Earth is hit by about 100 tons of cosmic debris every night. A lot of that is from comets, small (and I mean small) bits of fluff shed off of previous comet passes. And if you live in Utah and go out March 1, you’re sure to see at least one or two shooting stars…

So maybe that website is right!

Or not. I’m guessing not.

How much time and energy is wasted as drivers circle around blocks and creep down streets, on the prowl for open parking spots? Burning fuel, they simmer silently in their seats, running late for work and appointments. Thankfully, technology has some solutions to ease the pain of finding parking.

Engineers Marco Gruteser and Wade Trappe of Rutgers University have combined ultrasonic sensors, GPS receivers, and cellular data networks to create a handy and ultra-cheap “parking-spot finder.” Their system distributes the task of finding vacant parking spots to sensors placed on a number of roving vehicles, and then combines the info to make a map of all the available parking in a region. That map could theoretically be accessed through smart phones or dashboard navigation devices.

Technology Review reports:

The engineers devised a prototype of a sensing platform using a $20 ultrasonic sensor that reports the distance to the nearest obstacle and a $100 GPS receiver that notes the corresponding location. They connected both to a lightweight PC with a Wi-Fi card to transmit the data to a central server.

The researchers developed an algorithm that detects parked vehicles based on the ultrasonic sensor’s readings of obstacles. Based on the objects’ width and depth, the readings were further refined to filter away parked bicycles and trees. Then, they integrated this data with maps, to pinpoint the exact location of available parking. The engineers report that they were accurate 95 percent of the time finding slotted parking spaces using this algorithm, and were right 96 percent of the time detecting unslotted parking.

The researchers say that as cars like taxicabs drive around busy areas, they could use the sensors to collect data. The information collected by cabs could be sent to a large central server using cellular networks, and all that info could then be combined to create detailed maps of available spaces. The researchers say this information could be sent back to cars with commercial GPS receivers, if a deal is struck with the navigation companies.

If employed, the Rutgers team’s cheap networking sensors could end up saving cities like San Francisco millions of dollars in “smart parking infrastructure.” Already, the SFpark project in San Francisco allows real time information on parking at metered spaces. The fixed sensors used in that system cost $500 to install and maintain each year–adding up to a tidy $3 million annually. The Rutgers engineers estimate that they could outfit 300 San Francisco cabs for about $200,000, and they say that cab fleet could cover the city’s entire downtown.

Related Content:
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DISCOVER: Do Cell Phones Put Blinders on the Driver?
DISCOVER: The Physics of . . . Changing Lanes

Image: flickr / Extra Ketchup

Suddenly this obscure, blind cave dweller has become extremely interesting. It turns out to be a close cousin of the most diverse group of animals on Earth, the insects.

Insects–all one-million-plus-species of them–belong to a lineage of animals called arthropods. The arthropods emerged early in the history of animals, and while many of the early arthropods such as trilobites disappeared long ago, a vast diversity thrive on Earth today. Living arthropods share a number of traits in common, such as a hardened, segmented exoskeleton and compound eyes. But they’ve evolved into lots of different forms, ranging from scorpions to horseshoe crabs to centipedes to daddy longlegs to butterflies. They fly through the sky, plunge to the bottom of the sea, thrive in scorching deserts, and hang out in your kitchen.

In order to understand how the arthropods evolved into all this diversity, scientists have labored for many decades to figure out how they are related to one another. It has been a tricky undertaking for many reasons. For one thing, different lineages of arthropods have frequently evolved the same traits independently. So just because two species have long stalk-shaped eyes doesn’t mean that they share a close stalk-shaped ancestor. It’s possible they might have each evolved from two separate ancestors with ordinary eyes.

When scientists started to sequence DNA from arthropods, they hoped that they would be able to get a sharper picture of arthropod evolution. It has helped clear up some things. For example, for a long time scientists believed that insects were closely related to centipedes and millipedes. Along with their anatomical similarities, these two groups are also both mainly land-dwellers. But studies on DNA have pretty clearly demonstrated that, in fact, insects are closer to crustaceans like lobsters and shrimp than they are to centipedes and millipedes. So the two groups descend from two separate invasions of land.

However, studies on DNA did not immediately make all the uncertainties about arthropods disappear. And there’s no reason to have expected it would. DNA is not magic. It’s a great repository of information about the history of life, but it’s not perfect. For example, just as two insects may independently evolve stalk eyes, two lineages may evolve a similar sequence in a particular stretch of DNA. Another problem arises with groups like arthropods that blossomed very quickly into many lineages a long time ago. It’s hard to tease apart the ordering of the branches, just as it’s hard to tease apart distant galaxies in a telescope.

So scientists have been gathering more arthropod DNA and analyzing it in new ways, in order to find strong evidence for kinships. In Nature today, a team of scientists at the University of Maryland, Duke University, and the Natural History of Museum in LA have presented a particularly massive analysis. They lined up 41,000 bases of DNA from 62 genes in 75 species spanning the diversity of arthropods. They found that a number of the branches of the tree held up under a number of different statistical tests. The tree, in all its full glory, is reproduced at the bottom of this post.

In some respects, it supports a lot of traditional taxonomy. For example, everything we call an insect are closer to each other than to any arthropod not considered an insect. But there are also some intriguing surprises.

The one I’ll mention here is the cave-dwelling critter I mentioned at the top of the post. It’s called Speleonectes tulumensis. It lives only in the pitch-black, oxygen-free waters at the bottom of deep caves in the Bahamas. It belongs to a group of arthropods, which the authors of the new study dub Xenocarida, that have mystified scientists ever since they were discovered in the 1980s. Some researchers argued that they were the most primitive of all crustaceans. Yet some xenocarids have remarkably elaborate brains. Thanks to the fact that they live at the bottom of deep caves, scientists haven’t given them quite the attention they’ve lavished on fruit flies and honeybees and other arthropods in easier reach.

According to the new study, however, they deserve the attention of anyone interested in where insects came from. That’s because they are the closest living relative to the insects (along with springtails and other six-legged arthropods, the hexapods). They can therefore offer clues to what the forerunners of insects were like. Insects may not have evolved out of deep caves–it’s possible that xenocarids lived in other parts of the ocean in the past but have only survived in one extreme habitat. But before there were insects, this new study suggests, the proto-insects may have looked like this. It’s yet another demonstration of the knowledge that we can get even from rare, obscure species. If we had accidentally wiped out the xenocarids, no one would have ever known the important place they have in the history of this arthropod-dominated world.

The Sun does a lot of interesting things while it’s sitting out in space; not the least of which is to periodically fling billions of tons of charged particles out into space, with an average speed of 500 km/s.  These are Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs), and they are quite a show.

USGov/NASA, TRACE

Often compared with solar flares, CMEs are (as the name suggests) massive ejections of matter from the Sun’s corona.  Not all CMEs are “pointing at” the Earth; many are discharged harmlessly into space.  It doesn’t have to be “spot-on”, either.  In traveling, the mass spreads out and accelerates (or decelerates) to about the speed of the solar “wind” (400-500 km/s).

When all this highly-charged mass hits the Earth’s magnetosphere, it compresses it on the “leading edge”, the side facing the Sun, and elongates the “following edge”, the side facing away from the Sun.  Of course, the particles falling back to Earth along the magnetic lines is what’s responsible for the Aurorae.

USGov/NASA, TRACE, Aaron Kasse

If unprepared, CMEs can cause a great deal of damage to satellites and power grids serving large communities.  The NASA-launched STEREO Mission, Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory, allows for constant stereoscopic imaging and observation of the Sun.  This will give scientists enough warning (hopefully) when an extremely energetic CME is headed Earth’s direction.

For some very nice images of the Sun, take a look at these collected by TRACE.

This is cool: recent tech advances have lowered the cost of making aerogel sufficiently that it can be used for home insulation!

I’ve written about his bizzaro stuff before: it’s a silica gel that has so many air pockets in it it is essentially barely more dense than air itself. It has a lot of uses, like putting on board spacecraft to catch particles from comets. But it’s such a good insulator that it may very well revolutionize the industry.

It’s been around since before the space program, so we can’t attribute this invention to space age tech, but it does have a lot of uses, and I bet as the price lowers people will find lots of other ways to use it.

I love living in the future.

Last year DISCOVER asked the question, “Did We Mate With Neanderthals, or Did We Murder Them?” Now, Zach Zorich at Archaeology magazine is asking another big question about our hominid siblings: Should we bring them back?

Thanks to a slew of recent advances, the possibility is getting closer. 80beats reported a year ago that researchers had published the rough draft of the Neanderthal genome. However, that’s likely to contain many errors because it’s so difficult to reconstruct ancient DNA. Within hours of death, cells begin to break down in a process called apoptosis. The dying cells release enzymes that chop up DNA into tiny pieces. In a human cell, this means that the entire three-billion-base-pair genome is reduced to fragments about 50 base-pairs long [Archaeology].

Even if scientists succeed in figuring out the entire Neanderthal genome, they’d be faced with another problem before they could even consider the possibility of cloning one of these ancient hominids: We don’t have any living Neanderthal cells to work with. Thus, researchers will have to figure out how to put DNA into chromosomes, and how to get those chromosomes into the nucleus of a cell. What about altering the DNA inside a living human cell, and tweaking our genetic code to match the Neanderthal’s? This kind of genetic engineering can already be done, but very few changes can be made at one time. To clone a Neanderthal, thousands or possibly millions of changes would have to be made to a human cell’s DNA [Archaeology].

Even if scientists manage to put Neanderthal DNA in a cell nucleus, their problems aren’t over. The next step in creating a baby clone is to move the cell nucleus into the egg of a related species in a technique called nuclear transfer, and then implanting the altered egg in a female who can bear it to term. But in this process, which has been extensively tested on animals, cells often get sick or die, causing fetuses to die in the womb or clones to die young. That’s why the vast majority of scientists oppose using this method on people. Even if nuclear transfer cloning could be perfected in humans or Neanderthals, it would likely require a horrifying period of trial and error [Archaeology].

But Archaeology suggests that many of these obstacles will eventually be overcome, and proposes another cloning option: making Neanderthal stem cells. Last year researchers managed to turn mouse skin cells back into a pluripotent state, where they can act like stem cells, and used those to create a cloned mouse. Cloning a Neanderthal is a lot different than cloning a mouse, but if the process worked, a cloned Neanderthal would grow up with their genes expressing they way they were meant to.

That’s the “could we.” But what about the “should we?” More work has been done on this than you might think. In 1997, Stuart Newman, a biology professor at New York Medical School attempted to patent the genome of a chimpanzee-human as a means of preventing anyone from creating such a creature [Archaeology]. But he lost his case because the patent office said it would violate the 13th amendment prohibitions against slavery. And since Neanderthals would be even more human, it stands to reason that they’d receive at least some human rights protections.

Rightfully so. But as the bioethicist Bernard Rollin points out in the Archaeology piece, there’s more to worry about than the law. While Neanderthals are our close relatives on the evolutionary tree, you’d know one if you saw one. Tulane anthropologist Trenton Holliday argues that they could talk and act like us, therefore eventually they’d fit in. But that seems like wishful thinking. With no culture, no peers, and an unknown capacity to cope with the modern world mentally or physically, a Neanderthal would be adrift—caught between a zoo animal and a human being. The main point in cloning one would be for scientists to study it, but as law professor Lori Andrews says, a Neanderthal could be granted enough legal protection to make doing extensive research on it illegal, not just unethical.

That’s not to say there would be no benefits to science. But some things are best left in the past.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

After much debate over balancing the need for independent scientific testing and the needs of poor Indian farmers, the Indian government has decided to put on hold the introduction of genetically modified eggplant in the country. The move hampers the expansion of seed makers including Monsanto Co. in the world’s second-most populous nation [BusinessWeek]. The government said there was no overriding food security argument for GM eggplant, and added that more safety studies needed to be done before the ban could be reconsidered.

There is little evidence that GMO eggplant would cause harm to people eating it, but the crop is consumed very often in India, and some scientists and regulators argued that they needed more proof that long-term consumption wouldn’t cause a problem. “It is my duty to adopt a cautious, precautionary principle-based approach and impose a moratorium on the release of Bt Brinjal till such time independent scientific studies establish, to the satisfaction of both the public and professionals, the safety of the product” [Daily News and Analysis], said the environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, who delivered the announcement.

The eggplant had been genetically modified by introducing a gene called cry1Ac from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt. The gene instructs the plant to produce a protein toxic to certain insects, so the GM eggplants would have been able to fend off common borer pests. The Bt was sourced from Monsanto, which already sells Bt corn and Bt cotton seeds in the United States. In the 1990s, Monsanto triggered a huge debate in India by introducing genetically modified cotton.

Alhough the GM eggplant (or brinjal, as it is called in India) was cleared by a federal agency, the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC), the government put the roll-out on hold. Ramesh also said the national bureau of plant genetic resources had found that India’s diversity rich regions were likely to be affected by the introduction of Bt Brinjal due to gene flow [Daily News and Analysis]—the tendency of crops to cross-breed and share genetic traits with other plants.

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Image: Wikmedia / David. Monniaux