Nature’s Nicola Jones interviewed me about the art and business of writing books, and you can read it in this week’s issue. It’s part of a series of interviews about books that will be appearing this month.

For folks who already spend most of their time updating Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts, here is one more site to add to the mix. None other than Google has decided to jump into the social networking fray by launching Google Buzz–a social networking tool that is also integrated with email and mobile phones.

Buzz can be accessed through any Gmail account and lets users share updates, photos, links, or anything else with their Gmail contacts. Bloggers have likened it to Twitter, except that it dwells within your Gmail. Google has already rolled out Buzz to some journalists, and Gmail users can expect to see it within their inboxes over the next couple of days.

The Buzz tab will be located right below your inbox tab. To get someone started with Buzz, Gmail is expected to pull info about the user’s contacts to create a list of people who the user frequently emails and instant messages with. This list becomes the blueprint for the people the user “follows.” The user can then “buzz” them, sharing pictures and links. When a user posts to Google Buzz, he can share publicly to followers and his Google profile, or privately to his existing Gmail groups or custom groups. Notifications of shares and comments will appear in a user’s inbox with a special Buzz icon next to those items. Comments will appear in real time [ReadWriteWeb].

It may seem that Google is late to the social networking party–and indeed, it may be tough to convince Facebook’s 350 million active users to switch to a new platform. But Google Buzz does have one edge, in that it aims to be the easiest, most functional social networking tool for smart phones. If you log onto Google Buzz on your smart phone, the company will find you via your GPS, translate that from lat-long coordinates into English, “I’m outside Waldorf-Astoria,” and use that for all sorts of services. Your friends can now see where you are and hook up for a chance meeting…. If you’re looking for a good nearby restaurant, Google Buzz will let you scan all the public posts about establishments in your area [The Big Money].

There is a downside to this utility. Since Buzz will garner so many details about a user’s movements, some worry that our entire lives will be in Google’s database, making us active targets for advertisers. And with Buzz’s deep-embedded real-time tap on your life and both passive and pushed advertising, alongside its arch-rival Apple’s extensive plans for location-aware ads, the upshot is that there may not be a moment in your day when you’re not sharing deeply-personal data with Google, and having personalized ads thrust upon you [Fast Company].

It’s also worth noting that Facebook, the current ruler of the social networking universe, won’t just be standing by and watching Google tempt away its users. Facebook is reportedly working on a “Gmail-killer” tool of its own. Facebook is completely rewriting their messaging product and is preparing to launch a fully featured webmail product in its place, according to a source with knowledge of the product. Internally it’s known as Project Titan [TechCrunch].

To get a sense of how Buzz works, take a look at this demo video.

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Image: Google

Here at Fortress Zimmer, we’re gradually getting buried under the latest Snowmageddon, Blizzaster, SnOMG, or whatever you want to call it. The real spectacle so far has been the giddiness of local meteorologists on television and on weather blogs. My wife Grace reminded me of this excellent 1954 essay by E.B. White, in which he described listening to the radio about Hurrican Edna. Suddenly, I feel linked to history.

It became evident to me after a few fast rounds with the radio that the broadcasters had opened up on Edna awfully far in advance, before she had come out of her corner, and were spending themselves at a reckless rate. During the morning hours, they were having a tough time keeping Edna going at the velocity demanded of emergency broadcasting. I heard one fellow from, I think, Riverhead, Long Island, interviewing his out-of-doors man, who had been sent abroad in a car to look over conditions on the eastern end of the island.

“How would you say the roads were?” asked the tense voice.

“They were wet,” replied the reporter, who seemed to be in a sulk.

“Would you say the spray from the puddles was dashing up around the mudguards?” inquired the desperate radioman.

“Yeah,” replied the reporter.

It was one of those confused moments, emotionally, when the listener could not be quite sure what position radio was taking–for hurricanes or against them.

Last week, the Harvard Kennedy School had a great event on just why it is that we are up such a creek with respect to global warming, politics, and the U.S. public. The featured speakers were Andrew Revkin and Matt Nisbet. Nisbet has a long post providing the audio of the event and a summary of its contents.

He was also kind enough to summarize a question I asked at the end; as the author of The Republican War on Science, I feared my wares were being misused, and the tables unfortunately turned, as now the anti-science folks are crusading at climate scientists and the Obama administration on allegedly scientific grounds:

3. A third important question came from friend and journalist Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science and blogger at Discover’s The Intersection. Mooney noted that in his own book, he had plied the public accountability frame to draw attention to perceived political wrong doing on the part of the Bush administration and conservatives. This message was also taken up by many liberal advocates and organizations. Now that the Obama administration is in power, observed Mooney, shouldn’t we have been prepared that climate skeptics were going to turn to the public accountability message to leverage their own political goals?

I must confess that unfortunately, I wasn’t prepared enough. I fell for the enthusiasm after Obama’s promise to restore science to its “rightful place” in American life. I myself wrote at Slate that the “war on science” was over. That was wrong.

Granted, in a certain sense the “war” I wrote about did indeed end with the Bush administration. For there is no longer any systematic attempt to undermine scientific integrity coming from within the federal government–and that was the chief characteristic of the Bush “war on science.”

However, what I and many others failed to anticipate was that a kind of guerilla war on science–and especially climate science–would take its place, driven by blogs like Climate Depot and Watts Up With That. This war springs from the same politics, but it is coming from those who are out in the wilderness, rather than running the government.

As a result, this war hits harder, and is much more personal—aimed at discrediting individual researchers, by sifting through their emails and accusing them of scandalous wrongdoing. And it is draws its momentum from the vast numbers of online commenters who closely follow the climate “scandal” stories and then show up at this blog, and other ones, to leave comments attacking scientists like Mann, and institutions like the IPCC.

And how do we counter this war? Well, that’s something I’ll ask readers to ponder…..

Yesterday’s book club raised the question of what first inspires young people to get interested in science. Many Cosmic Variance readers aren’t scientists at all, but a lot of you are. So — what first set you down this road? For purposes of this highly non-scientific investigation, let’s define “scientist” fairly broadly, as someone who has either received a bachelor’s degree in some scientific field, or is currently on the road to doing so (e.g. someone currently in high school or college). Even if you’re not currently a full-time scientist, we’ll count you if you got the degree.

Here’s a poll based on my quick guesses as to what might be the leading causes of nudging people into science.

What first inspired you to study science?
	Parent, relative, or friend.
	Role model outside friends and family.
	Teacher or a particular class.
	Science fair, mathletics, or other scholastic activity.
	Personal hobby or tinkering.
	Science books (non-fiction).
	Science fiction or fantasy literature.
	Movies, TV, radio.
	The internet (for you youngsters).
	Other
Free polls from Pollhost.com

I’d be very interested to hear if I’m leaving out some hugely influential category. And you can vote for more than one thing, if you think you were influenced by multiple sources. Among the many flaws of this kind of poll is that you might not actually remember what first inspired you — maybe it was hearing something on the radio, which made you go check out a book, but you remember the book and not the radio show. So be it; just try your best to be honest.

Fat is normally not a word associated with anorexics, but researchers at the Children’s Hospital Boston suggest that people who suffer from the eating disorder anorexia nervosa have some fat stashed away in a surprising place. They may not have a thick layer of fleshy insulation like people with regular amounts of fat, but anorexics do store fat in their bone marrow–with detrimental results. The findings will be published in the February issue of Journal of Bone and Mineral Research.

In the study, researchers took MRI scans of the knees of 40 girls, half of whom were anorexic and the other half healthy. The average age of these girls was 16. Radiologists who studied the MRIs found that girls with anorexia had very high fat content in their knees and less than half as much healthy red marrow.

The researchers say that at an age when young girls should be developing bone mass, the malnutrition induces the bone marrow to stop yielding cells that aid in building bone, and instead redirects the marrow towards forming fat cells.

Science Daily reports:

One speculation is that it’s the body’s attempt to store energy and preserve warmth. Anorexics often develop hypothermia because of a lack of insulating fat, and are often hospitalized with extremely low body temperatures.

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Image: iStockphoto

Plenty has changed since the last update of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the operating manual for psychiatrists, was published in 1994. With the new fifth version set for a 2013 release, the task force behind the update released its recommended changes for public comment this week, and comments will likely come in droves.

The proposed changes touch many of the psychiatric issues that get people the most riled up. For example, the four separate diagnoses related to autism — autistic disorder, Asperger’s disorder, childhood disintegrative disorder and pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified — would now be referred to as autism spectrum disorders [Los Angeles Times].

That won’t sit well with many people who have Asperger’s, Geraldine Dawson of the advocacy group Autism Speaks tells the Los Angeles Times, because they see their condition as something distinct from the others. People with Asperger’s usually don’t have the cognitive and verbal problems that often come with autism, and they can have savant-like abilities. Some scientists are displeased as well. “By massively pathologizing people under these categories, you tend to put them on an automatic path to medication, even if they are experiencing normal distress,” said Jerome C. Wakefield, a professor of social work and psychiatry at New York University [Washington Post].

Other proposed changes include officially classifying binge eating as disorder—but not obesity. Similarly, there’s a proposal to include “hypersexual disorder,” but neither sex nor Internet use (not you, dear reader) would fall under the new “behavioral addiction” category (though gambling would).

In another significant revision, the new DSM would add a childhood disorder called temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria, a recommendation that grew out of recent findings that many wildly aggressive, irritable children who have been given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder do not have it. The misdiagnosis led many children to be given powerful antipsychotic drugs, which have serious side effects, including metabolic changes [The New York Times].

Beyond shuffling the definitions of particular conditions, the new version of DSM would slightly alter the diagnostic process from the top, changing the definition of what a personality disorder is. The proposed revision suggests that instead of a pervasive pattern of thinking/emotionality/behaving, a personality disorder reflects “adaptive failure” involving: “Impaired sense of self-identity” or “Failure to develop effective interpersonal functioning” [Psychology Today].

But while that could sound to some ears like quibbling over semantics, the American Psychiatric Association says that the details that go into its bible couldn’t be more important. “It not only determines how mental disorders are diagnosed, it can impact how people see themselves and how we see each other,” said Alan Schatzberg, the association’s president. “It influences how research is conducted as well as what is researched” [Washington Post].

The ASA’s proposals are now up for review and public comment at dsm5.org.

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Image: iStockphoto

We live on a wonderful planet with a beautiful Moon. But I sometimes think we got gypped.

The view from Saturn can be sooooo much cooler:

That’s the moon Enceladus passing in front of (what we science-types call "transiting") Rhea. Enceladus is about 500 km (300 miles) across and Rhea is 3 times bigger. Rhea was about 2.7 million km (1.7 million miles) from Cassini when these shots were taken, and Enceladus a bit closer at 2.3 million km (1.4 million miles). Of course, by a bit closer I mean the same distance our Moon is from the Earth, so there was plenty of room for this mutual event.

Here’s a zoom of the middle frame:

Awesome. Note that these images were taken about one minute apart, so things were hopping. It’s amazing to me that not only can we put a probe around Saturn and get images of its moons, but our math and physics are so freaking accurate we can say, "Hey, you know what? On this date at this time if we turn Cassini that way we’ll see a moon over 2 million kilometers away pass in front of another one nearly 3 million kilometers away."

Every morning, I have a 50/50 chance of finding my keys. That kinda puts things in perspective.

Love is in the air at NCBI ROFL! Tuesday-Friday this week, we will feature research articles about love in its most physical form (okay, we just mean plain ol’ sex). Enjoy!

“While writing a book on paraphilias, the author made a thorough search of early references to paraphilias in literature, especially the Bible. Surprisingly just one published paper was available in the literature having any discussion on the references of paraphilia in the Bible, and that too was in French. [Bieder J. The polymorphous sexual deviant: a reading of Freud and the Bible. Ann Med Psychol (Paris) 1973;2(2):274-81 [in French]]. For the readers in English language, nothing was available on this interesting topic. The author undertook the task of reading the original Bible and finding out instances of paraphilias mentioned therein. Main paraphilias, abnormal sexual behavior and sexual crimes to which explicit allusions were present in the Holy Bible were adultery, incest, sexual harassment, drug facilitated sexual assault, rape, gang rape, homosexuality, transvestism, voyeurism, bestiality, exhibitionism and necrophilia.”

Image: flickr/charlie cravero

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Tsang Cheung Shing is the ceramic artist who created this incredible pottery installation called “Ying Yeung.” The name refers to a Chinese beverage of mixed coffee and tea and also symbolizes the mandarin duck, a metaphor for marriage and love. Just amazing.

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

Click here to view the embedded video.

Marian is coming right up, just wanted to share the shuttle launch.

Source

Baboon syndrome

“Andersen et al described baboon syndrome in 1984. It was characterized by a clinical presentation of systemic contact dermatitis with pruritic and confluent maculopapular light-red eruption, localized in the gluteal area and the major flexures, developed several hours or days after drug or agent contact. This syndrome has a pathognomonic distribution but its cause has not been elucidated yet. Histopathology of the lesions shows non-specific features of dermatitis. Several drugs have been previously described as responsible for the Baboon syndrome origin. Mercury is the most frequent implicated agent; other agents are nickel, different antibiotics, heparine, aminophylline, pseudoephedrine, terbinafine and immunoglobulins.”

Love is in the air this week at NCBI ROFL! Tuesday-Thursday this week, we will feature research articles about love in its most physical form (ok, we mean plain ol’ sex). Enjoy!

Image: flickr/mixlass

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Over the weekend, everybody was emailing me this Washington Post Outlook article, which critiques my first book in the context of arguing that liberals are sneeringly dismissive of the conservative intellect, and guilty of “intellectual condescension”:

This liberal vision emphasizes the dissemination of ideologically driven views from sympathetic media such as the Fox News Channel. For example, Chris Mooney’s book “The Republican War on Science” argues that policy debates in the scientific arena are distorted by conservatives who disregard evidence and reflect the biases of industry-backed Republican politicians or of evangelicals aimlessly shielding the world from modernity. In this interpretation, conservative arguments are invariably false and deployed only cynically. Evidence of the costs of cap-and-trade carbon rationing is waved away as corporate propaganda; arguments against health-care reform are written off as hype orchestrated by insurance companies.

Let me go on the record as saying that I am no fan whatsoever of intellectual condescension. I think there is way too much of it on my side of the aisle. So I should be at least somewhat sympathetic with this author, one Gerard Alexander of the University of Virginia.

But here’s the problem. He gets my book’s arguments almost entirely wrong. First, I don’t argue that conservatives “disregard evidence.” The problem is that they make up their own evidence, using their own “scientists” to do so. They then use this pseudo-expertise to disregard expertise and consensus–a very different thing.

Second, I never argued conservatives were arguing “cynically.” It was obvious they believed what they said on matters of science. After all, they had their pseudoexperts to bank on.

Finally, I clearly distinguished between distorting the facts of science on the one hand, and making economic, moral, and policy arguments on the other. So a sentence like Alexander’s last one completely misses the boat: “Evidence of the costs of cap-and-trade carbon rationing is waved away as corporate propaganda; arguments against health-care reform are written off as hype orchestrated by insurance companies.” This stuff has nothing to do with the arguments of The Republican War on Science.

If there is ever a case for being intellectually condescending–and I’m not sure that there is–perhaps it’s to someone who critiques you while getting your arguments wrong.

Five years ago, the Cassini spacecraft first detected plumes of water ice emanating from Saturn’s moon Enceladus, making the moon one of the best hopes for finding life somewhere else in the solar system. Astronomers have argued over whether or not those jets come from a subsurface ocean of liquid water, but new findings by Cassini provide evidence that water could indeed be sloshing around beneath the frozen surface of this small moon.

During a 2008 pass through the plumes, the spacecraft found negatively charged water molecules. Back home this short-lived type of ion is produced where water is moving, such as in waterfalls or crashing ocean waves [Scientific American]. Researcher Andrew Coates led the study, which is coming out in the journal Icarus.

Besides the water ions, the team also found negatively charged hydrocarbons—huge ions that could result from Saturn’s magnetic field and the sun’s ultraviolet rays interacting with the atmosphere of Enceladus. Researchers find the combination of ions enticing. “While it’s no surprise that there is water there, these short-lived ions are extra evidence for sub-surface water and where there’s water, carbon and energy, some of the major ingredients for life are present,” said Dr Coates [BBC News]. Previous studies have shown that the Enceladus plumes contain ammonia, which could act as an antifreeze to keep an ocean in liquid state, and others have argued that the plumes are spewing sodium, which would indicate that liquid water had been in contact with rocks that leach salt.

Cassini’s new ion findings make Enceladus look a little more like its big brother, the huge and also hugely interesting Saturnian moon of Titan. In fact, the same plasma spectrometer on board Cassini has been used to confirm the presence of large negative hydrocarbon ions high in the atmosphere of Titan, indicating the presence of an organic mix of chemicals called “tholins” on Titan’s surface [Discovery News]. NASA just extended Cassini’s mission by seven more years, giving it time to learn even more about both of these marvelous moons.

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Image: NASA / Cassini

You might not be a smoker yourself, but hanging around people who are smoking can cause you to inhale noxious cigarette fumes. For years, scientists have cautioned against the ill-effects of such second-hand smoke. Now they’re warning about the dangers of “third-hand smoke”—the chemical traces that cling to a smoker, and that are left behind in a room where someone has been smoking.

A team of researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that remnants of a smoke don’t just inertly settle onto surfaces, they can react with a common gas (nitrous acid, which is emitted from gas appliances and vehicles, among other sources) to create carcinogenic compounds known as tobacco-specific nitrosamines (TSNAs) [Scientific American]. The study (pdf) was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study suggests that even if a smoker puffs outside, some smoke swirls and settles in clothing and hair and is brought back into the building. With smoking inside, the left-over nicotine residue settles on surfaces like furniture, carpets, and curtains, where it can mix with common gas and turn into the carcinogenic TSNAs. Says study coauthor Hugo Destaillats: “It’s this third-hand smoke residue that is the source of the smells that we all easily perceive in a room or a car where cigarettes have been smoked, as a consequence of such places being coated with cigarette emissions…. And we found that such emissions do give rise to new pollutants when they react with non-cigarette compounds found indoors” [BusinessWeek].

To study how the carcinogenic compounds were created, scientists used samples from the glove compartment of a pick-up truck whose driver smoked in the truck regularly. They also studied a cellulose-containing paper similar to a carpet or drape and let it absorb nicotine from cigarette smoke. They then put this paper in a chamber containing nitrous acid and studied the reaction between nicotine and the nitrous acid. In both the lab and in the truck, the reaction between nicotine and nitrous acid produced substantial amounts of three types of toxic compounds…. All three compounds belonged to a group called nitrosamines, which are known to prompt tumor growth [Discovery News].

The researchers say with so many toxic compounds, young infants could be at a risk as they crawl around on rugs and come into contact with dust. However, they also caution that there needs to be more research into third-hand smoke, and note that the study doesn’t indicate that homes and couches that smell of smoke could potentially cause cancer. To deal with third-hand smoke, researchers recommend avoiding smoking in closed spaces like homes and cars. Also, in enclosed spaces that have seen plenty of puffs over the years, they suggest replacing furniture, carpet and even wallboard to cut down on the amount of TSNA exposure [Scientific American].

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Image: flickr/SuperFantastic

Under the Microscope is a cool website ‘where women and science connect.’ It’s the online component of the Women Writing Science project at The Feminist Press featuring stories from women about science, technology, engineering, and math, and aimed to inspire the next generation of STEM pioneers. Last week I was delighted to chat with one of the hosts, Kristina Necovska. Here’s an excerpt from our Q&A:

UTM: I’m curious whether you’ve found that the public’s ability to distinguish credibility and sound arguments is going out the window?

SK: I’m very concerned. We just saw this hack into e-mails of climate change. Most people made very quick judgments without fully understanding the context of what they were reading. [There is] a survey just released by George Mason University and Yale Center for Climate Change Communication. It’s a dismal report, people more than ever don’t “believe” in climate change.

The big point here is that pseudoscience is on the rise. … It’s dangerous and I’m not sure what it means for the future of science and it’s a big red flag in terms of where we’re going. Science needs a better platform. It’s certainly not about PR in a traditional sense but we have to think about how we’re represented when we’re working against so many other forces that have a certain vested interest. We’re trying to emphasize the best research and [research] is very dynamic. There’s no black and white in the way that the pseudo-scientific [groups] want to represent things.

UTM: Can you give us just a few examples of what ordinary people can do to benefit science literacy?

SK: I think just being engaged and being interested is a big part of it. Looking for sources that you should be able to trust like universities. More and more young scientists are creating their own websites in order to counter the rubbish that’s out there. I’d love to see more young people engaged in their communities — like those that have a [bachelor of science] but are unsure whether they want to go to graduate school — writing op-eds or working with local politicians or schools.

Read the full interview here and stick around to check out other featured stories and interviews at Under The Microscope.

Welcome to this week’s installment of the From Eternity to Here book club. This week we’re tackling two chapters at once: Chapter Four, “Time is Personal,” and Chapter Five, “Time is Flexible.” That’s just because these chapters are relatively short; next time we’ll return to one chapter per week.

Excerpt:

Starting from a single event in Newtonian spacetime, we were able to define a surface of constant time that spread uniquely throughout the universe, splitting the set of all events into the past and the future (plus “simultaneous” events precisely on the surface). In relativity we can’t do that. Instead, the light cone associated with an event divides spacetime into the past of that event (events inside the past light cone), the future of that event (inside the future light cone), the light cone itself, and a bunch of points outside the light cone that are neither in the past nor the future.

It’s that last bit that really gets people. In our reflexively Newtonian way of thinking about the world, we insist that some far away event either happened in the past, the future, or at the same time as some event on our own world line. In relativity, for spacelike separated events (outside one another’s light cones), the answer is “none of the above.” We could choose to draw some surfaces that sliced through spacetime, and label them “surfaces of constant time,” if we really wanted to. That would be taking advantage of the definition of time as a coordinate on spacetime, as discussed in Chapter One. But the result reflects our personal choice, not a real feature of the universe. In relativity, the concept of “simultaneous faraway events” does not make sense.

These two chapters take on a task that is part of the responsibility of any good book on modern cosmology or gravity: explaining Einstein’s theory of relativity. Both special relativity and general relativity, hence two chapters. In retrospect they are pretty short, so an argument could be made that I should have just combined them into a single chapter.

The special challenge of these chapters is precisely that many readers — but not all — will already have read numerous other popular-level expositions of relativity. But you have to do it. Fortunately, my favorite way of talking about relativity is a little bit different from the standard one, and lines up well with the overarching goal of understanding the meaning of “time.” In particular, I try to make the point that the secret to relativity is to think locally — to compare things happening right next to each other in spacetime, not events that are widely separated. You’re allowed to compare separated events, of course, but the answers are necessarily dependent on arbitrary choices of coordinates, and that leads to endless confusion. So you won’t read a lot about “length contraction” or “time dilation,” but you will read a lot about the actual amount of time measured along a trajectory.

Unfortunately, a search for vivid examples of the maxim “freely-falling paths through spacetime experience the longest amount of proper time” led me directly to the most embarrassing mistake in the book. (At least, “most embarrassing mistake so far uncovered.”) Sordid details below the fold!

The mistake is the claim that a clock that sits stationary on a tower will experience less proper time than a clock that orbits the Earth at the same height above ground. That’s wrong: the orbiting clock will measure less time. This appears in the paragraph at the bottom of page 85 and top of 86, and is elevated from “unfortunate” to “a real doozy” by being illustrated in graphic detail by the figure on page 86. Not really any way I can claim it was just a typo.

The subtle issue underlying the mistake is illustrated in this figure, which shows two paths connecting two points on a sphere. Both paths are great circles. The shortest distance between two points on a sphere is a great circle; but it certainly doesn’t follow that any path following a great circle gives us the shortest distance between two points. If you go more than half the way around the sphere, you end up with a pretty long path!

The same kind of thing happens in spacetime. The trajectory of longest proper time between two events will always be a freely-falling trajectory (a geodesic). But not every freely-falling path gives us the longest time, and that’s exactly the case in this example. Given two events at the same position above the Earth, the actual path of longest time is a radial freely-falling orbit. If you want your clock to experience the longest time it can, you throw it straight up in the air to where the gravitational field is weaker (and clocks run more quickly with respect to time measured at infinity) and let it fall back down. A circular orbit actually loses time by staying at the same altitude but zipping around the Earth. I relied on my affection for the general underlying principle, and didn’t bother to sit down and work out the actual numbers in this case, so I never found the mistake. Pretty sure my membership in the general relativists’ guild is going to be permanently revoked for this one.

If you’re still not convinced of the wrongness of my example, here’s an equation, the line element along a circular trajectory in the equatorial plane in the Schwarzschild metric:

On the left we have a small interval (squared) of the proper time τ, what a clock would measure along some path. The first term on the right is the contribution from our motion with respect to t, the time measured at infinity; for any given amount of t, we experience less proper time τ as our height r decreases and the coefficient (1-2GM/r) becomes smaller. The second term on the right is the contribution from our angular motion φ. Taking the square root of the whole thing and integrating along a path gives you the proper time.

We don’t have to go through the entire calculation to convince ourselves that staying stationary on the tower has a longer proper time than the circular orbit does. Both trajectories get the same contribution from the first term on the right side, while the second term is zero for the clock on the tower (it’s not moving, so dφ=0), but it’s negative for the orbit. So the orbit is definitely less time. To be corrected in the next printing.

The deep point, of course, remains true: the time measured by clocks in general relativity depends on their path through spacetime, and the way to maximize that time is to take a freely-falling path. Just not that one.

Whether your fear is panicked, like in a life-or-death situation, or deliberative, like a decision about whether to take a big risk on game show, it all comes back to the amygdala. And a new study of patients with lesions on the amygdala, reported by Caltech scientists in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that damage to our brain’s fear center might turn people into reckless gamblers.

The researchers found two women with Urbach-Wiethe disease, which results in damage to the almond-shaped amygdala. Benedetto De Martinoa and his team paired those two with 12 people with undamaged brains, and presented everyone with a series of gambling tests. The study found that healthy volunteers would only opt to gamble if the potential gains were one and a half to two times the size of the potential losses [BBC News]. The women with Urbach-Wiethe, however, would keep rolling the dice as the odds got worse, and in some cases would even play if the potential loss was greater than the potential gain.

Two, of course, is a pretty small sample size. But that problem is unavoidable, the researchers say. They noted this kind of study usually involves only a few people as it is not possible or ethical to deliberately damage a person’s brain to see what happens [Reuters]. So Urbach-Wiethe patients are particularly valuable to science, showing how damage to one particular area of the brain can change a person’s behavior.

The PNAS findings also back up what some of the same researchers have documented in previous studies, that the amygdala might be responsible not only for more primal fears, but also for social fears and inhibitions. Last year study coauthor Ralph Adolphs led a separate study of a patient with amygdala damage and found that her understanding of personal space was far different from most people’s (she stood much closer during conversation), and she struggled to pick up signs of fear or aggression in other people. Says Adolphs of the newer work: “A fully functioning amygdala appears to make us more cautious. We already know that the amygdala is involved in processing fear, and it also appears to make us ‘afraid’ to risk losing money” [Reuters].

Related Content:
80beats: An Acidic Brain Leads to Panic; A Deep Breath Can Fix That
80beats: Jell-O Shots in Adolescence Lead to Gambling Later in Life
DISCOVER: Conquering Your Fears, One Synapse at a Time
DISCOVER: Emotions and the Brain: Fear

Image: flickr / Morberg

Oh, I have a very cool anaglyph (red-green 3D images) for you! Stuart Atkinson from the Cumbrian Sky blog has created some fantastic anaglyphs of images from the Mars rover Opportunity as it investigates Concepcion crater. Here are some blocks that look like ejecta from the impact itself:

[Click to embiggen.]

These are beautiful! They almost look sedimentary, which at least makes some sense given that the region Opportunity is roving, Meridiani Planum, was once under water. Closeups of those rocks show they have the famous "blueberries", concretions of jarosite formed by mineral-laden water.

Stuart has lots more pictures he’s fiddled with, too, and it’s well worth your looking around his site. You should also read Emily Lakdawalla’s great description of Concepcion, talking about how we know it’s a fresh crater about 1000 years old. It’s a fascinating read.

I haven’t read all the new material yet that my good friends at DeSmogBlog are producing. But I have long been suspicious of the attacks on leading climate researchers, like the recently vindicated Michael Mann, because they are so obviously diversionary, and yet also so obviously strategic.

There is no doubt that those attacks have been mounting; I believe a new and full scale “war on science” is afoot in the climate arena, something I hope to say more about shortly.

But in the meantime, it appears that following ClimateGate and GlacierGate, we are once again getting some revelations taking on the other side. Maybe this means the pendulum will shift, and good science can move back off the ropes, where it has been for too long. We’ll see. I’ll be watching closely.