Last week, a study found that an early dinosaur had a red mohawk and striped tail, one of the first pieces of solid evidence regarding dinosaur coloration. But a new study forthcoming in Science goes one step further, mapping in full 3D the strange plumage of the earliest-known feathered dinosaur, Anchiornis huxleyi.

Richard O. Prum, leader of the new study, was among the first to document that pigment-giving structures called melanosomes could survive fossilized for millions of years. The shape and arrangement of melanosomes help produce the color of feathers, so the scientists were able to get clues about the color of fossil feathers from their melanosomes alone [The New York Times]. British and Chinese scientists used this technique to release last week’s color study of the 125-million-year-old Sinosauropteryx, and Prum’s team applied it to the 150-million-year-old Anchiornis.

Because the feathers of Anchiornis (which lived in what is now China) covered nearly its entire body and were so well preserved, Prum’s team could create this detailed color map. They believe its body was grey; it had a reddish-brown Mohawk-like crest, speckles on its face and white feathers with black tips on its wings and legs. The scientists say the pattern of colour on the wings and leg feathers is very like that of modern Spangled Hamburg chickens [BBC News].

The researchers behind last week’s announcement argued that perhaps Sinosauropteryx’s fancy color scheme played a role in courtship displays. The same idea could be true for Anchiornis, and could help explain how feathers evolved in the first place, says paleontologist Philip J. Currie: “Ancient creatures didn’t just sprout feathers and start flying. The feathers were there for another reason first…. Dinosaurs were very visual animals, just like birds are” [Wired.com].

Expect the dino color studies to keep coming, and perhaps the verbal barbs as well. Study co-author Jakob Vinther wasn’t too kind to the team the published last week’s study: “They are in the Stone Age when it comes to understanding melanosome fossilization and interpretation of original colors,” he says [Not Exactly Rocket Science]. His disdain comes because he says the other team’s assessment relied on only one of the two kinds of melanosomes, while color, he says, can vary greatly depending on how the two are mixed.

Related Content:
80beats: New Analysis Reveals Color of Dinosaur Feathers for the First Time
80beats: Model Suggests 4-Winged Dino Glided Like a Flying Squirrel
80beats: How Dinosaur Feet Evolved Into Bird Wings: New Fossil Provides Clues
80beats: Study: Velociraptor’s Cousin Had a Venomous Bite and Saber Teeth
The Loom: Moving Dinosaurs Into Technicolor
DISCOVER: Did T-Rex Taste Like Chicken?

Image: National Geographic

Perceptions of the Jackson-Timberlake Super Bowl incident: role of sexism and erotophobia.

“201 college women’s and 179 men’s impressions of the Jackson-Timberlake Super Bowl incident were related to measures of benevolent sexism, hostile sexism, and erotophobia. For both women and men high benevolent sexism was correlated (.17-.24) to perceptions that the incident was degrading and that agents (e.g., MTV, NFL, Hollywood) other than the actors were responsible for the incident, whereas high erotophobia was correlated (.29-.39) to perceptions that the incident was degrading, attributable to others, and personally upsetting.”

Birth and evolution of the football helmet.

“OBJECTIVE: To review the advent and evolution of the football helmet through historical, physiological, and biomechanical analysis… Significant correlation exists between head injuries and the advent of the football helmet in 1896, through its evolution in the early to mid-1900s, and regulatory standards for both helmet use and design and tackling rules and regulations. With the implementation of National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment standards, fatalities decreased by 74% and serious head injuries decreased from 4.25 per 100,000 to 0.68 per 100,000. Not only is the material used important, but the protective design also proves essential in head injury prevention. Competition among leading helmet manufacturers has benefited the ultimate goal of injury prevention. However, just as significant in decreasing the incidence and severity of head injury is the implementation of newer rules and regulations in teaching, coaching, and governing tackling techniques. CONCLUSION: Helmet use in conjunction with more stringent head injury guidelines and rules has had a tremendous impact in decreasing head injury severity in football.”

Thanks to Daniel for today’s ROFL!
Photo: flickr/quinnanya

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: I wonder if this paper was cheer-reviewed.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: The mystery of the missing viking helmets.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Dizziness in discus throwers is related to motion sickness generated while spinning.

The more people yell about Facebook, Google, and Twitter, the more I think back to Mark Twain, and his 1880 sketch, “A Telephonic Conversation.”

I consider that a conversation by telephone—when you are simply sitting by and not taking any part in that conversation—is one of the solemnest curiosities of this modern life. Yesterday I was writing a deep article on a sublime philosophical subject while such a conversation was going on in the room. I notice that one can always write best when somebody is talking through a telephone close by. Well, the thing began in this way. A member of our household came in and asked me to have our house put into communication with Mr. Bagley’s, down town. I have observed, in many cities, that the gentle sex always shrink from calling up the central office themselves. I don’t know why, but they do. So I touched the bell, and this talk ensued:—

Central Office. [Gruffly.] Hello!

I. Is it the Central Office?

C. 0. Of course it is. What do you want ?

I. Will you switch me on to the Bagleys, please ?

C. 0. All right. Just keep your ear to the telephone.

Then I heard, k-look, k-look, k’look— klook-klook-klook-look-look! then a horrible “gritting” of teeth, and finally a piping female voice: Y-e-s? [Rising inflection.] Did you wish to speak to me?”

Without answering, I handed the telephone to the applicant, and sat down. Then followed that queerest of all the queer things in this world,—a conversation with only one end to it. You hear questions asked; you don’t hear the answer. You hear invitations given; you hear no thanks in return. You have listening pauses of dead silence, followed by apparently irrelevant and unjustifiable exclamations of glad surprise, or sorrow, or dismay. You can’t make head or tail of the talk, because you never hear anything that the person at the other end of the wire says. Well, I heard the following remarkable series of observations, all from the one tongue, and all shouted,—for you can’t ever persuade the gentle sex to speak gently into a telephone:—

Yes? Why, how did that happen?

Pause.

What did you say?

Pause.

Oh, no, I don’t think it was.

Pause.

No! Oh, no, I didn’t mean that. I meant, put it in while it is still boiling,—or just before it comes to a boil.

Pause.

WHAT?

Pause.

I turned it over with a back stitch on the selvage edge.

Pause.

Yes, I like that way, too; but I think it ’s better to baste it on with Valenciennes or bombazine, or something of that sort. It gives it such an air,—and attracts so much notice.

Pause.

It ’s forty-ninth Deuteronomy, sixty-fourth to ninety-seventh inclusive. I think we ought all to read it often.

Pause.

Perhaps so; I generally use a hair-pin…

You can read the rest of sketch online (horrors!) in the archives of the Atlantic.

[Image: Wikipedia]

I’m heading out for a series of Unscientific America talks this Friday/Monday, as long as the weather permits for the second leg of the journey:

Houston, TX
Lunch Discussion and Book Signing
Friday, February 5
12:30 PM–2:30 PM
Event sponsored by the Science and Technology Policy Program, James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy
Dore Commons
James A. Baker Hall
Rice University
Houston, TX
Web site

Bethesda, MD
Speech at the National Institutes of Health
Monday, February 8
10:00 AM–11:00 AM
National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine
NIH Clinical Research Center
(Building 10)
Bethesda, MD
Web site

Stop in if you live/are going to be in these areas….

P.S.: I am revising the talk to contain a bit more ethos and pathos, because like many science-focused or intellectual talks, it currently has too much logos. Jokes are still good though…

I knew writing comic book dialog was easy! This is a brilliant idea. Geez, I need to start thinking of stuff like this myself. Step 3: profit!

And yes, I wrote those lines myself. Use ‘em if you want, but if you don’t credit me the batarang’ll be paying you a visit.

UPDATE:  SOLVED at 1:56 pm CDT, by Nick

We have some smart people out there reading the blog, so  I decided to mix things up a little bit this week, and see if I could make you think.  The answer to today’s riddle will not be an object.  It will be an event.  We’re operating under the same rules:  This deals with astronomy; it’s something with which you are familiar;  it’s something you grew up knowing.

I think I’ll make you work a little this week.

Image shamelessly lifted from Space.Com

This event occurred within recent history.

It was known globally while it was happening.

It has happened before.

It will happen again.

Image: National Archives circa 1938-1945, ID 195876

It left traces behind.

It is at the top of the heap for its type of event within recorded history.

After it occurred, there was no evidence of this event in space (this is not a contradiction).

The depiction of this event occurring at any time makes for a thrilling plot line.

STS112 EVA Image: NASA

Your final clue, just to save us all time:  The event in question is NOT an asteroid strike.

Hmmmm.  Any guesses?  Come on out and play — I’ll see you in the comments.

Good luck!

Tim writes,

I’m a post-doctoral cognitive neuroscientist working in MR research at the University of Pittsburgh. I stumbled across the Science Tattoo Emporium and wanted to share my own science based ink.

The attached image shows my second tattoo and the most directly science-themed ink (although the others are also peripherally linked to the career I love so dear). The four hieroglyphic characters are the earliest written form of the word “brain” and are found in the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus. Dating back to seventeenth century BC Egypt, the papyrus is perhaps the first neurological case study describing the symptoms of head injuries and the odd fleshy matter that was often visible in the most gruesome of head wounds. These symbols and the story of the papyrus are the opening to the classic textbook “Principles of Neuroscience”, which I first came across when taking an undergraduate course in 2000. In honor of starting my graduate research career in studying the brain, I got this tattoo while attending a neuroscience conference in NYC in 2002.

Anyway, hope you enjoy. Thanks for putting together the gallery that lets me know I’m not the only geek crazy enough to make his passion a permanent part of his body.

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

I don’t usually do this, but TechyDad left such a great comment on my post about the antics of antivax founder Andrew Wakefield, I have to reproduce it here for all to see.

Talking about the inherent contradictions and cherry-picking that go on in the alt-med purveyors’ heads, TechyDad says:

Gotta love the disconnect. If pharmaceutical companies make any money off of vaccines, it’s "Big Pharma’s injecting us with chemicals to make money!!!"

Now if a homeopath or an "alternative therapy" company makes money off of their "treatment" it’s “They’re such wonderful people helping to treat these awful conditions!”

If a single batch of a single vaccine is recalled for a tiny problem they shout "See!!??? Big Pharma’s trying to pump us full of unsafe toxins!!!!"

If a company comes out with an outrageous sounding "alternative therapy" for some disease, they say "They say it works right here. It’s alternative and alternative is always good."

If a homeopath says Treatment X doesn’t work they say "It must not work because he’s a homeopath and thus is fighting against the Medical Establishment."

If a physician says Treatment Y doesn’t work they say "It must work and the Medical Establishment is suppressing it."

In other words, they’re right, science is wrong and all evidence will be cherry picked and skewed until their view is supported.

Nailed it in one.

Reproduced here with permission from TechyDad.

Full video of yesterday’s talk is up, as is the dialogue with former Clinton science adviser and Baker Institute fellow Neal Lane that followed it. You can watch here.

I don’t watch the show Dragon’s Den, though I’ve heard of it: potential entrepreneurs pitch their products to a group of wealthy investors in the hope that they will get some capital. The investors — the dragons — are blunt when they need to be, and it does make for an interesting show.

… especially when the guy who comes in pitching his wares is an alt-med quack who says his bottle of water will cure everything from pink eye to leukemia to cancer:

Too bad ultradistilled water doesn’t cure vulturism. That guy looks pretty unhappy as he left, but he was treated very nicely indeed compared to what he deserves.

We’re only a week away from the 2010 Winter Olympics opening in Vancouver, and the return of the games brings with it the return of crazy stories about how far world-class athletes will go to get even the tiniest edge, legal or illegal. In the journal Science this week, researchers led by geneticist Theodore Friedmann take the opportunity to warn about gene doping, the next looming crisis in cheating at high-stakes athletics.

Genetic doping isn’t new to the headlines—the International Olympic Committee banned it in 2003. But its prevalence is growing, especially since improving testing is starting to weed out more standard forms of cheating like steroids and EPO, a hormone that boosts red blood cell production. Three years ago, German track coach Thomas Springstein was busted after unsuccessfully trying to score Repoxygen, an experimental gene therapy drug that boosts red blood cell production, for his runners. At the Olympics in Beijing, an unidentified Chinese doctor offered stem cell injections to a German journalist posing as a swim coach [Wired.com].

Beyond the ethical concerns of cheating, there is the issue of safety when it comes to athletes trying out new, unregulated therapies, Friedmann says. Most likely, current efforts would be “hamfisted” and dangerous, he said. But “we know there are disreputable people in sport with access to technology and a lot of money” [National Geographic]. Even athletes and coaches without dubious intentions could be duped by claims about therapies that sound legitimately scientific, he says. As a result, he and the other scientists call out their colleagues to develop and test therapies responsibly, under the internationally accepted ethics codes for medical research.

Of course, with so much at stake, it’s a bit of wishful thinking to suggest that all developers or athletes are going to play by the rules. So Friedmann and other researchers are racing to keep up by developing new detection methods. The direct evidence of genetic tampering is hard to find. But telltale side effects could give away gene dopers. The authors note that jacking up genes is “likely to produce broad metabolic, genetic, and proteomic changes” [Scientific American]. That could include levels of fatty acid production, or other system-wide changes that can’t be easily hidden.

So far those kinds of detection tests are limited to animals. But if Friedmann and other scientists bring them to bear in humans, there are other concerns besides effectiveness. He notes that, while delving into athletes’ genomes raises important privacy issues, “that’s kind of the cost of being an elite athlete” [National Geographic]. And even if it works and researchers do come up with sophisticated ways to catch gene dopers, athletes and treatment developers will be moving on to the next generation of performance enhancing drugs. The cat and mouse game continues.

Related Content:
80beats: Can “Biological Passports” Save Sports From Doping?
80beats: Doping Police Try Out “Biological Passports” for Athletes
80beats: Gene Therapy That Bulks up Muscles Raises Doping Concerns
80beats: Olympic Pistol Shooter Used Anti-Trembling Drug To Steady His Hand
DISCOVER: Will Genetic Therapy Destroy Sports? explores the potential for genetic doping

Image: iStockphoto

The Hubble map of Pluto from 1994 (upper) and the latest one below. Be sure to click the image for a larger version. Image credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Buie (Southwest Research Institute)

Pluto has a surface temperature of something like 35 to 45 K (-378^oF to -396^oF). I sort of always thought of Pluto as a pretty static place, but not so.

The little world’s northern hemisphere is getting brighter and it is becoming redder as a result.  Hubblesite described it as an icy and dark molasses-colored world.

Here are some of the other Hubble images:  90 degs / 180 degs / 270 degs.  The images don’t give us a lot of detail as far as the surface features go, still a lot can be learned from these pictures.  We do have a spacecraft on the way to Pluto and in 2015 it will finally arrive – Pluto is a LONG  ways away, heck those are Hubble pictures and we still can’t resolve the surface!

Ok before I get all carried away, Pluto has a diameter of 2,390 km and if you are thinking that’s smaller than our moon, you’d be right.  Our moon happens to be the 5th largest moon in the solar system, but that’s another story.  The other thing about Pluto’s size is Eris (yeah, the one that caused the hub-bub) is maybe even a little larger than Pluto.  Pluto’s whole orbit is tilted 17 degrees relative to the ecliptic and it’s also very elongated.

I’m not going to go into the whole planet, dwarf planet debate.  I will say I’ve come to my own conclusion.  Suffice it to say, Pluto is very strange place.

Head on over to Hubblesite for the full press release, more images and even video.

This could mean an end to fear and loathing at the dentist’s office. A new (allegedly) painless blowtorch-like device is being developed that uses a thin beam of plasma could kill oral bacteria in cavities. A plasma is an ionized gas—one in which some of the electrons are stripped away from their atoms.

The plasma kept the dentin, the fibrous bonelike material that makes up most of a tooth under the outer enamel layer, intact, while reducing bacteria 10,000-fold. This means that plasma jets could be used to wipe out the tooth-decaying bacteria in cavities–a procedure that normally requires the use of a painful dental drill to grind away the infected portion of tooth.

The plasma being used is a “cool” plasma with a temperature of just 100 degrees Fahrenheit. When it fires, it charges the oxygen gas around it, which creates reactive molecules that break down and destroy the bacteria’s cell walls, killing them in the process.

But here’s the bad news: If you have a gnawing cavity right now, there’s no point putting off a visit to the dentist. Researchers say it will take three to five years for the new plasma drill to make it to the dentist’s office.

Related Content:
Discoblog: Bye Bye Dentures? Researchers Isolate “Tooth Growing” Gene
DISCOVER: Tooth DNA Dates Back To The First Americans
DISCOVER: Tooth IDs Famed Egyptian Queen
DISCOVER: A Pre-Columbian Cavity
80beats: Ancient Big Tooth Shark Had the Mightiest Bite in History

Image: Stefan Rupf

Automaker General Motors and NASA share a long history; it goes back to GM supplying the lunar rover used during the later Apollo missions in the early 1970s [MSNBC]. In their latest partnership, GM and NASA have created the Robonaut 2–a humanoid robot that can be used both on Earth and in space. The collaboration comes a time when the Obama administration has called for NASA to focus more on commercial spaceflight and on collaboration with private industry [CNET].

Robonaut 2, which looks a bit like a sleeker version of R2-D2, is a step up from the first iteration made 10 years ago by NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA). That robonaut was intended to be used mostly for space purposes. But the new version, R2, would be equally at home on the International Space Station or on a car assembly line in Detroit.

R2 has been built to replicate the appearance of a human from the waist up so that it can fit into and work in the same spaces, doing the same jobs as people do, sometimes right alongside them [MSNBC]. It has a humanoid torso, head, arms, hands, and fingers, and it displays remarkable flexibility. R2 can also lift and move up to twenty pounds with each arm, which NASA says is about four times more than other humanoid robots. Its four-jointed opposible thumbs allow it to use tools, much like a human. But while the upper half resembles a human, the bottom half of the robot is yet to be designed. Scientists expect R2 to either stand on one leg or be fitted with wheels.

For now R2’s design make it perfect for factory floors. In the past, GM had complained that it spent too much money installing protection systems and cages when it put a robot (usually just a set of mechanical arms with tools) on the assembly line. The company said they thrashed about, without any regard to who or what was next to them. With R2, scientists are hopeful they have a machine that is not just more dexterous but can also be an effective worker on the floor. GM executive Alan Taub explains that Robonaut2’s arms are small and light, with excellent sensors to ensure they stop if they come in contact with something unexpected. “It has a very elegant sensing system so it can sense resistance in the arm,” said Taub. “A child’s hand will stop it” [MSNBC].

The partnership between the automaker and the space agency is expected to yield benefits for both. GM sees the project as a way to develop new sensors, controls, and vision technology that can be integrated into future automobiles and factories to make them safer [Slashgear]. NASA officials, meanwhile, are hopeful of employing R2 in space alongside human astronauts. It could serve, they say, as an assistant on spacewalks by going ahead of the crew to set up the work site.

Related Content:
80beats: Laser-Powered Robot Climbs to Victory in the Space-Elevator Contest
DISCOVER: Smart Food for Robots
DISCOVER: Tiny Robot Walks Using Rat Heart Muscle
DISCOVER: Man’s Best Friend

Image: NASA

Captain Disillusion is the reigning superhero of skepticism, and his video exploits are legendary.

Of course, he’s also a filthy liar, saying I don’t like cats:

[Shh! I have to say I like cats, because if I don't then my cat will steal my breath in the middle of the night and kill me.]

Click through to see the rest. He’s funny. And Bolingbrook Babbler somehow caught wind of this as well, to my chagrin. Of course, it’s one of the few MSM outlets that gets quotes from me right…

This is the fourth in a series of guest posts by Joel Barkan, a previous contributor to “The Intersection” and a graduate student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The renowned Scripps marine biologist Jeremy Jackson is teaching his famed “Marine Science, Economics, and Policy” course for what may be the last time this year (along with Jennifer Jacquet), and Joel will be reporting each week on the contents of the course.

“Find a CITES, find myself a CITES to live in.” Isn’t that how the Talking Heads song goes? No? Either way, I had the tune stuck in my head all afternoon during our most recent class, in which we discussed the merits of listing species on both the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) and the IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species. The student presentations covered the listing criteria and some of the problems associated with both groups. CITES has successfully impeded illegal trade of tropical reptiles and amphibians, but it lacks the same influence with marine species. For instance, China removed itself from the CITES treaty and freely imports dead seahorses, which are used for traditional medicinal purposes.

Many students seemed puzzled by the role of CITES and the Red List. What exactly are we trying to accomplish by making lists of animals that are in really, really big trouble? Adding a doomed species to a list of other species that aren’t doing so hot doesn’t magically solve the problem, as one student pointed out during our discussion. I came away frustrated at the IUCN’s unwillingness to stand up for the species it so painstakingly evaluates. Each species on the Red List receives a thorough population analysis by groups of unbiased scientists. The product is a detail-rich compilation of thousands of species—some critically endangered, some vulnerable, all meticulously calculated by the IUCN.

So what does the Red List do? You tell me. When I visited the San Diego Zoo a few weeks ago, I read the Red List status of every animal I saw, from the Komodo Dragon (Vulnerable) to the Harpy Eagle (Near Threatened). It’s a wealth of information, sitting on the internet, on dusty library shelves, on sun-bleached zoo placards. The Red List prides itself on its objectivity. It doesn’t want to ruffle any feathers. I think it needs to be subjective. It needs to stick its neck out and make assertive policy recommendations based on its research. I’m sure policy-makers use information from the Red List when making decisions, but the IUCN’s own voice would be welcomed and respected; after all, they did all the grunt work. It’s one thing to make a list—I used to make one every December for Santa. It’s another thing to use your hard work to help make difficult decisions that could lead to important changes.

There’s more bad news for the Baltic Sea. Reports had already indicated that it was one of the most polluted bodies of water in the world, and now a report from a Swedish TV station alleges that Russia dumped nuclear and other toxic waste into Swedish waters in the Baltic in the early 1990s.

According to a report by the SVT network, Russian boats sailed out at night to dump barrels of radioactive material, from a military base in Latvia, into Swedish waters. And even though the Swedish government at the time reportedly knew this, no action was taken to find the waste [BBC News]. These accusations—particularly that the Swedish government knew about the dumping and did nothing—aren’t sitting well with current Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt. But Carl Bildt, who was the country’s prime minister during the alleged dumping, says he never heard about it.

Russian Admiral Vladimir Yegorov, who commanded the Baltic fleet in the 1990s, balked at the charges and called them baloney. “The naval forces that were pulling out of the Liepaja naval base in Latvia in the early 1990s did not have chemical weapons, radioactive materials and waste,” Yegorov insisted [The Local].

The Baltic just can’t seem to catch a break. Last month we reported on concerns that shipworms were creeping north and threatening thousands of shipwrecks that the sea’s normally brackish water (meaning less salty than normal ocean water) had preserved. And because the Baltic is largely enclosed—emptying only through a small opening in the south, around Denmark—toxicity takes a long time to escape. The sea was already in such peril, in fact, that a summit of heads of state of countries bordering the Baltic Sea was to take place in Helsinki Wednesday to try to solve the problems [AFP].

Related Content:
80beats: Next Global Warming Victim: Centuries-Old Shipwrecks [resting at the bottom of the Baltic]
80beats: Russia Is Developing a Secret Plan to Divert a Non-Threatening Asteroid
80beats: 21 Years After Spill, Exxon Valdez Oil is *Still* Stuck In Alaska’s Beaches

Image: flickr / txd

While we know what it looks like when a star explodes into a luminous supernova, here’s a chance to discover what one sounds like–sorta. Scientists have translates a supernova’s electromagnetic waves into waves of sound; and when there is sound, there is music. Enter the Grateful Dead.

The band’s famed percussionist Mickey Hart is working on a musical project to “sonify” the universe–taking sounds collected by scientists from supernovae and other astronomical phenomena and using them in his new album “Rhythms of the Universe.” To anyone who has ever heard one of the Grateful Dead’s extended “drums and space” jams, this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.

Keith Jackson, a computer scientist and musician who works at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, collaborated with Hart on this project, collecting data from the supernova Cassiopeia A. He converted this high-frequency electromagnetic wave data into lower-frequency sound waves that are within the range of human hearing. Hart took these sounds and used them to create music that was presented during the Cosmology at the Beach Conference held recently in Mexico.

For Jackson, Science Daily reports, the opportunity to turn data from supernovae into something Mickey Hart could use in an album was the best of both worlds.

“It brings together my love of science, my love of music, and my love of the Grateful Dead. What more could you ask for in life?”

Here’s a sample of what a supernova sounds like.

And here is what the rings of Saturn, recorded in a separate project, sound like.

Related Content:
Discoblog: Carl Sagan Sings Again: Symphony of Science, Part 4
Discoblog: Strummin’ the Moon With Your Program
80beats: Detoured Light From Tycho’s Supernova Finally Makes it to Earth
80beats: The First Stars Started Small, Grew Fast, and Died Young

Image: NASA

I love clouds, and Boulder is a never-ending and always-changing nebular cloudscape of them.

Last Saturday I saw this out my home office window:

It was gorgeous! It’s a lenticular (lens-shaped) orographic cloud; a cloud caused by moisture-laden air rising up and cooling as it passes over mountains. We see them here all the time just east of the Rockies, and when they get all lenticular it’s a very cool bonus.

Orographic clouds aren’t limited to the Earth you know; other planets have atmospheres with some moisture and tall mountains to overcome as well.

Some people think that science takes away the romance of nature. Those people are wrong. When I lie out in the Sun and muse about the pretty clouds over my home town, I can know that what I’m seeing happens on other planets spinning around the Sun, and I’ll just bet it’s happening somewhere on a planet orbiting some other distant sun, lost among the billions in our galaxy.

What could possibly be more romantic than that?

This is an idea that has been bouncing around for a while, but is now apparently seen in experiments: real-world photosynthesis taking advantage of quantum mechanics. (Story in Wired, via @symmetrymag. Here’s the Nature paper on which it’s all based.)

The idea is both simple and awesome: you want to transport energy through an “antenna protein” in a plant cell to the “reaction-center proteins” where it is chemically converted into something useful for the rest of the plant. Obviously you’d like to transport that energy in the most efficient way possible, but you’re in a warm and wet environment where losses are to be expected. But the plants somehow manage the nearly impossible, of sending the energy with nearly perfect efficiency through the judicious use of quantum mechanics.

We can think about this in terms of Feynman’s way of talking about quantum mechanics: rather than a particle taking a unique path between two points, as in classical mechanics, a quantum particle takes every possible path, with simple paths getting a bit more weight than complicated ones. In the case of the protein, different paths for the energy might be more or less efficient at any particular moment, but this bit of quantum trickery allows the energy to find the best possible route at any one time. Imagine at rush hour, if your car could take every possible route from your home to the office, and the time it officially took would be whatever turned out to be the shortest path. How awesome would that be?

The reason you can’t do that is that your car is a giant macroscopic object that can’t really be in two places at once, even though the world is governed by quantum mechanics at a deep level. And the reason for that is decoherence — even if you tried to put your car into a superposition of “take the freeway” and “take the local roads,” it is constantly interacting with the outside world, which “collapses the wave function” and keeps your car looking extremely classical.

Proteins in plants aren’t as big as cars, but they’re still made of a very large number of atoms, and they’re constantly bumping into other molecules around them. That’s why it’s amazing that they can actually maintain quantum coherence long enough to pull off this energy-transport trick. Previous studies had hinted at the possibility, but only by cooling the proteins down and shielding them from external jiggling. This new work happens at room temperature in the context of marine algae, so it seems to indicate that it can happen in real environments.

One step closer to building my teleportation machine. Get to work, quantum engineers!