Like any good author, one of my duties is taking to the airwaves to flog my book. A list of upcoming events can be found at Booktour.com, and of course you can always subscribe to the Facebook page or Twitter feed. But I wanted to highlight some stuff coming up over the next two weeks:

• Friday January 29, 12:30 p.m. Pacific: I’ll be appearing on NPR’s Science Friday with Ira Flatow. (That’s today/tomorrow, depending on when you’re reading this.) Listen online, or via your favorite public radio station.
• Saturday January 30, 2:00 p.m. Pacific: From Eternity to Here will be the subject of a Firedoglake Book Salon. I’ll be answering questions online, and our host will be none other than Chad Orzel, who has a book of his own you should check out.
• Saturday February 6, 10:00 a.m. Pacific: Crank up your avatars, I’m giving a talk in Second Life. (And if you don’t already have an avatar, it’s easy to get one. And you can shop for clothes!) Sponsored by MICA, it will be held at the large amphitheater on StellaNova.
• Saturday February 6, 5:00 p.m. Pacific: For everyone here in Los Angeles and environs, I’m doing a good old-fashioned book reading/signing at Skylight Books, an awesome independent bookstore in Los Feliz. 5:00 on Saturday night — what better way to kick off the evening’s festivities?

Hope to see you there, virtually or in person!

NASA is sending a radar-equipped jet to conduct flights over Haiti and the Dominican Republic to capture 3-D images that could help predict future earthquakes. An estimated 170,000 people were killed in the 7.0 earthquake that battered Haiti on January 12. Unfortunately, experts predict more quakes as the country is situated in a seismically volatile zone.

A Gulfstream III jet is now on its way to map Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the two nations that share the island of Hispaniola. The Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar, or UAVSAR, was originally on its way to Central America to study volcanoes, forests, and Mayan ruins, but on its way south it will now also study Hispaniola’s fault lines.

The principal investigator for the Hispaniola overflights, Paul Lundgren, said the aircraft will take images of the Earth’s surface and other changes associated with the Haiti earthquake. He said NASA will then analyze the 3-D results for features that could signal “aftershocks, earthquakes that might be triggered by the main earthquake farther down the fault line, and the potential for landslides” [Wired.com]. Lundgren expects the future earthquakes to be “either along adjacent sections of the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault that was responsible for the main earthquake, or on other faults in northern Hispaniola, such as the Septentrional fault”[Wired.com]. NASA has used this kind of radar-equipped jet in the past to examine California’s dangerous San Andreas fault.

UAVSAR flies at 41,000 feet and sends microwaves, from a pod located on the aircraft’s belly, down to the ground. It then records the returning signal. The differences in the times it takes waves to return from points on the ground to the plane gives information about the topography. By hitting the same target from different angles as the plane flies overhead, a 3-D image can be made. Very precise details about ground motion can be calculated by flying over the same area later, giving scientists information about strain buildup on a fault [Wired.com].

Haiti is located on a part of the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault zone–a fault that had been building up strain over the last 240 years. Scientists were expecting an earthquake in that region, but no one could predict exactly when and where. But about 100 miles to the northeast is a long segment of a similar fault, the Septentrional, that has not had a quake in 800 years. Researchers have estimated that a rupture along that segment — and again, they have no idea when one might occur — could result in a magnitude 7.5 quake that could cause severe damage in the Dominican Republic’s second-largest city, Santiago, and the surrounding Cibao Valley, together home to several million people [The New York Times] . The data collected by the UAVSAR is expected to help scientists study the potential for future earthquakes on this particular fault. The 3-D images are due to be released to the public in a few weeks.

Related Content:
80beats: Where in the World Will the Next Big Earthquake Strike?
80beats: Satellite Images Show the Extent of Haiti’s Devastation
80beats: Haiti Earthquake May Have Released 250 Years of Seismic Stress
80beats: Science Via Twitter: Post-Earthquake Tweets Can Provide Seismic Data
80beats: A Major Quake Could Release Plutonium from Los Alamos Lab
The Intersection: Ways to Support the Relief Effort in Haiti

Image: NASA/JPL

Cells just keep surprising us. Researchers have now found that, with a little genetic tweaking, they can transform skin cells into brain cells without having to first reprogram them to act like multipurpose stem cells. This finding, the first of its kind, is in this week’s edition of the journal Nature.

The researchers did their study on mice. They induced the change by inserting only three genes into cultured skin cells. Once those three genes activated, the skin cells converted into fully functioning nerve cells that even formed synapse connections with the other converted nerve cells [Popular Science]. That change took less than a week, a surprisingly rapid rate. Said team member Marius Wernig: “These are fully functional neurons. They can do all the principal things that neurons in the brain do” [AFP].

Four years ago, when researchers figured out how to turn adult cells back into a pluripotent state, where they can then become any cell type in the body, it opened up many new research avenues (and raised hopes of getting around the controversy that dogged embryonic stem cell research). But making these induced pluripotent stem cells is a complex process. This study’s approach removes the entire middle step, making the leap directly from one kind of cell to another. There’s another major advantage: pluripotent cells can also grow into tumors, so skipping that step reduces the risk of cancer.

If this new approach worked in people, the medical consequences could be impressive. Brain cells derived from a skin graft would be genetically identical to the patient and therefore remove the risk of immune rejection–such an approach might one day be used to treat Parkinson’s or other neurodegenerative diseases [Technology Review].

That could take some time, because not only was this study done on mouse cells, but the scientists also aren’t 100 percent sure how the process works. When scientists convert adult cells to an embryonic state, they can just strip out epigenetic markers (overlying mechanisms that determine which stretches of DNA are active in the cell, and therefore how the cell will function). Team member Qiao Zhou says the new process requires more precision. “But when directly reprogramming from one somatic cell to another, you cannot randomly remove epigenetic marks,” says Zhou. “You have to remove some and add some and keep many intact. Recognizing which to leave alone and which to change is the key” [Technology Review].

Related Content:
80beats: One Step Closer To Embryo-Free (And Controversy-Free) Stem Cells
80beats: A Safer Way to Transform Skin Cells Into Stem Cells Brings Medical Trials Closer
80beats: Nanoparticles + Stem Cells = Faster Healing Wounds
80beats: Liposuction Leftovers Are a Stem Cell Bonanza
DISCOVER: Second Act for Stem Cells

Image: Thomas Vierbuchen

On January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded less than two minutes after takeoff. Yesterday too was the anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire.

I wrote about these events three years ago, and my feelings have not changed.

You can also read more about this, with links to others’ thoughts, on Universe Today.

Most of us associate the bacteria E. coli with nasty stomach ailments. But a new study published in Nature magazine suggests E. coli can not just turn stomachs, but could potentially turn the wheels of your car, since a genetically engineered strain of the bacteria has produced clean, road-ready biodiesel.

The bacteria can work on any type of biomass, including wood chip, switchgrass, and the plant parts that are left behind after a harvest–all contain cellulose, a structural material that comprises much of a plant’s mass. Study coauthor Jay Keasling and his colleagues report engineering E. coli bacteria to synthesize and excrete the enzyme hemicellulase, which breaks down cellulose into sugars. The bacteria can then convert those sugars into a variety of chemicals–diesel fuel among them. The final products are excreted by the bacteria and then float to the top of the fermentation vat before being siphoned off [Technology Review].

E. coli bacteria naturally turn sugars into fatty acids to build their cell membranes; the researchers just tweaked the bacterium’s genetics a bit. The researchers basically amplified and then short-circuited E. coli’s internal machinery for producing large fatty-acid molecules, enabling them to convert precursor molecules directly into fuels and other chemicals…. In all, the authors report more than a dozen genetic modifications [Nature]. Researchers said the process could be refined to produce multiple chemical products ranging from jet fuel to solvents and lubricants [MSNBC]. However, they cautioned that the study was a “proof of concept” rather than a full demonstration of a commercially viable process.

Still, the news of bacteria producing biofuels has been welcomed by biofuel manufacturers who usually use corn and sugarcane to produce ethanol; these processes have raised ethical questions about using food crops for fuel. This new bacterial biofuel technique avoids such problems. The cellulosic biomass doesn’t have to come from plants that are consumed by humans or used in animal feedstocks, so the process doesn’t add undue pressure on global food prices, and since the E. coli can ferment and convert the biomass to biofuel all at once the process could greatly improve the economics of biofuel production [Popular Science].

Study coauthor Keasling is certainly excited about the possibilities. “We’ve got a billion tons of biomass every year that goes unused,” said Jay Keasling…. Theoretically, the fuel produced from biomass could make up for as much as 50 percent of U.S. oil imports. ”We want to turn the U.S. Midwest into the new ‘Mideast,’” Keasling said [MSNBC].

Related Content:
80beats: Study: Algae Biofuel Production Guzzles Water & Energy
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80beats: Algae Tech’s Latest Goal: Make Ethanol for Bioplastics
80beats: Forget Biofuel. Is Bioelectricity the Next Big Thing?
80beats: Super-Green, Algae-Derived Jet Fuel Passes Tests With Flying Colors
DISCOVER: The Second Coming of Biofuels

Image: iStockphoto

I started a post this morning on the release of the new national survey out of Yale and George Mason regarding public beliefs and attitudes on global warming, but CM beat me to posting it. Still, it’s important to emphasize my concern reading that public trust in scientists has decreased, while the number of Americans who do not think climate change will harm biodiversity is on the rise. Some more of the figures:

• The percentage of Americans who think global warming is happening has declined 14 points, to 57 percent.
• The percentage of Americans who think global warming is caused mostly by human activities has dropped 10 points, to 47 percent.
• Only 50 percent of Americans now say they are “somewhat” or “very worried” about global warming, a 13-point decrease.
• Sixty-five percent distrust Republicans Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sarah Palin as sources of information.
• Fifty-three percent distrust former Democratic Vice President Al Gore and 49 percent distrust President Barack Obama.
• The percentage of Americans who believe that most scientists think global warming is happening is now at 34 percent

So amid growing scientific evidence that climate change will have–and indeed, is already having–real impacts around the world, there is a dramatic and dangerous disconnect with the American public. Unfortunately, we continue to live in an increasingly Unscientific America–where partisan politics, media spin, religious ideologies, and special interests hamper progress.

Continuing a month of skeptical victories, the UK’s General Medical Council has found that Andrew Wakefield — the founder of the modern antivaccination movement — acted "dishonestly and irresponsibly" when doing the research that led him to conclude that vaccinations were linked with autism. This is being reported everywhere, including the BBC, Sky News, the Yorkshire Evening Post, and more.

The GMC (the independent body of medical regulators in the UK, rather like the AMA in the US) didn’t investigate whether his claims were correct or not — and let’s be very clear, his claims have been shown beyond any doubt to be totally wrong — only whether he acted ethically in his research. What they found is that his research (involving spinal taps of children) was against the children’s clinical interest, that Wakefield was unqualified to perform the test, and that he had no ethical approval to do them.

Wow. Again, let’s be clear: that’s a whole lot of ethical damnation from the UK’s leading medical board.

Not to pile on here, but I was rather surprised that they didn’t mention the claims — supported by a lot of evidence — that on top of all that unethical behavior, he may have faked his results, too. There’s also no mention of his grave conflict of interest– at the time he published his paper slamming vaccines and which started the antivax craze, he was developing an alternative to vaccinations, so he had a very large monetary incentive to make the public distrust vaccines.

The GMC has not announced whether he (and two of his cohorts) will be sanctioned or not. I’ll be very curious to see what they do.

Will this deter Wakefield and the antivax movement? Ha! Of course not. Note that supporters of Wakefield heckled the GMC members as they read their announcements.

Also, the evidence was already overwhelming that Wakefield was wrong, just as it’s overwhelming that vaccines are totally and completely unrelated to autism. But the antivaxxers’ world is not based on evidence. It’s more like a dogmatic religion, since many of its believers will twist and distort the truth to fit their views, even, tragically, if it means babies will die.

The antivax movement is resulting in the deaths of children from preventable diseases, many of which were all but gone in the United States. We’re seeing the return of measles, mumps, pertussis, even polio — polio, which was eradicated entirely in the US by 1994. Because vaccines are so effective, people don’t remember these diseases and how they would kill, and now the antivaxxers are paving the way for their return.

This ruling against Wakefield is a step in the right direction, but the path is long and the antivaxxers will be there at every one of these steps, trying desperately to trip up reality. It’s up to us to make sure that we keep walking.

[Apparently, as commenters have, um, commented, I wasn't the first to make this word up. But I did do it independently, and until someone can prove time traveling pundits didn't steal from me in the future, I'll still it to be mine. Hold on, I'm getting a note... apparently I've already left a comment making this same joke. I guess future me read this update and used a time machine to steal this joke from present me. Sneaky.]

The other day, while commenting on Twitter about the comedy of Mike Adams’ toddler-like tantrum about skeptics and how his advice which can lead to people getting sicker or even dying should absolutely make him eligible for an Internet award, I coined a new word, and I feel that everyone should see it:

Schadenfreudelicious.

I hereby grant free license for its use. You may thank me later, as I know you will when a situation arises where you need to use this word. And it will.

In the meantime, if you are so inclined and have an established Twitter account, please vote for Rachael Dunlop for a Shorty Award. She is a good friend and a tireless fighter of quackery and alt-med health threats. You can read more about her here.

When confronted with arguments over an issue, how do you decide what to do? Especially when, to you, both sides seem to make good points?

I’ve written about this before, and won’t belabor the logic process that goes into decision making over a contentious issue — even if the controversy is manufactured, as it is for vaccinations.

Instead, I’ll give you an anecdote. When making a scientific argument anecdotes should be avoided, since they are the beginning of inquiry, not the endpoint. But I’m not trying to make a scientific argument here, I’m hoping to support the decision making process… and sometimes a good example is worth a dozen detailed instructions, so read this essay by a worried parent over his decision to vaccinate his child. It’s a wonderful tale from someone who managed to find the narrow path of reality having once been well away from it.

If you’re a new parent wondering whether to vaccinate your children, then you absolutely have to read that essay. You’re not alone out there. There are lots of people who have been through what you have, and some of them have figured out how to make the right decision.

Tonight, New York’s splendid Carnegie Hall will not only resound with beautiful music, it will glow with unearthly images.

A performance of the orchestral suite The Planets, by the English composer Gustav Holst, will be accompanied by a new video put together in cooperation with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and featuring the latest high-definition planetary images. The suite contains seven movements that correspond to seven planets: Earth isn’t included, and the disputed planet Pluto hadn’t been discovered when Holst finished the piece in 1916. As for the images, they come from missions like the Mars rover explorations, the Cassini-Huygens investigations of Saturn, Galileo’s trip to Jupiter, and the epic Voyager 1 and 2 treks across the solar system.

Maestro Hans Graf of the Houston Symphony explains the origins of The Planets: An HD Odyssey in this video:

Ironically, Holst was inspired not by the astronomical wonders seen through a telescope, but rather by the astrological clap-trap of horoscopes and star signs. Still, as long as we get to swoop over panoramas of Mars in high-definition, we’ll forgive the composer his quirks.

Tickets here.

Related Content:
Discoblog: Trippy Lunar Opera: Haydn at the Hayden Planetarium

Fans of the hit TV series Lost are awaiting the big event next week: the premiere of Season Six on Tuesday night. The show is famous for its mysteries and plot twists, so this year has a special status: it’s the final season, where everything that’s going to be revealed will be revealed. That might not be absolutely everything, but it should be a lot.

Lost has always played with time and narrative — characters’ backstories were told through elaborate flashbacks, lending a richness of nuance to their behavior in the main story. But time travel as a plot device was established as a central theme during Season Five. One happy consequence was the invention of Lost University, through which fans could learn a little about physics and other real-world subjects underlying events in the show.

Naturally, scientifically-minded folks want to know: how respectable is the treatment of time travel, anyway? We are, as always, here to help. My short take: Lost is a TV fantasy, not a documentary, and it doesn’t try all that hard to conform to general relativity or the other known laws of physics. But happily, the most important of the Rules for Time Travelers is very much obeyed: there are no paradoxes. And more interestingly, the spirit of the rules is obeyed, and indeed put to good narrative effect. The potential for time-travel paradoxes helps illuminate issues of free will vs. predestination, a central theme of the show. And what more can you ask for in a time-travel story than that?

Details below the fold, full of spoilers. (Not for the upcoming season, of course.) See also discussions from io9, Popular Mechanics, and Sheril.

The way that time travel works in Lost can be analyzed on three separate levels: physics, logic, and metaphor. (Or by ignoring all these high-falutin’ ideas and just enjoying the show, but where’s the fun in that?)

Physics

Make no mistake: the point of Lost is not to present a realistic depiction of time travel according to the laws of physics as we know them (or ever expect to know them). As explained in Chapter Six of From Eternity to Here, a remarkable feature of Einstein’s general relativity is that it provides a context in which we can sensibly talk about the idea of traveling in time. Space and time are curved together, and the amount of time elapsed between two events is affected by motion and gravity. Traveling near the speed of light, or lingering in a powerful gravitational field, you will “move into the future faster” than someone floating freely in empty space.

It’s easy to imagine — likely impossible to construct, but easy to imagine — curvature so intense that you can hop in a space ship and come back before you left. One particularly evocative mechanism for dramatic spacetime curvature is a wormhole, a shortcut through spacetime through which one could easily reach tremendous distances or wildly separated times via a relatively short journey. But it would still be a journey, involving relatively conventional means of transport; no flashing lights, no dematerializing and popping into existence elsewhere or elsewhen.

The tremendous amounts of energy and spacetime curvature necessary to maintain a realistic wormhole don’t fit easily into the island milieu of Lost. So the show simply doesn’t bother with such details. Characters, not to mention the island itself, do indeed pop randomly from one time to another. Even more divorced from realism, Desmond and other characters have their consciousness travel through time (”temporal displacements”), appearing in their physical bodies with all the memories and feelings of their future selves. Neither Einstein nor anyone else suggests any way that could happen in the real world.

Which is fine; it’s a TV show, not a science documentary. It’s an invented world, not the real one. But the writers do nevertheless hint at a scientific basis for time travel within this invented world, one that borrows from real physics. I probably was not the only viewer to laugh during Season Three when one of the hated Others was shown deeply engrossed in A Brief History of Time. More directly, in one of the Dharma Initiative orientation videos “Edgar Halliwax” (Dr. Chang) explains that the island contains a pocket of exotic matter, perhaps sustained by the Casimir effect, which lets them conduct unique experiments in space and time. That’s all on the right track. Even though general relativity lets us talk about wormholes, under ordinary circumstances we wouldn’t expect them to be useful for purposes of time travel — even if a wormhole were created, it would collapse to a singularity before anyone could cross it. A hypothetical way out is to invoke exotic matter, which would have a negative energy density and prevent the wormhole from collapsing. And how can we get negative energies? Perhaps from the Casimir effect, which arises when materials alter the energy contained in quantum vacuum fluctuations. Again, it’s not a full-blown respectable and realistic theory of time travel; but I’m happy that the show nods in the direction of real ideas, which will hopefully inspire the occasional viewer to dig more deeply into them.

Logic

It’s much more important that time travel in Lost makes logical sense — it’s consistent and obeys rules, even if the rules are not those of the real world. Most fundamentally, you can’t go into the past and alter the future; there are no alternate histories or any such cheap ploys. Daniel Faraday says at one point, “What happened, happened”; Sawyer just says “What’s done is done.” Dr. Chang, confronted in the video above with a worker who jokes about going back and killing Hitler, reacts in anger: “Don’t be absurd. There are rules!”

And the main rule is that things happen in a unique way at every place in space and time. If we have good reason, based on memories or some other form of records, to think that events played out in a certain way, then that’s what they did. There’s no changing things, and more than we can imagine changing the past under ordinary circumstances; the past already happened. As far as I can tell, the events we’ve been shown conform very well to this principle. Of course, there are certainly mysteries, and we’ll have to see how those are resolved in the season to come.

There is one seeming exception to this rule: Desmond’s visions of future events. He can see something happen in the future, and then take some action to prevent it (at least for a while). But as long as we’re being sticklers, we have to admit that a vision of the future isn’t the same as having that future actually happen. There is no paradox; only one thing ever happens in the real world, it’s just not necessarily the thing Desmond sees in his vision. When Desmond shuttles information back and forth between the past and present, it doesn’t conform to our ordinary notions of causality, but there’s nothing inconsistent about the complete history through time. I’m inclined to grant this bit of poetic license in the cause of interesting storytelling, as it still respects the no-paradox rule.

Despite the importance of this rule, fictional invocations of time travel tend to violate it all the time. Most such stories are all about changing the past, acting as if there is some narrative “meta-time” with respect to which events unfold, independently of the good old time we measure with physical clocks. (Think of Back to the Future, where Michael J. Fox does something in the 50’s and conditions “immediately” change back in the present day — erggh.) Personally I find the restrictions of logic to ultimately provide a more satisfying story structure.

By the end of Season Five, Faraday has become convinced that you can alter time, and hatches a plan to donate a nuclear bomb in 1977 to ultimately prevent everything we’ve later seen happen on the island. Faraday is killed by his mother, Eloise Hawking, but Jack and the other survivors try to carry out the plan. The finale of Season Five ends with a bright flash of light. We don’t know exactly what this means — that’s what cliffhangers are all about — but presumably this is the “Incident” referred to in later Dharma Initiative videos. I hope so, anyway; after all this wonderfully consistent if complicated narrative, it would be a shame to throw out a universe and start all over again.

Metaphor

Why does time travel fascinate us, anyway? Why do we find it so interesting? Part of it is the interest in changing the past — all of us have things we’d like to do over. But part of it is the fear of predestination. We like to think that, while the past is set in stone, we can make choices about our future — we have free will. But if we are able to travel into the past, then our future is part of the time that already happened — so in fact we don’t have complete freedom of action. Whatever it is we do when we get to the past, it must ultimately be consistent with how we know that past ultimately evolved into the present. That seems a bit irksome, even if it does respect the laws of physics.

This is where I think Lost really shines. One of the major themes of the show is destiny vs. free will, as embodied in the characters of Locke and Jack. Are there places where we are “meant” to be, or can we choose our paths for ourselves?

Well, there’s a balance. I can choose to turn right or left at a fork in the road, but I can’t choose to simply float into the air — there are the laws of physics to be obeyed. Lost uses the device of time travel to play with this tension — we think certain things are destined to happen, but we don’t know how. The logical restrictions of time travel are used as metaphors for the competition between predestination and choice.

A great example is the idea of “course corrections,” explained to Desmond by Eloise Hawking. Even if you see the future and try to prevent it, ultimately the designated fate is going to come to pass, perhaps in a different way (as with Charlie’s death). As a physicist this originally annoyed me, as that’s not how the laws of nature work — things happen or they don’t, but they’re not teleological, working through multiple channels to fulfill some crudely-specified goal.

But taking off my physicist’s cap and thinking more as a storyteller, I came to really appreciate this conceit as an interesting metaphor for how we try to think about fate. Determinism and the laws of physics are not the point; it’s simply that certain kinds of conditions pretty much inevitably result in certain kinds of outcomes. (Ever had two friends get together, and you knew from the start that it wasn’t going to last?) In our human lives, the rigid inevitability of the underlying physical laws isn’t very relevant to figuring out what’s going to happen next, but there is still some degree of predictability. The battle of destiny vs. free will isn’t one that has a winner and a loser; we are both constrained by circumstances, and free to make choices within that framework. That’s what makes life interesting.

Ultimately the idea of free will is tied to the arrow of time. Given perfect information about the present, in principle we could predict both the past and the future, without any wriggle room. But we don’t have perfect information. Because of the low entropy boundary condition in the past, we can nevertheless reconstruct what already happened with a certain amount of reliability; that’s why we think the past is unchangeable. But the future has no such boundary condition, and many possibilities are open. Otherwise I would tell you what’s going to happen over the next eighteen episodes of Lost.

The thoughts can occur to all of us when we slip behind the wheel of a car: That guy in the other lane is crazy, the old lady up ahead is driving dangerously slow, and seriously, how long is it taking that guy to make that turn? Apparently, we’re all kept warm in our cars by our smugness.

When researchers from Ottawa University polled nearly 400 drivers, ranging from driver’s license newbies to the very old, they found that all of them rated themselves favorably compared to other drivers. In other words, everyone thinks they’re above average.

The researchers asked the drivers how they would fare under different driving conditions including poor weather, emergency stops, and heavy traffic. They also asked the drivers how likely they were to have a crash, compared to an average motorist of the same sex.

The BBC reports:

All drivers, men and women, young and old, rated themselves over the “average motorist”, especially when this average motorist fell into the over 65 age category. Young men felt the most superior. Middle-aged men rated themselves as better than similarly aged drivers, and far superior to younger and older motorists. Older drivers – aged 65 plus – felt most superior when they compared themselves with motorists of the same age.

Really? So if everyone is such a great driver–who are those other people clogging up the roads and making the dumb turns?

The researchers warned that while confidence can be beneficial, it can also lead to people paying less attention when they’re behind the wheel. They suggested this overconfidence might be one of the reasons why so many young people get into accidents.

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DISCOVER: Drinking vs. Talking
DISCOVER: Driving Simulator
DISCOVER: Do Cell Phones Put Blinders on the Driver?
DISCOVER: The Physics of . . . Changing Lanes
80beats: In the Commute of the Future, Drivers Can Let a Pro Take the Wheel

Image: iStockphoto

Some alarming results just out from Yale and George Mason. Not only are Americans growing less convinced about global warming– either that it is happening or that it is human caused. We knew that already. But what’s more, Americans also appear less trusting of scientists in general, which is pretty alarming, as there have long been positive (if vague) sentiments towards the scientific community in this country:

The survey also found lower public trust in a variety of institutions and leaders, including scientists. For example, Americans’ trust in the mainstream news media as a reliable source of information about global warming declined by 11 percentage points, television weather reporters by 10 points and scientists by 8 points….

Finally, Americans who believe that most scientists think global warming is happening decreased 13 points, to 34 percent, while 40 percent of the public now believes there is a lot of disagreement among scientists over whether global warming is happening or not.

All of this amounts to nothing short of a complete PR nightmare. I am no public opinion specialist, but I wonder if we are seeing a trace of scandals like ClimateGate and GlacierGate in the data here. If so, it would be just more evidence (not that I needed it) that we are getting it handed to us by the skeptics, as never before….

As much as paleontologists have sorted out about the dinosaurs, one of the main aspects of their appearance—what color they were—has remained mysterious. But in a new Nature study, a team of British and Chinese scientists report that they found a way to unlock the color patters of one of the earliest feathery dinosaurs—it had a red mohawk, they say, with a red and white striped tail.

The dino in question is called Sinosauropteryx, which lived about 125 million years ago. Looking at fossils found in China, the team led by Mike Benton found what they think are the remains of feathers. And they found something inside the feathers that matches modern birds: melanosomes. These structures provide the melanin pigment in bird feathers (and human hair), and what color they are depends on the shape. “A ginger-haired person would have more spherical melanosomes, and a black-haired or grey-haired person would have more of the sausage-shaped structures,” said Professor Benton [BBC News].

Analyzing the Sinosauropteryx remains, the team found that spherical and sausage-shaped melanosomes alternated in its tail, which indicated to them that it would have been striped red and gray. Why would a dinosaur need a striped tail? Many birds, the living descendants of non-avian dinosaurs, use brightly colored tails for courtship displays. [National Geographic News]. They also found a “mohawk” of feathers running down its head to its back, but these showed just signs of red, not stripes.

You have to get lucky to find such evidence. Dinosaur fossils are mostly drab collections of mineralized bones. A few preserve traces of skin, and fewer still preserve structures that many scientists have argued are feathers [The New York Times]. But, Benton argues, his team’s stroke of good fortune lends more weight to the idea that birds descended from the dinosaurs called theropods, of which Sinosauropteryx was one: “Critics have said that these visible spiny structures could be shredded connective tissue. But the discovery of melanosomes within the bristles finally proves that some early dinosaurs were indeed feathered” [BBC News].

Related Content:
80beats: Model Suggests 4-Winged Dino Glided Like a Flying Squirrel
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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: Chuang Zhao and Lida Xing

Sigh. I do so love this kind of art.

This was the art drawn by Winsor McCay for an editorial in the Chicago Herald Examiner on March 29, 1931. Does anyone know more about the article that went with this art? I’d love to see it.

Tip o’ the 100 inch to Zach Weiner

Here’s a collection of astronomy-related links for you which I’ve enjoyed and found useful.  I am by no means implying that a site is NOT good if I haven’t listed it; good grief, there are thousands of them!  These are just a few of those I’ve used, and thought you might like to look them over if you haven’t done so already.

Of course, the preface “http://” is implied for each of these links, and you don’t have to use capital letters.  I did that for clarification, and to make it easier to find something if you’re just scanning down the list.

http://www.NASA.gov – This is NASA’s website, and is a great starting place for all things NASA.  It’ll give you directions to set up your very own NASA page, streamlined to your interests, called “MyNASA”.

http://www.ESA.int – Here’s the European Space Agency homepage.  News stories, images, videos, and additional links can be found here.  ESA, like NASA, has a section for kids with great games, competitions, downloads… well, you get the general idea.

http://www.JPL.nasa.gov – While many people think of NASA and the Jet Propulsion Lab (CA Institute of Technology) as one organization, they aren’t.  Their relationship is more like an extremely successful and productive marriage.  You’ll find a lot of duplication between NASA’s website and this one, but you’ll also find a lot of incredible new stuff.

SOHOwww.nascom.nasa.gov – I know, the “soho” before “www” looks weird, but that’s the correct address.  This is the home of SOHO, the Solar and Heliospheric observatory.  This is one cool website, for a really cool project.

http://www.HUBBLEsite.org – “Out of the ordinary …out of this world.”  That certainly describes Hubble, and HubbleSite.  Here’s where to find all those beautiful Hubble images, extras for kids, help for educators, news about Hubble… many, many fascinating bits and pieces to keep you interested for hours.  There’s even a little section on the Webb Space Telescope (not due to launch until 2014).

http://www.SPITZER.caltech.edu – Here’s where you’ll find Spitzer Space Telescope images, along with all things Spitzer.  Of course, you get a lot of cross-over from NASA, JPL, and CalTech, but it’s still a great, stand-alone site.

CHANDRA.harvard.edu – Another weird address… there’s no “www” in front of “Chandra”.  Among other features, this site (like HubbleSite) has a “where is Chandra right now” section that’s updated every minute.  It’s great to have all of Chandra’s jaw-dropping images in one place, too.

saturn.jpl.nasa.gov – Bet you’re thinking I just lost my mind!  This is the address to the CASSINI MISSION homepage.  Again, no “www” in front of “saturn”.  This site, along with NASA’s home page, won a WEBBY in 2009 for excellence on the internet.  The Cassini Mission site won for “best science site”.  Nice.

VOYAGER.jpl.nasa.gov – If it’s jaw-dropping images you’re looking for, don’t neglect this site.  Welcome to the home of Voyager I and II.

MESSENGER.jhuapl.edu – Messenger’s web site.  There are some great images of Mercury here that Tom and I haven’t had a chance to use yet.

antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov – The address for ASTRONOMY PICTURE OF THE DAY.  This is a fairly simple, straightforward web site, which disguises the fact that you’ll find some of the most beautiful images you’ve ever seen hiding behind all that simplicity.  One tip:  The search engine is not designed to handle “sounds-like” searches, so you’ll need the exact spelling.

SPACEWEATHER.com – I bet you’re beginning to wonder if anything is prefaced “www” anymore.  This site will give you cool images, interesting articles, and helpful links.  For instance, if you go to this link today, you’ll see that tomorrow is the biggest full moon of the year (with images).

STEREO.gsfc.nasa.gov – For the best information and 3-D images of the Sun, this is the site to visit.  Here is where you can see what the Sun looks like right now.  The whole thing… hair/hide/fur/feathers and all.

ngm.NATIONALGEOGRAPHIC.com – The home of National Geographic.  Good articles, stunning images… how could I leave out National Geographic?  A lot of its content is more “down to Earth”, but NatGeo is right there in space exploration and funding, too.

There, that should keep you busy for a little while if you weren’t already familiar with each of these sites.  There are tons more, and you’ll find handy links to some very interesting places.  If nothing else, pop over and look at how the moon will appear tomorrow.

And see?  I can yap for HOURS without any encouragement.

Here’s the part of last night’s speech that is directed at us nerds:

Next, we need to encourage American innovation. Last year, we made the largest investment in basic research funding in history – an investment that could lead to the world’s cheapest solar cells or treatment that kills cancer cells but leaves healthy ones untouched. And no area is more ripe for such innovation than energy. You can see the results of last year’s investments in clean energy — in the North Carolina company that will create 1,200 jobs nationwide helping to make advanced batteries; or in the California business that will put a thousand people to work making solar panels.

The new investments in science were wonderful–but will they be able to continue with the president’s proposed three year “freeze” on spending?

But to create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. And that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country. It means making tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development. It means continued investment in advanced biofuels and clean coal technologies. And, yes, it means passing a comprehensive energy and climate bill with incentives that will finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy in America.

I know greens are ticked about this part of the speech. The conjunction of nuclear, drilling, and clean coal made them understandably apoplectic. But it seems to me that now that Democrats have lost their supermajority in the Senate, it may be necessary to give some ground on these areas if we want a real energy plan to go through. And it sounds like Obama is willing to do that.

I am grateful to the House for passing such a bill last year. And this year I’m eager to help advance the bipartisan effort in the Senate.

I know there have been questions about whether we can afford such changes in a tough economy. I know that there are those who disagree with the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change. But here’s the thing – even if you doubt the evidence, providing incentives for energy-efficiency and clean energy are the right thing to do for our future – because the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy. And America must be that nation.

Go Greg Craven–Obama made your argument!

I’m glad the president isn’t backing down on the Senate bill. I am not in a position to handicap the votes, but, let’s face it: George W. Bush would have gotten the bill through without a supermajority in the Senate. He did it again and again. If Democrats play tougher, and smarter, they can still put us on a path towards solving the climate problem.

“A flat plate model was used to calculate heat loss from the pinnae [outer ears] of the animated elephant Dumbo.  In conditions of high wind velocity and large gradients, Dumbo could potentially dissipate more heat than he produces. This suggests that he may need the large ears to help lose the excess heat produced while flying.”

Image: flickr/hairgeek

I happen to be visiting UCSD this week, and woke to the news that Geoffrey Burbidge passed away yesterday afternoon. He was a giant in the field of astronomy and cosmology, and (despite himself) was one of the main contributors to the establishment of the standard Big Bang model of cosmology. He was perhaps best known for his work in stellar nucleosynthesis (encapsulated in the B2FH paper: Burbidge, Burbidge, Fowler, and Hoyle 1957, Rev. Mod. Phys. 29, 547), which in some sense established that we are all made of “star stuff”. There are few research papers that are widely known simply by their author’s initials (especially over 50 years later); the paper even has its own wikipedia page. (Off hand, the only other one I can think of is EPR.)

However, for the past years Burbidge was primarily associated with advocating a steady-state model for the Universe. For many decades this model was incredibly important, as it provided a foil with which to challenge the big bang theory. It pushed us to get as much data as possible, and helped usher in the era of precision cosmology. In some sense, it is because of the steady-state model that we are as confident as we are in the big bang model. [Famously, the very name "big bang" was coined derisively by Hoyle, one of the originators of the steady state model, and the "H" in B2FH.] Burbidge was a proponent of his alternative cosmology, long after the vast majority of people in the field abandoned it. The data became overwhelming (in particular, the incredibly perfect black body spectrum from COBE, and then the completely incontrovertible “acoustic” peaks from WMAP, among other things). Burbidge was adamant that we should always question, and carefully distinguish between data and models. He did not like the “bandwagon” aspect of science, and remained leery of the broad consensus behind the big bang.

There’s an article in our very own Discover Magazine which nicely sums up Burbidge’s personality and science. He did vital and important work in the field, and should be remembered for this.

Next month I will be part of a virtual book party. Here’s the deal: the American Institute of Biological Sciences is inviting fellow Disco-blogger Chris Mooney and me to talk about our recent books via video. Registered participants can then ask questions and discuss the books. Plus, a couple lucky registrants will win a copy of our books! You can find more details and register here. (Space is limited.)