With one week until the premiere of the final season of LOST, let’s consider the possibilities for what might happen next…

At this point in the story, the island has stopped jumping through time, but some survivors stuck in the past have just detonated–or attempted to detonate–a conveniently placed nuclear bomb. If successful, they could change everything.

Their plan was first concocted by the island’s resident physicist, Daniel Faraday, who figured out that variables (i.e., time travelers) may be able to alter the future, but unfortunately, he was shot by his own mother–who was pregnant with him at the time. So the other survivors took up Faraday’s mission to change what’s to come, reasoning that if the island and its mysterious energy no longer existed, their plane would not have crashed, they would not meet each other, and the entire first five seasons would never take place!

Where are we now? It also seems that master manipulator Benjamin Linus was just a pawn for the even greater master manipulating smoke monster (a.k.a., the Egyptian god Set?) who found his loophole to kill Jacob in John Locke. However, we suspect Jacob anticipated what would take place and set a series of events in motion by visiting each of the main characters before they reached the island, possibly derailing the smoke monster’s plan so his own murder would never happen. Further, it appears that this is a sort of game the two play: Endlessly calling travelers to their island to move them about like chess pieces. And Jacob always triumphs… so far.

Still with me? So this thread’s just for fun for all of the LOST fans out there. Let’s speculate on what’s to come in the final season and whether Jughead can actually change the future–or if it’s all been done before. What do readers think? I’ll get us started with a similar question to one I posed last year:

If you theoretically travel back in time to change the future–only to realize you’ve already been there and failed–might free will result in different choices leading to new and alternative realities?

Eric Berger of the Houston Chronicle has a really important article out about how, basically, the good guys lost a major battle in the climate war over the past few months. Some combination of the weather, ClimateGate, the relative failure of Copenhagen, and now, the decreasing likelihood of the U.S. Senate passing cap and trade have shifted a mood of climate optimism–which I certainly felt about a year ago–to one of deep despair. “The climate surrounding climate change has changed, and not for the better for those seeking to reduce carbon dioxide emissions,” writes Berger. Sadly, I have to agree.

What went wrong? That’s a very long story, and Berger relates much of it. For my part, I am convinced the fundamental factor is that our camp egregiously misunderestimated the skeptic/denial camp and what it was capable of. Our thinking went something like this: “the science keeps getting stronger, and now we have Obama…the tide has turned.” And so we were lulled into a false sense of security. Now, there is a hell of a lot of regrouping to do, and I am not even sure where to begin. But one thing is certain: We should never again assume that science alone is going to make the political difference on this issue, no matter how strong it gets.

This isn’t really about astronomy, but in a way, it is.  I was cruising around the web the other day, and I went to a site I usually visit because of amusing content and comments.  The site had used 15 images produced by NASA et al, ESA et al, and various astrophysicists to illustrate that day’s post, but none of the images were credited.  Not a single one.  I commented on it, and wrote the site owner twice, but nothing was done to credit the owners of these images.  I never got a response, either – not from my comment or my two emails.

What’s that called in the digital era?  We used to call it “rude”, “copyright infringement”, and “theft”.

Organizations like NASA and ESA don’t care if you use their images; they want people to see them and enjoy them.  That’s why they put them out there.  But you have to credit the image, guys.  These agencies and the people working for them depend on public recognition of their work for funding.  If you didn’t know it was Hubble that put all those amazing images out all those years, do you think we’d still have the program?  No way.  The Hubble would have been shut down within two years, and look at all we would have lost.

I think it’s wrong.  There’s no excuse for it, especially when it’s so easy to credit the image.  I mean, it’s written right THERE to whom it belongs, you can’t miss it when you go to NASA or HubbleSite or wherever to get the image… it just takes 30 sec worth of typing to attribute the image.  Forgetting is one thing; blowing it off is another.

I’m still kicking around whether or not I should link the site to NASA and ESA and let them contact the site owner… because they will if they know about it.  They’re very careful about attribution, because it matters to them.

And it should matter to us.

On Monday night, CBS Evening News covered the arrest of the snake-oil salesman who was selling what he claimed are bomb-sniffing dowsing rods, but are in reality (gasp!) totally useless:

Lt. Col. Hal Bidlack (retired), interviewed in the show, is an old friend and friend of the JREF; if you’ve attended a TAM then you’ve seen him MC the event. He got in a couple of excellent sound bites!

And I guess I should be fair. The magic wands aren’t totally useless. They’re perfect for getting people blown up and killed. I’m sure the terrorists love them.

Related posts :
A double military victory!
When antiscience kills: dowsing edition
Hal Bidlack: Colorado’s next Congressman (and yeah, that didn’t work out as well as planned, but it’s worth reading for things Hal has said and done.)

For years, prions have been known only as a serious danger to animal and human health. These misfolded brain proteins have been linked to fatal diseases–like mad cow disease in cattle and the deadly variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. But apart from causing these diseases, scientists puzzled for years about the exact function of a properly folded prion protein.

A new study in Nature Neuroscience may have some answers. After 20 years of research, an international team of neuroscientists reports that, in mammals, the mysterious proteins help to maintain the myelin sheath that protects the body’s nerves [Nature News]. A healthy sheath is necessary for nerve cells to transmit impulses rapidly.

The study, conducted by Adriano Aguzzi and his team at University Hospital of Zurich, Switzerland, observed mice that were bred lacking prion proteins altogether. They found that these mice developed a condition where their peripheral nerves, which connect the limbs to the central nervous system, lost much of their myelin coating [Nature News]. By the age of two months, the mice’s nerves had lost their protective coating and the mice had become more sensitive to pain. Scientists say this shows that prion proteins (in their properly folded form) play some role in keeping nerve cells healthy, and add that the findings could lead to new research on human diseases that involve the nerves. For example, it could offer a new way of looking at multiple sclerosis, an incurable disease caused by demyelination of nerves in the brain and spinal cord [Nature News].

But there have been other hints that prions play a beneficial role in human health. A few years ago, scientists found that prions could be safeguarding our brains by preventing neurons from overworking themselves to death [New Scientist]. Another team discovered evidence that prion proteins could play a role in protecting our brains against the neural plaques associated with Alzheimer’s, noting that the more prion protein human brain cells made, the less plaque-forming protein they made, and vice-versa [New Scientist].

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Image: Steve Gschmeissner/ SPL

If you’ve been outside after it gets dark lately, you may have noticed the brilliant reddish star in the east. But that’s no star; it’s Mars! About every year and a half, the Earth passes Mars as they both orbit the Sun, very much like how a faster racing car on the inside track laps a slower-moving car on the outside track.

When Earth does lap Mars, the Red Planet’s on the opposite side of the sky from the Sun, rising at sunset and setting at sunrise — we say that Mars is at opposition when that happens. When it does, we get two advantages in one: it’s at its closest point, so it’s bigger in telescopes, and it’s up all night so you can observe it at your convenience. This happens next in just a few days, on January 29, 2010.

That’s why the Beauty Without Borders program has set up a Mars observing campaign, to get everyone outside and looking at Mars. If you are part of a local astronomy group, let them know about the campaign, which lasts from tonight, January 25th, through the 30th. Get folks to attend and see Mars through a telescope! It won’t be terribly big like you might see in space probe pictures, of course, but you may catch the polar ice caps, or some other features.

And when the event is done, you can report your results to the Beauty without Borders group, so they can collate them. Did you see the same things as people across the world?

I love hearing about events like this. The hardest thing to do, sometimes, is simply to get people to look up. You really should try it. Otherwise, you’re missing the entire Universe.

Tip o’ the Tharsis shield to ThilinaH.

Go where the flock goes: That seems to be the new message from the Vatican last Saturday, when Pope Benedict XVI sent a message instructing his priests to adopt a “new media mindset.” The pope encouraged his priests to use all the digital tools at their disposal to preach the Gospel, version 2.0. Expect to see more priests online engaging in dialogue with the faithful, and maybe even a priestly Facebook page or two.

The Washington Post reports:

The Vatican has tried hard to keep up to speed with the rapidly changing field. Last year it opened a YouTube channel as well as a portal dedicated to the pope. The Pope2You site gives news on the pontiff’s trips and speeches and features a Facebook application that allows users to send postcards with photos of Benedict and excerpts from his messages to their friends.

Monsignor Claudio Maria Celli, who heads the Vatican’s social communications office, said the Pope’s words aim to encourage the use of social media.

But according to The Washington Post, he clarified to reporters:

“That doesn’t mean that (every priest) must open a blog or a Web site. It means that the church and the faithful must engage in this ministry in a digital world. At some point, a balance will be found.”

Engaging with followers online may be the Vatican’s new mantra, but they could also pick up a few tips from some Hindu temples that have moved their gods online–offering online prayer services and “viewings” for almost a decade now.

And we were recently reminded that on Plough Monday, some Anglican churches bless technological gadgets, the successors to the farm implements of old.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: How to Teach Science to the Pope
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Discoblog: Vatican Science: Pope Blames Male Infertility on…the Pill

Image: Wikimedia

Friday saw the release of two science-centered films: the medical drama “Extraordinary Measures” opened around the country, while the British-made Charles Darwin biopic “Creation” finally found a U.S. distributor and began limited showings on this side of the pond.

Starring Brendan Fraser and Harrison Ford, “Extraordinary Measures” tells the Hollywood-ized true story of researchers racing to find a cure for Pompe disease, a genetic affliction affecting fewer than 10,000 people in the world. Two of those people, however, are the children of John Crowley, Fraser’s character. “The movie is a great exposure for a rare genetic disease,” said Duke University School of Medicine’s Priya Kishnani, who studies Pompe and participated in much of the research that led to the first and only approved treatment for the disease…. “I would have never thought in my lifetime, a disease that I’m so passionate about would make it into mainstream Hollywood cinema” [The Scientist].

While Dr. R. Rodney Howell also applauded Hollywood for making the film, he wrote for the Miami Herald that people must be careful not to imagine that the Hollywood version of finding cures—Crowley overcoming all odds nearly alone to successfully save his children—is the way it really works. There’s much more to the story of how drugs are developed in the real world. And, as Americans turn to the promise of science to correct deadly genetic mistakes, we need to realize drugs don’t get “discovered” the way Hollywood says they do [Miami Herald]. The real-life Pompe treatment upon which the film is based, called Myozyme, took 20 years of work, with teams of scientists building on the work of other teams, Howell points out.

As for “Creation,” prospects looked grim last fall for the film even finding distribution in the United States. Producer Jeremy Thomas ranted to The Telegraph that the poor percentage of Americans accepting evolution, compared to residents of other countries, was keeping his movie out of the United States. Less than two weeks later, however, the U.S. distribution rights were picked up by Newmarket Films – which was ironic, because five years earlier the same company handled “The Passion of the Christ,” Mel Gibson’s worshipful (and graphic) tale of Jesus’ death and resurrection [MSNBC].

Actually, according to director Jon Amiel, the holdup happened mostly because U.S. distributors didn’t see a period drama about big ideas as a big money-maker, as opposed to say, blue creatures with tails piloting dragons in 3-D. “I’d love to say that it was a conservative, right-wing religious conspiracy that hampered the film’s distribution prospects,” he said, “but the truth is a little more complicated” [Wired.com].

“Creation” stars Paul Bettany as the great naturalist and Jennifer Connelly as his wife, Emma Darwin. Amiel’s film focuses particularly on Darwin’s personal life, reviews say, especially the fact that the real Darwin wasn’t the religion-smasher that some critics make him out to be, but rather held conflicted feelings on the implications of his singular notion for humanity’s place in the cosmos.

Related Content:
The Intersection: Darwin Film “Too Controversial For Religious America?”
Discoblog: Darwin May’ve Had “Cyclical Vomiting Syndrome” (It’s As Fun As It Sounds)
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Discoblog: Sneak Preview of Darwin: The Musical
DISCOVER: Vital Signs, all our medical mysteries

“Creation” Image: Newmarket Films

For years, farmers in Kenya’s arid north have suffered huge losses when droughts wiped out their cattle herds. Now, they have a means to protect their sole source of livelihood when rains fail and grasslands disappear. A new insurance scheme hopes to safeguard cattle-rearers in northern Kenya’s drought-prone Marsabit district by using satellite imagery to track changing landscapes and the subsequent loss of cattle.

The program, launched by the International Livestock Research Institute, is being billed as the world’s first insurance program to track changing pastoral grounds. When the satellite photos reveal that a verdant green landscape has changed to a dry brown, the insurance kicks in and farmers can collect their payments. The program will make things easier for insurance companies–for whom estimating losses in the past has been all but impossible. Partly because it has simply been too expensive for insurers to go and count the number of dead animals which might be spread over a vast rural area [BBC]. The scheme’s launch comes at a time when the Marsabit region has suffered 28 droughts in the last 100 years and four in the past decade alone [Kenya Broadcasting Corporation].

The program will be run by a Kenyan bank in partnership with a local insurance firm. The initial aim is to get 1,000 families in northern Kenya to insure their cows, goats, sheep and camels. To insure a herd of 10 cows for example a family would pay the equivalent of around $50 [BBC]. That may sound like a lot of money for cattle-herder in the developing world, but it represents less than a third of the value of a single cow. For many farmers, the cattle are the sole means of livelihood, so protecting them through insurance seems to be a good idea.

Marsabit is home to more than 2 million cows, camels, goats and sheep, worth an estimated $67 million. Livestock here is rarely sold or slaughtered–instead, families depend on them for milk and routinely drink their blood for nutrition. For now, the scheme has been launched just in the Marsabit District–if it works well, then it will be launched across Africa. The program has some precedents: In Mongolia, a different form of insurance brings payouts for all pastoralists if severe snowstorms kill animals in benchmark herds [News24].

Related Content:
80beats: West Africa Is Prone to “Mega-Droughts,” But People Aren’t Prepared
80beats: Do Hot, Dry Conditions Cause More African Civil Wars?
80beats: Kenya’s Man-Eating Lions Not as Man-Hungry as Previously Thought
80beats: Elephants’ Tail Hairs Tell a Story of Competition on the Savanna

Image: iStockphoto

If you’ve never played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, take a trip to the Oracle of Bacon, where you can see how far any actor is from Bacon in the Hollywood movie network.

And once you’ve played that game, check out my new article at Yale Environment 360 to see how ecosystems are a lot like Hollywood, at least when it comes to networking.

For more on ecological network theory, check out Jordi Bascompte’s web site.

The Wide-field Infrared Satellite Explorer has detected its first near-Earth asteroid! Named 2010 AB78, it was discovered in mid-January by the orbiting observatory. Here’s an image of the rock:

AB78 is about a kilometer (0.6 miles) or so across, making it one of the bigger asteroids that can buzz the Earth. The orbital information on it isn’t perfect yet, but we already know its orbit doesn’t actually cross the Earth’s so it can’t hit us. At closest approach it’s still many million of kilometers away from us, and poses no threat.

However, I’ll be honest and say this discovery is mildly alarming (stressing the word mildly). One of the missions of WISE is to find such asteroids; some rocks are dark and therefore hard to detect using telescopes which search in visible light. However, AB78 is warm, so it glows in the infrared, making it an easy target for WISE. That’s why searching for such asteroids is one of WISE’s main goals.

The thing is, statistically speaking we should already know of almost all the kilometer-sized rocks that are in near-Earth orbits; given the rates and methods of finding them, our catalog should be about 90% complete. Finding an asteroid this size that eluded detection up until now is somewhat unsettling. How many more have we missed?

Let me be clear: this could be a statistical fluke; even if we know of 90% of all the NEAs out there, 10% still lurk out in the black. It could simply be that this first one found by WISE is somewhat on the hefty side, and the next 20 will be far smaller. Remember too, this one is bright in the IR (in the above picture, red is actually at a wavelength of 12 microns, 15 times longer what the human eye can see) and so it was easy to spot. Smaller ones are fainter, so they may not be as obvious and will take longer to detect. Also, AB78 is on a weird orbit, tipped substantially (about 33°) to the plane of the solar system, again making it more difficult to spot.

And in a way, this is good news! The more we know about these things, the better. AB78 may be a fluke, or there may be more rocks this size out there hiding, but either way I want as much info as we can get. Just knowing how many asteroids of a given size orbit the Sun and get near the Earth is an important piece of data, so that we can apply some statistics to them and try to figure out, on average, how often we get hit. That’s one of the things WISE will do over its 10-month-long mission, so in a year or so we’ll be in a better position to understand these orbiting worldlets.

Emily Lakdawalla at The Planetary Society has more info as well.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

At a time when wearing fur is generally considered a fashion faux pas, designers like Oscar de le Renta and Billy Reid are taking a big fashion risk. They are selling pelts from an unusual source: the nutria.

Ever heard of the nutria? It’s a nocturnal, semi-aquatic rodent that weighs around 12 pounds. It has the body of a beaver, the tail of a rat, the feet of a duck, and it wears its nipples on the sides of its body rather than on its belly. It is also destroying Louisiana’s wetlands.

In the 1930s, Louisiana fur farms imported these animals from Argentina for their supple pelts. Unfortunately, some nutria got loose and made Louisiana’s marshes their new home. As the demand for nutria fur diminished in the 1980s, these animals went from posh fashion statement to ecological pest.

Today, nutria have destroyed tens of thousands of acres of wetlands in Louisiana by feeding on marsh vegetation. Nutria graze on the roots of plants, making it difficult for this vegetation to regenerate. When a marsh’s natural flora is destroyed, the soil underneath gets swept away by the tide, and the marsh becomes open water.

Over the years, the government of Louisiana has gone to great lengths to curb the nutria problem. It has even invented a number of nutria-based recipes, encouraging citizens to make nutria a delicious part of their daily diets.

Members of Louisiana’s Coastwide Nutria Control Program already kill thousands of nutria a year, letting their pelts go to waste. But now, designers and activists alike are attempting to hype the nutria as an eco-friendly source of fur. One group, known as Righteous Fur, is promoting the use of nutria in fashion and even held a nutria fur design competition on January 8^th.

So if you love the feel of fur on your skin, but don’t want to be burdened with guilt, consider the nutria. That is, if you don’t mind wearing a water rat.

By Anna Rothschild. This article is provided by Scienceline, a project of New York University’s Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program.

Image: flickr / amboo who?

What’s this? Two outstanding and surpassingly beautiful Cassini images in one day?

Yeah, because this is how much I love you guys. Check. This. Out:

[Click to embiggen.]

That is so cool! It’s Saturn’s moon Dione passing in front of Tethys as their mutual motion, combined with Cassini’s, give us this incredible view of what astronomers call an occultation (also called a "mutual event"… but you can just think of it as an eclipse).

There’s so much awesomeness in this picture. For one, see the faint glow on the "dark" side of Tethys? That’s reflected light from Saturn, which is well off to the right in this picture. But we don’t see any reflected light on Dione. Why not?

Even though the two moons look about the same distance away, that’s very misleading: in this image, Tethys is 2.6 million kilometers (1.6 million miles) from Cassini, while Dione is 400,000 km (240,000 miles) closer. That’s enough to significantly change the geometry of the situation, so that we don’t see Saturnlight on Dione.

Note that while both moons are roughly the same size (Tethys is 1062 km (660 miles) across, and Dione is 1123 km (700 miles) in diameter), Dione looks bigger because it was closer to Cassini when these shots were snapped. If they had been at the same distance from Cassini, you’d just barely be able to tell Dione is bigger. Sometimes distance matters, not size.

And sometimes size matters too. It’s hard to miss the vast Odysseus crater on Tethys, a terrifying 400 km (240 miles) across. That’s the size of Ohio. An impact that large on Earth would pretty much wipe out every living thing on the planet’s surface.

For another little dose of coolness, these images were taken about one minute apart, covering just two minutes of Cassini’s tour of Saturn and its armada of moons. Imagine what you’d see if you could be there, staying at a hotel orbiting Titan? What wonders would befall your eyes if you had years to explore?

Hmmm. Come to think of it, we don’t have to wonder about it. Cassini is showing us.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

In the new version of the Unscientific America talk, I also tried to make more explicit the reasons why we think “scientific literacy,” broadly defined, is essential to American democracy, and something every citizen should strive for. What’s so great about it? Well, here are my answers:

1. Knowledge is a good in and of itself. The more anyone has of it, the better.

2. Empowerment: The more Americans know about science, and the methods of critical thinking about evidence that it imparts, the better off they’ll be when it comes to making choices in their own lives, e.g., in the medical arena.

3. Citizenship: The more scientifically literate our citizens are, the more they’ll be able to access and engage with the scientific aspects of key public policy issues like climate change.

4. Policy: There is a reality out there, and we need our decisions to be aligned with it. Ultimately, 3 should lead to 4, as more citizen engagement with science reverberates in the decision-making process. And that’s what matters most of all.

Any questions or objections? Or does that about encompass it?

I think that traditionally, most of the emphasis in “scientific literacy” discussions has been on 1 & 2. What I like think is different about the approach that we take in Unscientific America is that it much more strongly stresses 3 & 4.

At some level, I understand the motivations of people who promote "alternative medicine". They may very well be altrustic, seeing what they perceive as a massive failing of so-called Western medicine, and feeling strongly that they know how to fix the situation, if only people would seek alternatives. I know that when I feel strongly enough about an issue, I feel morally obligated to speak up.

The problem is that for a lot of this so-called alternative medicine, there is no evidence it works, and in fact evidence it doesn’t work. Worse, a lot of its biggest purveyors actively try to denigrate real medicine, the stuff that, y’know, works, in an attempt to bolster their alt-med claims. And you have to be a little suspicious when they hawk their wares on their sites, too.

So I question the motivations of some of these people, including one Mike Adams, about whom I wrote a couple of days ago. When called out for what is apparently voter fraud for a Twitter Shorty Award, he threw an epic tantrum that displays a decided lack of grip on reality (assuming he honestly believes what he’s selling). After that fact-free diatribe he followed up with a rant about skeptics that’s so far off the mark that it’s hard to believe anyone could post something like that honestly. Steve Novella takes him down on that one.

And as if these word spasms from Adams weren’t enough, he posted a third article where he completely gets science wrong, claiming water and quantum mechanics are magic, and then a fourth about the Shorty Awards where he once again ramps up the paranoid conspiracy theories.

Sigh. The irony is that he makes my job easy since he’s self-debunking, but also makes it harder because so many people swallow what he says whole without even giving it a moment of critical thought.

Joe Mercola, the other "victim" professing to have the vapors over this Shorty Award nonsense, decided to jump into the fray as well. Instead of using facts — because why start now? — he thought it was a good idea to say that Rachael Dunlop is fat:

An arrogant group of science bloggers that have vilified me for the past few years have started a campaign to have an Australian shill to win a health award on Twitter. This overweight non-physician has arrogantly bashed nearly every alternative therapy and encourages reliance on drugs.

Rachael is a woman who has tirelessly fought quackery and the dangerous wares of many alt-med purveyors, and of course Adams and Mercola are squarely in her crosshairs. She has called out many an antivaxxer, and was a key player in the travesty involving Dana McCaffery (an infant who died of pertussis) and Meryl Dorey, an antivaxxer who claims no one dies from pertussis anymore.

So when faced with someone like Rachael who has years of experience and who wields science, evidence, and reality, Mercola decided to stick out his tongue and call her fat.

Wow, folks. There’s your alt-med hero.

And yes, I am engaging in an ad hominem, an attack directed at someone instead of their arguments. But it’s not always wrong to do so; in this case Steve Novella, Orac, Rachael, and many others, including me, have already shown that people like Mercola and Adams are full of it. But sometimes that’s not enough. I think it does a lot of good to see how vile these people can be, and something like this is not only warranted, but needed, especially when these alt-medders set themselves up to be victims, claiming to be sympathetic and only wanting to help. They don’t help; they hurt.

Happily, some of Mercola’s followers are starting to see through him.

Look. We’re not talking about goofy nonsense like ghost-hunting or UFOs here. We’re talking about people’s lives. Alt-medders like Adams and Mercola reject treatments that we know to work, that we know can cure illnesses, that we know can relieve pain and suffering on a massive scale, and that we know can save lives. That’s what you’re turning your back on when you listen to them.

And I still endorse Rachael for the Shorty Award in health. Keep fighting the good fight.

If you thought a zoo chimpanzee’s life was a simple sequence of “see banana… peel… eat,” then think again.

The BBC is set to air a new documentary titled “The Chimpcam Project,” that has been shot entirely by chimpanzees at Scotland’s Edinburgh Zoo. We’re guessing it won’t quite match the high-tech joys of “Avatar,” but the film is expected to provide fascinating clues as to how chimps view the world around them.

The movie was primatologist Betsy Herrelko’s idea. She introduced video technology to a group of 11 chimps living in a newly built enclosure at the Edinburgh Zoo. At first she just wanted to see if chimps could use a touchscreen to select different videos, thereby offering her a chance to study what images chimps liked.

The BBC reports:

Initially, the chimps were more interested in each other than the video technology, as two male chimps within the study group vied to become the alpha male, disrupting the experiment. But over time, some of the chimps learned how to select different videos to watch.

Then, Herrelko wanted to gauge if chimps could record images with a chimp-proof camera–a camera enclosed in an orange bash-proof box.

When the chimps were handed the “chimpcam” as a group, they carried it around the enclosure and were fascinated by the viewfinder. However, the BBC reported that the apes were not likely to have actively filmed any particular object or to have understood that they were making a film. But the researchers are confident the chimpcam will help garner new info on how chimps see the world.

The film will premiere this Wednesday on the BBC, but here’s a sneak peek at the list of chimps who made the end credits: Cindy, Ricky and Louis from Africa, Emma from Bedforshire, UK, and David, Kilimi, Kindia, Liberius, Lucy, Lyndsey, and Qafzeh who were all born at the Edinburgh Zoo.

Related Content:
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80beats: New HIV Strain Came to Humans from Gorillas, Not Chimps
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DISCOVER: An Embarrassment of Chimps

Image Credit: iStock Photo

We’re long overdule for an open-type thread around here, so let me provide the excuse by asking one of the world’s great questions: what’s the best way to make coffee?

I’m an eclectic coffee drinker; I like espresso but also enjoy a really good cup of American coffee, and I prefer coffee black but am willing to adulterate it with milk if I suspect the quality is not going to be that high. (Sugar under no circumstances.) For the past few years I’ve relied on the lowest-effort method I know of that is guaranteed to produce a good cup: freshly-ground dark roast beans, placed in a simple cone filter and hot water poured right in. Practically instant coffee, but a result that can be as good as the beans allow.

But I’d like to start mixing more espresso into my home coffee experience, so I’m in the market for a new espresso machine. If I were a physicist of means, I might go for a work of art like the Elektra Micro Casa Lever on right. Or would I? This is a spring-action lever machine, which is to be contrasted with the manual levers, not to mention the automatics and super-automatics, and then there’s the matter of boilers, switches, heat exchangers … a complete mess. The pumps are certainly elegant, but I’d also like something that is functional and doesn’t require constant pampering. So I am in the unusual position of being frozen with indecision about what kind of espresso machine to get. Any opinions out there?

The ground rules here are:

1. There’s no such thing as right or wrong; different people have different tastes, for which different approaches are appropriate.
2. Answers with specific comparisons of advantages and disadvantages are more useful than simple insistence on truth.

I do understand that this is the internet and rules are unlikely to be followed, but I feel I should try.

Obviously not all advice on such a topic is too be trusted. The Engineer’s Guide to Drinks thread featured a sobering (as it were) number of people who think a “martini” should just be chilled gin rather than a proper cocktail, and were proud to admit it in public! So caveat lector. And if you want to talk about something other than coffee, be our guest.

Despite the prevalence of post traumatic stress disorder, especially in veterans (an estimated one in five from Iraq and Afghanistan have it, according to the Department of Defense), it can be maddeningly tricky to diagnose. But in a new study in Journal of Neural Engineering, brain researcher Apostolos Georgopoulos argues that his team has found, through the brain scanning technique called magnetoencephalography (MEG), a pattern in the brain associated with PTSD. In a MEG scan, researchers measure the magnetic fields generated by electric activity in the brain; the scans are far faster than those taken via MRI.

Georgopoulos and colleagues studied 74 U.S. veterans with PTSD and 250 people with no mental health problems. They scanned the brains of study participants looking for a signal that might distinguish a PTSD patient from a healthy volunteer [Reuters]. The researchers mapped the neural interactions for both groups, and they say that the resulting map of biomarkers allowed them to look at brain scans, without knowing whether the person had PTSD or not, and pick out the PTSD patients from controls with 90 percent accuracy.

The main upshot of finding reliable biomarkers for PTSD would be making diagnosis easier and more accurate. In addition, the map shows changes over time, which therapists could consult to see how well treatment is working. But for Georgopoulos, there’s something more: “This shows that PTSD is a brain disease,” he says. “There have been questions that this is a made-up disorder and isn’t a true brain disease, but it is” [TIME].

The biomarkers in question are patterns of tiny magnetic fluctuations that occur as groups of neurons fire in synchrony, even when subjects are not thinking of anything. These “synchronous neural interactions” have already been shown to distinguish signals from subjects with a range of disorders including Alzheimer’s [BBC News].

Not all are convinced that Georgopoulos is on to something: Dr. Sally Satel, a psychiatrist now affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute who has studied PTSD, says she’s skeptical that there’s “a fixed neural signature” for the condition [TIME]. However, she says, Georgopoulos’ approach could become part of a more through PTSD diagnostic process, and he says he plans more ambitious studies beyond this first step. The researchers say they want to evaluate 500 vets and 500 civilians to further test their findings, and it will be important to investigate whether certain pre-existing conditions that are also PTSD symptoms, i.e. anxiety and insomnia, skew the results [CNET].

Related Content:
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DISCOVER: Treating Agony With Ecstasy
Cosmic Variance: Guest Post: Tom Levenson on the Iraq War Suicides And the Material Basis of Consciousness

Image: iStockphoto

Are you ready for some free fall?

Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner officially announced that sometime this year, he intends to jump from a balloon at a height of nearly 23 miles, breaking the 50-year-old world record for the highest parachute jump held by retired U.S. Air Force pilot Joe Kittinger. Kittinger is the Stratos mission’s capcom (short for capsule communicator), which means that he will be the voice in Baumgartner’s helmet. Kittinger’s advice to his successor: “Have fun, enjoy it, and tell us all about it when you get down” [Scientific American].

Baumgartner is a BASE jumper who once flew a glider across the English Channel, but he and his team say they have loftier goals than simply a world record and a huge adrenaline rush. If he makes the jump, Baumgartner could be the first person to break the sound barrier without the benefit of an aircraft, and his crazy stunt could provide valuable data on how that affects the body. Just as Kittinger did, Baumgartner will go up in a balloon, though his pressure suit, capsule and monitoring equipment will be much more advanced [Reuters]. Baumgartner says that a successful test would also benefit future spaceflight, showing that if astronauts had a problem as their craft entered the stratosphere, it theoretically would be possible for them to bail out and safely reach the ground.

Baumgartner’s pressurized, airtight suit is much like those worn by space shuttle astronauts, and Art Thompson, the project’s technical director, explains that it’s vital to his success. The jump height is above a threshold at [62,000 feet] called the Armstrong line, where the atmospheric pressure is so low that fluids start to boil. “If he opens up his face mask or the suit, all the gases in your body go out of suspension, so you literally turn into a giant fizzy, oozing fluid from your eyes and mouth, like something out of a horror film,” Thompson explained. “It’s just seconds until death” [New Scientist].

Hopefully Baumgartner has better luck than others who have tried to fall to Earth from the highest heights. The most recent attempt was made in 2008, by a former French paratrooper, Michel Fournier, who spent years preparing only to have the balloon that was set to take him up break from its moorings and float away [The Independent]. Fournier, however, pledges to try again this year, so it could be a race to jump from the stratosphere—if everybody remembers to keep their balloons strapped down until they’re ready.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: The Daredevils Who Chase One of the Sky’s Greatest Mysteries
DISCOVER: Here’s Your Jetpack
DISCOVER: The X-Prize, an in-depth look at the contest back in 2002

Image: Red Bull Stratos

Just a hair over ten nine years ago, the Cassini spacecraft caromed past Jupiter, stealing a tiny bit of the giant planet’s energy to hasten the space probe’s journey to Saturn. When it passed Jupiter at a distance of about 10 million kilometers (6 million miles), Cassini saw this:

[Click to enjovianate. Seriously, the full-res picture is jaw-dropping.]

This stunning shot is actually a mosaic of 27 images: 9 images to cover the planet in a 3×3 grid, and 3 images at each location to get red, green, and blue exposures to make this near true-color image. While the Voyagers (which also flew past Jupiter) and Galileo (which orbited the planet for about 8 years) took higher-resolution images, this is the sharpest color global view of Jupiter taken.

It’s one of my favorite shots of Jupiter, too, edged out by the crescent view of the planet from Cassini (with the added bonus of a crescent Io) as it left on its way to Saturn. You can see that image and more on the Cassini Jupiter Encounter page. The probe has been in orbit around the ringed planet for a long time now, but when you peruse those gorgeous images, don’t forget that in space, you can almost always get more than just one bird with one stone.

Tip o’ the Red Spot to Carolyn Porco, who mentioned this on her Twitter feed.