“STUDY OBJECTIVE: To determine the incidence of blunt trauma in northern New York City before and after the distribution of 25,000 baseball bats at Yankee Stadium… …MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: Seventy-seven patients sustained bat injuries, 38 (49%) before and 36 (47%) after Bat Day. There were no significant differences between the two groups with respect to age, sex, time of injury, number and distribution of fractures and lacerations, incidence of loss of consciousness, source of history, or dispostion. There was a positive association between the number of cases on a given day and the average temperature that day (r = .5; P < .01). CONCLUSION: The distribution of 25,000 wooden baseball bats to attendees at Yankee Stadium did not increase the incidence of bat-related trauma in the Bronx and northern Manhattan. There was a positive correlation between daily temperature and the incidence of bat injury. The informal but common impressions of emergency clinicians about the cause-and-effect relationship between Bat Day and bat trauma were unfounded.”

Thanks to Timon for today’s ROFL!

Over the weekend, to prepare for my keynote at the Hope Summit 2010 in St. Louis, I went back through the Unscientific America PowerPoint and added a number of updates and new observations. I may blog a number of the changes, but I want to highlight one of them in particular–I added this figure from the latest Science and Engineering Indicators report out of NSF:

Contrary to popular misconceptions, the U.S. is producing an increasing, not decreasing, number of scientists and engineers right now. But China…whoa. The figures above only go through 2007, and in light of that slope, it may well be that China is producing more science and engineering Ph.D.s annually than any other country in the world by now.

What you’re looking at, folks, is the rapid birth of a science superpower.

So when you hear concerns about declining U.S. leadership in science, there is definitely something to it. In fact, those concerns aren’t just rearview mirror watching any more; China is the car that’s blowing past us in the left lane. Whether they are producing scientists who are as talented, as well-trained, or as interdisciplinary as American scientists, I can’t say. But boy are they ever producing scientists.

Can you imagine being in space, calmly watching a star, and all of a sudden…

Kepler’s Supernova Remnant, Went supernova circa October 1604  Image:  NASA/JPL ESA-SOHO Chandra/Spitzer/Hubble

Isn’t that gorgeous?  Spectacular?  Better hope you’re a few light years away from that puppy, because when it goes, it GOES.

In a short time, a star going supernova will radiate as much energy as our Sun could radiate during its entire life span… that’s billions of years.  It will out-shine a galaxy.  The shock wave of the supernova blows out at a velocity of about a tenth of the speed of light.  That’s all or most of that star’s matter coming at you at about 30,000 km/s.  The word “boom” doesn’t quite encompass the process.  We’re talking about one of the most powerful, catastrophic events to occur in the universe.

There are several types of supernovae, and not every star will supernova at the end of its life.  For instance, the Sun won’t.  It doesn’t have enough mass.  It will blow off its hydrogen “crust” as its going from red giant to white dwarf, but it won’t supernova.

SN1994D  NASA/ESA Hubble

The process by which a supernova is initiated varies depending on what type of star we’re talking about, and what type of supernova happens to it.  Just remember, it is a catastrophic breakdown of the mechanics of the star.  The process is irreversible, and unstoppable as far as we know.  Most commonly, the process begins when the core ignites iron, as the fusion of iron takes more energy than it produces.  The star burns hydrogen to helium to carbon to neon to oxygen to iron.  The core begins to collapse when iron fusion begins, and the energy produced in the rebound shockwave of the sudden core collapse (it happens within seconds) appears to be what triggers supernova.  The synthesis of most elements heavier than iron occurs in the supernova.  It’s very dramatic.

A supernova fairly close to the Earth (within 6,000 ly) is believed by some to have triggered the Odovician-Silurian extinction, the second largest extinction event on Earth for total loss of life.  This event occurred right at 443.7 million years ago.  Supernovae are powerful, commanding events, and you don’t want to be anywhere near one when it happens.  We get neutron stars, pulsars, and black holes from the event, not to mention everything else.  In 1054 CE the Chinese astronomers recorded a supernova that was so bright they could see it during the day.  We call what’s left of it the Crab Nebula.

This is the SN1006 remnant (occurred in 1006 CE):

SN1006 Remnant    NASA/JPL  Chandra

This is believed to be the brightest apparent magnitude event to have occurred in recorded history.  It outshone Venus, and was about 1/4 the brightness of the moon.  SN1006 is about 7200 ly away from Earth.  Getting kinda close, there.

Supernovae are fascinating, awe-inspiring events.  They are an expression of almost unimaginable power and force.  They are the death of a star; but in their death, life is created.

Just think – if you are wearing gold jewelry right now, you are wearing something that was created in the power of a supernova.

Here’s a talk I just gave on Big Think–about viruses, synthetic biology, and tapeworms that carry my name. The sound quality isn’t as good as I’d like, but I hope the words make up for it.

Apparently, I am Tom Baker. I had guessed I’d be David Tennant, but thinking on it carefully, Baker’s a closer fit to who I am; Tennant (at least up until the last episode, feh) was who — I mean, Who — I wanted to be.

Which Doctor Who are you?

Tip o’ the big floppy hat to regular BABloggee IVAN3MAN.

This week’s edition of The Science of Kissing Gallery features the custom of foot kissing as depicted on this woodcut ‘Passionary of the Christ and Antichrist‘ by Lucas Cranach the Elder.

Submit your original photo or artwork to the gallery here and remember to include relevant links to blogs and events.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The really isn’t meant as a commercial, I just found it funny.   The “deer in the headlights” look is about what I’ll look like this week after the staff meeting I have to go to. 

UPDATE:  SOLVED! at 12:19 CDT

Okay, everybody wake up.  It’s time for the Saturday riddle.  C’mon… let’s get perky.

I’ll give you a hint right off:  We’ve talked about today’s subject a lot.  You absolutely know what it is.  You’ve heard about it since you were a tot.  It’s so easy, it’ll make your teeth ache.  Ready?

This is a single object.

It was known to ancient astronomers.

It is visible to the naked eye.

Historical image – Andromeda  Isaac Roberts, published in 1899

It is responsible for something very, very large.

This object gives more than it gets.

Sometimes, we hear this object on the Earth.

Image “Old Radio”  Duncan Rawlinson

I bet you figured it out already, haven’t you?

I’m in the comments.

This story is too funny, but it takes a little background.

Mike Adams is an alt-med pusher; he writes at Natural News, a website chock-full-o’ nonsense about vaccines, homepathy, and so on. Regular readers may remember Mr. Adams from his particularly vile and horrific diatribe about real medicine after Patrick Swayze died. Adams claims to want to help people, but instead peddles all manners of treatments that are known not to work at all.

So that ought to give you a picture of how Adams operates.

The Shorty Awards are a popular new internet award for people who use Twitter. It allows tweeters to vote for someone in various categories like science, humor, celebrity, and, oh, say, health.

Adams, who tweets under the name HealthRanger, was doing well with votes in the Shorties last week, well ahead of everyone else. In second place was another alt-med antivax promoter named Joe Mercola. I’ve written about him before as well.

But then skeptic Tim Farley noticed something– a lot of votes going to Mercola and Adams were coming from brand new Twitter accounts with only one actual tweet: a vote for Mercola or Adams for the Shorties.

Hmmm.

Now, someone who may be a bit conspiracy-minded might assume that either Mercola or Adams, or their followers, might be working a campaign to stuff the ballot box by setting up fake Twitter accounts for the sole purpose of making sure these alt-med public health threats would win the Shorty award in health.

So Tim tweeted about it, and a bunch of us started to promote our friend Australian Rachael Dunlop, who has been tirelessly fighting alternative medicine quackery for years. Within a few days Rachael had moved into first place. Yay!

But there’s more! Tim (as well as several others, including me) reported Mercola’s and Adams’ voter fraud to the people at the Shorty Awards. Today it was announced that Adams was being removed from the contest due to this fraudulent ballot stuffing.

Adams, of course, took this all in stride and has been gracious and self-deprecating about it all.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh my. Of course he hasn’t. Instead, he posted what can only be called a frothing rant about this, accusing the Shorty Awards and many of us reality-based people with all kinds of evil doing. You have to read his diatribe to believe anyone could post something so filled with rage, righteous indignation, logical fallacies, made-up transgressions, self-contradictions, and paranoid conspiracy mongering. It’s really a masterpiece of woo-based garment-rendering nonsense. He’s even threatened to sue!

Maybe he should win a Shorty Award for fiction.

To be fair, I actually don’t think Adams should have been disqualified; we don’t know who set up the fake votes for him. It might have been just one overzealous altmed fan. What should have happened was all the fake votes should have been struck from the count — a large fraction — and then let the most popular person win. It hardly matters anyway, since Rachael is so far out front that she’ll win anyway. But it would be the fair thing to do.

Not that this would assuage Adams anyway. Since he doesn’t deal with anything using facts and logic in the first place, he’ll just continue to post his nonsense as he pleases.

Orac posted a lovely satirical takedown of all this, which is worth reading. It’s always a good idea to keep yourself abreast of what these people are like. The alt-med movement talks a good game about the evil of Big Pharma and Western Medicine, and also claiming they want to help people out of the goodness of their hearts… but when you actually get a glimpse of what’s in their hearts, well, it’s not exactly rainbows and unicorns.

All of Caltech, and the cosmology community worldwide, is mourning the death of Andrew Lange. He was one of the world’s leading scientists, co-leader of the Boomerang experiment that provided the first precise measurement of the first acoustic peak in the cosmic microwave background. He took his own life Thursday night.

It’s hard to convey how unexpected and tragic this news is. Very few people combined Andrew’s brilliance as a scientist with his warmth as a person. He always had a sparkle in his eye, was enthusiastically in love with science and ideas, and was constantly doing his best to make Caltech the best possible place, not just for himself but for everyone else around him. He was one of the good guys. The last I spoke with him, Andrew was energetically raising funds for a new submillimeter telescope, organizing conferences, and helping plan for a new theoretical physics center. We are all walking around in shock, wondering how this could happen and whether we could have done anything to prevent it. Caltech has had several suicides this year — hard to make sense of any of them.

The message from Caltech President Jean-Lou Chameau is below the fold. For any local readers, there’s contact info if you would like to talk to counselors for any reason.

—————————————

January 22, 2010

TO: The Caltech Community

FROM: Jean-Lou Chameau

It is with great sadness and regret that I must report to you the death of Professor Andrew Lange, a valued member of the Caltech faculty. Andrew was found this morning off campus, and it appears that he took his own life. Among the most difficult things that people have to deal with in life are tragedies of this sort, especially when they affect people that we know and care for; and Andrew was such a well-known, well-respected, and well-liked member of our community that many of us will be deeply affected.

Andrew came to Caltech in 1993 and was most recently the chair of the Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy. He was a truly great physicist and astronomer who had made seminal discoveries in observational cosmology.

Andrew was a valued colleague and a close friend to many of us. His death is a source of great sadness to us all and our deepest sympathy goes out to his family, friends, and colleagues, all of whom mourn his loss.

We know this tragic news will come as a shock to everyone — faculty, staff, and students alike, even those of you who knew that Andrew had been struggling with personal issues. Many of us feel the need in times like these to reach out and seek help in dealing with the shock, and I urge anyone who wants help to seek it from family members, friends, faculty, and/or professional counselors. This is not only a reasonable thing to do, it is an important thing to do. I want to emphasize in particular that counselors are always available, 24-hours a day. Students should call the Counseling Center at 626-395-8331, while faculty, staff, and postdocs, should call the Staff and Faculty Consultation Center at 626-395-8360. In addition, the Counseling Center will be open on Saturday and Sunday from 10-3pm.

In my book Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life, I describe how this humble germ helped make modern biology possible–and, in the process, has been engineered to do all sorts of remarkable things. In 2008, I blogged a fresh example, courtesy of Jeff Hasty and his colleagues. They retooled the bacteria to flash in clock-like rhythms. Now Hasty has taken another step forward, rejiggering E. coli so that millions of bacteria can flash in waves. The new paper’s in Nature, and the journal put together a lovely video of the bacteria in hive-mind performance. Check it out below.

One small step for flashing bacteria, one giant leap for synthetic biology. In a new Nature study, molecular biologist Jeff Hasty and his team say they have created a line of E. coli bacteria that flash in fluorescent light and keep time like a clock.

Previously, scientists had engineered only single cells to become oscillators — devices that could count time by performing a particular activity on a cyclical schedule [Nature News]. Back in 2008, Hasty and his team created an oscillator for single cells that could be set to temperature or chemical triggers. But now the researchers have induced a whole host of bacteria to work together to keep time by taking advantage of the way they collaborate naturally: quorom sensing.

Quorum sensing enables bacteria to change their behaviour once they reach a critical density. For example, at high densities, the bacterium Vibrio fischeri, which lives on the skin of squid, starts to light up, helping to camouflage the squid, but V. fischeri living in isolation don’t glow, saving their energy for swimming instead [New Scientist]. Hasty’s engineered bacteria express three new proteins: a sort of catalyst molecule called AHL, a fluorescent protein, and a chemical “off switch.” When just a few engineered E coli clump together, they produce AHL but nothing else happens. When enough bacteria congregate, the AHL causes the cells to produce the the next two proteins, and the fluorescent protein causes them to be suffused with a bright glow. However, when the concentrations of the chemical “off switch” get high enough the whole system shuts down, which it why it oscillates like a clock.

But while the video of this is very cool, it’s not all fun and games. “The ability to synchronize activity among cells in a population could be an important building block for many applications, from biomedicine to bioenergy,” says Ron Weiss, a … bioengineer at MIT who was not involved in the research. For example, the bacteria could be engineered to detect a specific toxin, with the frequency of the fluorescence indicating its concentration in the environment [Technology Review]. Other applications of such synthetic biology could include time-sensitive drug delivery.

Related Content:
80beats: Synthetic Life By Year’s End? Yes, Proclaims Craig Venter
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DISCOVER: A Synthetic Genome Is Built From Scratch

Video: Nature

America seems to be more and more linked to Asia–not just by complicated financial ties, but also by currents of air pollution that are boosting smog levels in American skies. For years scientists wondered why some rural areas in the western United States had high levels of ozone, when the areas had very little industry or automobile traffic. The answer, apparently, was blowing in the wind.

A new study, published in Nature reveals that springtime ozone levels in western North America are on the rise, because of air pollution coming in from south and east Asia.

The study, led by Owen R. Cooper, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado, examined nearly 100,000 observations two to five miles above ground — in a region known as the free troposphere — gathered from aircraft, balloons and ground-based lasers [Los Angeles Times]. This is the area between the stratosphere, that contains a thin layer of ozone to filter out harmful UV rays, and the ground. Researchers found that ozone levels in the monitored area jumped 14 percent between 1995 and 2008. When data were included for 1984, the year with the lowest average ozone level, the increase from that date up to 2008 was a whopping 29 percent [AFP].

The researchers haven’t yet determined exactly how much of the ozone increase comes from Asia but they found that the increase was about twice as much when prevailing winds came from South and East Asia [Los Angeles Times]. Researchers say this spike in ozone could make it hard for the United States to stay under pollution limits for ground level air set by the Clean Air Act. Ground-level ozone is also linked to serious health problems, and can cause or aggravate heart and lung conditions.

The rising ozone levels in the free troposphere may also have repercussions that go beyond local air quality. In a Nature commentary that accompanied the study, atmospheric chemist Kathy Law wrote that higher ozone levels “certainly have implications for climate change, causing warming either at the mid-latitudes where ozone forms, or in sensitive regions such as the Arctic to which ozone might be transported” [Los Angeles Times].

Related Content:
80beats: Today’s Biggest Threat to the Ozone Layer: Laughing Gas
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DISCOVER: The Hole Story
DISCOVER: Son of Ozone Hole

Image: iStockphoto

Both Uranus and Neptune have quirky magnetic poles—they’re located about 60 degrees off the geographic pole rather than very nearby, like ours is. The reason, researchers suggest in a new Nature Physics study, could be that oceans of diamond—yes, oceans of diamond—cover our solar system’s two most distant planets.

The diamond idea isn’t a new one, but it’s a terribly hard question to study because you have to get diamond to melt in the lab to study it, and this experiment was the first to document the pressure and temperature at which that happens. The mineral is notoriously hard, of course, but there’s something more: Diamond doesn’t like to stay diamond when it gets hot. When diamond is heated to extreme temperatures it physically changes, from diamond to graphite. The graphite, and not the diamond, then melts into a liquid. The trick for the scientists was to heat the diamond up while simultaneously stopping it from transforming into graphite [Discovery News].

Doing so required not only extraordinary heat, but also extraordinary pressure. The researchers liquefied the diamond at 40 million times more than the pressure at sea level on Earth. When the pressure fell to only 11 million-times Earth sea level and temperatures dipped to 50,000 degress Celsius, solid chunks of diamond began to appear in the liquid [The Telegraph]. Because diamond is one of those rare liquids, like water, that is less dense as a solid than a liquid, solid diamond “icebergs” could float on to of the diamond seas on Neptune and Uranus.

Both planets have the conditions and the carbon to make this possible; each one is made from up to 10 percent carbon. And all that diamond would explain the out-of-whack magnetic pole, the scientists say. A huge ocean of liquid diamond in the right place could deflect or tilt the magnetic field out of alignment with the rotation of the planet [Discovery News].

Related Content:
80beats: Did Galileo Spot Neptune Two Centuries Before Its “Discovery?”
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Bad Astronomy: A New Ring Around Uranus
Bad Astronomy: Did Herschel See the Rings of Uranus?

Image: NASA

It’s official. Even people in space are tweeting. NASA announced today that astronaut T.J. Creamer on the International Space Station has become the first person to tweet directly from space, making use of a brand new direct Internet connection. Creamer tweeted: “Hello Twitterverse! We r now LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station — the 1st live tweet from Space! More soon, send your ?s”

Yay. Space tweets. Sweet.

In the past, astronauts could use email and twitter–but they had to relay their messages to ground control in Houston, who then sent them on. But now, thanks to the new system of personal Web access, called the Crew Support LAN, astronauts can take advantage of existing communication links to and from the station and browse the Web directly.

Associated Press reports:

The International Space Station crew can now use an on-board laptop to reach a desktop computer at Mission Control, and thereby browse the Web. This remote Internet access is possible whenever there is a solid high-speed communication link.

So no more going through ground control if astronuats want to update their Facebook status. Which is great for them, as we imagine it must get a little lonely out there in space. If you want to follow what they’re up to on a day-to-day basis, follow their tweets here.

With direct internet access in space, we wonder if the World Wide Web has taken the first step towards becoming the Universe Wide Web. Also, if all the astronauts are online now–who’s manning the ship? Hello!

Related Content:
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Image: Twitter.com

Is your child practically a vampire? Avoiding the sun, holed up at home, and playing video games non-stop? Two scientists in Britain now suggest there might be link between such inactivity and rickets–a painful bone condition caused by lack of vitamin D, and which is much more common in malnourished children of the developing world.

Researchers Simon Pearce and Tim Cheetham of Newcastle University have published a clinical review in the latest issue of the British Medical Journal blaming the rickets resurgence on our more interior lifestyle. According to The Guardian, Pearce said:

“Vitamin D levels in parts of the population are precarious. The average worker nowadays is in a call center, not out in the field. People tend to stay at home rather than going outside to kick a ball around. They stay at home on computer games.”

The consequent lack of vitamin D (which is produced in skin that’s exposed to moderately strong sunlight) could be the chief cause for the return of rickets in England, with 20 new cases reported each year from Newcastle alone.

But we might not have to unplug the game consoles and toss kids out into the sun. Researchers say that outdoor time could be topped up with a change in diet or vitamin D supplements. They even suggested to the British Department of Health that vitamin D be added to milk to get past picky eaters. (Currently, unlike the U.S., the UK does not add vitamin D to milk.)

Related Content:
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Image: iStockphoto

Mankind has been thinking about extraterrestrial life every since we developed a cerebral cortex and could “think” about anything.  Discovering evidence of life anywhere else, life of any kind, is the “Holy Grail” of astrophysicists and astrobiologists.  We’re all pretty sure we aren’t going to find another civilization in our solar system, but what about microbial life.

What are the chances that microbial life has developed somewhere else in our solar system?

The chances are, honestly, pretty good.  There are a couple of places I could talk about off the top of my head that would be a good candidate for microbial life (often referred to as “critters”) to have developed… but I want to talk about one very special place today.

Europa.

Image:  Europa as seen by Galileo spacecraft  NASA/JPL

What makes Europa so special and exciting?  Liquid water, for one thing.  Science is reasonably sure that the majority of life they locate will be carbon-based (there’s a good reason for that, trust me), and dependent on liquid water to survive (there’s another good reason for that).  Looking on Mars for traces of fossilized life is exciting… but what about digging under the ice crust of Europa to the ocean of liquid water believed to exist?  Do you think we’ll find any critters there?

I bet we do.

Look at Earth for a moment.  Life is everywhere here, and I do mean everywhere.  It lives in solid rock, digesting minerals for energy.  It lives in ice.  It lives in salt mines.  It lives on the floor of the ocean.

Whoa.  Back up… the floor of the ocean?  Cold, no sunlight, horrible pressure… that floor of the ocean?  You betcha.  And not just critters, there.  Complex organisms, going about their daily lives perfectly happy in an environment very close to what we believe will be found under the ice of Europa.

There is another place on Earth where it looks like conditions are very close to Europa:  Lake Vostok in Antarctica.  Have you read about that?  It’s amazing… this lake has been frozen over, away from outside influence, for about a million years.

Lake Vostok  NASA/JPL Goddard  RADARSAT image

There’s liquid water under that ice sheet, away from sunlight and environmental influences.  Current projects are underway to find a method of getting to the Lake Vostok environment and studying it without contaminating it.  And kids, whatever method works for Lake Vostok will work for Europa.

So, is there other life in the universe?  Oh, yeah, I’d say that’s probably a given.  Is there other life in our solar system?  You know what?  I think there is.

What do you think?

If you’re out shopping today and happen to pass your friendly neighborhood newsstand, then may I suggest you pick up a copy of the winter special issue of Discover Magazine? The theme is "Extreme Universe", with articles about the Big Bang, quantum mechanics, particle physics, and lots more.

Of course, included in that "lots more " is, well, me. I wrote the introductory essay to the issue, and also have a list of my favorite good and bad science moments in movies. The Hive Overmind Discover Magazine has a gallery up, too, with pictures and my descriptions of the movies.

I was surprised how hard it was to make the list, given a) I’ve seen almost every science fiction movie ever made, and 2) you’d think examples would abound. But finding specific scenes turned out to be tough, also given the criterion that it has to be in a movie lots of people have actually seen; calling out the lava flow sequence in "Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet" (1965) won’t get you terribly far. But I think I did OK.

Got a favorite bad or good scene in a movie? Discuss.

It always helps to have good timing. And no one seems to understand that better than the tobacco plant Nicotiana attenuata, which grows in Western United States and flowers at night [The New York Times]. Normally, the tobacco plant is pollinated by hawkmoths that visits its flowers every night. But when these hawkmoths leave eggs behind that develop into leaf-chomping caterpillars, the plant’s self-defense snaps into place and switches to flowering in the day. That attracts a different pollinator, the hummingbird.

Ecologist Danny Kessler noticed this change when he was trying to get a picture of the plant being pollinated for a study. He saw that the plant was not just flowering in the day but also that they had changed their flowers to make them more attractive to hummingbirds: they emitted less of a chemical that attracts moths; they had less sugar in the nectar, which is the way hummingbirds prefer it; and they were more tube-shaped, making them friendly to a hummingbird’s long, thin beak [ScienceNOW Daily News].

Kessler and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute, including ecologist Ian Baldwin, wondered if this change of flowering time and pollinator had anything to with being eaten by caterpillars. They decided to check it out. He [Kessler] put caterpillars on plants that had not been attacked and found that after 8 days, 35% of their flowers opened in the morning–compared with 11% on unmolested plants. Plants responded the same way when Kessler wounded the leaves and put caterpillar spit on them [ScienceNOW Daily News]. Their results were published in Current Biology.

The researchers said the plant’s responses show it remains hyper-alert for voracious caterpillars, while other scientists note that these alterations suggest that plants can adapt their flowers to suit changing conditions. It also makes us think differently, say the researchers, about how to deal with pests that attack plants. Instead of just spraying bug-spray, they point out that there may be other ways to deal with the problem–making a plant less attractive to the mothers of the predators, for example [ScienceNOW Daily News].

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Image: Danny Kessler