It’s been little over a week since the beginning of the spat between Google and China over censorship and hacking attacks. But that was more than enough time for the fracas to escalate into international political tensions and name-calling.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joined in today. In a wide-ranging speech in Washington, Mrs Clinton said the internet had been a “source of tremendous progress” in China but that any country which restricted free access to information risked “walling themselves off from the progress of the next century” [BBC News]. In taking a foreign policy stand on information freedom, she also singled out other countries that she says harass bloggers or promote censorship and called on other companies to follow Google’s lead in taking a stand against restrictive governments.

“A new information curtain is descending across much of the world,” she said, calling growing Internet curbs the modern equivalent of the Berlin Wall [Reuters].

China, unamused at being called out, shot back. Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu this morning warned, “The U.S. side had criticized China’s policies on Internet administration, alluding that China restricts Internet freedom. We firmly oppose such words and deeds, which were against the facts and would harm the China-U.S. relations” [ABC News]. The Chinese government referred to Clinton’s foreign policy stand as “information imperialism,” and called her allegations groundless.

The public strife started last week when Google threatened to pull out of China if the country didn’t change its censorship policies or do something about the China-based attacks against Google and other American tech companies. That was an about-face from 2006, when Google agreed to censorship demands to enter the Chinese market. But Google may not have realized then that the Chinese government would alter the bargain by demanding stricter censorship or blocking other Google services — or that Chinese hackers would launch a widespread, well-orchestrated series of attacks on its computers [Washington Post].

For some observers, Sec. Clinton telling China to tear down this firewall is a struggle that will go far beyond the two nations. This fight is about much more than China vs. the U.S, or even China vs. Google. It is about a future of nation-states, corporations and other nonstate actors struggling to define liberty on the Internet [Forbes].

Related Content:
80beats: Google to China: No More Internet Censorship, Or We Leave
80beats: Is Google the Guardian Angel of Rainforests?
80beats: Googlefest Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: 3 New Ways Google Will Take Over Your Life
80beats: China Bans Electroshock Therapy for “Internet Addiction”
80beats: China’s Internet Users Force Government to Back Down on Censorship

Image: Wikimedia Commons / M. Weitzel

I am very, very pleased to write about two wins for the military and skepticism today:

Story the first:

Remember the company that made millions by selling totally worthless bomb-sniffing magic wands to the military, detectors that were used at checkpoints in Iraq to search cars, and which failed to detect the terrorist bombs used to kill 155 people in October and 120 more in December last year?

Yeah, well, Jim McCormick, the head of the company that sold those useless dowsing rods, just got arrested for — oh, let me savor typing these words — "suspicion of fraud".

Wait, wait. That felt so good to write, let me do it again: Jim McCormick, who sold provably worthless dowsing rods to the military, has been arrested for suspicion of fraud.

Ahhhhh. That was just as good to type the second time.

This has been reported in The Register as well as The Times Online, which mentions Randi for an added bonus! The BBC has an in-depth analysis of this as well.

In the courts, you are presumed innocent until proven guilty. But in this case, we have scientific evidence that the kits sold by the company are 100% garbage, and I hope this guy gets everything he deserves.

And is McCormick penitent? Of course not! With apparently no sense of Teh Stoopid, he said:

We have been dealing with doubters for ten years. One of the problems we have is that the machine does look a little primitive. We are working on a new model that has flashing lights.

Holy wow. Serously, dude? I mean, really? Here’s a clue, Mr. McCormick: it’s not that your dowsing rods lack doodads and flair and blinking lights. It’s that they don’t frakking work, and because the Iraqi military swallowed your story people have died.

I hope that’s clear now.

Story the second:

Our second news item is also quite satisfying, and also has a bit of the cluelessness from a company that sells things to the military. Trijicon, the company that inscribed references to Bible quotations on rifle scopes sold to the military, has announced that they will no longer inscribe them, and will provide kits to the military to remove the references in existing scopes.

Very cool. The military has rules forbidding proselytizing in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the rifle scopes were in clear violation of this. Of course, the company did this because of their concern over our troops and for the appearance of the military overseas, right? About that, the President of Trijicon, Stephen Bindon, said this:

Trijicon has proudly served the U.S. military for more than two decades, and our decision to offer to voluntarily remove these references is both prudent and appropriate.

As I read that, it translated in my head as, "We did this because we were suddenly getting tons of bad press, and had to do something about this PR disaster, so we can can make it look like we’re being all altruistic and everything." Here’s another free hint to the head of a company selling stuff to the military: don’t thump your own chest and say how cool you are when we all know better. Simply admit your mistake, and let people know you’re honestly sorry. Telling everyone what a great move this was on your part is maybe just a wee bit oily.

So I’m really thrilled that rational and critical thinking has had two victories today. The fight continues, because the forces of irrationality are always, always on the march. So, for those of us fighting for reality:

Corporations can now spend freely in federal elections. Given the US government is supposed to represent its constituents, I fear we’ve just taken an disastrous great leap in the other direction.

It’s Friday and science keeps getting in the way of blogging, but here’s one of the more useful posts you’ll ever get from us: via FlowingData, the Engineer’s Guide to Drinks. Yes, there is a full-sized pdf at the original post.

That’s a slightly crazy Martini — 2:1 gin to vermouth. I think the pendulum has swung too far towards “dry,” but please.

When scientists talk up learning about transportation networks from nature, it’s often ants that get the praise for being so much more organized and efficient than we humans with our silly gridlock. But a team of Japanese researchers found, for a new study in Science, that you don’t even need a brain to be to a traffic genius. Single-celled slime molds, they found, can build networks as complex as the Tokyo subway system.

The yellow slime mold Physarum polycephalum grows as a single cell that is big enough to be seen with the naked eye. When it encounters numerous food sources separated in space, the slime mold cell surrounds the food and creates tunnels to distribute the nutrients [Science News]. To test how efficient the mold could be, Toshiyuki Nakagaki’s team duplicated the layout of the area around Tokyo: They placed the slime mold in the position of the city, and dispersed bits of oat around the “map” in the locations of 36 surrounding towns.

The mold explored slowly at first, but like any good transportation engineer it began to figure out traffic patterns. To continue growing and exploring, the slime mold transforms its Byzantine pattern of thin tendrils into a simpler, more-efficient network of tubes: Those carrying a high volume of nutrients gradually expand, while those that are little used slowly contract and eventually disappear [ScienceNOW Daily News]. When the mold got its system settled, researchers say, it looked rather similar to the actual Tokyo subway system, as you can see in the illustration.

The scientists didn’t just marvel at the slime mold’s mapped-out network; they also tried to capture its technique in math, Wolfgang Marwan added in an accompanying piece in Science. Marwan called the mathematical model “beautifully useful.” He added that: “It quantitatively mimics phenomena that can be neither captured nor quantified by verbal description alone” [Scientific American]. But will slime mold subways start to show us how we ought to be building our transport systems or other networks? Perhaps not so fast, says Portland State University’s Melanie Mitchell. “This paper uses only one relatively simple example,” she cautions. “It’s not obvious that similar experiments would work as well for matching other transport networks” [ScienceNOW Daily News].

Related Content:
Discoblog: Ant Intelligence Could Help Us Steer Clear of Traffic Jams
DISCOVER: Slime Molds Show Surprising Degree of Intelligence
DISCOVER: The Truth About Traffic

Image: Science/AAAS

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

Here in Southern California, we’re enduring an extended period of heavy rains and high winds, or as Floridians would call it, “July.” People from harsher climates may laugh at our predicament, but the truth is that San Diego and its residents are ill-equipped to deal with rain. Streets flood almost immediately because drainage is almost non-existent. Traffic slows to the kind of crawl I experienced during white-out blizzards while growing up in Maine.

Most San Diegans know not to swim in the ocean during and after a storm. The rain washes an assortment of chemicals, fertilizers, oil, and garbage straight down the hills and into the sea. How would you feel knowing the fish you ate for dinner came from a farm that similarly inundated the surrounding waters with bacteria? The discharge of waste is just one of many controversial issues concerning aquaculture, our most recent class topic here at Scripps.

Globally, aquaculture is the fastest-growing food production system, increasing by 8.8% per year since 1985, according to a 2007 report by the FAO. Aquaculture already accounts for around one-third of global fish production and may soon rival wild-caught fisheries as our primary source for fish. A shift to reliance on farmed fish could also lessen the burden on over-exploited wild stocks. It’s difficult to talk about aquaculture without mentioning the growing human population: simply put, we’re going to need more protein to feed an estimated 9.2 billion people by 2050. Proponents of aquaculture call it a possible solution to our potential food crisis.

Unfortunately, aquaculture is not the silver bullet that will magically save us from overfishing and global food shortages. Unless the farms are a closed system, effluent from fish pens will pollute the surrounding waters. Escapees can transmit diseases to wild stocks—they become parasite-bearing fish on the lamb, terrorizing the innocent locals. Plus, we need to catch millions of tons of wild fish, like the Peruvian anchoveta, to grind into fish meal to feed the farmed fish. It’s like hunting seagulls off the coast of Africa and using the gull meat to feed chickens on a farm in Arkansas. Despite these problems, we’re going to have to find ways to lessen the environmental impact of aquaculture as the industry continues to grow.

It was pointed out in class that a variety of U.S. government agencies regulate aquaculture, depending on where you are and why you’re doing it. A good start to better management of aquaculture in our country would be to streamline the regulatory power to a single agency. Then we can shift our focus to the rest of the world: to China, to India, to Chile, and every other country hoping to feed its people with farmed fish.

In the aftermath of Haiti’s devastating earthquake, nervous citizens can be forgiven for wondering where the next Big One will hit. Major quakes strike with alarming regularity: Earthquakes of magnitude 7 or greater occur approximately 18 times a year worldwide. They usually originate near faults where tectonic plates —tremendous fragments of the earth’s crust—collide or push above or below each other.

Geologists suspect that Haiti’s destructive quake resulted from 250 years of seismic stress that has been building up between the North American and Caribbean tectonic plates. In fact, a group of U.S. geologists presented a study in the Dominican Republic (which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti) in 2008 saying that the region was at risk of an earthquake potentially even bigger than last week’s magnitude 7.0 quake. Part of their presentation is particularly chilling in light of what would happen less than two years later: “This means that the level of built-up stress and energy in the earth could one day be released resulting in an earthquake measuring 7.2 or more on the Richter Scale. This would be an event of catastrophic proportions in a city [Port-au-Prince] with loose building codes, and an abundance of shanty-towns built in ravines and other undesirable locations.”

Earthquakes are still impossible to predict with precision; in the words of one of the geologists who predicted the Haiti quake, “It could have been the next day, it could have been 10 years, it could have been 100… This is not an exact science.” But researchers have identified a handful of seismic zones around the globe that are storing up especial amounts of stress and are particularly hazardous. Browse through the gallery for a world tour of the planet’s most seismically vulnerable regions.

By Aline Reynolds

Image: USGS

You’ve seen this ad before.

Weight loss program Jenny Craig’s spokeswoman, actress Valerie Bertinelli, is hanging out in a gleaming white “lab,” surrounded by guys in thick-framed glasses and lab coats. She gleefully announces that people on the Jenny diet lost two times as much weight as those who were on the other big diet program (read: Weight Watchers). She also claims that the results were an outcome of a “major clinical trial run by serious lab geeks.”

Now, Weight Watchers has lashed back, dragging Jenny to court–alleging that the ad campaign makes “deceptive claims” about its success rate.

The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, according to AdWeek, and it said in part:

“The trials cited by Jenny Craig (available on its Web site) are, in fact, two separate studies, conducted 10 years apart for entirely different purposes than comparing the efficacy of the Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers weight-loss programs … The Jenny Craig ‘trials’ do not relate to WW’s current offerings.”

So a New York court has now granted Weight Watchers International a temporary restraining order and has prohibited Jenny Craig from using these comparative claims of superiority in its current ads.

In the ad, Bertinelli cheerfully declares, “I love science.” We might suggest she say instead, “I love putting a patina of scientific authority on whatever flimsy claim our marketing people are peddling today.”

Related Content:
Discoblog: Fast Food Joints Lie About Calories (Denny’s, We’re Looking at You)
Discoblog: Heart-Stopping Cinematic Excitement: Guess How Much Fat Is in Movie Popcorn?
80beats: Diet and Exercise in a Pill: Experimental Anti-Obesity Drug Could “Trick” the Body
80beats: A Victory for the Atkin’s Diet? Not so Fast.

Video: Jenny Craig

[Kari, Grant, and Tory from The Mythbusters will be on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson tonight, so it seems like a good time to post this.]

In case anyone was wondering if I would succumb to the bright lights of Hollywood, the answer is, of course: duh.

Last week I attended a wonderful party in Pasadena, thrown by the Discovery Channel for their 25th anniversary (my pictures from the party are on Flickr). My friend Katherine Nelson secured an invite for me; she does PR for the channel and we met at Comic Con in 2008 when I was tagging along with My Close Personal Friend Adam Savage™. Last week I happened to be in LA working on my sooper sekrit project, and that timing happily coincided with the party.

I’m not used to high-end parties, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I decided to go all out and wear a tie. Go me.

I got to the hotel, located somewhere down twisty passages in Pasadena all of which look alike, and started wending my way to the party itself. As I randomly walked, I wondered to myself what celebs might be here, and at that very moment happened to see Ed Begley, Jr.

OK then.

When I finally reached the actual party location, I was happy to see Katherine taking pictures of Kari Byron, Grant Imahara, and Tory Belecci from Mythbusters! I hadn’t seen Kari in a couple of years (I moderated a panel with three of them in Canada), but I saw Grant and Tory at Comic Con last year. It was nice to see them again. I hung out a bit with them, and, as always, found them to be fun and charming and pretty much what you see on TV. At least, they’re nice enough to a dork like me.

There were lots of Discovery Network celebs there (as well as a giraffe). I was completely unashamed to horn in on Stacey and Clinton from "What Not to Wear" and chat for a second. I was thrilled to get a chance to talk with Annabelle Gurwitch, who is on Planet Green now, but I know her from watching "Dinner and a Movie" on TBS a few years ago, and she was exactly as I had hoped: funny and sassy and totally approachable. Also? A doll. There, I said it.

I also dorked a bit when I got a chance to say hi to Kat von D from "L.A. Ink", since she wasn’t in the shop the day I got my tattoo. It was totally cool to show her my tattoo (patience; my show is supposed to air next month) and thank her for the experience. We swapped a couple of stories, and I found she was like everyone else I met at the party: approachable, open, and interesting.

In fact, if there was any disappointment with the party (besides not being allowed to actually eat the cakes made by the bakery from "Cake Boss" and realizing after I had gotten back to my hotel that the Meteorite Men were there and I missed them) it was of the snarky variety; that is, no one was a jerk. I mean, c’mon! This was a Hollywood party! No cocaine? No obnoxious divas?

Could it be that the portrayal of Hollywood in Hollywood films has been Hollywooded? Hmmm.

So all in all it was a fabulous event with a lot of people having lots of fun. It makes me wonder… could it be that because there is a science bent to the networks (not all the shows, but many) the party was more about the fun and less about the personalities? Hmmm again.

Maybe not. But still. Science is cool.

As a parent, I spend a lot of time worrying about my daughter. That’s part of the job description. But what they don’t tell you is exactly how to figure out what to worry about.

I suspect that in Fluvanna County, Virginia, that’s a problem too. It’s there, you see, that a bunch of parents are upset about an abstinence-only sex education class. Now, I’d certainly be upset if they offered such nonsense in my daughter’s school, since it has been shown repeatedly that sexual education based on abstinence only doesn’t work at all.

But that’s not what has Fluvanna County parents unhappy. Instead, it’s that students in the class were asked to fill out a survey without first notifying the parents. That’s against the school district rules, not surprisingly. And, to be fair, I’d want to be notified as well so I could look at the survey.

But really, that’s a minor, minor point compared to the fact that their children are not only not getting a real sexual education, but by taking an abstinence-only class they will be more open to STDs and teen pregnancies.

The program in question is called Worth Your Wait. I looked over their website, and will readily admit that a lot of the advice they give is fine: self-control is important, it’s best to wait until you’re ready, and so on. But that hardly matters, since the very basis of what they’re saying is known not to work. It’s like having a website saying drinking a glass a water a day will cure AIDS, and it’ll also hydrate you. Sure, the latter is true, but the overall message is bunk.

It’s too bad, because it’s an enticing idea: teach your kids to not have sex, and like magic, they won’t! But it’s a crock. It’s worse than that, really, because study after study show this very clearly: kids still get pregnant, kids still get STDs, and in fact with abstinence-only education they tend not to get educated on how to practice safe sex, so pregnancies and incidents of STDs actually go up for AO educated children.

But why let research and reality get in the way of dogma?

Tip o’ the chastity belt to Nicole Gluggerflurnaven.

“A 45-year-old man was referred for investigation of an undescended right testis by computed tomography (CT). An ultra-sound scan showed a normal testis and epididymis on the left side. The right testis was not visualized in the scrotal sac or in the right inguinal region. On CT scanning of the abdomen and pelvis, the right testis was not identified but the left side of the scrotum seemed to be occupied by a screaming ghost-like apparition (Figure 1). By chance, the distribution of normal anatomical structures within the left side of the scrotum had combined to produce this image. What of the undescended right testis? None was found. If you were a right testis, would you want to share the scrotum with that?”

And for your enjoyment, Figure 1 (the free PDF is available here):

Thanks to Tom for today’s ROFL!

I recently appeared on this show, and I wasn’t the only one. Here’s the guest list:

Stewart Brand – author of the newly published Whole Earth Discipline
Dr Janet Rowley – human geneticist at the University of Chicago
Chris Mooney – author of The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America
Reverend Robert Sirico – founder of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty
Professor Jared Diamond – Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs and Steel: How Human Societies Fail
Oliver Morton – Energy and Environment Editor for The Economist
Dr Brent Blackwelder – President Emeritus of Friends of the Earth, United States

All in all, I have to say it made for a crowded, but very interesting, debate about science, politics, and society in the U.S., exactly one year after President Obama promised to restore science to its “rightful place,” & c & c.

I found that I agree with Stewart Brand about a lot. I also found that I agree with Robert Sirco about pretty much zero–and the same goes for Brent Blackwelder, at least based on what I heard on the show.

Oliver Morton’s comments on science and the American frontier were either deep or brilliant, I’m not sure which. But they gave me a little chill.

Based on his comments, I think Jared Diamond would like Unscientific America.

Oh, and Janet Rowley: Loved her comments on Leon Kass assigning an anti-science short story, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Birth-Mark, at the first meeting of the President’s Council on Bioethics under Bush…an episode that should never be forgotten.

Listen to the whole program here.

A small meteorite, about the size of a tennis ball or so, crashed into a Lorton, Virginia doctor’s office on Monday, according to several reports including one in the Washington Post. No one was hurt, but there was some damage — not surprising, since it must have hit at a couple of hundred kilometers per hour (it’s a Hollywood myth that small rocks hit at huge speeds with flames drawn out behind them; they slow down to highway-like speeds while they are still dozens of kilometers off the ground). The Maryland Weather blog has a picture of the interplanetary interloper — there’s a clear fusion crust (the blackening of the surface from heat), which is a giveaway it’s a meteorite.

There were hundreds of eyewitness reports of the fireball reaching as far north as New Jersey, so the rock must have been traveling southward. There may be other pieces along the path, most likely near where this one hit. I wonder if there were other people who may have seen small debris hit but haven’t put the story together? If you live in that area (it’s actually near where I grew up, which is neither here nor there, but still makes me faintly jealous) then keep your eyes and ears open for any stories. It’s still pretty rare to be able to collect specimens from recent falls, making this a very valuable find– both scientifically and financially!

[Update: Nancy Atkinson has video on Universe Today, too.]

Tip o’ the Whipple Shield to Bill Smith.

The Cat's Paw (NGC 6334). Imaged at the ESO. Click for a larger version. Credit: ESO

Just look at this! The ESO has outdone themselves this time. I’m glad too because given my location it would be pretty much right on the horizon and throw in the local geography I’d probably never get to see it otherwise.  If you click on the ESO link below you will get more and larger versions of the image.

The ESO press release:

Few objects in the sky have been as well named as the Cat’s Paw Nebula, a glowing gas cloud resembling the gigantic pawprint of a celestial cat out on an errand across the Universe. British astronomer John Herschel first recorded NGC 6334 in 1837 during his stay in South Africa. Despite using one of the largest telescopes in the world at the time, Herschel seems to have only noted the brightest part of the cloud, seen here towards the lower left.

NGC 6334 lies about 5500 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Scorpius (the Scorpion) and covers an area on the sky slightly larger than the full Moon. The whole gas cloud is about 50 light-years across. The nebula appears red because its blue and green light are scattered and absorbed more efficiently by material between the nebula and Earth. The red light comes predominantly from hydrogen gas glowing under the intense glare of hot young stars.

NGC 6334 is one of the most active nurseries of massive stars in our galaxy and has been extensively studied by astronomers. The nebula conceals freshly minted brilliant blue stars — each nearly ten times the mass of our Sun and born in the last few million years. The region is also home to many baby stars that are buried deep in the dust, making them difficult to study. In total, the Cat’s Paw Nebula could contain several tens of thousands of stars.

Particularly striking is the red, intricate bubble in the lower right part of the image. This is most likely either a star expelling large amount of matter at high speed as it nears the end of its life or the remnant of a star that already has exploded.

This new portrait of the Cat’s Paw Nebula was created from images taken with the Wide Field Imager (WFI) instrument at the 2.2-metre MPG/ESO telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile, combining images taken through blue, green and red filters, as well as a special filter designed to let through the light of glowing hydrogen.

Discoblog readers: We need your help.

If you’ve been reading the DISCOVER blogs this week, you might have caught 80beats’ coverage of the study out suggesting the ultra-tough shell of a deep-sea snail could inspire the next generation of body armor. For reasons that could only be described as “dropping the ball,” we didn’t include the illustration provided by the National Science Foundation. It’s not every day that you get to see a samurai attacking a giant snail, though he probably should’ve brought his Hattori Hanz? sword rather than this spear.

Samurai vs. Snail:

Not to be outdone, the Nature study we covered today, arguing Madagascar’s mammals arrived there via flotilla, came with its own illustration. In it, the happy lemur wins the boat race to the Africa while the sad hippos and lions, too fat to ride, stay on the mainland.

The Great Animal Boat Race:

More awesomely bizarre? Please, help us decide:

<br /> <a href=”http://answers.polldaddy.com/poll/2570157/” mce_href=”http://answers.polldaddy.com/poll/2570157/”>Which is the more awesomely bad science illustration?</a><span style=”font-size:9px;” mce_style=”font-size:9px;”>(<a href=”http://www.polldaddy.com” mce_href=”http://www.polldaddy.com”>surveys</a>)</span><br />

Related Content:
80beats: Could a Deep Sea Snail’s Shell Inspire Next-Gen Body Armor?
80beats: Study: Madagascar’s Weird Mammals Got There On Rafts

Images: NSF; Luci Betti Nash

Flashy tits equals stronger sperm–at least in the bird world.

A recent study of the birds known as great tits, by evolutionary ecologist Fabrice Helfenstein at the University of Bern, Switzerland, found that the more colorful and bright a male tit’s plumage, the stronger the bird’s sperm is.

The study, published in Ecology Letters, explains that the plumage of some birds contains caretenoids–important antioxidants that can help the bird combat cellular damage caused by stress from predators or feeding babies. A higher amount of caretenoids also results in intensely colored plumage in males, signaling the bird’s increased capacity to ward off stress and preserve its sperm from damage.

New Scientist reports:

[Fabrice Helfenstein] tested this by upping the parental workload of wild male great tits, Parus major – which have yellow breast plumage – by adding two extra chicks to their nests. After five days of looking after their big brood, males with paler plumage suffered a greater reduction in sperm motility than more colorful males. Supplementing the birds’ diet with carotenoids markedly improved the sperm quality of the paler males.

Related Content:
80beats: Male Cleaner Fish Punish Females Who Piss Off The Boss Fish
80beats: In Galpagos Finches, Biologists Catch Evolution in the Act
80beats: Rumors of Y Death Are Greatly Exaggerated; Male Chromosome Evolving Like Crazy
80beats: Study: The Chemical BPA, in High Doses, Causes Impotence

Image: iStockphoto

While we’re on the topic of charities, it seems appropriate to note that this is a particularly opportune time to donate to an exceedingly worthwhile charity: Doctors Without Borders. They are doing amazing work around the world, and the current tragedy in Haiti is no exception.

Note that Doctors Without Borders (more generally known as Médecins Sans Frontières) is not the same as Doctors of the World (Médecins du Monde; now called HealthRight). It’s somewhat ironic, but the Doctors couldn’t agree about how to go about saving the world. So MDM split off in 1980 (and is roughly 1/40th the size). The critical issue was the degree to which “witnessing” was a part of their mission. On the one hand, if you want to be able to go anywhere that you’re needed, it’s wise to be explicitly apolitical. Your goal is simply to help the sick and relieve suffering. On the other hand, if you witness atrocities, it seems incumbent upon you to tell the world what has happened. If you are on the ground in the midst of genocide, is it really appropriate to stay silent? Both groups “bear witness” to atrocities, but MSF is more conservative, while MDM is more aggressive.

I think strong arguments can be made for both approaches, and I don’t think you can go wrong supporting either organization. As always, it makes sense to check out any intended recipient of largess on Charity Navigator. Both organizations get essentially identical, stellar scores (implying that the vast majority [~90%] of what you donate goes to people in need, and not to fatten the pay of executives, or into the pockets of Madison Avenue).

Haiti is a tragedy of epic proportions. Here is a way to help.

Just how did all the exotic mammals of Madagascar, like its unique collection of lemurs, originally reach the African island? Did they float there from the African mainland, or did nature provide a land bridge? The question has vexed biologists because both explanations have their problems. But a new study in Nature proposes an answer to the main problem posed by the floating-across-the-channel idea, suggesting that it is the most likely explanation.

Because of the narrow range of biology on Madagascar, most biologists favored the floating rafts hypothesis. But there has always been a problem with this notion: the currents swirling in the channel and the surrounding Indian Ocean would make it virtually impossible for a floating Noah’s Ark of vegetation to reach Madagascar’s shores [AFP]. Were those currents always this way, though? No, says a team led by Matthew Huber.

Huber and his colleagues employed the computer modeling techniques used in modern climate studies to predict backwards. 50 million years ago Africa and Madagascar sat about 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) south of their current positions due to continental drift…. By plugging data about the ocean and atmosphere of ancient Earth into modern climate models, Huber and Ali found that ocean currents around the two land masses once flowed eastward, toward Madagascar, after all [National Geographic].

Madagascar’s four groups of land mammals would’ve arrived on the island between 60 and 20 million years ago. The peculiar set of creatures that arrived had always suggested that migration opportunities probably were scarce—otherwise (as with a land bridge) a greater mammalian variety probably would’ve arrived. The rafting hypothesis also matches the reality that none of the mainland Africa’s very large mammals made it to Madagascar. As you can see in the illustrative yet strange image above, you just can’t fit an elephant or hippo in a dinghy… or a natural raft.

Related Content:
80beats: Madagascar Chameleon Makes the Most of a 4-Month Life
80beats: Scientists Find Oddball Right-Side-Up Bat in Madagascar
DISCOVER: A Bridge To Madagascar
DISCOVER: The Deadliest Carnivore, on Madagascar’s fossa

Image: Nature

If you are a normal person trying to figure out who is right and who is wrong on an issue, it can be pretty confusing. When it comes to things like global warming, there are folks out there who twist, distort, and spin the facts so grievously that it’s hard to tell the difference between what they are doing and outright lying. And when one of them does it, a slew of others pick it up, making the chorus of nonsense self-reinforcing, muddying the waters even more.

We saw this happen with the CRU emails that were hacked — a situation which was nowhere near as important as so many trumped them up to be — and of course we will see it again and again.

To help staunch that, there are two points about global warming I’ve recently come across that I want to make sure are very clear.

1) Some global warming denialists obfuscate what’s going on with Antarctica, saying the ice there is actually growing, not melting. That is patently false. Where it really matters, Antarctic ice is melting.

As you can see by this NASA graphic from the linked page, Antarctica loses over 100 billion tons of ice per year, the equivalent of about a hundred cubic kilometers (more than 20 cubic miles) of ice. That number is hard to grasp, but it’s the equivalent to the volume of a mountain about 14,000 feet high — or, if you prefer, it’s like saying that one Colorado Rocky Mountain’s worth of ice disappears every year. Just in Antarctica alone.

You may note that the line fitted to the points in that graph is changing its slope, getting steeper with time. I wouldn’t extrapolate that too much, but if true, it means the loss rate is accelerating.

2) The IPCC report in 2007 was a landmark analysis of the current GW situation. It has been attacked repeatedly by denialists, of course. As it happens, in one part of the report they said that Himalayan glaciers may melt away completely by 2035. This turns out to have been based on a report that was not peer-reviewed, and most likely incorrect.

However, this does not mean the entire report is wrong, and it certainly doesn’t even mean that Himalayan glaciers are fine! Quite the opposite, in fact. A new study of Himalayan ice using satellite data shows that the ice is disappearing, and from 2003 to 2009 shrank at a rate of 47 billion tons per year. I’ll be careful to note that the uncertainty in this measurement is about 25% (12 Gt/year) and has a short baseline in time, but even considering that, the loss of Himalayan ice is definitely large and almost certainly increasing — perhaps twice as rapidly now as it was in the past 40 years before the study.

This is supported by a ground-based study of over 600 glaciers being monitored by Chinese scientists, which showed that between 1980 and 1995, 90% of those glaciers were retreating, and in the period of 1995 – 2005, 95% retreated. In other words, the vast majority of the glaciers studied were losing ice, and in more recent years the number of glaciers losing ice increased.

This is all consistent with global loss rates of ice: it’s disappearing faster now than it was in previous decades.

Get a good look at Himalayan glaciers while you still can.

Expect to hear the antiglobal warming crowd crowing over this, and the media misreporting this to sow more doubt about global warming. But the important point to remember is this: the Himalayan ice really is shrinking, and the same thing is happening in Antarctica.

Global warming is real. It’s also getting worse. You can shout, you can scream until you’re red in the face, and you can deny the facts all you want. But facts are pesky: they exist whether you believe in them or not.

My thanks to expert glaciologists Drs. Lonnie Thompson and C. K . Shum for taking time to explain the Himalayan studies to me and for providing me with the numbers from the ground studies.

Glacier image from mckaysavage’s Flickr stream licensed under creative comons.

Anthony Lane reviews the new Darwin biopic Creation in the New Yorker. As is his habit, Lane manages to write some lovely stuff about a movie he doesn’t care much for (”at once slow and overwrought”). I have to agree with him on this, for example:

[Actor Paul] Bettany, with his jungly sideburns and smooth pate, offers a reasonable likeness of the great man, although he lacks the shaggy overhang of brow, extending far beyond the sunken eye sockets, which lent Darwin not only his solemn frown but, it must be said, his semi-simian air. I sometimes wonder if his tracing of our ancestry began not on his travels, or at his desk, but one morning when he glanced into his shaving mirror.

[Image: Wikipedia]