As I write this, it’s about -15 C outside where I live in Boulder, and even the snow looks like it’s shivering. So I’m not sure if I’m happy to share the grief or feel badly about the weather for folks in the UK, who generally don’t get (metric, I suppose) tons of snow. But then I saw this image from NASA’s Earth observing Terra satellite:

Holy Haleakala, that’s gorgeous! I won’t say I’m exactly glad they got lots of snow, but still, wow. Sorry, my anglic friends, but your suffering has produced this stunning beauty.

The image was taken on January 7, 2010 at around noon local time. The image above has 1 km pixels, but you can also grab the image in higher-res 500 meter and 250 meter versions, too.

Ladies and gentlemen, for your viewing and listening pleasure, it’s the fourth installment of “Symphony of Science.” If you missed the first three iterations of John Boswell’s creation, he auto-tunes the syncopated scientific stylings of Carl Sagan’s monologues from “Cosmos,” combined with guest stars like Stephen Hawking, Neil deGrasse Tyson (of DISCOVER’s StarTalk podcast, among many other media ventures), and Richard Feynman. If you need to catch up, all four are available on Boswell’s site. The first can even be had on vinyl through the label of the White Stripes’ Jack White—Third Man Records.

Here’s the newest, “The Unbroken Thread.” Watch and enjoy.

Related Content:
Cosmic Variance: AutoTuned Sagan
The Loom: The Continuing Return of Carl Sagan
Bad Astronomy: What I Learned from Carl Sagan

You could’ve seen this one coming a mile away—the high seas tensions between Japanese whalers and the environmental groups that harass them degenerated into downright naval warfare this week. A Japanese whaling ship collided with a environmental group’s boat in waters near Antarctica yesterday, sparking finger-pointing, international bickering, and even more bad blood.

The collision late yesterday damaged the Ady Gil, a powerboat that is part of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society protest against the Japan’s annual whaling expedition to the Southern Ocean. Six crew members were rescued by another protest vessel and the boat may sink, Sea Shepherd said in a statement [Business Week]. The governments of Australia and New Zealand say they plan to investigate the crash; the Ady Gil is registered in New Zealand, which opposes the Japanese whaling.

Unsurprisingly, each sides blamed the other. The Japanese boat released a video shot from its deck. The video shows a frothy wake coming from the stern of the Ady Gil, although it is unclear whether the trimaran (the Ady Gil) was moving. The Shonan Maru 2 was directing a water cannon at the Ady Gil before and during the collision, which is clearly seen on the video, and the bow of the Ady Gil was sheared off [The New York Times]. However, the Sea Shepherd people released their own video which shows the whalers veering to intercept. Take a look:

Sea Shepherd boats routinely dog the Japanese whaling vessels, which operate under a loophole in the international moratorium on whaling that allows a certain amount of whale killings for research purposes. DISCOVER has documented complaints by American scientists that killing whales isn’t necessary for the research Japanese scientists are conducting, and also the stealthy killings of other cetaceans, like bottlenose dolphins. The International Whaling Commission continues to try to figure out how to amend its rules to contain Japan’s whaling efforts, thus far without success.

No one on board the Ady Gil died this time around, but one activist reported cracked ribs. The vessel’s six crew members were rescued from the stricken craft by the crew of the Bob Barker, a former Norwegian whaler recently purchased and refitted with a $5-million donation from Bob Barker, who hosted the TV game show “The Price Is Right” for 35 years [Los Angeles Times]. In the aftermath of the close call, a détente seems far out of reach. Sea Shepherd spokesman Paul Watson said the incident had turned the confrontations into a “real whale war” [BBC News].

Related Content:
80beats: Is the Whaling Ban Really the Best Way to Save the Whales?
80beats: Controversial Deal Could Allow Japan To Hunt More Whales
80beats: Commando Filmmakers Expose Secret Dolphin Slaughter in Japan
Discoblog: Japan Whaling Redux: American Scientists Say Slaughter Was Unnecessary
Discoblog: Say What? Japanese Whaling Ships Accuse Animal Planet of Eco-Terrorism

Surprise, surprise…. Fast food restaurants might be lying to your face.

According to the Los Angeles Times health blog, Booster Shots:

Researchers from Tufts University took commercially prepared foods — both prepackaged and from restaurants — and analyzed them in a bomb calorimeter. The measured energy values of 10 frozen meals purchased from supermarkets averaged 8% more than originally stated, and foods from 29 restaurants (both fast-food and sit-down venues) were on average 18% more than reported.

The most egregious offender? Denny’s, whose dry toast is advertised to contain 92 calories but actually packs a diet-busting 283 calories! If they can’t even get the numbers on toast right, just imagine the true caloric content of one of their Grand Slamwiches.

So if your New Year’s resolution includes getting back in shape, help yourself out by resolving to stop eating fast food and frozen meals all together.

Related Content:
Discoblog: Food Fraud: High Schoolers Use DNA Tests to Expose Fake Caviar
Discoblog: Fiber-Filled, Antioxidant-Packed Ice Cream—Brilliant? Sacrilegious? Nasty?
Discoblog: Heart-Stopping Cinematic Excitement: Guess How Much Fat Is in Movie Popcorn?

Image: flickr / fotographix.ca

Four hundred years ago tonight, a man from Pisa, Italy took a newly-made telescope with a magnifying power of 33X, pointed it at one of the brighter lights in the sky, and changed mankind forever.

The man, of course, was Galileo, and the light he observed on January 7, 1610 was Jupiter. He spotted "three fixed stars" that were invisible to the eye near the planet, and a fourth a few days later.

Here is how he drew this, 400 years ago:

He noted the stars moved around Jupiter as they followed it across the sky, and so was the first to figure out that other planets had moons like our own. It wasn’t an easy observation; his telescope was still small, the field of view narrow (so not all the moons were visible at the same time), and the moons faint next to Jupiter’s brilliant glare. But Galileo persisted, and figured it out. We call these four the Galilean moons in his honor: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.

Here’s how we see them today:

The image above [click to embiggen] is from the New Horizons spacecraft as it shot past Jupiter in early 2007, showing all four moons. Each is scaled to show its true relative size to the others. It’s impossible not to wonder what Galileo would have thought, knowing that just shy of 400 years after he made his first observations, we would fling our robotic proxies out into the solar system and get close up views of the objects he discovered.

Think of it! For all of time before, Jupiter was just a light in the sky. And then, forever after that night forty decades ago, it was a world, surrounded by more worlds.

[See more pictures of Jupiter and its moons in a gallery over at 80 Beats.]

Galileo went on to observe craters on the Moon, spots on the Sun, and the phases of Venus. It was that last that may have been his crowning achievement, because the way Venus showed phases meant it could not possibly orbit the Earth, and that it must orbit the Sun. The geocentric theory had held sway for over a thousand years, but Galileo proved it was wrong almost overnight. Of course, the Church wasn’t thrilled with this, though I suspect they might have rolled with it if Galileo hadn’t been such an arrogant jerk and published a manuscript insulting the Pope, a man who used to be his friend and supporter.

If there is a lesson in there, I leave it to my readers to suss it out.

Now, all these years later, a lot of legends exist over the man. He didn’t invent the telescope, he wasn’t the first to point it at the sky, and he wasn’t even the first to publish his drawings. But he was a merciless self-promoter, and because of that we do remember him now (again, any lessons learned here are up to you). And it’s not entirely unfair to do so; he was a tireless observer, a wonderful artist, a great inventor (he may not have been the first to build a telescope, but he made his far better than its predecessors) and a brilliant scientist who, even if he hadn’t done so much for astronomy, would still be remembered today for his other work.

Tonight, just after sunset, Jupiter will be a glowing white beacon in the southwest. I have a Galileoscope, an inexpensive telescope created as part of the International Year of Astronomy 2009, an effort to get as many people on Earth to look up as possible. I think perhaps it would be fitting if I brave the subzero temperature outside, maybe for just a few minutes, and take a look at the mighty planet. Tonight’s display is better than Galileo himself had it: all four moons will be perfectly arrayed, two on each side of Jupiter’s face.

I’m not a very religious man, nor am I a very spiritual man. But I know there will still be a sense of connection, a sense of wonder that I will have tonight that I will share with a man long dead, but whose life and achievements still echo through time.

On January 7, 1610, Galileo Galilei pointed his “spyglass” to the heavens and stared up at Jupiter, one of the brightest lights in the evening sky, and noted what he at first assumed to be three bright stars near the planet. But over the following nights, he realized that those three bright bodies weren’t fixed in the heavens like stars, but rather seemed to dance around Jupiter along with a fourth, smaller body.

Galileo triumphantly announced his discovery of four “planets” that revolved around Jupiter in his March treatise, Starry Messenger [pdf]. Thinking of his pocketbook, he dutifully proposed naming them the Medicean Stars in honor of his patron, Cosimo de Medici. But the name didn’t stick, and today we honor the scientist rather than the patron by calling Jupiter’s four largest satellites the Galilean moons.

The discovery dealt a death blow to the Ptolemaic understanding of the universe, in which all planets and stars were believed to orbit the Earth. For, as Galileo wrote in his treatise, “our own eyes show us four stars which wander around Jupiter as does the moon around the earth.”

In the 400 years that have passed since Galileo first laid eyes on them, we’ve learned a great deal about the moons Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto (all named after the mythological paramours of Jupiter). If all goes according to plan we’ll soon get to know them much more intimately–NASA and the European Space Agency are currently planning missions to closely observe three of the moons. Click though this gallery to view NASA’s most stunning photos of the four satellites, and to find out what we’ve discovered in the four centuries since Galileo began the work.

(For more on Galileo’s discovery and what it meant to science, check out this post from DISCOVER’s Phil Plait.)

Image: NASA/JPL/DLR

Back and forth go the studies investigating whether cell phone uses increases the risk of brain cancer (the latest one to get major press, released last month, found nothing there). This week, though, new research has grabbed the headlines by declaring that our ubiquitous communication and time-wasting devices could actually provide a health benefit.

In a study set to come out today in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease (and funded in part by the National Institute on Aging), a group led by Gary Arendash argues that the radiation from cell phones that we’ve been worrying about could protect against Alzheimer’s Disease. But it’s far too soon to advise people to start medicating themselves by talking even longer on the phone.

Researchers at the Florida Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center arranged about 70 mouse cages in a circle around a central antenna that emitted electromagnetic waves typical of what would emanate from a phone pressed to a human head. They were exposed to the radiation for two hours a day over seven to nine months. About two dozen other mice served as controls [Los Angeles Times]. Arendash’s team used mice they had genetically engineered to develop the brain buildups and memory problems typical of Alzheimer’s when they got older. The team says that the memory problems of those mice exposed to the radiation began to disappear during the study. Not only that, but normal mice (that hadn’t been genetically engineered) also showed memory improvements after exposure.

Why? The researchers showed that exposing old Alzheimer’s mice to the electromagnetic waves generated by cell phones erased brain deposits of beta-amyloid, a protein strongly associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Clumps of beta-amyloid form so-called brain plaques that are a hallmark of the disease [LiveScience]. According to the scientists, the slight increase in brain temperature brought on by the radiation could’ve caused the mouse brains to release those plaques.

Arendash surprised himself, saying that before the study he’d expected to see that cell phone use would make dementia worse. “Quite to the contrary, those mice were protected if the cell phone exposure was stared [sic] in early adulthood. Or if the cellphone exposure was started after they were already memory- impaired, it reversed that impairment,” Arendash said [Reuters]. When the benefits for the mice continued without any noticeable detriments, he was sold.

Glowing from success, Arendash and USF colleagues said future research could determine the best “dosage” of radiation for targeting these brain plaque deposits: the 918 megaHerz in US mobile phones, 800 megaHerz in European phones, or another frequency — and how long effective “treatment” would have to be [AFP].

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, though. The work by Arendash opens up all kinds of avenues for possible research, but research on the health effects of cell phones seems prone to long, drawn out studies and occasionally contradictory headlines, like those we see about red wine or coffee being good or bad. William Thies, chief medical and scientific officer of the Alzheimer’s Association, warned against self-medicating with extra cell use based on these findings. (And just yesterday we covered the scientist smackdown over whether a virus truly causes chronic fatigue syndrome, with the British researchers now arguing that the link isn’t proven, and warning people not to seek out antiretroviral drugs.)

The next steps: Other researchers will try to replicate Arendash results in mice, and if they do so, scientists can go on to test whether electromagnetic waves have the same effect on humans.

Related Content:
80beats: Can You Fear Me Now? Cell Phone Use Not Linked to Brain Cancer
80beats: Cancer Doctor Issues Warning About Cell Phones, And Causes Panic
80beats: Scientist Smackdown: Is a Virus Really the Cause of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?
80beats: Lack of ZZZZs Linked to Alzheimer’s in Mice
80beats: Electrical Brain Stimulation Prompts Big Hopes—And a Dash of Concern

Image: University of South Florida

First light from WISE. Image Credit: NASA/JP-Caltech/UCLA

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer also known as WISE gets its first view of the sky. I have to say, this is pretty remarkable, less than a month between launch and releasing a first light image.

Among the ambitious plans for the WISE mission is the detection of Brown Dwarf stars down to a temperature of 150^o K out to 10 light years, and 450^oK out to 75 light years. This of course is very interesting because at the moment if the failed stars are there they are invisible to us.

Another very exciting aspect of this mission is the hunt for asteroids and an extensive education and public outreach program led by UC Berkeley. Apparently they are going to involve the public in searching for the asteroids including students. So that IMHO makes this one of the most exciting missions in a while.  More about the education and public outreach.  Oh and you may note the 150^oK is around -190^oF/-123^oC!!

Pay a visit to the WISE website by clicking the link below for more details about this mission.

About the image from the WISE website:

This infrared snapshot of a region in the constellation Carina near the Milky Way was taken shortly after NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) ejected its cover. The “first-light” picture shows thousands of stars and covers an area three times the size of the Moon. WISE will take more than a million similar pictures covering the whole sky. The image was captured as the spacecraft stared in a fixed direction, in order to help calibrate its pointing system. The mission’s survey will be done while the satellite continuously scans the sky, and an internal scan mirror counteracts the motion to create freeze-frame images. The team is working now to match the motions of the spacecraft and the scan mirror precisely. This eight-second exposure shows infrared light from three of WISE’s four wavelength bands: Blue, green and red correspond to 3.4, 4.6, and 12 microns, respectively.

The graphic shows the relative size and temperature of the newly found exoplanets. Click for a larger version. Image is from Science@NASA site linked below.

The Kepler mission has returned its first results:  it found FIVE planets around different stars.  No surprise these are very large large planets as we can see in the Kepler graphic.  The planets are named and rightly so: Kepler 4b,5b, 6b, 7b, 8b.

It is only reasonable to find larger objects first, but wow, the planets are found by watching the light from the starlight dim ever so slightly as the planet transits the face of the star!  Think of it, the light doesn’t dim very much yet it can be detected.

The orbit can be determined quite simply by watching the dimming patter over time, the size of the planets can be determined by the amount of the dip, and the temperature of the planet can be determined by knowing the orbital distance and how hot the star is (which is fairly easy because it is based on the type of star) – simple and brilliant.

Kepler is watching an astounding 150,000 stars at once.  Imagine the data they have to sift through!  Ultimately the goal is to find roughly sized planets in the habitable zone of the parent star.

From the NASA press release:

“These observations contribute to our understanding of how planetary systems form and evolve from the gas and dust disks that give rise to both the stars and their planets,” said William Borucki of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. Borucki is the mission’s science principal investigator. “The discoveries also show that our science instrument is working well. Indications are that Kepler will meet all its science goals.”

The Kepler mission team must be extremely happy, congrats to them!  Still think we’re alone?

Science@NASA has a good article on the new findings, check it out.

Much to the chagrin of a certain Wyoming Senator, the Central Intelligence Agency is poised to fight terrorism and spy on sea lions (Sen. John Barrasso once quipped the CIA should stick to the former occupation). The nation’s top scientists and spies are collaborating on an effort to use the federal government’s intelligence assets — including spy satellites and other classified sensors — to assess the hidden complexities of environmental change. They seek insights from natural phenomena like clouds and glaciers, deserts and tropical forests [The New York Times].

The program will have little impact on the CIA’s normal intelligence gathering, say those involved, and will only release data already in hand or data gathered during satellite down time. The images will even have their sharpness decreased in order to maintain some secrecy about the satellites’ true capabilities.

60 scientists, all with security clearances, will oversee the scientific aspects of the project, like analyzing detailed images of the polar ice caps. Of course, not everyone in Washington is on board with the collaboration, and as the attempted airliner bombing on Christmas Day reminded the public of the terrorist threat, the critics are likely to get louder. However, a report from the National Academy of Sciences, which advises the federal government, calls the satellite data essential, saying “there are no other data available that show the melting and freezing processes” [Popular Science]. The program actually began under former President Clinton, but was canceled by former President Bush. Clinton’s vice president Al Gore has been lobbying to restart the program since 2008.

Related Content:
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80beats: Is the Once-Stable Part of Antarctica Starting to Melt?
80beats: Armed With Data, Scientists Still Mystified by Antarctica’s Hidden Mountains

Image: NASA Earth Observatory

I am not all that big on celebrity endorsements, but I do understand that they can be very beneficial in getting the word out on important topics ot people who might not otherwise hear it.

So I’m pleased to see that Jennifer Lopez did a short video about the benefits of vaccination against pertussis for a website called Sounds of Pertussis (created by the vaccine division of the pharmaceutical company Sanofi Aventis). The video calmly and rationally explains why it’s important to vaccinate for pertussis, also known as whooping cough.

Regular readers know my stance on this: pertussis can kill, as parents David and Toni McCaffery found out when their four-week-old daughter Dana died from it in 2009 — she was infected because not enough people had vaccinated their children, and the herd immunity in that area of Australia was too low. It’s important to talk to your physician about this and find out if you should vaccinate yourself and your loved ones.

The antivaxxers are loud about this issue, of course. Meryl Dorey and her Australian Vaccination Network have spread misinformation far and wide on this issue, even saying that pertussis doesn’t kill anyone… a statement that is so clearly false that it’s difficult to believe someone could honestly utter it. No doubt the antivaxxers will ooze out of the woodwork in the comments below — they always do — and make all sorts of similar false claims. And also no doubt we’ll see the attempts to poison the well by saying the JLo video was produced by a — gasp — pharmaceutical company!

Like Ben Goldacre, I am not a huge fan of a lot of the tactics used by those companies to sell drugs. But that doesn’t mean everything they do is wrong. Vaccinations, as I feel I must point out over and again, have saved hundreds of millions of lives, a number so huge it’s awe-inspiring. But so many antivaxxers seem to want to see us return to the days when children died of measles, when kids were confined to iron lungs when they couldn’t breathe due to polio, and people died by the millions from smallpox and other preventable diseases.

Antivaxxers are wrong. The data are overwhelming that their arguments are false. Vaccines save lives, countless lives. Talk to your physician. Please.

Parasite Rex has made a very special list of books to read after you get dumped. To quote from Lemondrop over at the AOL collective:

Do you need something to so totally fill you with paranoia and fear that you can’t even think about the worm that just dumped you? How about a terrifying book about worms! AGH! You’ll never walk barefoot in the street again, plus you’ll be so full of disgusting factoids that you won’t even have time to mention what’s-his-name at a party — you’ll be too busy grossing people out. FTW!

I would suggest waiting to find a new special someone until the book has cleared your system. I was still single while I was writing Parasite Rex, and the book made going out on dates very awkward.

So, what’s your next book about?

Parasites, and why they’re totally awesome. See, like, there’s this worm that crawls across your eye…

Check, please!

On the plus side, it’s a very quick test to see if your date shares your taste for the grotesque.

Here at DISCOVER, we do our best to keep you informed of all the crap scientific advice that celebrities dispense, be it Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy’s anti-vaxxer yarns, Oprah providing a platform for new-age nonsense, or soccer star Robin Van Persie’s praise of placenta massage to heal injuries. But with so many celebrities and so much bad advice, it can be hard to catch it all—TMZ might catalog the whereabouts and philandering of the rich and moderately famous, but not necessarily their quackery.

Never fear, though, because once again the British organization Sense About Science has pulled many of the year’s worst offenses together in a handy compendium. The charity’s annual review pairs celebrity claims with reality-based quotes from doctors and scientists.

Here’s one choice gem: Heather Mills, the animal rights activist and former wife to Paul McCartney, claimed that when you eat meat “[it] sits in your colon for 40 years and putrefies, and eventually gives you the illness you die of. And that is a fact.” Thanks for the info, Heather!

More from New Scientist:

Other celebs have been pulled up this year for apparently not realising that natural substances such as hormones are chemicals, and that ovulation is suppressed naturally by pregnancy and prolonged breastfeeding. Actress Suzanne Somers, for example, was quoted as saying that the contraceptive pill must be unsafe “because is it safe to take a chemical every day, and how would it be safe to take something that prevents ovulation?”

Actor Roger Moore, meanwhile, was taken to task for claiming that foie gras causes Alzheimer’s disease, and Sarah Palin for dismissing evolution.

Apparently playing James Bond not only gets you good tables at restaurants, it also makes you think you have medical expertise.

Related Content:
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Bad Astronomy: Oprah: Shame on You
The Intersection: On Vaccination and Autism: Don’t Believe the Hype

Image: flickr / Wonker

Last month I wrote an essay about the future of evolution for Science. I paid particularly close attention to what will happen to our own species, describing some recent research and ideas from scientists. Natural selection will not stop, nor will the emergence of new, neutral mutations.

But this week, the evolutionary biologist Michael Lynch has published a provocative paper (to mark his inauguration into the National Academy of Sciences) in which he makes another kind of forecast. Our future evolution, he warns, is going to lead to a devastating decline in our health.

The idea is not new. Hermann Muller, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on mutations, first raised the specter of evolutionary decline in 1950. He pointed out that many mutations that arise in a population are harmful. They can cause various diseases, cutting lives short or making it harder for organisms to reproduce. Left to themselves, these mutations can drive down the reproductive rate of a population. But their harmful effects can be balanced by natural selection. If individuals with harmful mutations have fewer offspring than other individuals, the mutations become less common. Overall, the population can continue to reproduce at a healthy rate.

As Lynch points out, Muller’s argument depended on the actual rate of mutations and other vital statistics that no one in the 1950s could know with much precision. But in his new paper, Lynch surveys recent studies that make it possible to know the mutation rate quite well. Lynch concludes that every gamete (a sperm or egg) acquires the following:

–38 base-substitution mutations (a single “letter” of DNA changes to another one).

–3 small insertions or deletions of a stretch of DNA

–1 splicing mutation (which changes the combination of segments of a gene that cells use to build proteins)

–Plus some assorted other mutations (gene duplications, insertions of DNA copied by transposable elements, and so on).

All told, Lynch estimates a total of 50 to 100 mutations.

Compared to other species, Lynch points out, we mutate a lot. Any base in our DNA is twice as likely to mutate as a base in a fruit fly’s DNA, for example. Part of our special burden is our long life. As sperm divide rapidly during a man’s life, they pick up lots of new mutations. We are also left prone to cancer, as our skin, intestines, and other tissues continue to divide and sometimes pick up new mutations.

A lot of the new mutations in every new baby are harmless. But each baby may acquire a few harmful ones. These mutations rarely cause a swift death. Instead, in their totality, they slice off a tiny fraction of the total offspring an entire population can produce. Lynch estimates that mutations to protein-coding DNA cause the fitness of a population to decline by 1%. That’s assuming natural selection does not favor other mutations over these harmful ones.

Lynch acknowledges that natural selection is still in effect in humans, particularly in places where people never see doctors, let alone get clean drinking water. But as the world’s standard of living goes up, he argues, more and more people are being shielded from natural selection’s most intense effects–and harmful mutations are piling up.

In a matter of a few centuries, Lynch predicts, industrialized societies may experience a huge increase in harmful genes–”with significant incapacitation at the morphological, physiological, and neurobiological levels,” he writes.

Battling this decline won’t be easy, says Lynch. Rather than a few big mutations causing the trouble, the decline will be brought about by a vast number of mutations, each with a very small effect. The fantasies of selective breeding dreamed of by eugenicists aren’t just loathesome–they’re also useless. Instead, Lynch argues for something that would make the eugenicists crazy. “Ironically, the genetic future of mankind may reside predominantly in the gene pools of the least industrialized segments of society,” he writes.

Image: IU

Scientists are pushing back the date that the first land-walkers stepped foot on solid ground. Thanks to the discovery of prehistoric footprints from an 8-foot-long animal, scientists now say creatures strolled the Earth 20 million years earlier than previously thought. The prints were made by tetrapods—animals with backbones and four limbs—and could rewrite the history of when, where, and why fish evolved limbs and first walked onto land, the study says [National Geographic News]. The researchers published their results in the journal Nature.

Dozens of the fossilized footprints were found in an abandoned quarry in Poland, and the researchers say that the area was probably a lagoon or an intertidal flat when the tetrapod wandered across it about 395 million years ago. Researchers say the footprints in such old rock was a big surprise: They’re about 10 million years older than body fossils of creatures such as Tiktaalik and Panderichthys, … believed to represent the transition from lobe-finned fish to creatures fully adapted to life on land [Science News].

The tracks were made by several four-limbed creatures sporting prehistoric toes. There are distinct “hand” and “foot” prints, with no evidence of a dragging body or tail, because the animals’ body weight would have been partly supported by water [Guardian]. The results highlight how little scientists really know about the early history of land vertebrates, the researchers say, and the find pushes back the evolutionary fork where tetrapods split from fish. The discovery will force scientists to reexamine what they know about water-to-land transition during vertebrate evolution, say the study’s authors.

Related Content:
80beats: Early Mini-Whale Slurped up Mud to Find Hidden Prey
80beats: In Galapagos Finches, Biologists Catch Evolution in the Act
80beats: New Fossil Suggests Dinosaur World Domination Started in S. America

Image: Per Ahlberg et al.

An estimated three in 1,000 people suffers from the mysterious affliction chronic fatigue syndrome. Those people were probably enthusiastic in October when a team of U.S. medical researchers released a study arguing that not only is the syndrome real (some doctors dismissed it as purely psychological “yuppie flu”), but also that they’d connected it to a specific virus. DISCOVER covered the hubbub after the paper came out in the journal Science.

But now, in a study in PLoS One, a British research team has cast doubt on the American team’s findings, saying there’s no conclusive link between the virus and chronic fatigue syndrome, which is also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis.

The U.S. team’s findings sounded robust when they came out. They found the murine leukaemia virus-related virus (XMRV) in blood samples of 68 of 101 patients diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. Just eight out of 101 healthy “controls” drawn at random from the same parts of the US also tested positive, suggesting that XMRV played a key role in triggering the condition [The Independent]. When the scientists from Imperial and Kings colleges in London attempted to replicate these findings, however, they found nothing of the sort. Of the 186 people with the syndrome that this team tested, not one showed signs of XMRV, or of any related virus.

Study coauthor Myra McClure of the Imperial College also criticized the U.S. team and the journal Science for rushing the findings into print in October. “When you’ve got such a stunning result you want to be absolutely clear that you are 1,000 per cent right and there are things in that [previous study] I would not have done. I would have waited. I would have stalled a little” [The Independent], she said.

As for the new study conducted in London, McClure declared: “We used very sensitive testing methods to look for the virus. If it had been there, we would have found it…. We are confident our results show there is no link between XMRV and CFS, at least in the UK” [The Guardian]. But the U.K. team says its contradictory findings could have resulted from differences in patients. According to the new study, the discrepancy “may be a result of population differences between North America and Europe regarding the general prevalence of XMRV infection, and might also explain the fact that two US groups found XMRV in prostate cancer tissue, while two European studies did not.”

Though McClure and her colleagues can’t say for sure how they and the Americans came to such different results, they wanted to put a stop to the rush of patients who started seeking antiretroviral treatments for chronic fatigue after the Science paper came out in October (XMRV is a retrovirus, like HIV). They say potent antiretroviral drugs should not be used to treat CFS because there is not enough evidence that this is necessary or helpful. The drugs may do more harm than good, they say [BBC News].

This might throw a wrench into the plans of Judy A. Mikovits, the lead author of the U.S. paper, to go ahead with antiretroviral testing. But the “avalanche of subsequent studies” that one medical researcher predicted to The New York Times after Mikovits’ paper is sure to continue.

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Discoblog: What’s in a Name? Real Diseases Suffer from Silly Name Syndrome

Image: Whittemore Peterson Institute

Researchers from the Charles Darwin University in Darwin, Australia (they really like Darwin there, apparently) thought they had schemed up a clever way to study how Australian Green Tree Frogs regulate their body temperature.

They surgically implanted temperature-sensitive radio transmitters inside the frogs’ bellies, but months later when they went to retrieve the frogs, the scientists found the transmitters scattered on the ground. Like so many great scientific discoveries, the researchers eventually went from “huh?” to “aha!” according to Nature News:

Researchers have discovered that these amphibians can absorb foreign objects from their body cavities into their bladders and excrete them through urination.

For the frogs, this means that any thorns or spiny insects they swallow while hopping around trees are safely (but painfully?) removed from the body.

This is the first time this phenomenon has been observed in an animal’s bladder, but some fish and snake species can absorb objects into their intestines from their body cavity and remove them by defecation.

Talk about adaptations that would make Darwin proud.

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Image: flickr / VannaGocaraRupa

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has seen first light — in other words, taken its first image from space!

[Click to embiggen and get access to a big TIFF version.]

Nice. It may not look as pretty as a Hubble or Spitzer shot at first glance, but to an astronomer it’s the Mona Lisa. The images are sharp (it’s in focus), the stars are not overexposed, diffuse sources are detected, and the diffraction spikes (the crosshairs centered on stars) are clean.

In other words: bingo!

This is an engineering image, not a science one. So it’s not supposed to be gorgeous or ready for publication or anything like that. It’s more like an aliveness test, to make sure the spacecraft is operating as expected. And it is!

This image is an 8-second exposure of a region in the constellation Carina. Normally, WISE will always be on the move, constantly sweeping the sky and taking data. But in this case, they pointed it at one spot to make sure everything was working. WISE works in the infrared, and this picture is actually a composite of three images: blue represents light at 3.4 microns (about 5 times longer than what we can see with our eyes), green is 4.6 microns, and red is 12 microns. This is well into the IR, and shows stars and warm dust in that region.

To give you an idea of the scale, the image covers the same area of the sky as three full Moons, so WISE takes big swaths of the sky when it looks around. That’s why it’s called a survey explorer. It will take millions of images of the sky, which can be stitched together to make mosaics.

WISE launched last December, and we’ve been waiting for news that it’s working. This image shows it is, so we can expect very cool stuff coming from the orbiting observatory in the future. The mission is actually quite short, only 10 months long. In October, it’s expected run out of the frozen hydrogen (!) being used to cool the detectors — warm objects emit infrared light, and you don’t want your telescope glowing in the light you want to see. In this case, the hydrogen keeps WISE’s cameras at a bone-crushing 8 Kelvin, or -445° F.

You can read more about this in my earlier post about WISE. My congrats to the team!

African chimpanzees know how to handle wildfire, as DISCOVER noted last month. But lava is a different deal. Nyamulagira, a volcano in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, began to erupt over the weekend and threatened not only the people nearby, but also the endangered primates that live in the area. The southerly lava flow appears to have spared most human settlements and the mountain gorillas of Virunga National Park, but the native chimps haven’t been so lucky.

The 40 eastern chimpanzees that live on Nyamulagira itself could still be at risk if they are surrounded by lava, and as the plants they rely on for food become coated by abrasive volcanic ash. Park officials hope animals in the lava’s path will simply move away from it [New Scientist]. United Nations peacekeepers, who are in the Congo to protect civilians from the seemingly unending war there, have offered the country’s leaders the use of UN planes and helicopters to monitor the situation.

Innocent Mburanumwe, a warden of the nature reserve, didn’t even recognize the disaster at first. “I thought there was fighting again near our park station,” he said, referring to the conflicts which have wracked eastern DR Congo. “Then I saw the mountain was on fire with sparks flying” [BBC News]. Due in large part to that Congolese warfare, the chimp population was already in decline before this eruption. The so-called “Tonga group” of chimps most directly affected by the eruption is estimated to have been reduced to as few as 40 animals prior to the latest threat [The Independent]. No official count is available, though, because it’s simply too dangerous for conservationists to work in the area.

Virunga National Park is Africa’s oldest, and its mountain gorillas account for 200 of the 720 remaining in the world. But this has always been a precarious area. Nyamulagira tends to erupt every three or four years; its last explosion came in 2006.

In happier volcano news, the lingering threat to the Philippines seems to be waning. For weeks Mt. Mayon threatened to erupt, sending many people scrambling to get away. But the government says that volcanic earthquakes have diminished in number, and officials reduced the alert level for Mayon. Still, the volcano may yet emit many tons of sulfur dioxide as it degases.

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Image: iStockphoto

It’s a classic case of bolting the barn door after the horses are gone. Politicians are angry that the “crotch bomber” (who tried to blow up an airplane of Christmas day) got through airport security with his explosives undetected, and have demanded that full-body scanners be placed in all airports. So far, 19 U.S. airports are using the scanners, and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) hopes to put hundreds more in airports across the country.

Proponents of this technology argue that it’s worth sacrificing privacy (and modesty) for safety. But in their rush to do something policymakers be ignoring five big problems with rolling out this technology:

1. Manufacturers aren’t willing to fill orders. According to a spokesperson for Smiths Detection, a manufacturer of millimeter-wave body scanners, the scanner technology has not yet been certified as fit for purpose by national governments – and manufacturers will not invest in mass production until it has [New Scientist]. Until the TSA and the European Union certify the technology, don’t expect manufactures to rush into production, seeing as how the scanners cost around $125,000 each.

2. They won’t actually catch that many threats. According to a spokesperson for QinetiQ, another body scanner manufacturer, airport body scanners would be “unlikely” to detect many of the explosive devices used by terrorist groups [BBC News]. QinetiQ said the technology probably wouldn’t have detected the Christmas day underwear bomb. Neither would the scanners have caught the explosives from the 2006 airliner liquid bomb plot, nor the explosives used in the 2005 London Tube train bombing. The body scanners aren’t very useful for detecting liquids and plastics and can only help spotlight irregularities under a person’s clothes, said the spokesperson. Singling out every irregularity for further screening will place a heavy burden on airport security (read: bring a pillow with you to the airport).

3. The scanners may violate child pornography laws. A trial run of the scanners in Britain was only allowed to proceed after children under 18 were exempt from screening. The decision followed a warning from Terri Dowty, of Action for Rights of Children, that the scanners could breach the Protection of Children Act 1978, under which it is illegal to create an indecent image or a “pseudo-image” of a child [Guardian]. It’s not clear if children would continue to be exempt from screening should the scanners become widely used, or where the United States stands on screening children. (And then there’s other types of pornography to worry about–imagine the media frenzy that would ensue should a celebrity body scan make its way to the tabloids. The images are not supposed to be stored after their creation, but many critics say the security personnel analyzing the images are poorly monitored to ensure the scans are disposed properly.)

4. Other countries won’t use them. A year ago, Germany said “nein” to the idea of using full body scanners in its airports, saying the technology is little more than security theater. There is some indication that the German government has recently softened its stance, but its new position has a lot of “ifs.” German Interior Minister Thomas de Mazière said he is ready to introduce full body scanners if they are safe and “fully guarantee” the privacy rights of passengers. Wolfgang Bosbach, Bundestag interior committee chief, told Germany’s Tagesspiegel: “If this technology [full body scanners] has demonstrated its usefulness in practice, i.e. it works reliably and is quick, we should use it” [Christian Science Monitor]. See reasons 2 and 3 above.

5. Full body scanners can’t see inside your body. Generally, the machines can’t find items stashed in a body cavity. So the scanners wouldn’t stop at least one common smuggling method used by drug traffickers [New York Daily News]. It’s not hard to imagine terrorists following in drug smugglers’ footsteps–in fact, one already has. In September, an Al Qaeda suicide bomber hid explosives in his rectum in an attempt to kill a Saudi Prince (but because the bomber’s flesh absorbed most of the blast, he died and the prince survived).

The bottom line? Playing catch-up with evildoers probably won’t do much good, which is essentially what the TSA is doing with its embrace of full body scanning technology–along with its current rules about liquids and removing one’s shoes, for that matter.

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Image: TSA