You may have heard the recent news that an expert panel of pediatricians reviewed the literature on gastrointestinal disorders and autism, and found no link between them. A key phrase in their findings was

The existence of a gastrointestinal disturbance specific to persons with ASDs (eg, "autistic enterocolitis") has not been established.

They also found that there was no evidence that special diets help autistic kids. Mind you, this was a panel of 28 experts, scientists who have devoted their careers and lives to investigating autism.

So if you were a reporter at ABC News, who would you turn to to get an opinion on this? If you said Jenny McCarthy, then give yourself a gold star, because that’s just what ABC News did. Go and watch that interview (have some antacid ready). In it, she says that scientists need to take anecdotes seriously, a statement so awful it’s hard to know where to start with it.

First of all, scientists did take the anecdotes seriously. That’s why they investigated any possible links between GI disorders, diets, and autism. What they found was that there is no link.

Second, McCarthy confuses anecdotes with data. As I have said before, anecdotes are where you start an investigation, not where you finish one. That’s the difference between science (aka reality) and nonsense. You can convince yourself of all manners of silliness through personal experience. I decide to whistle before drinking my coffee one morning, and I find a $20 bill in the street. So does that mean if I whistle every morning before my java I will find money? No, of course not. But that’s precisely the type of thinking McCarthy is promoting.

Getting back to ABC News, they also posted a story that tries to throw all sorts of doubt on the results of the report by the pediatric experts. I suppose they’re trying to find balance and all that in this issue, but again, as I have said before, sometimes stories don’t have two sides. There is reality, and there’s fantasy.

Should they post a rebuttal by an astrologer every time we find a new extrasolar planet? How about getting a creationist’s opinion on a new malaria vaccine?

Sadly, Jenny McCarthy is news because she’s the voice of a group of people who listen to her, but that’s at least in part due to the fact that the news organizations treat her seriously. It’s a self-fulfilling news cycle, and ABC News just gave it another nice little boost.

Shame on you, ABC News. Shame.

Happily, not every news outlet is so gullible. USA Today just posted a great article about the dangers of not vaccinating your kids, and they don’t pull any punches. Because people like Jenny McCarthy muddy the waters and add so much noise to the real science, people are turning away from real medicine and embracing "alternative" methods that we know don’t work.

The result it not just that kids who need help aren’t getting it (the so-called "what’s the harm?" fallacy). The result is that kids are getting sick, and some of them are dying. When you reject reality and turn to nonsense, it has real effects. And it’s not just affecting your kids, it affects all kids.

Talk to your physician about vaccines, autism, and diets. Read the real work being done.

Tip o’ the syringe to Gary Schwitzer.

When it comes to peculiar penises, there’s no shortage in the animal kingdom. Just last month DISCOVER blogger Carl Zimmer documented new research into why many male ducks have such an extravagant spiral-shaped phallus. This week, in a paper (in press) in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the study of goofy genitalia follows fruit flies.

The male fruit fly has a penis that resembles a medieval weapon, dotted with hooks and spines. Are those barbs there to remove rival sperm, or pierce the female’s genital tract to allow sperm a shortcut, or something else? There was one way to find out: lasers.

Scientists used lasers to shave the extra equipment off male fruit flies’ penises and set them free to try to mate. And, as it turned out, the hooks and spines simply help a male hang onto a female for the whole 10 minutes it take them to mate; without them, he didn’t do so well. From “Not Exactly Rocket Science”:

They found that a partial shave did nothing, but the full treatment significantly reduced the odds of the males mating with females. With the spines, they were virtually guaranteed to mate if a female was around; without them, their chances fell to around 20%. It wasn’t for lack of trying either – all of the shorn males tried to woo a female and almost all tried to mate. They simply failed. They did all the right things – mounting, placing their genitals in the right place – but it was for nought. And if the spineless males were placed in direct competition with a normal one over a female, they almost always lost.

Related Content:
Discoblog: The Strange, Violent Sex Lives of Fruit Flies & Beeltes
80beats: Meet the Sexually Irresistible Fruit Fly
The Loom: Kinkiness Beyond Kinky

Image: Wikimedia Commons / André Karwath

A few weeks ago the American Museum of Natural History posted a video showing a voyage from the surface of the Earth to the last-scattering surface (at the “edge” of the Universe). What makes the video unique is that it is based on real data, not an artist’s conception. The thin ellipses represent actual satellites orbiting the Earth; the dots represent the location of actual quasars billions of lightyears away. (No, the Universe is not composed of pie slices of galaxies, as in the movie. They used data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which is one of our most comprehensive views of the Universe, but which has only surveyed certain areas of the sky.) Perhaps most amazingly, the video has gone viral–with over 1.9 million views and thousands of comments to date.

I was lucky enough to see an (interactive) preview of this video while I was in New York attending the Amaldi meeting. It is a modern retelling of the Powers of Ten video by Charles and Ray Eames (who, as it happens, also designed fabulous furniture; I’ve been lusting after an Eames recliner for years [how many pieces of furniture have their own wikipedia entry?]). The videos help us develop a healthy perspective, which is a good way to start off the New Year. It is humbling, after all, to realize how insignificant we really are. Yes, we have the gall to change our planet, and threaten all living beings on its fragile surface. But, still, in the grand scheme of things, we’re a grain of sand in a vast and beautiful ocean. We’re totally irrelevant. I find this to be oddly reassuring and calming.

Back in December 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope created the now-famous “deep field” image, which took more than 300 exposures over the course of 10 days to peer deep into the history of the universe and spot more than 1,500 galaxies. A decade and a half later—after failures, upgrades, and the “ultra deep field“—Hubble marches on. Yesterday at the American Astronomical Society meeting, astronomers announced they’d used the telescope to look deeper into the past than ever before.

The new image captures 7,500 galaxies of all kinds and shapes. The oldest galaxies in the image glow an intense blue, indicating high concentrations of the lighter elements hydrogen and helium. Hydrogen fusion inside active stars creates heavier elements such as iron and nickel, which get spread across the universe when massive stars explode. These elements cause modern galaxies to glow in a rainbow of colors, so the extreme blueness of the newfound galaxies suggests that they formed before very many massive stars had lived and died [National Geographic News].

The ancient galaxies are also tiny by galactic standards, containing just one percent of the mass of our own Milky Way galaxy. But they could play an important role in showing astronomers how galaxies formed as the universe aged. These galaxies started forming just 500 million years after the big bang, which is thought to have occurred around 13.7 billion years ago. That pushes back the known start of galaxy formation by about 1.5 billion years [National Geographic News].

Hubble captured this newest image with its Wide Field Camera 3, a new piece of equipment that the last space shuttle flight to upgrade the telescope installed last year. But unanswered questions remain. The big mystery is the era when ultraviolet light from the youngest stars electrically charged early clouds of interstellar gas, triggering magnetic effects that played a role in later galaxy formation, says astrophysicist Mario Livio…. This “re-ionization” era probably played out just before or during the time when the lives of the early galaxies turned up in the new Hubble images [USA Today]. Hubble’s would-be successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, could help sort out this era’s history when it launches in 2014.

Related Content:
80beats: Prepare to Be Amazed: First Pics from the Repaired Hubble Are Stunning
80beats: Space Shuttle Grabs Hubble, and Astronauts Begin Repairs
80beats: A Hot Piece of Hardware: NASA’s New Orbiter Will Map the Entire Sky in Infrared
Cosmic Variance: Well, That Was Fast, on the upgraded Hubble’s initial data
Bad Astronomy: Hubble’s Back, and Spying on Wailing Baby Stars

Image: NASA

I’ve seen this several times, and it still makes me laugh.

Mrs. BA got me a Flip vidcam for Christmas, and I’ve been following around my cat for days. She doesn’t do anything interesting until I have my back turned. Sigh.

Anyway, you may enjoy this strange video of a cat being either happy or ticked. Maybe it’s Schrödinger’s cat, and it’s both.

Things have been so nuts for me over the past few days, I haven’t even been able to blog my Washington Post Outlook piece from Sunday about the need for better science communication in the wake of the devastating blow dealt by the ClimateGate scandal. The piece has been drawing tons of supportive private emails, as well as lots of online critiques and reactions, and fully 800 plus comments on the Post’s website, many of them from climate deniers.

Anyway, the article starts like this:

The battle over the science of global warming has long been a street fight between mainstream researchers and skeptics. But never have the scientists received such a deep wound as when, in late November, a large trove of e-mails and documents stolen from the Climatic Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia were released onto the Web.

In the ensuing “Climategate” scandal, scientists were accused of withholding information, suppressing dissent, manipulating data and more. But while the controversy has receded, it may have done lasting damage to science’s reputation: Last month, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 40 percent of Americans distrust what scientists say about the environment, a considerable increase from April 2007. Meanwhile, public belief in the science of global warming is in decline.

The central lesson of Climategate is not that climate science is corrupt. The leaked e-mails do nothing to disprove the scientific consensus on global warming. Instead, the controversy highlights that in a world of blogs, cable news and talk radio, scientists are poorly equipped to communicate their knowledge and, especially, to respond when science comes under attack.

A few scientists answered the Climategate charges almost instantly. Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, whose e-mails were among those made public, made a number of television and radio appearances. A blog to which Mann contributes, RealClimate.org, also launched a quick response showing that the e-mails had been taken out of context. But they were largely alone. “I haven’t had all that many other scientists helping in that effort,” Mann told me recently.

This isn’t a new problem….

Read here, there’s much more….on science communication strategies, how to fight the evolution war, and so forth. In essence, the piece builds on some of the central arguments of Unscientific America, but strained through the new example of ClimateGate, which is surely the number one reason yet that scientists have got to mobilize in the way that we recommended in the book. Hope you enjoy…

Of all the concepts brought to us by science fiction, matter transportation is one of the more interesting.  It’s right up there with warp drive and time travel.  How convenient would it be to be able to transport matter over distances?  Leaving out the transportation of living biological matter, just think of the energy resources we could conserve and the waste we could avoid if only we could “beam” matter we now move around by boat, plane, truck or train.  Still, you know that if there were matter transporters operating anywhere, someone is going to crawl into one and try to beam himself coast-to-coast.  Many someones.  What are their chances for survival?

USS Enterprise (NCC-1701) All rights reserved

In the Star Trek universe (of which I’ve been a fan since 1966), the process of matter transportation is described as the process by which a computer scans a person (storing all the information about the person within seconds), disrupts all the atoms within the body, turns the atoms into energy, shoots the energy to a remote location, converts the energy back into atoms, then reassembles the person exactly as they were in the remote location.

I have a few problems with that.

Leaving out the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle altogether (after all, they DO have a Heisenberg Compensator), the information from just one adult would take up billions of terabytes worth of computer storage.  One terabyte is 1000 gigabytes, as you know.  So, that much disc space would fill about 500 million Empire State Buildings.  Okay, suppose we solve that with DNA computers (and we will, eventually, you know).  The energy involved in turning  just one adult into pure energy is about 41 times the energy released by the largest nuclear device ever detonated on this planet (that would be the Tsar Bomba, 50 Megatons TNT… the bomb that decimated Hiroshima was about 15 kilotons TNT).  Okay, suppose we solve that little issue using the energy from matter/anti-matter conversion, and assume at the same time that we figure out how to contain such a reaction outside of unsurvivable pressures of gravity (I know, that’s a whopping assumption there), is it really “you” that’s reassembled, or a quantum replica?

Tsar Bomba fireball  Historical photograph, all rights reserved

And, by the way, wouldn’t a transporter like that be an immortality machine once your information became part of computer record?  The computer could take any matter and reassemble it back into your 26 year old self.  How would we ever be completely free of the Hitlers of the future?  And why not use transporters as eugenics machines?  Just edit out what you don’t like, and insert what you do.  Ta da.  Your own perfect little world, just for you.

And you know, you KNOW, some doofus is going to clone himself using a transporter.  So, if the replica is “you”, and YOU are “you”, which “you” is you?  Can’t you just imagine the ethical problems waiting to attack our descendants?

Hopefully, by the time our descendants gain the knowledge necessary to transport themselves around, they will also gain the wisdom to use it wisely.

And just think, how great was a show from 1966 that we still love it and pick it apart forty-four years later?  My deepest appreciation to all those involved in the creation, and portrayal, of Star Trek: The Original Series.

Waltzing black holes, star-destroying black holes; it’s a black hole bonanza as the American Astronomical Society meets this week in Washington DC.

First, the orbiting pairs: Just about every galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its heart that is millions if not billions the size of our sun. Logic would suggest that when two galaxies merge, astronomers would see the two great black holes orbiting each other, but so far they’ve had tough luck, astronomer Julie Comerford says. “We expect the universe to be littered with these waltzing black holes,” Comerford said. “But until recently, only a few had ever been found.” Those missing black hole pairs posed problems for theories of how galaxies merge and grow [Wired.com].

Comerford, however, announced at the meeting that her team has found 33 new pairs of black holes in galactic centers. When the black hole dances toward Earth, its light is blueshifted — meaning it has a shorter wavelength. The team identified waltzing pairs by looking for instances when one black hole was blueshifted and the other redshifted [Wired.com]. Those black holes orbit each other at 200 km per second, but they’re not in a close embrace—several thousand light years separate each pair.

Next, the star destroyers: Astronomers see plenty of supermassive black holes, whether paired or not. And they see lots of black holes close to our sun in mass, like the kind a single star’s supernovae creates. But what about the black holes in between? Black holes measuring in the range of hundreds to thousands of solar masses have only existed in theory up till now and observational evidence of these “medium-sized” singularities has been very hard to come by [Discovery News].

The Chandra X-Ray Observatory, however, just discovered one of these intermediate black holes. Not only did Chandra catch a black hole in the missing size hanging around a globular cluster, it also caught the black hole in the process of ripping apart a star. In this case, that star was probably a white dwarf: The observations suggest oxygen is in abundance, but there is a deficiency in hydrogen, suggesting that the material was being stripped from an old, white dwarf star. (The lack of hydrogen shows that the stellar object has burnt up its fuel) [Discovery News].

For more on the Chandra discovery, check out Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy post. And for more about how black holes could have shaped the early universe, read the DISCOVER story “Are Black Holes the Architects of the Universe?”

Related Content:
80beats: Far-Off Quasar Could Be the Spark That Ignites a Galaxy
80beats: Researchers Spot an Ancient Starburst from the Universe’s Dark Ages
Bad Astronomy: Monster Black Hole Devours Dead Star
DISCOVER: Are Black Holes the Architects of the Universe?

Image: NASA / Chandra

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has taken detailed pictures of what scientists are saying is evidence that large lakes of liquid water sat on the planet’s surface relatively recently–which is to say, about 3 billion years ago.

MRO imaged several deep depressions that scientists previously attributed to the sublimation of underground ice 4 billion years ago. However, the new images show that the depressions are connected by long channels, and researchers say these channels could only be formed by running water, and not by ice turning directly into gas. The scientists’ ageing of the region, which on bodies like Mars is done by counting craters, suggests the features formed during the so-called Hesperian Epoch on the Red Planet [BBC News]. Essentially, this means that there was water on Mars a billion years more recently than previously thought. The findings were published in the journal Geology.

The researchers aren’t quite sure how the lakes, which are up to 12 miles long, were filled with water. Scientists had believed that the planet was a frozen wasteland during the Hesperian Epoch, but researchers now suggest that it may have had short-lived warm phases. Mars could have been warmed by volcanic activity, meteorite impacts or even orbital shifts. The result would be a temporary increase in planetary temperature as the gases created in those events thickened the Martian atmosphere [SPACE.com]. Regardless of how it happened, scientists and space nerds are giddy about the possibility that these lakes could have once harbored life.

A few months ago, NASA announced their finding of a huge ice sheet under the Martian surface, and where there’s water, there could have once been life. According to researcher Sanjeev Gupta, “potentially life could have survived in these lakes, we would be talking about microbial life…. But now we have shown that there was standing water, this is another avenue to explore” [Telegraph]. The researchers are widening their search to include spots along Mars’ equator to determine how large an area the lakes covered.

Related Content:
80beats: NASA Finds Big Stash of Water on Mars
80beats: Spirit Rover’s 6th Anniversary on Mars Is Likely Its Last
80beats: New Map Suggests Huge Ocean Once Dominated Mars’ Northern Hemisphere

Image: NASA/JPL/Imperial College of London

I’m at the annual winter American Astronomical Society meeting, and just left an interesting address by the new NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden. He’s a former astronaut (he was on the initial Hubble Shuttle mission back in 1990) and Marine corps pilot, but now he’s the top guy at NASA.

It’s a tradition for the NASA head to speak at the AAS meetings. I’ve heard talks from ex-Admins Dan Goldin, Sean O’Keefe, and Mike Griffin, and this one was very different. NASA is at a very tumultuous point in its history, with the Shuttle winding down, the future of the Constellation rocket program uncertain and under fire, and even the direction of the agency itself unclear. Because of this, and because President Obama has not made a public policy statement about these issues yet, Bolden could not give a nuts-and-bolts speech, which is understandable. For those of you who weren’t following my live comments on Twitter during the talk, here are some of the highlights.

He was very clear that we all need to do what we can to inspire kids about science. In a remarkable turn, he literally choked up on stage while talking about putting together a telescope with his granddaughter, and saying we need to get more kids to look through eyepieces. "Look at this!" he said, "This is what we do!" That resonates with me, of course; I’ve made that exact comment on this blog dozens of times.

He also said that manned space flight would not be paid off the back of science. This generated applause from the audience. However, I’ve heard that before, just a few years ago from Mike Griffin… and then saw science missions’ funding cut back to pay for the lunar exploration program. So while I agree with Bolden’s sentiment, I don’t know if he can pull that particular feat off. I sure hope he can.

When asked about the issues with delays in the Shuttle replacement, he stated that "This President won’t be the one who presides over the demise of the manned space program." (quoting from my memory of what he said). He also stated how strongly Obama supports science; something we already know but it’s damn good to hear it again.

He also said, "If you had told me 20 years ago that we wouldn’t be back on the Moon by now, I’d have said you were smoking dope." That was great to hear! I know a lot of us outside of NASA have been saying that for years, but it was refreshing and wonderful to hear the head of NASA saying it, and saying it so frankly. He even repeated the statement to make sure we got it. Very cool indeed.

Overall, Bolden reinforced how committed NASA is to science — something that needs to be said when addressing 1000+ astronomers, who traditionally and by large majority tend to support unmanned robotic exploration over the much more expensive and usually less-scientifically oriented manned flight. He stressed that we all need to be teachers, and we all need to be the inspiration for the next generation. I agree in general, and certainly in specifics about inspiration.

So this first date with the NASA chief went as a lot of first dates go. Hopeful, with some reservations on promises made based on the delivery of further evidence, but… hopeful.

[During the talk I sat next to my dear friend and women-full-of-awesome Pamela Gay, who has posted her thoughts on this as well.]

For evolution to take place, you need DNA or RNA to change through mutation, providing the variations for natural selection to select. Right? Well, it may be more complicated than that. A new study suggests an exception: prions, the infectious protein bits that can cause degenerative brain diseases like mad cow disease. In a paper in Science, researchers document these lifeless structures evolving, despite the fact that they lack any DNA or RNA.

Study leader Charles Weissmann and his team transferred prions from brain cells to other kinds of cells and watched as certain members of the prion population adapted to the new environment and took over, out-competing their brethren. When he transferred the prions back to brain cells, the ones most adapted to brain living got the upper hand and increased in number as they out-competed the prions that had adapted to other cells. Weissmann argues that this shows Darwinian evolution can go even further than we thought: “In viruses, mutation is linked to changes in nucleic acid sequence that leads to resistance. Now, this adaptability has moved one level down- to prions and protein folding – and it’s clear that you do not need nucleic acid (DNA or RNA) for the process of evolution” [BBC News].

In diseases like mad cow and the human version of it, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, proteins in the brain go awry. Mammals produce the normal protein cousins of infectious prions as part of normal cell development, but during infection, misfolded or warped proteins can convert normal host prion protein into its own toxic, misfolded form. When this happens enough times, massive tissue and cell damage can occur [Popular Science].

This pattern of warping proteins could be the key to how this DNA-less evolution occurs, the researchers propose. When a prion converts a normal protein, it typically forces it into the same structure as itself, but at a low probability, other variant structures result. The population of these variants can then expand or contract based on selective pressures [Ars Technica]. This appears to happen more quickly when the prions are transferred to a new host, as happened in previous research when scientists moved prions from sheep to mice—the more virulent variants got a chance to take hold.

Given the problems today with bacteria and viruses evolving drug resistance, the idea of evolving prions seems like more bad news. But, taking a note from DISCOVER blogger Carl Zimmer’s “Evolving Viruses to Death,” perhaps doctors could use prions’ strength against them: Since infectious prions need their normal cousins to feed their own replication and evolution, therapies that limit the supply of normal prion proteins could essentially starve the degenerative cycle that makes those illnesses so effective at killing their hosts [Popular Science].

Related Content:
80beats: Ripped From the Journals, including a Nature study fingering prions from spreading chronic wasting disease in deer.
The Loom: Return of Mad Cow Memories
DISCOVER: When Bad Prions Go Good
DISCOVER: Prionlike Protein Help Form Memories
DISCOVER: Picturing Prions

Image: Eye of Science / Science Photo Library

The elite online dating club BeautifulPeople.com (yes, this is a real Web site), trimmed 5,000 members from its service because they appear to have indulged in too much Christmas ham.

Feast your eyes on this excerpt from the company’s statement, via CNN:

“As a business, we mourn the loss of any member, but the fact remains that our members demand the high standard of beauty be upheld,” said Robert Hintze, founder of BeautifulPeople.com. “Letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model and the very concept for which BeautifulPeople.com was founded.”

Publicity stunt? Probably. Shocking? Hardly. When vain folks sign up for a service so they can be rated by a group of narcissistic pretty people this is bound to happen.

If you’re one of the expelled 5,000, don’t let this get you down. The company says you’re welcome to reapply—after the love handles are gone, of course.

Related Content:
Discoblog: New Theory: Plastic Can Make You Fat?
Discoblog: Fighting Child Obesity, One Bake Sale at a Time
Discoblog: Researchers Discover How Ice Cream Controls Your Brain

Image: Beautifulpeople.com

I am heartbroken to learn the loss of a member of the physics community in the recent avalanche in Switzerland. I have few details, but it appears that Thomas Binoth was killed in the avalanche, and that at least two other physicists and astrophysicists from the party have been hospitalized. Many others were lost, including some of the rescuers, who were swept up in a second avalanche.

Condolences to all who have been affected by this tragedy.

By now a lot of people have seen James Cameron’s Avatar, and a much larger number have formed an opinion about it. Anticipation had been building for months, as people were excited by the prospect that ultra-realistic computer animation would combine with dazzling 3D technology to produce a different kind of movie than anyone had ever seen.

It’s generally not a good sign when the buzz is about the technology behind a movie rather than the story within it, and in the case of Avatar the worries are justified. There’s no question that the moviemaking is truly impressive; not only is it a great technological achievement, but Cameron is an accomplished storyteller. The film is long but never ponderous, the set pieces are thrilling, and one’s heartstrings are tugged at all the right places. As a bonus, the acting is fantastic — Sigourney Weaver’s gruff scientist in particular is a great character.

Alas, in a world that one would like to see fleshed out in shades of gray, Cameron’s contrast knob is stuck resolutely at eleven. (Spoilers henceforth.) Humans have destroyed their own planet, and are now descending on Pandora to set about destroying that. The bad guys are represented by a craven businessman and a scarred ex-Marine. War and capitalism are bad! We get it.

But cartoonish villains don’t necessarily spell doom for a movie, especially one meant to be an elaborate thrill ride. I didn’t leave Raiders of the Lost Ark wishing that the Nazis had been more fleshed-out, and nobody gives thanks that the Star Wars prequels let us in on Darth Vader’s backstory. The problem arises when such banal evil is trotted out in service of A MESSAGE. And if there’s one thing Avatar has, it’s a message — a particularly trite one, which is deeply misguided, but a message nonetheless.

The Na’vi, Pandora’s native race, are presented very bluntly as traditional noble savages. They may be nine feet tall and blue, and find themselves trapped in a series of Yes album covers, but that just provides a convenient excuse to mix and match features of Native Americans and African tribes as the director sees fit. The Na’vi are portrayed as saintly tree-huggers who feel bad when jungle beasts are killed unnecessarily; at any moment you expected to hear “This animal is called the bufa’lo. We use every part of it.”

To drive things home, most of the humans are portrayed by white actors, while most of the actors behind the motion-captured Na’vi are people of color. And to drive things home even more (things worth driving home can never be driven too much, right?), the Na’vi have a literal connection with the natural world around them. Which might be a cool idea worth exploring, if it weren’t deployed as a gimmick to emphasize the pastoral purity of the pre-technological natives. (I can’t wait for Oscar night: “We would like to express our gratitude for all these Academy Awards for technical achievement given to our movie about how true virtue is to be found in wearing loincloths and chanting around trees.”)

And even that wouldn’t be so bad, if the noble savages weren’t portrayed as good-hearted but ineffectual. Eventually they manage to fight off the invading Earthlings, who despite mastering interstellar travel and consciousness-transferal are still stuck using machine guns and tiny rockets when hostilities break out. But they’re only able to do so because the kind-hearted white warrior rides to their rescue. Sam Worthington’s character, the protagonist with whom we are supposed to identify, spends three months as a Na’vi and turns out to be better at it than any of the primitive sods who were actually born that way. Only he is able to tame the legendary beast, bring far-flung tribes together to work for a common cause, and have the wit to appeal to the ecosystem-network for a bit of help.

It’s an old trope, fueled by liberal guilt. “Sure,” the elaborate narrative rationalization goes, “people like me have screwed over people like you for generations. But I’m pretty sure that, had I been around at the time, I would have been one of the shining exceptions who bravely turned against my compatriots to side with the honorable native folk. Who, frankly, could have used my help.” It’s the victors who tell the stories and make the movies.

How one reacts to Avatar depends strongly on how bothered one is by this kind of stereotypically condescending storyline. As a thrilling popcorn movie, it absolutely works; the detailed world Cameron created is breathtaking; and the technological feat is singularly impressive. But when these achievements are in the service of a message that is so ham-handed and ultimately off-putting, I find it hard to enjoy. If the storytelling had been handled with a little more self-awareness and toleration for ambiguity — by the folks at Pixar, for example — it might really have been an historically good movie.

Orbiting our Milky Way galaxy like two bickering siblings are the Magellanic Clouds, galaxies in their own right, though far smaller than ours. The smaller of the two — named, shockingly, the Small Magellanic Cloud — is also the farther of the two, about 200,000 light years to the Larger cloud’s 180,000 or so. The SMC is loaded with gas and dust, and is actively churning out stars.

The Spitzer Space Telescope, which observes infrared light from astronomical sources, took this incredibly beautiful image of the SMC:

[Click to embiggen, including getting access to a huge 7800 x 7000 40Mb version.]

Remember, this is not a visible light image! In the picture, blue represents light at a wavelength of 3.6 microns, about 5 times longer than what the human eye can see. Green is 8 microns, and red 24. So what you see here as blue is really what we would think of as red stars if we saw them with our eyes. Green shows light from big organic molecules called PAHs, for polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Red is light from stars deeply embedded in dust, and is where stars are busily being born.

All together, this image shows starbirth on a vast scale, thousands of light years across. And this may be a new phenomenon for the SMC: measurements of the elements in the stars there show that they have far fewer heavy elements (like oxygen, iron, and so on) than stars in the Milky Way, as little as 1/5th as abundant. Since these elements are created inside of stars over time, this indicates that stars in the SMC are on the whole younger than in the Milky Way.

Even though the two Clouds are the closest galaxies we can see — and you can spot them easily with the unaided eye in the southern hemisphere — there’s still a lot we don’t know about them. In fact, we’re not even sure if they are orbiting the Milky Way, or just passing by! Even over decades, measuring their actual motion across the sky is very difficult; their mind-numbing distance of quintillions of kilometers away shrinks any real motion into apparently microscopic amounts. It may be quite some time before this question is finally resolved.

Another image from Spitzer also shows a tail of gas streaming away from the SMC, material ripped out of the body of the galaxy itself by the gravity of the Milky Way. It’s possible that interactions with the Milky Way and the other Magellanic Cloud are what triggered the star formation in the SMC, too.

It’s rather convenient to have such a nice laboratory for dwarf galaxies and starbirth so close to us. That makes it easier to study, giving us access to really high resolution images like this one. And the bonus? They’re pretty, too.

NASA’s new eye in the sky has spotted the first handful of what it hopes will be a flood of new exoplanets. The Kepler telescope, launched last year with the express purpose of planet-hunting, has found its first five new worlds, with the results forthcoming in the journal Science this week. Just don’t get any ideas about living on any of them.

“One of the planets is amazingly light – like Styrofoam,” said William J. Borucki, the astronomer from NASA’s Ames Research Center…. “And all five simply glow,” he said, “they’re like looking into a blast furnace – but that’s simply no place to look for life” [San Francisco Chronicle]. The scalding-hot planets measure in excess of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hotter than molten lava. These planets all orbit their stars in a hurry, taking between three and five days to make a circuit. Ground measurements confirmed Kepler’s findings.

Four of the five exoplanets—including Styrofoam world—are mysteriously light; they’re far less dense than Jupiter despite being 40 percent larger, as you can see in the chart. “This is accumulating evidence that low density is a common feature” among exoplanets, says planetary physicist David Stevenson of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, who was not involved in the research. The problem is that no one has come up with a mechanism that could puff up an exoplanet that way [ScienceNOW Daily News].

Kepler’s first foray found more than just new planets. It also measured the light from 43,000 stars like our sun in its field of view and found two-thirds of them to be about as stable as the sun. That seemingly obscure observation suggests that the majority of stars potentially are as hospitable to life as Earth’s sun, assuming there was an Earth-like planet orbiting at the right distance from the star [Christian Science Monitor].

Related Content:
80beats: New Super-Earth: Hot, Watery, and Nearby
80beats: Meet the New Neighbors: Earth-Like Worlds Orbiting Nearby Stars
80beats: Don’t Pack Your Bags Yet—New Planet-Finder Hobbled By Electronic Glitch
80beats: Kepler Sends Postcards Home: It’s Beautiful Out Here
DISCOVER: How Long Until We Find a Second Earth?
Bad Astronomy: Kepler Works!

Image: NASA

Well, I’ve spent quite a bit of time away from the blog recently, feeling rather overwhelmed as a number of responsibilities accumulated over the last hectic year finally caught up with me. But, for now at least, things seem to be in check and I’m hoping to get a little more writing done.

The last few months of the year were quite a ride. For example,

• I started teaching again (after a sabbatical at Cornell, and then a one semester leave to help me settle in at Penn), and very much enjoyed introducing the complexities (no pun intended) of contour integration, asymptotic methods, Sturm-Liouville theory, etc. to a whole new batch of beginning graduate students at a whole new institution.
• The first (albeit limited) renovations were completed as part of the Center for Particle Cosmology, and helping oversee these, as well as planning for much larger future renovations took up a huge part of the Fall semester. In the end though, this should be well worth it, with a new and highly-functional space for us to work and collaborate in.
• I stared doing significant service again; organizing departmental colloquia and sitting on our graduate admissions committee. Plus some new editorial work
• I went to Australia, to speak at the COSPA-09 meeting in Melbourne (if you look carefully you’ll see both Sean and me in the group picture on the main page.) This was my third visit to Melbourne, and once again I was struck by what a liveable and lovely city it is. The conference was great fun, and I saw a number of talks that gave me something to think about back in Philly.
• I finished some papers.
• We ran an intense and, I thought, successful workshop – New Horizons in Particle Cosmology – to inaugurate the Center for Particle Cosmology. This involved some of the biggest names in our field, and included a very well-attended public lecture by Paul Steinhardt. My colleague Justin Khoury deserves considerable praise for taking on most of the organizational work of the conference and lecture.

Right now I’m gearing up for next week’s beginning of my graduate General Relativity class, which is my absolute favorite subject to teach. I’m also preparing for quite a bit more travel this year, although not for a few weeks at least. But most importantly, of course, I’m hard at work on a number of projects that I hope will come to fruition in the pretty near future.

So this post is just intended to get back into the swing of things. I’ll leave you with an interesting new link. NPR is entering the science blogging field with a good-looking new blog featuring, among others, science writer and friend-of-the-blog, K.C. Cole, and former guest contributor, physicist Marcelo Gleiser. Their blog is called 13.7 (for reasons you might try guessing before checking on) and I hope you’ll check them out – we wish them all the best.

I just wanted to post this graph, which I found while researching vaccinations.

Antivaxxers: bite me^*. We win.

This morning I’m back in the District to address the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) about ways to improve the communication of science. With members representing over 90 organizations including NOAA, NASA, and USGS, they work to collect, interpret, and develop applications for Earth observation information. It’s my first talk of 2010 and I’m very much looking forward to spending the day with such a neat interdisciplinary group.

This past Sunday was the sixth anniversary of the NASA rover Spirit’s landing on Mars and the beginning of its adventures on the red planet. However, this anniversary is shaping up to be its last. As we’ve previously covered here at DISCOVER, Spirit has gotten itself into a jam.

A sand trap and balky wheels are challenges to Spirit’s mobility that could prevent NASA’s rover team from using a key survival strategy for the rover. The team may not be able to position the robot’s solar panels to tilt toward the sun to collect power for heat to survive the severe Martian winter [NASA]. The rover has been stuck in the Martian sand for nine months with only four of its six wheels functioning. Now, NASA says the rover may run out of power and shut down by May.

NASA is close to throwing in the towel on its attempts to extract Spirit from its rut, so the sandpit known as “Troy” may be Spirit’s final resting place. To conserve power, the rescue operation may come to a halt this month. Unless Sprit can angle its solar arrays to capture the maximum possible sunlight, it faces the prospect of freezing to death when winter arrives in five months, since it won’t be able to power the internal heaters which protect its electronics. NASA explains that the current tilt is “nearly five degrees toward the south”, which is “unfavorable because the winter sun crosses low in the northern sky” [Register].

Whether or not Spirit can break free of the sand trap, the rover has already exceeded expectations with its research on Mars’ environment–it was initially scheduled to perform only a 90-day mission. In fact, until it kicks the bucket, Spirit can keep gathering data while bogged down in the sand. NASA scientists believe they can use the rover to gather data about the interior of Mars, Martian weather, and any interesting deposits near the rover’s wheels.

Related Content:
80beats: Future Looks Grim for Stuck Mars Rover
80beats: Mars Rover Will Try Daring Escape From Sand Trap of Doom
80beats: Will This Mars Rover Ever Rove Again? Spirit Get Stuck in the Sand
80beats: Mars Rover Spirit Shows Signs of Age, Including Senior Moments
DISCOVER: Mars Rover Delves Into Crater
DISCOVER: Those Mars Rovers Keep Going and Going…

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech