This fall, I gave a number of lectures about the evolution of swine flu. By the time I got to the end of the talk, I could tell that a lot of people in the audience were feeling a bit resigned, given the way evolution allows viruses like the flu to evade our best attacks. (Here’s the full video of my lecture at the University of British Columbia.)

To try to cheer up the crowd, I’d offer a note of hope–the notion that we could turn the evolution of viruses against them, by pushing them into mutation overdrive. (This slide gets across the basic idea–the flu virus is like a sports car. Going fast is cool. Going too fast–not so cool.)

In tomorrow’s New York Times, I lay out this intriguing idea, that goes by the profoundly cool name of lethal mutagenesis. Check it out.

I received a mysterious email recently, promoting what to me sounds like a great idea: a concerted effort in the UK to increase the public awareness that homeopathy is quackery, pure and simple. It’s called the 10:23 Campaign, and it’s being promoted by various skeptic groups in Britain. The website is a placeholder for now, but you can sign up there for updates.

Why do this? Well, as they say,

Homeopathy is an ancient, pre-scientific and absurd pseudoscience. Yet it persists today as an accepted complementary medicine, largely because people don’t know what it is.

The 10:23 Campaign aims to show the public what homeopathy is and explain how we know it doesn’t work. It will launch in early 2010.

Excellent. And why call it the 10:23 Campaign? Well, happily I have a mole who informs me of such things.

Remember the embarrassment that the Transportation Security Administration suffered last month, when a bout of lax editing allowed the TSA standard operating manual to leak across the Web? Last week, the TSA inflicted another public relations snafu upon itself. Agents subpoenaed two travel bloggers who published the organization’s temporary procedures in the wake of the attempted Christmas Day airline bombing, only to drop the subpoenas shortly thereafter.

The document, which the two bloggers published within minutes of each other Dec. 27, was sent by TSA to airlines and airports around the world and described temporary new requirements for screening passengers through Dec. 30, including conducting “pat-downs” of legs and torsos. The document, which was not classified, was posted by numerous bloggers. Information from it was also published on some airline websites [Wired.com]. Still, the TSA (which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS) decided to target the two bloggers, Chris Elliott and Steven Frischling, to make them reveal who leaked the information to them. And the strong-arm tactics the agency used quickly made it look draconian and repressive.

After both men published accounts (Elliott, Frischling) of the TSA threats on their blogs, media outlets picked up the story and the TSA dropped both subpoenas. Public embarrassment could have induced the TSA to leave the bloggers be, but the agency may have already had what it wanted by the time the story broke. DHS officials returned to Mr Frischling’s home on Wednesday morning and forced him to hand over his laptop computer. The TSA has since dropped both subpoenas, but it’s certainly possible that the agency was able to discern the leaker’s identity by sifting through the information on Mr Frischling’s computer [The Economist].

Perhaps the TSA simply wanted to find out who sends its info to members of the media, even though the information in this case wasn’t actually classified. In a statement Friday, the the agency wrote, “TSA takes any breach in security very seriously. In light of the posting of sensitive security information on the web, TSA sought to identify where the information came from. The investigation is nearing a successful conclusion and the subpoenas are no longer in effect” [CNN]. Frischling said the TSA also apologized to him, but only after taking the laptop and threatening to get him fired from his job writing a blog for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Wired.com reports. Frischling also says the TSA agents indicated that they could have him declared a security risk, which presumably meant he’d be flagged for additional screening at airports.

The TSA’s public stance, expecting privacy for information sent to thousands of people around the world (and posted on some airline Web sites), smacks of the same unfair finger-pointing that the U.S. Senate was guilty of when it lambasted the TSA in response to the leak of the standard operation manual in early December. At that time, the TSA lacked an official head because of a political fight in the Senate over nominee Erroll Southers, led by Senator Jim DeMint. The South Carolina Republican wants Mr. Southers to promise that he would oppose granting collective-bargaining rights to the TSA’s tens of thousands of employees [Wall Street Journal]. A month later, that fight still goes on, and the TSA remains without a Senate-approved leader.

Related Content:
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80beats: Are Digital Strip Searchers Coming Soon to Every Airport Near You?
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DISCOVER: A Wing and a Prayer: The U.S.’s Crumbling Air-Travel Infrastructure

Image: TSA

Relax, Indiana Jones. Snakes aren’t so scary… as long as you’re wearing a good pair of jeans.

According to research done by scientists in California, denim provides more than classic American fashion statement. While this may seem somewhat obvious, the researchers are happy to announce that covering your legs with jeans doesn’t just reduce the amount of venom that a snakebite can inject into your system—it reduces it by a lot. From Reuters:

Drs. Shelton S. Herbert and William K. Hayes used latex gloves filled with saline to simulate a human appendage, then exposed the gloves to bites from small and large southern Pacific rattlesnakes. Some of the latex “limbs” were covered in a layer of denim.

The researchers found that compared with the jeans-less gloves, those covered in denim absorbed about two-thirds less venom from the rattlesnake bites. Instead, a high proportion of the venom “spilled harmlessly” onto the denim, the researchers report in the Annals of Emergency Medicine.

Two things come to mind as a result of this study. One: Yes, scientists will study anything. And two: If you’re planning to hike in rattlesnake country, forget about working on your leg tan and just throw on those old Levi’s.

Come to think of it, perhaps this explains President Obama wearing those thick, high-waisted “mom jeans” to throw out the first pitch at this summer’s Major League Baseball All-Star Game. The St. Louis Cardinals’ home stadium is presumably free of venomous snakes, but the Secret Service takes nothing for granted.

Related Content:
Discoblog: Snake with Foot, Beaten to Death with Shoe
Discoblog: “Spitting Cobras” Don’t Really Spit After All
DISCOVER: Is That a Gun in Your Pocket, Or Are You a Size 2?

Image: flickr / Marcy Reiford

In an area of the sky obscured from us by the Milky Way Galaxy there lies a gravity anomaly called “The Great Attractor”.  Noticed first in 1973, and again in 1978, by variations in the expected expansion of the universe.  Something was pulling galaxies toward it; in fact, it was believed to be pulling the Milky Way and Andromeda toward it.

The Great Attractor, as it has been called, is not a galaxy.  It’s not a cluster of galaxies.  It’s believed to be a “supercluster” of galaxies.

NASA/JPL IPAC/CalTech, by Thomas Jarrett

Looking at this chart, you can see the Great Attractor slightly below the plane of the Milky Way (follow the blue arrow).  Now, look above it.  Do you see something called the Shapley Concentration (yellow arrow)?  It’s behind the Great Attractor, and much further out.  It’s also what we’re being drawn toward.

I hear gasps of dismay.  In 2005, X-ray surveys in the “Zone of Avoidance” (the area behind the Milky Way which we normally can’t study very well) confirmed that it was the Shapley Concentration we were being pulled toward, not the Great Attractor.  In all fairness, it was the Great Attractor and its gravity anomaly which caused scientists to study the area so closely, only to rediscover this huge concentration behind it.

Richard Powell Atlas of the Universe, all rights reserved.

The Shapley Concentration is a massive overdensity in the constellation of Centaurus.  It is the largest concentration of matter in the observable universe.  Astronomers have long known the Milky Way is moving toward the constellation Centaurus, and at quite a respectable 1.4 million miles per hour.  Many thought the pull was the Great Attractor, but with the use of X-rays to peer beyond the Milky Way’s dust, they learned the Great Attractor didn’t have nearly the matter they had originally thought.  They also got a good look at the Shapley Concentration, and saw that it did have the matter.  As a matter of fact, the Great Attractor is being pulled toward the Shapley Concentration.

Containing many thousands of times the mass of the Milky Way, and about 650 Mly away (that’s million light years), the Shapley Concentration is a rare supermassive cluster of many galaxies.  We are being drawn inexorably toward it, and will one day become a part of the cluster ourselves.

Oh, not “us” as in you and me… I mean “us” as in this galaxy.  Humanity will be long gone by then, extinct on a planet no longer able to support life as we know it.  In fact, we’ll probably run into Andromeda long before we become a bug on the windshield of the Shapley Concentration.

So to speak.

Click here to see a larger view of the first image.  It’s really cool.

1. A tower in Dubai that opens today has earned the title of world’s tallest building with a height of 2,717 feet (828 meters). That’s more than half a mile high. Actually, it grabbed that title during construction back in July 2007 when it passed Taipei 101, which stands 500 meters tall.

2. Until its official opening today, the building’s exact height was a closely held secret known by only a few people. The building’s architects, Chicago-based Skidmore, Owings, and Merril, speculated last week that someone might try to steal the thunder from the big announcement by measuring the building’s shadow to figure out its height.

3. The opening ceremony included another surprise. The tower, which had been known as the Burj Dubai, was renamed the Burj Khalifa, in honor of Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the president of the neighboring emirate Abu Dhabi. The last-minute switch carries a symbolic weight in light of the billions of dollars oil-rich Abu Dhabi has poured into Dubai in order to cover its debts [The New York Times].

4. The Burj is not only the tallest building in the world, it’s also home to the highest observation deck, swimming pool, elevator, restaurant, and fountain in the world.

5. Speaking of the acrophobia inducing elevator, it travels at speeds roughly 40 miles per hour (65 kilometers per hour) and reaches the observation deck in about 2 minutes.

6. Once at the top, visitors can enjoy temperatures that are nearly 15 degrees cooler than at the building’s base.

7. Dubai is built in the middle of the desert, so to withstand the UAE’s 120-degree blistering summer heat the tower is covered with 24,348 cladding panels.

8. Many skyscrapers are built to bend with the wind—the Burj, which will be exposed to strong desert winds, more than others. According to lead architect George Efstathiou, “the building is tuned to sway slowly so your middle ear doesn’t pick it up,” Efstathiou explained. “They tune it just like a musical instrument so that the harmonics of the building don’t coincide with the harmonics caused by the wind…. We tune it so that on the floors where people are going to be, you don’t feel it that much” [CNN].

9. Before all those floors fill up with people, Burj Khalifa has an empty weight of 500,000 tons.

10. The building won’t be empty much longer, however. So if you want in, you better hurry; 90 percent of the 900 residences (not including the soon-to-open Giorgio Armani-designed hotel) have been sold.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: 20 Things You Didn’t Know About…
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80beats: Windmills on NYC Skyscrapers Sound Cool, but Wouldn’t Work
80beats: Green Makeover Aims to Cut Sears Tower Electricity Use by 80%

Image: flickr / joi

It’s been simultaneously amusing and horrifying to read through the comments on my post about the misguided atheist holiday display in Illinois. This is still the Internet after all, and “reading comprehension” is not a highly valued skill, even among subsamples self-selected for their logic and reasoning abilities.

In brief: thinking that atheists shouldn’t be needlessly obnoxious doesn’t make me a “faithiest” or an “accommodationist” or someone without the courage of my convictions. Those would be hard charges to support against someone who wrote this or this or this or this. I just think it’s possible to have convictions without being a jerk about them. “I disagree with you” and “You are a contemptible idiot” are not logically equivalent.

Phil just pointed to a good post by Steve Cumo about precisely the same issue, with “atheism” replaced by “skepticism.” A lot of skeptics/atheists are truly excited and passionate about their worldviews, and that’s unquestionably a good thing. But it can turn into a bad thing if we allow that passion to manifest itself as contempt for everyone who disagrees with us. (For certain worthy targets, sure.) There’s certainly a place for telling jokes, or calling a crackpot a crackpot; being too afraid of stepping on people’s toes is just as bad as stomping on feet for the sheer joy of it. But there’s also a place for letting things slide, living to dispute another day.

We atheists/skeptics have a huge advantage when it comes to reasonable, evidence-based argumentation: we’re right. (Provisionally, with appropriate humble caveats about those aspects of the natural world we don’t yet understand.) We don’t need to stoop to insults to win debates; reality is on our side. And there are many people out there who are willing to listen to logic and evidence, when presented reasonably and in good faith. We should always presume that people who disagree with us are amenable to reasonable discussion, until proven otherwise. (Cf. the Grid of Disputation. See also Dr. Free-Ride.)

That’s very different than “accommodationism,” which holds that science and religion aren’t really in conflict. The problem with accommodationism isn’t that its adherents aren’t sufficiently macho or strident; it’s that they’re wrong. And when respected organizations like the National Academy of Sciences, the National Center for Science Education, or the American Association for the Advancement of Science go on record as claiming that science and religion are completely compatible, as if they were speaking for scientists, that’s unconscionable and should be stopped. They don’t have to go on at great length about how a scientific worldview undermines religious belief, even if it’s true; they can just choose not to say anything at all about religion. That’s not their job.

It’s also wrong to fetishize politeness for its own sake. Some people manage to forfeit the right to be taken seriously or treated politely. But that shouldn’t be the default position. And being polite doesn’t make you more likely to be correct, or vice-versa. And — to keep piling on the caveats — being “polite” doesn’t mean “keeping quiet,” at least as a general principle. We all know people who will resort to a cowardly tactic of claiming to be “offended” when you say something perfectly reasonable with which they happen to disagree. There’s no reason to give into that; but the solution is not to valorize obnoxiousness for its own sake.

The irony is that the pro-obnoxious crowd (obnoxionists?) is ultimately making the same mistake as the accommodationist crowd. Namely: blurring the lines between the truth of a claim and the manner in which the claim is presented. Accommodationists slide from “we can work together, in a spirit of mutual respect, with religious people on issues about which we agree” to “we should pretend that science and religion are compatible.” But obnoxionists tend to slide from “we disagree with those people” to “we should treat those people with contempt.” Neither move is really logically supportable.

A lot of the pro-obnoxiousness sentiment stems from a feeling that atheism is a disrespected minority viewpoint in our culture, and I have some sympathy with that. Atheists should never be ashamed of their beliefs, or afraid to support them vigorously. And — let’s be honest — there’s a certain amount of pleasure to be found in being part of a group where everyone sits around congratulating each other on their superior intellect and reasoning abilities, while deriding their opponents with terms like “superstition” and “brain damage” and “child abuse.” But these are temptations to be avoided, not badges of honor.

Within the self-reinforcing culture of vocal non-believers, it’s gotten to the point where saying that someone is “nice” has become an insult. Let me hereby stake out a brave, contrarian position: in favor of being nice. I think that folks in the reality-based community should be the paragons of reasonableness and even niceness, while not yielding an inch on the correctness of their views. We should be the good guys. We are in possession of some incredible truths about this amazing universe in which we live, and we should be promoting positive messages about the liberating aspects of a life in which human beings are responsible for creating justice and beauty, rather than having them handed to us by supernatural overseers. Remarkably, I think it’s possible to be positive and nice (when appropriate) and say true things at the same time. But maybe that’s just my crazy utopian streak.

The mysterious and deadly facial cancer that has sent populations of Tasmanian devils crashing now has a known source, according to findings published last week in the journal Science. The ailment originated in nerve cells of the devils themselves.

A genetic analysis of tumors from Tasmanian devils widely separated geographically shows that all the tumors are virtually identical and distinct from the animals’ own genomes…. The tumors probably arose from Schwann cells, which normally play a role in protecting and cushioning nerves [Los Angeles Times]. Tasmanian devils have a lot of nerves on their faces near their whiskers, the researchers note, and therefore have Schwann cells there. Team member Jenny Graves says the tumor could have arisen in one cell in one animal two decades ago, and then passed from devil to devil as they bit each other. The disease has already killed 60 percent of the population.

Graves says the findings have real practical value. “The good news is that one of the active proteins is easy to detect and it will give us the chance to diagnose the cancer early, which is important for setting up cancer-free ‘insurance populations’,” she added. “It also allows us to study the way the cancer changes over a long period, which potentially offers new insights for all cancer research” [The Times]. Hopefully new insights for these marsupials will come fast; at present rates the cancer could wipe out all Tasmanian devils in 30 to 50 years.

Tasmanian devils are an easy target for such a plague because they’re such a small, inbred population. Tasmanian devils are so genetically similar to one another that their immune systems don’t recognize infectious cancer cells from another individual as foreign [Science News]. The same kind of phenomenon showed up in 2006 in dogs.

For more on the Tasmanian devil paper, check out DISCOVER blogger Carl Zimmer’s post at The Loom.

Related Content:
80beats: Tasmanian Devils Have Precocious Sex to Beat Cancer
80beats: Tasmanian Devils’ Social Networking May Spell Doom for the Species
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The Loom: Saving Tasmanian Devils from a New Form of Life—Themselves
The Loom: A Dead Dog Lives On (Inside New Dogs)

Image: flickr / JLplusAL

Click here to view the embedded video.

Today, a comet, called a sun grazer, looks to have flown too close to the sun and apparently like the son of Daedalus, did not survive.

In the video, the comet appears towards the end of the video from the lower left..well you’ll see.  Also it happens pretty quick almost too quick really.

I say “apparently” because I suppose it could still be behind the sun, but boy it appears like it vaporized.  I will update in a couple more hours; in the mean time watch the video and see what you think.

Source

Icarus who?

This week’s contribution to The Science of Kissing Gallery comes from a particularly gorgeous woman I adore in the science blogosphere. Thanks to her for contributing what can only be described as the steamiest image so far. Submit your original photo or artwork here.

Steve Cuno is a skeptic as well as man who knows his marketing — he’s a professional. He’s spoken at two TAMs, both times about how better to market and brand skepticism. His points have hit home with me, because what he says about how we behave as skeptics is something I have seen countless times to be true. He thinks — and I agree — that we need to be more positive about what we know to be true. Instead of only saying "the antivax movement is baloney," (which we know to be a correct statement) we need to promote actual medicine and talk about why vaccinations are important. I try to do that here on the blog, because I know full well how skeptics are seen outside our own circles: naysayers, pointy-headed ivory tower academics, and so on. By being positive, we promote ourselves much better to the public.

Steve Cuno wrote an article for the JREF’s Swift blog which has many excellent points about how we as skeptics need to think about ourselves and our behavior. I think everyone who has ever sat next to an astrology buff at a dinner party or written anything on the web dealing with skeptical topics should read what Steve wrote, and pay attention to it. We could do a lot worse than to follow the lead he’s laid out.

In the spirit of yesterday’s post, let’s start off the New Year with a bit of wisdom from Hippocrates:

Life is short,
art long,
opportunity fleeting,
experiment dangerous,
judgment difficult.

I’m pretty sure he was thinking about the Large Hadron Collider.

Emily writes, “Ever since I was a kid, I have had a love for astronomy. I studied Earth and Planetary Sciences in college and am now in graduate school, studying to be a middle school science teacher. Another love I had as a kid was reading Calvin and Hobbes. My science tattoo combines these two childhood loves — with Calvin and Hobbes looking up at the 8 planetary symbols and the symbols for a star and water. Just like Calvin and Hobbes, I will always be gazing up at the sky with wonder and awe.”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

UPDATE:  SOLVED (exclamation point)

(update at 12:30 pm CDT) What?  Thirty minutes without a guess?  Don’t TELL me I stumped you!

(update at 2:00 pm CDT)  Two hours up without a solution.

Solved by Alejandro at 3:10 CDT

Who’s feeling frisky today?  I have a nice, easy riddle for you to ponder.  You know the rules… and you know the answer.  C’mon… you can do it…

Enigma Machine, circa WWII

This is a single object.

It is seen at different times in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.

We think of it as fairly young, but to itself, it is old.

NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope – the NGC 4414 Galaxy – Gorgeous, isn’t it?

What it once was, it will be again.

It probably has a companion.

It serves as a baseline.

Many different things on Earth carry its name.

Ahhh… I’ve piqued your interest, haven’t I?  I’m hanging out in the comment section, so drop by and solve this for me so you can choose my next post topic.  I’ve had some REALLY good choices, and I look forward to today’s selection.

Does the Sun look a little brighter to you? Maybe that’s because at nine minutes after midnight (UT) tonight, January 2/3, the Earth will be at perihelion, the closest point on its elliptical orbit to the Sun.

At that moment, the Sun’s center will be 147,098,040 kilometers away from the Earth’s center (that’s 91,402,484.5 miles for you Murricans). That is, assuming the distance from the centers of the two bodies is 0.983289667 Astronomical Units, and one AU is 149,597,870.7 kilometers. You can compare that to when we reach aphelion, our most distant point from the Sun, which in 2010 will occur on July 6 at 11:30 UT, when we’ll be 1.016701958 AU or 152,096,448 km (94,508,351.3 miles) from our star.

That change in distance — about 5 million kilometers, or 3 million miles — is only a small fraction of our distance from the Sun, so it doesn’t change the Earth’s temperature very much: a few degrees Celsius, but that’s about it. So, of course, that’s not the reason we have seasons. If it were, then we’d have winter in July in the northern hemisphere! But of course, the international cabal of astronomers covers this fact up.

Still, when you think about it, the Sun is a frakkin’ long way off. Even now, at our closest point, it would take over 20 years to fly to the Sun in an airplane at 800 kph (500 mph)! And the TSA would make you sit silently with nothing in your lap for the last 3 years of the journey, too.

But my point is (in case you were wondering if I had one) that the Sun is hot, and there’s a lot of it. I’m glad it’s so far away, even when it’s at its closest.

Okay, I cheated.  It’s not the birthday of Ceres, it’s the anniversary of the discovery of Ceres, January 1st, 1801, by Guiseppe Piazzi.  Piazzi was looking for a star when he found Ceres, and initially thought it might be a comet (but had his suspicions he had discovered “something better”).

Named “Ceres” after the Roman goddess of motherly love and the harvest, Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt.  With a diameter of 590 miles, it contains fully a third of the belt’s mass.

Ceres (bottom left) to scale.  Image:  NASA/JPL

Ceres is believed to have a rocky core, overlaid by a thick mantle of water ice about 100 km thick.  That would mean that Ceres is carrying around about 200 million cubic km of water, more than the volume of fresh water on the Earth.  This is difficult to confirm, because water ice on Ceres would be expected to sublimate (go directly from a solid to a gas, bypassing the liquid form… happens on Earth all the time) instead of evaporate.  Hopefully when the Dawn Space Probe reaches Ceres in 2015 we will find out for sure.  Ceres has a rotational period of 9 hours, 4 min, and an orbital period of 4.6 Earth years.  The orbit is inclined 10.6 degrees.  Once thought to be a member of the Gefion asteroid family, it has since been proven to have an uncommon origin.

Image:  NASA/ESA  Hubble Space Telescope images of Ceres.  Nature of the “white spot” is unknown.

Spectral analysis of Ceres has shown some very interesting indicators for iron-rich phyllosilicates, making it the third object in our solar system discovered to have carbonates (the other two are Earth and Mars).

I’m looking forward to 2015.

If you’re interested, this is a link to a research paper on the surface composition of Ceres, published in 2006.

Richard Wiseman is funny, smart, personable, and uncommonly handsome. He’ll also be giving a talk on January 5th in New York City promoting his new book 59 Seconds. Called "Investigating the Impossible", it’s sponsored by the NYC Skeptics. It’s free and open to the public. He really is a great speaker, and if you’re near the Big Apple you should go. And tell him how good-looking he is.

I know it’s traditional to take this time to look back, and to look ahead. And while I’m not a traditional sort of fellow, I do want to take just a moment here and indulge myself. New Year’s is rather arbitrary for a number of reasons, but there is one substantive change that happens today.

As of right now, I am no longer President of the James Randi Educational Foundation. That job now falls on the able shoulders of my friend D. J. Grothe, who takes that position as of today, January 1, 2010. D. J. is, quite simply, a tremendous guy, and if this is the time for looking ahead, then I see great things happening with him at the helm. He brings loads of experience to the job as well as a fresh perspective. I won’t wish him luck — I don’t put much stock in either that verb or that noun, but I hardly need to. D. J. has earned my trust, and I know he’ll be great.

Like everyone else, I don’t know what 2010 will bring. I’m working on my sooper sekrit TV project, and I’ll have news for that in the coming months, no doubt. I’m hoping to let people see my tattoo very soon, too. I’ll let y’all know as soon as I’m able.

And for astronomy, the future is always uncertain. We have astonishing capabilities coming online, with Herschel, Kepler, and WISE opening their eyes. Hubble is newly refitted, and has already once again proven its worth. Cassini still dances around Saturn, returning one breathtaking image after another. And we still have Spitzer, Chandra, and a fleet of other space-borne instruments, as well as the solid ground-based observatories that are making vast leaps in our knowledge of the heavens.

But we’re still in a recession. Times are tough for everyone, and we’re still not sure as I write this just what President Obama has in store for NASA. We may find out as early as next week, at the annual American Astronomical Society meeting, which I’ll be attending. Hopefully I’ll have some fun stories and pictures from the meeting; there is always big news revealed then.

Anyway, enough rambling. You’re probably just reading this waiting for the antacid tablets to dissolve, so I’ll sign off for now. But stay tuned. One thing I don’t need psychic powers to predict: there will be lots of good news for science, as well as bad. Either way, I’ll be here to talk about it on this blog, as will my friends and colleagues at Discover Magazine and other sites.

Thanks to all my readers for the past year — the past decade. See you for the next one!

Credit: NASA

Well first off I hope everybody had a good year and 2010 is even better.

Here’s my list of five things to watch for in the new year:

1.  Hubble’s new camera.  The servicing mission is complete and Hubble is in fine form.  Hat’s off to everybody involved.  We have only seen the beginning of the great things to come.

2.  Sunspots!  Finally it appears the new sunspot cycle 24 is finally getting going much to the delight of ham radio operators everywhere.  YAY!  I am hoping (not predicting) the increase in solar activity is rather rapid, although the “predictions” seem to indicate the peak will be somewhat muted.  Still, think auroras!

3.  WISE.  The WISE spacecraft jettisoned the lens cap just the other day and very soon it will be starting to survey the sky.

4.  Oh the conspiracy theorists are going to go nuts!  Heck they’ve already started.  You may have heard the story about the Russians thinking about a mission to see if they can bump the asteroid Apophis into a different orbit, EVEN though NASA says chances of it hitting in 2036 is slim after downgrading the initial 1 in 37 initial chance.  I heard a Discovery.com rep saying well they are just really sensitive because of the Tunguska event and a lot of the ground track is in Russia.  However I read today a comment to an article on SOTT, go read it and decide for yourself, but be sure to read the comment at the end.

5.    Finally, after losing my beloved Phoenix this past year, I was lucky enough to get a commitment from a breeder for a new puppy this coming year.  A puppy is a lot of work, but I’m up for it, and this isn’t just any dog.  Both parents and both sets of grandparents are either American or European Champion/Grand Champion working dogs.  What? A  Doberman of course

I’m working this weekend, but you all  have a great holiday and STAY SAFE!!

Apologies for the dismal lack of blogging — apparently even scientists travel around the holidays, who knew? I’m in South Carolina at the moment, so instead of the well-constructed argument (complete with witty parenthetical asides) on a pressing issue of the moment that I’d love to provide, please accept this simple link to some sketches by Richard Feynman. (Via Chad Orzel, author of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog.)

Feynman’s fondness for drawing is well-known, especially when the subject was naked ladies. The sketches aren’t going to win any art competitions, but they’re certainly better that I could do. And here’s one I bet very few professional artists could pull off:

I find that the subtle use of integration by parts really speaks of man’s inhumanity to man, don’t you agree?

But my favorite recent example of science-inflected art has to be this newly discovered late-period Jackson Pollock:

Oops, sorry; that’s not an abstract expressionist masterpiece at all. It’s a plot of theoretical predictions and experimental constraints for dark matter, as linked by Brian Mingus in comments. Check out dmtools if you’d like to make your own plot. Science and art are for everyone.