This is simply too cool: the shadow of Saturn’s rings moving across the face of its tiny moon Janus.

This animation is made up of images taken by Cassini (of course) in August. At that time, it was the equinox on Saturn, so the Sun was shining straight down on Saturn’s equator… which happens to be the plane of the orbit for both the rings and the moons. In other words, the Sun was shining straight along the rings. During this brief time, twice per Saturn orbit of 29 years, the moons can cast long shadows across the rings, and the rings can cast shadows on the moons.

Janus really is dinky, just 179 km (111 miles) across, which is why it’s not really all that round. Its gravity isn’t strong enough to crush itself into a sphere. Other moons are bigger, of course, and the Cassini folks just released several other astonishing animations of them as well, showing the moons dancing and eclipsing each other, with Satrun’s rings as the backdrop. This one showing Rhea and Janus is particularly beautiful.

What more can I add? Cassini continues to deliver, over and again. Amazing.

Related posts:
Behold, Saturn
Ringless
Titan’s Shadow
Saturn’s rings do the wave

I have a tale of death, near death, and undeath to weave for you, but first, gaze upon the jewel-like beauty of the glittering denizens of M30:

This image was taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys on board the Hubble Space Telescope. I had to cut it and compress it drastically to get it to fit on the blog, so you very much want to click on it to embiggen it massively and see it in its fully resolved glory.

The image is of the insanely beautiful globular cluster M30, an ancient city of a few hundred thousand stars located 28,000 light years away in the constellation of Capricornus. The cluster is ancient, about 13 billion years old, making it as old or even older than the Milky Way itself. The core of the cluster is unusually dense as such things go, which is why it was studied. Where better to find vampires and thrillseekers?

Like people, stars are born, age, and die. Stars born with more mass tend to die off more quickly, consuming their fuel at far higher rates than their lower-mass brethren. These stars tend to be blue, so in an old cluster like M30 you’d expect to see no blue stars at all; they should all be long gone. And yet, there are quite a few — astronomers call them blue stragglers. Where did they come from?

One theory, which has been borne out by observations, is that blue stragglers are in tight binary systems, with a dead star in such close proximity to a normal star that it can siphon off the normal star’s gas, using it to rejuvenate itself. This would make them vampires, of course, sucking the life force of other stars in an attempt to stay young.

But another idea was that dead stars might also physically collide with other stars and merge, forming a single star that would burn blue and bright. In an environment like that near our own Sun this kind of collision can almost literally never happen; even considering the entire Milky Way Galaxy over its entire lifetime a head on collision has probably never happened out here in the stellar suburbs.

But that cluster M30 is pretty densely populated with stars, and collisions are far more likely. What observations like this one of the cluster (and also of an ancient cluster called NGC 188) have shown is that the blue stragglers appear to have two different sub-groups; one that appears to have come from the vampire stars, and another from stars that have collided: thrill-seekers, stars that have physically slammed into each other and merged, their combined mass separating them from the other blue straggler group.

Blue stragglers have been known since the 1950s, and the idea that they were pulling gas off nearby stars was proposed to explain them, too, but it’s only with our modern instrumentation that we can not only show that this is true, but that a second, far-fetched-sounding scenario of collisions also contributes.

I find it wonderful and extremely uplifting that an image as spectacular and gorgeous as the one above — it became my desktop wallpaper as soon as I saw it! — not only satisfies our desire for beauty and art, but can also be tapped to deliver incredible science that boosts our awe of what Nature can do. I love that we can understand such things, but you know what I love even more? The idea that we have only begun to understand the Universe.

Some people are simply addicted to Facebook, even those that should keep a low profile, according to CNN:

Craig Lynch, 28, escaped Hollesley Bay open prison near Suffolk, eastern England, back in September, but has continued to update his Facebook status regularly — describing everything from his meals to who his next girlfriend will be.

On his Facebook page, Lynch, who was sentenced to seven years for aggravated burglary, is literally giving the finger to the law. The police have spoken with Facebook and are following his status updates like bread crumbs in an attempt to track him down. Then again, ”We’re taking what he’s saying on Facebook with a pinch of salt because he’s now aware that people may be reading what he’s writing,” says one cop.

Uh, not to tell you how to do your job, officers, but maybe you should try tracking the data packets back to the computer he’s using rather than just hoping he’ll make slip up and tell you where he’s hiding out.

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How does a scientist study a million genes? In my latest podcast I talk to John Wooley, a leading figure in the new science of metagenomics. Check it out.

Who needs to dream of a white Christmas when you live in Boulder? But as a devoted astronomer, I need a little polychromaticism in my life, too.

Enjoy a fun and happy holiday, folks.

P.S. Last year’s holiday message still holds, too.

One of the reasons I love this time of year is that Mrs. BA is a fantastic cook and baker. She was making cutout cookies the the day, and asked if I wanted anything special.

Well, duh.

Who wouldn’t want a cookie that’s bigger on the inside than the outside?

And of course, more apropos of the season:

MMMmmmmmm. Sacrilicious.

The San Andreas. Credit: Reuters

Reuters has a very interesting story saying tidal forces parallel to a segment of the San Andreas Fault could be causing non-volcanic tremors, and a study published in Nature Magazine say the tidal forces are the tug of the sun and moon. These tremors could possibly used to predict earthquakes.

From Reuters:

Low-level tremors have long been associated with volcanoes, because they often warn of impending eruptions.

A study published in the journal Nature says these tremors beneath the San Andreas Fault could provide similar clues about earthquakes.

The researchers say the faint tug of the sun and the moon on the fault causes tremors well below the level where earthquakes occur.

The finding suggests that rock far underground is lubricated with pressurized water, allowing the rock to slip easily and weakening the fault.

“If you could go down there and push the rock with your hand you would cause a tremor,” said researcher Amanda Thomas of the University of California, Berkeley.

Thomas and colleagues analyzed nearly 2,000 tremors detected over eight years in the Parkfield segment of the San Andreas Fault. They also looked at micro-earthquakes in the same area and calculated the stresses produced by the Earth and ocean tides.

The study says they found a strong correlation between non-volcanic tremor activity and extremely small, tidal stresses parallel to the San Andreas Fault.

Thomas says studying tremors could help seismologists better understand and, perhaps, predict earthquake activity.

“They’re looking at tremor as kind of an indicator of large earthquakes as tremors signal the buildup of strain below the fault zone,” Thomas said. “So we might be able to use tremor to tell us something about when the next large earthquake will happen.”

Reuters editing by Maggie Fox and Sandra Maler.

OK, this is it. Last day to buy stuff in a panic before Christmas. What to do?

I suggest the bookstore. Who doesn’t like books? And it just so happens I have a few to recommend.

Death from the Skies!
You may not know this, but I wrote a book. Nothing says holiday cheer like a trillion ton asteroid barreling down on the Earth at 45,000 kph. And it has a happy ending! The entire Universe dissolves.

This book may not save Christmas, but it might save your life. All your friends need copies. Even strangers. Buy 50.

Don’t Be Such a Scientist
This book, by Randy Olson, is a primer for how scientists and science-types should communicate with the public. As someone whose job it is to do that, I found it readable, funny, and of great use. I chuckled a lot reading it, seeing many people I know being described in its pages. Not specifically, of course, just in general.

At first I was thrown a bit by his comparison of science to Hollywood, but it soon became clear that the lessons Olson learned in Tinseltown really do need to translate to the way we talk about science, at least on TV and in movies. Books are still books, and blogs still blogs, but if we science supporters want to reach millions of people all at once, then we could do a lot worse than heed Olson’s advice when we’re on camera or in front of a microphone.

And if his name is familiar, it’s because he created the mockumentaries "Flock of Dodos" and "Sizzle, A Global Warming Comedy". If you’ve seen those, you know what the book will be like! If you’ve ever been in a conversation with someone and you’ve tried to explain something scientific, this book is a good one for you.

Unscientific America
Speaking of communicating science to the public, my Hive Overmind co-bloggers Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum wrote Unscientific America as a call to arms for scientists everywhere. This book doesn’t complain about how the public doesn’t get science, it actually has advice — good advice — for how people can take up this charge.

It’s aimed at science lovers, but also at scientists themselves. Chris and Sheril are careful to show just where things have gone wrong: a public with a short attention span, media all too willing to make that worse (and to screw up science every chance they get, through ignorance or greed), antiscience promoters, but also scientists themselves. I see a whole lot of scientists trying to communicate science, but honestly not that many are good at it. That should be self-evident, even to scientists themselves; some are theorists, some experimentalists, some field workers, and so on; the point being we all have our areas of expertise. Not everyone is good in front of a camera, and we need to find the ones who are and groom them.

Chris and Sheril took a lot of heat from scientists about this claim, most of which I found ridiculous and unfair. Scientists need to accept our share of the burden of blame for where we are in America right now — we do own part of it, folks — and we need to shoulder that blame and do something about it. Also, there is a section in the book taking the so-called "New Atheists" to task for fanning the religious flames in America. Although the situation is pretty complicated, I think there is truth to what Chris and Sheril wrote, and I also think that this part of the book should be read by skeptics and atheists very carefully. I won’t go into details here — I’ll save it for a lengthier post sometime — but I think what they’ve written is salient and should be considered by everyone.

Atheist’s Guide to Christmas
Speaking of which, this is a good book for the non-believer in your circle of friends and family. I’ll simply point you to my previous exhortations about it and remind you that all proceeds go to the UK HIV charity Terrence Higgins Trust, a secular group that provides information, advice, and support for HIV positive people in the UK.

[UPDATE: The outspoken ZOMGitsCriss has put up a video plugging Atheist's Guide, and says very nice things about my essay in the book. Thanks Criss!]

Why Does E=mc²
Regular readers know about my friend Brian Cox, a particle physicist with CERN who has dastardly plans to destroy the Earth using the LHC is charming, funny, and an excellent spokesman for science. This book is a wonderful explanation of relativity, one of the best I’ve read. It was inspired by his awesome wife Gia, who asked him the title question one day.

You’ll need to think while reading this; it’s not a breezy beach thriller. But I found it to be a very enjoyable and fascinating primer on, exactly, why energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. It explains things in ways that hadn’t occurred to me before, and I found myself nodding my head as I suddenly understood concepts that had always bugged me (like, why do massless particles travel at the speed of light, and just why is that the ultimate speed limit of the Universe?). It’s a great book, and I highly recommend it.

7th Son
J. C. Hutchins is a science fiction writer and podcaster. He’s among the new group of writers who serialize their fiction and give it away as audiocasts. Once an audience is built up, they can then turn their serialization into book form. I won’t give away the plot of the book, but it’s an engaging read involving some fun science fiction concepts. My only complaint is that he needs to write the sequel yesterday. Too bad it’s not a time travel book!

If you’re curious, Hugo-winning author John Scalzi has a blog post up about J. C. and the book that’ll entice you, too.

There are lots of other books I could recommend, but I’ll cut it off here. Do you have ideas? Post ‘em in the comments! I’m sure we all have books we love and would recommend. Tell us!

Atheists can be such uptight downers. And I say that completely seriously and non-sarcastically, despite being a card-carrying atheist myself.

The latest example appears at the Illinois State Capitol, where someone from Freedom From Religion Foundation had the genius idea of erecting this sign among the holiday displays (via PZ):

At the time of the winter solstice, let reason prevail. There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is just myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.

Well now, there’s an uplifting and positive message. I’m sure that lots of religious folks came along to read that sign, and immediately thought “Gee, whoever wrote that sounds so much smarter and more correct than me! I will throw off my superstitious shackles and join them in the celebration of reason.”

There is a place to argue for one’s worldview — but not every single place. I happen to agree with all of the sentences on the sign above, but the decision to put in front and center in a holiday display merits a giant face-palm. (So does calling it “hate speech,” of course.) It’s like you’re introduced to someone at a party, and they immediately say “Wow, you’re ugly. And your clothes look like they were stolen off a homeless person. And you’re drinking a domestic beer, which shows a complete lack of sophistication.” I don’t know about you, but I’d be thinking — “Such taste and discernment! Here’s someone I need to get to know better.”

Until atheists learn that they don’t need to take every possible opportunity to proclaim their own rationality in the face of everyone else’s stupidity, they will have a reputation as tiresome bores. They could have put up a sign that just gave some sort of joyful, positive message. Or something light-hearted and amusing. Or they could have just left the display alone entirely, and restrained the urge to argue in favor of waiting for some more appropriate venue. (Maybe they could start a blog or something.)

Understanding how the real world works is an important skill. So is understanding human beings.

I have been saying for years that a) most UFOs are simply misidentified mundane phenomena (satellites, meteors, balloons, Venus, weird clouds, even the Moon) and that 2) if they were real, astronomers — who spend a lot more time looking at the sky than your average person — should be reporting most of them.

My musings on this have been twisted and distorted by UFO folks — shocker! — even though I’ve been pretty clear about what I would count as evidence. But now we may have a way to cut through the garbage. A new website has been started for professional and amateur astronomers to report Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. I rather like this new UAP acronym, since it avoids the UFO/flying saucer baggage. Anyway, it was set up as part of IYA 2009 to help astronomers report things in the sky they may not immediately understand. Better yet, it has links to handy guides that will help people who might otherwise misidentify normal things like sundogs and other weather phenomena.

The website is the brainchild of Philippe Ailleris:

Despite the controversy surrounding the topic, he believes that it is possible to approach the UAP field from a professional, rational, and scientific angle without any a priori. He considers that UAP studies my increase the scientific understanding of today poorly understood natural phenomenon, and ultimately he even sees the potential for Science to discover new unknown phenomena, therefore making such study invaluable. His research therefore focuses on attempting to raise the interest of the scientific community and to bridge various fields to devise what he believes is the necessary multidisciplinary approach to studying the phenomena.

I agree. As Carl Sagan said, whether UFOs are real and we’re being visited, or they’re a mass social phenomenon due to the way our brains work, either aspect is fascinating and worthy of actual study.

Come to Kazakhstan—specifically the ice-cold capital of Astana—said Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev in an annual speech yesterday. Here is part of his pitch to diplomats and government officials, via Reuters:

“Well today it’s only -30 C (-22 F). It only strengthens our spirit,” Nazarbayev, in power for 20 years, told diplomats at his lavish marble-and-turquoise presidential palace.

“This city is so sterile. Even germs can’t survive in this weather. So we can enjoy living long lives here. Well, maybe not as long as those of mammoths, but still quite long.”

Great success! Nazarbayev thinks Astana is so extreme that he moved Kazakhstan’s capital there in 1997, which makes Astana the second-coldest capital city in the world. Watch your back, Ulaanbaatar!

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It wasn’t for nothing that I asked these questions yesterday (and some of the responses were very helpful). Over at the Science Progress blog, I’ve now done a full piece about what happened in science in 2009, which includes observations like these:

It was a year of complete U-turns in science policy. President Barack Obama reversed George W. Bush’s dramatic restrictions on embryonic stem cell research, and the first 13 new stem cell lines were approved for federally funded research since 2001. Meanwhile, the Obama Environmental Protection Agency moved to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, finding that they do indeed endanger the public.

It was also the year of the first-ever passage, by a 219-212 margin in the U.S. House of Representatives, of a cap-and-trade bill that would cut domestic greenhouse gas emissions—but not the year for any parallel action in the U.S. Senate.

It was the year that everyone seemed to own an iPhone and use the word “app” in regular conversation. It was the year Twitter went from being a mere annoyance to the epitome of web-based communication.

It was a year that saw the very first Nobel laureate scientist assume a cabinet position, in the figure of U.S. Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu.

It was the year of….many, many, many other things, some funny, some outrageous, some profound. Read here for the whole list, and leave comments about anything you think may have been left out!

When it comes to understanding fire, chimpanzees might have a leg up not only on the rest of the animal kingdom, but also on those of us in the human species who would sprint in the other direction at the sight of a blaze. A study published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology argues that these primates don’t panic when the flames start, and could even understand the basics about how fire behaves.

Primatologist Jill Pruetz has been observing chimps in Senegal since 2001, but it was in 2006 that she first noticed how the animals reacted to wildfire. When people in the area set fires to clear the land, the chimps refused to tuck tail and run. “It was the end of the dry season, so the fires burn so hot and burn up trees really fast, and they were so calm about it,” Pruetz said of the chimps. “They were a lot better than I was, that’s for sure” [LiveScience].

For her study, Pruetz divided up the mastery that humans have over fire in three cognitive steps: understanding how it behaves, learning to contain and control it, and figuring out how to start one. Most animals fail the first step, reacting by instinct. West African reed frogs flee at the sound of fire, brush-tailed bettongs in Australia become dazed and confused, and stress hormones jump in African elephants [ScienceNOW].

As the flames neared her chimps, however, they didn’t flee. If they had, it would have required long travel in the open sun in 110-degree temperatures with scarce water supply. Instead, she said the chimps reacted calmly. They monitored the fire, moved to keep out of its way, and in doing so, minimized the amount of energy they expended to stay safe [Des Moines Register]. Pruetz even documented the males doing a series of exaggerated motions she dubbed the “fire dance,” a nod to the so-called “rain dance” Jane Goodall documented in chimps. And, she said, the chimps uttered a distinct sound in response to approaching fire.

Pruetz’s paper probably kick up a few arguments over what this really means—whether chimps really “learn” how fire behaves, and whether that shows how early humans might have learned to control fire, which scientists like Richard Wrangham argue was a critical step in our evolution. In any case, if you find yourself stuck in a Senegal wildfire, follow the chimps.

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Image: flickr / cnynfreelancer

I pay a lot of attention to weird things, and to weird weather. I thought I had heard it all: mammatus clouds, inversion layers, parhelic arcs.

But I can still be surprised! For example, I would’ve sworn up and down that snow rollers — giant rolls of snow that look like huge white Ho-Hos — were fake. But they are, in fact, real. Back in March, Tim Tevebaugh saw some in Idaho and snapped away. I couldn’t believe the photos, they’re so weird, I had to contact Tim. He kindly replied, and gave me permission to post pictures:

There they are, sitting on a plain. Evidently, wind conditions need to be just right, and the snow must be precisely the right consistency. I don’t think anyone has seen them form, but I suspect a small clump of snow gets picked up by the wind and rolls into a snowball. When it gets too big it collapses, starts rolling again, picks up more snow, collapses again, and eventually forms these long cylinders. It’s just a guess, but it seems logical. [UPDATE: several commenters have pointed out that the ball need not collapse to make a roller; I had supposed that happened to help spread the ball out horizontally. I stand corrected!]

Just how bizarre are these things? Here’s another picture:

If you look at the big one on the right, you can see how it looks like a piece of foam that’s been rolled up, a testament to how it formed. It like looking down the maw of the Doomsday Machine from Star Trek. I would love to see something like this as it happened. I’ve not seen anything like it in Boulder, but we’re getting plenty of snow here, and it’s plenty windy here so one day I hope to spot them.

I’m perpetually amazed at the imagination and creative power of nature. Snow rollers! Who knew?

Tip o’ the Frosty magic top hat to James Oberg and my thanks to Tim Tevebaugh for sending me the pictures and giving me permission to post them.

There comes a time in every science writer’s career when one must write about glass duck vaginas and explosive duck penises.

That time is now.

To err on the side of caution, I am stuffing the rest of this post below the fold. My tale is rich with deep scientific significance, resplendent with surprising insights into how evolution works, far beyond the banalities of “survival of the fittest,” off in a realm of life where sexual selection and sexual conflict work like a pair sculptors drunk on absinthe, transforming biology into forms unimaginable. But this story is also accompanied with video. High-definition, slow-motion duck sex video. And I would imagine that the sight of spiral-shaped penises inflating in less than a third of second might be considered in some quarters to be not exactly safe for work. It’s certainly not appropriate for ducklings.

So, if you’re ready, join me below the fold.

This story is actually a sequel. Back in 2007, I wrote in the New York Times about the work of Patricia Brennan, a post-doctoral researcher at Yale, and her colleagues on the weirdness of duck genitals. The full story is here. (Brennan also appeared in a Nature documentary, starting at about minute 38:35.)

In brief, Brennan wanted to understand why some ducks have such extravagant penises. Why are they cork-screw shaped? Why do they get so ridiculously long–some cases as long as the duck’s entire body? As Brennan dissected duck penises, she began to wonder what the female sexual anatomy looked like. If you have a car like this, she said, what kind of garage do you park it in?

Brennan discovered that female ducks have equally weird reproductive tracts (called oviducts). In many species, they are ornamented with lots of outpockets. And like duck penises, duck oviducts are corkscrew-shaped. But while male duck penises twist clockwise, the female oviduct twists counterclockwise.

Brennan speculated that all this bizarre anatomy is the result of a peculiar form of evolution known as sexual conflict. A strategy that allows females to reproduce the most offspring may not be so good for males, and vice versa. For example, male fruit flies inject their mates with lots of chemicals during sex, and those chemicals make her less receptive to other males, thereby boosting his chances of fathering her eggs. But those chemicals are harsh and will make female flies sick. Females, in turn, have evolved defenses against those chemicals, blunting their effects.

With many examples of sexual conflict in nature, Brennan wondered if sexual conflict between male and female ducks was giving rise to their weird genitals. Female ducks pair off with male partners for the breeding season, but they also get harrassed by other males, sometimes being forced to have sex (and sometimes dying from the attacks). A third of all duck matings are forced.

And yet only 3 percent of the ducklings that female ducks produce come from such forced matings. Brennan speculated that the female ducks can block forced copulations with their mismatched spirals. And they might also be controlling which drake got to fertilize their eggs by socking away the sperm of different mates in different pockets. And the extravagant penises of males might be the result of an evolution around those defenses.

As I reported in 2007, Brennan discovered a pattern that supported this hypothesis. Among 16 species of water fowl, species in which the males grew long phalluses also had females with more turns in their oviduct and more side pockets. The ducks were escalating an arms race, genital for genital.

But Brennan didn’t actually know how duck penises actually moved through the labirynthine oviduct, and how the oviduct’s shape might affect the drake’s delivery of sperm. So she traded calipers and rulers for high-speed video.

Brennan and her colleagues traveled to a California duck farm, where workers are expert at collecting sperm from drakes. The first step in the collection is to get a drake excited by putting a female duck in his cage. The drake climbs on top, and then the penis emerges. Before its emergence, a drake’s penis is usually completely hidden from view, tucked inside his body like an inside-out sock. Drakes unfurl their pensises differently than male mammals. In mammals, the penis becomes erect as blood flows into the spongy tissue. Ducks pump lymph fluid instead. And as the fluid enters the penis, it does not simply become engorged. It flips rightside-out.

Here’s how it happens, in slow motion. A Muscovy drake everts his penis in about a third of a second, at speeds of 1.6 meters per second.

Of course, drakes don’t mate with the air. Having made this video, Brennan still needed a way to see how a duck penis actually performs its appointed task. Unable to film duck penises in a real female oviduct, she built a fake oviduct out of silcone. She then managed to get a drake to mate with it. But the overwhelming force of the explosive penus broke the fake oviduct.

So Brennan turned to glass. Her new fake oviducts were strong enough to handle the drakes, and she started filming. Here’s what she saw.

As Brennan had predicted, the counterclockwise turns of an oviduct slow down the expansion of the duck penis, compared to a straight tube or a clockwise one. Brennan suspects that female ducks slow down males trying to force a mating, but they can also let their partner’s penis move faster through the oviduct. They have been observed to relax and contract their muscles arond the oviduct.

Female ducks can’t stop an unwanted male from delivering his sperm, but the obstacles in their oviducts may give them control over what happens to that sperm. The female ducks may use their oviducts to slow down the expanation of the penis, so that by the time the drake ejaculates, the sperm are delivered in the lower reaches of the oviduct. A female ducks’s partner, with her cooperation, can deliver sperm further up the oviduct. With the wanted and unwanted sperm delivered to different places in the oviduct, a female duck may be able to store the sperm in different pockets. And then she can choose which drake will father her duckling. For all the explosiveness male ducks may display, it’s the female ducks that get the final say.

[Postscript: I tell Brennan's story in more detail in my new book, The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution. It opens the chapter on sex--where I show how the same processes that explain these strange genitalia explain many other things in the natural world.]

Reference: Patricia L. R. Brennan et al, “Explosive eversion and functional morphology of the duck penis supports sexual conflict in waterfowl genitalia,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, doi: 10.1098/rspb.2009.2139

[Update: 12/23--a couple misspellings fixed]

Thirty thousand years is a long time to hang out in any one place, much less stuck inside a tiny salt crystal. But microbiologist Brian Schubert says he found just that in a crystal from sediments in Death Valley—bacteria-like archaeans that have lived inside the tiny enclosure for all those years.

The researchers announced in a paper in Geology that they could culture the archaeans in the liquid from inside the crystal, liquid they estimate to be 22,000 to 34,000 years old. Previous studies suggesting even longer lives for microbes stuck in salt crystals (one even getting up to an insane-sounding 250 million years) have been met with skepticism. But even doubters of those studies say Schubert’s could have more validity, as the Death Valley area wouldn’t have allowed recrystallization (which would permit the liquid to escape and fresh microbes to get in) for 10,000 years at the least.

From New Scientist:

Moreover, Schubert thinks he can explain how his microbes managed to stay alive so long. Every crystal that contained live archaeans also contained dead cells from a salt-lake alga known as Dunaliella, which contain high concentrations of glycerol. The team suggest that the glycerol had seeped out of the cells, and that the archaeans lived off this.

Dunaliella cells are such good fodder that the microbes could live much longer than 30,000 years, says Schubert. He calculates that a single Dunaliella cell contains enough glycerol to meet an archaean’s minimal needs for 12 million years. “We have inclusions with dozens of these algal cells inside and just a couple of archaeans, so they have basically a limitless supply,” he says.

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Image: flickr / Shayan (USA)

What if waiting for treatment in the emergency room was like waiting for your toaster to ding, and you knew exactly how long you were going to wait? Many healthcare providers are hopeful that by banding together to coordinate information about how congested their waiting rooms are they can help people make the best decision about where to seek medical attention, according to the Los Angeles Times:

In part to ease the minds of those seeking emergency care — or at least disclose how bad the wait will be — a growing number of suburban emergency rooms around the country are advertising wait times.

Some post the times on their websites. Others tweet, send text messages or display the times on huge highway billboards. A few are testing a service by a start-up company, InQuickER, that allows patients to register online, pay a small fee and hold their place in line while they wait at home.

But what seems like a good bit of pubic service has some doctors concerned that the posted wait times will be misleading. For example, a patient suffering ominous chest pains might be persuaded to drive to a hospital further away for a shorter wait even though he may have been bumped to the front of a longer line closer to home.

So while it may be useful for someone with a minor condition to seek out a shorter wait time, doctors in the article say that people with serious injuries should get to the closest help possible — and fast.

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The battered moon Rhea. Click for a larger version (~96k) Credit: Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

This Cassini image highlights just how battered the Saturn moon Rhea really is.  There is more than what I thought.  Clicking the image will bring up a larger version and shows some nice detail.

From the Cassini site:

Craters imprinted upon other craters record the long history of impacts endured by Saturn’s moon Rhea.
This view looks toward the mid-southern latitudes of the Saturn-facing side of Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across). North on Rhea is up.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 13, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 45,000 kilometers (28,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 105 degrees. Image scale is 262 meters (860 feet) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

Damien Bouic, who graciously allowed me to use his very cool renderings of Earth with rings in my article about, um, the Earth with rings, has translated that post into French. I took French many years ago, and all I can still say is Je suis desole, Madam, mais nous n’avons pas du jambon aujord hui. So I hope he did a good job.

Alons-y!