Today marks the winter solstice here in the north, the sun sets rises as far “south east” as it will get.  If you are in the southern hemisphere this is your summer solstice  YAY!

For me and those in these parts, we can see the days grow longer and for a couple months see the cold grow stronger.  Been pretty cold so far this winter, but not too much snow.  For you south of here in the mid-Atlantic states – I do feel your pain.  I will say I am rather impressed though.  I was watching some traffic cams out of Tyson’s Corner VA at a big intersection and while there was some problems, for the most part people did really well driving in the snow.  Well done!

I’ll be back!

Solved!!!

Here’s an easy riddle for you.

I was seen by the Ancient Greeks but I have no Greek myths associated with me.  Perhaps they didn’t recognize me for what I am.  I bear them no grudge because the Greeks have slipped from my view so never mind them.  Besides I am regarded as a representation of a god by some cultures.  In fact I am important to many nations today in symbol and song, and you are familiar with me.

Then there is the story about me of the brothers, their friends and the campfires.  Oh I will say no more about it, no need to give the answer away.

In not so ancient times I was finally recognized, some say by a Frenchman, others by a Dane.  Tom is going with the Dane, but then Tom has NEVER seen the jewels I possess for himself.

Oh I am quite visible, depending on where you live.  Do you know who I am?  I know you do.

A couple of notes:

The winner gets to ask a question (see last week’s riddle for the ground rules).  There is an unanswered question out there too, Marian has been terribly busy.  She’ll get to it.

The site will down for a brief time (hopefully) in the morning for some tinkering.

By now a lot of you fellow geeks will have seen this:

[Click to see the whole thing at artist Ibrahim Evsan's site.]

I recognize waaaay too much of it. But c’mon. Where’s Wil?

The Republican War on Science is back, and it’s badder than ever. Or, that’s what I reported over at Mother Jones’ “Blue Marble”:

…the Washington Post and ABC released the latest in a set of public opinion findings that have not only shown growing skepticism about mainstream climate science in the US, but now, negative views of environmental scientists in general.

More specifically, here’s what the new survey found. Forty percent of Americans don’t trust what scientists have to say about the environment; among Republicans, it’s nearly 60 percent. Both numbers are an increase from polling results in the past; and for the public in general, a significant part of the change seems to be coming among political independents.

….By seizing upon “ClimateGate” and directing concerted fire against the scientists involved, Republican politicians, activists and global warming “skeptics” and denialists have now arguably caused more damage to the scientific community than the Bush administration did.

You can read the full item here.

Sometimes, even when we know we’re playing hardball, we forget how hard the ball actually is.

On Monday, I noted in Mother Jones that a failure in Copenhagen would strengthen the would-be geoengineers, some of whom–like the Russians–are already starting to fire sulfates into the air in field trial experiments.

Well, there has been a failure–or at least, a very weak agreement–in Copenhagen. Expect to hear more and more talk about geoengineering as this ongoing climate policy mess–now two decades old–continues and continues and continues.

I am not in favor of geoengineering, but I am in favor of geoengineering research–and pragmatic solutions. And if the policy process can’t deliver a global cutback in emissions sufficient to avert “dangerous anthropogenic” climate change, then I think geoengineering has to be in our toolkit as a last option.

Unfortunately.

Brooklyn, New York is suffering a large outbreak of mumps right now. There have been 600 cases either confirmed or suspected in the past few months. Compare that to the fewer than 300 cases total on average in the entire United States over the course of a whole year and you’ll see that this is clearly a major outbreak.

Interestingly, the population affected is overwhelmingly comprised of orthodox Jews. That surprised me; I didn’t know of any prohibitions against vaccinations in Jewish culture, and after some research have determined that there is none — in fact, vaccinations appear to be taken very seriously in Jewish teachings, and there have been times that rabbis have allowed people to get vaccinated even on the Sabbath! However, the report linked above indicates vaccination rates in that area of NYC are lower than the national average, about 80%. It’s not clear why.

A similar outbreak occurred in a Jewish community in Antwerp, Belgium in 2007-2008. In that case, a large number of the parents of unvaccinated children all went to the same physician, who "was opposed to vaccination". Nice work, doc! A vaccination campaign was quickly set up to prevent the outbreak from spreading; together with a high overall rate of vaccination in Antwerp (94%!) this appears to have worked in stemming the tide of the outbreak there.

Most vaccination rates need to be at 90% or higher to provide herd immunity — where enough people are vaccinated that the potentially infectious disease in question basically doesn’t have a place to live. Lower rates mean more people can host the bug, and an outbreak can occur. Worse, the mumps vaccine (usually given together with a measles and rubella vaccination, the so-called MMR shot) has a somewhat lower immunization rate of 80% effectiveness after one dose (that is, 80% of people receiving the shot develop immunity after that one dose — which is why two doses are recommended). That means herd rates must be higher to prevent outbreaks.

The outbreak in NYC has been traced to an infected child who was visiting the area from the UK. Vaccination rates in the UK are lower, in large part due to the antivax scare started by Andrew Wakefield and his now-discredited study linking vaccines to other illnesses. There have been over 6000 cases of mumps in the UK this year so far (not even including the last quarter of 2009) — 6000, more than twenty times the cases we get in the US, and we have five times the population here.

All those thousands of kids suffering through mumps — and potential deafness, encephalitis, meningitis, orchitis in boys, and ovarian swelling in girls — because of the antivaxxers and their misinformation campaign.

The good news here is that enough people are vaccinated in the Brooklyn area to prevent this from becoming an epidemic. It’s clear there would be many more cases if that weren’t the case.

As always, don’t listen to the lies of the antivax movement. Go to your board-certified physician an ask them about vaccinations, and do the research yourself. Get the truth.

Tip o’ the syringe to BABloggee Cristiana Senni.

A bridge in Connecticut, January 2004: Having left New York at 4:30 am, I settled into my Honda hoping to reach Maine before nightfall. The first couple hours were uneventful until… suddenly the wheel locked, the brakes failed and my car spun haphazardly across three lanes to face oncoming traffic. Yet somehow, we didn’t suffer a scratch between us.

I was lucky, and I want to encourage readers in the northeast to keep black ice in mind as you brave the roads this morning. And since this is Discover blogs, what causes the slippery stuff anyway?

Black ice is ice that forms without many air bubbles inside, commonly occurring on roads as moisture from car exhaust condenses. Because it’s transparent, it takes on the color of whatever surface it forms on–and if you can detect black ice at all, it generally looks like wet asphalt. It can also form when temperatures are above freezing meaning it’s hard to be prepared. Unfortunately, four-wheel drive vehicles do not protect you from losing control and salt is also not as effective at freezing temperatures. And finally–as I observed firsthand–bridges and overpasses are often most dangerous because cold air circulates above and below elevated surfaces, making them freeze fastest.

I hope those driving on wintry roads today remember to be extra cautious.

* * * * * * * * * *

Given the winter storm blanketing the northeast, this is a re-post from March. Please drive carefully today.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I think we need more “Voyagers”.

Source

On Friday I posted about a video created by the NYC American Museum of Natural History taking you on a tour of the Universe.

I just received a note from Ben Oppenheimer, the Associate Curator and Professor at the Department of Astrophysics of the American Museum of Natural History (phew!), thanking me for linking to the video, but also noting that there is a lot more information available online about it, including background about the production, and his own blog.

But perhaps the coolest thing is that you can download their atlas — which has stars, galaxies, nebulae, everything — and use it to create your own fly-through of the Universe!

The software is not all that simple, but it can be used to create all sorts of tours of space. If you download it and make some, then post links to what you’ve done in the comments!

This week’s spectacular kissing series was captured last month in Amboseli, Kenya by primate researcher Catherine Markham:

Thanks to Catherine for contributing! Submit your original photo or artwork to The Science of Kissing Gallery here.

I participated in two panels while in Copenhagen, and the first–a discussion following a screening of the docu Owning the Weather–now has a YouTube video up recapping the event. Yours truly is in there, talking about the film and about geoengineering, as are scientists Stephen Schneider and Jason Blackstock. Hope you enjoy–don’t miss the incredible gigantic spinning globe that was displayed at the center of the Copenhagen city square, and is captured in the video:

Crispian Jago may be our single greatest weapon against nonsense that exists when it comes to the public. Why would I say that? Just go and read his brilliant satirical page, "The Ladybird Book of Chiropractic Treatment and English Libel Law".

Incredible. He sets the bar pretty high for himself — he did the Skeptics playing cards (he even made one for me), a homeopathic urine video, and much more. He’s hysterically funny, with a laser-sharp wit. When most of us are grinding our teeth and fuming, he is responding with humor that cuts right through the garbage and exposes the fetid underbelly of antiscience nonsense like chiropractic.

If you liked his Young Readers book, then please Digg it! Help spread the word, and show the world that science cannot be silenced.

Trigona carbonaria is a bee without a stinger, one of the 10 or so out of 2,000 Australian bee species to lack the feature. This doesn’t appear to have been any concern… at least not until the hive beetle Aethina tumida showed up. This invasive insect may have reached the island continent along with a flock of athletes during the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, and as the name suggests, it like to invade beehives. But it hasn’t been very successful in this case, thanks to creative defensive tactics by the bees.

Since the worker can’t sting, they instead make the beetles into mummies. Workers swarm to the approaching beetle, which adopts the turtle defense–tucking in its head and legs, according to researcher Mark Greco, whose team used CT scans to see the action inside the hive. Then the construction onslaught starts. From BBC News:

This gives the bees an opportunity to mummify their enemy, which they do by coating the invasive parasites in resin, wax and mud.

“The beetles remain in position and eventually starve and shrivel on the spot,” Mr Greco told BBC Earth News.

Within 10 minutes, Greco says, the bee flurry repulses the beetle attack and saves the colony.

Related Content:
Discoblog: Rat Risotto & Emu Chips: Thing Not to Eat in Australia
Discoblog: To Fight Croc-Killing Toads, Australians Turn to “Cane Toad Golf”
Discoblog: Bees on a Plane! 10,000 Bees Swarm an Airplane Wing in Massachusetts

Image: Mark K. Greco

The genomes of lung and skin cancer have been decoded by scientists at the UK-based Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute near Cambridge, which is the first time an entire cancer gene map has been created.

The scientists say they have pinpointed specific DNA errors that may cause tumors in these two cancers, both of which have direct known causes—smoking for lung cancer and sun exposure for skin cancer. Researchers predict these maps will offer patients a personalized treatment option that ranges from earlier detection to the types of medication used to treat cancer. The genetic maps will also allow cancer researchers to study cells with defective DNA and produce more powerful drugs to fight the errors, according to the the study’s scientists [CNN]. News reports are heralding the new research as revolutionary, however it will be years, perhaps decades, before the full implications of the work are understood.

The lung cancer and skin cancer studies, which were published in the journal Nature, found the DNA code for a skin cancer called melanoma contained more than 30,000 errors almost entirely caused by too much sun exposure. The lung cancer DNA code had more than 23,000 errors largely triggered by cigarette smoke exposure [BBC News]. The bullet point grabbing most headlines is that the scientists say for every 15 cigarettes a person smokes, they acquire a new mutation in their DNA. Not all of those mutations will be in areas of a person’s DNA related to cancer, but some will.

According to Mike Stratton, of the Cancer Genome Project at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, “these catalogues of mutations are telling us about how the cancer has developed, so they will inform us on prevention. They tell us about all the processes which are disrupted in cancer cells, which we can try to influence through our treatments. So this is a really fundamental moment in the history of cancer research. I can envisage a time a decade or more hence when these catalogues will become routine, and influential in selecting treatment for that individual. That’s what we’re expecting—every cancer patient will have one of these charts” [London Times]. However, just because scientists now possess this genetic information, it doesn’t necessarily mean a cure for cancer is around the corner. The sequencing of the human genome almost 10 years ago had many researchers giddy about the possibility of personalized medicine and gene therapy, but it’s been much harder to translate the genomic data into treatments than many anticipated.

The study is a part of the International Cancer Genome Consortium, which involves countries around the world working on similar cancer-genome-sequencing projects. The UK is looking at breast cancer; the U.S. at brain, ovary, and pancreatic cancer; China at stomach cancer; Japan at the liver; and India at mouth cancer. The completion of all this work is at least five years—and several hundreds of thousand dollars—into the future, say the researchers.

Related Content:
80beats: Can a Genetic Variation Boost Empathy and Reduce Stress?
80beats: What Can We Learn From the Naked Mole Rat’s Immunity to Cancer?
80beats: Murderer With “Violent Genes” Gets Lighter Sentence in Italian Court

Image: iStockphoto

Over the past few days, I’ve been following a tale of paleontological woe with a surprisingly happy ending.

Matt Wedel, a paleontologist, has been blogging about his experience with a television show on the Discovery Channel called Clash of the Dinosaurs. It didn’t go well. The producers edited Wedel’s interviews to turn his words around 180 degrees. For example, remember that old notion of big dinosaurs having a second brain along their spinal column? Not true! Wedel explained this, but if you tune into the show, you see Wedel essenitally saying, True!

Wedel understandably flipped out. He complained to the producers and got back a non-apology that just made him angrier. He was transformed into the terrible Blogosaurus, and with his resonant nasal cavity he let out a clarion call for his fellow blogosaurs to stampede the production company

I’ve heard this sort of story many times before, and this is where it usually ends. Blogosaurus slinks back to his office and sulks.

But today the story has another ending. Wedel now reports that someone from the Discovery Channel called him up and is going to make things right. I can only guess that blogs do actually make a difference some of the time. Or maybe just this once.

Still, I find this story heartening, because I find science on television to be so vexing. We’re at the point now where all the pieces are in place for some utterly exhilarating programs. We’ve got awesome computer graphics. We’ve got lightweight HD cameras that people can bring to out-of-the-way places. We’ve got scientists ready to give their time and expertise. We’ve got all sorts of innovative ideas about how to make documentaries. Sometimes they add up into good science shows, but rarely great ones. And too often we end up with Clash of the Dinosaurs, or worse.

There are three kinds of terrible science shows on television.

1. The sleepy, dutiful schlep. Just because a show is accurate doesn’t mean that it’s worth watching.

2. The show that’s crazy from the start. Exhibit A: Nostradamus 2012. Just full-goose bozo from scene one, and spreading misinformation far and wide.

3. The show that could’ve been a contender, instead of a bum, which is what it is. Wedel’s experience is a good example of this category. The show sounded great to Wedel when the producers described it to him. But along the way, somebody got the idea stuck in his or her head that it would be so cool for dinosaurs to have a second brain. It would look great. And so great effort and editing was undertaken to achieve that dream–with no apparent interest in whether it was actually true.

I’ve been involved peripherally in some television science shows. In some cases, the producers and I were totally on the same wavelength. I helped them make their shows accurate and clear, and they understood what I was getting at. In other cases, I got stuck in Category Three situations. I had to explain again and again why something in a script was just totally wrong. I wanted to rig up an electrified fence around the falsehood to keep the producers from sneaking back to it. The producers in these particular cases, I suspect, really do just care about the good look–or, rather, they don’t want to spend the time making the truth look good instead.

Wedel has had a small victory in Category Three. The DVD of Clash of the Dinosaurs will get right what the broadcast version got wrong. Wedel’s experience shows that scientists and audience members can have an effect on science TV. And I suspect that it also shows that deep down, television producers know that they can’t do science shows without scientists. (Although there’s always the chance they’ll turn to pseudo-scientists.)

Still, it would have been nice for the show to have been right from the start–and not just right, but to convey how scientists do science. Some have argued that the only way to be sure you don’t get involved in a turkey is to get lawyerly. Get the final approval on all your material in writing.

It’s good advice, up to a point. At best, it leads to a hostile detente between scientists and producers. If scientists just crouch in their offices, ready to thwack any passing television producer with legal documents, I don’t think we’ll see a blossoming of great science TV any time soon. For that to happen, there will have to be deeper partnerships, in which TV folks recognize what science is actually about, and scientists will leave their staid jargon and lecturing styles at the studio door and spend some serious time thinking about what documentaries can achieve.

In the meantime, as my fossiliferous friend Chris Norris notes, there’s always Wikipedia.

[Image: Sauroposeidon, Matt Wedel's beast of choice, via Wikipedia]

A peculiar flash of light glinting from Saturn’s largest moon confirms what’s been suspected for years: liquid lakes exist on the surface of Titan!

[Click to entitanate.]

The image above was taken on July 8, 2009 by the Cassini spacecraft. Light can reflect off the surface of liquids, producing a little sparkle or glint, called a specular reflection. Knowing that earlier images had shown what look to be lakes of liquid methane on Titan, they kept their eyes open for Cassini’s images of the moon to show such a glint. There are lots of lakes in the northern hemisphere of Titan, making the odds better it would be seen there, but it was only last year that spring sprung in Titan’s northern latitudes. That’s when it was finally possible to see sunlight plinking off of any purported standing liquid.

And that’s what we’re seeing here. They checked to make sure this wasn’t some other source of light like lightning or geologic activity, and were able to trace the position of this glint to the shores of a monstrous lake called, appropriately, Kraken Mare. It’s a sprawling 400,000 square kilometers, bigger than the Caspian sea!

Titan’s atmosphere is thick and hazy, so visible sunlight isn’t strong enough to produce a glint. The image was taken at 5 microns, well into the infrared, where Titan’s atmosphere is essentially transparent. Cassini was about 200,000 km (120,000 miles, about half the distance of the Earth to the Moon) away from Titan when the image was taken.

It’s a cool picture! It looks a lot like images of Earth taken from space. I don’t mean the color or fuzziness — both due to Titan’s smoggy air — but just the way our brain recognizes how a flash of light like that is from liquid. We have to double check our brains, of course, since we’re easily fooled, but the confirmation of it satisfies some part of my own brain that likes to categorize things.

And it also brings home, so to speak, just how Earthlike this alien world is. It has a thick atmosphere, weather, and a hydrological cycle… except where we have water, Titan has methane. And of course it’s incredibly cold there; water would be frozen into ice literally as hard as rock. But liquid on the surface harkens to another part of our brain, the piece that asks if life could arise in such a place.

The answer is, of course, we don’t know. Not for sure. But we can’t rule it out, either.

The more we learn about Titan — and everywhere in our solar system — the more intriguing and beguiling it gets. I know that even now scientists are planning the next generation of exploratory spacecraft. I hope one of them will take a much closer, and much wetter, look at this giant satellite world.

A sun glint off Titan. Click for larger. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/DLR

I know, we sort of knew there is probably lakes of methane or some similar hydrocarbons but to be able to see more evidence is pretty fun to me and I’m sure mind boggling to the Cassini mission and Titan researchers everywhere. This glint is a pretty remarkable catch. I wonder if we can repeat it sometime knowing the configuration required to see it. All things being equal I suppose it is up to the atmospheric conditions on the moon.

From the Cassini site:

This image shows the first flash of sunlight reflected off a lake on Saturn’s moon Titan. The glint off a mirror-like surface is known as a specular reflection. This kind of glint was detected by the visual and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIMS) on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft on July 8, 2009. It confirmed the presence of liquid in the moon’s northern hemisphere, where lakes are more numerous and larger than those in the southern hemisphere. Scientists using VIMS had confirmed the presence of liquid in Ontario Lacus, the largest lake in the southern hemisphere, in 2008.

The northern hemisphere was shrouded in darkness for nearly 15 years, but the sun began to illuminate the area again as it approached its spring equinox in August 2009. VIMS was able to detect the glint as the viewing geometry changed. Titan’s hazy atmosphere also scatters and absorbs many wavelengths of light, including most of the visible light spectrum. But the VIMS instrument enabled scientists to look for the glint in infrared wavelengths that were able to penetrate through the moon’s atmosphere. This image was created using wavelengths of light in the 5 micron range.

By comparing the new image to radar and near-infrared light images acquired from 2006 to 2008, Cassini scientists were able to correlate the reflection to the southern shoreline of a Titan lake called Kraken Mare. The sprawling Kraken Mare covers about 400,000 square kilometers (150,000 square miles). The reflection appeared to come from a part of the lake around 71 degrees north latitude and 337 degrees west latitude.

It was taken on Cassini’s 59th flyby of Titan on July 8, 2009, at a distance of about 200,000 kilometers (120,000 miles). The image resolution was about 100 kilometers (60 miles) per pixel. Image processing was done at the German Aerospace Center in Berlin and the University of Arizona in Tucson.

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 was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team is based at the University of Arizona, Tucson.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm. The visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team homepage is at http://wwwvims.lpl.arizona.edu.

So this time, a guy leaves a brillo pad (for those not from the U.S., a steel wool pad with soap in it to scour pans and such) in his sink. He removes it, and what does he see?

He claims it’s Jesus.

Um. Seriously? I mean really, Jesus? In that?

He may claim that, but I think we all know who it really is.

Tip o’ Karen Black’s sharpened teeth to Fark (warning: potentially inappropriate language in that thread because, duh, it’s Fark).

Cocaine and heroin are generally acknowledged to be fairly dangerous chemicals to put in your body. And that’s not even considering that cocaine could well be tainted with opossum de-worming medication and heroin may be laced with anthrax—that’s right, anthrax.

Yes, it’s been a week of dangerous and deadly adulterants showing up in recreational drugs. DISCOVER actually highlighted the story of the tainted cocaine back in September, when the Drug Enforcement Agency first announced that they had found cocaine tainted with levamisole. The drug is used to treat cancer in humans and as a de-worming agent in livestock, but can have dire effects on the immune system. Just how it got into cocaine nobody knows for sure, though scientists think it may spark a more intense high for users.

Today, the Centers for Disease Control has published a report documenting levamisole in cocaine in four states; the organization found 21 cases and one death. The DEA suggests that nearly 70 percent of cocaine coming into the U.S. contains levamisole, and the CDC acknowledges that there were probably many more illnesses in the states it studied that went unreported, as tends to happen with highly illegal drugs.

Meanwhile, in Scotland, at least two heroin users appear to have died from anthrax. Again, the authorities are trying to get the message out to heroin users through the news media, though they’re not sure exactly how the problem came to be. From The Guardian:

“It’s highly conceivable that it could have been contaminated either from the source in the [heroin's] origin country or it could have been contaminated as a consequence of subsequent cutting when it arrived in this country,” said Dr Colin Ramsay, of Health Protection Scotland.

Related Content:
80beats: One-Third of U.S. Cocaine Tainted with Dangerous Livestock Drug
80beats: Honeybees Get High on Cocaine and Dance, Dance, Dance
80beats: To Help Heroin Addicts, Give Them… Prescription Heroin?

Image: iStockphoto