For soldiers and civilians alike, insurgency wars are not only deadly but also frustrating in their apparently random spikes of violence. In a study in Nature, however, researchers put forth a mathematical model that shows terrorist attacks and insurgencies are not so scattershot as they seem.

The team searched for statistical similarities across nine historic and ongoing insurgencies including those of Iraq, Afghanistan and Northern Ireland [BBC News]. That meant compiling more than 50,000 acts of violence. And despite the fact that these events happened in different countries in different times, Neil Johnson and his team found a relationship between the size of an attack in casualty terms and how often it occurs.

By plotting the distribution of the frequency and size of events, the team found that insurgent wars follow an approximate power law, in which the frequency of attacks decreases with increasing attack size to the power of 2.5. That means that for any insurgent war, an attack with 10 casualties is 316 times more likely to occur than one with 100 casualties (316 is 10 to the power of 2.5) [Nature].

Researchers have used power laws to try to find order in natural phenomena, like a size vs. frequency pattern in earthquakes or avalanches. Johnson and his colleagues argue that the pattern arises because insurgent wars lack a coherent command network and operate more as a “soup of groups”, in which cells form and disband when they sense danger, then reform in different sizes and composition [Nature]. Also, he says, terrorist groups compete for media attention, which could help drive the pattern.

Other researchers doubt the reliability of the model. For one thing, terror cells battle one another and probably aren’t as free to break up and reform as the study suggests, terrorism modeler Roy Lindelauf says. And the number of insurgents in a fight might not stay close to constant, as the model presumes. But the math could have real-world practicality, team member Michael Spagat argues. “We could never say with certainty that there were going to be 10 attacks on one day, for example,” [BBC News] he says, but the model could predict whether a given day carried a lighter or heavier probability for a deadly attack.

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Image: flickr / :.phoenix.:

For those too busy (or self-important?) to pocket the iPhone while walking down the street and too safety-conscious to blunder out into traffic while texting, we’ve got just the app for you, via Gadget Venue:

The application is called Type and Walk and makes use of the camera on your iPhone to push video in to the background of an application where you can type on top of the video, thus being able to see obstacles as you are walking.

Type n Walk was designed to work with your favorite apps — not try to replace them. Use it to compose your email, text message, status update, or tweet and paste it into your target app (or the browser) to send.

Yes, the app shows you the same thing you’d see if you just looked ahead of you without the iPhone, the same way people have for thousands of years, and animals before them for millions of years. Is it genius? A signal that our species has really, finally gone too far with this technology thing?

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Video: YouTube / typenwalk

A few days ago I changed my facebook photo to feature Neytiri, a central character from James Cameron’s much anticipated new film Avatar. Displaying an ‘avatar‘ as my avatar seemed funny, but to my surprise, several ‘friends’ emailed puzzled over the switch. And while a simple facebook pic requires no explanation, it’s good reason to bring up the movie, which looks visually spectacular with an intriguing story to boot. Over at The New Yorker:

James Cameron’s “Avatar” is the most beautiful film I’ve seen in years. Amid the hoopla over the new power of 3-D as a narrative form, and the excitement about the complicated mix of digital animation and live action that made the movie possible, no one should ignore how lovely “Avatar” looks, how luscious yet freewheeling, bounteous yet strange. As Cameron surges through the picture plane, brushing past tree branches, coursing alongside foaming-mouthed creatures, we may be overcome by an uncanny sense of emerging, becoming, transcending—a sustained mood of elation produced by vaulting into space.

I’m very much looking forward to the premiere and extremely curious to see how Cameron and his team imagined this other world called ‘Pandora’ and its Na’vi inhabitants. What can I say… the science geek in me just loves the possibilities! There’s already a community blog and lots of enticing reviews around the interwebs.

While I don’t catch many films this days, you bet I’ll be buying tickets for Avatar in 3D. Who’s with me?

The Information is Beautiful site is really wonderful; David McCandless presents information, well, beautifully, using graphics with accompanying text. It’s a great way to take complicated, contentious issues and simplify them, making them easier to understand.

This time, he’s taken on global warming, creating what to me looks like a well-balanced presentation, fairly representing the arguments. While this probably won’t change anyone’s minds on its own, it is a handy tool to show some of the arguments.

Tip o’ the ice core to my big sister Marci.

And the exoplanet count marches on. A few days ago astronomers announced they had found a handful of new planets around sun-like stars, some only 29 light years away. Now, in a study published today in Nature, a team led by David Charbonneau unveils a new super-Earth that’s hot, watery, and only 2.68 times the size of our own world.

The planet currently bares the name GJ 1214b, and while Charbonneau says it’s probably not habitable (because of the 400-degree Fahrenheit surface temperature), it’s not too far off the mark. Geoffrey W. Marcy, a planet hunter from the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in an accompanying article in Nature that the new work provided “the most watertight evidence so far for a planet that is something like our own Earth, outside our solar system” [The New York Times].

Despite the heat, the astronomers say, their new planet most likely holds a lot of water. By determining the new world’s mass and size as it passed in front of its star, the researchers could calculate its density: one-third that of Earth. Because water has a much lower density than rock, astronomers figured that the “most plausible scenario is a planet made mostly of water, with a significant atmosphere,” says Charbonneau. So despite its high temperature, GJ 1214b’s high atmospheric pressure and relatively low density mean liquid water could exist there after all [TIME].

Finding GJ 1214b didn’t take a giant telescope or a space observatory like NASA’s Kepler mission. The team used an array of smaller telescopes on an Arizona mountaintop, and project called MEarth. Relatively dim, relatively close stars were favored because the planet’s dimming effect would be more noticeable than it would be with brighter, bigger, farther-out stars [MSNBC]. One of Charbonneau’s graduate students noticed the blip as the planet passed in front of its star, and it didn’t take long to confirm the find: GJ 1214b orbits its M-dwarf star once every 38 hours.

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Image: David A. Aguilar/CfA

Discover is a science magazine. DiscoverBlogs is a science blogging site. And as far as I can see, pretty much everybody here accepts the well established scientific consensus on global warming, which is that it is real and human caused.

Whenever I blog about the matter, though, there is always a cascade of denialist/skeptic comments, frequently of enough magnitude to overwhelm the pro-science commenters. That cascade has been particularly pronounced as I’ve blogged more and more about “ClimateGate,” but it has been a smouldering fire for a long time. And as far as I can tell, although we have gotten some anti-climate science links, such as from Morano, they are not sufficient to explain the phenomenon.

So here’s my somewhat befuddled and honestly, generally curious question–and I really don’t have an answer to it–do a lot of regular online readers of Discover doubt the science of global warming? Or, alternatively, are a lot of the “skeptics” that we’re getting here non-regular readers who are coming from elsewhere for some reason?

The 133rd edition of the Carnival of Space is up at Next Big Future. You know what to do. Click there and read all the cool blog posts, I mean. I guess you probably really did know that already.

I love this quote from my Massachusetts senator who is here in Copenhagen (hat tip to the WWF Climate Blog):

There isn’t a nation on the planet where the evidence of the impacts of climate change isn’t mounting. Frankly, those who look for any excuse to continue challenging the science have a fundamental responsibility which they have never fulfilled: Prove us wrong or stand down. Prove that the pollution we put in the atmosphere is not having the harmful effect we know it is. Tell us where the gases go and what they do. Pony up one single, cogent, legitimate, scholarly analysis. Prove that the ocean isn’t actually rising; prove that the ice caps aren’t melting, that deserts aren’t expanding. And prove that human beings have nothing to do with any of it. And by the way — good luck!

Ladies and Gentlemen: Here in Copenhagen, now and forever, amateur hour is over. It’s time for science fact to trump science fiction.

Amen. These tough words are totally justified, especially in light of the new extremes that climate denialism has reached lately.

Doctors at the University of Miami have developed an improvised way to perform a long-distance organ transplant involving the islet cells of the pancreas, which produces insulin and other enzymes the body requires.

A 21-year-old Air Force enlistee, Tre Francesco Porfirio, was shot while on duty in Afghanistan and his pancreas was essentially destroyed. With an injury like that, Porfirio’s prognosis was very difficult: If he could survive long enough to get to a specialized transplant center, he could perhaps get a transplant of islet cells from a deceased donor and take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of his life. Or doctors could remove his pancreas, leaving him completely dependent on insulin. Either way, an early death from complications of Type 1 diabetes was highly likely [Los Angeles Times].

So doctors went with an experimental procedure that involved removing the young man’s pancreas, flying it from Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. to the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine. There, a team of doctors, led by Camillo Ricordi, director of the University of Miami’s Diabetes Research Institute, removed and purified the islet cells, flew them back to Walter Reed, and fed them back into Porfirio’s liver through a tube. Within days the cells in the liver began to produce insulin, basically doing the work of the removed pancreas.

Only 15 cities have medical centers equipped to prepare islet cells for transplant, but the new procedure is a way to expand the centers’ reach. Porfirio is unusual also in that his islet cells came from his own pancreas, which, while in shreds, was not dead yet. Most patients must rely on a deceased donor’s pancreas and must take anti-rejection drugs to ensure their immune system doesn’t attack the foreign cells. The ability to use Porfirio’s own islet cells for the transplant, while “very rare,” according to Ricordi, means he will not face rejection issues that make such transplants a lifelong challenge for recipients [Los Angeles Times]. The transplant was performed around Thanksgiving, and is the first of its kind. This procedure, although undoubtedly expensive, may one day become available to patients that have not only suffered pancreatic trauma, but also to those with chronic pancreatitis.

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You know the prevailing posture of a bat in repose—hanging upside down. All but six of the known 1,200 bat species in the world roost with their heads down, but now naturalists have had the chance to study a Madagascar bat that not only roosts right-side-up, it hangs onto surfaces in a totally unexpected way.

Myzopoda aurita is endangered and listed as vulnerable to extinction. But a team lead by Brown University’s Daniel Riskin got to travel to Madagascar and found colonies of the bat in newly grown forests. There they found that the bat roosts right side up by deploying a kind of liquid adhesive.

This was a surprise. As you can see in the image, Myzopoda aurita appears to have sucker-type feet like many bats do. But by demonstrating that the bat could stick to both surfaces with tiny holes and surfaces with those holes covered by tape, the researchers showed that it wasn’t using suction to stick (if it was, the bat wouldn’t be able to create a seal and therefore couldn’t stick to the holey surface). They also discovered a nomenclature problem on their hands. From Science Daily:

While the finding settles the question of how the bats roost, it means science has misnamed the bat. “Myzopoda literally means ’sucker foot,’” Riskin, the paper’s lead author, said. “You can’t change Latin names, so it’s stuck with it.”

For the whole story on Myzopoda, see “Spiderman’s Bats” by DISCOVER blogger Carl Zimmer.

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Image: Brown University

Holy yikes: an iceberg 25 kilometers across that broke off of Antarctica in 2000 has made a break for it and is headed toward Australia! Check this out:

Whoa. The berg has been monitored from space by NASA since November. Usually, they circulate around Antarctica due to currents there but this one managed to escape, and is drifting northeast toward Australia’s south-southwest coast. Since it broke off the main ice mass it shrank from 140 square kilometers (and may I say HOLY CRAP 140 SQUARE KILOMETERS! That’s 54 square miles!) down to 115 square km.

If you’re not sure how big that is, then think on this: Manhattan is 88 sq km. It would fit comfortably inside that iceberg.

NASA is monitoring this berg using the Terra and Aqua satellites designed for just this purpose. A shipping warning has been issued — though it may be hard to miss a chunk of ice 20 freaking kilometers across, the berg itself is calving, and smaller shards could be a hazard to ships in the area.

That is a whole lot of ice. I can’t help thinking: it’s actually bigger than the Kuiper Belt Object spotted by Hubble which I wrote about earlier. And it’s a whole lot closer. Wow.

How is your brain like a telegraph? Check out my latest column in Discover for the answer.

Artists concept of smallest KBO. Click for larger. Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI) Science Credit: NASA, ESA, and H. Schlichting (Caltech)

The image shown here is an artist concept depicting Hubble’s detection of the smallest Kuiper Belt Object or KBO yet found.

You might be wondering why there is an artists concept and not the actual image.  The object, just 3,200 feet across, is estimated to be 4,200,000,000 miles away and “shines” at 35th magnitude that’s 100 times fainter than even Hubble can see!!  I guess “shines” isn’t really a good term, but you know what I mean.

The image was found by it occultation of a star.  The KBO passed in front of a star causing it to wink out briefly.  By knowing the instrument on Hubble samples changes 40 times a second, the researchers involved determined the event to last 0.3 seconds so they could calculate how large something would be to have to be.

Read the full story here at the Hubble page.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Wow, the WISE spacecraft launched from Vandenberg AFB this morning.  I posted the video in case anybody who wanted to see it could.  I was busy trying to solve some stupid “crises” at work and missed it completely – the so called “crises” was some billing error that turned out to be nothing to do with me.

The launch was just the first mile stone for WISE, the second occurred  shortly after the spacecraft separated from rocket, it oriented itself so the solar panels could soak up the sunlight it will need for power.  Once that was complete, another 17 minutes passed and valves on the cryostat opened so the WISE instrument can cool down.

The WISE instrument must be colder than the objects it is observing and some of them can be very cold.  So they use….get this…hydrogen ICE (!!!) for the cooling.  Oh dear, we are looking at – 447 ^oF.  WOW!

On another note, did anybody get to see the meteor shower?  I am hearing it was very good.  It was raining here, yeah rain.  When the rain started the thermometer read 32 ^oF, not good, however we climbed to near 40 and right here so I am glad about that.  I am going to try and watch tonight, but I’m not real hopeful.

Those hoping to read Marian’s response to the riddle, you need only to wait a bit longer.  Don’t worry, it’s coming.

Video source

We should probably stop being amazed at the things octopuses can do and just accept that they’re just unfathomably cool (pun fully intended). Case in point: The veined octopus totes around coconut shells that it then hides in. Check out the footage, courtesy of Australia’s Museum Victoria:

In another video on YouTube that Ed Yong features in his post on Not Exactly Rocket Science, a coconut-clad octopus is strolling along the ocean floor on two tentacles and doing a pretty good job of disguising itself as a rolling coconut.

So what’s the big deal? Well, as Yong points out, the veined octopus uses the coconut shells as actual tools and is able to deploy them as needed. Unlike hermit crabs that live inside their body armor, the veined octopus only uses its armor when it senses danger. It’s able to seal itself inside a hollow coconut husk using its suckers to hold two halves of a shell in place.

Because it has the foresight to carry around the components of a make-shift panic room, this means the octopus is even smarter than originally believed. Scientists are now discovering that some marine invertebrates possess abilities once thought to be reserved for humans.

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Video: Museum Victoria

In the not too distant future, testing for certain cancers may be completed in less time than it takes to watch an episode of Scrubs. A new portable device, expected to be about the size of a paperback book, works by detecting biomarkers in the blood, substances that suggest that a patient is diseased. The sensor, which uses nanotechnology, is so accurate that it could pick up a grain of salt in a swimming pool, claim the researchers [Telegraph]. With just a small amount of blood and 20 minutes, doctors can have an electronic read out of biomarker concentrations at their fingertips. The research, led by Mark Reed at Yale University, may lead to quick, easy, and low-cost cancer tests.

Reed says the technology would be ideal for measuring lung cancer biomarkers in a phlegm sample, or colon or ovarian cancer biomarkers in a blood sample, making their technology the first to measure biomarkers from normal samples of bodily fluids. Previous technologies work in much the same way, but can only detect biomarkers in purified solutions, not the real thing — meaning fluid samples from patients [U.S. News and World Report]. The applications aren’t limited to cancer biomarker measurements; the researchers say they could also measure cardiovascular disease biomarkers in small blood samples. The scientists have published their research in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

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Image: Mark Reed / Yale University

Astronomers announced today the discovery of at least four — and as many as six — planets orbiting two nearby stars. These planets are relatively low mass, ranging from 5 to 25 times the mass of the Earth. For comparison, Jupiter is over 300 times more massive than the Earth, and Uranus 15 times our mass.

Three of these extrasolar planets orbit the nearby star 61 Virginis, which is only about 28 light years away (that’s a stone’s throw in galactic terms). 61 Vir has been a target for planet hunters for some time because it’s very much like our Sun: while it has slightly less mass and is a tad less bright, its temperature is almost the exactly the same as the Sun’s. It’s about 6 billion years old, 1.5 billion years older than the Sun. It’s bright (easily visible to the unaided eye from a dark site), making it easy to study. It also has a very similar chemical composition as the Sun, which may be important in the planet-making business. And now we know it has planets! Little ones, too.

Here is a schematic of the system:

Inner planets in our solar system are shown with dotted lines, and the three 61 Vir planets as solid lines. As you can see, they all orbit closer than Earth does to the Sun, and the third one out has a fairly elliptical orbit. In order from their star, the planets have masses of approximately, 5, 18, and 24 times the Earth’s mass (they may be somewhat more depending on our viewing geometry, which is difficult to determine). They orbit 61 Vir in 4, 38, and 124 days respectively. While all of these are far more massive than the Earth, they represent big steps forward in finding more Earthlike planets, since they are in fact low mass compared to other planets found, and the outer one takes longer to orbit than usual as well.

Interestingly, recent Spitzer Space Telescope observations indicate a fairly hefty ring of dust around 61 Vir as well, at a distance of about twice the distance of Neptune from the Sun. This probably comes from collisions of comets and asteroids, meaning that this system 300 trillion kilometers away really does look a lot like our own solar system.

On top of that, another sunlike star, HD 1461, was found to have at least one planet orbiting it. The planet has about 7.5 times the Earth’s mass, and orbits close in, taking six days to circle the star once. There may be two other planets orbiting this star as well, but the signals from them are just a bit too weak to be sure.

All of these planets were found by analyzing the stars’ light and looking for a periodic Doppler shift. As a planet orbits its star, it in turn pulls the star around very slightly, and that can be seen as a teeny shift in the wavelength of the starlight. And by teeny, I mean really teeny; it’s only been the past 15 or so years that this method has been refined enough to yield results.

So this is very cool, and brings us another step closer to what we all really want to find: a terrestrial planet orbiting a star in an Earthlike orbit. That doesn’t guarantee life — heck, it doesn’t even guarantee the planet will look anything like Earth at all (just take a peek at Venus and Mars to confirm that), but this new discovery does mean that lower-mass planets are abundant in the galaxy. And that’s very cool news indeed.

Orbital schematic credit: Chris Tinney

Northern New Mexico is an absolutely fabulous place to live. But, on occasion, I wish I had a teleporter handy. One of those occasions would be when the “Swell of the Century” hits the Hawaiian Islands, as it did last week. It turned out to be more like the “Swell of the Decade”, but apparently was nonetheless quite spectacular. Spectacular enough to hold the Eddie, a big-wave contest that can only be held in epic conditions.

There’s some good video here and here. Conditions were apparently squirrely, so most of the footage consists of fairly spectacular drops leading to gnarly wipeouts. Every now and then someone (often Kelly Slater [at left above]) emerges intact. Unless you’ve been out in overhead+ surf, I think it’s hard to fathom just how powerful these waves can be. You’ve bodysurfed three footers, and you think you have a clue. But you don’t. For a little perspective, here’s an excellent video from a (professional) surfer who wiped out at Jaws (on the north shore of Maui; it only fires on big days [like last week]). He survived (more-or-less).

While Hawaii was being slammed by water horizontally, we got a vertical contribution (in the form of a couple of feet of snow). It’s time to go dust off my snowboard.

The National Center For Science Education (now at its new ncse.com address) is offering a free pdf of a chapter from my book, The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution. The chapter, called “Radiations and Extinctions,” is about the two sides of biodiversity. First I look at how biodiversity rises over time (the ascent of the animal kingdom, for example, and the wild exuberance of insects). Then I look at how biodiversity falls, thanks to background extinctions and mass extinctions. And then I take a look forward and see ominous signs for biodiversity’s future, such as corroding oceans.

If you like what you read, you can find out more about The Tangled Bank here. Or you can cut to the chase and get the whole book–as a holiday gift for yourself, or for that special someone who keeps asking you how we can be descended from monkeys if there are still monkeys around.