Andrew Revkin, the climate ace, is leaving the New York Times. The trend towards fewer and fewer science journalists in the mainstream media continues….and meanwhile, as we’ve just seen, in their absence we get Fox News style phony balanced coverage and attempts to artificially create scientific “debates” where none actually exist.

The situation is grim out there for coverage of science…just when we most need that coverage to be functional and healthy.

Note: CJR has more on the Revkin departure (he took a buyout and will apparently continue blogging at Dot Earth) here.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has returned another incredible picture of an Apollo landing site, this time of our second manned walk on another world… and again, the footprints of the astronauts are clearly visible!

In November 1969, Apollo 12 touched down near the Surveyor 3 probe, which had soft-landed two years previously. The astronauts walked up to the lander and even brought back pieces of it! Surveyor is easily seen in this image, as well as the craters Pete Conrad and Al Bean investigated. In this high-resolution image (taken in September), you can even see their bootprints radiating away from their lander!

After the other Apollo images from LRO, I know this is more of the same. But don’t let it fall from your mind that these images show that once, not long ago, we dared to explore. For those few shining moments, we reached farther than our grasp, and managed to do something extraordinary. We let that slip away not too much later. Yes, our robots probe and peer into every corner of the solar system, and have done a magnificent job. But I am of the opinion that we need to send men and women out there as well, to extend the human presence beyond our own planet, beyond a simple low-Earth orbit.

I don’t know when we will exceed our grasp again. But I hope it’s soon.

Despite their tiny size and short lifespan, fruit flies are familiar test subjects in labs because they can show us a lot about ourselves, particularly in terms of genetics. And in a study for Current Biology, a team led by Anita Devineni found that the insects have another thing in common with people—they like alcohol, sometimes a little too much.

The scientists started by giving their test subjects a choice. Flies held inside vials could sip from thin tubes holding either liquid food spiked with 15 percent ethanol or plain liquid food. The researchers measured the descent of the liquids inside each tube to get a readout of which food the flies preferred [Science News]. It was no contest: The flies preferred the alcohol-spiked food, and the more they had it, it seems, the more they craved it—the flies’ tipples grew more frequent over time [National Geographic News].

Researchers found other signs of addiction similar to human alcoholism. When they upped the alcohol content from 15 to 25 percent, flies who hadn’t been drinking didn’t care for the harder stuff, but those already accustomed to alcohol slurped it up. When the researchers laced the booze-food mix with small amounts of the toxic chemical quinine, those flies continued to drink, even though fruit flies normally avoid the chemical. “I was actually pretty surprised when they continued to drink it,” Devineni says [Science News].

That alcohol has strong effects on fruit flies is unremarkable; other studies have shown that. But Devineni’s study offered the flies a choice to drink or not, which revealed some new ways it can change them. Her team found that flies even relapse: those allowed to drink for a few days and then forced to abstain for a day or two went right back to boozing at peak levels when the scientists offered the spiked food again. The team hopes to investigate the genetics behind this behavior in the future, in hopes of zeroing in on the genetic component of alcoholism in humans.

Related Content:
80beats: Tiny Tree Shrews Live on Alcohol, But Never Get Drunk
80beats: Cheesecake is Like Heroin to Rats on a Junk-Food Diet
80beats: Fetal Alcohol Exposure Makes For Booze-Loving Rats
Discoblog: A Scientific Defense of Beer

Image: Edward Dougherty

This weekend, Fox News had a “debate” over global warming between Senate denier James Inhofe and Dem Ed Markey, chair of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. The question: Does global warming actually exist?

This is of course not really a debate, but biased coverage that undermines what we know by suggesting there is really an open question here. Think Progress has more, including this stunning exchange between host Chris Wallace and Inhofe:

WALLACE: The fact is, just this week, the world meteorological organization said that this decade is the warmest on record, and that 2009 is the 5th warmest year on record. Does that mean nothing?

INHOFE: It means very little. Because that was based on the same flawed science — the IPCC science — that we have been looking at.

Yup–for Inhofe, it’s all a vast conspiracy and it all centers on the IPCC. Even though the IPCC only assesses the science every 5 years, and certainly hasn’t assessed the temperature record between, um, its assessments….

It’s pretty unfair to call somebody “anti-science.” I mean, everybody likes science, right?

That’s what I always thought–at least until fairly recently. That Daniel Henninger Wall Street Journal article got me thinking otherwise, a bit–but only a bit.

But now comes a piece in Investors.com (”powered by” Investor’s Business Daily) by David J. Theroux, who is head of the Independent Institute, a think tank that in the past has been a recipient of ExxonMobil largesse. “Science is not the final arbiter of truth,” blazes the headline–but hey, we all know authors don’t write their headlines.

But the rest of the article is actually in a similar vein:

Thanks to the e-mail exchanges and other documents hacked from computers at the Hadley Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Great Britain, we now know there has been a conspiracy among some in the science community to spread alarmist views of global warming and intimidate, if not silence, those who disagree.

Let’s hope these revelations result in a sober reassessment both of academia, generally, and the scientific enterprise specifically.

There’s no evidence of a conspiracy, actually, in those emails. Nor is there evidence of anything at all surprising about academia or about science. But Theroux continues:

For far too long, science has been shrouded in a cloak of unquestionable authority as the final arbiter of all knowledge (except, of course, when the research has been funded by business, which for some makes it necessarily suspect).

Such a status has resulted in the creation of enormous, government-funded institutions to examine seemingly every aspect of human existence, with climate science alone receiving $7 billion annually from the U.S. government — more than is spent on cancer and AIDS research.

Unlike business- or even independently funded research, the findings and recommendations of government-funded researchers has been viewed by many as sacrosanct.

Sacrosanct? In my experience, government-funded researchers are under constant fire, and nowhere more than on the climate issue. Indeed, they have been under fire from think tanks like the Independent Institute and its many brethren, who wish to set up an ideological counter academia that will, I assure you, be massively more biased, and massively less dependable, than anything that currently exists in either academia or established science.

Theroux finishes:

The Climate-gate revelations may finally dispel the myth that has surrounded the global warming movement and trigger a movement to put scientific inquiry back into the laboratory and keep it out of the political arena.

Which is weird….because anybody who knows anything about scientists knows that they tend to be really shy about venturing into the political arena. Bizarrely, Theroux wants to lock scientists back up in the lab where, frankly, many would be glad to stay in the first place–because they know well there are many ideological opponents out there, out gunning for them.

It continually astounds me just how much some conservatives live in an upside-down world with respect to modern science. They fear a thing that does not exist; they demonize the unknown. I simply don’t understand how they could talk about “ClimateGate” in the way they do–in the way Theroux does–if they had any serious sense of the realities of trying to conduct science while under fire, in a politicized area like climate research.

Or, alternatively, perhaps conservatives do understand these realities, but are simply engaging in a deafening chorus of “shocked, shocked” behavior.

Either way, it is telling that, by way of spinning “ClimateGate” into the scandal of the century, they feel compelled to denounce the entire infrastructure of modern science in the process.

[UPDATE: As of 8:10 a.m. Mountain time (15:10 GMT) the launch went well, and WISE is now orbiting the Earth. There will be some engineering checkouts over the next few hours, but everything looks good! Congrats to the WISE team!]

If all goes according to plan, a Delta II rocket will thunder into the California sky at 9:09 a.m. EST (14:09 GMT) Monday, carrying the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) into orbit.

WISE is an amazing instrument. It will survey the entire sky in the far mid infrared, with much better resolution than ever before. It is expected to detect hundreds of millions of objects, including galaxies, faint, cool stars, asteroids in our solar system, and much more. Amy Mainzer, Deputy Project Scientist for WISE, is in a video that explains what it’ll do (sorry, the embedding didn’t work, but click through and watch it).

WISE is a precursor mission to the James Webb Space Telescope, a huge infrared observatory that will be to the mid infrared sky what Hubble is to the visible, near IR, and near UV. Surveying the entire sky will enable astronomers to make quite the wish list for JWST once it’s up and running in 2014.

I’m looking forward to seeing what WISE can do; the images alone should be jaw-droppingly beautiful, and of course the science will be great. You can watch the launch live on NASA TV, too.

Image credit: NASA/VAFB

The annual Geminids meteor shower peaks tonight, so if you’re willing to brave the cold weather (assuming it’s cold where you are) then tonight is your best chance! I wrote a guide to watching meteors showers a while back (it’s for a different shower, but the general advice still holds true) that should help, too. I’ve heard rumors that things will be pretty good tonight for people on the east coast of the U.S. after midnight. If the clouds dissipate tonight I may go for them myself… now that it’s finally warmed up to the better side of the freezing point of water around here.

And if you do observe, you can join people across the planet and record your observations on Twitter using the hashtag #MeteorWatch. Universe Today has details.

Here are the opening sentences of Chapter Five of my book:

When most people hear “scientist,” they think “Einstein.” Albert Einstein is an iconic figure; not many theoretical physicists attain a level of celebrity where their likeness appears regularly on T-shirts. But it’s an intimidating, distant celebrity. Unlike, say, Tiger Woods, the precise achievements for which Einstein is actually famous for remain somewhat mysterious to many people who would easily recognize his name.

And now we can add, “and some achievements should really stay mysterious, thanks just the same.”

The first selected submission to The Science of Kissing Gallery comes from photographer Lucie Kerley. I really love the way that snow makes this image look warm and cold at the same time.

You can visit Lucie’s website at http://www.luciekerley.co.uk and check out her blog for more great pictures.

Submit your own original photo or artwork for consideration at srkirshenbaum@yahoo.com.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The video is a preflight press conference about the WISE mission.  The first 15 or so minutes talks about the science and about the spacecraft after.  Very interesting stuff and a very ambitious mission.

Launch Date:  December 14, 2009 with a window at 9:09.33 to 9:23.51.

Odds of good weather: 80%

Yeah, I will try to record the launch, don’t hold your breath though, you know I am as apt to mess it up as not.

OH!!!!  Don’t forget to head outside and check out the Geminids meteor shower tonight!!!

Video source

Hubble's latest Ultra Deep Field image. Click for larger (you will be glad you did). Credit: NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth (UCO/Lick Observatory and the University of California, Santa Cruz), R. Bouwens (UCO/Lick Observatory and Leiden University), and the HUDF09 Team

Just look at what Hubble’s new camera can do!

Astronomers aimed Hubble at the same region of the sky as the famous Deep Field image taken in 2004.  This time around they used the WFC3 camera which can see in the near infrared allowing an even deeper look into the universe.

Click the image for a larger version, the faintest and reddest galaxies were formed just 600 million years after the Big Bang – Hubble’s deepest look into the past so far.

Visit the Hubble site (they have a zoomable image too!)

Switching on a black hole. Click for larger. Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/M.Machacek; Optical: ESO/VLT; Infrared: NASA/JPL/Caltech

Check this out!  A galactic collision wakens a black hole.  If you live in the Southern Hemisphere you can see this if you have a telescope, the coordinates are (Equatorial)  RA: 20h 17m 57s   Dec: -70°44′23″

From NASA:

This composite image of data from three different telescopes shows an ongoing collision between two galaxies, NGC 6872 and IC 4970. X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory is shown in purple, while Spitzer Space Telescope’s infrared data is red and optical data from ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) is colored red, green and blue.

Astronomers think that supermassive black holes exist at the center of most galaxies. Not only do the galaxies and black holes seem to co-exist, they are apparently inextricably linked in their evolution. To better understand this symbiotic relationship, scientists have turned to rapidly growing black holes — so-called active galactic nucleus (AGN) — to study how they are affected by their galactic environments.

The latest data from Chandra and Spitzer show that IC 4970, the small galaxy at the top of the image, contains an AGN, but one that is heavily cocooned in gas and dust. This means in optical light telescopes, like the VLT, there is little to see. X-rays and infrared light, however, can penetrate this veil of material and reveal the light show that is generated as material heats up before falling onto the black hole (seen as a bright point-like source).

Despite this obscuring gas and dust around IC 4970, the Chandra data suggest that there is not enough hot gas in IC 4970 to fuel the growth of the AGN. Where, then, does the food supply for this black hole come from? The answer lies with its partner galaxy, NGC 6872. These two galaxies are in the process of undergoing a collision, and the gravitational attraction from IC 4970 has likely pulled over some of NGC 6872’s deep reservoir of cold gas (seen prominently in the Spitzer data), providing a new fuel supply to power the giant black hole.

The term “sooty star” or “carbon star” almost makes them sound like big chunks of coal.  You know that wouldn’t work.  In the interest of brevity, quick definition of a carbon star is an evolved giant (or sometimes a dwarf) with circumstellar “clouds” of carbon dust.  It’s seeing the star through this atmosphere of carbon that gives it its red appearance; because carbon absorbs “blue” light.  Classical carbon stars are massive; non-classical less so.  Most are long-period variables.

Image:  Greg Parker, New Forest Observatory

This is an image of La Superba – Y Canum Venaticorum (Y CVn), one of the reddest stars in the sky, and among the brightest of the red giants.  It’s a semi-regular variable carbon star.

Image:  H. Olafsson, Stockholm Observatory (et al)

This is TT Cygni.  The ring you see around the star is a shell of gas expanding outward.

Classical carbon stars are single giants at the end of their lifespan.  Non-classical carbon stars are those in a binary system where one is a white dwarf and the other a red giant.  The giant accreted carbon from its companion, now the dwarf, to become the carbon star.

Carbon stars are somewhat rare, and they quickly evolve out of this phase because they lose tremendous amounts of mass.  Their carbon “shell” becomes part of the interstellar dust; providing the raw materials for the creation of new generations of stars and planets.

Ghostly Spokes on the rings of Saturn. Click for larger. Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

The Cassini spacecraft has returned a fine example of the phenomenon of “spokes” in Saturn’s rings. Saturn has made (almost) one orbit since the Voyager spacecraft fist discovered the rings in 1980 and 1981.

Here’s a short YouTube video of the spokes.

The Cassini caption:

Bright spokes grace Saturn’s B ring in this Cassini image.

To learn more about the ghostly radial markings called spokes, see PIA11144 and PIA08288. Spokes appear bright when they are viewed at phase, or Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, angles higher than about 45 degrees. The phase angle in this image is 61 degrees.

Prometheus (86 kilometers, or 53 miles across) orbits between the A ring and the thin F ring. Epimetheus (113 kilometers, or 70 miles across) orbits beyond the F ring in the top left of the image. The bright dot in the top right is a star.

Scale in the original image was 71 kilometers (44 miles) per pixel. The image has been magnified by a factor of 1.5 and contrast-enhanced to aid visibility.

This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from about 12 degrees above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Sept. 22, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (746,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 61 degrees.

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.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.

The August 2009 discovery image of GJ758 B and C, taken with Subaru HiCIAO in the near infrared wavelength. Without angular differential imaging, the star's speckle halo (burst-like feature in the center) would overwhelm the signals from the planet candidates. Images and captions: Max Planck Institute for Astronomy/National Astronomical Observatory of Japan

A research team using a brand new planet-hunting instrument on the Subaru Telescope called the High Contrast Instrument for the Subaru next generation Adaptive Optics, (let’s just call it HiCIAO), has found and imaged not one but two possible exoplanets.

The star named GJ 758, a sun much like our own was found to have at least one and possibly two other constituents that are very possibly exoplanets – maybe.  The other amazing thing is how close the two objects are to the parent star, at about the same distance as Uranus and Neptune is to ours.  Sure that is a ways, but to be able to see them in the glare of the parent sun and at 50 light-years is astounding.

Maybe?  Why maybe?  The first object called GJ 758 B has a mass of 10 to 40 times Jupiter, and the general feeling is it is either a giant planet or a lightweight brown dwarf.  The temperature of this object is about 600 K ( 620^oF / 327^oC), you might be thinking it has to be a brown dwarf at that temperature, but the temperature could be explained by compression heating due to gravity.

The object designated GJ 758 C has a similar mass to the first, but the researchers are being pretty careful saying its presence is “suggested” and are not saying it is really there.  Better to err on the side of caution.

We will know more in about a week when the results are published and I can’t wait!

Size comparison between representatives of our Solar System (Sun, Jupiter, and Earth) and the GJ 758 system. GJ 758 B’s temperature of about 600 K makes it glow cherry-red. You will note the depiction of GJ 758 B is about the same diameter or a little smaller than Jupiter and I mentioned the mass of GJ 758 B is 10 to 40 times as massive. The size I was referring to is the mass, how much stuff is packed into the package.

UPDATE:  SOLVED!  At 4:08 CDT.

There you are; back for another riddle?  This one is easy… you should get it in a few minutes.  I’ve been timing you guys, and last week it took an hour and 25 minutes for Patricia to solve the riddle.  How are you going to do this week?

I know you know this one; it’s probably one of the first “things” of its class you looked at… and I know that when you saw it, you were impressed.

Okay, you know the rules!  I’ve been getting some great subjects about which to post from the people who are solving the riddles, and I am really looking forward to this week’s chosen topic.  Ready?  This object is…

Known for its beauty.

Can be seen with the naked eye.

We are watching the death of this object.

Seen in the Northern Hemisphere in the autumn and early winter.

Thought of as one of the most luminous objects in the galaxy.

This is a single object.

It would take about 4.5 billion suns to equal it (yes, that’s a “b” for “billion”).

It is the prototype for its class.

When it is gone, its gift to us will be a thing of great mystery.

Do you know the answer?  I’m hanging out in the comment section, so give it a shot!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ah, it’s a rods and cones thing.

Hubble sees NGC 4710. Click for a larger version. Credit: NASA, ESA, and P. Goudfrooij (STScI)

This past January the Advanced Camera for Surveys on board the Hubble took this image of the galaxy NGC 4710.  The galaxy is about 60 million light-years away in the direction of Coma Berenices.

The galaxy is pretty much edge on and one of the striking things about it is the “X” pattern around the bulge.  According to the press release the “X” is caused by the vertical motions of the stars around the core.  Another interesting thing about galaxy is the apparent lack of globular clusters around the bulge and that is being attributing to a slow assembly, I would have thought the other way.  Do check out the press release below too, it contains a lot of information packed into a concise read.

I wanted to make this into a background, things didn’t work out very well.  If you haven’t clicked on the image yet, give it a try, you can spot a couple even more distant galaxies.  To see a even larger version and one that is “zoomable” have a look at the Hubble page at NASA for links.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA.

These observations were obtained by a team led by Paul Goudfrooij from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, USA.

Click the “more” link below to read the press release:

Just as many people are surprised to find themselves packing on unexplained weight around the middle, astronomers find the evolution of bulges in the centres of spiral galaxies puzzling. A recent NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of NGC 4710 is part of a survey that astronomers have conducted to learn more about the formation of bulges, which are a substantial component of most spiral galaxies.

When targeting spiral galaxy bulges, astronomers often seek edge-on galaxies, as their bulges are more easily distinguishable from the disc. This exceptionally detailed edge-on view of NGC 4710 taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) aboard Hubble reveals the galaxy’s bulge in the brightly coloured centre. The luminous, elongated white plane that runs through the bulge is the galaxy disc. The disc and bulge are surrounded by eerie-looking dust lanes.

When staring directly at the centre of the galaxy, one can detect a faint, ethereal “X”-shaped structure. Such a feature, which astronomers call a “boxy” or “peanut-shaped” bulge, is due to the vertical motions of the stars in the galaxy’s bar and is only evident when the galaxy is seen edge-on. This curiously shaped puff is often observed in spiral galaxies with small bulges and open arms, but is less common in spirals with arms tightly wrapped around a more prominent bulge, such as NGC 4710.

NGC 4710 is a member of the giant Virgo Cluster of galaxies and lies in the northern constellation of Coma Berenices (the Hair of Queen Berenice). It is not one of the brightest members of the cluster, but can easily be seen as a dim elongated smudge on a dark night with a medium-sized amateur telescope. In the 1780s, William Herschel discovered the galaxy and noted it simply as a “faint nebula”. It lies about 60 million light-years from the Earth and is an example of a lenticular or S0-type galaxy – a type that seems to have some characteristics of both spiral and elliptical galaxies.

Astronomers are scrutinising these systems to determine how many globular clusters they host. Globular clusters are thought to represent an indication of the processes that can build bulges. Two quite different processes are believed to be at play regarding the formation of bulges in spiral galaxies: either they formed rather rapidly in the early Universe, before the spiral disc and arms formed; or they built up from material accumulating from the disc during a slow and long evolution. In this case of NGC 4710, researchers have spotted very few globular clusters associated with the bulge, indicating that its assembly mainly involved relatively slow processes.

Rob Seaman is open to the idea of bribery. To those of us who know him well this will not come as a surprise. All in a good cause though…

Rob has this to say:

This is a blatant attempt at bribery.

Lego in the Age of Aquarius

The VOEvent working group has been shameless from the very beginning in seeking ways to promote its agenda of world dominion. An early notion was to build a LEGO NXT robotic telescope to demonstrate this IVOA celestial transient alert protocol. The initial prototype was shown at the Hotwired I workshop in 2007. This first model was joined by a second telescope by the time of the Austin American Astronomical Society meeting in 2008.

With two telescopes it is possible to demonstrate behavioral interactions as observatories pursue the discovery and follow-up of transient phenomena. Such interactions can be arbitrarily complex, but even a simple “Simon says” interaction as demonstrated in Austin provides the opportunity for rich discussions with colleagues on diverse scientific and technical issues. Ideally the robotic behavior would be explicitly tied via either pseudo or actual interfaces to other astronomical facilities such as provided through the Virtual Observatory, World-Wide Telescope, Google Sky or SkyAlert.

Indeed a third LEGO NXT kit was purchased with the hope of elaborating on the pedagogical behavior available in 2008. Circumstances intervened (including the departure of two successive VOEvent programmers at NOAO – for unrelated reasons) and this kit remains in the box.

The LEGO NXT kit is the bribe, offered as a prize to the best interface between virtual astronomical technology (for instance as displayed on a nearby monitor and/or handheld device) and the two model robotic telescopes. This simulation must be robust enough to be suitable for low maintenance, multi-day, multi-audience demonstrations. The intent is that I will deliver this presentation for the duration of the upcoming high profile AAS meeting in Washington, DC. Glory (and explicit credit) will accrue to all involved!

VOEvent is a technology for enabling autonomous astronomical architectures for pursuing empirical investigations. How can this be conveyed to the public, or perhaps even more challenging, to astronomers?

Hack day at .Astronomy 2009 is on the Wednesday. In support of this mission, I will be giving a talk titled “LEGO in the Age of Aquarius – Presenting complex technologies to diverse audiences” during the “unconference” sessions in Leiden on Monday or Tuesday.

If you’re interested get your thinking caps on and see if you can leave the meeting with a shiny new Lego NXT kit. You’ll have (free) access to Amazon EC2 and S3 and Google’s App Engine during the meeting (within limits!), access to Arduino microcontrollers and the tools you’ll need to do something interesting with them, as well as iPhone and Android handsets and their respective SDKs. Hack day may be on Wednesday, but you can hack all week…

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