New meteor shower points to a future close encounter | Bad Astronomy

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A pair of astronomers monitoring an all-sky camera got a surprise (PDF) when they checked data from last February: a half dozen meteors all seemed to come from the same spot in the sky, indicating they all had a common origin. After doing some calculations, they found that they probably come from a parent comet with an orbit that’s at least 53 years long. Moreover, the orbit of this comet crosses that of the Earth, meaning we may have a close encounter with this object sometime in the future.

And because I can sense the oncoming panic on the web over this news, let me break it down for you. I’ll give you the science (which is cool), how we know this unseen comet may be potentially, um, interesting, then the reason you don’t need to run around in circles screaming (spoiler: it’s rude to others nearby, but also unnecessary).

But just to be up front: should you panic? Nope. We know there are objects out there that could hit us in the future sometime. This comet is in many ways just another one. As I’ll point out below, we pass ...


Wall Street Journal Denounces the “Tea Party Hobbits” | The Intersection

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I’ve posted twice now about the psychology underlying the debt ceiling negotiations, and the insoluble problem that occurs when one side is inclined to think in black and white, and one side is not. We rarely admit that we have a divide over nuance and compromise at the heart of our politics, and yet the evidence supporting this idea is strong, and the problem seems to be getting worse.

Now comes the Wall Street Journal, of all places, reaffirming this assessment in a fascinating, albeit seemingly unconscious way:

The idea seems to be that if the House GOP refuses to raise the debt ceiling, a default crisis or gradual government shutdown will ensue, and the public will turn en masse against . . . Barack Obama. The Republican House that failed to raise the debt ceiling would somehow escape all blame. Then Democrats would have no choice but to pass a balanced-budget amendment and reform entitlements, and the tea-party Hobbits could return to Middle Earth having defeated Mordor.

This is the kind of crack political thinking that turned Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell into GOP Senate nominees. The reality is that the debt limit will be raised one way or another, and the only issue now is with how much fiscal reform and what political fallout.

First just a technical matter: Mordor is part of Middle Earth. The Journal means “return to the Shire.” C’mon, don’t conservatives know this stuff?

More broadly, is not the Journal, itself a conservative outlet, affirming with this analogy the idea that the Tea Party sees the world in black and white, good and evil? And that this is um, kind of an inadequate way of looking at things?

I myself, though, am inclined to use a Star Wars analogy.

In the immortal words of Obi Wan Kenobi: ”Only a Sith deals in absolutes.”


The Stock Market Shows Debt Ceiling Deniers a Little Slice of Reality | The Intersection

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Today was the first day–and may not be the last–that the markets got measurably riled by the debt ceiling battle. Traders finally let fear get the better of them and dumped stocks (and much else). Lots of people have been saying this was going to happen; and it’s only a small slice of what could happen, since there was nothing to spook the markets today other than continuing Washington gridlock. It is not like a default has come yet, or a credit downgrade. Then, we could see a mega selloff akin to the collapse of 2008.

Why do we know that the debt ceiling impasse is starting to stoke fear? Simple: We have a measurement of it. Here’s CNN Money:

One sign of the increasing worries among investors is the VIX (VIX), also known as Wall Street’s “fear gauge,” which jumped by more than 13% on Wednesday alone. The index is up nearly 20% in the past five days.

So traders have been inching towards being afraid, and today they finally gave in and ran.

Which gets me to what I don’t understand about right wing debt ceiling denial: It’s one thing to claim that President Obama and Treasury Secretary Geithner are bluffing, and the government will still be able to pay its bills after August 2. I don’t believe that, but I can see how Tea Partiers could believe it.

But even then, I don’t see how you could believe that the stock market, or the economy, will somehow survive this brinksmanship. Markets aren’t rational–they often run on rumor, and they often run on fear. In other words, it doesn’t matter whether or not you believe what Obama says. It matters what the market will do if you force the issue. And now, the market is doing it.

But of course, there will be another rationalization available to debt ceiling deniers. When the market crashes even further, and their own constituents are further damaged, they will be able to content themselves by saying, “It’s Obama’s fault.”


How Chinese genetics is like Chinese food | Gene Expression

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Representatives of Szechuan and Shangdong cuisine

The Pith: The Han Chinese are genetically diverse, due to geographic scale of range, hybridization with other populations, and possibly local adaptation.

In the USA we often speak of “Chinese food.” This is rather peculiar because there isn’t any generic “Chinese cuisine.” Rather, there are regional cuisines, which share a broad family similarity. Similarly, American “Mexican food” and “Indian food” also have no true equivalent in Mexico or India (naturally the novel American culinary concoctions often exhibit biases in the regions from which they sample due to our preferences and connections; non-vegetarian Punjabi elements dominate over Udupi, while much authentic Mexican American food has a bias toward the northern states of that nation). But to a first approximation there is some sense in speaking of a general class of cuisine which exhibits a lot of internal structure and variation, so long as one understands that there is an important finer grain of categorization.

Some of the same applies to genetic categorizations. Consider two of the populations in the original HapMap, the Yoruba from Nigeria, and the Chinese from Beijing. There are ~30 million ...

NCBI ROFL: Get angry. Get noticed. | Discoblog

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Facial Expressions of Emotion: Are Angry Faces Detected More Efficiently?

“The rapid detection of facial expressions of anger or threat has obvious adaptive value. In this study, we examined the efficiency of facial processing by means of a visual search task. Participants searched displays of schematic faces and were required to determine whether the faces displayed were all the same or whether one was different. Four main results were found: (1) When displays contained the same faces, people were slower in detecting the absence of a discrepant face when the faces displayed angry (or sad/angry) rather than happy expressions. (2) When displays contained a discrepant face people were faster in detecting this when the discrepant face displayed an angry rather than a happy expression. (3) Neither of these patterns for same and different displays was apparent when face displays were inverted, or when just the mouth was presented in isolation. (4) The search slopes for angry targets were significantly lower than for happy targets. These results suggest that detection of angry facial expressions is fast and efficient, although does not “pop-out” in the traditional sense.”

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Tolerance of extramarital sex by sex | Gene Expression

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Are Empowered Women Driving Reduced Tolerance Of Extramarital Affairs?:

My girlfriend’s theory about this, which makes sense to me, is that as women’s labor market opportunities have improved their dependency on husbands for economic security has declined and, in turn, their willingness to put up with misbehavior has gone down. Looking at a gender breakdown of responses might shed some light on this, but I can’t figure out how to work the General Social Survey website.

He’s talking about a chart which shows decline in tolerance of extramarital sex by education:

I just replicated but broke it down by male and female:

The LHC, the Tevatron, and the Higgs Boson | Cosmic Variance

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A few weeks back I wrote about the remarkable milestones passed by the Tevatron and LHC, and prognosticated that if there was ever a time when new discoveries could come out rapidly, this was it, especially for the LHC experiments analyzing a data sample 30 times larger than the previous one.

The result? Nature is being coy – in basically every new particle search for new particles and phenomena conducted by the CMS and ATLAS experiments at the LHC, we see naught but eerie agreement with the predictions for ordinary standard model background.

A huge raft of results has been presented at two large international conferences: the annual European Physical Society meeting on high energy physics in Grenoble, France, and the Particles and Nuclei International Conference (PANIC11) at MIT in Cambridge, MA. I presented the CMS results on the searches for the Higgs boson at the latter on Tuesday…more on that below.

There is a trove of material available online for these two conferences and at the ATLAS and CMS public physics result web sites. Let’s just look at a couple examples, though.

The theme of the PANIC conference was the centennial of Rutherford’s discovery of the nucleus, and what better way to celebrate it than to essentially perform his experiment with a million times more energy, and peer inside quarks to see if…well, to see if there is an inside, to see if they have substructure. Naturally, to do the experiment we smash quarks together and see if we see any hint that there is something smaller inside, which would manifest itself as an excess of particle jets coming out sideways to the beam, much as Rutherford’s students Geiger and Marsden saw alpha particles deflected from their gold foil at angles far too large to explain.

But in the first graph here all we see is a smooth spectrum, agreeing exceedingly well with the predictions, extending out to huge energies…no bumps, no excess in the tails, and no excess of jets coming out sideways. In one fell swoop we’ve extended the limit on the size of quarks down by a factor of three or four. As far as we can tell, quarks are pointlike. It’s the subject of the first paper from CMS using 1 fb-1.

Another huge effort went into searching for evidence that there may be supersymmetric partners for the known fermions and bosons – a search that has been underway for the past three decades. If supersymmetry is present in nature it would help solve a theoretical riddle as to why the calculated mass of the much-touted Higgs boson can remain stable in the face of enormous quantum mechanical correction factors. Supersymmertry would provide a mechanism to largely cancel these corrections.

Supersymmetry could show up in a variety of ways at the Tevatron and LHC, but with three and a half times more energy than the Tevatron, the LHC has a huge advantage in this search, and already with last year’s sample of data the LHC experiments blew past all of the Tevatron exclusion limits.

And now with thirty times more data, in search channel after search channel, the story from CMS and ATLAS is the same: no hint of supersymmetry is evident anywhere. You shouldn‘t take this statement to mean that supersymmetry cannot exist. All we can say at this point is that if it does exist, in a generic, simple version of supersymmetry called mSUGRA, the masses of the partners of the quarks appear to be very heavy, over 1 TeV. The heavier they are, the less effective their power is to cancel the Higgs boson corrections. And theorists are very inventive, and are thinking about supersymmetry models that might not show up so easily in our experiments [see the comment below by Matt Strassler].

And what of the Higgs boson? Here, I must say, the story is becoming very interesting. The LHC experiments have a big advantage over the Tevatron, and the bottom line is that for high mass Higgs bosons, in the mass range above 150 GeV or so, the LHC has totally eclipsed the Tevatron, basically ruling out a Higgs boson with mass anywhere from about 150 GeV to 450 GeV. This is directly a result of the huge increase in the size of the data sample, and combining a half dozen search channels. Both CMS and ATLAS obtain similar results in this mass range, and despite a slight excess around 230 GeV in the ATLAS experiment, I think I can say with confidence that the Higgs boson will not be discovered in that regime.

But I personally never thought that this was likely. The sum total of the world’s data on precise measurements of the W and Z boson masses and properties, and the mass of the top quark, when taken together, tend to suggest a very light Higgs boson, much nearer 100 GeV. In fact the best predicted value for the Higgs boson mass is a good deal less than 80 GeV, but the LEP 2 experiments excluded a standard model Higgs boson with mass less than 114.4 GeV. This defines the low end of the present search window, which now extends to 150 GeV or so, and the precision data favor the low end of this range.

In a nutshell, what is happening is that the Tevatron experiments are bringing down a curtain on the Higgs boson, but the curtain is lower on the low mass end. The LHC is bringing down the curtain, too, but from the high mass end. So the two machines are in a race to achieve sensitivity to a standard model Higgs boson in the low mass range near 120 GeV.

The Tevatron experiments will collect their last data in two months, but the LHC experiments will keep collecting data, probably quadrupling the present sample by the end of the year. So time is a factor here as well, and the Tevatron experiments now truly have one last chance to cover the interesting low mass range.

But what to we mean by “cover” the range? If there is simply no Higgs boson to be discovered, then my prediction is that the Tevatron experiments can exclude it with 95% confidence up to a mass of around 120 GeV with the final data sample. If the Higgs boson truly is in that mass range, however, the experiments should not be able to exclude it!

The LHC will continue to press on, the experimenters will continue to improve and refine the analyses, and by he end of the year, I predict, if all goes well at the LHC we will either exclude the Higgs’ existence all the way down to the Tevatron limit or begin to see an excess.

In fact, the LHC data from both CMS and ATLAS are showing an excess in a broad range at low masses. Now this could be a systematic underestimate of the backgrounds, a statistical fluctuation in the observed spectra, or it might, just might be due to the presence of a low mass Higgs boson. It is not surprisin g that the excess is n a broad mass range, because one of the most sensitive channels, in which the Higgs decays to WW, has little or no mass resolution. This excess is why the press has recently picked up on this excitement – it’s quite in line with what one would expect to see if there is a Higgs boson signal just beginning to show itself.

To truly discover the Higgs boson will take a LOT more data, which we will get from the LHC in 2012. Now, we usually reserve the word “discover” for the situation where we have a “5 sigma” excess, by which we mean that there is less than one chance in over 3 million that a statistical fluctuation of the background alone could give us what we observe, or more. This is a stringent criterion, and not at all easy to establish, taking into account all the various experimental uncertainties.

If the Higgs boson mass is near 120 GeV, can we get a 5 sigma discovery by the end of 2012? It may take combining the data from the LHC experiments with the data from the Tevatron, a radical concept at present I have to say, but technically possible.

So despite the coyness of Mother Nature as to the nature of any new physics beyond the standard model, it’s nevertheless a very exciting time in the field, and who knows: maybe if we hold our mouths just right, cock our heads and squint just so, we might soon see something we hadn’t quite thought of before.


Light-Activated, Injectable Gel Could Help Build New Faces | 80beats

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gel
Before LED light is shined on it, the injected gel is still fluid and
can fill up any gaps of spaces under the skin.

What’s the News: Scientists have developed a gel that could be used to rebuild the faces of crash victims. Activated by light, it solves several of the problems inherent in the usual methods.

What’s the Context:

Dealing with damaged soft tissue is often more complex than dealing with damaged bone and skin. The shape of someone’s face is dependent on the fat, muscle, and other tissue below the surface, and doctors trying to restore someone’s facial structure must contend with scar tissue, swelling, and loss of movement.
Current methods include injecting hyaluronic acid (HA), a naturally occurring molecule that helps thicken the gel that surrounds cells in the body, or synthetic materials, but both of these have their issues: HA injections don’t last, and synthetic materials can cause inflammation. Grafting soft tissue from other parts of the body is also an option, but that can cause scar tissue to form where it was removed and at the graft site.
Additionally, it’s not possible to control the shape of the synthetic materials after they’re ...


Memory improves when neurons fire in youthful surroundings | Not Exactly Rocket Science

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As we get older, our memories start to fail us. The symptoms of this decline are clear, from losing track of house keys to getting easily muddled and confused. Many of these problems stem from a failure of working memory – the ability to hold pieces of information in mind, block out distractions and stay focused on our goals. Now, a team of American scientists has discovered one of the reasons behind this decline, and a way of potentially reversing it.

Our working memory depends on an area known as the prefrontal cortex or PFC, right at the front of the brain. The PFC contains a network of nerve cells called pyramidal neurons that are all connected to one another and constantly keep each other buzzing and excited – like a neural version of Twitter. This mutual stimulation is the key to our working memory. As we age, the buzz of the pyramidal neurons gets weaker, and information falls more readily from our mental grasp.

But this decline isn’t the fault of the neurons themselves. By studying monkeys, Min Wang from the Yale University School of Medicine has found ...

Extroverted Elephants Change Their Best Friends Over Time | Discoblog

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spacing is important

While there are many different specific personality types, people are often categorized as either introverted or extroverted. Some like to keep to just a few close friends, rarely leaving their small comfort zones, while others are more outgoing, collecting friends wherever they go; most of us fall somewhere the middle. But we’re not the only mammals with this type of social diversity. Researchers in Sri Lanka have now found that many female Asian elephants—previously believed to be kind of antisocial—are social butterflies, changing their circle of friends as the seasons pass. Moreover, they maintain close ties with pals even after extended periods of separation.

In an Asian elephant society, females and calves stick together in groups of a few individuals, called herds, while males roam about more independently, doing male things. These small bands are part of much a larger group. In the new study, published in the journal BMC Ecology, researchers wanted to see how the relationships of individual female elephants changed over time, so they stalked nearly 300 pachyderms for five seasons in the Udawalawe National Park in Sri Lanka.

As expected, Shermin de Silva, a behavioral ecologist at the ...


It’s official: we’ve moved to open.nasa.gov

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It was February 2008 when I posted my first article on opennasa.com! So much has changed both at NASA and in the world since then. We originally launched opennasa.com because we were a group of people extremely passionate about space exploration that wanted to share, first hand, our perspective of what was happening inside the U.S. space program. We started a conversation that lasted 3.5 years. 277 posts, 5,274 comments, 347 tags and an average of ~54 unique visitors per day.  It’s been such an amazing adventure.  We have really appreciated the conversation and the #opengov community that has formed within the space industry since then.

Yesterday we launched open.nasa.gov. Like openNASA, the new site will be a collaborative platform for the open government community to share success stories and projects they are working on. We are excited to finally have a home on nasa.gov and look forward to highlighting the ways that transparency, participation, and collaboration are being embraced by NASA policy, technology, and culture and discuss the amazing future that becomes possible because of that commitment.

Content from authors who will participate in the new open.nasa.gov site will be ported over, but this site will remain online and serve as an archive for the content from all those who have contributed to the project.  We have a lot planned for the new site, and anticipate it will be an even more successful project than openNASA.  We encourage you to check out the new site and let us know what you think! See you at nasa.gov.

http://open.nasa.gov

Dear NASA Folks: Show Up For Work, Please

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Message from the NASA Administrator 29 July 2011

"As you know, Congress is debating how it plans to meet its obligations and raise the debt ceiling so that the country can pay its bills. The President expects that Congress will do its job, enact an increase of the debt ceiling that he can sign into law, and end this impasse. I am sending this note to remind you that NASA employees should plan to come to work next week, as scheduled, at their normal place and time."

Jack Marburger

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Statement by Director John P. Holdren on the Passing of Jack Marburger

"It is with great sadness that I note the passing of Dr. John H. Marburger, III, former Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Science Advisor to President George W. Bush. Jack Marburger leaves a legacy of exceptional public service and substantial scientific contributions. He was the Nation's longest-serving Presidential Science Advisor, and his focus on basic research as a driver of economic growth was a common thread across Congresses and Administrations."

Poll Suggests Public Concern Over Direction In Space

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IBOPE Zogby Poll: Six in 10 Disagree With Ending Space Shuttle & Fear Others Will Surpass U.S. in Exploration

"Majorities of U.S. voters disagree with the decision to end space shuttle missions and fear other nations might surpass the U.S. in space exploration. Also, future space exploration through both NASA and private companies is seen as preferable to either going it alone. The IBOPE Zogby interactive poll conducted from July 22-25 also shows 74% say the space shuttle was a worthwhile use of government resources. The final space shuttle mission ended with the safe landing of the Atlantis last week."

Senate Issues Subpoena to NASA for SLS Materials (Update)

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Keith's 11:00 am EDT note: Sources are reporting that the Senate Commerce Committee has finally made good on its threat and has issued a subpoena to NASA regarding materials related to the SLS decision. Prior to this several letters and a hearing were held to prompt NASA in this regard. No luck. Congress is more or less convinced that the decision regarding SLS design/architecture has already been made and they are using the tools at their disposal to force NASA/the White House to admit that this is indeed the case. Stay tuned.

NASA Has Not Delivered All Of The Documents Requested by Congress, earlier post

Senate Threatens NASA With Subpoena For Missing Documents, earlier post

Keith's 1:00 pm EDT note: According to NASA PAO "While we share the Senators' commitment to human space exploration and implementation of the Authorization Act, we also have a commitment to be responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars. The Space Launch System is the most important -- and expensive -- decision NASA will make for the next decade, and we want to get it right so we don't repeat the mistakes of the past or get pushed into making a premature decision about our nation's deep space exploration plans."

More Climate Change Arm Waving

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New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism

"NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth's atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed."

Climate-change politics: The sceptic meets his match, Nature

"Joe Bast and his libertarian think tank are a major force among climate sceptics -- but they just can't win the battle over science."

Hope For Laid Off NASA Contractor Employees

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DOE, Interior Eye Employees Jettisoned by Space Program, New York Times

"The Energy Department and the Department of the Interior are among dozens of federal agencies looking to hire some of the engineers and scientists from NASA's closing space program. NASA and the Office of Personnel Management held a job fair yesterday in Cape Canaveral, Fla., less than a week after the space shuttle Atlantis landed. All told, about 5,500 contract employees at Florida's Kennedy Space Center have lost their jobs in recent months, and NASA contractors are expected to lay off another 2,000 over the next year. For an area nicknamed the "Space Coast," the end of the space program is a blow. But federal agencies are swooping in to take advantage of a pool of employees they say have skills that are usually hard to find."

Russia Has Decided To Throw the ISS Away in 2020 (Update)

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Russia Plans to Sink the International Space Station in 2020, Fox

"Russia's space agency announced Wednesday that the International Space Station -- a space base the world's scientists and billions of U.S. tax dollars helped build and maintain some 200 miles above the surface of the Earth -- will be de-orbited and allowed to sink into the Pacific Ocean in 2020, just like its Russian predecessor, Mir. "We will be forced to sink the ISS. We cannot leave it in orbit as it is a very complicated and a heavy object," Roscosmos' deputy head Vitaly Davydov said in an interview posted on the agency's website."

NASA and International Partners Discuss New Uses for Space Station

"The Multilateral Coordination Board (MCB) for the International Space Station partner agencies met Tuesday, July 26, to discuss how to use the space station as a test bed for technologies that will enable missions beyond low Earth orbit."

Keith's note: So, I guess that's it then. Russia gets to make the decision to scrap something we paid the lion's share to build and operate - after paying to keep Russia's space program aloft for a decade prior to that. Who makes all of these "deals" for the U.S. anyway? We seem to be getting the short end of the stick each and every time. Why have these MCB meetings about other uses for the ISS when Russia simply plans to scrap it anyway?

NASA Needs To Go To Priceline.com, earlier post

Space station sinking? Not so fast, MSNBC

"The interview from "Good Morning Russia" ("Utro Rossii") caused a stir when a Russian-language transcript turned up on the space agency's website, but don't panic: If anything, the International Space Station will be in operation well after 2020. Russia, NASA and the other partners in the 16-nation venture are looking into extending the station's lifetime to 2028 -- that is, if they can verify that its components will still be in working order until then."