Atlantis, one last time in the Sun | Bad Astronomy

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Thierry Legault has done it again!™

Thierry, an amateur astronomer from Belgium France, has had many of his amazing photographs grace this blog, and just yesterday I was wondering what he would get from the last Space Shuttle mission. As if on cue, he alerted me about his latest set of pictures, including this amazing shot of Atlantis moving across the face of the Sun:


[Click to enspaceplanenate.]

This is a combination of four images, with the position of Atlantis marked with circles. He took that shot in Germany just 21 minutes before the de-orbit burn, meaning this may be one of the last images ever taken of an Orbiter actually in orbit (the picture I posted earlier today taken from the space station shows Atlantis as it was moving through our atmosphere, when it was no longer in orbit).

A few days earlier, in the Czech Republic, Thierry captured Atlantis and the ISS less than an hour after the Orbiter had undocked:

I marked the position of the two with an arrow; again, click to embiggen. You ...


The fiery descent of Atlantis… seen from space! | Bad Astronomy

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It’s a little early for me to start thinking about my annual Top Ten Astronomy Pictures, but I have a feeling this one will make the cut: the actual glowing trail of plasma left in the wake of Atlantis as it entered Earth’s atmosphere, as seen from space by astronauts aboard the space station!

Amazing! Oh yes, you want to click to embiggen.

Atlantis undocked from the International Space Station on July 19, and two days later the ISS was in position to coincidentally catch a view of the Orbiter as it made its final descent. This shot shows the plume of ionized gas left behind as Atlantis descended, as well as clouds, parts of the ISS itself, and atmospheric airglow: the faint glow of molecules and atoms high in the atmosphere as they slowly recombine with electrons and emit light.

This shot is simply spectacular. Since the stars aren’t trailed, this must be a fairly short exposure, not more than a few seconds. The trail you’re seeing is therefore not actually the Orbiter streaking across the Earth! The plasma trail behind it fades with time, so the trail is ...


Moon wanes, Leo rises – lion attacks more common in week after a full moon | Not Exactly Rocket Science

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It’s been a week since the last full moon on 15th July. During this time, the odds of being attacked by a lion are highest than at any other point in the month, which is why I’ve been walking around the neighbourhood with two guard bears and a platoon of ninjas. The fact that I live in a leafy suburb of London is inconsequential. You can never be too careful. Constant vigilance.

Of course, lion attacks are more of a problem in other parts of the world. In Tanzania, lions have attacked more than a thousand people between 1988 and 2009, and eaten around two-thirds of them. Now Craig Packer from the University of Minnesota has shown that the frequency of these attacks is tied into lunar cycles.

Texan-born Packer first visited Tanzania in 1972 to study baboons with Jane Goodall. When he returned to the country in 1978, his attention had shifted to lions and it has never left. His team expanded upon records of local lion prides that began in the 1960s, creating a massive set of data on over 5,000 individuals from the Serengeti National Park and ...

Asian Negritos are not one population | Gene Expression

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Negrito, Philippines. Credit: Ken Ilio

In the post below I mentioned that the Malaysian and Philippine Negritos seem to be two very distinct populations. This was something I wanted to explore in more detail, so I naturally decided to poke around the Pan-Asian SNP data set. The aims are made somewhat more difficult by the fact that there are only ~56,000 markers in the data set (as opposed to ~600,000 in the HGDP and more than 1 million in the HapMap). Additionally, the intersection with other data sets is small. For example, only ~20,000 SNPs with the HGDP. With all that in mind I hazarded that something is better than nothing. Relatives and HapMap populations were removed from the data set (thanks Zack). Additionally, I beefed up the South Asian populations with the Gujaratis from the HapMap,which had an intersection of ~32,000 SNPs. After a few test runs I decided to remove the Mlabri. They always shook out very early as a separate population from many others nearby, and, their genetic distances were very high. This tribe is only numbered in the hundreds, ...

A beast with human skin? | Gene Expression

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I don’t give much thought to chimeras, so this editorial in Nature took me unawares (OA): The legacy of Doctor Moreau:

Innumerable mice and other animals have been engineered in past decades to express a human gene and model specific aspects of human disease. They rarely inspire disgust, because they still resemble their own species. But further advances in genetic and stem-cell technologies mean that researchers could, in theory, create animals with quintessentially human characteristics or behaviours. The sight of an animal with shiny, furless ‘human’ skin, for example — exceptionally useful for research into skin disorders — could evoke disgust similar to that created by Moreau’s beast folk, even though the animal itself might be perfectly comfortable. One of the biggest horrors — although technically unlikely — could be a self-aware monkey, a creature with human thought trapped in the body of an animal, unable to express itself.

Perception, the ‘optics,’ matters. I think there are going to be serious issues if chimeras resemble humans. It’s just too good for video not to trigger outrage. More subtle hybridizations which are less phenotypically salient though….

NCBI ROFL: Bionic insect cyborgs: 90% insect, 10% robot, 100% terrifying. | Discoblog

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Balloon-assisted flight of radio-controlled insect biobots.

“We report on radio-controlled insect biobots by directing the flight of Manduca sexta through neuromuscular activation. Early metamorphosis insertion technology was used to implant metal wire probes into the insect brain and thorax tissue. Inserted probes were adopted by the developing tissue as a result of the metamorphic growth. A mechanically and electrically reliable interface with the insect tissue was realized with respect to the insect’s behavioral and anatomical adoption. Helium balloons were used to increase the payload capacity and flight duration of the insect biobots enabling a large number of applications. A super-regenerative receiver with a weight of 650 mg and 750 muW of power consumption was built to control the insect flight path through remotely transmitted electrical stimulation pulses. Initiation and cessation of flight, as well as yaw actuation, were obtained on freely flying balloon-assisted moths through joystick manipulation on a conventional model airplane remote controller.”

Photo: flickr/ sarihuella

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A Shuttle tribute | Bad Astronomy

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When I was four, humans landed on the Moon. I grew up with the Saturn V. It was my rocket.

But folks younger than me, people around 35 and younger, they’ve known the Space Shuttle as their rocket their whole lives. This video is a tribute to all of them.

It was put together by Dave Holloway and Adam Rutherford, and shows clips from all 135 Shuttle missions. I like the way they handled Columbia and Challenger, too. Very nice.

Tip of the heat shield tile to my pal Gia.


Romney Plays to His Denialist Base: “I Don’t Think Carbon Is a Pollutant” | The Intersection

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by Jon Winsor

Last month we praised Mitt Romney for taking a brave stand, if not a full-throated one, supporting the overwhelming weight of climate science. He was immediately pounced on by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santorum–while standing alone from the other GOP presidential contenders in talking seriously what scientists have said in unambigiously large numbers.

Meanwhile, the unapologetic Tea Party candidate Michele Bachmann has taken the lead in Iowa by 13 points. To be fair, Romney has decided not to compete in Iowa. But Bachmann has made a name for herself by proposing things like abolishing the EPA, and no doubt Romney has taken notice.

In a recent town hall meeting in Derry, New Hampshire, Romney took his own swipe at the EPA:

The key statement: “I don’t think carbon is a pollutant in the sense of harming our bodies.”

My favorite comeback to the “not a pollutant” argument is from Steven Chu: “water is generally very good, water in great deluges is not good.” It doesn’t matter what you call it. The question is what effect it has. And as Romney’s own Massachusetts DEP concluded, there are profound health consequences to climate change.

What Romney may be considering, though, is the term “pollutant” in the legalese of the Clean Air Act, and he may sincerely think that the EPA shouldn’t enforce this law in such a broad way. The conservative American Spectator, though, remains unimpressed:

The Romney campaign contends there is an “important distinction” between pollutants and greenhouse gases, in the context of global warming and regulation of the invisible gases… but what’s the difference? He believes they should be limited just like real pollutants, so whether or not he calls them that is irrelevant.

I tend to agree with this (although I don’t agree with much else in the American Spectator). For Romney, the EPA may be the wrong regulatory vehicle, but that doesn’t mean he’s against regulating carbon. But here’s the big problem: It’s almost impossible to tell what Romney thinks. Does he actually want a serious effort to curb carbon emissions, or is carbon for him not a “pollutant,” and has no potential to “harm our bodies”?

I doubt we’ll learn any time soon. It’s interesting to contrast Romney with his counterpart Republican governor in that other blue, high tech state on the other coast, California. Romney hedges very carefully in this 2004 Massachusetts Climate Protection Plan (slow Internet Archive PDF download here) even when his statement appears in front of pages and pages of informative discussion and plans for action. By contrast, his west coast counterpart Arnold Schwarzenegger never hedged.

Why are these two politicians so different? Romney is by nature an incredibly cautious politician (Rick Perlstein conjectures why here). And Schwarzenegger can’t be president (he wasn’t born in the US, so he’s ineligible), so Schwarzenegger never had a reason to be cautious, and never had to worry about the national Republican base. Romney on the other hand had his eye on national office early on, and needs that base’s motivated support in the primaries and beyond (and can’t afford to lose that support to Michele Bachmann). For this reason, Romney’s squirming and awkward posturing is not surprising coming from the governor who initiated the 2004 Massachusetts Climate Protection Plan…

Update: According to ThinkProgress, Romney’s administration in Massachusetts had no problem frequently referring to carbon dioxide as a “pollutant.”


Dolphins Protect Themselves With Sponges To Seek Out Bottom-Dwelling Fish | 80beats

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A few years ago, scientists observed that some bottle-nosed dolphins held sponges in their beaks as they poked around the ocean floor, flushing out fish they promptly gobbled up—and that mothers taught this trick to their daughters. In a follow-up study published yesterday, the scientists shed some light on why dolphins go to all this trouble: They’re after fatty, energy-rich fish on the seafloor, and the sponges let them scare up a snack without scraping their beaks on sharp rocks or coral.

[PLoS One via ScienceNOW]


A space-age mystery to celebrate Apollo’s anniversary | Bad Astronomy

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Last night, at 02:56 UTC, it was the 42nd anniversary of humans putting a bootprint on another world. Before Apollo 11 touched down on the Moon, though, NASA and the USSR sent a fleet of unmanned probes there. Since that time we’ve sent many more, including the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, one of my favorite spacecraft of all time. It takes amazing high-res images of the Moon… and to celebrate today’s anniversary, they released this mysterious picture:

Cooool. Click to enlunenate.

This image is about 400 meters across, and shows an impact site with two lobes of material laid down to the sides. This butterfly-shape is a clear indication of a low-angle impact; it’s seen on many bodies in the solar system including the Moon, Mars, and even Earth (though the physics of exactly how the bi-lobed patterns form is still not well understood). Features like this are very rare… but it’s known that when a satellite orbit decays, it will impact at a low angle.

As the LRO site notes, in October 1967, the Lunar Orbiter 2 spacecraft impacted the lunar surface, possibly very near this spot. ...


Scientists Uncover a New, Genetic Cause of Male Infertility—And It Appears to be Widespread | 80beats

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spacing is important

What’s the News: What if the egg is fine and the sperm is dandy, but you still can’t seem to have a baby? Couples who are having trouble conceiving can testify to the frustration of learning that there’s no clear reason for their infertility. Now, however, scientists have found a genetic mutation that makes outwardly normal sperm much less fertile, potentially explaining many such cases and suggesting new routes to conception.

What’s the Context:

Infertility is defined as failure to conceive after a year of unprotected sex. About 10-15% of couples run into this problem.
Some cases of infertility are fairly easily explained: there may be a shortage of sperm, or they may be unable to swim far enough to make it to the egg. The eggs in turn may be malformed, or the womb may have conditions that make implantation of the fertilized egg difficult. But in about 20% of infertile couples, it’s not clear what is impeding the process.
When treating infertility, knowing the source of the problem is a big help. For instance, if the problem is the number of sperm, one option is concentrating sperm into a single sample and trying with ...


Knights in Shining Armor Probably Had Terrible BO | Discoblog

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A knightly stroll, with treadmill and respiration mask

Medieval knighthood was physically grueling work: Jousting with massive lances. Charging into battle. Jogging on a treadmill in a full suit of armor. You know how it is.

It’s no surprise that beneath their shining armor, knights shimmered with sweat. Running around in up to 110 pounds of armor, or even advancing at a stately walk, would take a whole lot of effort. But, a team of scientists wondered, just how exhausting was it?

Since the researchers had missed their chance to track exertion on the jousting pitch by several hundred years, they recruited four modern volunteers, historical re-enactors from the Royal Armories in London. These guys had ample experience wearing armor, making them better proxies for knightly exertion than volunteers who wouldn’t know a culet from a cuirass. Each man donned a replica 15th-century suit of armor and hopped on a treadmill. As the volunteers walked and ran, the researchers kept tabs on their heart rate, their respiration rate, how much oxygen they used, and how long their strides were.

Sure enough, the researchers found, armor was exhausting. The men used 2.3 times as much ...


House mice picked up poison resistance gene by having sex with related species | Not Exactly Rocket Science

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Since 1948, people have been poisoning unwanted rats and mice with warfarin, a chemical that causes lethal internal bleeding. It’s still used, but to a lesser extent, for rodents have become increasingly resistant to warfarin ever since the 1960s. This is a common theme – humans create a fatal chemical – a pesticide or an antibiotic – and our targets evolve resistance. But this story has a twist. Ying Song from Rice University, Houston, has found that some house mice picked up the gene for warfarin resistance from a different species.

Warfarin works by acting against vitamin K. This vitamin activates a number of genes that create clots in blood, but it itself has to be activated by a protein called VKORC1. Warfarin stops VKORC1 from doing its job, thereby suppressing vitamin K. The clotting process fails, and bleeds continue to bleed.

Rodents can evolve to shrug off warfarin by tweaking their vkorc1 gene, which encodes the protein of the same name. In European house mice, scientists have found at least 10 different genetic changes (mutations) in vkorc1 that change how susceptible they are to warfarin. But only six ...

Brain Cuttings Kindle: On mysterious sale for $3.99 | The Loom

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Amazon has put my ebook, Brain Cuttings: Fifteen Journeys Through the Mind on sale for the gotta-get-it price of $3.99. If you want some information on the ebook, check out…

The Brain Cuttings page on my web site

A conversation with science writer Steve Silberman on Brain Cuttings and the future of science ebooks

A review by Vaughan Bell on his essential blog, Mind Hacks

And if the only information you need is “$3.99,” here’s where you can get a copy.

(PS–I have no idea why Amazon decided to put the ebook on sale, and have no idea how long the sale will last. So grab it now!)


… and then there were none. | Bad Astronomy

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At 09:57:54 GMT today, July 21st, 2011, the Space Shuttle Orbiter Atlantis rolled to a safe stop on Runway 15 at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, marking the end of last Shuttle flight.

It flew 33 missions since its first launch in 1985, spending over 300 days in space and making nearly 5000 orbits of the Earth. It visited Mir, the ISS, and even Hubble.

With this landing, the Era of the Shuttle is over. But our presence in space is not. NASA still has working rockets that can carry machines into space, and is working on developing a new rocket system. Private companies are gathering the capability to go to space and to low-Earth orbit. Other countries still have the ability to take humans into space as well. As Americans we pride ourselves on our history of exploration and being the first. For now, that pride may have to wait.

But I’ll note that after Apollo 17, the last Moon landing, it was 8 years before the first Shuttle launch. I’m hoping the current gap that began this morning will last much less than that. I wish there were no gap at ...


Nuclear Decay Beneath Your Feet Accounts for Half of Earth’s Heat Output | 80beats

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spacing is importantAtoms sometimes release alpha particles during radioactive decay.

What’s the News: An international team of researchers has completed the most precise measurement of the Earth’s radioactivity to date. By analyzing subatomic particles streaming out of the interior of the planet, the geologists and physicists discovered that the radioactive decay of several elements generates roughly half of the Earth’s total heat output. Their results were published recently in the journal Nature Geoscience.

What’s the Context:

Radioactive decay is a natural process where an unstable atom loses energy by emitting particles (thus decaying into smaller atoms). Radioactive decay can sometimes release neutrinos: tiny, electrically neutral, and nearly massless elementary particles that pass through most normal matter with little to no interaction. Because of their ability to phase through matter mostly unaffected, these ghostlike particles are very hard to detect.
Like all other particles, neutrinos have anti-siblings, called antineutrinos. A proton can sometimes capture an antineutrino, which then splits into a neutron plus a positron (an anti-electron). That positron will annihilate when it hits an electron, releasing energy that can be detected with very sensitive instruments, such as the Kamioka Liquid Scintillator Antineutrino Detector (KamLAND) deep in ...


NCBI ROFL: Domestic cats do not show causal understanding in a string-pulling task. | Discoblog

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“This study explored how domestic cats perform in a horizontal string-pulling task to determine whether they understand this case of physical causality. Fifteen cats were tested on their ability to retrieve an unreachable food treat in three different set-ups: (a) a single baited string, (b) two parallel strings where only one was baited and (c) two crossed strings where only one was baited. All cats succeeded at pulling a single string to obtain a treat, but none consistently chose the correct string when two strings were parallel. When tested with two crossed strings one cat chose the wrong string consistently and all others performed at chance level. There was no evidence that cats understand the function of the strings or their physical causality.”

Photo: flickr/oskay

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WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!


Who knows heritability and what do they know | Gene Expression

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Heritability is a fraught topic. It comes up repeatedly on this weblog, but even long time readers can be confused as to its implications, as evidenced by the incorrect inferences made from their own understanding of the concept. The most common problem is that too often people think that heritability is just a scienced up version of the colloquial idea of some traits being “more genetic” or “less genetic.” It’s not that at all. Traits totally specified in their details by genetic pathways can be non-heritable. That’s because heritability looks at the association between parents and offspring on a trait and attempts to separate the population-wide proportion of the variation attributable to genes and not attributable to genes. When you have a genetically specified trait, like the number of human fingers, you have no real variation within the population to work with (with some rare exceptions). It doesn’t make sense to talk about the heritability of the number of fingers, because this is a fixed trait in the human species.

In contrast, height is a perfect trait to illustrate heritability. Unlike behavioral or cognitive traits its measurement is clear, ...

The end of evolutionary psychology | Gene Expression

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A new paper in PLoS Biology is rather like the last person to leave turning the light off. Evolutionary psychology as we understood it in the 1980s and 1990s is over. Darwin in Mind: New Opportunities for Evolutionary Psychology:

None of the aforementioned scientific developments render evolutionary psychology unfeasible; they merely require that EP should change its daily practice. The key concepts of EP have led to a series of widely held assumptions (e.g., that human behaviour is unlikely to be adaptive in modern environments, that cognition is domain-specific, that there is a universal human nature), which with the benefit of hindsight we now know to be questionable. A modern EP would embrace a broader, more open, and multi-disciplinary theoretical framework, drawing on, rather than being isolated from, the full repertoire of knowledge and tools available in adjacent disciplines. Such a field would embrace the challenge of exploring empirically, for instance, to what extent human cognition is domain-general or domain specific, under what circumstances human behaviour is adaptive, how best to explain variation in human behaviour and cognition. The evidence from adjacent disciplines suggests that, if EP can reconsider its basic tenets, it will flourish as a scientific discipline.

Some non-effects of adoption | Gene Expression

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I mentioned offhand to Trey of Genomes Are Us that I’d look around for the effect of adoptive environments on criminality (what with the recent concern about studying the genetics of criminal predisposition). Luckily I have Steve Hsu in my RSS, as he posted something of interest just yesterday, pointing me to this paper, The environments of adopted and non-adopted youth: evidence on range restriction from the Sibling Interaction and Behavior Study (SIBS):

Previous reviews of the literature have suggested that shared environmental effects may be underestimated in adoption studies because adopted individuals are exposed to a restricted range of family environments. A sample of 409 adoptive and 208 non-adoptive families from the Sibling Interaction and Behavior Study (SIBS) was used to identify the environmental dimensions on which adoptive families show greatest restriction and to determine the effect of this restriction on estimates of the adoptive sibling correlation. Relative to non-adoptive families, adoptive families experienced a 41% reduction of variance in parent disinhibitory psychopathology and an 18% reduction of variance in socioeconomic status (SES). There was limited evidence for range restriction in exposure to bad peer models, parent depression, or family climate. However, restriction in range ...