We are proud to announce the launch of LPIN.TV. Currently, we have two “stages.” The first is LP 101 TV. We asked you to pick videos for your friends, and we’ve put them in to a 24/7 stream that’s connected to facebook chat. We also have Training TV, a channel devoted to helping you navigate the political [...]
Just as dangerous as full size pigs.
Authors: V. V. Zharkova, N. S. Meshalkina, L. K. Kashapova, A. A. Kuznetsov and A. T. Altyntsev.<br />Astronomy & Astrophysics Vol. 532 , page A17<br />Published online: 13/07/2011<br />
Keywords:
Sun: flares ; Sun: radio radiation ; Sun: X-rays, gamma rays ; polarization ; scattering.
Authors: J. M. Fernandes, A. I. F. Vaz and L. N. Vicente.<br />Astronomy & Astrophysics Vol. 532 , page A20<br />Published online: 13/07/2011<br />
Keywords:
methods: numerical ; stars: fundamental parameters ; Hertzsprung-Russell (HR) and C-M diagrams ; planetary systems.
OUr newly found neighbors. Click for a larger image (full sized linked below). Credit: AIP, NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive
Hey, check out the new neighbors!
About the images as explained by Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam: False-color images of the two brown dwarf discoveries WISE J0254+0223 and WISE J1741+2553 (composite of three images taken by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) with different filters in the infrared). In the WISE colors, the extremely cool brown dwarfs appear as yellow-green objects. The positions of the objects as observed by a previous near-infrared sky survey about ten years before the WISE observations are also marked. Every image covers a sky field about 200 times smaller than the full Moon. After 700 and 1,200 years, respectively, the proper motions of the two objects lead to a shift in their position as large as the full Moon diameter. (Credit: AIP, NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive)
The full story, click this link to see the full sized images too:
Scientists from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) have discovered two new brown dwarfs at estimated distances of only 15 and 18 light years from the Sun. For comparison: The next star to the Sun, Proxima, is located slightly more than 4 light years from the Sun, whereas the nearest known brown dwarfs, epsilon Indi Ba and Bb, also found at the AIP several years ago, are about 12 light years away.
Ralf-Dieter Scholz and his AIP colleagues used the recently published data of the NASA satellite WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) for their discovery. The two new Solar neighbours, named WISE J0254+0223 and WISE J1741+2553, attracted attention by the extreme contrast between their strong brightness in the infrared and their almost invisible appearance in optical light. In addition, both objects move at comparably large speed across the sky (proper motion), i.e. their positions are remarkably different with respect to earlier observations. This was a first hint of their vicinity that was confirmed by the comparison of their colours and magnitudes with those of other similar objects. The brighter of the two objects was visible on the night sky at the time of its discovery so that the AIP team could use the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) in Arizona/USA for determining the spectral type and distance more accurately. Both objects belong to the coolest representatives of T-type brown dwarfs, just at the boundary to the predicted but not yet well-defined class of Y-type ultracool brown dwarfs.
Brown dwarfs are also called failed stars, since during their formation, they could not accumulate enough mass to ignite the natural nuclear fusion reactor in their core, that is the long-living energy source of stars. Therefore, their brightness decreases strongly with time. Presumably, most brown dwarfs have reached surface temperatures below the “oven temperature” of about 500 Kelvin (about 230 degrees Celsius), may be even as cool as the temperature at the surface of the Earth. The search for these elusive neighbours of the Sun is currently in full swing. It cannot be excluded that ultracool brown dwarfs surround us in similar high numbers as stars and that our nearest known neighbour will soon be a brown dwarf rather than Proxima Centauri.
Atlantis and the Aurora Australis. Click for a larger version, even more choices linked below. Image Credit: NASA/STS-135 crew.
Here’s one way to see the “southern lights”, seems strange to say because I’m so used to “northern lights”. Still an equally stunning sight and to see it from the ISS as this one was and photographed by the STS-135 Atlantis crew, well it’s just right.
Want a larger version? Click here to go to NASA and choose from a variety of sizes.
Vesta from about 62,000 miles. Click for larger. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDAbri
Here’s a new image of Vesta as seen from the Dawn spacecraft. It was taken on July 1, 2011 from a distance of about 62,000 miles (100,000 kilometers) away from the protoplanet Vesta. Each pixel in the image corresponds to roughly 5.8 miles (9.3 kilometers).
This month begins a year long observation of the protoplanet when Dawn goes into orbit around Vesta. Eventually the spacecraft will get just 120 miles above the surface during the mapping phase where it will remain for 70 days.
Currently the spacecraft is about 35,000 miles from Vesta and approaching at 50 meters/sec (or 110 miles per hour). Visit the Dawn website for all the scoop.
Shuttle update: Mike Fossum and Ron Garan completed installing the Robotic Refueling Mission (RRM) experiment onto a platform on Dextre, the Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator during a spacewalk today.
No word on the piece of debris from a old Soviet Cosmos 375 satellite that everyone was watching for the possibility of interfering with the ISS/Shuttle mission. These encounters are not all that rare anymore with an estimated half million bits of junk orbiting around. As long as we know about them we can work around them. Seems that eventually if the junk doesn’t re-enter it could form a ring around the Earth and we can join the ranks of Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune as a ringed planet, of course our ring will be garbage. Hmmmm.
What is a Neptnian Year you ask? Click for larger. NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Now you know! 
From Hubblesite:
Today, Neptune has arrived at the same location in space where it was discovered nearly 165 years ago. To commemorate the event, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has taken these “anniversary pictures” of the blue-green giant planet.
Neptune is the most distant major planet in our solar system. German astronomer Johann Galle discovered the planet on September 23, 1846. At the time, the discovery doubled the size of the known solar system. The planet is 2.8 billion miles (4.5 billion kilometers) from the Sun, 30 times farther than Earth. Under the Sun’s weak pull at that distance, Neptune plods along in its huge orbit, slowly completing one revolution approximately every 165 years.
These four Hubble images of Neptune were taken with the Wide Field Camera 3 on June 25-26, during the planet’s 16-hour rotation. The snapshots were taken at roughly four-hour intervals, offering a full view of the planet. The images reveal high-altitude clouds in the northern and southern hemispheres. The clouds are composed of methane ice crystals.
The giant planet experiences seasons just as Earth does, because it is tilted 29 degrees, similar to Earth’s 23-degree tilt. Instead of lasting a few months, each of Neptune’s seasons continues for about 40 years.
The snapshots show that Neptune has more clouds than a few years ago, when most of the clouds were in the southern hemisphere. These Hubble views reveal that the cloud activity is shifting to the northern hemisphere. It is early summer in the southern hemisphere and winter in the northern hemisphere.
In the Hubble images, absorption of red light by methane in Neptune’s atmosphere gives the planet its distinctive aqua color. The clouds are tinted pink because they are reflecting near-infrared light.
A faint, dark band near the bottom of the southern hemisphere is probably caused by a decrease in the hazes in the atmosphere that scatter blue light. The band was imaged by NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1989, and may be tied to circumpolar circulation created by high-velocity winds in that region.
The temperature difference between Neptune’s strong internal heat source and its frigid cloud tops, about minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit, might trigger instabilities in the atmosphere that drive large-scale weather changes.
Neptune has an intriguing history. It was Uranus that led astronomers to Neptune. Uranus, the seventh planet from the Sun, is Neptune’s inner neighbor. British astronomer Sir William Herschel and his sister Caroline found Uranus in 1781, 55 years before Neptune was spotted. Shortly after the discovery, Herschel noticed that the orbit of Uranus did not match the predictions of Newton’s theory of gravity. Studying Uranus in 1821, French astronomer Alexis Bouvard speculated that another planet was tugging on the giant planet, altering its motion.
Twenty years later, Urbain Le Verrier of France and John Couch Adams of England, who were mathematicians and astronomers, independently predicted the location of the mystery planet by measuring how the gravity of a hypothetical unseen object could affect Uranus’s path. Le Verrier sent a note describing his predicted location of the new planet to the German astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle at the Berlin Observatory. Over the course of two nights in 1846, Galle found and identified Neptune as a planet, less than a degree from Le Verrier’s predicted position. The discovery was hailed as a major success for Newton’s theory of gravity and the understanding of the universe.
Galle was not the first to see Neptune. In December 1612, while observing Jupiter and its moons with his handmade telescope, astronomer Galileo Galilei recorded Neptune in his notebook, but as a star. More than a month later, in January 1613, he noted that the “star” appeared to have moved relative to other stars. But Galileo never identified Neptune as a planet, and apparently did not follow up those observations, so he failed to be credited with the discovery.
Neptune is not visible to the naked eye, but may be seen in binoculars or a small telescope. It can be found in the constellation Aquarius, close to the boundary with Capricorn.
Neptune-mass planets orbiting other stars may be common in our Milky Way galaxy. NASA’s Kepler mission, launched in 2009 to hunt for Earth-size planets, is finding increasingly smaller extrasolar planets, including many the size of Neptune.
I am having lunch and watching the NASA TV coverage of the docking of Atlantis with the ISS. The docking has happened and now we are waiting for the hatches to open, really one is open already and the main hatch is still closed at the moment.
Will we even have a “NASA” much longer? The future of NASA is partly with the Orion spacecraft, check out the video.
Click here to view the embedded video.
LOL, I’m watching one of the ISS crew, he’s seemingly pointing right at me and saying “hurry up and finish the post”, not really, but it did look like it.
So, we have this new idea the Orion but will it ever come to pass? Oh you don’t see how it couldn’t? If the successor to the Hubble, the James Webb Telescope, is on the chopping block at this stage in its development and make no mistake it is in jeopardy of being cut this year, the Orion probably isn’t that far behind.
I still say spending less than a dime on a US tax dollar towards the sciences (of which spaceflight is a part) like we do (~ 0.86 %) is a pretty good deal.
Oh well, sour grapes I guess. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say the door is closing on NASA.
Be sure to check out the Space shuttle Tribute put together by Vizme, it’s rather good; AND lest you say my cup is half empty today, the hatches between the shuttle and the ISS are both open! Other than a problem with a general purpose computer due a minor switch issue things have been going great on the still young mission.
by Jon Winsor
Conventional incandescent light bulbs are tremendously inefficient. Only about 10% of the energy used to power the light bulb actually goes to producing light, and the remaining 90% is emitted as heat. And it’s easy to see why. An incandescent bulb filament relies on the fact that it’s a poor conductor of electricity. It’s essentially the same concept used by inexpensive space heaters. So doubtless, the technology could be improved—the same way that many appliances have been improved by efficiency standards over the years.
At least that was the way Fred Upton (R – MI) was thinking when he helped craft a provision of the Energy Independence and Security Act (ESIA), which was signed into law by George W. Bush in 2007—with support from manufacturers, who have since invested millions in retooling their factories. The provision didn’t choose “winners and losers” as far as light bulb technology goes. Incandescent bulbs were fine, as long as they met the standard. Under the law, as the Christian Science Monitor reported,
…general-purpose light bulbs must become about 30 percent more energy efficient. Different bulb classes face different deadlines, all between 2012 and 2014. The old Edison bulb gets killed on January 1, 2012. But more-efficient incandescent bulbs, which use only 72 watts to give the same output as an old 100-watt Edison bulb, will still be sold.
While Edison bulbs today are about 30-50 cents apiece, updated versions cost $1.50. But the latter pay for themselves in energy savings in about six months.
These bulbs also last about 50% longer, and households were expected to save $100 to $200 per year under the new standards. Not to mention the power plants that wouldn’t need to be built, the gains in US energy independence, and the gains in US jobs (the Guardian reports that presently no US factory manufactures the old 100 watt light bulbs).
Enter Rush Limbaugh.
According to a number of sources, the genesis of the controversy was one Joe Barton coveting a committee chairmanship of Fred Upton. Sensing the opportunity for a tea party-style groundswell that he might ride to a committee chairmanship, Joe Barton made an appeal to the uniquely unreasoning and dialog-free medium called talk radio–which promptly turned the light bulb into a pet cause.
Now there could be a reasonable argument that talk radio might have made—that up front costs are something that consumers should choose to pay. Maybe consumers want to keep their $1 per bulb up front, instead of their $100-200 savings. That’s at least reasonable, although it makes you stop and go hmmm…
But that kind of nuance isn’t what talk radio is about. Says Rush Limbaugh, “Unless there’s a policy reversal, next year the 100-watt incandescent light bulb will be banned… Let there be incandescent light and freedom. That’s the American way.” Saying “ban” is entirely misleading, but it’s too much talk radio gold to pass up. “They’re coming for your lightbulbs, America, and you’ll be forced to fill your house with those weird, screwy things.” Now that’s exciting radio, exciting in the way that a Grover’s Mill, NJ farmer got excited during a 1938 broadcast of War of the Worlds.
The campaign has been very effective. Upton defended his decision for a time, but eventually bowed to pressure and disowned his own bill (he even took down his 2009 defense of ESIA from his website). In the end, Upton managed to keep his seat. But the talk-radio based campaign gained momentum (with help from a CEI “grassroots” group), and eventually garnered 233 votes for their measure in the house, and then today finally got a procedural voice vote to block enforcement of Upton’s original provision.
An interesting question is, without talk radio’s misleading “stop the ban” campaign, would this effort have even come close to getting 233 votes? What does this do to our politics if every time a politician has a whim like Barton’s, they could just get Rush to do a few segments and work up the Republican base in whatever way is needed, no matter how capricious that need might be?
My sample size for the reader survey is now ~200. I’m aiming for ~500. If you are a regular reader of this weblog, please consider filling out the survey. The software is telling me that the average reader is taking about ~10 minutes. All questions are optional, so you can quickly skip over confusing ones or those which you don’t want to divulge.
The results so far are here. At least for the questions which weren’t open ended. I added a lot of open ended numeric questions so that I could run some scatterplots and more natural statistics (i.e., I don’t have to convert categorical responses into numerics and so forth).
To give a taste for the kind of stuff I’m running on the nerd-heavy data set I thought I would explore how # of sexual partners relates to age and IQ. First, let me admit that I assume that the IQ distribution of the readership here is somewhat artificially shifted upward (to the right of the distribution). Those with higher IQs are more likely to know their IQs. And whether unconsciously or consciously individuals will almost certainly self-report results which are drawn from the higher range of their results ...
It’s CMAJ week on NCBI ROFL! All this week we’ll be featuring articles from the Canadian Medical Association Journal’s holiday issues. Enjoy!
“Background: Controversy remains about whether early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise (the Ben Franklin hypothesis), or healthy, wealthy and dead (the James Thurber hypothesis).
Methods: As part of the Determinants of Myocardial Infarction Onset Study, we determined through personal interviews the bedtimes and wake times of 949 men admitted to hospital with acute myocardial infarction. Participants reported their educational attainment and zip code of residence, from which local median income was estimated. We followed participants for mortality for a mean of 3.7 years. We defined early-to-bed and early-to-rise respectively as a bedtime before 11 pm and wake time before 6:30 am.
Results: Hours in bed were inversely associated with number of cups of coffee consumed (age-adjusted Spearman correlation coefficient r –0.07, p = 0.03). The mortality of early-to-bed, early-to-risers did not differ significantly from other groups. There was also no relation between bed habits and local income, nor with educational attainment.
Interpretation: Our results refute both the Franklin and Thurber hypotheses. Early to bed ...
Life at the top ain’t easy.
What’s the News: In the hardscrabble world of a baboon troop, being the alpha male has its perks: power, food, ample opportunities to woo the ladies. But all that status brings with it a great deal of stress, a new study shows, as the alpha male constantly scrambles to stay atop the social pyramid. The life of a second-in-command beta male—somewhat fewer perks but, the researchers found, a whole lot less stress—is starting to sound like the better deal.
How the Heck:
The researchers gathered samples of feces from 125 adult male baboons in Amboseli, Kenya, collecting more than 4,500 samples over nine years. They then measured the level of glucocorticoids—hormones that play a major role in the body’s stress response—in each sample to determine the baboons’ stress levels.
Alpha males’ stress levels, the samples showed, were high—as high as those of low-ranking males, who are constantly being bullied and deprived of access to food and mates. The alpha males do more than their share of fighting and mating, the scientists found; defending themselves and keeping others away from potential mates likely account for much of the added stress ...
Several people have pointed me to Mary Carmichael’s piece for Nature, Newborn screening: A spot of trouble. It’s free, but you have to register. The subheading is: “By raising hell about newborn blood-spot screening, Twila Brase could jeopardize public-health programmes and derail research. The problem is, she has a point.”
The broader issue is “genetic privacy,” and the nature of consent in our public health system. Here’s an interesting paragraph which gets to some of the things we’ve discussed here before:
Twila Brase was not always the kind of person who hands out politically charged propaganda in airports. On a first meeting at her modest office in a shopping plaza in St Paul, Minnesota, she seems more like the unassuming nurse she was back in 1995 — before she began her second life as a bioethical gadfly, and before she had started making YouTube videos that accuse her state of commandeering the DNA of children as “government property” through widespread newborn screening programmes. Her voice is quiet and level. It is difficult to write her off as a conspiracy theorist: she simply doesn’t sound like one, even when, 4.5 minutes into making the case against screening, she ...
1) Post from the past: Race: the current consensus.
2) Weird search query of the week: “i, for one, welcome our aquatic overlords reddit.”
3) Comment of the week, in response to “What one (or more) genomes can tell us”:
An important constraint on mutation rate shifts is that chimpanzees and humans are almost exactly equally diverged from Gorilla (and Orang-Utan). As the mutation rate varies with generation time, this suggests that the mean generation time of humans and chimps since the split can’t be hugely different, and strongly argues against major mutation rate changes in our ancestors of the last few million years.
4) And finally, your weekly fluff fix:
What’s the News: Several days ago, a tasty tidbit hit the science blogosphere: writing in a journal of the American Chemical Society, scientists reported the successful production of gelatin from human proteins.
Understandably, the verdict of the crowd was, “Groooooosss!” The details of the experiment were dutifully reported—the human gene for collagen, the protein in skin and bones that makes up gelatin, was inserted into a yeast, which then cranked it out, along with the help of certain enzymes—but its purpose was sometimes glossed over in favor of giant images of quivering dessert. Like the one above. Yum.
So why use human genes to make gelatin?
Scientists are not actually on a mission to (a) gross us out, or (b) make us into cannibals. Gelatin, summed up quickly, is usually made by boiling and chemically processing the bones, skin, and connective tissue of animals like cows and pigs to release collagen, a long molecule that, when further broken down by heat and mixed with water, will set into a gel at room temperature. This is where your jiggly dessert comes from (apologies if I’ve just turned you vegetarian, or at least non-gelat-tarian).
Unfortunately, this process yields ...
This is a pretty nifty illusion: as you look at a spot between two rapidly changing images of faces, your brain distorts the images, making them look really weird:
I could do without the title they chose for the video, but the paper on which it’s based is called "Flashed face distortion effect: Grotesque faces from relative spaces", which may not explain much, either. What it means, basically, is that as the faces flash, certain features get distorted by your brain, and the amount of distortion depends on how much that feature deviates from the rest in the set. In other words, someone with slightly larger eyes gets perceived by you as having huge eyes. Go ahead and pause the video and click through it; the faces are pretty much normal faces, so the distortion really is an illusion.
I think that’s pretty neat; I’m fascinated by how our brains perceive faces in particular, since people see them everywhere. I’d love to see some variations on this, like showing men’s faces, or a man on one side and a woman on the other. Would it work for animal faces too? Hmmm.
I’ll note that some people ...
Georgia Tech researcher Manos Tentzeris holding
up one of his inkjet-printed antennas.
What’s the News: With all of the electronics cluttering our daily lives, the air is abuzz with ambient electromagnetic energy from sources like cell phone networks, radio and television transmitters, and satellite communications systems. Now, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have devised a simple, cheap way to harness that wasted energy: capturing it with inkjet-printed antennas and storing it in batteries.
How the Heck:
Electrical engineer Manos Tentzeris and his team created an ink mixture containing nanoparticles of silver, which, as a conductor, is useful for building circuits. Using an inkjet printer, they printed radio frequency components and circuits onto paper and flexible plastic.
The printed antennas receive a wide range of frequencies—100 MHz to 60 GHz (that is, all the way from FM radio to radar). The researchers installed the antennas in miniature devices that collect the energy, convert it to DC power, and store it in ...
The life of the cottony cushion scale insect reads like something from the most ridiculous of tabloid newspapers. Dad leaves parasitic body parts in his own daughter, which produce sperm that fertilise her eggs. He is both father and grandfather to his own grandchildren.
On top of that, these insects are mostly hermaphrodites. With the exception of the odd pure male, almost every individual is both male and female. They reproduce by having sex with themselves, fertilising their own eggs with their own sperm. And this means that scale insects can be father, mother, grandfather and grandmother to all of their grandchildren. Good luck drawing that family tree.
Scale insects are small animals that suck on plant sap for a living. Encased in bizarre waxy shells, most people wouldn’t even recognise them as insects – the cottony cushion scale, for example, looks like a dollop of shaving foam. It and two of its close relatives are the only known hermaphrodites out of several millions of insect species.
In most hermaphroditic animals, an individual grows up and develops the organs that make both sperm and eggs. But that’s not the case for ...
What’s the News: A daily dose of anti-HIV drugs can significantly reduce the likelihood that straight men and women will contract HIV from an infected partner, according to two new clinical studies. These studies add strong evidence to earlier findings that taking HIV drugs can prevent healthy people from contracting the disease, and are the first to show that the drugs reliably lower transmission risk in heterosexuals.
How the Heck:
One study enrolled 4,758 straight couples in Kenya and Uganda, in which one partner—either male or female—had HIV and the other didn’t.
The uninfected partners were split into three even groups. Each group was given a different type of pill, which they were instructed to take daily: a pill containing the antiretroviral drug tenofovir; a pill with both tenofovir and another HIV drug, emtricitabine; or a placebo.
Over course of the three-year study, 47 participants taking the placebo contracted HIV, compared with 18 taking tenofovir and 13 taking the combination pill—meaning that the drug ...
