Scent-Gland Bacteria Help Hyenas Identify Friends, Strangers, and Pregnant Females | Discoblog

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Spotted hyenas are sometimes portrayed as cowardly scavengers, always laughing, always up to some kind of mischief. If you’ve ever seen Disney’s The Lion King, then you may already have that image in your head. Here in the non-Disney universe, spotted hyenas are actually fascinating creatures. For example, they hang out in matriarchal “clans,” and the females, with their aggressive behavior and pseudo-penises (large clitorises), are very difficult to tell apart from the males. But it turns out that spotted hyenas may be even stranger than we initially thought: they may use bacteria to help communicate with one another, suggests Michigan State University zoologist Kay E. Holekamp in a recent, amusing New York Times blog post.

Unlike many other carnivorous species, spotted hyenas do not mark their territory by lifting their legs and peeing. Instead, the animals produce a yellowish paste in their scent glands located above their anuses. The paste accumulates in adjacent pouches, which the hyenas then rub on grass stalks. In previous research, Holekamp and her students learned that the paste odor provides a wealth of information to roaming hyenas, such as the sex of the paste owner, ...

Atlantis rides above the waves | Bad Astronomy

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At 11:29 Eastern (US) time, the Space Shuttle Atlantis roared into space for the last time.

I have mixed feelings about the Shuttle, NASA, and our future in space — you can read about that here — but it doesn’t change the fact that watching a Shuttle shed the bonds of Earth and leap into space is still a magnificent thing to do.

This may be the last launch of the Shuttle, but it is not the final step for mankind. Private industry is there, other nations are still launching, and I have hope that through hard work America will once again lead the way to the final frontier. And it won’t just be into orbit, which is, after all, still bound to Earth. It will be beyond, back to the Moon, on to Mars, on to near-Earth asteroids, and eventually into deep space. It may take decades, even centuries, but the human-populated solar system I dreamed and read about, the one I still imagine, will come to life some day.

We just have to choose to make it happen.

Per ardua, ad astra.

Image credit: Robert Scoble.


Will Atheists Rally Behind “The Ledge”? | The Intersection

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Today in New York and Los Angeles, “The Ledge” premieres–see here for our Point of Inquiry episode–a landmark, by any reasonable estimation, in the cinematic depiction of atheism. Tell me another movie that has top tier Hollywood stars in it (Liv Tyler, Terence Howard), that has been nominated for best drama at Sundance, and that actually advances the case that atheists are ethical, good, and even heroic people?

When Mel Gibson made The Passion of the Christ, evangelicals rallied around the film dramatically and made it a huge success. Seriously, the film grossed over $ 600 million!

You might think atheists would see their chance to do the same…but then, atheists are not like Christians, in many, many ways. Psychologically–this is my opinion, but actually grounded in a lot of data–they are highly individualistic, not followers, not into heeding any authority, marching to their own drum. That is, of course, what makes them atheists and what makes them reject the dogmas of religion. And it is also what makes them regularly criticize their own.

You see this in the blog comments on The Ledge wherever you go–a lot of negativism directed towards the film. I know that those who comment on blogs are only a small proportion of those who read them, but–if you want to have an effect through popular culture, this does not bode particularly well.

The film may cascade to prominence anyway–Bill Donohue’s Catholic League has been baited into attacking it, which is great PR for the film, and it does after all feature a star studded cast. But this weekend is crucial–the opening in New York and LA has to be strong in order to spread to more theaters. Will atheists come out, in these two cities that are absolutely full of them?

Let’s hope so–you can find a theater here. And for those who aren’t based in our two bi-coastal megacities, you can still stream the movie via Sundance.

Meantime, here is a clip of the central “debate over God” scene:


Cascades of Phone Calls Show Relationships Between States | 80beats

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Researchers sifted through a whole lot of AT&T mobile phone data to find out who’s talking to who—or, really, where’s talking to where. The Connected States of America, as the project is called, has produced some amazing maps showing clusters of communication, from the surprising—neighboring states like Oklahoma and Arkansas pair off, chatting mostly with each other—to the expected: the flood of continent-spanning calls between New York and San Francisco.

[MIT Senseable City Lab, via GigaOM and Gizmodo]


Watch the Space Shuttle Atlantis Blast Off in a Few Minutes | 80beats

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Today, weather permitting, the last space shuttle will launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Watch the launch live here at NASA TV.

For live tweets, follow @NASAKennedy and the journalists on the ground: Alan Boyle (@b0yle), Dave Mosher (@DaveMosher), and Xeni Jardin (@xenijardin) are a good start, and for from-a-distance commentary, follow Phil Plait at @badastronomer.


Endings | Cosmic Variance

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While the astronomy community reels from the potential loss of the James Webb Space Telescope (see Julianne and Risa’s posts), it is appropriate that we also mark the passing of the Space Shuttle program. All being well, in about 15 minutes the last space shuttle will rocket into space (live video).

The space shuttle program was essential to the launch, and perhaps even more importantly, the multiple repairs of the Hubble Space Telescope. And it is the inevitable loss of the Hubble, and the absence of a worthy successor in space, that is leaving the astronomy community despondent.

These are difficult financial times. Brutal decisions need to be made. It is certainly conceivable that the United States (and the world) simply can no longer afford to finish off the James Webb Space Telescope. However, it is worth noting that this telescope in many ways symbolizes the best aspects of humanity: our thirst for knowledge, our desire for exploration, and our quest to find our place in the Universe. There is a reason that the Hubble space telescope captures the imagination of both practicing scientists and the general public. We cannot help but be moved and fascinated by images of the cosmos. Have we truly come to a point where we abandon this most noble and inspirational of pursuits?


Goodbye, E. coli? | The Loom

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Lucas Brouwers, one of the new bloggers at Scientific American’s snazzy new blog network, takes a look at an intriguing paper (free pdf). The authors of the paper in examined many different strains of E. coli and come to a remarkable conclusion: they’ve been splitting apart so far that they may soon no longer be a single species. Check it out. (And, if you have a lot of time to spare, check out the rest of Scientific American’s fine line-up of bloggers.)


NCBI ROFL: Scientists watching babies watching robots. | Discoblog

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Can we talk to robots? Ten-month-old infants expected interactive humanoid robots to be talked to by persons.

“As technology advances, many human-like robots are being developed. Although these humanoid robots should be classified as objects, they share many properties with human beings. This raises the question of how infants classify them. Based on the looking-time paradigm… we investigated whether 10-month-old infants expected people to talk to a humanoid robot. In a familiarization period, each infant observed an actor and an interactive robot behaving like a human, a non-interactive robot remaining stationary, and a non-interactive robot behaving like a human. In subsequent test trials, the infants were shown another actor talking to the robot and to the actor. We found that infants who had previously observed the interactive robot showed no difference in looking-time between the two types of test events. Infants in the other conditions, however, looked longer at the test event where the second experimenter talked to the robot rather than where the second experimenter talked to the person. These results suggest that infants interpret the interactive robot as a communicative agent and the non-interactive robot as an object. Our ...

Everything I didn’t know about sex | Gene Expression

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ResearchBlogging.orgThe Pith: The primary reason for the pervasiveness of sex among complex organisms is to maintain genomic integrity, not to increase genetic variation..

I just read a very strange article in the journal Evolution, Sex reduces genetic variation. In it the authors argue that contrary to conventional wisdom and evolutionary orthodoxy the rationale for the prevalence of sex amongst eukaryotic organisms is not maintenance of genetic variation, but rather a constraint upon genetic variation! This is a very peculiar view, and as someone not immersed in the literature on sex totally surprising to me.

The standard model is simple: sex allows organisms to swap genetic material and generate new combinations. This is at a particular premium for large, complex, and slow-breeding lineages, as is the norm amongst eukaryotes. In contrast, bacteria and their ilk have huge population sizes to draw from, and are quite literally protean in their ability to shift strategies to climb whatever adaptive landscape nature throws at them. Carl has a nice review of a paper in Science which reported just this finding in keeping with expectation. Increase the pathogen pressure, and eukaryotes which exchange genes marginalize those which do not because ...

Symphony of Science: Children of Africa | Bad Astronomy

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I’m very pleased to find out that Symphony of Science has put out a new video: Children of Africa:

Lovely, as always. Nice to see such wonderful speakers for science in this work, doing what they do best: inspiring us to explore more, think more, and be better humans.

Related posts:

- New Symphony of Science: Wave of Reason (the one I’m in)
- Symphony of Science Movement 4
- The Unbroken Thread
- The Case for Mars


Reverse Engineering John McPhee | The Loom

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I’ve never met John McPhee, but he’s always been lurking around my office. I’ve got a number of his books, and I always keep an eye out for his latest piece in the New Yorker. I can’t count the number of times reading a few lines of his stuff helped get me revved up again for writing.

Recently, Alexis Madrigal of the Atlantic invited me to participate in a Neiman Storyboard series called “Why’s This So Good?” Writers pick out a good piece of long-form journalism and try to figure out what makes it so. Having just revisited out McPhee’s sprawling 1987 epic on engineering the Mississippi, “Atchafalaya,” I chose it for my object of study. Here’s my take. And, if you have a free moment to quaff 28,000 words, here’s McPhee’s piece.


English monkey gives itself a pedicure with self-made tools | Not Exactly Rocket Science

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Animals use tools to get food, communicate with one another, defend themselves or even have a scratch. But in Chester Zoo, England, one monkey uses tools to give itself a pedicure.

Riccardo Pansini and Jan de Ruiter from Durham University watched a 18-year-old mandrill called JC clean his toenails out using small splinters. He made them himself, fashioning them from wood chips and twigs on the floor his enclosure, and honing them till they were small and sharp.

JC is the alpha male of the zoo’s six-strong group of mandrills. Over three months of observations, Pansini and de Ruiter saw JC give himself a pedicure seven times. On a couple of occasions, he ignored the wood altogether and just plucked out one of his own hairs to clean his nails with.

Many animals will use tools, but it’s not often that they modify those tools to make them more suitable for their needs. Chimps do it, as do New Caledonian crows. Among monkeys, biologists have documented a capuchin dressing her baby’s head wound with modified plants, spider monkeys making back-scratchers out of sticks, and Japanese macaques ...

The biocultural frog and tortoise | Gene Expression

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As many of you know when you have two adjacent demes, breeding populations, they often rapidly equilibrate in gene frequencies if they were originally distinct. There are plenty of good concrete examples of this. The Hui of China are Muslims who speak local Chinese dialects. The most probable root of this community goes back to the enormous population of Central Asia Muslims brought by the Mongol Yuan dynasty that ruled ruled China for over a century from the late 1200s to 1300s. Genetic studies of this group that I’ve seen indicate that a high bound estimate for West Eurasian ancestry is ~10%. The other ~90% is interchangeable with the Han Chinese. So let’s assume that the Hui are ~10% West Asian. If you assume that in the year 1400 the Hui were “pure,” you have 24 generations (25 years per generation). The original population of “Central Asian Muslims” were heterogeneous, including Iranians and Turks. But let’s take it granted that they were 50% East Eurasian and 50% West Eurasian in ancestry at the time of their arrival. What would the intermarriage rate per generation have to be so ...

NASA’S SDO captures final moments of a comet streaking across the Sun | Bad Astronomy

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It’s not known how many comets orbit the Sun in our solar system, but the number may be in the trillions. They spend a long, long time in the deep reaches of the outer solar system, only occasionally plunging toward us. If they pass near a planet their orbit can be changed, and some wind up on paths that take them so close to the Sun they burn up. These are called sungrazers.

That is what NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observatory saw on the evening of July 5/6, 2011. This has been seen many times before, but this is the first time one has been seen streaking directly across the Sun’s face!

Here’s the video (I recommend watching it in HD — at least 720p –to make the comet easier to spot):

Did you see it? The whole event took about 20 minutes to unfold, and is seen here highly compressed in time. This is no perspective effect; that comet really was just above the Sun’s surface, and most likely impacted the Sun or disintegrated from the heat. Astronomers are even now going over the data from the event to see if they can determine the comet’s fate.

On ...


Why is there sex? To fight the parasite army | The Loom

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For several decades now, biologists have been puzzling over sex. In some ways, it seems like a huge waste of effort.

Sexual reproduction requires splitting a species into two sexes, only one of which will be able to produce offspring. There are some species of animals that do without males; the females simply trigger their eggs to develop into embryos without any need for sperm. All the offspring of an asexual animal can produce offspring of their own, instead of just half. So it would make sense that genes that gave rise to asexual reproduction would win out in the evolutionary race.

Clearly that hasn’t happened. The world is rife with sex. Animals do it. Plants do it. Even mushrooms do it. So evolutionary biologists have carried out a number of studies to get an answer to the question, “Why sex?”

In 2009, I wrote an essay for Science about this research. If I had been writing that essay today, I’d have focused some attention on an elegant experiment on the sex life of a humble worm. It gives a big boost to the long-floated idea that ...


Buonanotte, Italia | Bad Astronomy

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I love pictures of Earth from space, but there’s something especially thrilling when it’s some place you can easily recognize instantly. Like, say, the boot heel of Italy at night:

Sigh. Così bella! [Click to empeninsulate.]

This picture was taken by an astronaut on board the International Space Station. There’s not a lot of science to be done necessarily with pictures like this, but sometimes it’s OK just to gawk at pretty pictures from space.

And come to think of it… not that I recognized it, but just to the left of the top of the heel is Bari, a town I spent a day in while cruising with the Center for Inquiry. CfI sponsors many cruises to help raise funds, so keep an ear open for them. The JREF does things like this sometimes, too.

Italy is lovely from the ground, but, like the rest of the planet, literally takes on a new dimension from space.

Image credit: NASA

Related posts:

- The storm below
- A puzzling planet picture from the ISS
- Followup: city lights from space
-

Using a Microscope, Scientists Resurrect a 123-year-old Recording | 80beats

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The recording’s grooves, seen through the microscope.

What’s the News: More than a century ago, Thomas Edison recorded a woman speaking the first verse of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” on a metal cylinder for use in a talking doll. Now, scientists using microscopes to create 3D scans of the badly damaged cylinder have made it possible to hear her voice again, through the patina of years.

How the Heck:

The recording is encoded in a series of grooves carved by a stylus into a short cylinder or ring of metal, which was found in Thomas Edison’s West Orange, NJ, laboratory, now a museum. But the cylinder had grown so warped that it could not be played on any phonograph or similar device.
Using a confocal microscope, usually used by biologists for making detailed 3D images of cells and cellular structures, scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scanned the cylinder to recording the meanderings of the grooves, whose slight variations in depth correspond to modulations in the voice of the speaker.
When they hooked their topographical map of the cylinder up to audio software, they heard, through the skips and scratches, the words of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”


Scientists Find the Molecule that Makes Sunburns Hurt—And a Way to Block it | 80beats

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What’s the News: Researchers have pinpointed the molecule that makes sunburned skin so sensitive to pain, they reported yesterday in Science Translational Medicine. This finding could help scientists develop new painkillers not only for sunburn, but for chronically painful conditions such as arthritis.

How the Heck:

The researchers exposed small patches of skin on rat’s paws and the forearms of ten human participants to UVB radiation, the ultraviolet rays that cause sunburn.
When the sunburn was at its most painful, two days later, the researchers took tiny samples of the sunburned skin. They found high levels of CXCL5, a protein that summons immune cells to injured tissue as part of the body’s inflammatory response.
To determine whether high CXCL5 levels were responsible for the skin’s sensitivity—since no previous studies had specifically linked the protein to pain—the scientists injected rats that hadn’t been exposed to UV rays with CXCL5. Sure enough, these rats showed about the same sensitivity to pain as sunburned rats did.
What’s more, the team found they could reduce the rats’ pain sensitivity by injecting them with an antibody that blocks the effects of CXCL5.

What’s the Context:

Of course, ...


Alleged scientific fraud: lawsuit reveals DOE failures | The Intersection

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This is a guest post by Eugenie Samuel Reich, a contributing correspondent for Nature.

Last time I posted on The Intersection, a couple of commenters were curious about a disclosure I made about having brought a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the US Department of Energy (DOE), to obtain a report into alleged scientific fraud at Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL).

So I thought that Intersection readers might be interested in my article, out today in Nature, reporting on the lawsuit’s progress.

The fraud allegations in the case date back to 2006. That year, a group of researchers led by Stephen Pennycook were accused of fabricating data; which they have strongly denied. Pennycook’s research involves developing cutting-edge techniques for imaging materials using an electron microscope, which can solve problems in nanotechnology, energy research, and condensed matter physics. His group receives about $2 million per year from DOE.

The data that prompted concerns included one example, discussed in this 2006 Boston Globe article, where the group had mirrored and spliced datasets together to represent a scan of a sample that had allegedly never been studied for real. In another example, the group had replaced some, but not all, of the electron energy loss spectra taken from a sample with allegedly completely different ones when a reviewer suggested the scientific conclusion that atomic-scale resolution had been achieved were not fully supported by the originals.

Following federal policy on research misconduct, ORNL held an investigation. The investigation panel of three scientists exonerated the group of misconduct, finding they were guilty of no more than errors of judgment and careless errors. In order to understand how this conclusion was reached, I sought the investigation report under FOIA, and went through several rounds at the DOE appeals process (with at one point, the Office of Hearings and Appeals ruling in my favor, only for the Office of Science, which had the report, to dispute its conclusions. In 2008, a summary statement by the investigators was released, but I continued to pursue the original report. By 2009, I had received a final answer that DOE wouldn’t release it, and so sued the agency in district court in Boston, where I am based.

In fighting the case, the government has gone to great lengths to argue that the investigation report it received is not a government record subject to FOIA. Its rationale for this is that ORNL is run by a private contractor, UT Battelle, which owns the report, and that DOE officials did not read or rely upon it when they approved the investigation. The court filings include sworn declarations from officials involved in approving the investigation saying they didn’t read the final investigation report, and later gave it back to UT Battelle. They say they approved the exoneration through phonecalls and meetings with an ORNL manager. They imply this is typical for science oversight at the DOE national labs and consistent with federal policy that requires the investigation report and evidentiary record to be documented by the funding agency for oversight purposes.

An editorial in Nature accompanying my article characterizes the problem this way:

Important decisions were taken informally by a small group of officials and an adviser who apparently shared a common interest: to see the matter quietly resolved. The procedure ought to be more formal, better documented and even adversarial, with the institutional managers required to satisfy officials whom they do not know and who have no stake in the case outcome. This is closer to the more careful oversight of alleged misconduct by both the Office of Research Integrity at the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and the inspector-general of the National Science Foundation.

Not reading the report apparently had an advantage for DOE: the judge ruled in March that the record was not subject to FOIA in part because the government had never read it. I’ve filed a motion to reconsider, and the case is still pending.


Why We Need the James Webb Space Telescope | Cosmic Variance

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Over the last 24 hours, the astronomy community has begun facing the possible cancellation of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The House Appropriations Commerce, Justice, and Science Subcommittee has recommended: “$4.5 billion for NASA Science programs, which is $431 million below last year’s level. The bill also terminates funding for the James Webb Space Telescope, which is billions of dollars over budget and plagued by poor management.” This is not the end of the game for JWST, as many other branches of government have yet to weigh in, but it’s not good news.

Looking at it from the public’s view, sure, cutting projects that are “billions of dollars over budget and plagued by poor management” sounds like a pretty reasonable action. But I’d like to try to take a few minutes to explain why it’s not as simple as the committee would like you to believe.

First and foremost, in many fields of astronomy we are rapidly approaching the limit of what can be done scientifically without JWST. I recently finished teaching a graduate class on extragalactic astronomy, and I can’t tell you the number of times where I brought the students up to speed on the state of a field, and then had to say “If we’re going to push this to the next level, we need JWST”. To demonstrate this, the plot below shows the brightness (i.e., flux) of an astronomical point source that can be detected with different telescopes in a fixed amount of time, as a function of the wavelength of light (along with a typical galaxy spectrum). The magenta points show that JWST is hundreds of times more sensitive than anything out there. In terms of scientific impact, this is like the difference between walking (4 miles/hr) and flying (400 miles/hr) for your ability to explore terrain on the Earth. This is not to mention the drastic increase in the angular resolution of JWST compared to any other telescope on that plot — JWST will be able to see fine-scale structure that has never been seen at these wavelengths.

Moreover, JWST will blow through limits that lie at some of the most exciting areas of astronomy, with some of the widest public appeal, including high redshift galaxies and extrasolar planets. The public rightfully adores Hubble for expanding our view of the universe, but it’s not going to last forever. (Given funding constraints, the most likely fate for Hubble is the same as your 20 year old Toyota Tercel — it gets you where you’re going, but at some point you stop paying the money to fix the heater, repair the cracked windshield, and deal with the oil leak, and accept that sooner or later you’re going to be stranded on the side of the highway.) When Hubble expires — and it will within a decade or less — where is the system that will expand upon the wonders that Hubble revealed? Even Milky Jay knows that JWST is the future.

The demise of JWST would be a huge blow to american space-based astronomy as well. On the ground, the US has ceded much of its historical primacy to the Europeans. If JWST were cancelled, it would be a heavy blow to the US dominance in running true space-based observatories. NASA will continue to run “experiments” in space — i.e., targeted smaller missions focused on limited scientific goals, but they will be giving up their unique place in creating flagship facilities that literally anyone can potentially use. The impact of Hubble came in large part because it wasn’t a specific experiment for one particular problem. It has broad capabilities, that were kept up to date with servicing missions, but using those capabilities was then essentially “crowd-sourced” to the entire world. Through on-going rigorous, and frankly brutal, evaluations of scientific proposals, the community identifies the single most important scientific questions to be addressed by Hubble. This process is carried out every. single. year., making sure that Hubble gets the most bang for the buck. The same process also applied to NASA’s other “flagship” missions (e.g., Chandra, Spitzer), focused on other wavelengths, but these facilities too are rapidly running out of time.

To see what the loss of JWST would mean, look at the following chart of NASA missions. JWST is the only flagship observatory coming up. If we lose it, the person with the next great idea loses the chance to try it out.

So yes, JWST has cost more than was planned for. But the majority of the cost is now “sunk costs”, and a huge fraction of the telescope and instruments actually exist. This is not just a hole that people have been shoveling money into, and not getting anything for — useful stuff is actually built! And working! I would of course prefer that JWST launched on time and under budget, but, given how close we are to the end, I much prefer to go for it. Canceling JWST is not going to usher in a golden age of other space-based science opportunities (the “crowding out theory”, where once the shade of JWST is gone, a thousand flowers will bloom). The money will simply be gone from space-based astronomy, and instead of a single tree we can all climb, there will be some smaller pieces of shrubbery.

So to close, I’d like to leave with you with one of the finest bits of advocacy for JWST around.

(edit: Which I now realize Risa just posted! She has “how to contact your legislator” information, which is the single most important thing you can do at this point.)