Rosetta Spies Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko

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An enlarged image of comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko from the Rosetta spacecraft. More images linked below. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA)

 

The European Space Agency has a spacecraft enroute to meet a comet. The name of the comet is Churyumov-Gerasimenko (say that three times fast). Rosetta was launched in 2004 and won’t actually get to the comet in 2014.  ESA is getting ready to put the spacecraft in a hibernation for the last three years of the journey.

The picture above was a test of the on board system called OSIRIS, (short for Optical, Spectroscopic and Infrared Remote Imaging System) and at a distance of over 101 million miles (163 million km) taking a picture of an object that is only 2.5 miles (4 km) in diameter I’d say it works pretty well.

Check out the press release and more images.

Fading Supernova Brightens

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SN 1987A. Click for larger. Credit: Pete Challis (CfA)

 

The supernova of 1987 (SN 1987A) in the Large Magellanic Cloud appears to be brightening. The press release (below) does mention that it may be only the sharper vision of Hubble and the relatively close proximity to the supernova that we see the brightening. So we don’t know how much brightening is occurring only that it is.

Still, it’s a great picture. The ring is about 6-trillion miles (~ 1 light-year)in diameter and you can see the remnants of the star that exploded inside the ring.

If you want to see a very large version of this image click the link below.

Here’s the press release from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

New Supernova Remnant Lights Up

Cambridge, MA – In 1987, light from an exploding star in a neighboring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud, reached Earth. Named Supernova 1987A, it was the closest supernova explosion witnessed in almost 400 years, allowing astronomers to study it in unprecedented detail as it evolves.

Today a team of astronomers announced that the supernova debris, which has faded over the years, is brightening. This shows that a different power source has begun to light the debris, and marks the transition from a supernova to a supernova remnant.

“Supernova 1987A has become the youngest supernova remnant visible to us,” said Robert Kirshner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).

Kirshner leads a long-term study of SN 1987A with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Since its launch in 1990, Hubble has provided a continuous record of the changes in SN 1987A.

As shown in the accompanying image, SN 1987A is surrounded by a ring of material that blew off the progenitor star thousands of years before it exploded. The ring is about one light-year (6 trillion miles) across. Inside that ring, the “guts” of the star are rushing outward in an expanding debris cloud.

Most of a supernova’s light comes from radioactive decay of elements created in the explosion. As a result, it fades over time. However, the debris from SN 1987A has begun to brighten, suggesting that a new power source is lighting it.

“It’s only possible to see this brightening because SN 1987A is so close and Hubble has such sharp vision,” Kirshner said.

A supernova remnant consists of material ejected from an exploding star, as well as the interstellar material it sweeps up. The debris of SN 1987A is beginning to impact the surrounding ring, creating powerful shock waves that generate X-rays observed with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. Those X-rays are illuminating the supernova debris and shock heating is making it glow. The same process powers well-known supernova remnants in our galaxy like Cassiopeia A.

Because it’s so young, the remnant of SN 1987A still shows the history of the last few thousand years of the star’s life recorded in the knots and whorls of gas. By studying it further, astronomers may decode that history.

“Young supernova remnants have personality,” Kirshner agreed.

Eventually, that history will be lost when the bulk of the expanding stellar debris hits the surrounding ring and shreds it. Until then, SN 1987A continues to offer an unprecedented opportunity to watch a cosmic object change over the course of a human lifetime. Few other objects in the sky evolve on such short time-scales.

This research appears in a paper in the June 9, 2011 issue of Nature. The first author is Josefin Larsson (University of Stockholm).

Skylab

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The Mars Rover Opportunity took this image of a small crater called Skylab. I wonder how they resisted the urge to go digging around, I don’t think I could.  The black looking rock at 2 o’clock looks pretty interesting too.

You can get full res images of this picture at the link below.

The NASA caption:

NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity used its navigation camera to take the exposures combined into this view of a wee crater, informally named “Skylab,” along the rover’s route. The component images were taken during the 2,594th Martian day, or sol, of the rover’s work on Mars (May 12, 2011), after Opportunity had driven 239 feet (72.7 meters) that sol.

This is a young crater about 30 feet (9 meters) in diameter. How young? The blocks of material ejected from the crater-digging impact sit on top of the sand ripples near the crater. This suggests, from the estimated age of the area’s sand ripples, that the crater was formed within the past 100,000 years. The dark sand inside the crater attests to the mobility of fine sand in the recent era in this Meridiani Planum region of Mars.

The view spans 216 degrees of the compass, from northwest on the right to south on the right. It is presented as a cylindrical projection.

Opportunity successfully completed its three-month prime mission on Mars in April 2004 and has continued in bonus extended missions since then. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover Project for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington.

Endeavour and the ISS

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STS-134 and the ISS. Click for larger. Image credit: Thierry Legault and Emmanuel Rietsch.

Check this out!

Have you ever tried to image the ISS?  I have on several occasions and I can tell you it is very difficult to say the least. Everything has to be just perfect, you need to know exactly where it will be at a certain time, point your instruments in that direction, the camera has to track perfectly and at the proper speed to keep the ISS in frame and IMHO the hardest part is to get a focused image.  Yeah the focus sounds like it would be the easiest part but in practice it usually turns out quite different.  Oh then there are exposure times and on it goes.

Thierry Legault and Emmanuel Rietsch: “Passage of the International Space Station and Endeavour, taken on May 29th 2011 at 3:55UT from the area of Pau, France, after installation of the AMS (Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer). The video is accelerated 2.5 times (acquisition at 10 fps, video at 25 fps). The altitude of the ISS is 360 km (200 miles), for a size of a hundred metres. The speed of ISS is 17,000 miles per hour and its angular speed at zenith is 1.3º per second.”

So hopefully you get a feeling for how difficult it was for Thierry Legault and Emmanuel Rietsch remarkable this image is and how even more remarkable the other photos, animations and even 3D images are.  Have a look.

Hurricane Season 2011

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System 94L - NASA Image

NASA Satellite Reveals a Huge “System 94L” Trying to Organize in the Caribbean A large area of low pressure has been lingering in the southern Caribbean since last week and is being monitored for tropical cyclone development. NASA’s Aqua satellite noticed that the showers and thunderstorms associated with the low cover a huge area and there are a lot of strong storms within it. Infrared imagery on June 5 at 18:11 UTC (2:11 p.m. EDT) from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument that flies aboard Aqua showed strong convection (rapidly rising air that form the thunderstorms that power a tropical cyclone) in various areas of the low pressure area called “System 94L.” Some of those thunderstorm cloud tops that stretch from Jamaica east to the area south of Puerto Rico are very high and very cold. The strongest cloud top temperatures are as cold as or colder than -63 Fahrenheit / -52 Celsius, which is an indicator of a lot of energy building those high thunderstorms. The AIRS imagery is about 1700 kilometers (1,056 miles) wide, and the showers and thunderstorms associated with System 94L fill up that track from west to east, making this a huge area of low pressure. Interestingly enough, the National Hurricane Center noted that today, June 6, the area of lowest pressure is located about 130 miles south of Grand Cayman, and separate from the strongest thunderstorms. The National Hurricane Center (NHC) noted that this system has a Medium chance of becoming the Atlantic Ocean season’s first tropical storm before the upper level winds start battering it. NHC is planning to send a hurricane hunter into the storm on Tuesday, June 7 to investigate. In the meantime, those strong thunderstorms on AIRS infrared imagery mean heavy rainfall for Haiti and Jamaica. For a look at the development of System 94L, check out NASA’s Hurricane page update on System 93L from last week, when both low pressure areas were in the Caribbean: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hurricanes/archives/2011/h2011_93L.html. Text Credit: Rob Gutro, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

 

NCBI ROFL: You know what they say about barnacles with long legs… | Discoblog

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Modular phenotypic plasticity: divergent responses of barnacle penis and feeding leg form to variation in density and wave-exposure.

“Traits can evolve both in response to direct selection and in response to indirect selection on other linked traits. Although the evolutionary significance of coupled traits (e.g., through shared components of developmental pathways, or through competition for shared developmental resources) is now well accepted, we know comparatively little about how developmental coupling may restrict the independent responses of two or more phenotypically plastic traits in response to conflicting environmental cues. Such studies are important because coupled development, if present, could act as an important limit to the evolution of functionally independent plasticity in multiple traits. I tested whether developmental coupling can restrict the direction of plastic responses by studying how penis form and leg form-both highly plastic traits of barnacles-varied in response to differences in conspecific density and water velocity. Penis length and leg length in Balanus glandula varied in parallel with variation in wave-exposure but varied in opposite directions with variation in conspecific density. This study represents one of the rare tests of developmental ...


Flavors of Afro-Asiatic | Gene Expression

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In the post yesterday I reported what was generally known about the Horn of Africa, that its populations seem to lie between those of Sub-Saharan African and Eurasia genetically. This is totally reasonable as a function of geography, but there are also suggestions that this is not simply a function of isolation by distance (i.e., populations at position 0.5 on the interval 0.0 to 1.0 would presumably exhibit equal affinities in both directions due to gene flow). For example, you observe the almost total lack of “Bantu” genetic influence on the Semitic and Cushitic populations of the Horn of Africa, and the lack of Eurasian influence in groups to the south and west of the Horn except to some extent the Masai.

Tacking horizontally in terms of discipline, over the past few generations there has been a veritable cottage industry making the case for the recent origin of many ethno-linguistic populations through a process of cultural self-creation. Clearly there are many cases of this, some of them studied in depth by anthropologists (e.g., the shift from Dinka to Nuer identity). But there has been an unfortunate tendency to over-generalize ...

Most College Undergrads Question Science-Religion Conflict | The Intersection

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I’ve just been made aware of this intriguing study by Christopher P. Scheitle, in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. Looking at a survey of the religious and spiritual views of a very large sample of university students, Sheitle finds, surprisingly, that science-religion-conflict views (whether pro-science or pro-religion) are not predominant. Rather, they’re a minority (31 % overall), with science religion “independence” or “collaboration” views more prominent (69 % overall).

However, the conflict perspective was strongest in two areas. Among those studying natural sciences, engineering, or mathematics, the “conflict: I side with science” perspective was above 20 percent. Among those studying education, meanwhile, the “conflict: I side with religion” perspective was over 35 percent (!). Here is the conclusion of the study:

The predominant narrative surrounding the religion and science relationship has been driven by the assumption that these institutions are engaged in an unavoidable con?ict resulting from their contradictory claims to truth (Evans and Evans 2008). However, the analysis conducted above found that most undergraduates, regardless of their area of study or even their religiosity, do not hold a con?ict perspective. Furthermore, many more students move away from a con?ict perspective to an independence/collaboration perspective than vice versa. This ?nding might be especially surprising since many people, especially religious families, assume that higher education has a secularizing in?uence on students (Smith and Snell 2009:248), which might be expected to increase perceptions of a con?ict. Despite its seeming predominance, the con?ict model of understanding religion and science issues does not seem to have much support within the undergraduate population. Ecklund and Park (2009) made a similar conclusion in their analysis of the views of academic scientists.

Still, some of the patterns seen in the analysis above might be disconcerting for those looking to move beyond the public battles for power between religion and science. The ?nding that scientists and engineers are among the most likely to have a pro-science con?ict perspective could mean that some of the most in?uential voices in these public debates might be more likely to fuel the debates than attenuate them. Similarly, future educators are among the most likely to hold a pro-religion con?ict perspective. Given that classrooms and school boards have been one of the central forums for the struggle over religion and science, this does not bode well for a
reduction of those struggles.

Full study here. I am sometimes asked why there aren’t more young people who are interested in freethought, skepticism, and so forth–especially since millennials, we know, are highly secular. But insofar as the skeptic/freethinker/atheist movements are wedded to “conflict,” I think this study may suggest part of the answer.


After Microcredit Loans, Businesses Owners Are Worse Off, Study Finds | 80beats

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microcredit

What’s the News: Making loans to small business owners in developing countries has quite the positive reputation. It has given people in poverty, especially women, a chance to bootstrap themselves up the economic ladder despite having marginal or no credit history and little work experience, as people have used the tiny loans to start businesses, purchase herds of animals, or invest in improvements to their shops or inventory. The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the economists who developed the practice in the 1970s at Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank.

But does microcredit really pay off? In a study published today in Science, economists have taken a rigorous look at it and concluded that in many or its modern implementations, it’s not having the touted benefits.

What’s the Context:

The problem with studying the effects of microcredit is that there tend to be a lot of factors at play in addition to the money. Lenders might provide counseling to business owners—as part of a broader category of services called microfinance—or decide to give credit to only those they think most likely to succeed. This makes it hard to tell whether the money, all on its own, can have ...


Sunrise, sunset… an arctic time lapse video | Bad Astronomy

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I know this isn’t strictly astronomy, but it’s a lovely time lapse video of sunrises and sunsets in the arctic… and since the Earth is tilted, in the summer the Sun skims just below the horizon as it circles the sky. So hey, I guess it is astronomy related!

You can really see this effect well starting at 1:06 into the video; the Sun sets at a very low angle to the ground, and comes right back up. The sky never gets completely dark.

The video was shot by a man who calls himself Mr. TSO, and he has many other lovely videos on Vimeo. It’s Friday, so take some time and look. You’ll breathe just a little bit easier if you do.

Related posts:

- Gorgeous Milky Way Time Lapse
- Very Large Telescope, Very Stunning Time Lapse Video
- Incredibly, impossibly beautiful time lapse video
- Dust, from the desert below to the galaxy above
- Stunning winter sky timelapse video: Sub Zero
- OK, because I like y’all: bonus aurora timelapse video
- AWESOME timelapse video: Rapture


Scientists Pinpoint Why Smokers Pack on Pounds When They Quit | 80beats

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What’s the News: Scientists—and smokers—have long known that nicotine is an appetite suppressant, but just how it kept hunger at bay remained unclear. Now, researchers have uncovered the neural pathway by which nicotine reduces appetite, in a study published today in Science. This discovery could lead to new drugs that help people quit smoking or lose weight.

How the Heck:

The researchers first observed that mice given nicotine or the drug cytisine, which binds to some nicotinic receptors in the brain, ate less and had less body fat than mice not given either drug. When the researchers gave mice a chemical compound that blocked nicotine receptors, the appetite-suppressing effects of these drugs went away.
Since cytisine binds particularly well to a type of nicotinic receptor called ?3?4, the researchers figured that receptor might be the major player in decreasing appetite. Sure enough, when the researchers genetically knocked out that receptor in some mice, those mice were immune to the drugs’ appetite-reducing effects.
The researchers then looked at what parts of the brain had ?3?4 receptors, since different nicotinic receptors are present in different groups of neurons. These particular receptors show up in ...


Everything You Want to Know About Bitcoin, the Digital Currency Worth More Than the Dollar | 80beats

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bitcoin

What’s the News: The currency on the tech world’s lips these days isn’t the yen or the yuan. It’s Bitcoin, a digital form of money that’s totally anonymous and currently valued at many times the worth of the dollar and the Euro. How does it work, what can you buy with it, and why is it making people mad?

What’s the Context:

The first thing to consider is that currency is just the physical manifestation of a promise. Money issued by governments has value because governments say it does, and its value fluctuates according to people’s faith in the government. It used to be that money was worth something because of the agreed-upon value of its contents, like gold or silver, but modern currencies trade on trust rather than intrinsic value.
Digital currency can be made anonymous and independent of third parties like governments or banks. Its advocates, notably the hacker community, see this ...


D0 Decides to be Debbie Downers | Cosmic Variance

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Alliterative title stolen shamelessly from the lovely and understanding Jennifer Ouellette, who blogs background about the hunt for new particles at Discovery News.

So here we have science, marching on. Just last week we heard that CDF, one of the big experiments at the Tevatron at Fermilab, had collected more data relevant to a mysterious bump they had previously reported around 150 GeV in collisions that produced a W boson and two jets. The new data (7.3 inverse femtobarns, up from 4.3 fb-1 previously) made the bump look even more prominent, rather than watching it regress back down to the mean. The discrepancy is now more than 4 sigma, giving license to get just a wee bit excited that new physics might be on the loose.

Now D0, the other big experiment at the Tevatron, is ready to weigh in — and the “D” stands for “damper,” it appears. Here’s a blog post at symmetry, a link to the technical paper, and a webcast for a talk that will happen this afternoon at 4:00pm Central Time. You knew that Jester would be on the case, and he is.

But this picture tells you all you need to know.

With 4.3 fb-1 of data analyzed, the CDF bump should be just barely visible, as indicated by the dotted line labeled “Gaussian.” But there doesn’t seem to be anything there. And it’s not just you; the collaboration estimates that the probability that there is really a bump there is less than 10-5. Not very encouraging, really.

But still — it does seem to be there in the CDF data. So what’s going on? At this point, it’s not clear. Both experiments are extremely mature and well-understood, and the collaborations are good at what they do, so it is likely to be something very subtle at work. It still could be new physics, that is somehow playing games with us, but certainly the prospects don’t look as good today as they did yesterday. Look like science is going to have to march on a bit more before everything is clear.


In Soviet Russia, ATMs Interrogate YOU | Discoblog

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atmNot just the Russians: A biometric ATM in Korea

ATMs in Russia may soon be outfitted with intelligence services–style lie detection software, designed to help banks pick out consumer credit fraud—without bank employees actually having to go through the arduous business of talking to and evaluating potential cardholders.

People will be able to apply for credit cards by chatting with one of the new machines about their financial history. But these ATMs won’t just take your word for it: They come equipped with voice analysis software meant to pick out telltale signs of lying, made by a company that supplies nifty technologies to the Federal Security Service, a successor to the KGB. Even better, these new cash-and-credit dispensers are currently being developed by the country’s biggest bank, Sberbank—of which the Russian government is the majority shareholder.

To design these voice analysis programs, the company put to use hours and hour of interrogations recorded by the Russian police, in which the person being question was found to be lying. The stress of lying is thought to cause involuntary physiological changes that alter the patterns of a person’s voice. The software’s hard to fool, the company says, since, like a ...


The Left and Science: A Call for Point of Inquiry Guest Ideas | The Intersection

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Following on my last post, I want to do a show that really gets into the political left and its relationship with science. That relationship is not without its problems–GMOs, nuclear, vaccines–though I believe it is nothing like the current relationship with the political right.

But the question is, which guest would have the most insight into this question? I’ve already interviewed Yale’s Dan Kahan so he’s out, though obviously he has much insight.

I would welcome your suggestions. I’m very open to interviewing a conservative who has thought deeply on this question. In fact, that would be the ideal choice.


We purge, you save: Autographed US first hardback edition of Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea | The Loom

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In the continuing quest to avoid packing boxes before our house gets ripped open for renovations this summer, allow me to offer you–for one week only!–another sale. I’ve got 33 autographed copies of the first US hardback edition of Evolution: The Triumph of An Idea, which are available for $20. (The cover price is $40, and this particular edition has been out of print for some time now.)

This book was a companion to a series that aired in 2001 on PBS. But it’s not a nonfiction novelization of the show. In fact, the show hadn’t even been shot when I started working on the book a year earlier. Instead, I wrote a stand-alone introduction to the history of evolutionary biology and to its many avenues, from sex to mass extinctions to the rise of our species. The publishers packed the large-format book with photographs and color artwork. “Zimmer writes in a gloriously clear and lively style,” wrote a reviewer for Scientific American. “His coverage is as thorough as it is graceful. This is as fine a book as one will find on the subject.”

If this sale is like ...


Sexy Science? The New Glam of Science in Advertising | The Intersection

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This is a guest post by Dr. Jeffrey H. Toney, an educator and scientist whose career has spanned academia and the pharmaceutical industry, and currently serves as the dean of the College of Natural, Applied and Health Sciences at Kean University. He blogs regularly at ScienceBlogs, NJ Voices, OpEdNews and The Huffington Post.

Sex sells…but can science? Grabbing a consumer’s attention using sex goes beyond branding. In fact:

…sex is an inherent, inseparable brand message. It is the message.

Scientific messages are becoming increasingly apparent in advertisements, whether as claims of health benefits (“clinically proven”) or trumpeting a “scientific breakthrough” displayed, inexplicably, by showing chemical structures or dramatic hi-tech animations. This is a curious schizophrenia. On the one hand, the public is often disinterested and skeptical of scientific claims, often confusing facts with opinions. Evolution and climate change are obvious examples.

Coverage of science in the news media has declined dramatically:

“For every five hours of cable news, less than a minute is devoted to science; 46 percent of Americans reject evolution and think the Earth is less than 10,000 years old; the number of newspapers with weekly science sections has shrunken by two-thirds over the past several decades.”

On the other hand, use of science within advertising somehow bestows upon the product a higher status, a gravitas, the excitement that this thing that the consumer must have is one of a kind, a rare breakthrough discovery. More perplexing is the way that science is presented in these ads – as something mysterious (chemical structures fly across the screen), as something utterly confusing to the non-scientist.

Consider the L’Oreal Paris Youth Code Collection. An article in The New York Times heralded that “L’Oreal Paris Cracks the Code”–presumably referring to genetic code. The commercial:

“Specially formulated with Biolysat, Adenosine and enhanced with peptides, the Youth Code GenActiv TECHNOLOGY™ targets the repair gene and enhances its ability to regenerate under stress.”

What is Biolysat? What is adenosine? A “repair gene”? {Most people know what a gene is, but what is it repairing?} What does it mean to “target” a gene? Doesn’t that sound dangerous?

It gets worse:

“Biolysat works to activate the expression of the repair gene while Adenosine, a molecule that is naturally found in skin cells’ DNA and acts as an anti-wrinkle ingredient, helps stimulate DNA and protein synthesis.”

What is “activate the expression of the repair gene”? “Stimulate DNA and protein synthesis? An astute non-scientist could interpret this as something harmful. After all, don’t cancer cells grow rapidly, making more DNA and more protein?

My focus here is not to debunk the scientific claims behind these statements. That would be relatively easy, requiring no more than a few hours exploring the scientific and medical literature coming from the Saint-Louis Hospital Skin Research Institute in Paris, the home base of these products. Instead, I wonder what led the marketers to decide to use such representation of science in their advertising. Certainly they did market research that supports the approach.

So how could the same public be attracted and engaged by science in advertising but remain skeptical and generally apathetic towards science? Exploring this requires a deep understanding of sociology, psychology and even neurology – just to get started. Like any worthwhile scientific research project, this opens up many more questions for exploration. I can’t wait.


Man at Bab el-Mandeb | Gene Expression

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ResearchBlogging.orgIn light of my last post I had to take note when Dienekes today pointed to this new paper in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Population history of the Red Sea—genetic exchanges between the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa signaled in the mitochondrial DNA HV1 haplogroup. The authors looked at the relationship of mitochondrial genomes, with a particular emphasis upon Yemen and the Horn of Africa. This sort of genetic data is useful because these mtDNA lineages are passed from mother to daughter to daughter to daughter, and so forth, and are not subject to the confounding effects of recombination. They present the opportunity to generate nice clear trees based on distinct mutational “steps” which define ancestral to descendant relationships. Additionally, using neutral assumptions mtDNA allows one to utilize molecular clock methods to infer the time until the last common ancestor of any two given lineages relatively easily. This is useful when you want to know when a mtDNA haplgroup underwent an expansion at some point in the past (and therefore presumably can serve as a maker for the people who carried those lineages and their past ...

How to be inoculated against antivax conventions | Bad Astronomy

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There’s a grand irony about skepticism and alt-med groups that I suspect most people don’t know. Skeptics are commonly seen as curmudgeonly cynics, poopooing new ideas and excluding anyone not in their club. Alt-med people are seen as warm, open, willing to try new things, and welcoming anyone to their group.

But that’s not the way it really works. In fact, skeptical groups welcome people who believe in various things we don’t (we’ve had them come to various TAMs; the effort we make in outreach could be improved, of course, but we certainly don’t turn them away — an important point, as you’ll see in a moment), and alt-med groups… well, they talk a good game, but when it comes down to a skeptic actually showing up at their meetings, their actions speak much louder than words.

But don’t take my word for it. You can read all about what happened to my pal and active supporter of real medicine Jamie Bernstein when she attended the antivax Autism One convention. She wrote up her experience in two parts: the first on Skepchick, and the second