Select Page ::

Look Breasts! | The Intersection

Posted on October 24, 2010 by Danzig

Recently I asked why science magazines seem to be marketed to men. On newsstands, they frequently appear alongside GQ, Esquire, Playboy, and other male-oriented content. Yes, men purchase science magazines more frequently than women, but I also think this is–at least in part–a chicken and egg problem: What’s traditionally marketed to male audiences gets purchased by them. A solution might be to change the target a bit, gear some more content to women, attract a wider audience, and–in doing so–maybe even encourage greater numbers of women to pursue the STEM areas over time. (Culture matters!)

Needless to say, I am disappointed to see Wired’s latest cover choice. Here’s the view from my iPhone at the Atlanta airport:

Friday Fluff – October 22nd, 2010 | Gene Expression

Posted on October 24, 2010 by Danzig

FF3
1. First, a post from the past: The Round-Eyed Buddha.

2. Weird search query of the week: “straight jacket sex.”

3. Comment of the week, in response to Glenn Beck, Evolution, Global Warming & Tea Parties:

People who don’t believe in evolution don’t comprehend evolution. Evolution is a struggle to survive as a species. How else can you explain Neanderthal man and the dead end they came to? They existed, despite the Bible’s not bothering to mention them. The traits that ensured modern man’s survival were passed on genetically. That’s what evolution is; the passing on of traits that are more suited for the survival of the species.
This is all self evident. It doesn’t threaten religious orthodoxy except in the most simple-minded way. You have to wonder if the people who dismiss evolution because it somehow conflicts with their religious beliefs have ever taken the trouble to actually read Darwin’s “Origin Of The Species”? I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess no.
Evolution is not only a fact, it’s a necessity. It’s all about a species being able to adapt to it’s environment in order to survive. Many species in the history of this planet have gone extinct. How do you account for it? Was it God’s will, or something more plausible? How about this? They ceased to exist as a species because of their failure to adapt to their environment. In other words, their failure to evolve.
Homo-sapiens didn’t become the dominant species on this planet because we had so much spirituality and trust in the Lord. How did we do it? Here’s a clue, our eyes are located in the front of our heads like any natural predator, we stand upright and have opposable thumbs. The homo-sapiens with eyes in the front, who grasped weapons and stood on their hind legs to hunt, survived and passed these traits along. The traits most suitable for survival were passed along. Get it? It’s called natural selection.
As to how evolution gacked up a human hairball like GLenn Beck is another matter entirely. I think he must be some kind of double agent planted by the left in order to make conservatives look like a bunch of clueless, bloviating demagogues. Mission accomplished.

Often people who believe in evolution don’t comprehend evolution

4) From last week: “Genomic sequencing will be able to predict offspring I.Q. as well as looking at parental values + regression in….”. Here were the outcomes:

Never – 26%
More than 30 years – 14%
16-30 year – 34%
11-15 years – 10%
5-10 years - 14%
Less than 5 years – 2%

View Survey

5) And finally, your weekly fluff fix:

feelslikefall

Exoplanets survive their star’s fiery death. Or were they born from it…? | Bad Astronomy

Posted on October 24, 2010 by Danzig

It’s kind of amazing that with nearly 500 planets discovered orbiting other stars, we’re still finding ones that are really weird. Massive planets orbiting so close to their stars they are practically plowing through the stellar atmosphere; hot spots on the planet not aligned with their stars; planets orbiting so far out it’s a struggle to understand how they got there.

And now we can add the planets NN Serpentis c and d to that list.

Lying about 1500 light years from Earth, NN Ser is a binary star — most stars in the sky are part of multiple systems, so that in itself isn’t all that odd. But NN Ser is weird: it’s a very dinky red dwarf orbiting very close to a white dwarf. And by very close, I mean really close: they’re separated by only 600,000 km (360,000 miles), which isn’t much farther apart than the Earth and the Moon!

The planets

I’ll get back to the stars in a sec. The planets found (named c and d because the two stars are a and b, according to the naming conventions) are Jupiter-scale beasts, with masses of about 6 and 2 times Jupiter’s, orbiting the binary stars at a distance of roughly 825 and 450 million km (500 million and 270 million miles).

Those numbers don’t seem too odd; lots of planets have been found with similar characteristics. But when you take a closer look at the system…

The stars

Let’s go back to the stars. They orbit each other very rapidly: a complete orbit only takes about 3 hours! So those stars are really hauling. As it happens, the orbit is seen almost edge-on from here on Earth, so we literally see the stars pass in front of each other twice per orbit. That’s pretty cool, because it means that over a short time we can watch lots of eclipses and get really good statistics on how long the eclipses last, what the time period is between them, and so on. What the astronomers found is that the period of the eclipses is very slowly changing, and the best explanation is that of the two planets tugging on the stars as they orbit.

This turns out to be an incredibly difficult thing to measure; in fact a possible planet was reported just last year for this system, but the parameters for the planet didn’t fit more recent data. These new results for two planets are based on more data and analysis, and look pretty solid to me.

The bizarre history of NN Ser

Where things get really weird is when you look at the stars, or more specifically, the white dwarf. These are dense balls of compressed material left over when a star like the Sun dies. As it ages, a star like this will turn into a red giant, swelling up to hundreds of times its current size, and blow off vast amounts of material. Over tens of thousands of years or more, it loses mass, shedding its outer layers. Eventually, all that’s left is the core of the star, a hot compact object we call a white dwarf.

So that one star in NN Ser must have once been a star like the Sun which swelled up, blew off its material, then became a white dwarf. But wait a second… when it was a red giant, it was probably a hundred million kilometers across! But the other star in the system, the red dwarf, is only a few hundred thousand kilometers away. How does that work?

Almost certainly, the red dwarf used to be millions of kilometers or more away from the primary star. When the more massive star turned into a red giant, it would have literally engulfed the dwarf. Through friction, the red dwarf would’ve spiraled in, getting closer and closer to the core of the star. Eventually, when the bigger star blew off its outer bits, what was left was that white dwarf, and the red dwarf in its current, extremely tight orbit. It sounds incredible, but we’ve seen this happen before, and may be a relatively common occurrence in the Universe.

But hang on again! What about those two planets? How did this affect them?

Well, that’s a bit of a poser. There are two scenarios. One is that they formed along with the stars long ago, and somehow survived this cataclysm. However, this strikes me as pretty unlikely. When the primary star went red giant and started blowing off matter, it was losing mass, and therefore its gravity got weaker. That means its hold on those planets would’ve gotten more tenuous, and they would have migrated outwards. This in turn means they would’ve been much closer to the star in the past. But we know the red dwarf is there, and while it’s a dinky star, it’s far more massive than a planet. It’s very hard to see how planets could be in stable orbits so close to such a massive object. Models show they’d be ejected from the system relatively quickly.

That makes it unlikely they formed with the two stars. That leaves the second scenario: they formed after the primary star turned into a red giant!

That’s pretty weird, too. But some models suggest that as the red dwarf spiraled into the core of the red giant, a massive disk of material would form around it. This disk could then be the raw material from which the two planets were formed. That seems fantastic to me as well, but look: we have two planets orbiting a very tight binary star where one is a white dwarf and the other is red dwarf. Something weird must’ve happened here! The real choice is to pick which is the least bizarre.

The view

Whatever happened, we’ve got what we’ve got: two planets orbiting this weird binary. Now imagine you’re standing on one of those planets (well, since they’re almost certainly gas giants, imagine you’re standing on the surface of one of their moons). Look up. What would you see?

From the inner of the two planets, the two stars would be a bit less than a tenth of a degree apart; about 1/5th the width of the full Moon. You’d be able to see them as separate stars. The red dwarf would barely resolve itself as a disk; it wouldn’t look like just a dot in the sky. The star is far less luminous than the Sun, but would still shine about 20 times brighter than the full Moon on Earth. In other words, if it were the only object in the sky you could read by it, and looking at it would make you squint a bit.

The white dwarf, on the other hand, is tiny: only about 30,000 km (roughly 20,000 miles) across. It would be a dot in the sky from that distance. However, it’s so hot that it shines more brightly than the Sun does, and from that inner planet would be about half as bright as the Sun appears to us from the Earth. It would be an intense pinprick in the sky, a brilliant dot that would be very painful to look at. In fact, it would drown out the red dwarf completely, shining thousands of times more brightly.

What an incredible sight that would be! If alien life developed on a moon of one of those worlds, the only way they’d know of the existence of the red star would be due to the eclipses. Every 3 hours and 7 minutes, the primary star would suddenly disappear for a few minutes as the bigger but far less massive and bright star blocked it out. At that time, and pretty much only then, would the faint red star be visible at all.

Cultures all over the Earth worshiped the Sun for obvious reasons: bringer of light and heat, we depended and still depend on it. What sort of myths would have arisen had the Sun’s light been completely cut off a half dozen times a day?

And I have to wonder what other strange things await us as we discover more planets orbiting other stars. We have a pretty good idea of how stars age and die, but there will always be systems on the edge, ones we’ll have a hard time understanding. What new things will we uncover then? And what would the sky look like from those alien worlds?

Related posts:
- Gallery of exoplanet images: real pictures of alien worlds
- Sunburned star turns hot face away from star
- Star: Om nom nom! Planet: Aiieee!
- Dying beautifully in a crowd

The Guggenheim/YouTube Art Experiment: See Winning Videos Here | Discoblog

Posted on October 24, 2010 by Danzig

In June, the Guggenheim Museum announced a collaborative video contest with none other than YouTube. Yes, you read that right: YouTube, the video website overrun with videos of cats and each tween’s latest shopping spree.

The contest was open to anyone and everyone who has made a video in the last two years. A total of 23,000 videos were submitted and judged by a panel of artists and curators, and the competition’s 25 winners were announced last night. These 25 videos will be on display at the Guggenheim Museum in New York through the weekend, and all the shortlisted videos will stay online indefinitely. While there was some excitement about the prospects of such a venture, the New York Times isn’t impressed by the final product:

At the time of the announcement, there was much talk about originality and discovery, which sounds rather hollow now, compared with the low quality of the 25 finally selected.

Ouch! When the competition was announced, some feared that it would dumb down the video art world, while others dreamed that it would break the community open to embrace YouTube’s DIY creativity and modern folk art stylings. The critics over at the New York Times seem to think the winning videos did neither, and fell somewhere between sophisticated video art and YouTube folk art:

One way to explain the lackluster quality of the first incarnation of “YouTube Play” is that almost none of the final 25 works, which are being screened in a gallery at the museum this weekend, fit either of those categories…. They seem to occupy a third sphere of slick and pointless professionalism, where too much technique serves relatively skimpy, generic ideas.

You can take a look a the 25 finalists and the additional 100 “shortlisted” videos online. In addition to the “Birds on the Wires” video above, here are some of my other favorites from the top 25:

“Bear untitled — DO Edit” is a tragic love story done in 8-bit by Christen Bach:

This video, called “Words,” has made the rounds of the interwebz before, but I think it deserves another mention, in case you haven’t seen it:

This video, called the “The Huber Experiments–Vol 1,” is a great use of high speed video. Who wouldn’t want to play with their food?

And another video that makes great use of technique, “Bathtub IV” by Keith Loutit:

Other videos that have been getting attention in the media include a video interview/spontaneous music video “Die Antwood – Zef side (official)” with South African Rap Trio Die Antwood, “This Aborted Earth: The Quest Begins,” by Michael Banowetz and Noah Sodano, “Noteboek,” created by Dutch video artist Evelien Lohbeck, and “I Met the Walrus,” by Jerry Levitan, Josh Raskin, James Braithwaite and Alex Kurina. ABC News liked a rap-Disney mash-up:

“Wonderland Mafia,” by Lindsay Scoggins of Tampa, Fla., fuses rap and cartoon. The Disney film “Alice in Wonderland” has been mashed-up with the hip-hop of Three 6 Mafia. Scoggins says the video “is meant to illustrate a disjointed amalgamation of the media one encounters in adulthood (versus) childhood.”

And even the New York Times found something it didn’t hate:

Amid all the artifice of the final 25, Lisa Byrne’s documentary short “Taxi III Stand Up and Cry Like a Man” may burn a hole in your heart. The third in a trilogy, it consists of interviews with taxi drivers who survived paramilitary attacks in Northern Ireland during the conflicts of the 1980s and ’90s.

I’m sure I missed some good videos. If you think I’m completely off base with my choice of favorites–or if you think the New York Times is being too cranky by far–tell me about it in the comments.

Videos: Youtube.com/play

Video: The Physics of How a Wet Dog Shakes | Discoblog

Posted on October 24, 2010 by Danzig

“Many furry mammals engage in oscillatory shaking when wet.” Translation: When a dog comes in from the rain, it engages in a body-twisting, jowl-flapping shake that sprays water over the living room. But exactly what kinds of oscillations are required to make the water droplets scatter? Thankfully a team of curious researchers decided to study the physics of that motion.

In the abstract posted on ArXiv, Andrew Dickerson of the Georgia Institute of Technology and some colleagues explain that they attacked the question via high-speed video and fur-particle tracking:

As you can see from the data in the video, the research raises further questions. Their mathmathical model is based on the idea that surface tension holds the water droplets to the animal’s hair, and that centripetal forces from the shaking have to exceed that surface tension in order to free the water. This implies that smaller animals (or as they might say, animals with a smaller radius) have to shake faster in order to get dry, a prediction borne out by observations of everything from mice to bears. But when the researchers plotted the data on a graph, it didn’t quite conform to their predictions.

Technology Review, where we first saw this story, explains where they may have gone wrong:

Clearly, their model misses some important correction factor. Dickerson and co make one suggestion. In their model, the radius is the distance from the centre of the animal to its skin. Perhaps the fur makes a difference, they say.

The video helpfully declares that no animals were harmed in its making; they were just somewhat dampened.

Video: Andrew Dickerson et al.

Felling Ancient Trees is Risky Business | Visual Science

Posted on October 24, 2010 by Danzig

This photograph, taken in Masoala National Park, Madagascar, shows a Malagasi worker illegally felling a rosewood tree in UNESCO protected forest. Despite the risky work, dangerous conditions, and tremendous price of rosewood overseas, each worker is paid the equivalent of about four dollars per day. The wood is extracted deep from within the national parks and is financed by powerful local traders. The ancient and densely grained Malagasy rosewood trees are sought after for musical instruments and furniture. Plunder of the remaining rainforest stands for rosewood and ebony is wreaking ecological devastation in this unique habitat, home to around 14,000 species of plants, 90 percent of which exist here alone.

Photographer Toby Smith reports that after 4 months of continued unchecked extraction the labourers had to trek deeper into the forest to find stock. Smith met the worker in this photo previously, and asked permission to document him cutting a tree. One day this same worker suddenly appeared and beckoned Smith to where he and his partner were clearing the surrounding vegetation in order to swing an axe to cut down the tree. After making this image, the word was out that Smith was interested in tree-cutting, so Smith and his guide had to race back down the valley from there, their cover blown. The Environmental Investigation Agency will be using the photos Smith made in Madagascar as part of a case to prosecute those responsible for creating the international market for the illegally harvested woods.

Courtesy Toby Smith/Environmental Investigation Agency

Arctic Report Card: Warm Weather and Melted Ice Are the New Normal | 80beats

Posted on October 24, 2010 by Danzig

arctic-warming “Return to previous Arctic conditions is unlikely.” That’s the understated conclusion from this year’s Arctic Report Card, which found that air temperatures will continue rising and ice will continue melting in the Arctic as global warming continues to take its toll on the region. The annual report was prepared by 69 researchers in eight countries, and was issued by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

What goes on in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic. The researchers note that conditions in the Arctic can affect global weather, and point to the huge snowstorms that hit the American northeast and mid-Atlantic states last winter as an example.

“Normally the cold air is bottled up in the Arctic,” said Jim Overland of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle. But last December and February, winds that normally blow west to east across the Arctic were instead bringing the colder air south to the Mid-Atlantic, he said. “As we lose more sea ice it’s a paradox that warming in the atmosphere can create more of these winter storms,” Overland said at a news briefing. [Washington Post]

The Arctic is feeling the effects of climate change faster than the rest of the globe due to a feedback cycle called polar amplification.

Warming air melts the sun-reflecting white snow and ice of the Arctic, revealing darker, heat-absorbing water or land, spurring the effects of warming. This is further amplified by the action of the round-the-clock sunlight of Arctic summers. [Reuters]

Other findings from the report: Sea ice has declined sharply over the past three decades and hit record lows in the last four years, glaciers are losing mass, and permafrost temperatures are increasing. These rapid changes are forcing Arctic animals to adapt or die; the report notes that some species of seabirds and whales seem to be prospering in a warmer world, but many more species are in decline.

Here’s a video NOAA put together to sum up its findings:

Image: iStockphoto

It Gets Better | Cosmic Variance

Posted on October 24, 2010 by Danzig

No substantive blogging from me — I’ve lost my laptop and need to get a new one, with all the crapola that entails. (Speaking euphemistically here; it wasn’t “lost,” it was stolen. Story later.)

In the meantime here’s a video from Barack Obama, supporting Dan Savage’s It Gets Better campaign. (Via Jezebel.) Savage is a well-known sex columnist, and Obama is President of the United States, so it’s a newsworthy pairing in its own right. But this is an important message for every teenager, or for that matter for every person. The campaign is aimed primarily at LGBT (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgendered) kids, who are very commonly bullied and ostracized in school. But bullying isn’t right no matter who the target is. It does get better, as you grow up and figure yourself out and find supportive communities. It shouldn’t ever be bad in the first place, so we have to do what we can to change the cultural acceptance of harassment.

New languages evolve in rapid bursts | Not Exactly Rocket Science

Posted on October 24, 2010 by Danzig

This is an old article, reposted from the original WordPress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. I’m on holiday for the moment, but you can expect a few new pieces here and there (as well as some exciting news…)

The birth of new languages is accompanied by a burst of rapid evolution consisting of large changes in vocabulary that are followed by long periods of relatively slower change.

Languages are often compared to living species because of the way in which they diverge into new tongues over time in an ever-growing linguistic tree. Some critics have claimed that this comparison is a superficial one, a nice metaphor but nothing more.

But the new study by Quentin Atkinson, now at the University of Oxford, suggests that languages evolve at a similar stop-and-start pace, which uncannily echoes a long-standing theory in biology, known as ‘punctuated equilibrium’. The theory’s followers claim that life on Earth also evolved at an uneven pace, full of rapid bursts and slow periods.

Famously championed by the late Stephen Jay Gould, the punctuated equilibrium theory suggests that most species change very little over time and big evolutionary changes are concentrated at rare moments where new species branch off from existing lineages. Together with colleagues from the US and New Zealand, Atkinson found similar patterns in three of the worlds’ largest families of languages.

They compared lists of words from the Indo-European group, which include English and Hindi; the Bantu group, consisting of several hundred African languages; and the Austronesian group, which includes over a thousand tongues from Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and the Polynesian islands. Between them, these three families account for a third of all the world’s languages.

Of course, languages borrow words from each other all the time and indeed, 50% of English words are loans from French and Latin. That was a potential pitfall of the study and Atkinson avoided it by only considering basic words such as numerals, body parts and pronouns that are very unlikely to have been co-opted from another tongue.

For each group, Atkinson built a family tree showing how newer languages split off from ancestral ones. The trees mirrored those that biologists use to chart the evolutionary relationships between species.

In the model, the birth of new languages is represented by new branches on the tree and the length of each branch depends on the difference in vocabulary between the new tongue and its parent one. The greater the changes, the longer the branch.

In each family tree, Atkinson saw that the parts of the tree with the most branches also had the longest ones. So groups that spawned the highest number of new languages also diverged most significantly in their repertoire of words. That’s the pattern you would expect if the birth of new languages triggered bursts of rapid evolution. If the pace of evolution was more constant, the number of branch points would have no effect on overall branch length.

These rapid bursts accounted for 31% of the vocabulary differences between Bantu speakers, 21% of the differences in Indo-European languages and 10% of the variation in the Austronesian group. For comparison, team estimated that these fast and slow evolutionary cycles explained about 22% of the genetic differences between biological species.

As they split from each other, new sister tongues begin to adopt new words at a fast pace and these are probably accompanied by equally quick changes in pronunciation, spelling and grammar. As their identities become clearer, the pace of change slows.

Atkinson thinks that this process happens when different groups of people try to establish distinct social identities by exaggerating differences in language. American English may have developed along these lines and the need for a unique identity was at the forefront of Noah Webster‘s mind when he published his first American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828. “As an independent nation, our honour requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government,” he said.

Reference: Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1149683

More on language:

“Life Ascending” Wins the Royal Society’s Science Book Prize | 80beats

Posted on October 24, 2010 by Danzig

Ascending_web Nick Lane’s book Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution has just won the Royal Society’s science book prize. The book chronicles the history of life on Earth through ten of evolution’s greatest achievements, from the origins of life itself to sex, eyes, and DNA.

The judges said that the ease with which Lane communicates these complex scientific ideas is what makes the book shine.

“Life Ascending is a beautifully written and elegantly structured book that was a favourite with all of the judges. Nick Lane hasn’t been afraid to challenge us with some tough science, explaining it in such a way that we feel like scientists ourselves, unfolding the mysteries of life,” said Maggie Philbin, chair of the judges. [The Guardian]

Instead of dumbing down the science, Lane’s words build the reader up to an understanding of evolution’s work.

Lane is a superb communicator. He knows exactly how much technical detail is required to provide satisfying explanations for the evolution of the genetic code, photosynthesis, complex cells, muscles and eyes, and his enthusiasm is catching. [The Guardian's book review]

Lane, a biochemist himself at University College London, believes in what he writes about. He studies and formulates hypotheses about the evolution of life for his job, and loves to communicate these ideas.

“Writing is my way to understand the world. I tried to get across the boundary between what we know and what we don’t know,” Lane explained. “It’s a thrilling tapestry that writing can take you across – you can ask any question you want, but there’s responsibility that goes with that.” [Nature]

Alas, this may be the last year of the prestigious book prize. It lots its sponsor, pharmaceutical company Aventis, in 1997, and has run out of funds.

Image: W. W. Norton & Company

Protecting Aliens From Us—an E.T. Bill of Rights | Science Not Fiction

Posted on October 24, 2010 by Danzig

His VP is The Great Gonzo. Remember in E.T. where the government finds E.T. and decides they should do all sorts of crazy awful experiments on him? Or how about in District 9 where an entire alien race is subjected to squalor, neglect, and vivisection? Or maybe in The Day the Earth Stood Still when Klaatu takes a round in the shoulder from some nervous infantrymen? What all of these movies have in common is that on present-day Earth, aliens have no rights. Despite a demonstration of equal or superior intelligence, a capacity for moral reasoning, complex culture, and peaceful intentions, aliens are regularly mistreated.

“Why should I care?” you might ask, gesturing with your cigarette holder and adjusting your pashmina scarf. You should care because either we are going to find aliens on an earth-like planet, like Gliese 581g, or they’ll find us first—and soon. We’ve got time, but not much, before we’ll be looking at some living something from another world.

Well why should aliens have rights? Because, as I’ve argued before, they have personhood. (Quick refresher: personhood is the idea that rights stem from aspects of an entity’s mind. For example, a sentient creature has the right not to suffer, and a self-aware creature has the right to self-determine. It doesn’t matter if the mind is in a robo-power suit, an ethereal protoplasm, distributed among a living swarm, or at the center of a writhing mass of tentacles. If a sentient, rational, and moral mind is present, it has personhood.)

If an alien can suffer, can reason, and can tell right from wrong, then it has rights and responsibilities. But what are they?

A Bill of Rights for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Draft)

I imagine the preamble would be pretty simple and to the point. Our goal is to outline what is protected (intelligent aliens) and what isn’t (probes, asteroids, King Ghidorah). Remember all those episodes of Star Trek where the Prime Directive gets the Enterprise crew in trouble because the non-warp civilization has no idea how to deal with aliens? Think of these rights as the Prime Directive in reverse—a list of rights to protect peaceful space explorers.

Preamble: The People of Earth recognize that any Extraterrestrial Intelligence that is sentient, conscious, autonomous, and recognizes other persons shall be protected by the rights articulated herein. The rights articulated remain in effect while the visiting Extraterrestrial Intelligence is within the scope of direct, immediate human interaction and does not present a clear and present danger to the People of Earth.

The main goal here is to prevent us from accidentally triggering an intergalactic war because we’re too jumpy. As Stephen Hawking pointed out, a superior species should have no trouble wiping us out if they wanted. It’s even more unlikely that aggressive intentions will be hidden or sneaky; even Independence Day only took 24 hours to go from first contact to Armageddon. If aliens don’t come out guns a-blazing, we should probably give them benefit of the doubt. Furthermore, peaceful aliens with personhood (like A.L.F.) would be protected while those without (the Blob), would not be. Pretty good so far! I’m a regular founding father.

On to the articles of rights. What are we trying to do with these articles? Protect the aliens from us. The same way the Bill of Rights is supposed to protect citizens from the government, we should be protecting aliens from humanity. Let’s take a shot.

Article I. The People of Earth shall, in a manner prescribed by national and international law, form a delegation of representatives appropriate to the Extraterrestrial Intelligence. This delegation will be entrusted with ensuring adherence to the values and articles within this document.

Just who, precisely, is going to interact with the aliens is quite important. My hope is that it isn’t a bunch of politicians, but actually some real scientists, philosophers, and the odd polymath (cough Jeff Goldblum cough) to round things out. Alright, now on to making sure we don’t mistreat our guests.

Article II. The People of Earth shall make no act of aggression, pre-emptive or otherwise, towards an Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

Article III. The People of Earth shall not unjustly imprison, restrain, or delay the movement of any Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

Article IV. The People of Earth shall observe the same standards of ethics—including dignity, autonomy, and informed consent—regarding any potential scientific or medical interaction with the Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

Whew! No being mean, no prisoners, and no evil experiments – I just made a whole lot of science fiction stories very boring. In all honesty, my suspension of disbelief is most rattled by films where one of these three articles is violated. I just can’t imagine someone thinking it would be a good idea to imprison, shoot at, or dissect a strange, advanced, alien species. But it’s better safe than sorry.

Back to the task at hand. What we need to round things out is some sort of catch-all article, like the 10th Article of the Bill of Rights, to end this little list. Ah, got it:

Article V. The People of Earth shall act as to best preserve a peaceful relationship with the Extraterrestrial Intelligence while working to preserve mutual cultures and identities.

Boom! There it is folks, a Bill of Rights for our first visitors. Any loopholes? As always, I’m sure the lovely commenters will provide fine fodder for thought.

Canadian scientists fight back against censorship | Bad Astronomy

Posted on October 24, 2010 by Danzig

In September, I wrote about how the conservative political party in control in Canada is throttling scientists, forcing them to get permission to discuss their scientific results with the media. This is a clear attempt to keep scientists from talking about results that are contrary to the ideology of the political party– and we’re talking about such topics as global warming here. This hearkens back to what was going on here in the US just a few short years ago.

Now Canadian scientists are firing back: they’ve launched a website where they can take their results straight to the public without government interference. The site — artfully named PublicScience.ca — features interviews and videos with Canadian government scientists.

The site is a beautiful thumb-to-the-nose to those in the government who think they can suppress science. Here’s their site description:

This site is sponsored by the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada.
PUBLICSCIENCE.ca opens up the world of science for the public good.
PUBLICSCIENCE.ca advocates for support for the science that touches the daily lives of Canadians in so many important ways.

"Opens up the world of science for the public good." Awesome. Their press release announcing the site makes this clear, too.

I’m certain this makes some government officials apoplectic, and I’m quite enjoying myself envisioning that right now. I loathe censorship in any form, but I especially abhor it when it’s done out of ideology to choke out science and reality.

Good on ya, Canadian scientists. Speak up, loudly and clearly. At the bottom of the site’s homepage is a call to action for Canadian citizens, too. I encourage my neighbors to the north to follow those links, and let your government know that science is for everyone, and not just when it agrees with your personal beliefs.

Tip o’ the toque to Boing Boing and Westsidekef.

Dengue on the march: My new podcast | The Loom

Posted on October 24, 2010 by Danzig

On my latest podcast, I take a look at dengue fever, a viral disease that’s infecting some 50 million people a year and is even turning up in the United States. I talk to Thomas Scott of UC Davis about how this cunning virus takes advantage of human networks to spread its aches, pains, bleeding, and death. Check it out.

A sign that Facebook has peaked | Gene Expression

Posted on October 24, 2010 by Danzig

The other day NPR’s Planet Money quipped that the gold bubble was going to burst soon, as they’d decided to buy gold. Well, perhaps Facebook is nearing its bursting point…I created a Gene Expression fan page. I don’t have a good sense of the great utility of this sort of thing…you can after all find the two GNXP weblogs on the world wide web pretty easily. And I feed the blog posts to two twitter accounts. I can see the value-add of Facebook’s selective semi-permeability when it comes to the “social graph”, but less so for websites which have a robust presence on the internet. GNXP in some form has been around for over 8 years. I can’t but help feel that this is a flashier Geocities fan page.

Also, it has a URL that’s easy to remember: http://www.facebook.com/GeneExpression

NCBI ROFL: Morphing into Michael Jackson. | Discoblog

Posted on October 24, 2010 by Danzig

2973994306_fd1a5860f2 It’s case study flashback week on NCBI ROFL! All this week we’ll be featuring some of our favorite medical case studies from the archives. Enjoy!

Mandibular angle augmentation with the use of distraction and homologous lyophilized cartilage in a case of morphing to Michael Jackson surgery.

“Correction of an ill-defined mandibular angle is not an easy task, whether it is requested by the “congenital, orthognathic or cosmetic” patient. Deliberate over-correction has not been reported to our knowledge. This article presents a combination of distraction osteogenesis and lyophilized cartilage used to three-dimensionally over-augment the mandibular angle of a long-face prognathic patient who had the wish to be morphed to Michael Jackson or at least as far as current technique and his endogenic features allowed.”

Photo: flickr/dalbera

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: The politically incorrect nose job.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: I still think listening to country music is degrading.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Sorry Pedobear, science proves drinking is no excuse.

WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

Pretty Liquid Crystal Experiments Could Reorganize Electronic Displays | 80beats

Posted on October 24, 2010 by Danzig

A new approach to electrophoresis is giving researchers more control over how they play with small particles.

Electrophoresis is the movement of particles in solution under a current–a phenomenon that can be exploited for use in everything from ePaper to DNA separating gels. Instead of using a normal fluid to conduct current, researchers led by Oleg Lavrentovich tried using liquid crystals as their conductive fluid.

Liquid crystals, like those seen in the first three pictures above (which might look similar to the patterns you’ve seen when you push on the screen of some of your electronics), act like a fluid. But instead of being a disorganized jumble of molecules, the individual rod-shaped particles line up parallel to each other. When they take on different orientations, they refract different colors of light, a phenomenon called birefringence.

The last picture in the set shows a 10 micron glass sphere moving in a liquid crystal carrier. You can see the “tail” of unorganized liquid crystal around and above the object (it would be moving in a plane with the screen, from top to bottom). This tail is what propels the object through the charged liquid crystal.

The liquid crystal can be used to propel small objects (anything bigger than about a half a micron wide) in a variety of ways and trajectories based on how the crystals are aligned. The parallel lines of molecules can be set up in such a way that when a current is applied, the object moves through the liquid crystal, following the track, and being propelled by the “tail” of deformed liquid crystals behind it. In this way, the liquid crystal can also move non-charged particles and those with symmetrical structures, which were troublesome when using non-crystalline carriers.

From the paper, which was published in Nature:

The phenomenon offers new perspectives for practical applications where highly flexible, precise and simple control of particle (or cargo) placement, delivery, mixing or sorting is needed. Examples include microfluidic devices and electrophoretic displays.

Images: Nature / Oleg Lavrentovich, Israel Lazo, and Oleg Pishnyak

The golden age (is ending) | Cosmic Variance

Posted on October 24, 2010 by Danzig

As has been oft remarked on this blog, we are in a golden age of astrophysics and cosmology. The data is pouring down from the heavens, in large part from 14 state-of-the-art NASA space telescopes. However, this cornucopia of astronomy is about to come to a crashing stop. We are at the high-water mark, and the next few years are going to see a rapid decline in the number of observatories in space. In five years most, if not all, of these telescopes will be defunct (WMAP is already in the graveyard), and it’s not clear what will be replacing them. This is brought into startling focus by the following plot:

The dotted line shows “today”. In a few years, the only significant US space observatory may be the James Webb Space Telescope (assuming it’s on budget and on time, neither of which are to be taken for granted). The reasons for the current “bubble” in resources, and the impending crash, are myriad and complex. These missions take many years, if not multiple decades, to plan and execute, and we are currently reaping the harvest of ancient boom times. But one aspect subtly implied by this graph is the impact of JWST on space funding. The cost of this mission is now over $5 billion, and continues to rise. Very optimistically, the mission will be in space in 2014, and will continue to consume major developmental resources until then. In an era of fiscal austerity, it is difficult to imagine that the immense ongoing cost of JWST leaves room for much else to be done. The community has gone through the painful exercise of winnowing down its “wish list” to a few key, high-impact missions (as detailed by Julianne here, here, and here; my summary here). It is not immediately apparent that even this fairly “modest” list is attainable given current budget realities. Astronomical data from space over the next decade will pale in comparison to the previous one. We are at a unique moment in the history of space astronomy; it is highly unlikely that we will have fourteen major space astrophysics missions flying again within our lifetimes. We need to make the most of what we have, while we still have it.

Want to Watch a Mars Rover Being Built? There’s a Webcam for That | Discoblog

Posted on October 24, 2010 by Danzig

curiosity-cam Want to see your tax dollars at work? There’s a more exciting way to do it than watching a road crew pour asphalt for the latest highway expansion. Now you can watch the next Mars rover being built in a clean room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, thanks to a well-positioned webcam.

Curiosity rover, also known as the Mars Science Laboratory, is a hulking beast compared to its smaller cousins, Spirit and Opportunity. The six-wheeled Curiosity is about the size of a car and weighs 2,000 pounds. The rover is scheduled to blast off toward Mars in the winter of 2011, and to reach the planet in August 2012. Its mission: to probe rocks, take pictures, and generally cruise around looking for signs of life, past or present.

The “Curiosity Cam” went live today. It will typically show technicians working from 8 in the morning until 11 at night, Monday through Friday, but the bunny suit-clad engineers sometimes disappear from the shot when their work draws them to other parts of the building. (During their lunch break today one commenter groused that it was boring to stare at an empty room.) Right now the technicians are working on the rover’s instruments, tomorrow they’re scheduled to put the suspension system and wheels on. Be sure to tune in!

Image: NASA / JPL

Borders we forget: Saudi Arabia & Yemen | Gene Expression

Posted on October 24, 2010 by Danzig

There’s a lot of stuff you stumble upon via Google Public Data Explorer which you kind of knew, but is made all the more stark through quantitative display. For example, consider Saudi Arabia and Yemen. In gross national income per capita the difference between these two nations is one order of magnitude (PPP and nominal). Depending on the measure you use (PPP or nominal) the difference between the USA and Mexico is in the range of a factor of 3.5 to 5. Until recently most Americans did not know much about Yemen. It was famous for being the homeland of Osama bin Laden’s father and the Queen of Sheba.

Let’s do some comparisons.

Good luck Saudi Arabia! Couldn’t happen to a nicer nation.

Second Look at NASA’s Moon Bombing Reveals Even More Water | 80beats

Posted on October 24, 2010 by Danzig

LCROSS1 Remember one year ago, when NASA’s LCROSS mission (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) blasted the moon to kick up a plume of debris? The satellite’s first look at that plume saw that, yes, there was water ice there, much to DISCOVER’s delight. One year later, scientists have published an in-depth analysis of the LCROSS plume and found that there might be even more water than they first thought: In certain places, the moon could be twice as wet as the Sahara Desert.

In a series of articles in Science (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), researchers detail just how much moisture—and what other surprises—they found when they bombed our natural satellite.

“It’s really wet,” said Anthony Colaprete, co-author of one of the Science papers and a space scientist at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. He and his colleagues estimate that 5.6% of the total mass of the targeted lunar crater’s soil consists of water ice. In other words, 2,200 pounds of moon dirt would yield a dozen gallons of water. [Wall Street Journal]

The water isn’t all (though there was lots of it in the plume, more 300 pounds). Other studies in the mix found methane, silver, gold, ammonia, and many more substances in the cloud of debris NASA created.

“This place looks like it’s a treasure chest of elements,” said Brown University planetary geologist Peter Schultz, one of the principal investigators of the NASA mission. He said the compounds migrate to the poles and then get quick-frozen and collect in craters, where they stay “in the permanent shadows.” Although the presence of some lunar ice and water vapor was reported earlier from that mission, the full richness of what lies in the coldest and darkest reaches of the moon took a year to tease out. [Washington Post]

While the menagerie of elements fascinates scientists, it could complicate matters for dreamers who want to go back to the moon and use its resident water supply to establish a base in the future. For instance, the LCROSS team found lots of mercury, which has a little toxicity problem that could get in the way of harvesting water in a drinkable form.

Not all of the moon is so rich in water and other materials, either. As Schultz noted, NASA chose a polar site for LCROSS because those sites don’t receive enough direct sunlight to blast off the material there. The rest of the moon is much, much drier than the driest places on Earth.

However, we’re continually ready to be surprised. If this year has shown us anything, it’s that our growing knowledge continues to paint a new picture of the moon.

“We’ve always been told the moon is bone dry and that was the legacy of Apollo and that’s true — in all the samples we picked up,” Schultz [says]. “It’s now a new moon to me. We know there are places we can explore that can tell us brand new things,” Schultz said. [Discovery News]

Image: NASA

Select Page ::