Variations of the spectral index of dust emissivity from Hi-GAL observations of the Galactic plane*

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Authors: D. Paradis, M. Veneziani, A. Noriega-Crespo, R. Paladini, F. Piacentini, J. P. Bernard, P. de Bernardis, L. Calzoletti, F. Faustini, P. Martin, S. Masi, L. Montier, P. Natoli, I. Ristorcelli, M. A. Thompson, A. Traficante and S. Molinari.<br />Astronomy and Astrophysics Vol. 520 , page L8<br />Published online: 30/09/2010<br />
Keywords:
dust, extinction ; infrared: ISM.

Saturday — In The Park –

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As of 1:45 CDT, the riddle remains open.

UPDATE:  SOLVED by Brad at 2:47 CDT

Yay, it’s riddle time.  I have a fun puzzler for you this week; one that shouldn’t leave you puzzled for long.

Okay, everybody, get your geek on.  Today’s riddle answer is straight out of SciFi.

You are looking for a being.

This being does not exist in the real world…

…as far as we know.

It might behoove us to take the moral high ground.

Extending the “olive branch” can be a dangerous move.

There are several iconic SciFi stereotypes associated with this being.

As far as famous last words go, this being delivers a beaut.

Did I capture your interest?  I’ll be lurking in my usual spot, waiting for someone with whom to talk.

Oileán Ruaidh

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A meteorite the Rover Opportunity found. Click for a false color version. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell University

The Mars Rover Opportunity spotted what was thought to be a meteorite on the Martian surface a few weeks ago on September 16, 2010.  Have wheels will travel was the motto and pretty soon as you can see, the little rover bumped right up to it and gave us this nice close up look.

Using the microscopic imager and the X-ray spectrometer the mission team determined this is an nickel-iron meteorite.  The mission team named the meteorite Oileán Ruaidh for an island off the northwest coast of Ireland (YAY Ireland!!  I love Ireland, got kin there and it’s a great place to visit).  According to NASA it is pronounced ay-lan ruah, my Gaelic is next to nothing so I’ll take their word for it.

So now the rover has been there and done that as they say and is heading off towards Endeavour Crater.

It’s hard to keep a good rover down.  ;-)

Before anybody comments that such a dense meteorite should have left a rather big hole. . .  I’m there too.  Speculate away.

Move Over NASA

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If things are left to Luke Geissbuhler and his 7-year old son Max from Park Slope New York, it won’t be long before the private space industry really gets going.

The video shows their work around launching a balloon with a styrofoam capsule with a camera into the upper atmosphere and retrieving said craft.

They shared this video and all I can say is BRAVO!!


Click here to view the embedded video.

28 Days To Go

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Conet 103P/Hartley 2 in the infrared by the WISE spacecraft. Click for larger. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

There are just 28 days to go before EPOXI flys past comet 103P/Hartley 2.  Before I forget, Hartley 2 may become a naked-eye comet before all is said and done.

The EPOXI spacecraft will pass just 435 miles (700 km) from the comet and will mark the fifth time a comet has been imaged close up.  The speed of the passing by will be 7.6 miles per second (12.3 km/sec) so hopefully things will go smoothly with the camera.

The spacecraft is closing the distance at about 607,000 miles per day or about 976,000 km per day so it’s a ways off yet but gaining fast.

The image at the top of the post is from the WISE spacecraft taken in the infrared back in May 2010, the tail you can see is just over a million miles long (1.8 million km).  You can read more about the comet and of course WISE here at the image source.

The image below is from the Hubble Space Telescope.  The blue color was added after the fact.  Originally the image was black and white and recorded overall brightness.  Essentially what they did was make a brightness map.  There is another version of same image (no graphics) at Hubblesite.

Brightness map of Hartley 2 by Hubble. Click for larger.

Planet X

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Planet X.  Well, well, well.  Are we talking about any unidentified planet in the solar system, or the one hiding behind the sun waiting for a chance to pop out and surprise us?  Let’s talk about the mystery planet hiding behind the sun.

NASA/Hubble This is V838 (a star) supposed to be proof of Planet X

People, that’s mathematically impossible.  I’m not talking improbable here, I’m talking IMPOSSIBLE.  Even if it were possible… guys, we’ve seen the back side of the sun.  There’s no planet hiding there.  Unless the d*** thing has a cloaking device, we would have seen it by now.

Let’s get real here.  The whole Planet X/Nibiru thing came from this Wisconsin woman, Nancy Lieder.  She’s special.  See, some gray extraterrestrials called “Zetans” implanted a receiver in her head so she could get all this first hand information (of course they’re gray).  They talk to her.  The told her we would be wiped out in 2003.  Wait, let me look at my calendar.  Okay, we escaped that one.  Whew.  Miss Nancy has a website called ZetaTalk if you want the 411 directly from her.  Of course, she’s now changed the date of our demise to December 2012.  You know what I think about that.

Okay, I just deleted a bunch of stuff that Tom won’t let me put in because it would probably get me sued, but I’m not too worried about that.  I double-majored in college, but my MINOR was law.  So bring it on, baby girl.  Let me just say I think she should be prosecuted for the garbage she’s spewing, but idiocy isn’t a crime.

The name “Nibiru” came from Zecharia Sitchin, by the way.  He believes we’re descended from ancient extraterrestrial miners.  He tries to distance himself from Ms Lieder, but she won’t leave him alone.

Here’s the good part:  Planet X is supposed to be roughly four times the size of Earth, and when it blows by it’s going to stop the rotation of the Earth for five days.  Then the rotation with start again.  (cough cough)  Have I already said “mathematically impossible”?  Do you have any idea how much energy it would take to brake the Earth?  Then, what starts it again?  Put a tennis ball on the table in front of you and tell me how long it takes it to start rotating.  But hurry, I’m kinda old, I doubt I have the THOUSANDS OF YEARS to wait for that tennis ball to start rotating on its own.  Which it won’t.  Ever.  Even after thousands of years.

Now, for the idea it has this really strange orbit that takes it wa-a-a-a-a-a-a-y out into the Oort cloud, then every 3600 years or so, it comes back.   3600 years.  Uh huh.  If you do the math, that puppy would have been shot out of the solar system on it’s first orbit.  But, let’s just say it doesn’t have to follow the laws of physics.  Funny, we can see billions of light years away, but we can’t see something four times the size of the Earth in our own solar system.   Oh, and hey, 3600 years is within our human history.  I don’t remember reading about it, but I guess I could have missed it.  You’d think someone would have mentioned that 3600 years ago the poles physically switched places and killed most of the life on Earth.

Ms Lieder advises everybody to destroy their pets before Planet X comes by.  No, I am serious… she says to euthanize your pets.  And people actually do it.

I can’t say what I think about that because this is a family site.  I can curse fluently in five languages, and I find that is not enough.

Triton

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Way out in the deep freeze of our solar system lies an unassuming moon quietly circling around Neptune…
…or so you thought.

Did you know that this quiet little moon is the largest moon to have a retrograde orbit (spins opposition to its planet)?  And speaking of large, it’s the 7th largest moon in the solar system.  AND, children, it has a nearly perfect circular orbit.

Thought to be a Kuiper Belt capture, Triton acts a lot like Pluto.  Also, it’s one of the few moons in the Solar System known to be geologically active.  That’s right; volcanos.  You won’t see many impact craters looking at Triton.  Maybe a few, but you’ll probably mistake most of those with volcanos.

Voyager 2 evidence of cryovolcanism

Discovered just 17 days after Neptune itself, William Lassell also thought he saw a ring system around Neptune, but was pretty much laughed out of the astronomical community for that.

Ha.  Ha.

Triton’s retrograde orbit has been the object of study for years.  True, there are smaller moons – much further than their primary – which exhibit retrograde orbits, but none as close or as large as Triton.  As I said, Triton also orbits its primary in a near perfect circle.  That’s very uncommon.  It is believed that in about 3.6 billion years, Triton will either impact Neptune’s atmosphere or cause a ring system to rival Saturn.

Triton has a very thin atmosphere of nitrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide.  It may also have liquid water below the surface due to the tectonic activity… but it’s not considered a candidate for life.

Voyager 2, of course... Neptune

Interested?

Get Your Riddle Here

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UPDATE:  SOLVED by Sean at 12:01 CDT, a new record!

Finally, it’s Saturday.  It’s been an exciting week in astronomy, with the confirmation of Gliese 581g.  Tom posted on it here.  At a little over 20 lya, the Gliese system is doable; at least for our descendants.  In the meantime, I’m waiting for some atmospheric studies.

Riddle time!  I bet you’re ready to play, so I’ll get right to it.  Ready?  Okay…

You are looking for a process.

This process occurs in the real world.

This process happens everywhere.

You could not exist without it.

It has a “flip side” to it that confuses people.

When you compare it to its flip side, you find a puzzle.

Although this process is no purring kitten, it’s a lot nicer than people might think.

There is a barrier to this process which must be overcome, but once it is, nothing can stop it.

This process is your past, your present, and definitely your future.

Got it?  Solve this nice, easy riddle, Robert, so I can bury Planet X for you.  You know where to find me!

Open Thread – October 9th, 2010 | Gene Expression

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Fall is upon us. I do not recommend The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism. Too thin. Finally getting to Paul Bloom’s How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like. But after hearing him in interviews and reading his articles on the topic over the past six months as he was promoting the book I’m finding that there isn’t that much that’s surprising!

For various reasons I didn’t get a DonorsChoose page up & running this year. But I suggest you check out the science bloggers leaderboard. Anne Jefferson has a summary of what’s going on.

For more general charitable concerns, I suggest checking out GiveWell. Also see their blog.

Relative & absolute perceptions of well being | Gene Expression

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I asked this on twitter, but no one responded. If you had to choose between two scenarios, which would you choose:

- A world population of 10 billion where 90% were not malnourished?

- A world population of 500 million were 90% were malnourished?

The first scenario has 2.2 times as many malnourished individuals as the second.

This issue of relative and absolute values matters. Most of you are likely aware of the economic literature on the “big fish small pond” vs. “small fish big pond” effect. Perceptions of poverty are to some extent standardized to local distributions.

Or consider this data on manufacturing output:

curiouscat_top_manufacturing_countries_comparison_1990-2008

curiouscat_chart_top_manufacturing_country_percent_of_output_1990-2008

In case it isn’t clear: the first chart shows that the United States remains the absolute top ranked nation in manufacturing output. The second chart shows that the United States remains proportionally the largest producer of manufactured goods in the world.

And yet the perception is that American manufacturing is in decline. Why? Part of the issue is straightforward in that employment in American manufacturing is in decline. But I suspect another issue is that the scale and magnitude of American relative dominance is also in decline.

Finally, one thing to remember is that the USA is actually a relatively unglobalized economy for a large nation. We’ve had around 10% of goods and services be in the export sector for about a generation now. Here’s a chart which shows the trends. On the x-axis is income per capita (PPP). On the y-axis is the % of goods and services exported. The bubble size is proportional to population. The USA is at the bottom right.

Image Credit: Curious Cat Blog

Friday Fluff – October 8th, 2010 | Gene Expression

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FF3

1. First, a post from the past: Through the rugged roads of gene land

2. Weird search query of the week: “do estonians like finns”. Answer: no one likes Finns! (especially Swedes)

3. Comment of the week, in response to Things are looking up for the world’s poor!:

These are all percentages, and the rates of increases are generally lower than the population increases in poor parts of the world. So while the percentage of malnutrition, for example, may be increasing by 3% per decade, the total number of malnurished people is still increasing due to the increase in population.

A perfect illustration of the dynamic noted earlier (as a factual matter the comment above may, or may not, be correct by the way; depends on the statistics you look at. Though a true pessimistic can point out that there are hundreds of millions of more malnourished people alive today than in 1700).

4) From last week, 62% of you are not New Atheists, 22% are, and 15% don’t know.

View Survey

5) And finally, your weekly fluff fix:
laze

Science is Vital Protest Today! | Cosmic Variance

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Just a quick update about the Science is Vital campaign that I posted about last week. If you are interested, and close to London, thousands of people are gathering outside the Treasury today as part of Science is Vital to protest about the planned cuts to science funding in the UK.

I’d also like to correct an omission in my last post by giving credit to Jenny Rohn for founding Science is Vital. Thanks for doing this Jenny!

If I could be at the Treasury today, I would. If you can, I hope you make it.


Farmers, foragers, and us | Gene Expression

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At the Overcoming Bias weblog Robin Hanson has been ruminating on the shifts in human values and behaviors driven by transitions in modes of production. In particular, the dichotomy between foragers (hunter-gatherers) and farmers. Last week I pointed to Eric Michael Johnson’s review of data which indicate that modes of production may influence the normative marriage system. It is often stated that in most societies the ideal family system is for a polygynous household. This despite the fact that in total numbers those who hold these values are now the minority of humans, and even within these societies most men do not maintain a polygynous household. Johnson’s method is what I will term as “thick,” he began from the bottom-up from detail and made some tentative generalizations. Hanson’s method is relatively “thin,” starting from some general truths his process seems to be to generate a sequence of inferences and entailments from the coarse aspects of human history and nature which he takes as givens.

Here are Hanson’s posts:

- Two Types of People
- Fear Made Farmers
- Why Towns Conform
- Forage vs Farm Future

Some general thoughts:

- I believe that focusing on the shifts between modes of production is essential in understanding both human cultural and biological evolution, and their interplay. I first started asserting this about six years ago. My tentative thesis is that in our modern age the conflict between “traditional” and “Western” values is to some extent really be a conflict between “traditional” and “more traditional” values. That the individualistic ethos of the modern West, which puts less emphasis on the elaborate norms imposed from identity-groups, is a “throwback” to small-scale societies.

I came to this opinion mostly because of love. The ideology of romantic love has been thoroughly fleshed out in the modern West, and to some extent put at the center of our values in terms of what should matter in a relationship. This is not so in many societies, and was not so in the West in the pre-modern era. But, I believe that the core basic instincts and sentiments from which the ideology of love emerges are innate, and have their antecedents deep in our evolutionary history as a species. Even in societies which discourage romantic love as determinative in cementing a pair-bond the cultural myths still allude to tragic lovers. The impulses must be channeled, constricted, and marginalized, but they remain. The rise of social and political egalitarianism in the 18th and 19th centuries destroyed the power of kin-lineages which were the most self-interested opponents of individual love and choice (a very general illustration of this were the anti-miscegenation laws in the United States, which were passed to preserve the racial purity of the white race, at the expense of the preferences of a minority of whites).

-I believe that to a great extent class is a major parameter which we need to take into account when making these assertions about the spirit of the age. In much of the world the norms of traditional societies were enforced and policed only among elites, who were the guardians of the culture. The solemnization of marriage by religious authorities or secular institutions was more a feature of elite unions in the pre-modern age by and large. If property and honor were not at issue, as was less likely to be the case among low-status individuals, marriages of personal choice were no doubt possible. Though in this case there is the confound that choices were generally available only to elite individuals who were then constrained by norms, while low-status individuals who may not have been constrained by norms had little freedom of choice operationally.

The modern age has two countervailing trends. The rise of liberal individualism, and, the spread of traditional values which emphasized a restriction of choice. The latter is a function of the rise of egalitarian cultural awareness, nationalism, and economic surplus. For example, societies where women are ideally segregated and kept apart could only implement this for elite clans which had the economic surplus to afford the removal of their women-folk from the labor force. Low-status individuals may have had to mobilize the whole family, women and children, just to maintain survival at subsistence. In rural areas of Saudi Arabia women reputedly drive and work as a throwback to older economic necessities (in particular in the Hijaz), but the modern Saudi state can subsidize the leisure of its people. Sex segregation and the employment of a whole class of drivers for women is possible in such circumstances. If Saudi Arabia became poor, there would be no surplus to fund a whole class of religious police, and the poorer folk would no doubt have to mobilize their women-folk for economic production to survive.

- History moves in cycles, but it also moves linearly. There is a long debate whether hunter-gatherers were wealthier and healthier than farmers, on average, or whether they were as poor and unhealthy (tellingly, few people argue farmers were on average wealthier and healthier). The literature is mixed in this area. I lean toward the proposition that hunter-gatherers were somewhat healthier than farmers because of a greater diversity of diet, and possibly more variance in population because of more frequent inter-group conflict. But my confidence is modest on this issue. More important is that for almost all of human history our species existed on the Malthusian margin. That is, they were conventional animals whose population tracked resource availability. This implied that median wealth would have remained about the same, as population growth easily matched economic growth. There were exceptional transient periods. I believe that the shift from hunter-gathering to farming in any region was accompanied by generations of nutritional surfeit, as the farmers rapidly spread into “empty” tracts. The settlement of North America by the British, and Europeans in the generations after the Black Death, are other instances of transient periods of relative wealth and health. The key is to remember that this was for all practical purposes a zero-sum world, and wealth followed in the wake of death, while poverty followed in the wake of low mortality.

Our world is different, in particular the developed world. Economic growth does not get swallowed up by population growth. Not only does innovation produce productivity growth far greater than in the past, but greater wealth does not result in superior fertility. This a linear aspect of history, because hunter-gatherers and farmers both lived in the Malthusian world. One group may have been somewhat healthier than the other, but the mortality rate of modern humanity exhibits a qualitatively different pattern, shifted toward very advanced ages.

Additionally, there is a tendency to view the farmer as the prototypical modern man in his or her work ethic, while the hunter-gatherer lived a life of relative leisure. And yet histories of economic development indicate that there was a very noticeable shift from being a peasant to a factory worker in terms of work ethic and attention to time. The reality is that though farmers were very poor, in may be that for much of the year they had little work to do beyond the routine, and, importantly they may not have had the physical robusticity to work intensely for long periods. In this way it may be that pre-modern farmers resembled hunter-gatherers, going from feast to famine to feast. The main difference may have been density and a more sedentary character to life.

- A major difference between hunter-gatherers and farmers is the elaboration of cultural forms because of inter-generational institutions. I believe that supernatural thinking is the norm for the human mind. And certainly I do not see in the few surviving hunter-gatherers exemplars of of cool-headed materialism. I believe that hunter-gatherers had religion, but only the surplus stolen from aggregates of poor farmers could give rise to organized, institutionalized, religion. And it is organized religion which we term as “higher religion.” Higher religion is a system of thought, an elaborated set of norms, which persist over generations, and extend themselves outward. Only with the leisure and inequality of mass societies could we have Brahmins, Satmar Hasidism, or Deobandi punctiliousness.

Though religion is a clear and precise illustration of the principle, it seems that this is a general tendency. Many highly developed cultural forms which have specialist practitioners in the worlds of stolen surplus of the farmers and the post-Malthusian world today, music, art, and literature, clearly have their elementary precursors in the world of the hunter-gatherers. I believe that some of the modern world’s impatience with the baroque and irrational nature of these cultural forms has to do with the weakening of the power of elites and institutions over what are ultimately basic human impulses and competencies.

More later….

A New Exoskeleton Allows Paralyzed People to Walk Again | 80beats

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elegsHugging someone standing up. Going on a hike. Making eye contact with someone at their level, instead of always being looked down upon. These are simple things that people stuck in wheelchairs don’t have a chance to experience in daily life.

Berkeley Bionics is giving those experiences back to paraplegics with the introduction of an exoskeleton suit called eLEGS–a battery powered, artificially intelligent, wearable outer skeleton that gives these people back their freedom. People wearing these devices won’t be a common sight just yet–a suit is currently priced at about $100,000 a pop, and they’ll only be available for use in clinics at first–but it’s an exciting step forward.

The person straps into an exoskeleton made of carbon fiber and steel, which weighs 45 pounds. Sensors in the legs convey their position to a control unit contained in a backpack, and the controller tells which joints to bend to create a natural gait. The user gives the suit commands using two high-tech crutches: pressure on both tells the motorized legs to stand up, pressure on one means to step with the opposite leg. The suit’s battery pack can power up to six hours of walking, and it can reach speeds above two miles per hour.

Amanda Boxtel, who was paralyzed from the waist down in a skiing accident 18 years ago, tried out the device and says she took to it quickly.

“Walking with eLEGs took some rewiring and relearning,” says Boxtel, “but my body has the muscle memory. And I learned to walk really fast.” [New Scientist]

The suit will be used in a clinical trials at select rehabilitation centers starting in early 2011, and its makers hope a commercial model won’t be too far behind. Berkeley Bionics wants to make a lighter, thinner, and cheaper model (hopefully closer to $50,000, Berkeley Bionics CEO Eythor Bender says) available for home use by 2013.

Hit the jump for more info, and a poignant video of several paralyzed people giving eLEGS a tryout.

Berkeley Bionics isn’t the only company in the exoskeleton game. Argo Medical Technologies, a company from Israel, is already doing clinical trials and hopes to have its brand of ReWalk legs available in 12 to 18 months. There has also been long-standing interest in building exoskeletons that turn normal grunts into super-soldiers. In fact, that military research is where the eLEGS got their start. They’re modeled after an earlier exoskeleton design by Berkeley Bionics, the HULC, which enabled soldiers to carry over 200 pounds of weight for hours at a time.

But the company designed eLEGS specifically for people who are wheelchair-bound. And the few people who have tried out the device clearly appreciate it.

“To take my first step in the eLegs was just astounding,” Boxtel says with tears in her eyes, “because I bent my knee for the first time in 18 years and I placed my heel on the ground. And then I transferred my weight. And then I took another step. And another one. And it was so natural, and that was what really gripped me.” [CNET]

Being able to stand upright is not only good for patients’ mental well-being, it also aids digestion and blood circulation to the extremities. But some experts think the technology needs more refinement before its ready for everyday life.

Grant Elliot, an exoskeleton researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, says rehabilitation devices like eLEGS and ReWalk are promising. Still, he says that attention needs to be paid to such devices to ensure they remain compact enough for their users to move freely without bumping into objects. “Humans are used to moving through human-sized spaces, like narrow hallways,” says Elliot. [New Scientist]

Related content:

80beats: The Latest Robot From Honda: A “Walking Assistant” to Push You Upstairs

80beats: Robotic Exoskeleton Allows a Paralyzed Man to Walk

Science Not Fiction: We Can Rebuild You: 8 Ways Science Can Fix Your (or Your Cat’s) Broken Body

Science Not Fiction: Mind Controlled Wheelchairs, They’re For Reals

Not Exactly Rocket Science: Sniff-detector allows paralysed people to write messages, surf the net and drive a wheelchair

Image: Flickr/BerkeleyBionics