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NCBI ROFL: 8% of Swedish men are peeping Toms. | Discoblog

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Danzig

tom Exhibitionistic and voyeuristic behavior in a Swedish national population survey.

“We examined the prevalence and correlates of self-reported sexual arousal from exposing one’s genitals to a stranger (exhibitionistic behavior) and spying on others having sex (voyeuristic behavior) in a representative national sample. In 1996, 2,450 randomly selected 18-60 year-olds from the general population of Sweden were interviewed in a broad survey of sexuality and health. A total of 76 (3.1%) respondents reported at least one incident of being sexually aroused by exposing their genitals to a stranger and 191 (7.7%) respondents reported at least one incident of being sexually aroused by spying on others having sex. Exhibitionistic and voyeuristic behaviors were examined for possible associations with 9 sociodemographic, 5 health, 4 risk-taking, and 17 sexuality variables. Both paraphilia-like behaviors were positively associated with being male and having more psychological problems, lower satisfaction with life, greater alcohol and drug use, and greater sexual interest and activity in general, including more sexual partners, greater sexual arousability, higher frequency of masturbation, higher frequency of pornography use, and greater likelihood of having had a same-sex sexual partner. Consistent with previous research in clinical samples of men with paraphilias, respondents who reported either exhibitionistic or voyeuristic behavior had substantially greater odds of reporting other atypical sexual behavior (sadomasochistic or cross-dressing behavior). There was evidence both for general and specific associations between sexual fantasies and their corresponding paraphilia-like behaviors.”

Photo: flickr/Bengt Nyman

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Sorry Pedobear, science proves drinking is no excuse.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: References to the paraphilias and sexual crimes in the Bible.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: scientist… or perv?

WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

Digital Retouching Reaches a Whole New Level, and a New Cup Size | Discoblog

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Danzig

Dudes: are you looking to get that Baywatch body without all the pumping of iron? All you need is a little “MovieReshape” and you can be virtually buff! Just don’t let anyone see you in person.

MovieReshape is a program created by Christian Theobalt at the Max Plank Institute in Germany. The program will digitally alter your appearance (including height, weight, and muscle tone) in any movie clip. Women can even get a digital boob job or liposuction to automatically enhance body size and shape on the fly.

Earlier approaches to body manipulation on film required retouching of every frame, a very laborious process when you’re talking about 30 frames per second. But this approach is different–it works from a 3D body plan made from the scans of 120 different men and women of different shapes and sizes, and in many different positions.

Using off-the-shelf software the team then identifies the person to be manipulated, and tweaks parameters like height, waist girth, leg length, muscularity, and breast girth. Check out a video explanation (with some creepy demonstrations) after the jump:

One use of this software is obviously to make actors’ bodies even more unattainable–or to help them out, so they don’t have to gain or loose weight for a role. New Scientist suggests an alternate use for the program:

It could also be a cost-saver for advertising companies. Because standards of beauty vary across cultures, it is the norm to shoot several adverts for a single product. With the new software, firms could make one film and tweak the model’s dimensions to suit different countries.

The program isn’t perfect yet: the person being manipulated needs to be free of other objects around them. Also, the greater the manipulation, the greater the distortion around the person is. The team screened reactions from 15 people and they said the distortion wasn’t distracting, but judge for yourself in the video above.

Related content:
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Bad Astronomy: Video Illusions
DISCOVER: Is It Real or Is It Photoshopped?
Not Exactly Rocket Science: How objectification silences women – the male glance as a psychological muzzle

Image: Jain, et.al(pdf), to be presented at SIGGRAPH ASIA 2010.

The History of the Next Millennium According to Sci-Fi | Science Not Fiction

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Danzig

To celebrate DISCOVER’s 30th anniversary, we asked great minds of science to tell us their hopes for the future. But science fiction already knows what happens next. Just take these predictions for the next millennium, along with some near misses gone by during our first three decades.

1984: Big-screen TVs are good for government control and workout videos.

1997: IT issues lead to artificial intelligence–and cause nuclear war.

2001: All you need for space travel is classical music and murderous computers.

2015: DeLoreans work with fusion. Hoverboards, however, don’t work over water.

2019: Everyone loathes retirement.

2019: Reality television audiences call for (more) blood.

2022: After so many years of enmity, New Yorkers develop a taste for one another.

2027: First woman gets pregnant in 18 years. No one stops shooting.

2054: So long, psychic hotlines. Hello, precognition.

2063: Humans go warp speed. Vulcans notice. Good-byes now require finger trickery.

2154: Only blue aliens can stop forest fires.

2199: People are the new batteries.

2274: Thirtieth birthdays take a turn for the worse.

2805: Robots make cute couples. Humans make trash.

2999: Finally! Long-promised head-in-jar technology arrives.

Coal Lawsuit Puts EPA’s Moutaintop Removal Rules on Trial | 80beats

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Danzig

MTM When the Environmental Protection Agency issued new rules in April attempting to crack down on mountaintop removal coal mining, you knew it was only a matter of time before the major push-back arrived. With elections looming and politicians looking to score some points at home, that time is now.

Joe Manchin, the Democratic governor of coal-rich West Virginia, says his state will sue the EPA and ask a U.S. District Court to throw out the agency’s strict new guidelines. For Mr. Manchin, the timing is certainly good:

Mr. Manchin is running for the U.S. Senate seat, formerly held by the late Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd, against Republican businessman John Raese, who has pulled ahead in some polls. The EPA’s policies on mining and climate change are controversial in West Virginia, where coal mining is a major industry supporting thousands of jobs. [Wall Street Journal]

EPA’s legal authority here rests in the Clean Water Act. Mountaintop removal mining, as the name suggests, involves detonating explosives on mountains to access coal deposits. Unsurprisingly, blowing up a mountaintop makes quite a mess, and the debris is often dumped in valleys where it can pollute waterways. That’s why the EPA says the technique changed the rules for getting a Clean Water Act permit.

To qualify, companies would have to show that their projects would not cause pollutant concentrations in surrounding waters to climb past roughly five times the normal level. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said the rules would protect 95 percent of aquatic life and ban operators from dumping mine waste in streams in nearly all cases. [The New York Times]

The main sources of scientific disagreement in West Virginia’s complaint (pdf) are the EPA’s three main reports on mountaintop removal; West Virginia says EPA should have incorporated more peer-reviewed research. You can read the government reports online (1, 2, 3).

Meanwhile, in neighboring Kentucky, the EPA is carrying on with the coal crackdown. The EPA recently blocked water permits for 11 mines that had already gained state-level approval.

In objection letters about the permits from its Atlanta office to the Kentucky Division of Water, the EPA cited the state’s own assessment of poor water quality in the regions where the permits are sought. And it said state regulators, in moving to approve the permits, failed to conduct analyses to determine whether proposed discharges from new surface mining would likely violate state water quality standards. [Louisville Courier-Journal]

And the coal litigation is just getting started: Environmental groups including Appalachian Voices have announced that they’re suing three Kentucky coal mining operations. The activists claim to have found evidence that the coal companies routinely falsified their discharge reports.

“In one case, we noticed that all 42 of the reported pollutant levels of first quarter of 2009 were exactly the same as the second quarter,” said Donna Lisenby of Appalachian Voices, which conducted the study. In some, the reports were signed and dated in advance of the date of the tests, she said. [Louisville Courier-Journal]

Image: Wikipedia Commons

A Sneak Peek at The Science of Kissing | The Intersection

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Danzig

At the close of Book Week, a preview of my upcoming book The Science of Kissing: What Our Lips Are Telling Us in stores next January:

Paint + Sound Waves + High Speed Cameras = Mind-Boggling Beauty | Discoblog

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Danzig

Who would think a printer would inspire such beautiful art?

A collaboration between the ad company Dentsu London, Canon printers, and photographer/biochemist Linden Gledhill created these “sound sculptures” which use high speed cameras to catch tiny droplets of paint as they splatter under the force of sound waves. The resulting videos were used in an ad that celebrates Canon printers’ color quality, but honestly, who cares what they’re selling when the images are so pretty.

Gledhill gets extreme detail in his shots through his use of an ultra-high speed camera, which takes up to 5,000 frames per second, and a Canon 5D Mark II with a Canon EF 100mm Macro IS USM lens to get intense, up-close detail. He previously used the paint splatter sculpture technique in his “Water Figures” series, he said on Dentsu’s Flickr page:

I, like many people, find Water Figures almost compulsive viewing. They appeal to people in many ways because they represent a fusion of science, technology, natural chaos and art. Every image is unique and can be appreciated in all of these ways. For the scientist, who is interested in fluid dynamic or chaos theory, they capture the behavior of fluids in motion.

Hit the jump for more info and a video about the creative process.

To make the paint dance, he carefully lays out his paint droplets on a balloon stretched over a speaker. And while it looks like the droplets are dancing, Gledhill is actually only playing one tone at a time. To change up the action of the paint, he changes the instrument, frequency and volume of the tone, he explains:

Pure smooth notes create long tentacle like forms, whereas sharp complex high volume notes give rise to detached droplets which resemble planets.

Only about one in 10 of the pictures he takes are perfect enough to make the cut. Check out a video of the process below to learn more about how they made the magic happen, and read Gledhill’s blog post for more details.

In his other life, Gledhill is a biochemist at GlaxoSmithKline, where he works on diabetes and cancer drug development. In his spare time he likes to take close-up pictures of insects, plants and fungi, and as he told Dentsu London, he loves what he does:

I’m completely enchanted by the physical world around me and obsessed by its natural beauty. My career in science has magnified this feeling of awe. For me, photography is a way to capture this physical beauty and to pass this feeling on to others.

For more pictures and (much more oh-so-gorgeous) video visit Dentsu London’s Flickr page.

All Images: Dentsu London

Simulated Titan Atmosphere Produces Life’s Building Blocks | 80beats

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Danzig

TitanNaturalColor It’s just a lab experiment, but University of Arizona researcher Sarah Horst says that her team’s re-creation of the atmosphere on Saturn’s moon Titan showed that atmospheric reactions could produce some of life’s basic ingredients, and do it without the presence of liquid water.

Titan, which is larger than Mercury, boasts a thick atmosphere of mostly nitrogen with dashes of methane, carbon monoxide, and other trace ingredients (At -290 degrees Fahrenheit, Titan is a tad too frigid for liquid water). Horst brewed up an approximation of that mixture. She and her colleagues then blasted it with radio-frequency radiation, a lab stand-in for ultraviolet radiation from the sun.

“The really important thing is that you have enough energy to break that [nitrogen] bond,” she said. “We know there’s enough energy to break those bonds on Titan.” The experiment produced a slew of complicated molecules; the team has identified some 20,000 different kinds using mass spectrometry, Horst said. Included in this number are amino acids and nucleotide bases — the first time these molecules have been synthesized in an atmosphere simulation experiment without the use of liquid water, researchers said. [Space.com]

Horst presented the project at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Science, the same conference that has been buzzing with other fascinating ideas about Saturn and its lively satellites. And like other researchers hunting for life’s building blocks on Titan, Enceladus, Europa, or elsewhere, Horst’s team contends that their work could tell us more about the emergence of life here on Earth.

The researchers said that because they achieved the reactions without the presence of liquid water, it’s possible life could have sprung forth on Earth not in the seas, as commonly assumed, but perhaps in the planet’s early atmosphere—a considerably thinner version of the fog enveloping Titan today. [ScienceNOW]

Image: NASA

Michael Webber on SciFri | The Intersection

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Danzig

Earlier this week I wrote about Jonathan Bloom’s new book American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half Of Its Food (and what we can do about it). On a related note, this afternoon my wonderful and brilliant colleague Michael Webber will be on Science Friday to discuss the energy lost in the food we waste (yes, the very same topic we wrote about in New Scientist). Today’s episode is broadly entitled “Healthy Eating:”

Only 26 percent of the nation’s adults eat vegetables three or more times a day, according to a recent report from the CDC. At the same time, the USDA estimates that Americans waste 27% of their food — the energy equivalent of ~350 million barrels of oil a year. In this segment, we’ll look at our eating habits, and why they can be hard to change.

Walter Willett, Chairman of the Nutrition Department at Harvard’s School of Public Health will be on as well.

Make sure to tune in or listen to the podcast–this will be a great show! And don’t forget that Science Friday needs your support now more than ever.

Hungary’s Toxic Spill Reaches the Danube, but River May Escape Harm | 80beats

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Danzig

toxic-sludge-two The rust-colored flood that has been spreading across Hungary all week after an alumina plant accident on Monday is far from contained, and five deaths have been attributed to the wave of toxic sludge so far. Responders there say, however, that at least the worst has been avoided.

The blue Danube turned red?

After the spill began spreading, the concern that jumped off the page when you looked at a map was that the stuff would reach rivers that feed the Danube. Europe’s second-longest river (after the Volga in Russia) weaves its way past Hungary through Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, and on into the Black Sea.

Indeed, parts of the spill reached the Danube on Wednesday, but Hungarian responders say today that pH of the main river is just over 8, down from about 9 when the material first arrived. Neutral pH is 7, but a range of about 6.5 to 8.5 is considered a safe zone for consumption.

Hungarian disaster officials said alkaline levels in the Danube were normal after emergency crews poured plaster and acetic acid (vinegar) into rivers that flowed into it. “These data give us hope … and we have not experienced any damage on the main Danube so far,” Tibor Dobson, a Hungarian disaster spokesman, told Reuters. [The Guardian]

There were reports of dead fish in several of the smaller tributaries that feed into the Danube; in the small Marcal river, the first to be hit by the spill, all wildlife reportedly died. But officials are relieved that the much larger Danube doesn’t appear to be in serious danger. If the industrial waste that reaches the Danube is sufficiently neutralized and diluted, then the main worry is back in Hungary where the breadth of the red sludge remains, flooding the village of Kolontar. If weather turns warmer, the material could start to dry out and potentially get into the air, creating the danger of inhalation.

How toxic is this stuff?

The red sludge, which now reportedly covers an area of 16 square miles, is waste created by an industrial plant that processes bauxite (an ore made of several aluminum minerals) into alumina (or aluminum oxide—a molecule of two aluminum atoms and three oxygen atoms), which will later be refined into aluminum.

Much of the spill is iron oxide, which is why it has that rust color. The other ingredients, like calcium oxide and silicon dioxide, help to make the sludge itself highly basic, up to around 13 in pH. Hydrogeologist Paul Younger explains:

In the most concentrated areas, he says, it could be compared to products you would clean your kitchen with, causing dry or cracked skin, or — in cases of prolonged contact — it can “lift off the top layer of your skin.” Scores of people have already suffered burns in affected areas, with at least 120 receiving treatment. [BBC News]

So how much should we worry about it making people sick in the long term?

Dr John Hoskins, a consultant toxicologist, says that while the initial spill was quite dangerous, there should not be any long-term impact on human health as long as the waste is cleaned up. “It will be neutralised by nature, because of rain which will dilute it and because of the chances that it will come into contact with slightly acidic substances in soil… but that will take a little time,” he says. For humans, he says, “the danger would essentially be in ingestion, which is unlikely.” [BBC News]

That’s the official consensus at the moment. But Greenpeace scientists are on the ground in Hungary, and they say they’ve found “surprisingly high” levels of arsenic and mercury in the red muck.

Could it happen in the United States?

Probably not, the AP reports, because alumina plants here don’t store their waste as a liquid. The few such plants that operate in the United States dry the material before it goes into storage, leaving it in a consistency more like damp earth than water.

The three U.S. facilities are not required to “dry stack” the waste. But Sandra Bailey, environmental manager at the Sherwin Alumina Co. in Gregory, Texas, said dry waste is easier to handle and is less toxic. Most of the waste in Sherwin’s facility is 80 percent solid and strong enough for heavy equipment to ride on, she said. [AP]

Image: Google Maps

Bye Bye WMAP | Cosmic Variance

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Danzig

After almost ten years of diligent observations of the earliest light in the universe, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) fired its thrusters on September 8, and entered the world’s longest and most tedious holding pattern, circling the sun in a so-called graveyard orbit.

wmap-starfield

WMAP has been a triumph of observational cosmology. It has strengthened the case for cosmic acceleration, one of nature’s most mysterious phenomena; measured the composition of the universe, teaching us about dark matter and dark energy; observed the polarization signal, telling us about reionization; provided results consistent with an inflationary origin for the universe, while constraining and even ruling out some of the simplest models; and has left us with some intriguing open questions of its own. To those of us in the field, it seems like only yesterday that we were eagerly awaiting the first 3-year data release from WMAP. Now, the final data, collected on August 20, will form part of the complete 9-year dataset, capping a remarkable decade of cosmic discovery.

From a fundamental physics perspective, WMAP is a crucial component of increasingly accurate cosmological observations that challenge the standard model of particle physics. In accurately determining the dark matter abundance, it has specified even more precisely the requirements of the new particle physics required to account for that portion of the energy budget. If dark matter is made of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), for example, the range of properties they might have is more tightly constrained. In supporting the case for cosmic acceleration, it has sharpened the need for a fundamental explanation for the size of the cosmological constant and possibly for entirely new physics, such as dark energy or a modification of General Relativity. In providing a measurement of the baryon content of the universe in agreement with that required for successful primordial nucleosynthesis, it has further underscored the need for an explanation for the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the universe, some proposals for which will be tested at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). And in its precise measurements of the spectral index of the temperature fluctuations, it has constrained existing and newly-proposed models for the physics of the very early universe, requiring an almost scale-invariant spectrum, with specific small deviations.

We’re going to miss WMAP, but we’re not standing still – cosmologists are a very forward looking bunch for people whose lives revolve around what happened so far in the past. A host of new projects are coming, and in the microwave field the big one is the Planck satellite, already taking eagerly awaited data. So goodbye WMAP, and thanks! Now, what’s next? We’re hungry for more information!

A generation of human genetics & genomics | Gene Expression

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Danzig

If you are interested in human genomics and the types of papers I often review and discuss in this space, there’s a chapter of Vogel and Motulsky’s Human Genetics: Problems and Approaches you might find of interest. And, I just noticed that you can get it online (if you have academic access). It’s titled: Genetics and Genomics of Human Population Structure. Here’s the abstract:

Recent developments in sequencing technology have created a flood of new data on human genetic variation, and this data has yielded new insights into human population structure. Here we review what both early and more recent studies have taught us about human population structure and history. Early studies showed that most human genetic variation occurs within populations rather than between them, and that genetically related populations often cluster geographically. Recent studies based on much larger data sets have recapitulated these observations, but have also demonstrated that high-density genotyping allows individuals to be reliably assigned to their population of origin. In fact, for admixed individuals, even the ancestry of particular genomic regions can often be reliably inferred. Recent studies have also offered detailed information about the composition of specific populations from around the world, revealing how history has shaped their genetic makeup. We also briefly review quantitative models of human genetic history, including the role natural selection has played in shaping human genetic variation.

If you’re a “close reader” of the blog posts here you won’t see too much that’s new, but the authors of the chapter really tie many points of interest together well, and they bring a historical perspective to it, going back to The History and Geography of Human Genes. A worthwhile 25 pages if you’re interested in current developments in human genetics and genomics, but can’t follow what’s going on because of the lack of context or technical confusions.

Here’s a chart reproduced from The History and Geography of Human Genes:

historygeo1

And now a little less than 20 years later, a similar chart, but with fine-grained positioning of individuals instead of just relationships between populations:

histgeo2

Sex runs hot and cold – why does temperature control the gender of Jacky dragons? | Not Exactly Rocket Science

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Danzig

This is an old article, reposted from the original WordPress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. I’m travelling around at the moment so the next few weeks will have some classic pieces and a few new ones I prepared earlier.

Among Jacky dragons, females are both hot and cool, while males are merely luke-warm. For this small Australian lizard, sex is a question of temperature. If its eggs are incubated at low temperatures (23-26ºC) or high ones (30-33ºC), they all hatch as females; anywhere in the middle, and both sexes are born.

This strategy – known as ‘temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD) – seems unusual to us, with our neat gender-assigning X and Y chromosomes, but it’s a fairly common one for reptiles. Crocodiles are all-male at high temperatures and all-female at low ones, while turtles flip the rules around and produce more males in cooler climes. Assigning gender based on temperature is not uncommon but it is nonetheless puzzling.

Gender seems like an incredibly fundamental physical trait to leave to something as variable as the temperature of your surroundings. How has such a system evolved? What possible benefits could a species receive by switching control of from chromosomes to the environment? Now, a thirty-year old explanation for this puzzling system has finally been confirmed.

The most widely accepted hypothesis was put forward by Eric Charnov and James Bull over thirty years ago. They suggested that TSD occurs when the temperature of the environment affects the success of males and females strongly but differently. Parents can then use local temperatures as a sort of crystal ball, producing more males in conditions that are suited to males, and more females in conditions where they have the edge.

The idea is sound, but testing it has been remarkably difficult. The ideal experiment would involve hatching both males and females at the entire range of incubation temperatures and comparing their success over the course of their lives. Obviously, the very nature of TSD rules out that approach; how do you hatch males at low temperatures if those same conditions, by definition, beget females?

If that weren’t enough, most species that use TSD are large and long-lived. Imagine following a turtle for its entire 60 year lifespan and you begin to see the problem. All that changed this decade when TSD was found in the small and short-lived Jacky dragon (Amphibolorus muricatus). With a lifespan of 3-4 years, here was an animal that could be reasonably studied in experimental conditions.

With one problem down, Daniel Warner and Rick Shine from the University of Sydney solved the other by using hormonal treatments to sunder the link between temperature and sex. Temperature may decide gender but it does so through hormones. The key event is the conversion of testosterone to oestradiol (a relation of oestrogen) by an enzyme called aromatase. This happens at low temperatures and tells developing dragons to become females.

Warner and Shine overrode this process with a chemical that blocks aromatase. With the enzyme disabled, the duo managed to hatch male babies at temperatures that are exclusively female. The hormonally nudged Jackies were physically similar to their male siblings who developed in the normal way; that was essential if they were going to be compared fairly. The duo raised the babies in enclosures that mimicked their natural environments, and waited.

After three consecutive breeding seasons, Warner and Shine found (as predicted) that males sired more offspring on average if they were hatched at an intermediate 27ºC, a normal temperature for them in natural conditions. Males hatched at temperatures that are usually the province of females produced almost three times fewer young. The reverse was true for females; they enjoyed greater reproductive triumphs if they were hatched at a cooler 23ºC or a warmer 33ºC.

Although these results don’t explain why males and females should fare better at different incubation temperatures, they do fully vindicate the Charnov-Bull model. Exactly as predicted, male Jacky dragons produce more young if they hatch at temperatures that usually produce males, and likewise for females.

Such careful fine-tuning has done the lizards well over the course of evolution but it may put them in danger as the globe continues to warm. Like crocodiles, turtles and other reptiles that use TSD, the Jacky dragon may become a casualty of climate change, as rising temperatures lead to an all-female population and no way of producing a new generation.

Reference: Warner, D.A., Shine, R. (2008). The adaptive significance of temperature-dependent sex determination in a reptile. Nature DOI: 10.1038/nature06519

More on sex determination:

NCBI ROFL: Beer gushing: a global threat. | Discoblog

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Danzig

foam Are hydrophobins and/or non-specific lipid transfer proteins responsible for gushing in beer? New hypotheses on the chemical nature of gushing inducing factors.

“Gushing of beer is characterised by the fact that immediately after opening a bottle a great number of fine bubbles are created throughout the volume of beer and ascend quickly under foam formation, which flows out of the bottle. This infuriating gushing phenomenon has been, and still is, a problem of world-wide importance to the brewing industry. It is generally assumed that the causes of malt-derived gushing are due to the use of “weathered” barley or wheat and the growth of moulds in the field, during storage and malting. We now develop a hypothesis connecting several lines of evidence from different laboratories. These results indicate that the fungal hydrophobins, hydrophobic components of conidiospores or aerial mycelia, are gushing-inducing factors. Furthermore, increased formation of ns-LTPs (non-specific lipid transfer proteins), synthesised in grains as response to fungal infection, and their modification during the brewing process may be responsible for malt-derived gushing.”

Photo: flickr/ToOb

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Are full or empty beer bottles sturdier and does their fracture-threshold suffice to break the human skull?
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Beer consumption and the ‘beer belly’: scientific basis or common belief?
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Beer Consumption Increases Human Attractiveness to Malaria Mosquitoes.

WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

Tropical Animals May Get a Dangerous Metabolic Jolt From Climate Change | 80beats

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Danzig

lizard While the temperature effects of climate change are expected to be less dramatic in the equatorial regions, the cold-blooded tropical animals that live there may be in for a dramatic shock.

A study published this week in Nature focused on these cold-blooded animals–including insects, amphibians, and lizards–whose body temperatures are not constant, but instead rise and fall with the temperature of their environment. The researchers found that these creatures show great increases in their metabolism from slight changes in temperature; the metabolic increases were on the order of twice that of warm-blooded animals.

“The assumption has been that effects on organisms will be biggest in the place where the temperature has changed the most,” [first author Michael] Dillon said. “The underlying assumption is that … no matter where you start, a change means the same thing. But with physiology, that’s rarely the case.” [Scientific American].

This means that though climate change will be more extreme in toward the Earth’s poles, the cold-blooded animals that live near the equator (where changes should be milder) may react more strongly to the changes.

The team found this correlation by looking at readouts from temperature records from 3,000 weather stations around the globe, which collected six readings a day between 1961 and 2009. They ran this temperature information through models to determine how the changes over the last 50 years has affected the metabolism of cold-blooded animals.

“If we just pay attention to temperature patterns, that leads us to think we can ignore the tropics, because temperature change hasn’t been very great there,” [Dillon] said. “But even though the temperature change has not been great, the effect on organisms may be really, really big.” [Scientific American].

The findings suggest that these tropical animals will feel the brunt of increased metabolism brought on by climate changes.

“Large effects of recent climate warming on metabolic rates are predicted for invertebrates, amphibians and reptiles in equatorial West Africa, the Caribbean and Central America, Ecuador, eastern equatorial Brazil and the Persian Gulf region,” the report says. [Montreal Gazette]

While the idea of having a higher metabolism isn’t considered bad for people looking to lose their wealth of stored energy (i.e. fat), the researchers are worried about how it might affect the the future of these species, some of which live in areas where food and water is limited.

Dillon speculates that sped-up ectotherms [cold-blooded animals] in the tropics might become more vulnerable to starvation if resources can’t keep pace, he speculates. “If you’re burning more energy, you need more energy,” Dillon says. Food webs may shift. Soil respiration may increase. Mosquitoes may breed faster. Also, in the tropics, Dillon says, “the potential for big impacts on a global scale is the highest there simply because the biodiversity is the highest.” [Science News]

Image: Flickr/Mr. Usaji

Why the Neighbors of GM Corn Farms See the Greatest Benefit | 80beats

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Danzig

GMcornmap

Plant genetically modified corn, help your neighbor? That’s the argument of a study out in Science today—corn modified to keep pests away creates a “halo effect” that also reduces crop damage at neighboring farms that don’t plant the pest-resistant variety.

Bill Hutchison of the University of Minnesota led the study, which surveyed the records going back to 1996 for Minnesota and four other Corn Belt states: Nebraska, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois. 1996 is the key year because that’s when farmers first planed Bt corn, a variety modified to produce a toxin that keeps away the European corn borer. As the name suggests, that insect is an invader from across the pond that likes to devour corn, and Hutchison and colleagues wanted to see how effectively Bt corn kept the pest at bay during the last decade and a half.

“We were surprised to find that a higher proportion of the total benefit is actually going to the non-Bt farmers,” says Hutchison. The reason for the conventional farmers’ windfall is tied up in the effectiveness of the transgenic crop. Not only does Bt maize suppress the corn-borer population in fields planted with the GM crop, it exerts a ‘halo effect’, lowering the pest population in conventional maize fields too. As a result, farmers planting non-GM crops benefit from fewer pests, but don’t have to pay the higher prices for the GM seeds. [Nature]

Why don’t the corn borers simply flock to the non-Bt fields and wreak havoc there? I called Hutchison, who explained: “The female moths can’t tell Bt corn from non-Bt corn” when they go to deposit their offspring. So, he says, imagine a section of land that’s 80 percent Bt. If the females moths distributed their young evenly across that territory, 80 percent would be in Bt corn, and they would die. “The same thing happens the next generation,” he says, which leads to an overall decline in borer population that benefits everyone. But because the non-Bt growers didn’t pay the premium for the modified seed, they received the greatest benefit.

[The scientists] valued the extra corn harvested because of the reduction in corn borer numbers and took into account the extra $1.7 billion farmers had paid for the GM seeds, equivalent to $10-20 per hectare. The total benefit was $6.8 billion but they found it was not evenly distributed: non-GM fields gained two-thirds of the total benefit, despite making up only one-third of the land. [The Guardian]

At the moment, 63 percent of U.S. corn is Bt; you can see the distribution in the map above. As for Hutchison’s example, he didn’t pluck the 80 percent figure out of nowhere—that’s been the highest percentage EPA has allowed farmers to plant because of worries that a greater percentage would lead to resistance in the borers.

The US Environmental Protection Agency has recently approved a “refuge in the bag” approach, in which a mix of 90% GM corn and 10% non-GM corn is sold. Previously farmers had to plant at least 20% non-GM corn. “As we transition to this, I do have concerns about long-term resistance management and sustainability of the technology,” Hutchison said. [The Guardian]

Related Content:
80beats: GM Corn & Organ Failure: Lots of Sensationalism, Few Facts
80beats: GM Corn Leads to Organ Failure!? Not So Fast
80beats: New Biotech Corn Gives Triple Vitamin Boost; Professors Unmoved
80beats: Germany Joins the European Mutiny of Genetically Modified Crops
DISCOVER: Genetically Altered Corn tells how a corn not intended for humans got into the food supply

Image: Hutchison et. al

The Arrow of Time and the Multiverse on Philosophy TV | Cosmic Variance

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Danzig

Craig Callender is a philosopher of science at UC San Diego, who has written a lot about the nature of time, including a fun illustrated book. He’s more than a bit skeptical of the multiverse idea, and somewhat contrarian about the low-entropy nature of the early universe: he thinks it’s just a fact we should observe and accept (”nomological”), rather than a feature that cries out for a better explanation.

Here we’re having a chat on the recently launched Philosophy TV, sort of Bloggingheads for philosophers. Craig’s head obviously looms much larger than mine, so I had to use my wiles to bob and weave, intellectually speaking.

Callender and Carroll from Philosophy TV on Vimeo.

Bothered by My Green Conscience | The Intersection

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Danzig

For Day 4 of Book Week, I’m focusing on a unique read from artist Franke James entitled Bothered by My Green Conscience: How an SUV-driving, imported-strawberry-eating urban dweller can go green. This is no ordinary book. James uses colorful artwork and photography to convey her message and the result is an extremely successful convergence of images and ideas. In the author’s own words:

Bothered by My Green Conscience is the story of my true-life adventures in going green. It includes the story of us selling our only car (an SUV), winning approval from Toronto City Hall for the right to build a green driveway (and actually building it as a long weekend DIY project), rediscovering eccentric glamour in my own closet, understanding the real poop on social change, and also writing a visual letter to my future Grandkids in 2020, and wondering how they will judge us. The collection of five visual essays was published as a 160-page full color book by New Society Publishers in April 2009.

I really enjoyed flipping through this creative account of climate change and personal decisions. I’m not alone either: Bothered by My Green Conscience recently won the 2010 Green Book Festival Award for Graphic Novels. Visit Franke at her website here to see more of her artwork.

Alcohol Makes You Think Everyone Is Out to Get You | Discoblog

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Danzig

bar-fight Drunk fights are a typical occurrence at some bars–but why does drinking make us more likely to fight? Kate Shaw over at Ars Technica gives us a good example of a typical confrontation:

If you’ve ever had one (or ten) too many drinks at a bar, you’re probably familiar with this scenario: a drunk guy stumbles past you, spills a beer all over you, and you get angry. You’re convinced he did it on purpose, and you start fuming.

New research from Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that this “thinking he did it on purpose” is because alcohol makes you likely to interpret someone’s actions as intentional rather than accidental. In a bar situation, this can translate to a conviction that an offending act was aimed specifically at you–great, so alcohol essentially brings out the paranoid narcissist in all of us.

The researchers studied a group of unwitting “taste testers” who were given either juice or juice with alcohol. Half of each group was told that they were imbibing the alcoholic drink, even if they weren’t (this enabled the researchers to separate the alcohol’s actual effects from the effects of expecting to be drunk).

After the “taste test” they were all asked to label a list of actions as deliberate or accidental. Each action fell into one of three categories: deliberate, accidental, and those that could have been interpreted as either (Ars Technica gives an example of an ambiguous action: “He deleted the email”). When compared to the sober participants, the drinkers (whether they knew they were drinking or not) were more likely to assume that the ambiguous actions were done deliberately.

The made man blog explains the researchers’ interpretation of why alcohol changes our intentionality bias:

It takes cognitive effort and control to overcome intentionality bias. Those are skills you lack when you’ve been boozing. Alcohol also is known to decrease reasoning skills and the ability to pick up on social cues. A drunken ass clown lacks the cognitive ability to correctly interpret an unintended slight, the reasoning ability to allow both parties [to] save face and misses the social cues exhibited by everyone around him. Add testosterone, and faces across America are punched every Saturday night.

Image: iStockphoto

So Long, WMAP, and Thanks for the Age of the Universe | 80beats

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Danzig

WMAP Its multicolored ovals have become some of the most distinguishable pictures in science. Its estimate of the age of the universe is the most accurate ever produced. Its science team ought to win the Nobel Prize for Physics, Nobel predictors at Thomson Reuters say. But now, after nine years in space, the accomplished Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) is headed for its retirement home.

The spinning WMAP satellite scanned the sky to measure tiny variations in the temperature of the cosmic microwave background radiation 380,000 years after the Big Bang. Scientists consider the CMB the first light from the young universe after matter and light could exist independently as the universe cooled. Only sensitive microwave space telescopes can detect the temperature fluctuations, which amount to just a millionth of a degree against an average backdrop of less than -450 degrees Fahrenheit. [Spaceflight Now]

By finding these tiny differences in energy, WMAP allowed scientists to calculate when the birth of the universe happened—13.75 billion years ago, plus or minus about 0.1 billion years (100 million years or so).

But WMAP didn’t stop there. Although scientists have hypothesized that the universe went through rapid inflation just after the Big Bang, WMAP has managed to find even more supporting evidence that this growth spurt did happen. Thanks to WMAP, we also know that a mysterious entity called dark energy fills 72 percent of the cosmos and dark matter makes up for around 23 percent. “Normal” baryonic matter makes up for a piddly 4.6 percent of the observable universe. [Discovery News]

The satellite launched in 2001. Now that its nine-year mission has ended, NASA moved it from its position at the L2 Lagrange point to a permanent parking orbit. The researchers behind WMAP will continue to analyze its data for two more years—when a mission has been so fruitful, you want to stay with it until the bitter end.

Says principal investigator Charles Bennett of WMAP’s legacy:

“It was almost miraculous,” Bennett said. “All of a sudden, in one fell swoop, we suddenly had all these numbers: the density of atoms, the density of dark energy, the age of the universe, when the first stars formed, the distance light has traveled to get to us…. It was just really stunning to suddenly have all this fall into place.” [Wired.com]

Related Content:
Bad Astronomy: New WMAP results: quantum fluctuations, galaxies, and the first stars
Cosmic Variance: WMAP 5-Year Results Released
DISCOVER: A Field Guide to the Invisible Universe
DISCOVER: The Fingerprint of Creation (From our wayback machine, a 1992 article about WMAP’s predecessor, COBE)

Image: NASA

JSC 2069

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Danzig

This post is cross posted with permission from Steven González Advanced Planning Office Blog (note: this link works only behind the JSC firewall). Leave a comment either here or on the original post.

“This week I am introducing a new feature from the Advanced Planning Office. The idea for the project came from listening to all of the conversations around the center about the uncertainty and changes before us in 2011. Much of the conversation that I hear is focused on what we will not be doing and the loss of our workforce. Undoubtedly it is going to be a difficult transition as some of our colleagues will be leaving the JSC community and yet we WILL continue the Human Exploration of Space. JSC will carry the torch forward and what we do today will determine how quickly we get to extend our reach into our solar system. So with the inspiration of Pat Rawlings, we would like to engage the JSC community on a discussion of what we CAN DO today that will ensure the below vision of JSC at the 100th anniversary of our landing on the moon. Enjoy and let us know what you think.”

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