"This study investigated the physiological and psychological effects of sanitary napkins (SN) on women in hemorrhage treatment during the menstrual phase. Mesh and non-woven napkins were employed, and the effects were studied during the follicular and menstrual phases; mesh SN presented a higher textural surface-roughness. In both phases, the increases in systolic and diastolic blood pressure were significantly dependent on the application intervals. The low-frequency component of systolic blood pressure variability significantly increased, while the salivary secretion rate decreased with the use of mesh SN during the follicular phase compared with non-woven SN. In addition, the heart rate during the menstrual phase significantly increased in subjects after the replacement of mesh SN compared with non-woven SN. In cases of wearing the unpleasant mesh SN, electroencephalography (EEG) manifested bilateral enhancements in beta and alpha2 waves in the frontal areas increased arousal level during both phases. From the above findings, napkin use increased physiological loading and wearing napkins with higher textural surface-roughness tended to increase activities of the autonomic nervous system and brain arousal level." Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Uh, no. Aunt Flo means no ho, bro!
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Best materials and methods ever.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: analysis taken too far WTF is NCBI ROFL? ...
Why science fiction matters for people who don’t read science fiction | Gene Expression
Mythologist of Our Age: Why Ray Bradbury’s stories have seeped into the culture:
Science fiction dates as quickly as any genre, and Bradbury is not entirely immune to this. The futuristic rocket ships he wrote about in 1950 look a lot like the first-generation NASA rockets; the music of the future is Rachmaninoff and Duke Ellington; and in the terrifying “Mars is Heaven,” the planet bears an eerie resemblance to Green Bluff, Ill., right down to Victorian houses “covered with scrolls and rococo.” But the reason Bradbury’s stories still sing on the page is that, despite all his humanoid robots, automated houses, and rocket men, his interest is not in future technologies but in people as they live now—and how the proliferation of convenient technology alters the way we think and the way we treat each other.
One of the aspects of science fiction as a genre is that the masters of the field when viewed from outside of the core science fiction reading audience are often not necessarily dominant within the subculture. The core science fiction readership, those who immerse themselves in the genre, and might actually show up at a science fiction convention, are not the typical casual readers who might pick something up at the airport bookstore. They’re disproportionately male, disproportionately virgin, disproportionately young, and disproportionately nerdy, with a strong technical bent. For a quantitative overview of the reality of the demographic assertions I’m making, I point you to William Sims Bainbridge’s Dimensions of Science Fiction. For a more impressionistic “insider” view, you might check out Isaac Asimov’s memoirs. For examples of the “literature” which confirm that the audience for science fiction is really peculiar, I point you to Hal Clement’s oeuvre. His stories and novels would simply be unpublishable outside of the confines of the genre, they’re difficult to read for the typical person. Certainly there is action-packed space opera galore, socially conscious works of Ursula K. Le Guin, and authors who can be called literary stylists, such as Gene Wolfe. But these are in some ways deviations from type (notably, Le Guin and Wolfe are more fantasists than science fiction authors).
The heart of science fiction as a genre is “hard science fiction,” the other variants are to a great extent dilutions or modifications on the elements which you find within hard sf, with its outward focus on space, future orientation, and its embeddedness in a world where engineering is paramount. It is also notable that authors who become prominent outside of science fiction are not necessarily thought of as science fiction authors once they’ve achieved mainstream success. Sometimes this is due to the author’s own wishes, case in point being Kurt Vonnegut, who in his early years published in genre pulp magazines before becoming a literary sensation. Vonnegut pulled off the equivalent of going from working in porn to being a mainstream actor.
This weirdness of science fiction is due, I think, to the psychological diversity of mankind. Socially awkward teenage men with minimal interpersonal skills and no sexual experience with the opposite or same sex, but great fluency in the language of technology and science, are going to produce fiction which reflects their experiences, priorities and biases. They will consume fiction which reflects their experiences, priorities and biases. One reason that science fiction has traditionally been weak on character development is that many of the writers and readers are themselves tone deaf to the textured reality of most human social experiences (reading Isaac Asimov’s memoirs it seems clear that many of the early science fiction writers and fans were nerdy types who lacked social skills but made up for it with their raw intelligence).
All this makes it comprehensible why Ray Bradbury’s work has seeped into our culture; his works are only superficially science fiction. They have the exterior of science fiction, but at their heart they speak to the typical man on the street, not the nerds who form the genre’s core. Bradbury shrugged off his technical blunders without much self-consciousness. His errors were so numerous and blatant that fans, editors and critics such as Damon Knight took to mocking him in print. This is not to say that most science fiction is very technically coherent or thought out. Obviously it isn’t, else the authors wouldn’t be writers, they’d be NASA engineers designing FTL space ships. But Bradbury’s errors were often embarrassing howlers which went beyond the pale. But that’s fine for the general public, their focus would be on Bradbury’s abilities to write compelling characters and weave narrative which speaks to non-scientific issues. Which is why Ray Bradbury matters to the general public, and Larry Niven does not, and someone who considers themself a “crunchy conservative” and traditionalist Christian was intrigued by the possibilities in his fiction. Reality check: if someone who is enamored with St. Benedict and the Church Fathers thinks your literature might speak to him, you probably aren’t producing very good science fiction (as opposed to fiction).
Note: I’m focusing here on people who have read science fiction in book form. Not people who like Star Trek films. Science fiction films are generally space opera for obvious reasons, and some such as Star Wars really have more fantasy than science fiction elements (though there is good evidence that Star Wars took many of its ideas from 1930s space opera, especially E. E. Smith’s stories).
Image Credit: IMDB
Biology of Genomes tweeted | Gene Expression
Check out the #bg2010 hash-tag on twitter. There’s a lot of interesting tidbits. Here are some tweets from the presentation on the Neandertal genome in relation to the Denisova hominin (a.k.a. “X-woman”):
lukejostins SP: The Denisova finger is from the Neanderthal line, but didn’t interbreed with humans, hence looking like an outgroup
…
dgmacarthur: SP claims that Neanderthals and Denisova archaics are more closely related than either are to humans; intriguing.
…
dgmacarthur: SP: next steps: generate 10-20X coverage of Neanderthal, sequence other archaic humans (e.g. Denisova).
I hope Dr. Daniel MacAthur and Luke Jostins will say more when they get back to Perfidious Albion.
SETIcon update | Bad Astronomy
I’ll be at SETIcon, a celebration of 50 years of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, August 13 – 15. It’ll be a lot of fun, featuring some famous scientists and actors from Star Trek.
Part of the festivities will be a night of Rock Band hosted by me. If people pander enough, then I might take the stage as well. Can I sing or play drums? Come and find out.
They’ve also announced some new guests, including my friends Robert Sawyer (who wrote the novel Flash Forward) and astronomer Gibor Basri, who was a panelist on the recent Quest for a Living World event I moderated last month. Gibor is actively involved in the Kepler mission, which is looking for new Earths orbiting other stars.
Also — and this is very cool — there will be a copy of the novel Contact signed by Carl Sagan, Jodie Foster, and Jill Tarter auctioned at the event. Cripes, I may bid on that myself.
I plan on having a blast. I wind up working hard at these meetings a lot of the time, but for this one I think there will be some kicking back and actually enjoying it. You should come, too.
Found: The Genes That Help Tibetans Live at the Top of the World | 80beats
Tibetans not only occupy one of the most extreme locations on Earth, they’ve been doing it for thousands of years. This week in a study in the journal Science, scientists have for the first time picked out the particular genetic features that allow these people to survive in the low oxygen levels of the Tibetan Plateau, which is around 15,000 feet above sea level. Curiously, the way they have evolved to survive is unlike that of other high-altitude dwellers around the world.
The American and Chinese researchers doing the study started by keying on 247 genes that looked like good candidates—they tended to change across populations, and seemed to play a role in controlling a person’s blood oxygen level.
Then they analyzed segments of DNA that include those 247 genes in 31 unrelated Tibetans, 45 Chinese, and 45 Japanese lowland people whose DNA was genotyped in the HapMap Project. By identifying regions that had a characteristic signature of being strongly altered by natural selection, they were able to identify relatively new gene variants that had swept through highland Tibetans, but not Chinese or Japanese lowlanders [ScienceNOW].
Ten of the genes turned out to be particularly promising, with two, called EGLN1 and PPARA, showing up in the Tibetans who had the lowest levels of oxygen in their bloodstream.
That sounds strange at first. Typically, people who visit high-altitude locales tend to develop higher red blood cell counts and high concentrations of hemoglobin—which carries oxygen from the lungs—as their bodies try to adapt to the decreased oxygen in the atmosphere. Even some permanent mountain dwellers, like people in the Andes Mountains of South America, show this pattern. They’ve adopted high hemoglobin concentrations to survive there.
But not so the Tibetans. Increasing one’s hemoglobin can make blood too viscous, which is part of the reason people who visit Tibet often end up suffering health problems. Instead, over the presumably many thousands of years in Tibet, the people evolved to live with relatively low concentrations of hemoglobin, which must then act with great efficiency to keep enough oxygen in their blood. Scientists had seen this before, but now that they have pinned down some of the genes responsible, they can begin to investigate how exactly the Tibetans’ systems pull this off.
“What’s unique about Tibetans is they don’t develop high red blood cells counts,” Dr. Josef T. Prchal, study co-author and a hematologist and professor of internal medicine at the University of Utah, said in a news release. “If we can understand this, we can develop therapies for human disease” [BusinessWeek].
Related Content:
80beats: Tiny Soot Particles May Be Melting Mighty Himalayan Glaciers
DISCOVER: High-Altitude Determines Who Survives in Tibet
Bad Astronomy: From Tibet to Infinity And Back Again
Gene Expression: Tibet & Tibetans, Not Coterminus
Image: Wikimedia Commons
New Contraceptive Wins Gates Money: Blasting Testicles w/Ultrasound | 80beats
We mentioned on Monday that Bill Gates was giving $300,000 to a geoengineering scheme that would shoot seawater skyward to seed clouds. But the billionaire doesn’t just wanted to save the planet and stop the AIDS crisis—he would also like to improve your sex life.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded 78 promising but offbeat projects this week, one of those gifts being $100,000 to James Tsuruta and Paul Dayton of the University of North Carolina to pursue their idea of using ultrasound as a temporary and reversible male contraceptive.
Ultrasound produces a mild heating that appears to disable sperm cells and deplete the supply of stem cells that are required to replenish sperm reserves in the testes. Post-treatment images of the rat testes showed the tubules inside the testes completely lacking in sperm with almost no immature stem cells [The Times].
The scientists have already tried the test on male rats, with promising results. With the Gates’ money and more success in animal trials, they could extend this to human tests by next year, Tsuruta says.
“Our long-term goal is to use ultrasound from therapeutic instruments that are commonly found in sports medicine or physical therapy clinics as an inexpensive, long-term, reversible male contraceptive suitable for use in developing to first world countries” [BBC News].
First, however, they have to fully understand the process. It’s not clear exactly how the mechanism works—we know sperm don’t like excessive heat, but the scientists say it could be heating and shaking working in combination. The Times says that tests have show no long-term damage to the cells that produce sperm. But that doesn’t mean men will line up for this treatment when and if it’s approved.
Allan Pacey, a senior lecturer in andrology at the University of Sheffield, said: “There is certainly a place for an effective non-hormonal contraceptive in men, but whether men would find it acceptable to have their testicles scanned regularly remains to be seen” [The Times].
Related Content:
80beats: Bill Gates Funds Seawater Cloud Seeding, “The Most Benign Form of Geoengineering”
80beats: With $4.5 Million of Pocket Change, Bill Gates Funds Geoengineering Research
80beats: Bill Gates Patents a Device Aimed at Halting Hurricanes
Discoblog: Warning All Male Competitive Cyclists: Less Than 5% of Your Sperm May Be Normal
Image: iStockphoto
Glenn Beck: wait a sec. Who’s the idiot again? | Bad Astronomy
I really, really don’t like using epithets. The worst you’ll almost ever hear me say is that someone is a goofball or a knucklehead. But sometimes, just sometimes, I have to call ‘em like I see ‘em. And when someone like Glenn Beck puts themselves out in the public eye pushing complete and utterly hypocritical malarkey under the guise of them knowing what they’re talking about, well, sometimes you just have to use an epithet. And since he decided to call the rest of us idiots…
So, besides being racist, wrong on climate change, wrong about taxes, and really pretty much everything else between here and the edge of the Universe, I want to point out something else Beck did.
His book, the über-ironically titled Arguing With Idiots, has blurbs on the back. The publisher decided to go with some, ah, negative comments. Here is a picture of the back of the book:
See the blurb right above my thumb? It says, "Glenn Beck is an idiot." True enough, but it’s the attribution I’m unhappy with: they say it’s from Discover Magazine. But it’s not really: I said it. Right here, on this very blog.
When I wrote that, I was talking specifically about his making stuff up about global warming and the then-raging southern California wildfires. I was a bit concerned about litigation, but having the blurb used on his own book mollifies that quite a bit.
But anyway, I just wanted to clear the air here. Discover Magazine, as an institution, has no opinion on Beck, I’m quite sure. However, I’m not the magazine. And I certainly do have an opinion, and as I have made clear, I can back that opinion up with objective facts.
Others agree, obviously. For example, Apple recently pulled its ads with Fox News because of Beck. So did BMW, and many, many more. His appalling behavior is rapidly depleting the number of companies willing to do business with Fox. I applaud them.
So anyway, I’ll leave you with this video of the fantabulous Lewis Black, raking Beck over the coals. With his ravings, Beck has managed to somehow merge the laws of both Godwin and Poe into some sort of hellish mix of insanity. Black shows that sometimes, the best way to point that out is pure satirical mockery.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Back in Black – Glenn Beck’s Nazi Tourette’s | ||||
| http://www.thedailyshow.com | ||||
| ||||
Channel Your Anger and Help Mother Earth—by Breaking Stuff | Discoblog
If the frustrations of daily life are getting to be too much for you, don't keep your feelings bottled up--throw bottles! That's the philosophy behind New York City developer David Belt's newest project. "Glassphemy!" entails throwing used glass bottles in a 20-by-30-foot glass box in Brooklyn. Participants stand on one of two platforms in the box, hurling glass at the other end and watching it shatter, according to The New York Times:
""The bottles smash fantastically, artfully designed lights flash, and no one is harmed. “Recycling’s so boring,” Mr. Belt said. “We tried to make it a little bit more exciting. He added, “People just want to smash things.”"
The bottles are donated by local bars and provide more than a chance to get out some aggression; they also show the versatility of discarded glass. That's because instead of being thrown out, the glass fragments will be collected and recycled, taking into account suggestions submitted by readers to the DIY magazine, ReadyMade. One possible use is grinding the glass and using it as sand in the beer garden that will eventually make its home on Glassphemy!'s site.
"[Another possible recycling method entails a] DIY glass polisher out of a cement mixer that is ...
Wash Post Hits Cuccinelli Once Again | The Intersection
UVA is filing an extension in response to Cuccinelli's egregious request--but it should be fighting back in court, writes the paper:
Mr. Cuccinelli, apparently, speculates that Mr. Mann defrauded taxpayers by obtaining research grants to study global temperatures. It's clear from his statements that the "Climategate" controversy -- in which hackers stole records of e-mails between climate researchers that global warming skeptics then distorted -- inspired his witch hunt. Is there any doubt that the attorney general is trying to restoke that row with a fresh batch of e-mails?
In the process, he would deal grave harm to scientific inquiry throughout Virginia's public higher education system. Science progresses when researchers can propose ideas freely, differ in their methods and argue about the interpretations of their results. The commonwealth should nurture that process, not make scientists fear that they will be subject to investigation if a politician dislikes their conclusions. There comes a time when one has to stand up to bullying tactics--not to mention fundamental assaults on the ability of scientists to do their work. This is one of those times. UVA needs to stand up and be counted in defense of reason.
Cultural Relics From the Space Race Rescued From the Trash | Visual Science
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What is garbage to one is gold to another. The juicy new title by Blast Books, “Another Science Fiction” is proof. Incredibly, most of the images in this book came from discards from several libraries that were rescued by author and space history buff Megan Prelinger for her library in San Fransico, Prelinger Library. When Prelinger came across these images in magazines (like Aviation Week and Missiles and Rockets) that the Houston public library was throwing away, she was smitten. The book featuring these advertisements from the early space-race years followed.
Prelinger told me how she found featured artist Willi Baum: “He signed his paintings “W. Baum” and for three years I couldn’t find him because I didn’t know his first name. I finally found a reference to him in a commercial art annual from ‘62 that listed his full name. I then found that he lives just five miles away from me. I wrote to him, he wrote back the next day, and we became good friends. That’s quite a contrast to my searches for every other artist. Most were not contractually permitted to put signatures on paintings. So they have vanished from the record. Others were deceased.”
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Butts of Steel? Recycled Cigarettes Protect Metal From Hydrochloric Acid | 80beats
Cigarettes aren’t done causing damage when you put them out. Whether the tally of discarded butts worldwide is 4.5 trillion or 5.6 trillion, it represents an enormous amount of nicotine and heavy metals deposited in the environment. But what if the contents of your ashtray had a useful application? According to Chinese researchers, they might.
Seeking a use for all that junk, the scientists tested the chemicals in cigarette butts for their effects on a kind of steel used in oil and gas pipelines.
The results were pretty dramatic. In a near-boiling solution of 10 and 15 percent hydrochloric acid (HCl; same stuff as stomach acid), the cigarette-derived cocktail reduce corrosion by between 90 and 94 percent [Discovery News].
The researchers document their technique in the study in Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research. First, they had to soak cigarette butts they found on the side of the road in distilled water, with five butts to 100 milliliters (about 3.4 ounces) of water. That extract was then added to the HCL solution. If just five percent of the resulting solution consisted of that cigarette extract, those dramatic corrosion reductions began to appear.
If the researchers upped the strength of the acid, they needed to also increase the amount of added cigarette extract. For instance, with a 20 percent hydrochloric acid solution, the researchers needed to increase the butt leachate to 10 percent of the liquid to keep damage to the steel low: at less than 12 percent of the corrosion seen with the unamended acid solution [Science News].
Nine of the cigarette chemicals appeared to offer protective services for steel; interestingly, nicotine was the most important of the nine.
Don’t keep smoking for steel’s sake: The trillions of butts across the world represent more than enough for this use. But if you want to put your butts to good use, you can actually recycle them.
Related Content:
80beats: Study: “Third-Hand Smoke” Sticks Around & Produces New Carcinogens
80beats: Electronic Cigarettes Not a Safe Alternative to Conventional Cigs
80beats: In a Bad Economy, Recyclables Are Just Pieces of Junk
DISCOVER: Smoke Gets in Your Hair
Image: flickr / Nufkin
Live Eyjafjallajökull cam! | Bad Astronomy
This is very cool: a live camera pointed at the Iceland volcano Eyjafjallajökull. I don’t think it’s embeddable, so just click that link and take a look. To add to the coolness factor, there is also a thermal camera pointed at it with the same field of view and scale, so you can compare what you’re seeing visually with what’s going on in the far infrared.
Here’s a still I grabbed last night; You can clearly see the ash plume through the cloud layers:
They provide a map of the camera location, but there’s no scale. I put it into Google maps, and it appears to be just a few kilometers from the volcano. That matches the rate the plume appears to change, too.
Take a look. It’s mesmerizing. And don’t forget that the NASA Earth Observatory is posting very high-resolution and beautiful images of the volcano quite often as well. Put that in your RSS feed reader! I check it every day; besides the volcano they frequently have incredible imagery of places I’ve never even heard of. It’s a big planet, with lots to see.
Esoteric Knowledge | Cosmic Variance
You may have heard that a major climate bill — the “American Power Act,” sponsored by John Kerry and Joe Lieberman — is trundling through Congress. Its prospects for passage are highly unclear; it’s a giant mess of a bill, which would have important consequences for any number of sectors in the economy, and the country’s attention is largely focused elsewhere at the moment. (A substantial fraction is focused on Justin Bieber, but I don’t really blame him.)
So what does the bill say? Here’s the very short version, from our sister blog 80 Beats:
The carbon emissions targets are: 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, and 83 percent below 2005 levels by 2050. That’s made to match the goals in the House bill that passed in 2009. In addition, the bill proposes putting a price on carbon.
Somewhat longer version from Think Progress here. Or of course you could just read the bill yourself (pdf). Only 987 pages! Most of which read like this:
23 ‘‘(B) WITHHOLDING ALLOWANCES.—
24 ‘‘(i) IN GENERAL.—Notwithstanding
25 subparagraph (A), subject to the condition
1 described in clause (ii), the Administrator
2 shall withhold from distribution under this
3 paragraph a quantity of emission allow-
4 ances equal to the lesser of—
5 ‘‘(I) 14.3 percent of the quantity
6 of emission allowances allocated under
7 section 781(a)(1) for the relevant vin-
8 tage year; and
9 ‘‘(II) 105 percent of the emission
10 allowances of the relevant vintage year
11 that the Administrator anticipates will
12 be distributed to merchant coal units
13 and long-term contract generators
14 under subsections (c) and (d).
There are good reasons why bills are written in turgid legal language; but it means that very few concerned citizens are going to be curling up with a good piece of legislation in the evening. That’s okay; we have multiple high-profile media outlets that are here to help us understand the complexities of these important changes to how our country does its business. I mean, right?
Sadly, no, as a wise person once said. CNN had a sit-down interview with Kerry and Lieberman last night, and here’s what we get:
Last night, John Kerry and Joe Lieberman appeared on John King’s CNN program to promote their climate bill, the American Power Act. The transcript is fairly lengthy, but at no point does King ask them to explain the provisions of their bill. Instead, he begins by asking whether they have 60 votes, tries to get them to explain why John McCain isn’t on the legislation, and then asks them to comment on the Sestak-Specter race in Pennsylvania. In fact, the clip the John King show posted online (which I embedded above) doesn’t even mention the climate bill.
Isn’t there room in the media landscape for just one TV news channel that would take seriously the responsibility of actually providing their viewers with useful information? It might be a small, niche market, but if the Golf Channel can thrive, surely it’s an experiment worth trying? I refuse to believe that providing useful information is of necessity such a tedious and boring activity that it can’t be made interesting, no matter how hard we try. We need to get Stephen Spielberg and Jay Rosen in a room together to figure out how to make a news channel that would honestly inform people in an entertaining way. Have them call me.
“Hartwell Paper” Is the Anti-Kerry-Lieberman; Says Carbon Targets Don’t Work | 80beats
Yesterday Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman rolled out their new climate bill, the American Power Act. The 987-page piece of text was driven by what we’ve come to expect in climate legislation: Concrete targets for reducing carbon dioxide emissions a certain percentage by a certain year. But, an international group of economists and environmental scientists are saying, that approach is doomed to failure, and this is the time to change.
The Hartwell Paper, a product of 14 different authors working since February, came out this week to coincide with the release of the climate bill. The assessment is blunt: Reaching agreements like the Kyoto Protocols to reduce carbon emissions has been the primary means of addressing climate change since the mid-1980s, and it hasn’t worked. With the high-profile flop that was the 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen, the authors argue this is the chance to drive a new course on climate policy, one not singularly focused on CO2.
The Hartwell authors don’t downplay the importance of CO2 as a greenhouse gas; rather, they point to the silliness of being so fixated on that one compound; the Earth’s climate, after all, is a terribly complex system:
That is frustrating for politicians. So policy makers frequently respond to wicked problems by declaring ‘war’ on them, to beat them into submission and then move on. Indeed, almost any ‘declaration of war’ that is metaphorical rather than literal is a reliable sign that the subject in question is ‘wicked’. So, we have the war on cancer, the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on terror and now the war on climate change.
As we noted last week at the 25th anniversary of the ozone hole’s discovery, the ozone problem was one of those with a direct solution that governments could pursue in such a prompt, bludgeoning way. Climate change, not so much. And the paper authors also criticize the closed-off nature of choosing climate strategies that led to such focus on CO2:
A distinctive characteristic of the climate change debate has been of scientists claiming with the authority of their position that their results dictated particular policies; of policy makers claiming that their preferred choices were dictated by science, and both acting as if ‘science’ and ‘policy’ were simply and rigidly linked as if it were a matter of escaping from the path of an oncoming tornado.
So, then, if rigid carbon targets are not the way to address climate change, what would the Hartwell authors recommend?
Their oblique approach is to aim instead for a world with accessible, secure low cost energy for all. The hope, intuition or strategy at play here is that since fossil fuels cannot deliver such a world, its achievement will, in itself, bring about decarbonisation on a massive scale. Following a path stressing clean energy as a development issue provides a more pleasant journey to the same objective [The Economist].
Compared to what we’ve gotten used to in international agreements, it’s a backward approach: Forget about cutting carbon emissions to an arbitrary level by subsidizing cleaner energy technology that’s on the shelf now. Instead, wholeheartedly fund research and development to reach new energy sources capable of actually competing with fossil fuel in the marketplace, and cut carbon out of the economy that way. Meanwhile, go after the low-hanging fruit like slowing deforestation and cutting black carbon.
In short, it’s an energy policy first with climate benefits on the back end, instead of a huge worldwide climate policy.
They argue that there is something wrong with a world in which carbon-dioxide levels are kept to 450 parts per million (a trajectory widely deemed compatible with a 2 degree [Celsius] cap on warming) but at the same time more than a billion of the poorest people are left without electricity, as in one much discussed scenario from the International Energy Agency [The Economist].
The Hartwell Paper’s talk of elevating human dignity is all well and good, but what about the final question: Can we really afford to wait for the world that its authors want?
Though the paper is not explicit on this, to accept that decarbonisation will require as-yet unavailable technologies to achieve deep penetration around the world is to accept that carbon-dioxide levels will get a lot higher than current policies want them to. Which might seem a good enough reason to reject the whole idea. Except that the current policies have not, as yet, made a very great deal of difference [The Economist].
Related Content:
80beats: Skip the Political Babbling: Here Is What the Kerry-Lieberman Climate Bill Says
80beats: Why the Ozone Hole Prompted Global Action—And Why Climate Change Hasn’t
DISCOVER: It’s Getting Hot in Here: The Big Battle Over Climate Science, interviews with Judith Curry & Michael Mann
DISCOVER: The State of the Climate—And of Climate Science
Image: iStockphoto
Study Reveals Dolphins Lack Capacity To Mock Celebrity Culture | The Loom
Here’s a brilliant piece of science-writing satire from the Onion. I find it particularly funny because I’ve been writing a lot recently about the evolution of human uniqueness. It’s so easy to mix up “unique” with “totally awesome.” The conflation flatters my readers, and myself. That’s the sort of self-importance that great satire can deflate so quickly.
[Hat tip, Ed Yong]
Can Offering Prizes for Innovative Solutions Save the Gulf? | The Intersection
This is a guest post by Darlene Cavalier, a writer and senior adviser at Discover Magazine. Darlene holds a Masters degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and is a former Philadelphia 76ers cheerleader. She founded ScienceCheerleader.com and cofounded ScienceForCitizens.net to make it possible for lay people to contribute to science. Prizes: This old idea is making a sweeping comeback and it is changing the way government, industry and foundations help revolutionize future discovery. It’s high time we offer prizes to motivate and galvanize the public to come up with creative, real-time solutions to major disasters, such as the BP oil spill. Approximately one-and-a-half weeks ago, I received an email from Andrew Revkin (who writes the DotEarth blog at The New York Times) in which he challenged researchers and others to think creatively about substantive approaches to stanching the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. "There's a lot of talk about sweeping Grand Engineering Challenges this year. But one is unfolding in real-time in the Gulf. Waiting months for a relief well seems pretty in the box,” he wrote in the email (reprinted with Revkin's permission), and reiterated in this blog post. While it’s true that BP is accepting public suggestions about ideas ...
Why does the Moon look so huge on the horizon? | Bad Astronomy
I love illusions, and I love astronomy. So what could be better than combining the two?
If you’ve ever seen the Moon rising over the horizon, looking so fat and looming that you felt like you could fall right into it, then you’ve been a victim of the famous Moon Illusion. And it is an illusion, a pervasive and persuasive one.
So, how does this thing work? Ah, step right up.
One of my favorite brain-benders is the Ponzo Illusion. You’ve seen it: the simplest case is with two short horizontal lines, one above the other, between two slanting but near-vertical lines. The upper line looks longer than the lower line, even though they’re the same length.
The illusion works because our brains are a bit wonky. The slanted lines make us think that anything near the top is farther away; the lines force our brain to think those lines are parallel but receding in the distance (like railroad tracks). The two horizontal lines are physically the same length, but our brain thinks the upper one is farther away. If it’s farther away, then duh, our brain says to itself, it must be bigger than the lower one. So we perceive it that way.
While procrastinating on reddit, (you do look at reddit, don’t you, especially the science section?) I found this beautiful example of Ponzo:
Heehee! You’d swear up and down* that the red vertical line on the right is much longer than the one on the left, wouldn’t you? It looks almost twice as long to me. It’s a very powerful perception.
But they’re not! I cut out the two red lines and put them side by side. They’re pretty much exactly the same length (well, they’re off by a bit due to resolution issues in the image, but not by nearly as much as your brain likes to think).
This example is a great one because it uses a real-life image. You can see the wall tiles getting smaller with distance, and the horizontal layout of them, complete with the lines between them, forces your brain to see the line on the right as farther away. Bang! Ponzo.
This illusion plays out all the time… including when the Moon is rising (you were wondering when I’d get back to that, weren’t you?). The Moon Illusion is in part due to this same effect, but weirdly, you also need to understand how we perceive the sky.
If I were to ask you what shape the sky is above your head, you’d probably answer "a hemisphere". But in fact, almost everyone perceives it as an inverted bowl, flattened at the top. Put it this way: if the sky were a hemisphere above you, you’d say the horizon was as far away as the zenith. But in fact most people perceive the horizon being farther away than the point straight over their heads; test after test has shown this. This isn’t too surprising; think of a cloudy day. The clouds over your head are maybe two or three kilometers above, but near the horizon they may be 100 kilometers away!
See where I’m going with this? When the Moon is on the horizon, your brain thinks it’s far away, much farther than when it’s overhead. So the Ponzo Illusion kicks in: your brain sees the Moon as being huge, and it looks like you could fall into it. The Illusion works for the Sun, too. In fact, years ago I saw Orion rising over a parking lot, and it looked like it was spread across half the sky. It’s an incredibly powerful illusion.
Oddly enough, when it’s on the horizon, the Moon actually is farther away than when it’s overhead. Not by much, really, just a few thousand kilometers (compared to the Moon’s overall distance of about 400,000 kilometers). Behold my Photoshop skillz:
The guy at the top of the Earth in the diagram sees the Moon on his horizon, and the guy on the side of the Earth sees it overhead. But you can tell the distances aren’t the same: the Moon is closer to the guy who sees it as overhead (by an amount roughly equal to the Earth’s radius). That’s no illusion! That’s science, baby.
So the Moon Illusion is just that. It’s not the air acting like a lens, or foreground objects making it look big by comparison. It’s just the way we see the shape of the sky together with the well-known Ponzo Illusion.
Hmmm, is there a metaphor I’m sniffing here? Science taking something we perceive as real, breaking it down, and showing it to be an interesting but decidedly unreal illusion? Well, that’s what science does! It helps us not only understand the world better, but it also makes the world cooler, too.
*Haha! "Up and down!" Haha! Man, I kill me.
Moonrise image from Jorge-11’s Flickr photostream.
Life is One, universal common ancestry supported | Gene Expression
One of the notions implicit in most evolutionary models is that the tree of life has a common root. In other words all individuals of all species represent end points of lineages which ultimately coalesce back to the the original common ancestor. The first Earthling, so to speak. I say implicit because common ancestry isn’t necessary for evolution to be valid; after all, we presumably accept that evolutionary process is operative in an exobiological context, if such a context exists. Therefore it is possible that modern extant lineages are derived from separate independent antecedents. A “multiple garden” model. This has seemed less and less plausible as the molecular basis of biology has been elucidated; it looks like the basic toolkit is found all across the tree of life. But with a new found awareness of the power of processes such as horizontal gene transfer the open & shut case is faced with a new element of ambiguity. Or perhaps not?
Here’s a post from Wired, Life on Earth Arose Just Once:
The idea that life forms share a common ancestor is “a central pillar of evolutionary theory,” says Douglas Theobald, a biochemist at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. “But recently there has been some mumbling, especially from microbiologists, that it may not be so cut-and-dried.”
Because microorganisms of different species often swap genes, some scientists have proposed that multiple primordial life forms could have tossed their genetic material into life’s mix, creating a web, rather than a tree of life.
To determine which hypothesis is more likely correct, Theobald put various evolutionary ancestry models through rigorous statistical tests. The results, published in the May 13 Nature, come down overwhelmingly on the side of a single ancestor.
A universal common ancestor is at least 102,860 times more probable than having multiple ancestors, Theobald calculates.
The paper is now on the Nature website, A formal test of the theory of universal common ancestry. They looked specifically at 23 very conserved proteins across 12 taxa from the three domains of life (those being eukaryotes, prokaryotes, and the archaea). Here’s where the author explains the philosophy behind the statistical technique:
When choosing among several competing scientific models, two opposing factors must be taken into account: the goodness of fit and parsimony. The fit of a model to data can be improved arbitrarily by increasing the number of free parameters. On the other hand, simple hypotheses (those with as few ad hoc parameters as possible) are preferred. Model selection methods weigh these two factors statistically to find the hypothesis that is both the most accurate and the most precise.
The sorts of models compared is illustrated by figure 2. One the left you have the universal common descent model, and on the right the prokaryotes (bacteria) have an independent origin. The lines represent connections between the 23 conserved protein sequences, either through horizontal transfer or vertical transmission.
As noted in the Wired piece there’s no contest here. Universal common descent is strongly supported. I’ll let the author’s finish:
What property of the sequence data supports common ancestry so decisively? When two related taxa are separated into two trees, the strong correlations that exist between the sequences are no longer modelled, which results in a large decrease in the likelihood. Consequently, when comparing a common-ancestry model to a multiple-ancestry model, the large test scores are a direct measure of the increase in our ability to accurately predict the sequence of a genealogically related protein relative to an unrelated protein. The sequence correlations between a given clade of taxa and the rest of the tree would be eliminated if the columns in the sequence alignment for that clade were randomly shuffled. In such a case, these model-based selection tests should prefer the multiple-ancestry model. In fact, in actual tests with randomly shuffled data, the optimal estimate of the unified tree (for both maximum likelihood and Bayesian analyses) contains an extremely large internal branch separating the shuffled taxa from the rest. In all cases tried, with a wide variety of evolutionary models (from the simplest to the most parameter rich), the multiple-ancestry models for shuffled data sets are preferred by a large margin over common ancestry models (LLR on the order of a thousand), even with the large internal branches. Hence, the large test scores in favour of UCA models reflect the immense power of a tree structure, coupled with a gradual Markovian mechanism of residue substitution, to accurately and precisely explain the particular patterns of sequence correlations found among genealogically related biological macromolecules.
Citation: Theobald, Douglas L., A formal test of the theory of universal common ancestry, Nature, doi:10.1038/nature09014
New Senate Roadblock To Obama Space Plans
NASA's moon program gets a boost from Congress, Orlando Sentinel
"The measure by Republican Sens. Richard Shelby of Alabama and Bob Bennett of Utah would force NASA to keep spending money on the Constellation moon program in 2010, even though President Barack Obama wants to cancel a key component: the Ares rockets that would boost an Apollo-like capsule into orbit."
Shelby: Amendment Protects Constellation Program
"The President's NASA proposal has no clear direction other than to cancel Constellation, at any price, even if it means relinquishing our leadership in space," said Shelby. "NASA is now attempting to undermine current law as it relates to Fiscal Year 2010 Constellation funding by slow rolling contracts and pressuring companies to self-terminate. It is disappointing that the political appointees at NASA have so much trouble following the letter and spirit of law."
First Quarter Lobbying Expenses
Aerospace group spent $215K lobbying in 1Q, AP
"The Aerospace Industries Association of America Inc., which represents aviation and defense companies, spent $215,334 in the first quarter lobbying on funding for space exploration, the military's space budget, missile defense, and other issues, according to a disclosure report."
Raytheon spent $1.6 million on 1Q lobbying efforts, AP
"Raytheon, based in Waltham, Mass., also lobbied on issues including the Federal Aviation Administration's budget, the Department of Homeland Security's budget, NASA's budget, and the Defense Authorization Act., according to a filing on April 20."
Northrop Grumman Spent $4.1M Lobbying in 1Q, AP
"Northrop, based in Los Angeles, lobbied for funding in the defense spending bill on dozens of weapons systems for several branches of the armed forces. It also lobbied on satellite and space-related systems, health care and pension reform proposals."
General Dynamics spends $2.25M on 1Q lobbying, AP
"General Dynamics lobbied the U.S. Army, Navy, Marines, Coast Guard and Joint Chiefs of Staff. It also lobbied NASA on aeronautical and ground-based programs and the departments of labor and health on its medical technology systems."
