Press Release: Chromoscope

Posted on by

F O R   I M M E D I A T E   R E L E A S E

P R E S S  R E L E A S E

————————————————————

Astronomers from Jodrell Bank and Cardiff University today revealed a new way for members of the public to explore the galaxy. Their online tool, Chromoscope, allows anyone to view the Milky Way and the distant Universe more easily than ever before. The site shows the sky in a range of wavelengths, from high-energy gamma rays through to the longest radio waves.

Project member Robert Simpson, from Cardiff, said “Chromoscope sheds new light on familiar objects, such as the Orion nebula, our closest stellar nursery. This view of the Universe has been familiar to professional astronomers for a long while, but Chromoscope makes it accessible to everyone.”

The Chromoscope site is being launched at the dotAstronomy conference in Leiden, Netherlands. dotAstronomy is the world’s largest annual conference dedicated to work which combines cutting-edge astronomy with the latest on the web technology.

Lead developer, Stuart Lowe, from the University of Manchester, remarked that Chromoscope is a collaborative project. “Chromoscope uses data from a range of observatories, including the giant radio telescope at Jodrell Bank”, he said, “this allows people to see the connections between the night sky we see with our own eyes and the sky that astronomers explore in different wavelengths, such as radio and the infrared.”

Collaborator, Chris North from Cardiff University – also a researcher on BBC’s long-running Sky at Night programme – commented “We wanted to create something that was accessible to not only the general public, but also schools. Chromoscope can be downloaded and then used without an internet connection – or placed on a USB memory stick and passed around”.

The project involves data from ROSAT (X-ray), the Digital Sky Survey (optical), IRAS (infrared), WMAP (microwave) and other all-sky astronomical surveys. There are more wavelengths lined up and ready to go in the near future. It will be available at http://www.chromoscope.net from Thursday morning.

E N D  O F  P R E S S  R E L E A S E
—————————————————————————————————

Contact:

Stuart Lowe
E-mail: slowe@jb.man.ac.uk

Robert Simpson
Tel: +44 (0)7929 508961
E-mail: robert.simpson@astro.cf.ac.uk

Chris North
Tel: +44 (0)7815 115636
E-Mail: chris.north@astro.cf.ac.uk

.Astronomy 2009 is an event of the International Year of Astronomy 2009.

.Astronomy 2009 is supported by the Lorentz Center, NWO, ASTRON, the European programme RadioNet, the British Council/Platform Beta Techniek’s Partnership in Science programme and the Royal Astronomical Society.

Links:
http://www.chromoscope.net/
Twitter: @chromoscope
Blog: http://blog.chromoscope.net/

Related posts:

  1. Press Release: .Astronomy P R E S S   R E L...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Conference Quote Board

Posted on by

Every conference generates moments of clarity and wisdom. Inspiration drives people to say things that are quite profound – or just funny. Here are some of the best from this week – feel free to comment if you have heard any others.

“[In Australia] we measure population density in nanopeople per hectare” – Robert Hollow, PULSE@Parkes on the difference between where he lives and the Netherlands.

“The advantage of YouTube is that viewers can give comments. The disadvantage of YouTube is that viewers can give comments” – Amanda Bauer, University of Nottingham on posting science videos to YouTube.

“But you have no idea how many ends there are.” – Carolina Ödman, Universe Awareness when asked if she was burning the candle at both ends this week.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Conference cool links

Posted on by

During the talks a number of links (#coollink) were posted by the conference participants on the twitter stream (#dotastro). Here is a list of them:

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Our Alien Atmosphere? Earth’s Gases May Have Arrived Here Aboard Comets | 80beats

Posted on by

Atmosphere425Krypton and xenon make up trace amounts of the Earth’s atmosphere—about one part per million for the former, and even less for the latter. But these minor components could have a major impact in scientists’ understanding of how the atmosphere came to be. According to findings published in Science, many of the atmosphere’s gases that you’re breathing right now might have come from outer space rather than inside the Earth, as previously thought.

Researchers believed that when the Earth congealed from the gas and dust cloud that formed the solar system, some gases got trapped in the planet’s mantle. Then, over hundreds of millions of years, volcanic eruptions returned the gases to Earth’s surface, where gravity kept them from drifting off into space. The mixing of these gases–along with the oxygen and other molecules added by life–created the atmosphere we have today [ScienceNOW Daily News]. That’s been the common wisdom, anyway.

The new study by Chris Ballentine shakes up the idea. His team found a place in New Mexico where they could measure krypton and xenon that had never reached the surface, even after billions of years, and thus remained uncontaminated by our atmosphere. The prevalences and isotope ratios of the noble, or inert, gases, such as neon, argon, krypton and xenon, provide a valuable tracer of ancient processes, because they are chemically nonreactive and so do not change much over time [Scientific American]. What the team found didn’t match the established ideas about an atmosphere produced by volcanic eruptions. The red flag was in the isotopic ratio—the relative abundance of certain isotopes to others, like lighter krypton-82 versus heavier krypton-84.

If you look at krypton, the isotopic ratio in the Earth’s atmosphere is more tilted toward the heavy side than that sun’s is. According to the established model, this is true because new batches of these gases in the mantle came up to the Earth’s surface and replace some of what the atmosphere loses to outer space. But, for the math to work out, the gases coming up from the mantle have to be similar in isotopic ratio to the sun’s.

One problem: That wasn’t the case for the krypton Ballentine drew from the New Mexico mantle. It had an isotopic ratio tilted even further toward the heavy side than either the sun’s or the atmosphere’s. Actually, it matched closely to the krypton found in meteors. The upshot is this: If our atmosphere’s gases didn’t come from the interior of the planet, which is what Ballentine’s data suggest, then where did they come from? Based on their research, Ballentine and colleagues claim that our atmosphere likely formed when gas and water-rich comets bombarded Earth, shortly after its formation 4.54 billion years ago [National Geographic News]. Upon impact, the comets’ ice would have evaporated and left behind elements like krypton and xenon.

The team now must sample similar sites in other locations to see if their findings hold up—perhaps, skeptics note, there really was a reservoir solar-type krypton in the mantle, but now it’s gone. Ballentine’s team plans to take a look at the isotopic ratios in the comet material that NASA’s Stardust mission brought back to Earth. It they’re right, though, then we’re not just made of “star stuff,” as Carl Sagan was fond of saying, but also breathing comet stuff every day.

Related Content:
80beats: Study: Strange Planet Has an Atmosphere of Gaseous Rock–And It Rains Pebbles
DISCOVER: NASA Takes a Wild Comet Ride
DISCOVER: 10 Obscure Elements That Are More Important Than You’d Think
Bad Astronomy: Stardust Sample Exceed All Expectations
Bad Astronomy: When Did Earth’s Oxygen Atmosphere Appear?

Image: NASA


Weekly News Roundup: Bad Headlines, Martian moons, and Rotating Houses | Discoblog

Posted on by

roundup-pic-web• Worst science headline of the week? Switching a gene in adult mice easily transforms females into males. Yeah, it’s a little more complicated than that.

• Exposed! Martian moons Phobos and Deimos have been caught on camera together for the very first time.

• Want to track your data consumption? There’s an app for that.

• Not sure what to get that Sri Lankan farmer in your life this holiday season? Send them a package of poo… seriously.

• Australian family lives in an electric motor-powered rotating house that guarantees a different view every time they wake up.


Can “Biological Passports” Save Sports From Doping? | 80beats

Posted on by

syringeAs 80beats reported back in March, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has been experimenting with so-called biological passports to curb cheating in sports. Biological passports are electronic records for individual athletes that provide baseline measurements of substances in their blood and urine that officials can track to catch juiced athletes, since a sudden deviation from the baseline would suggest funny business.

Now, the WADA has released a new set of guidelines to monitor athletes’ blood profiles for evidence of performance enhancing substances. The guidelines take effect immediately and provide advice to antidoping agencies on how to put programs in place to collect and store athletes’ blood samples and monitor them for any variations that could indicate doping—without an actual positive test [The New York Times]. The new guidelines are necessary to keep pace with increasingly sophisticated cheating techniques, such as hormone injections, self-blood transfusions, and potentially gene doping.

During the upcoming Vancouver Winter Olympic Games in February, laboratories will be asked to take blood samples according to the new guidelines. Officials say it’s unlikely that these samples will be used to detect doping during these Winter Games, since earlier samples drawn under the same guidelines are needed for comparison. However, this could mark the beginning of a stricter, cleaner era of sports.

In the future when an athlete’s biological passport gives doctors cause for suspicion, a positive test for a banned substance won’t be necessary to take disciplinary action. The WADA said its guidelines suggest there should be an unanimous agreement by three experts that a profile shows signs of prohibited substance use before proceedings against an athlete can be launched. Three experts should also agree that the athlete’s explanation for the abnormalities don’t hold before sanctions can be considered [AP]. The new methods come after a study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine indicated that testing for high levels of testosterone was ineffective, and called for tracking athletes’ biological profiles over time.

Related Content:
80beats: Doping Police Try Out “Biological Passports” for Athletes
80beats: Gene Therapy That Bulks up Muscles Raises Doping Concerns
80beats: Three Weeks Before the Olympics Begin, New Questions About Doping
DISCOVER: Will Genetic Therapy Destroy Sports? explores the potential for genetic doping

Image: iStockphoto


Aiiiieeee! Slow down! | Bad Astronomy

Posted on by

Sometimes, news comes pouring in to Bad Astronomy HQ, and I am but a man, so I can’t keep up (writing about Saturn’s moons and giant galactic panoramas and big weird Scandinavian spinny thingies keep me pretty busy, y’know).

So here are some quick bits o’ interest.

1) Dr. Harriet Hall will inject (haha!) some medical sense into Oprah

2) You already knew this, but Rush Limbaugh is somewhat misinformed on basic matters of science and medicine*.

3) Obama’s science advisor John Holdren reads a book by my Hive Overmind compatriots!

4) Pulsar-discoverer Jocelyn Bell-Burnell blogs.

5) My friend, the Aussie skeptic Richard Saunders appeared on national TV and handed an astrologer his head.

6) My evil twin Richard Wiseman is fun at parties. Here’s the video:


OK, good. That oughta keep y’all busy while I write up my next big astronomy post.



In your head, you may wish to replace my description with some artfully selected words from Al Franken’s book title.


Finally! Math Shows How to Cut Evenly Sized Pizza Slices | Discoblog

Posted on by

pizza220Gotta love mathematicians: Even when they attack a practical problem familiar to just about everybody, the results can be wonderfully impractical.

New Scientist today documents the exhaustive, decades-spanning search of two mathematicians trying to solve the pizza problem: How to cut a pizza so that everyone gets a fair slice. Seems pretty simple with the standard method, cutting through the center four times to create eight equitable slices. But if you miss the center, or want to create a different number of slices, it opens up a world of possibilities for mathematicians to try to work out.

Rick Mabry and Paul Deiermann finally proved their pizza theorem, which they crafted through years of mathematical rigor, by bringing it down to a simpler, more elegant bit of algebra. Will you find it useful the next time you and four friends sit down with a large pepperoni. Not at all, Mabry says, but he doesn’t care:

“It’s a funny thing about some mathematicians,” he says. “We often don’t care if the results have applications because the results are themselves so pretty.”

From one impractical bit of practical math to another: British automaker Vauxhaull Motors teamed up with Professor Simon Blackburn to craft an equation for perfect parallel parking. After all, Vauxhall spokespeople say, the British may drive on the opposite side of the road as Americans, but they find parallel parking just as frustrating. From The Telegraph:

The formula was released after a Vauxhall survey showed 57 per cent lacked confidence in their parking ability and 32 per cent would rather drive further from their destination or to a more expensive car park, purely to avoid manoeuvring into a small space.

The least confident parkers were those from Norwich, while the most confident were the Welsh.

Whether Britons will be able to apply math become better parkers isn’t clear. Perhaps, though, Blackburn’s math could improve those computer systems in fancy cars that do it for you, which still freaks me out.

Related Content:
Discoblog: Three Euros, Three Minutes, and Presto: Fresh, Machine-Made Pizza
Discoblog: Is There Such a Thing as Dyslexia for Math?
DISCOVER: The Pizza Lab

Image: flickr / The Punch Pizza


Let Kids Eat Dirt: Over-Cleanliness Linked to Heart Disease | 80beats

Posted on by

baby-dirtThis week brings more vindication for a childhood full of bumps, bruises, and going outside, rather than sterile modern living. In a long-term study published in The Proceedings of the Royal Society B, U.S. researchers suggest that over-cleanliness could make babies more prone to inflammation later in life, and in turn raise the risk for stroke and heart disease.

Thomas McDade’s team studied more than 1,500 people in the Philippines who had health surveys at age two and then again at age 20. The team tested them for C-reactive protein (CRP), a marker of inflammation. They found that the more pathogens the people had encountered before age 2, the less CRP they had at age 20. Every episode of diarrhoea back then cut the chance of higher CRP later by 11 per cent; every two months spent in a place with animal faeces cut it by 13 per cent. Being born in the dusty, dirty dry season cut the chance by a third [New Scientist].

McDade chose the Philippines to test the idea that a dirty childhood leads to a healthier adulthood because the particular area lacked Western-style sanitation. The Filipino children thus had more infectious diseases than American kids, but their adult CRP was 80 percent lower. The research suggests that inflammatory systems may need a higher level of exposure to common everyday bacteria and microbes to guide their development [UPI].

The finding are another boon for the “hygiene hypothesis“—the idea that our sanitized world fouls up people’s immune systems (which evolved to deal with a germy environment), and makes people more prone to allergies, asthma, and more ailments. It also backs up a Nature Medicine study from last month which showed that over-cleanliness hindered the skin’s ability to heal.

So, McDade says, parents should develop a healthy medium between letting kids get dangerously sick and raising them in a nearly sterile environment. “In the U.S we have this idea that we need to protect infants and children from microbes and pathogens at all possible costs. But we may be depriving developing immune networks of important environmental input needed to guide their function throughout childhood and into adulthood” [LiveScience].

As for CRP, the Wall Street Journal says you might be hearing its name more frequently as the pharmaceutical giants move toward drugs for people with high levels.

Related Content:
80beats: Doc Diagnoses Our Nut-Phobic Society with Mass Hysteria
Discoblog: Let Them Eat Dirt! It Contains Essential Worms
DISCOVER: Asthma and the Curse of Cleanliness

Image: flickr / deanj


What Are The Best Science Papers Of The Past Decade? | The Intersection

Posted on by

As the weeks wind down to 2010, we’re bombarded with ‘Year’s Best‘ lists on everything music videos to movies. Colleagues and I have recently been discussing the best science papers–not just for 2009, but the entire past decade. We’ve had many ideas as there are obviously different kinds of breakthroughs across fields that have had enormous influence.

I’m very interested to hear the rest of the science community: What do you think have been the most significant, paradigm-shifting, and fascinating articles of the 2000’s? I’ll start with a particularly notable contribution from Colosimo et al. in 2005 to get the ball rolling…

Colosimo PF, Hosemann KE, Balabhadra S, Villarreal G Jr, Dickson M, Grimwood J, Schmutz J, Myers RM, Schluter D, Schluter D, Kingsley DM. Widespread parallel evolution in sticklebacks by repeated fixation of Ectodysplasin alleles. Science 2005 Mar 25 307 (5717): 1928-33

This study had a large impact on our understanding of biology with far reaching implications that “set a new standard in the identification of adaptive variants found in nature.” Evolutionary genetics hasn’t been the same since its publication.

Now let’s hear from readers…


La ciencia es importante. Una vez mas. | Bad Astronomy

Posted on by

Back in March, I wrote a piece called Science is Important and made a short video about it. I got a lot of positive feedback about it, which warmed my heart. People like science!

Shortly thereafter, BABloggee Lourdes Cahuich translated what I said into Spanish and posted a transcript. Now another fan, Julio Vannini, took the original video and created Spanish captions. He even posted it on YouTube:


My thanks to everyone who has helped, who has taken this message to heart, and who has run with it.


Sensenbrenner Pulls an Inhofe, Asserts Global Warming is an “International Conspiracy” | The Intersection

Posted on by

This speaks for itself:

This is really an inconvenient truth. The President’s science advisor, who is a former Harvard professor named Holdren, is involved in the email scandals and covering up the fact that data has been lost, the fact that contrary opinions to the global warming crowd has been squeezed out of scientific journals – and as a matter of fact – the editor of one scientific journal who published contrary data has been fired. Now this is an international conspiracy. Before we end up transferring trillions of dollars from the pocketbook of American ratepayers to China and India – which is what Al Gore’s global warming treaty proposes to do – then we ought to get to the bottom of this and find out whether this is really science or whether this is a bunch of people with a political agenda that’s cooked the books.

[italics added]

I had thought nobody in the GOP was more extreme on climate change than James Inhofe, who dubbed the idea of human-caused global warming the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”

But now, in conspiracy-theory-land, Inhofe has a true competitor.


Is Google the Guardian Angel of Rainforests? | 80beats

Posted on by

deforestation-sat-webGoogle.org, the non-profit division of the search engine giant Google, wants to help scientists monitor deforestation by harnessing the power of its popular Google Earth and Maps applications. Its new “high-performance satellite imagery-processing engine” can process terabytes of information on thousands of Google servers while giving access to the results online. The platform, which was demonstrated on Thursday at the International Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, would allow anyone using the tool to monitor whether or not trees were being chopped down in a given forest. It analyzes satellite images to show forest changes over a given time period [CNET].

The announcement comes at a time when delegates from around the world are attempting to negotiate a treaty to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Google debuted their new program at Copenhagen because they are hoping that their software could help countries conform to the REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries) program proposed by the United Nations, in which industrialized nations would pay developing nations to keep their forests standing.

Google’s program is based on recommendations included in reports such as the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, which found that keeping forests intact is one of the cheapest ways to reduce carbon emissions. Forests soak up and store carbon dioxide, but when they are cleared during deforestation all that C02 is released into the atmosphere, contributing to climate change. Politicians can propose all the limits they want, however there must be tools to monitor their countries’ emissions to ensure they are keeping their word–for example, by not allowing their farmers to clear cut forests to plant lucrative crops.

But actually tracking the changes in forestation can be a significant challenge, since it generally takes place across vast tracks of remote land and satellite imagery may be beyond the financial reach of developing-world governments or the research organizations that work with them. Furthermore, it’s essential that nations use a standardized, validated method of measuring changes, or it will leave any emissions tracking system open to misinterpretation, and any credit system open to abuse. [Ars Technica]. Google’s software is still undergoing testing, but they expect to have it ready by next year, and it will be freely available to all through Google.org.

Related Content:
80beats: Take a Virtual Tour of Pompeii on Google Street View
80beats: Could Google Book Search Be an All-Powerful, Privacy-Killing Monopoly?
80beats: Google Founder Tries to Crack Parkinson’s Genetic Code With Crowdsourcing
80beats: Googlefest Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: 3 New Ways Google Will Take Over Your Life

Image: USGS


Bundle up Sunday Night to Watch the Geminid Meteor Shower | 80beats

Posted on by

Geminid425As we approach the winter solstice, you might find yourself cursing the increasingly short days. But if you’re an astronomy fan—or just a hot cocoa enthusiast who enjoys a good show—the long hours of dark will be a blessing this weekend as the Geminid meteor shower, one of the most visible and reliable showers, makes it appearance.

The Geminid shower peaks the night of December 13/14. Although often considered a poor cousin to August’s Perseid shower, the Geminids often put on a better show [Astronomy]. And this year the moon won’t hinder the Geminid display—it won’t rise until nearly 6 a.m., when dawn will already be upon us.

Like the Leonid meteors we see in the constellation Leo, which made an appearance last month, the Geminids are so named because of their apparent origin, the constellation Gemini. The shower’s radiant, the point in the sky from which they all seem to originate, is near Castor and Pollux. It’s well up in the east by 9 or 10 p.m. and crosses near the zenith (for mid-northern observers) around 2 a.m [Sky & Telescope]. The Geminids are strange, too. Their parent object isn’t a comet, which is the case for the Leonids and most other showers, but rather an asteroid with a trail of debris. Astronomers aren’t 100 percent sure what’s going on here; the asteroid could be the nucleus of a comet that lost all its other material.

If you brave the cold Sunday night, you could get quite a show. Depending on dark your location is, and how much of the sky you can see, meteors may streak into view that night at an average rate of one or two per minute [SPACE.com].

Related Content:
80beats: Leonid Meteor Shower Set To Light Up the Tuesday Morning Sky, from November
80beats: Study: 20 Million Year Meteor Shower Turned Earth Warm & Wet
Bad Astronomy: Catch a Shooting Star This Weekend, on last year’s Geminids

Image: NASA


“ClimateGate” a PR Disaster That Will Be “Taught in University Communications Courses” | The Intersection

Posted on by

You simply must read science journalist Fred Pearce’s take on the PR blunders made in “ClimateGate,” especially by the University of East Anglia and other institutions. He writes:

The media blizzard that has descended on climate science since the hacking of hundreds of e-mails held on the webmail server at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, is set to become a case study — in public relations disasters, in the folly of incontinent electronic communication, in the shortcomings of peer review, and, very probably, in “how not to save the world.”

And again:

The failure of the University of East Anglia to respond substantially to the avalanche of invective from climate skeptics has been a PR disaster that undermined the reputation of science as well as the institution itself. One angry media insider says: “Their response will be taught in university communications courses. Because I’m going to make sure it is.” The university’s failure for a full fortnight to put up a single scientist to defend Phil Jones amounted to cruelty.

Ah, but will scientists and heads of scientific institutions take those communications courses? As we explained in Unscientific America, this is still a rarity, at best.

“ClimateGate” is really the ultimate in demonstrating that the scientific world has got to work vastly harder on communications.


Incredible VISTA of the cosmos | Bad Astronomy

Posted on by

Astronomers with the European Southern Observatory have just revealed the first images from their new telescope called VISTA: the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy. If ever there was an appropriate name for a ’scope, that’s it.

Why?

Here’s why:

vista_flamenebula

Oh baby. Yeah, click it to embiggen.

This image is of the Flame Nebula, a star forming gas cloud in Orion. The image itself covers about half a square degree on the sky (twice the area of the full Moon) and shows details of the nebula, including the core made up of stars invisible to optical telescopes. The bright star in the image is the monster blue supergiant Alnitak, which is the easternmost (left, to northern observers) star in Orion’s belt. Get a good look at it, because in a million years or so that star is gonna blow.

Can you spot the famous Horsehead Nebula in this picture? It looks a little different than you usually see it, because VISTA operates in the visible and near-infrared. It uses a 4.1 meter mirror (that’s big, folks) to suck down light from the sky. It is extremely sensitive and produces very high-resolution images… as you’d expect from a ’scope that has a 67 million pixel detector.

That’s so many pixels you’d think they’d make an image you could zoom into. Oh wait: they did. You’ll have some fun playing with that; in fact, if you spend more than 14 minutes playing with it you’ll have spent longer than it took to take this image! That’s right, that gorgeous shot is only a 14 minute exposure.

vista_starfieldHere’s another phenomenal picture. It’s an amazing 2 x 1.5 degree field toward the center of the Milky Way, revealing about a million stars! It’s taken completely in the near infrared, just outside of what the human eye can see, and shows dust and stars mostly invisible in optical light. As you can see, the center of our Galaxy is a mess. Getting images in different wavelengths of light allows us to get a better handle on what’s happening in this incredibly crowded volume of space.

And yeah, this image is zoomable too. You absolutely want to take that little tour; I literally gasped when I saw it.

vista_fornaxThere’s also this very pretty shot of the Fornax galaxy cluster, a collection of galaxies 60 million light years away. This 25 minute exposure captures quite a few galaxies. Like before, it’s shots like this that help scientists get a handle on not just individual objects, but the environment in which they live, too. If you want to see that environment for yourself, why, tour the zoomable image.

vista_detectorFinally, let me leave you with this remarkable photo, showing the VISTA camera itself. Note the dude standing on the left. VISTA is huge! It weighs three tons, and I suspect most of that is the support equipment for it, including a dewar that holds the liquid nitrogen needed to cool the detector down to -200° C. See the glass in the front? That’s the largest IR-transparent window ever created.

It’s hard to believe that such a hulking camera can take such fine, detailed images, but that’s how these things work. A lot of times in astronomy, bigger is better… especially when it allows us to take such deep images of the cosmos.

Credits: Credit: ESO/J. Emerson/VISTA. Acknowledgment: Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit; ESO/Y. Beletsky.


Michael Gerson Attempts Thoughtfulness on “ClimateGate,” Then Gives it Up | The Intersection

Posted on by

The latest column by Michael Gerson in the Washington Post is a fascinating read. He starts out with a well reasoned account of why the stolen climate emails from East Anglia cannot be taken to undermine the global edifice of climate science:

But the hacked climate e-mails reveal a scandal, not a hoax. Even if every question raised in these e-mails were conceded, the cumulative case for global climate disruption would be strong. The evidence is found not only in East Anglian computers but also in changing crop zones, declining species, melting ice sheets and glaciers, thinning sea ice and rising sea levels. No other scientific theory explains these changes as well as global warming related to the rise in greenhouse gas emissions since the Industrial Revolution. Over millennia, the climate shifts in natural cycles. But we seem to be increasing the pace of change so rapidly that plants, animals and humans may not be able to adequately adjust.

Bravo! This is better than I could have put it. And yet unfortunately, Gerson then somehow goes on blame the scientists quoted in the emails for undermining the whole scientific enterprise:

This professional objectivity is precisely what the hacked e-mails call into question. Some of these scientists are merely activists, deeply invested in a predetermined outcome. They assume that political change is the goal; the scientific enterprise is the means — like a political ad or a campaign speech. But without trust in disinterested, scientific judgments on climate, most non-scientists will resist costly, speculative, legislative actions. When the experts become advocates, no one believes the experts or listens to the advocates.

It is an irony of the first order. Having accused others of a “war on science,” it is climate scientists who are assaulting the authority of science more effectively than anyone else.

I’m not saying that every scientist whose emails have been quoted in “ClimateGate” behaved in a perfectly appropriate manner. However, although he whirls around the phrase “war on science,” Gerson clearly doesn’t know what it means.

What it means, among other things, is that the very scientists now in question were at that moment, when they were writing those emails, subject to politically motivated data requests, harassment, and attempts to seed the scientific literature with questionable papers, all activities tied to fossil fuel interests and their supporting think tanks and politicians. All of this is documented amply in The Republican War on Science.

So for Gerson to describe the scientists as arrogant, “a community coddled by global elites, extensively funded by governments, celebrated by Hollywood and honored with international prizes”–this is ludicrous. These are people who are regularly slandered, pulled before Congress, and indeed, subject to email hacking. They have been under intense and politically motivated fire for years. And, yes, they developed a bit of a siege/herd mentality as a result. Who wouldn’t?

The East Anglia emails cannot be read in any other context but this one.


Space: What’s NOT to Hope for?

Posted on by

At the NASA tweet-up down at the Kennedy Space Center for the STS-129 launch a reporter asked me a question that really threw me. Here, a week later, I’m still thinking about it. He asked:

“Do you think bringing tweeters here gives NASA hope for the future.”

NASA Tweeps Photo Credit: NASA/Carla Cioffi
NASA Tweeps Photo Credit: NASA/Carla Cioffi

Hope for the future? Really?

Why wouldn’t we have hope for the future? With or without Twitter in the mix?

What’s not to hope for?

Now, I get all the doom and gloom reporting about job losses with the end of the Space Shuttle program, and threats of budget cuts. Yes, the job losses are real. Yes, they are heartbreaking AND very frightening for those whose jobs are at stake. Yes, we’ll probably take some budget hits from the White House and Congress. We are, after all, in a squeezed economy…though we see signs of recovery. But none of this is new. We’ve faced all this before.

But, hope for the future? I simply can’t conceive the reverse.

We have a universe of questions out there to find answers to. We, as humans, are curious creatures. We’ll find ways to get the answers. It may or may not look like someone’s pet project. It may or may not fit on today’s calendar. Or even tomorrow’s.

But we, as a human race, WILL GO FORWARD. We will seek answers beyond our planetary borders.

NASA will play a role. What that role will be is determined by the President and Congress. That’s the way this works. But we’ll be a player, none-the-less. We’ll shape the debate. We’ll craft the solutions.

Again, what’s not to hope for?

Maybe what we need more than hope is to work harder to ignite that spark of passion in young and old alike to:

  • ask big questions,
  • never accept the easy answer,
  • stretch beyond even our wildest dreams.

Oh we have much to hope for! Humanity has many problems yet to solve. But some of us can’t sleep until we bridge the gap between imagination and reality. And, you know what? It’s not about you and me…or what we may want out of this life — fame, fortune, power, or simply survival.

Hope is about a better tomorrow…for all of humanity.

So the real question may be: what role will NASA and the international space community play in the future? (A HUGE one, I hope!) And, how can you and I take steps to get us there?

If you ask me, I want to: Be the hope! Be the change!

“Be the change you wish to see in the world.” Gandhi

Crosspost on Beth Beck’s Blog.