Author: Discover Main Feed

Just reading this article in Slate, How To Throw an Election:

On paper, that’s what Sudan’s 21-year civil war was all about. More than 2 million people died in that terrible religious-themed conflict between the Muslim, Arab-led north and the pagan and Christian black south. In reality, almost no one in the south bought the unity line except their charismatic (and autocratic) leader, John Garang. Garang, a favorite of the West, negotiated Sudan’s 2005 peace treaty, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, that finally ended the war. The document was essentially written to ensure he would be elected Sudan’s first black president.

How is it that the current president of Sudan (picture to the left) isn’t black, but Barack Hussein Obama is black? I’m in the category of people who think the world “race” has some utility and maps onto real patterns of human variation, but sometimes it’s just funny. The distinction between the Arabs of Sudan and blacks of Sudan is kind of weird, because Arab is not a race, and Arabs can be of any race theoretically (there are even Arabs in Yemen’s Hadhramaut who have a lot of Malaysian ancestry because of international trade), though generally they are of the olive persuasion. Perhaps the Sudanese Arab elite wouldn’t want to be identified as black because that isn’t particularly prestigious, but they’d certainly be identified as such in other Arab countries. Anwar Sadat was the subject of some racist attitudes within Egyptian society because of his Sudanese ancestry (his mother was Nubian) and his dark skin.

Anyway, my amusement was mostly the fact that they went with this text, and, added a picture of a man who most Americans would identify as black but noted implicitly that he wasn’t black. American journalists are generally punctilious about following the rule of hyodescent when it comes to Americans, even when those individuals object to this framing, such as Tiger Woods (who is twice as Asian ancestrally as he is black). But I guess in an international context they will bend more. It reminded me of stories that Afro-Arabs were often allowed to stay at “whites only” facilities in the USA when segregation was the norm because they were foreign.

Note: Hypodescent isn’t just an American issue. There are controversies about a new biopic of Alexandre Dumas where he is played by Gérard Depardieu. Some people wanted a non-white actor cast because Dumas’ mother was mixed-race. But of course Dumas was mostly white, and he seems to basically looked like a white guy. France of the 19th century was not the American South of the 19th century, and a drop of black blood did not make you persona non grate within white society. If you want real accuracy, perhaps cast Wentworth Miller as a young Dumas, he’s a white-looking mixed-race actor.

Image Credit: Slate & Whitehouse.gov

Detection of predefecatory rectosigmoid wave activity for prevention of fecal soiling in infants. “Identification of an electrophysiologic sign before defecation can prevent fecal soiling in infants. To identify such a sign, the contractile activity of sigmoid colon was recorded percutaneously in 48 healthy infants. The recorder was equipped with a digital clock synchronized to the recorder so as to set off an alarm upon significantly increased electromyographic activity of sigmoid colon. Examination of the recordings at high speed revealed three types of basal, signaling and predefecatory waves of activities. The ‘basal’ component was comprised of as negatively deflected slow waves. The signaling waves exhibited an increase in amplitudes, cycle rate and conduction velocity, were repeated 8.2+/-1.2 times and lasted for 14.6+/-2.1 minutes prior to defecation, The ‘predefecatory’ waves preceded defecation by 40.3+/-7.3 seconds, showed a significant increase in wave parameters and sounded the alarm. The findings show a method for early detection of defecation that can be used clinically to prevent fecal soiling in infants.” Image: flickr/keeping_it_real Related content:
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Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: “Back and forth forever” (or, DIY poop therapy). WTF is …

It’s Science vs. Magic week at L.A.’s Magic Castle, where comic magician Rudy Coby and his friends have taken over the Victorian mansion-styled club, and where waitresses are sporting lab coats and serving drinks in test tubes. Coby is reprising his mad scientist alter-ego Labman after a 15-year hiatus–during which time he crafted stage shows for one-time roommate goth rocker Marilyn Manson, who threatens a surprise cameo as “The Evil Magician” at one of Coby’s performances. The event is an ode to magic’s time-honored and gleeful distortion of scientific and technological principals. Coby’s Hypnotron 2000 makes it look like your skin moves after staring at a spinning wheel. Andrew Mayne–who creates illusions for David Blaine and produced the G4 Network’s quirky G4 Underground–unveils a don’t-try-this-at-home effect that has him drinking –320o Fahrenheit liquid nitrogen. College favorite Brian Brushwood has audience members use cell phones to capture a ghostly image on TV static patterns that their eyes miss (pictured). For the kids this weekend, mad scientist Prof. Wes Weasely wields audio magic with his theremin. More surprise guests are planned Thursday through Sunday. — by Sue Karlin Related Content:
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Since March 30, when the LHC at CERN first collided protons at an unprecedented total energy of 7 TeV (7 trillion electron volts) the machine has been steadily moving from crawling to walking. Last Saturday, I’d say it took its first steps, and like any toddler, will soon be running.

The plot shows what we call “integrated luminosity” which is simply a measure of the number of collisions of protons in the interaction regions at the four experiments. In this case, it’s my own experiment, CMS, the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment. CMS and ATLAS are the two large general-purpose detectors, each with thousands of physicists eager for real physics data.

As you can see, the vertical axis of the plot is labelled in units of “nb^-1” or inverse nanobarns. The unit “barn” is a unit of area, a kind of joke from Enrico Fermi and friends who, despite the tiny size of a nucleus, said it was “as big as a barn” even though in cross sectional area it’s on the order of 10^-28 m² (which is in fact the definition of one barn). If we think about the cross sectional area of the protons colliding in the LHC, they have a cross sectional area (or simply a total collision cross section) of about 0.12 barns.

So what’s an inverse nanobarn? Well, if we try to collide lots of protons, we might ask “how many collisions per barn or cross sectional area did we make?” It’s like throwing little paint blobs at a wall, one at a time. Eventually the wall is covered, and then covered again, and then covered many times over. We can ask “how many paint blobs per unit area of the wall did we cover?” The nano in nanobarns means one billionth of a barn, and so, now, the LHC has managed to produce its first inverse nanobarn: one collision per every billionth of a barn of cross section.

It’s just a unit – all that matters is “how many collision events of my favorite kind should have been produced?” To get this, you multiply the number of inverse nanobarns by the production cross section for that kind of event, and also by the probability that you actually detect it. So for Z boson production, for example, the cross section is about 30 nanobarns, so we should have a few by now. (I am not at liberty to say whether we do or not…)

The plot has stair steps – the horizontal axis is real time, and the LHC machine is filled with protons, then brought to full energy, then collimators put in, then the experiment turns on and records data for some time until the accelerator folks decide to dump the beam out and refill. As you can see this cycle has been going like clockwork, with fill after fill of the machine. And the experiment has been recording a very large fraction of the delivered collisions, the losses being quite normal and due to end effects and the occasional glitch.

But then came the LHC baby’s first real step last weekend: squeezing the beam. By raising the quadrupole beam focusing magnets to high field, the transverse size of proton bunches in the machine shrinks down and the probability of collisions goes up. In this case, the luminosity went up by an order of magnitude – it was a stunning success. Any imperfection in the focusing fields can send the beam right out of the machine, and, clearly, that did not happen.

The goal in the next year is to get to one inverse femtobarn – a million times more data. In the next week or so the plan, if all goes well, is to achieve another couple orders of magnitude in luminosity. Shit’s about to get real, folks…

I used to write for the Huffington Post, before it became overrun with antiscience alt-med antivax garbage so thick I could smell it through my monitor.

Case in point would be a somewhat targetless essay by Dr. Larry Dossey, who seems to be trying to say that because science is portrayed as an individual effort, but is actually usually a team effort, students get confused and marginalized. Or something. His point is difficult to determine. But in any case, he’s quite wrong; the idea of science being done by groups of people collaboratively is everywhere, from astronomy to zoology.

I need not go into details, because, happily, Steve Newton from the NCSE has posted a rebuttal on HuffPo that tears Dossey to shreds. My favorite part was when Dossey says Nobel Prizes are only given to individuals, and my first thought was “Wow, I wonder if the IPCC knows about this?”… in his essay, Newton says almost exactly the same thing. Great minds, yadda yadda.

Anyway, I suggest you read Dossey’s screed, and then read Newton’s slamdunking of it. It’s a wonderful exercise in muddied and clear thinking, in that order. With people like Newton writing for HuffPo, it makes me feel a bit better that I don’t need to as much.

Tip o’ the white lab coat Robert Luhn of the NCSE.

The Obama administration reaffirmed its commitment to clean energy sources today by giving the green light to the controversial Cape Wind project, clearing the way for 130 wind turbines to be built off the coast of Cape Cod. The wind farm will be built in Nantucket Sound, and aims to harness the steady breezes blowing along the East coast to produce clean, albeit expensive energy.

The project had been delayed for almost a year due to opposition from local Native American tribes. Two Wampanoag tribes said the turbines, which will stand more than 400 feet above the ocean surface, would disturb spiritual sun greetings and possibly ancestral artifacts and burial grounds on the seabed, which was once exposed land before the sea level rose thousands of years ago [Boston Globe]. U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who approved the project, assured the tribes that he had ordered modifications to lessen the turbines’ impact. He also said that the approval would require Cape Wind to conduct additional marine archaeological surveys and take other steps to reduce the project’s visual impact [Boston Globe]. If not held back by any other legal hurdles, construction could begin later this year.

The Horseshoe Shoals area of Nantucket Sound is said to be one of the best sites for a wind farm along the entire East coast: It not only has shallow, sheltered waters close to the shore, but also a strong supply of steady breezes. The wind farm is expected to produce as much power as a medium-size coal-fired power plant, and the project is also expected to reduce carbon emissions by the equivalent of 175,000 cars [Boston Globe]. The company behind the project, Cape Wind, says it can begin generating power by 2012 and hopes to supply power to the residents of Cape Cod and the nearby islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.

Some economic details still need to be worked out: The price of its electricity is expected to be higher than conventional power, and Cape Wind is still in negotiations with the utility company National Grid, which has agreed to purchase and distribute some of the wind farm’s power. Despite this hiccup, Cape Wind says the wind farm will be source of hundreds of green jobs and a reliable domestic energy source, while offshore wind advocates are hoping it can jump-start the U.S. industry [WBUR]. Opponents, however, contend that the turbines won’t just endanger marine life but will also be an eyesore in this scenic tourist stop.

The United States is the world’s largest producer of wind power, but there are still no commercial offshore wind farms; Cape Wind hopes to be the first. The U.S. Department of Energy envisions offshore wind farms accounting for 4 percent of the country’s electric generating capacity by 2030 [WBUR].

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Image: iStockphoto

Who needs poppy plants to produce morphine? Last month scientists said they’d isolated the genes those plants use to synthesize the narcotic chemical and made it themselves in a lab. Now, in a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, another team has suggested that we mammals might possess the pathway to create our own morphine.

Because we have receptors for the opiate in our brains (which makes it such an effective and addictive painkiller), and because morphine traces show up in our urine, scientists had long wondered if animals could produce the drug themselves. But studies using living animals yielded inconclusive results because of possible contamination from external sources of morphine in their food or in the environment [Nature]. In addition, the body breaks down and changes morphine, which complicates the task.

To sort out this mess, researchers injected mice with tetrahydropapaveroline (THP). Human brain cells have this chemical, and plants use it to make morphine. After the injection, mice started to turn the THP into salutaridine. In morphine-producing poppy plants salutaridine is then converted to thebaine, which undergoes further reactions to become morphine. The researchers show that mice can also do that chemical conversion, as well as others needed to generate morphine [Science News].

“This paper seems to be one of the most definitive I’ve seen,” says Chris Evans, a neurobiologist and expert on opioid drugs at the University of California, Los Angeles. “They’ve convincingly shown that there’s a pathway there which could possibly produce morphine” [Nature News]. But to what end? This study simply showed that the morphine-producing pathway is possible; it didn’t find traces in tissue. Thus, it can’t say for sure that mammals do produce morphine naturally, nor for what it would be used. Pain relief seems the obvious answer, since that’s the most common use of plant-created morphine, but the scientists don’t know if the body could make enough for that purpose.

The other outstanding question is: Did animals and plants evolve these pathways separately, or do parts of it date all the way back to simple common ancestors before the kingdom split? Coauthor Meinhart Zenk is leaning toward independent evolution, because the early parts of the process are different.

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Image: flickr / Evil Erin

The guys guarding the velvet rope at downtown’s hottest nightspot may be tough–but at least they don’t spit like these llama bouncers. The BBC reports that two llamas, Willy and Jack, have been drafted to protect the eggs and chicks of wading birds at the Merseyside nature park in Britain–in particular, they’ll guard lapwing and redshank birds, which are threatened species in England. Researchers say that the highly territorial llamas will kick up a fuss if intruders drop by, and will scare away foxes and other predators looking to snack on eggs or chicks. With the llamas on watch, the park officers hope, the young birds will have a shot at survival. This is not the first time that llamas have been deployed to protect livestock. The llama and its relative the alpaca have previous work experience protecting lambs and sheep from predators. Alpacas, in fact, come with great references—having been employed by the Prince of Wales to protect his lambs from foxes during lambing season at his Gloucestershire estate. Looking at the llamas’ resumes, it’s their bouncing skills that stand out. The BBC describes:
It is hoped their slightly erratic behavior, along with the groaning noises and the sound they make when afraid or …

You should probably just click this to see the whole comic. Notice I didn’t say “… see the whole joke” because, of course, it’s true. It’s also true that lobsters live in trees.

Incidentally, and no joke, this comes when a dozen astronomers are headed to Capitol Hill to make the case that astronomy is important. I hope they can do it. It is important!

I’m on the road today, so I don’t have time to explain the fascinating science behind this freaky new picture of feathered dinosaurs young and old. So let me just direct your attention to fellow D-blogger, Ed Yong, and Nature’s Janet Fang for more.

[Image by Xing Lida and Song Qijin]

At the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xing Xu is looking at two beautiful dinosaur fossils, both with clear feathers on their arms and tails. In the smaller specimen, the feathers are like thin ribbons at their base and quills at their tips (with vanes coming off a central shaft). The larger specimen is different – its arm and tail feathers are like quills across their entire length.

With such different feather structures, you might assume that these animals belonged to different species, but you’d be wrong. They’re actually different life stages of the same animal – Similicaudipteryx. Both are youngsters, but the one with the quill-like feathers is an older version of the one with the ribbons. Together, they demonstrate that the feather of some dinosaurs changed dramatically as they grew older, in a way that we don’t see in any modern bird.

By now, readers of this blog should be familiar with the idea of feathered dinosaurs (and, indeed, Xing Xu has discovered many of them). A spectacular series of fossils have revealed a wide range of plumes in a wide range of species, and we even know something about their colour. But we still know very little about how these feathers developed as the animals matured, because fossils of young feathered dinosaurs are few and far between. So for Xu to find two, and two of the same species no less, is a real treat.

Both hailed from Liaoning province of China (where else?), and based on their skulls, spines and hips, Xu has confidently classified them both as Similicaudipteryx, a small predator from the oviraptosaur group. Both animals are clearly youngsters. Although one is larger than the other, they’re both smaller than adult specimens of the same dinosaurs, and some of their bones haven’t fused completely yet.

The younger animal (a-c below) has downy feathers over much of its back and hips. Elsewhere, it has larger pennaceous feathers (with a shaft and vanes) – 10 on each arm, and 11 much larger ones on its tail. All of these are ribbon-like at the base and quill-like at the tips. The more senior juvenile (d-f below) also had downy feathers on its head, back and hips but its pennaceous feathers are very different to its younger peer. Each arm has 10 primary feathers and 12 secondary ones, and the tail had at least 12 pairs. All of them are quill-like from base to tip and the arm feathers are just as long as the tail ones.

These differences suggest that Similicaudipterx’s feathers changed dramatically as it grew from hatchling to adult. The move from partial ribbons to complete quills is the most obvious one, especially since the arm and tail feathers of modern birds hardly change after they moult their initial downy birthday suits. It’s possible, but very unlikely, that the individual feathers changed; instead, Xu says that the animal probably moulted its feathers as it grew and replaced them with new ones of a different type.

There were other changes too. If the younger animal really lacked secondary arm feathers (and it’s possible these just didn’t fossilise well), then Similicaudipteryx must have grown these as it matured. Modern birds have them from hatching. And the fact that the tail feathers outsized the arm ones in the younger individual but not the older one suggests that the feathers developed at different rates. Xu suggests that the arm feathers became more important as adulthood loomed.

We can probably even guess the genetic events that lay behind these changes. In modern feathers, scientists are well aware of the genes that control the formation of the rachis (the central shaft) and the barbs (the branches that come off the rachis). If you switched off genes that promote the production of barbs, such as sonic hedgehog (don’t ask – developmental biologists make their own fun), you’d get a flat continuous ribbon on either side of the rachis. That’s probably what happened in the younger animal, resulting in a feather that’s half-ribbon and half-quill. These genes were then switched on more forcefully in the older juvenile and in adults.

The half-ribbon feathers, formally known as “proximally ribbon-like pennaceous feathers” or PRPFs, are found in other dinosaurs, including primitive birds like the confuciusornithids. But they’re nowhere to be seen in modern birds. Because of this, Xu says that the development of the earliest feathers was probably much more varied and flexible than in today’s birds. It takes the discovery of rare and stunning specimens to reveal these programmes, which have since been lost in the course of evolution.

Reference: Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature08965

More on feathered dinosaurs:

• Zombie hands to bird wings – the evolution of the dinosaur wrist
• The renaissance of technicolour dinosaurs continues (and the gloves come off…)
• What colours were dinosaur feathers?
• An insider’s look at the feather, a marvel of bioengineering
• Evidence that Velociraptor had feathers
• Tianyulong – a fuzzy dinosaur that makes the origin of feathers fuzzier
• Beipaiosaurus was covered in the simplest known feathers
• Microraptor – the dinosaur that flew like a biplane

Hint: Its tannin content can poison horses, and the flower-like things are actually hairy appendages.

NASA has put together a pretty cool video to celebrate Hubble Space Telescope’s 20 years in space.

If that narrator’s voice sounds familiar, that’s because it’s Brent Spiner, the actor who played Data on “Star Trek: The Next Generation”. Apparently, Hubble is fully functional and programmed for multiple techniques.

Jaimee Alkinani and her husband had just bought their first home in a quiet suburb of Salt Lake City, Utah. The house was nice: three bedrooms, tree-lined street, kids riding bikes down the sidewalk, and friendly neighbors who waved when they passed. The family was on their way—they’d also just opened a small business near their home, had an eleven-month-old child, and Jaimee was eight months pregnant. Life had officially started for the Alkinanis. But soon things turned for the worse.

A few days after they had moved in, a neighbor welcomed them with disturbing news. “Your house used to be a meth lab,” he said—a fact that the seller had never disclosed. So they called their realtor. He told them not to worry, that the house had been decontaminated. He even produced a certificate from the local health department to prove it.

Then the family started getting sick. Within five months, Jaimee and her husband developed sinus problems that required surgery. When their baby was born, he had serious lung issues that caused him to stop breathing a few times. He also wasn’t gaining weight, and was in and out of the hospital…

People sometimes ask, “Is the universe a black hole?” Or worse, they claim: “The universe is a black hole!” No, it’s not, and it’s worth getting this one straight.

If there’s any quantitative reasoning behind the question (or claim), it comes from comparing the amount of matter within the observable universe to the radius of the observable universe, and noticing that it looks a lot like the relationship between the mass of a black hole and its Schwarzschild radius. That is: if you imagine taking all the stuff in the universe and putting it into one place, it would make a black hole the size of the universe. Slightly more formally, it looks like the the universe satisfies the hoop conjecture, so shouldn’t it form a black hole?

But a black hole is not “a place where a lot of mass has been squeezed inside its own Schwarzschild radius.” It is, as Wikipedia is happy to tell you, “a region of space from which nothing, including light, can escape.” The implication being that there is a region outside the black hole from which things could at least imagine escaping to. For the universe, there is no such outside region. So at a pretty trivial level, the universe is not a black hole.

You might say that this is picking nits, and the existence of an outside region is beside the point if the inside of our universe resembles a black hole. That’s fine, except: it doesn’t. You may have noticed that the universe is actually expanding, rather than contracting as you might expect the interior of a black hole to be. That’s because, if anything, our universe bears a passing resemblance to a white hole. Our universe (according to conventional general relativity) has a singularity in the past, out of which everything emerged, not a singularity in the future into which everything is crashing. We call that singularity the Big Bang, but it’s very similar to what we would expect from a white hole, which is just a time-reversed version of a black hole.

That insight, plus four dollars or so, will get you a grande latte at Starbucks. The spacetime solution to Einstein’s equation that describes a universe expanding from the Big Bang is very similar to the time-reversal of a black hole, but you don’t really learn much from making that statement, especially because there is no outside; everything you wanted to know was already there in the original cosmological language. Our universe is not going to collapse to a future singularity, even though the mass is enough to allow that to happen, simply because it’s expanding; the singularity you’re anticipating already happened.

Still, some folks will stubbornly insist, there has to be something deep and interesting about the fact that the radius of the observable universe is comparable to the Schwarzschild radius of an equally-sized black hole. And there is! It means the universe is spatially flat.

You can figure this out by looking at the Friedmann equation, which relates the Hubble parameter to the energy density and the spatial curvature of the universe. The radius of our observable universe is basically the Hubble length, which is the speed of light divided by the Hubble parameter. It’s a straightforward exercise to calculate the amount of mass inside a sphere whose radius is the Hubble length (M = 4π c³H^-3/3), and then calculate the corresponding Schwarzschild radius (R = 2GM/c²). You will find that the radius equals the Hubble length, if the universe is spatially flat. Voila!

Note that a spatially flat universe remains spatially flat forever, so this isn’t telling us anything about the universe now; it always has been true, and will remain always true. It’s a nice fact, but it doesn’t reveal anything about the universe that we didn’t already know by thinking about cosmology. Who wants to live inside a black hole, anyway?

Plans for the world’s largest telescope just took a major step forward. Researchers have selected a site for the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT): It will sit on the Cerro Armazones mountain in central Chile’s Atacama Desert. This site beat out other contenders, including other sites in Chile and La Palma in Spain, due to its excellent conditions for astronomy.

On this desert mountain, researchers will enjoy near-perfect observing conditions – at least 320 nights a year when the sky is cloudless. The Atacama’s famous aridity means the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere is very limited, reducing further the perturbation starlight experiences as it passes through the Earth’s atmosphere [BBC]. With such clear skies, astronomer Diego Mardones from the University of Chile remarked, “If you want to find another [observation area] like Chile, your options are Antarctica or space” [Merco Press].

The telescope’s primary mirror will measure 138 in diameter. The mirror will be made up of 984 segments and will gather 15 times more light than the largest optical telescope while returning images 15 times sharper than those beamed back from the Hubble Space Telescope [Wired]. Astronomers say the telescope will provide new information on the nature of black holes, galaxy formation, dark matter, and dark energy.

The E-ELT, which is estimated to cost almost a billion euros, is expected to be operational by 2018. The final go-ahead for the telescope’s construction is expected later this year.

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Image: ESO

At first glance, it seems like every young Boy Scout’s dream come true: a merit badge for video games. The Boy Scouts of America have finally recognized the vital importance of the pastime that occupies so much of modern children’s attention with the creation of a “video games” belt loop and pin, writes Engadget. But before anyone goes scurrying off to embark on a marathon gaming session, here’s the rub. The awards aren’t earned by beating a high score or rescuing the princess. Instead Boy Scouts have to fulfill several dull requirements in order to get the belt loop, including: Explain why it is important to have a rating system for video games. Check your video games to be sure they are right for your age. With an adult, create a schedule for you to do things that includes your chores, homework, and video gaming. Do your best to follow this schedule. Learn to play a new video game that is approved by your parent, guardian, or teacher. To get the pin, the scout also needs to create a plan with his …

With the Gulf of Mexico oil spill spreading and the operations to contain it taking too much time, Rear Adm. Mary Landry says the Coast Guard is considering another option to keep the spill from reaching nearby American shorelines: setting the oil on fire.

Yes, you read that right. The idea of a controlled burn surfaced as a possible way to remove thick pockets of crude rife with baseball-sized tar balls from within the massive slick. That tarry crude poses the biggest threat to sensitive coastal areas. Landry said burning could begin as early as today [Houston Chronicle]. BP, the company that leased the now-sunken oil rig, is trying to slow the leak via the work of submersible robots, but so far they’ve had no success. And so 42,000 gallons of oil continue to leak into the gulf every day. To keep the spill from becoming one of the worst in American history, the Coast Guard is considering all its options.

During the operation, the Coast Guard would use its boats and booms to get the oil into a U-shape, then ignite it. Response teams attempted this in Newfoundland in 1993, and found that they could get more than half of the oil collected—but not without the trade-off of separate environmental damage. The heat generated by the burning oil—a temperature of 1,800°F (982°C) was measured at the top of the boom at the Newfoundland burn—will cause the smoke to rise several hundred to several thousand feet and at the same time be carried away by the prevailing winds [National Geographic]. The plume created should be similar to that of a large forest fire.

The oil slick started about 50 miles off the Gulf Coast when the oil rig Deepwater Horizon exploded and then sank. Since then oil has spread outward in a hurry, and is now within 20 miles of the coast. While a controlled burn would give off plenty of nasty smoke, Landry says, the impact on Louisiana’s coastline, which contains some 40% of the nation’s wetlands and spawning grounds for countless fish and birds, had to be considered [BBC News]. Out at sea, the fumes from the fire could prove toxic to birds and other wildlife, but they have a better chance to escape that than if they find themselves stuck in the path of the water-borne oil.

Meanwhile, BP will keep pressing its options to slow the spread. The underwater robots are trying to reach valves that control pressure in the well, and should they ultimately fail in that operation, the oil company is preparing to drill a secondary well to relieve some of the pressure. But that could take two to three months.

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Image: NASA—the slick approaching Louisiana

I am on record as saying that I think that the Constellation rocket program should be axed, and replaced with a system that is more cost-effective and less likely to run overbudget as Constellation has. President Obama’s speech recently made it clear that Constellation’s days are numbered, and that he is urging NASA to look into a better heavy-lift vehicle.

Not everyone agrees, of course. Jeff Hanley — the manager of the Constellation Program — has apparently sent out an email that is an attempt to save at least part of the current system. I have not seen this email, but it’s alleged to try to use Obama’s idea of continuing with the Orion space capsule concept to save even more of Constellation.

Obama wants NASA to keep developing the Orion capsule as a lifeboat for the space station (and, I assume, a crew capsule for future deep space missions). Of course, to test such a capsule it has to be lofted to orbit. How do you do that? This is where Hanley’s email comes in: the best way to get Orion into space is aboard the Ares 1 rocket, the first such vehicle to be built under Constellation.

As schemes go, that’s pretty clever. Hanley is leveraging Ares — which will be canceled under Obama’s plan — using Orion. In other words, the Ares 1 rockets will have to continue to be developed and built if we are to get Orion up and running. That way, even if Constellation is canceled, at least part of it will live on.

It may be clever, but is it wise? I’m not sure. The Ares 1 has been tested once, and a lot of folks outside of NASA took a very dim view of it… Buzz Aldrin essentially called it a fraud, saying it was nothing more than a dog-and-pony show by NASA to make it look like progress was being made, when in reality it was a failure. That doesn’t make me hopeful that Ares 1 is what we want to throw our support behind.

I’ve been pretty clear on this: Constellation is basically a good idea, but is off to such a rocky start that it may be best to stop throwing money at it. NASA needs to do these things, in this order:

1) Figure out what its Next Giant Leap is — asteroid rendezvous, Moon base, mission to Mars;

2) Figure out just what is needed to not only accomplish this goal, but to sustain it with an eye toward the next big goal;

3) Start cutting metal.

The problem, as usual, is in Step 2. Sure, that first step (ironically) is sometimes fuzzy and vague, but Obama laid out at least a place to start in his speech last month (even if I disagree strongly with him about the Moon). But politics, public relations, whatever — NASA always stumbles (with plenty of help from Congress) at that dreaded Step 2, drawing up plans that seem to over-reach and not be realistic in terms of budget, goals, and timelines. That’s why we have the Shuttle, the space station, and no future plans.

Before I get the usual anti-Obama comments, remember that it was the Bush Administration that called for the retiring of the Shuttle before we had a working follow-up vehicle. So no matter what we have to rely on other countries and private industry until we get that next-gen rocket. But what happens next is perhaps the most critical thing NASA has ever done since the Apollo program was first announced. Political maneuvering and white-elephant saving are the last thing NASA needs.

What NASA needs is a clear goal, a clear vision, and a clear way to make those happen.

I listened today to an interview with Stephen Prothero, which outlined the argument in his book God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World-and Why Their Differences Matter. Prothero is a professor in the Department of Religion at Boston University, and he certainly brings some heft to this argument. Not having read the book, but listening to his talking points in interview and discussion, he seems to have a problem as an empirical matter with the contention regularly made in interfaith circles that all religions fundamentally point to the same truth. The metaphor that Houston Smith used whereby religions are separate paths to the same mountain top is referred to repeatedly. Prothero suggests that this universalistic model denies the deep reality of sectarian difference in belief, practice and outlook, and tends to be favored by those of liberal bent at ease with multiculturalism. He also notes that the foundation of common unity can be traced back to the perennial philosophy. This philosophy lay at the heart of the Traditionalist School, of which Smith was arguably a member, as was Julius Evola. So the tendency that Prothero is putting into focus is not necessarily associated with liberalism, though in the American context it is because of the Right’s capture by low church anti-elitist elements.

An illustration of the problems which crop up when those of distinctive religions attempt to find common ground is that that commonality is often generated through an exclusion of an out group. Jews, Muslims and Christians all worship the God of Abraham. But of course Buddhists find the God of Abraham irrelevant to the central questions of religion. Prothero also observes that liberal universalism tends to put a premium on elite mysticism, a mode of religiosity which is notable for transcendence of sectarian distinctions. But the much more common mode of religious life is that of plain believers who take distinctive beliefs and practices rather seriously. Pragmatically this sort of consideration is critical when assessing whether a Sunni vs. Shia distinction will have any importance. At the level of Sufi mystics these distinctions may melt away, but the rest of humanity is still something one must consider if one is a more prosaic sort who does not expect to actively gain salvation before death.

And it is at the level of the rest of humanity that I think Prothero’s own methodological orientation may cause problems in interpreting the world as it is. From what I can tell he operates out of the framework of Religious Studies (which coincidentally in the United States was shaped by Mircea Eliade, who was strongly influenced by Traditionalism). Too often it seems to me that scholars out of this tradition operate as if religion is a concrete entity, distinct and unique, as opposed to being an emergent property of normal aspects of culture and cognition. It is scientists who start from a naturalistic perspective who I think can take a final step back, and see religion as but a piece of the painting. Prothero is correct obviously that adherents of different religions view themselves as distinct, as following different truths. Fundamentalist Christians are liable to dismiss Allah as an Arab pagan divinity, or even a demon, despite the widely held belief by many that Allah is simply a different name for the God of the Christians. But what if you don’t believe that gods exist except in the minds of believers? Then whether as a practical fact Allah and the Christian God Allah or Lord Buddha are distinct beings rests in large part on whether humans conceptualize them differently. It turns out that in general they do not. In other words religious believers tend to conceive of their supernatural agents very similarly, whose traits are rather interchangeable, with the main difference being semantic. The book Theological Incorrectness cites a wide range of literature in this area, with a particular reference to the religious landscape of Sri Lanka.

The disjunction between assertions and sincere beliefs of deep difference, and the reality that cognitively there’s little gap at all, shouldn’t be too surprising. Promiscuity of belief has been relatively normal for much of human history, as was evident in the pre-Christian Roman Empire, or is evident in Japan or China. The exclusive tribal aspect of Islam and Christianity combined with their universal ambitions are somewhat atypical, though this suite of characters has been highly successful in propagating itself. Additionally, religion is more than simply belief, it is about communal rituals and belonging, and the daily regularity of banal practices and customs. Prothero is correct that acknowledging the deep differences are important, but I believe to a great extent he is wrong as to what those differences are. That Buddhism emphasizes suffering while Christianity emphasizes sin is not particularly significant unless you’re a Buddhist or a Christian, and even then most Christians have no idea what soteriology means for example. Beliefs are shallow markers to group affiliations, not deeply held axioms which serve as starting lines for chains of inference. Religious elites construct many distinctive aspects of their brand, but it is the functional components which are essential in furthering community and human flourishing.

I think the Shia-Sunni split which Stephen Prothero gives as an example of the need to understand the depths of difference is a good case of how beliefs may be secondary. The division here began originally as a political dispute, whereby the partisans of Ali and his family dissented from the decisions of the Muslim majority in the succession to the position of Caliph. Over the centuries these partisans evolved into the Shia faction, while those who were not Shia or other assorted sectarians become Sunni. Some distinctions of practice and belief did arise across this divide, but in general those distinctions evolved after the original political division (because the Shia party was decentralized they have preserved more of the theological diversity of early Islam than the Sunnis).

On a deep level Huston Smith was right. Human psychology is universal, so human intuitions about supernatural aspects of the world exhibit deep commonality and intelligibility. But it really doesn’t matter, human tribalism is also a universal, and it co-opts these religious intuitions into its service. The fact that both tribes don tattoos does not elicit in them an appreciation of the universality of these sorts of markers, the importance of belonging. Rather, the markers often separate those who are your brothers, and those who you wish to kill. In other words, what you believe may matter less than what you believe about what you believe.