Author: Discover Main Feed

Today in the LA Times Op-Ed section, our recent Point of Inquiry guest has a pretty unexpected take on air pollution: Namely, he describes it as useful for blocking sunlight. (The paper edition closed too early to add info about the recent Icelandic volcano, but for those wondering, Kintisch informs me that the amount of gunk it has spewed out is far too little to have a major climatic effect.) Here’s an excerpt from the op-ed:
You’re likely to hear a chorus of dire warnings as we approach Earth Day, but there’s a serious shortage few pundits are talking about: air pollution. That’s right, the world is running short on air pollution, and if we continue to cut back on smoke pouring forth from industrial smokestacks, the increase in global warming could be profound. Cleaner air, one of the signature achievements of the U.S. environmental movement, is certainly worth celebrating. Scientists estimate that the U.S. Clean Air Act has cut a major air pollutant called sulfate aerosols, for example, by 30% to 50% since the 1980s, helping greatly reduce cases of asthma and other respiratory problems. But even as industrialized and developing nations alike steadily reduce aerosol pollution — caused primarily by burning …

The Space Shuttle Discovery is scheduled to land at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center Monday morning at 08:48 EDT (12:48 GMT).

ISS astronaut Soichi Noguchi took this picture of Discovery over the Caribbean as she undocked from the station and prepped for landing. After she lands, there will be one more flight for the Orbiter, scheduled for September. In fact, each of the Orbiters — Discovery, Endeavour, and Atlantis — each have one flight left before they are retired. Assuming their lives aren’t extended, but that’s still in the scuttlebutt (shuttlebutt?) stage.

If you want to watch this landing yourself, the de-orbit burn will be at 07:43, so stay tuned to NASA TV around then to find out if weather will permit it to touch down. The ground track is unusual this time, taking the Orbiter over most of the country. It’s a bit too far north to get a good view from Boulder, and it’s also a bit early for me… but I might try for it anyway. It’s not like there are many more chances to see it.

[Update: I just noticed that if the landing is delayed one orbit — about 90 minutes — then Discovery will pass almost overhead at my location (and it’ll be at a more decent hour of the morning, too). Keep your eyes and ears open for news of when it lands, and check those ground tracks.]

Dawn Crawford describes this moment in Versailles as a personal favorite… Submit your photograph or artwork to the Science of Kissing Gallery and remember to include relevant links.

I wish everyone on Earth– including Oprah, and Jenny McCarthy, everyone — would take 19 minutes of their lives and watch Michael Specter talk about why science is so important:

Of course, Jenny McCarthy won’t listen. But if the people who listened to her did, then they’d stop listening to her. And what a wonderful world that would be.

Just a decade ago, our unsophisticated brains couldn’t even conceive of items like the iPhone–never mind the iPad. Starting with the premise that the unimaginable can quickly become ubiquitous, a group of designers, futurists, and journalists recently sat down in San Francisco to try and imagine our lives in 2020. They focused on how technology will impact social interactions, travel, commerce, healthcare, and the media.

The ideas came thick and fast. One idea for the future is a “Thingbook” that would take augmented reality to the next step. Designers imagined that the Thingbook would catalog and index every visible thing. So if you see someone on the street wearing a cool jacket that you’d like to buy, all you have to do is look at it and your mobile handset or AR-equipped eyeglasses will identify the object and look up the best price and retailer, writes design mind.

Other ideas included the Whuffie Meter, wherein you can immediately access everything public about a person who is sitting across from you, as well as the Bodynet, which would instantly compute the result of that big burger-and-fries lunch.

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Image: Designmind

On the eve of revolution in 1978, Pardis Sabeti’s (video interviews here) family fled Iran for the United States. Sabeti has embraced change ever since. A crucial pivot came when, en route to medical school, she instead took a Rhodes Scholarship, studying evolutionary genetics (and learning to relax by playing guitar). “I thought I was just passing time on the way to my real life,” she says. But today she blends her interests in health and evolution, tracking mutations in pathogens and their human hosts.

Your career started with a stumble, didn’t it?

I flunked my qualifying exam in the early phase of my Ph.D. The professors said I had no business in science. But I embrace failure. It sharpens your focus…

Eyjafjallajökull, Iceland

This is a steam cloud that formed as the lava from the recent volcanic eruption in Iceland flows into steep canyons partly filled with deep snow and ice. Occasional explosions also occur as steam gets trapped under hardened lava, and can make things pretty hairy for anyone nearby, as the Icelandic photographer Örvar Atli Þorgeirsson found out first hand as he and friends spent 10 hours on the scene.

Þorgeirsson: “To photograph a volcano has always been a dream. The first part of this eruption was a dream come true. The small scale of the first eruption allowed me to get very close to the crater and the lava flow. Even if it was small, being this close to it was thrilling. The heat, the loud noise, the smell, the contrast between the ice and fire was an experience I will never forget.”

Photograph by Örvar Atli Þorgeirsson

This sounds about right.

I like the cartoon, though I’m not a huge fan of Scott Adams himself; his creationist/Intelligent Design leanings make that difficult. Some people say he’s a gadfly, just trying to get people to think. But I’ve never found his arguments persuasive, and they’re generally just repetitions of some of the more basic (and easily debunked) ID claims. PZ Myers has dealt with him any number of times, and a web search will yield all sorts of interesting results.

Life is full of such conflicts; Jenny McCarthy is actually very funny when she’s not trying to infect the world with measles, Oprah does a lot of actual good work in contrast to her support of McCarthy, and Fred Phelps… no, my mistake. Phelps is just 100% awful.

Tip o’ the tie tip to my brother, Sid.

The absence of the paternal penis.

“Girls’ experiences of object loss, in conjunction with female anatomical structure, may lend themselves to a particular genital anxiety regarding openness and emptiness. The relational void in giving up the mother as love object may lead to an internal self-representation of a “hole” to be filled, much as the mouth sucks the pacifier in the absence of the nipple. This image may then be extended to the genital representation. In turning to the father, a girl may find that she lacks a relationship with him in the relational space opened up by the loss of the mother; the penis is symbolically withheld from her in the father’s relational distance. This lack of sexual and relational gratification, it is proposed, may be schematized by a female as her body being empty of something. The father’s absence–the absence of the paternal penis–may lead to an absence of the mental representation of the vagina and to an inhibition of the role the vagina then plays for a woman in sexual desire. Vaginal repression may serve to disguise object hunger that might otherwise be experienced as vaginal longing. An abbreviated clinical vignette, revolving around a masturbatory fantasy, is offered in partial illustration of the thesis.”

Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Mu

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I just watched the series opener for the fifth season of Doctor Who, with the new guy, Matt Smith. No spoiler warnings needed here, because I won’t give away anything. I’ll just say…

That.

Freaking.

Rocked.


I wasn’t sure if Smith could fill David Tennant’s shoes, but now I think he can. Whatever it takes to play The Doctor, whatever intangible quality an actor needs, Smith has it. This looks like it’ll be a very, very good series, especially with Steven Moffat at the helm. Oh yes.

And near the end, there is an excellent moment (one I knew was coming but still got to me) that hands the series over to Smith. Mr. Moffat, my hat’s off to you. Well done, sir.

So, when you get a chance, watch it. BBC America premiers it tomorrow, Saturday April 17.

In the meantime, this mathematical analysis of the ages of the actors playing The Doctor may amuse you.

Tip o’ the Sonic Screwdriver to Derek Colanduno for the regression link! And my thanks to Devin Johnson, BBC Senior Publicity Manager, for sending me the DVD screener.

Apple has asked the political cartoonist Mark Fiore to resubmit an application for his iPhone app “NewsToons” after a controversy erupted over the company’s earlier decision to reject the app. The initial rejection suggested that Apple put political satire in the same unacceptable category as pornography.

Earlier this month, Fiore created history by becoming the first online-only cartoonist to win a Pulitzer for his editorial cartooning on SFGate–the San Francisco Chronicle’s news Web site. While the cartoonist impressed the Pulitzer jury sufficiently to grab journalism’s highest award, his work apparently didn’t charm the gatekeepers at Apple’s app store.

In December, they rejected Fiore’s bid to offer iPhone users the NewsToons app, an app based on his editorial works. In its rejection letter, Apple said Fiore’s satirical work “ridicules public figures” and was in violation of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement, which bars any apps whose content that in “Apple’s reasonable judgment may be found objectionable, for example, materials that may be considered obscene, pornographic, or defamatory,” reports the Neiman Journalism Lab.

The Lab added:

Apple attached screenshots of the offending material, including an image depicting the White House gate crashers interrupting an Obama speech. Two other grabs include images referencing torture, Balloon Boy, and various political issues.

However, Fiore is not the first cartoonist to be initially shunned by the app store, which seems to take a dim view of political cartoons. It initially turned down cartoonist Daryl Cagle’s application, as well as an app called Bobble Rep that used political caricatures by Tom Richmond. Both these apps were later accepted.

Now, thanks to the online furor over Fiore’s rejection, Apple seems to have had a change of heart.

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Image: Mark Fiore/SFGate

A team of French scientists have proposed that when it comes to multi-tasking, our brains can handle only so much. In a new study, published in Science, scientists Sylvain Charron and Etienne Koechlin found that while the brain can easily divide its attention between two tasks, a third task will begin to slow it down–suggesting there is an upper limit to our multi-tasking abilities.

The scientists asked volunteers to do two complicated matching tasks simultaneously. With two tasks to deal with, the brain’s frontal lobes swung into action, working together to get the job done. The left side of the brain picked up one assignment while the right managed the other. But when scientists threw a third task into the mix, the brain began to fumble, with the volunteers making mistakes and slowing down, leading Koechlin to suggest that our frontal lobes “can’t maintain more than two tasks.”

To find out more about how the brain maxes out on multi-tasking and what this means for people who drink coffee and text while driving, head to Not Exactly Rocket Science’s for Ed Yong’s post: When multi-tasking, each half of the brain focuses on different goals.

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Image: Etienne Koechlin

Response to both Obama’s space policy and my blog post about it were pretty much as I expected. Haters, lovers, people who didn’t actually read what I wrote or listened to what Obama actually said, some thoughtful, some knee jerk. The usual.

But my favorite is from Congressman Todd Akin (R-MO), who, in a press release, posted this:

The decision by the Obama administration to gut NASA’s manned flight program does more than jeopardize the long term goals of solar system exploration, the cancellation of the space shuttles replacement will effectively leave the United States reliant upon the Soviet Union to grant us access to low earth orbit. As a member of the Armed Services Committee I am very concerned with that possibility, and as an American I am disappointed by the prospect.

It doesn’t surprise me that someone would erroneously say that Obama is gutting the manned space flight program, when we know he isn’t and when he may in fact be saving it. It doesn’t surprise me that people are forgetting that private industry is poised to take us into low Earth orbit before Constellation could have, though it’s odd for a “fiscally conservative” Republican Congressman — and therefore, one assume, pro-business — to forget such a thing.

It also doesn’t surprise me that someone would blame Obama about us having to rely on foreign partners for access to space after the Shuttle retires, and it certainly doesn’t surprise me that a Republican Congressman would say such a thing, even though this necessity came about because of President Bush’s decision to retire the Shuttle and not have a replacement ready for at least five years after.

But what I do find really interesting is that a Congressman on the Armed Services Committee would refer to Russia as “the Soviet Union”.

Pssst! Congressman Akin: it’s the 21st century. It stopped being the USSR in 1991. I guess it’s hard to keep up with such things if you can’t see Russia from your state, though.

[Update (14:30 MT): Apparently, Congressman Akin’s release has been updated, replacing “Soviet Union” with “Russian Federation”. My congratulations and thanks to his team. Now, if they could fix the other egregiously wrong things he said in that release, we’ll be copacetic.]

Tip o’ the Cossack hat to ScottW.

If past is prelude, then the volcanic eruption in Iceland whose plume of ash has grounded almost 300 flights across Europe may not only affect air travel in the coming days, it may also have a lingering impact on Europe’s weather. Experts are looking back to the aftereffects of a previous eruption–when the Laki volcano in Southern Iceland exploded more than 200 years ago. That explosion had catastrophic consequences for weather, agriculture and transport across the northern hemisphere – and helped trigger the French revolution [The Guardian].

The Laki volcanic fissure erupted over a eight month period between June 1783 and February 1784. Within Iceland, the lava and poisonous clouds of gas ushered in a time known as the “Mist Hardships”: farmland was ruined, livestock died in vast numbers, and the resultant famine killed almost a quarter of the population.

The eruption’s impact wasn’t confined to Iceland alone. Dust and sulfur particles thrown up by the explosion were carried as a haze across Northern Europe, clouding the skies in Norway, the Netherlands, the British Isles, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. In conjunction with another volcanic eruption and an unusually strong El Nino weather pattern, the Laki eruption is thought to have contributed to extreme weather across Europe for the next several years.

Describing the summer of 1783 in his classic Natural History of Selborne, British naturalist Gilbert White wrote it was  “an amazing and portentous one … the peculiar haze, or smokey fog, that prevailed for many weeks in this island, and in every part of Europe, and even beyond its limits, was a most extraordinary appearance, unlike anything known within the memory of man” [The Guardian]. Gilbert wrote that the haze blanked out the sun at midday, that it was “particularly lurid and blood-colored at rising and setting,” and that the heat was so intense that “butcher’s meat could hardly be eaten on the same day after it was killed.” This bizarre summer was followed by an usually harsh winter, historians say. Environmental historians have also pointed to the disruption caused to the economies of northern Europe, where food poverty was a major factor in the build-up to the French revolution of 1789 [The Guardian].

Experts observing this week’s volcanic eruption at Eyjafjallajökull (pronounced AY-ya-fyat-la-yo-kult) say that while the scale of crisis may not be the same, continued eruptions at the spot could cool temperatures in Northern Europe. Richard Wunderman, a volcanologist with the Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program said the volcanic plume contains a lot of sulfur “that can become an aerosol up there that hangs around a long time reflecting sunlight” [The New York Times], creating a regional “volcano weather” effect.

But a bigger concern lurks nearby. Just a few kilometers to the east of the erupting vent is a much bigger and potentially more dangerous volcano called Katla. In the past, when Eyjafjallajökull erupted, Katla did too. So scientists are closely monitoring Katla to see if it, too, might go [Science News].

The one bright spot in the current explosion, say scientists, is that there may be enough aerosols in the atmosphere to cause brilliant red sunsets across Europe.

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Image: NASA/MODIS Rapid Response Team

Apparently, the first meteorite from the fireball over Wisconsin has been found: a pair of brothers discovered a small chunk of the bright meteor that burned up over the midwest skies Wednesday night.

It certainly looks like a meteorite (click to embiggen); the outer blackened fusion crust is from passing through the air, and the interior has the gray, grainy structure in common chondrites. The cube is one centimeter in size and is used in photos like this to give scale.

Pretty cool. There may be thousands of such meteorites lying on the ground in Wisconsin right now; the meteoroid itself was probably a meter or so in size and weighted about a ton. Meteorite hunters are already there searching, and I hope that most of the fallen rocks will be sent to researchers for analysis.

Falls like this are very important scientifically. Having a lot of eyewitnesses means the path and therefore the orbit of the rock can be ascertained, and many times such meteoroids are part of a family of such objects; all on related orbits and probably from the same parent body. When we get samples of the meteorites that means we have samples of an asteroid!

So if you live in that area and find something suspicious, take photographs of it where it is, then carefully put it in a baggie or box (use gloves if you can so you minimize contamination) and contact a local University. The vast majority of rocks found this way aren’t meteorites (we call ‘em meteorwrongs, haha) but it’s worth making sure.

Image: Terry Boudreaux, submitted to Rocks From Space by Michael Farmer.

The qualities that set a great athlete apart from the rest of us lie not just in the muscles and the lungs but also between the ears. That’s because athletes need to make complicated decisions in a flash. One of the most spectacular examples of the athletic brain operating at top speed came in 2001, when the Yankees were in an American League playoff game with the Oakland Athletics. Shortstop Derek Jeter managed to grab an errant throw coming in from right field and then gently tossed the ball to catcher Jorge Posada, who tagged the base runner at home plate. Jeter’s quick decision saved the game—and the series—for the Yankees. To make the play, Jeter had to master both conscious decisions, such as whether to intercept the throw, and unconscious ones. These are the kinds of unthinking thoughts he must make in every second of every game: how much weight to put on a foot, how fast to rotate his wrist as he releases a ball, and so on. In recent years neuroscientists have begun to catalog some fascinating differences between average brains and the brains of great athletes. By understanding what goes on in athletic heads, researchers hope to understand more about the workings of all brains—those of sports legends and couch potatoes alike…

In the April issue of Discover, I take a look at the mind of the athlete. We may think of sports as a matter of muscle, but the brain is vital as well. And in becoming great athletes, people develop unusual brains. This transformation only makes sense–any intense training can change the brain, whether it’s practicing the piano or learning Mandarin. But for some reason, the idea that being a great athlete is, in part, a cerebral exercise still comes as a surprise. In fact, according to this ESPN take on my column, it’s downright disappointing.

[Image: Wikipedia]

The cargo from a Roman ship sunk off the coast of Sardinia more than 2,000 years ago will finally be put to use–it will become a shield for a neutrino detector. In Italy, 120 lead bricks recovered from the shipwreck will soon be melted to make a protective shield for Italy’s new neutrino detector, CUORE (Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events).

The ancient lead, which is useful because it has lost almost all traces of its natural radioactivity, has been transferred from a museum in Sardinia to the national particle physics laboratory at Gran Sasso. After spending two millennia on the seabed, the lead bricks will now be used in an experiment that will take place beneath 4,500 feet of rock.

Nature News writes:

Once destined to become water pipes, coins or ammunition for Roman soldiers’ slingshots, the metal will instead form part of a cutting-edge experiment to nail down the mass of neutrinos.

From slingshots to particle physics–we humans have come a long way in 2,000 years.

CUORE is due to begin operations next year and will be used to investigate neutrinos, particles that have no electric charge and were long thought to have no mass; recent research has proven that the puzzling particles do have mass, but physicists still haven’t been able to determine how much. Scientists at CUORE hope to finally estimate the neutrinos’ mass by watching as atomic nuclei shed particles through radioactive decay. In order to watch this process, the researchers need to shield their experiment from all external radioactivity.

To create this shield, scientists need lead. But freshly mined lead is slightly radioactive and contains an unstable isotope. This isotope, lead-210, gradually decays into more stable isotopes after it’s extracted from the ground; its concentration halves every 22 years. That’s why physicists are so interested in old lead. As CUORE scientist Ettore Fiorini told Nature:

“It is not unusual for particle physicists to go hunting for low-radioactivity lead,” he says. “Metal extracted from roofs in antique churches or from keels of wrecked ships has often been used in experiments.”

So when the Roman shipwreck was discovered in 1988 and was found to be full of lead ingots, scientists were thrilled–they would have access to lead whose radioactivity had substantially diminished over the centuries, and the quantity would allow them to fashion a shield more than an inch thick.

A deal was worked out with the Italian museum and a proportion of the ingots were acquired to make the shield. Before the ingots are melted down, their inscriptions, which represent the trademarks of the firms that extracted and traded the lead, will be removed and sent back to the museum for preservation.

Still, Donatella Salvi, an archeologist at the Sardinian museum, admits that parting with the ingots has been “painful.” Nature News writes:

The ones given to [Italy’s National Institute of Nuclear Physics] INFN are the worst-preserved, but are still of exceptional historical value. However, she says she is happy with the collaboration, because physicists are performing important analyses on the lead.

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Images: INFN/Cagliari Archeological Superintendence

Here’s a wonderfully disturbing new species of leech that you don’t want to find up your nose. For background, check out my profile of its discoverer, Mark Siddall, in the New York Times.

Lovely tribute in the Times to the Great Bear of Locktown.