Author: Discover Main Feed

In my talks, I often discuss the different groups who came to meet with me when I worked on Capitol Hill with regard to who was most effective. On science related issues, the general breakdown fell into two categories (with exceptions): Scientists from universities or NGO’s would usually show up in my office with a briefing binder as thick as a phone book. There would be a lot of charts, p-values, figures, and complicated concepts. Most didn’t talk to me, but at me. and the take home message would be different than that of the other scientists I met the previous hour on the same subject. Special interest groups were frequently very well organized. They spoke with a common theme and brought articulate speakers. Rather than stop in our office, they usually hosted large and well attended briefings, supplying easy to digest hardcover books with titles like ‘climate change conspiracy.’ Typically they were funny and made references to Michael Crichton’s science fiction. Perhaps most importantly, they provided a free boxed lunches and held long Q&As to engage the audience. Both types introduced themselves as the “honest broker” of scientific information, but the latter often made the stronger impression with staffers. Now removed from …

In 1978, Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was walking across Waterloo Bridge in London when he felt a sharp stinging pain in his leg. A passer-by had jabbed him with the tip of an umbrella and, having apologised, the two parted ways. Three days later, Markov was dead. The umbrella had fired a small poisoned pellet into his leg, turning Markov into the most famous victim of one of the world’s deadliest poisons – ricin.

Ricin is a great example to cite to people who think that “natural” equates to “healthy”. It’s a protein that comes from the castor bean, which is easy to grow, used in a wide variety of products, and delivers large amounts of its lethal chemical payload. One milligram can be lethal, and there is no known antidote. All of these qualities make it a potential bioterror weapon, and they have galvanised the quest for an antidote. That quest has just taken a big step forward, for Bahne Stechmann at the Curie Institute has discovered the first small molecule that protects mice against ricin.

Stechmann’s drug, known as Retro-2, not only saves mice from death by ricin, it also defends them against a related class of poisons called Shiga-like toxins. These are produced by disease-causing strains of the gut bacterium Escherichia coli and while less toxic than ricin, they can also be fatal. So Stechmann’s new discovery is a two-for-one defensive deal.

Both ricin and Shiga-like toxins have similar structures. One half of each protein – the A subunit – does the killing. It irreversibly breaks ribosomes, the factories that cells use to produce new proteins. A single ricin protein can knock out 1,500 of these factories every minute and without the ability to create new proteins, our cells perish. But a weapon is useless if it can’t be fired in the right place.

Getting the A subunit into range of the ribosomes is the job of the other half of the protein – the B subunit. It’s a backstage pass that sticks to docking molecules on the surface of our cells and allows the entire protein to be smuggled inside. Once there, it gets shuttled from one structure to another until it reaches the endoplasmic reticulum, where ribosomes live. If you block this chain of transport, you neutralise ricin and Shiga-like toxins; after all, the proteins cannot destroy what they cannot reach. And that’s exactly what Stechmann’s team has managed to do.

Stechmann, working with a large team of French scientists, scoured a library of over 16,000 potential drugs for any candidates that could protect cells from ricin. Modern technology allowed him to simultaneously test all of these chemicals on ricin-treated cells. To see if they worked, Stechmann gave the cells a radioactive amino acid; those that managed to incorporate this gift into new proteins were clearly shrugging off ricin’s ribosome-killing efforts.

The result of this “high-throughput screening” is the beautiful image below. The green band at the bottom is a baseline of death – it represents the no-survivor aftermath when human cells meet ricin. The yellow band at the top consist of control cells that are all still alive – that’s what you’d ideally be aiming for in terms of an antidote. The red dots represent what happens when the cells were treated with each of the 16,000 drugs. The vast majority are hovering at the green level, because most of the chemicals didn’t work. But you can clearly see that at least six of the drugs had a positive effect – these red dots stand out from the crowd, flirting with survival.

Stechmann decided to pursue two of these molecular guardians, Retro-1 and Retro-2 – they had the winning combo of protection against ricin and few side effects of their own. And to top it all off, the compounds worked against Shiga-like toxins too. In laboratory cells, these drugs only partially protected against death by ricin but, surprisingly, Retro-2 actually did much better when it was actually tested in mice. Even when Stechmann used a dose of ricin that would normally kill 90% of mice within three weeks, small doses of Retro-2 managed to save half the animals and larger doses protected all of them.

Neither Retro-1 nor Retro-2 works by actually affecting the toxins themselves; instead, they just stop them from reaching their destination. By acting on the host rather than the invader, they could work against many other threats and it should be harder to evolve resistance against them. For now, it’s not clear how exactly the two drugs prevent ricin and Shiga-like toxins from reaching their killing grounds. This is the big question that needs to be answered; doing so will allow scientists to develop Retro-2 into an even more effective anti-ricin drug.

Reference: Cell http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2010.01.043

More on new drugs:

• Rapamycin – the Easter Island drug that extends lifespan of old mice
• Drug improves endurance without need for exercise
• Drugs and stimulating environments reverse memory loss in brain-damaged mice
• Drugs that work against each other could fight resistant bacteria
• Sneaking medicines past the brain’s defences
• Neutralising anthrax by gumming up a molecular lock

It was a green idea that boogied straight off the dance floor and onto the city streets. Residents in the French city of Toulouse are testing out a special stretch of pavement in the city center that produces energy every time someone walks across it.

The pavement is embedded with special sensors that convert energy from motion into electricity. It’s an idea that was first implemented in a Rotterdam nightclub by the Dutch company Sustainable Dance Club (SDC), where the company installed special modular dance floors that harvested the dancers’ energy.

City authorities in Toulouse hope to replicate that system in the city center; as people walk across the special pavement, they’ll help generate between 50 and 60 watts of electricity. Energy captured during the day would be stored in a battery that could be used to power a nearby street lamp at night.

French authorities are powering ahead with the testing despite concerns about the system’s high cost, and have already overcome several problems along the way. The Guardian reports:

The prototype of the modules, said [City deputy mayor Alexandre] Marciel, was unsuitable for street use as “at that stage they only worked if you jumped on them like a kangaroo. So a model was developed on which you can walk normally and still produce enough energy to power the lights,” he said.

Meanwhile, in Sweden, experts have figured out a way to harness body heat from morning commuters at the busy Stockholm station and transfer it to the heating system of a nearby building. It’s a system that is already in use at the Mall of America in Minneapolis, but the Swedes have worked out a way to move the heat between buildings.

The station is toasty in the morning as more than 250,000 Swedes rush about getting to work; the station’s ventilation system traps their body heat, which is then used to warm water in underground tanks. That water is then pumped through pipes to a nearby 13-story building about 100 yards away and used to heat that building. In the long run, experts hope to lower energy costs in the new office building by at least 20 percent each year, all for an initial investment of just $30,000, writes Time magazine.

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Image: SDC

Yesterday I pointed to a new paper, Plasmodium vivax clinical malaria is commonly observed in Duffy-negative Malagasy people. P. vivax is the least virulent of the malaria inducing pathogens, and it is presumably responsible for the fact that the Duffy antigen locus is one of the more ancestrally informative ones in the human genome. In most of Eurasia the the Duffy negative null allele* is present at very low frequencies, less than 5%, and often simply absent. In contrast, in Sub-Saharan Africa the Duffy negative variant reaches frequencies as high as 95% in West Africa, and and 90% in many other regions. In North Africa and the Middle East the frequencies are intermediate, likely due to the necessity for local adaptation to malaria in many regions, and the historical introduction of the Duffy negative allele via the slave trade.

Before genomics looking at the Duffy locus was one simple way that geneticists ascertained the proportion of white admixture in the African American population. The Duffy negative allele was nearly absent in Europeans, and present in frequencies of ~95% in West Africa. Therefore, the ~70% frequency in African Americans indicates what we know from other sources, a substantial minority European contribution to their ancestry. The people of Madagascar are similar insofar as they are a byproduct of admixture between African and non-African populations. The source of the non-African ancestry is rather easy to determine, unlike most African countries Madagascar has one language, Malagasy, and it is of the Bartio family of languages. Aside from Malagasy the Barito languages are spoke only in a small region of southern Borneo in Indonesia. There are other aspects of the Malagasy culture which make their Southeast Asian provenance clear. The photo above is of Andry Rajoelina, the current President of Madagascar. Two aspects of his visage are salient, his youth (he used to be a disk jockey!), and the fact that his features do not seem typical Sub-Saharan African. Many of the leaders of Madagascar, including the former royal family, are from the highlands where Asiatic features and folkways are more prevalent.

But there is also a clear African component to the Malagasy, more obvious among coastal populations, but also possibly dominant in a genetic sense in terms of proportion to the Asian according to research using uniparental markers. An analysis of Y lineage Fst genetic distances suggests that the Malagasy are, on the whole, somewhat closer to East Africans than to people from Borneo. I stipulate on the whole because as implied above there seems to be regional variation, which Southeast Asian ancestry and culture least hybridized with a Sub-Saharan African in the central highlands, likely for ecological reasons.

If the Duffy negative allele was viewed purely as a neutral locus, and so ancestrally informative, one would assume that the Malagasy were mostly African. In the figure to the left the red tinted portions represent Duffy negative proportions, the green Duffy positive, and the darker shade P. vivax positivity. The green star indicates a site where P. vivax positivity was only found among the Duffy positive, while at the sites with red stars it was found among both antigen state groups. As you can see at none of the sites was the Duffy positive allele modal, and at Andapa the frequency of Duffy negative was typical of much of Sub-Saharan Africa. In the total data set 72% of the individuals were Duffy negative. Going by the previous cited work this would underestimate Asian ancestry, which seems likely to be near parity, if not quite.

Two points come to mind:

1) It seems clear that the Duffy locus is not neutral. It is subject to natural selection, as even though the malaria caused by P. vivax is relatively mild, it t does reduce fitness. Natural selection should result in an increase in frequency of the negative allele in regions where malaria caused by P. vivax is endemic. In the American South malaria was not as extreme of a problem, nor does Duffy negative status have a strong side effect (e.g., sickle cell), so it was a neutral locus and appropriate to inform ancestry.

2) Modern African populations may not be an accurate representation of the allele frequencies of Duffy in the ancestral groups which contributed to the ancestry of the Malagasy. More plainly, the Africans who intermarried with the Barito speakers may have had much higher frequencies of Duffy positive alleles because natural selection had not proceeded so that the null allele was driven to near fixation.

To assess the plausibility of #2, one needs to know how the Malagasy, or more accurately, the speakers of the Barito language which became Malagasy, got where they are. Unfortunately, no one really knows, and the hypotheses are controversial because of their speculative nature. It seems likely that the Southeast Asian mariners initially arrived in the western Indian ocean region ~2,000 years ago, but widespread settlement of Madagascar’s interior may not have been occurring until ~1,000 years ago. By the 13th century there was a large Muslim city in the north of Madagascar integrated into the Indian ocean trade network, so Madagascar is on the fringes of written history at that point. The anthropological evidence seems to point to a sojourn on the coast of East Africa by Southeast Asians, as there are aspects of Malagasy culture which seem related to Bantu groups in that area. Additionally, there some genetic data which point to an African contribution on the mtDNA from populations further north on the coast, toward Kenya, and Y DNA which suggests a connection with the adjacent region of the continent in Mozambique. A model of how this could occur is that the initial colonists in East Africa picked up local wives along the northern coast, and eventually resettled in Madagascar. After this settlement there were periodic migration of Africans from nearby regions, either voluntary or forced through slavery, which added the later diversity. The fact that this component is male-biased would point to slavery of the sort practiced in the New World, whereby Africans were forced to work in agriculture and male robustness was prized (this is in contrast with much of the Middle East, where female African domestic servants were the primary driver of slavery).

One of the mysterious aspects of the arrival of the Malagasy is that there aren’t records by the literate polities which fringed the Indian ocean of their movements. But why should there be? Open ocean traders were generally marginal to these states, who simply extracted rents from the activities of the merchants and migrants. It seems entirely plausible that many populations have been on the move throughout history, their impact in particular regions slowly being ablated by time. There is one aspect of Africa which makes it entirely plausible that the Barito presence would disappear or be marginal: the local populations seem biologically very well adapted to the pathogens on the continent. It is notable for example that the Arab and Persian cultural influence in East Africa never spread inland beyond the Indian ocean littoral. And yet these groups were present on the East African coast from the time of the Romans on. It seems likely to me that Africa is relatively resistant to “back-migration” from Eurasia on ecological grounds. North Africa is part of the Palearctic ecozone, while the highlands of Ethiopia are also ecologically distinct. Both these regions are strongly shaped genetically by populations with Eurasian connections, in the former case predominantly so, but both they are exceptions which prove the rule.

The maps to the left show topography and population density respectively. In Madagascar in the highlands Southeast Asians could transfer wet rice agriculture, and also escape the most baleful influences of African diseases (which would naturally be introduced with African populations). It is also where there is the greatest population density. In contrast the coastal regions are more lightly populated and have more African influence. Like South Africa or the Kenyan highlands I believe that Madagascar was one region of Sub-Saharan Africa which was open to the settlement of outsiders who lacked biological defenses because of its ecology. Granted, it seems to have been unsettled before the Malagasy arrived, but if its pathogen environment was equivalent to that of the mainland I suspect that African genes and culture would have replaced the Malagasy component rather rapidly. The Malagasy are just one of many populations which made some sort of great trek. Most of them disappear, get absorbed or become extinct. But in a few rare cases, such as in that of Iberians in the 16th century, or Polynesians 2,000 years ago, and the Malagasy, these travelers encountered territory which they were able to settle easily. And so we have concrete evidence of their past existence, their present existence. You couldn’t plausibly invent the cultural makeup of Madagascar, because our model of history and human population movement is simplified, and all the outliers and rough edges have been hidden or consciously removed.

Though the highlands of Madagascar allowed the Southeast Asian settlers a refuge for endogenous population growth, which allowed them to perpetuate their culture and leave a stamp on the island, Madagascar is African, and much of the island is clearly suited for malaria. The evolutionary dynamics may be contingent on the peculiarities of the island’s demographic history, but they will still proceed nonetheless. It is noted in these results that though varieties of P. vivax seem to have moved from the Duffy positive to the Duffy negative segment of the population, it is still much more virulent in those who are Duffy positive. There were 15 times as many full blown cases of P. vivax induced malaria (as opposed to positive infection status) among those who were Duffy positive than among those who were negative. Nevertheless, the emergence of strains able to infect Duffy negative blood cells opens up the possibility for more virulent strains in the future which could result in many more cases of full blown malaria within this population.

Let me jump to the conclusion:

Our observations in Madagascar showing conclusive evidence that P. vivax is capable of causing blood-stage infection and disease in Duffy-negative people illustrate that in some conditions P. vivax exhibits a capacity for infecting human erythrocytes without the Duffy antigen. The data assembled in this study suggest that conditions needed to clear the barrier of Duffy negativity may include an optimal human admixture. In Madagascar with significant numbers of Duffy-positive people and full susceptibility of hepatocytes in Duffy negatives, P. vivax may have sufficient exposure to Duffynegative erythrocytes, allowing more opportunities for de novo selection or optimization of an otherwise cryptic invasion pathway that nevertheless seems less efficient than the Duffy-dependent pathway.

There are several issues that I’ve glossed over in this paper, and one of them is that there are other populations which have a mix of negative and positive individuals. Implicitly the American South is one. But malaria is not endemic in most of the South. But in Brazil there is a similar racial mixture, and its climate is conducive to tropical diseases. It seems there are issues with detecting the P. vivax pathogen within blood cells, and so earlier studies as to the possibility of the infection of those who were Duffy negative were often muddled or inconclusive. In this study they established the existence of this group rather clearly, but is it due to the peculiarities of Madagascar’s population mixture and history? True, Brazil also has an admixed population whose Duffy allele frequencies are interchangeable with that of Madagascar, but Brazil has been settled for only the past ~300 years or so, with much of the population being of more recent origin (Brazil had the highest slave attrition rate on the American mainland, which explains the African nature of Afro-Brazilian culture. Many of the slaves were from Africa, or first generation, at emancipation). A lower bound for Madagascar is ~1,000 years, and the coexistence of Barito and African populations is likely closer to ~2,000 years. So the existence of P. vivax lines which can penetrate the negative allele population may be a function of the longer time given to the emergence of adaptive strategies.

I suspect the fact that there is a component of what ecologists term “patchiness” in the settlement patterns of various populations and ecology in Madagascar might have aided in the persistence of the Duffy positive allele. It seems that in much of the rest of Africa once agriculture became common and the conditions for the mosquito which carries P. vivax improved the Duffy negative allele swept to fixation. At this point the P. vivax infection rates were so low that natural selection became less of an issue (the extant variation was reduced, and only a small proportion of the population would have been subject to selection). It is on marginal areas where fixation did not occur that you’d have the diversity which might allow for the emergence of different P. vivax lineages. Another place to look besides Madagascar would be the margins of Ethiopia, as well as South Africa, where Bantu farmers came up against a very different ecologies and populations which they could not assimilate, or did so only partly.

* Duffy is really the the antigen itself, so “Duffy negative” means lacking the antigen. But I’m going to use the shorthand Duffy negative to point to the alleles which confer this state, which have names such as FY*A and FY*B. The gene itself is DARC.

Citation: Ménard D, Barnadas C, Bouchier C, Henry-Halldin C, Gray LR, Ratsimbasoa A, Thonier V, Carod JF, Domarle O, Colin Y, Bertrand O, Picot J, King CL, Grimberg BT, Mercereau-Puijalon O, & Zimmerman PA (2010). Plasmodium vivax clinical malaria is commonly observed in Duffy-negative Malagasy people. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 107 (13), 5967-71 PMID: 20231434

Image credit: BBC, Wikipedia

Don’t be fooled by the name—Iceland is one of the hottest hotspots in the world, geologically speaking. The island’s volcanic legacy reared its head again yesterday as a massive eruption by a volcano beneath a glacier caused the evacuation of hundreds of residents and created ash clouds that delayed flights all around Northern Europe.

The volcano, called Eyjafjallajokull, rumbled last month, but that was nothing like this. “This is a very much more violent eruption, because it’s interacting with ice and water,” said Andy Russell, an expert in glacial flooding at the University of Newcastle in northern England. “It becomes much more explosive, instead of a nice lava flow oozing out of the ground” [AP]. The flood caused by melted glacial ice caused the evacuation about 800 people. Waters threatened to spill over onto Highway 1, Iceland’s main highway that makes a circuit around the island. But some quick digging by construction crews altered the course of the water.

The huge cloud of ash meandered to the south and east toward the United Kingdom, and probably will move over mainland Europe before it finally dissipates. As a precaution, yesterday British aviation authorities totally closed the nation’s airspace. The move effectively grounded all flights in Britain from 11 a.m. local time and affected an estimated 6,000 flights that use British airspace every day, aviation experts said. Oddly, for travelers, the closing was announced under clear blue skies [The New York Times]. The altitude of the ash cloud made it difficult to see from the ground.

The main aviation risk posed by the ash cloud wasn’t that it would interfere with visibility, experts say, but rather that the fine silicate particles can seriously damage airplane engines. The particles can clog ventilation holes, causing the jet engines to overheat. Says vulcanologist David Rothery: “Air traffic restrictions have very properly been applied…. If volcanic ash particles are ingested into a jet engine, they accumulate and clog the engines with molten glass” [BBC News].

Despite the flight cancellations, scientists tried to assure people in Britain that the ash wasn’t heavy enough to be a public health concern. In fact, it’s nothing compared to the worst eruptions to happen in Iceland, according to vulcanologist Dougal Jerram. “One of the most influential ever eruptions was the 1783-1784 event at Laki in Iceland when an estimated 120 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide were emitted, approximately equivalent to three times the total annual European industrial output in 2006. This outpouring of sulphur dioxide during unusual weather conditions caused a thick haze to spread across Western Europe, resulting in many thousands of deaths throughout 1783 and the winter of 1784″ [BBC News].

The danger this time around is that Eyjafjallajokull will trigger an eruption of its more powerful neighbor, Katla. That happened back in 1821.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons / Chris 73; USGS

Last year I linked to Crispian Jago’s brilliant Skeptic Trump playing cards, featuring a few of skepticism’s stars. He included me in that constellation… but apparently was determined to make up for it by updating the cards and implying I have gained weight, presumably all in my mandible:

Hmph. I think Rebecca faired better, though apparently she ironically has the mumps (I blame Jenny McCarthy). To be fair, though, he nailed Ben Goldacre’s hair and Brian Cox’s teeth. And, I’ll admit: it’s not bad company for a chipmunk.

In American society the connection between religion and belief in god(s) is very close. This of course is not a universal. In Indian and Chinese religion there isn’t a necessary connection, though as a matter of operational reality most religious adherents in India and China do seem to believe in god. In the Abrahamic tradition the issue seems clear cut, but both Judaism and Islam are strongly orthopraxic, and somewhat less fixed on theological orthodoxy, so there is perhaps more wiggle room than one might think. Additionally, Jews are a nation, an ethnicity, as well as a people, and so those who are not particularly religious observant or believers in the God of Abraham, the God Isaac and the God of Jacob, may still identify with Judaism as their religion. The ‘cultural’ aspect of religion has even crept into Christianity, which was originally rather particular as to the content of one’s beliefs. In much of Europe the proportion of self-identified Christians exceeds the proportion of those who avow Christian theism.

In the comment below Amos Zeeberg guesses that many Jewish scientists are also atheists. This seems plausible, and ERV confirms it thanks to Amazon search, 75% of self-identified eminent Jewish scientists are atheists in Elaine Ecklund’s data set. And this tendency may not be limited to Jewish scientists, consider Freeman Dyson, a self-identified Protestant who admits to not confessing beliefs which one would expect from a Protestant.

I wanted to dig deeper. So again, the GSS. I wanted to look at the variable GOD and see how intelligence and education affected it across various religious categories. God has six responses:

– Don’t believe
– No way to find out
– Believe sometimes
– Believe, but doubts
– Know God exists

I clustered the first three into the category “non-theists,” and the middle two as “theist with doubts.” This is mostly because the sample sizes for religious groups crossed with the GOD variable aren’t that big on the secular end of the range. My question was how response on GOD related to intelligence controlled for religion and denomination. For religion I looked at Protestants, Catholics, Jews and “Nones.” For denominations only the Southern Baptists, United Methodists and Episcopalians had decent sample sizes.

To measure education was easy, and I divided them into two classes, those with at least a college degree and those without; the variable DEGREE. To measure intelligence I used WORDSUM, a vocabulary test. I constructed two categories, “average” and “smart,” the former ranging from 0-7 and the latter 8-10 correct.

I’ve included the results in the whole GSS data set without controlling for religion so you have a reference point. The rows add up to 100%. Additionally, if the numbers are bold that means that that point is outside of the 95% interval of its equivalent in the other category. For example, for the general population there’s a difference in proportion between non-theists between the smart and average whereby the 95% interval still does not overlap. Not so with theists with doubts.

		Non-theist	Theist with doubts	Know God exists
General Population	Average	12.4	20.6	67
	Smart	23.9	23.1	53
	Non-college	12.9	19.8	67.3
	College	24.2	23.8	52
Protestants	Average	6.2	17.5	76.4
	Smart	12.9	23.3	63.7
	Non-college	7	16.8	76.3
	College	12.7	24	63.3
Catholics	Average	8.7	26.5	64.8
	Smart	10.2	27	62.8
	Non-college	8.5	25.3	66.1
	College	10.9	29.6	59.5
Jews	Average	19.7	34.6	45.6
	Smart	44	34.1	21.8
	Non-college	18.8	31.5	49.7
	College	45.6	32.2	23.3
None	Average	49.5	23.4	27.1
	Smart	72.6	14.9	12.6
	Non-college	50.8	22.5	26.7
	College	75.8	14	10.2
Southern Baptist	Average	4.2	12.1	83.7
	Smart	5.5	15.9	78.6
	Non-college	3.4	11.8	84.8
	College	3.4	15.5	81.2
United Methodist	Average	9.5	25.6	64.9
	Smart	13.2	32.6	54.2
	Non-college	10.5	24.1	65.4
	College	13.7	30	56.3
Episcopalian	Average	7.3	22.9	69.7
	Smart	19.3	34.2	46.3
	Non-college	10	34.1	55.8
	College	18.6	29.5	51.8

A few notes. Sorry about the small sample sizes for some groups. That’s why seeing a lot of un-bolded numbers. But I do want to observe that for Jews and United Methodists many of the values came very close to being outside of the 95% intervals, and to a lesser extent with Episcopalians as well. Catholics are surprisingly homogeneous in this data set. One caveat is that there’s been a massive defection from the Catholic church since 1990, and the data goes back to 1972. It seems that the more ’secular’ the group the bigger effect that intelligence or education has. This goes for comparing Protestant denominations as well, Southern Baptists are relatively uniform, the Episcopalians less so. This makes sense since Southern Baptists are much more stringent in terms of the beliefs one must espouse, so that there’s an automatic filter. By contrast Episcopalians tend to accept a level of privacy in regards to theology or strength of belief. Interestingly, it is among those who have no religious affiliation that intelligence and education seem to be wear away theism the most.

One question I had was the independent effect of intelligence vs. education. Education may have a socializing effect. So I decided to look at the differences by intelligence controlling for education.

		Non-theist	Theist with doubts	Know God exists
Less than HS	Average	10.5	17.3	72.2
	Smart	17.7	15.1	67.2
High School	Average	11.6	20.3	68.1
	Smart	19.1	23.1	57.8
Some College	Average	9.5	25.9	64.6
	Smart	17.8	24.6	57.6
College	Average	19	25.3	55.7
	Smart	26.7	22.1	51.2
Post-graduate	Average	16.8	17.6	65.6
	Smart	32.8	26	41.2

I want to note that for college graduates the difference between proportions of non-theists between the smart and average came very close non-overlapping on the 95% interval. It looks that even controlling for education intelligence has an independent effect. I’m shocked by the finding for people with post-graduate education, but perhaps there’s some peculiarity about the who go on to receive advanced degrees of some sort but are not particularly bright.

For those of you in Wisconsin, apparently there was a heckuva meteor that lit up the skies there around 10:00 p.m. local time April 14, an hour ago as I write this. WKOW has reports and some great shots of it. It was terrifically bright, and there are reports of sonic booms being heard. Some reports are saying that was the sound of impact, but I doubt it; it’s far more likely to have been from the supersonic passage of the rock through the air.

If you have links, reports, or pictures, feel free to leave a comment. If you have good measurements of it (including where it was on the sky with some precision) then report it to the International Meteor Organization, which can help lead scientists to find meteorites if there are any. It also allows scientists to estimate the orbit of the object, which can help tie it to known objects like asteroids or comets.

I have to add this: I found out about it because an old post of mine about a fireball over Wisconsin in 2007 suddenly was getting a lot of traffic and new comments. Someone must have linked to it (currently I don’t have the stats so I’m not sure who did, but thanks whoever it was!) and people are leaving great reports about it.

Anyway, hopefully folks’ll find this post and leave comments here. Welcome!

“BACKGROUND: The Arts are replete with examples of presaged events of the future. Since a unique glimpse of the 23rd century is afforded by the television series Star Trek, a survey of the toxin-related events as chronicled by the crew of the USS Starship Enterprise may provide insight to prepare toxicologists for the future. METHODS: An investigation of the logs of the Enterprise was undertaken for the years 2266 to 2269 which were part of its first 5-year mission. Internet sites, published databases, and selected recorded episodes from the original Star Trek television series were searched for poisonings or toxin-related incidents. RESULTS: Out of the 79 Star Trek episodes, 28 (35%) involved toxin-related incidents. A total of 31 poisoning incidents were documented with 13 environmental, 9 intentional, 5 unintentional, and 4 homicidal circumstances. Biotoxins (10 incidents) were the most frequently involved toxin followed by neurotoxins (9), radiation (3), cytotoxins (3), temporal toxins (3), acids (2), and phytotoxins (1). Of these cases, 2 involved hazardous materials incidents, 1 was contamination of food, and 3 involved therapeutic misadventures. CONCLUSIONS: Many of the circumstances encountered in poisonings of the future will likely be similar to contemporary reasons, but the nature of the toxins will differ. Clinical toxicologists should prepare for the future by increasing their study of molecular biology, comparative medicine, physics, and history.”

Image: flickr/hunterseakerhk

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When it comes to religion, I’m more interested in scientific and philosophical questions — Does God exist? Can science say anything about the supernatural? — than in sociological or political ones — Is religion good and or evil?, etc. So there was not much temptation to wade in on Pope Benedict’s recent troubles, or the wider issue of sex scandals in the Catholic Church.

Now, happily, that temptation has dipped to zero, since Phil Plait has done such a good job. Read the whole thing, as they say. Roughly, Phil notes that the Pope seems to be responsible for some very bad things; that he should be brought to justice for any wrong-doings; that there is some relevance to concerns of the skeptical community, insofar as the Church invokes supernatural explanations; but finally, that the strategy should not be simply one of proclaiming superiority and tarring religion as evil and demanding heads on plates. Catholics and other believers, whether we disagree with them or not, are human beings who will understandably be upset and troubled at the recent news. We don’t help to convert them to atheism or naturalism or skepticism by shoving the shortcomings of their leaders in their faces in the midst of a crisis; reason and rational discourse should be more our style. It’s a nuanced argument, which means it’s guaranteed to be misunderstood and caricatured, since even God can’t control the natural impulses of the internet.

Let’s be clear: I want religion to vanish. I think that religious beliefs are wrong, and that the world would be a better place if everyone accepted the real world for what it is. And I believe that many of the actions of the Church when it comes to pedophilia certainly deserve the label “evil,” whatever one might think of the people who perpetrated them.

So the question is, how to bring about the rationalist utopia in which people’s actions are based on reason and reflection rather than faith and hierarchy? I agree with Phil’s answers, as I’ve argued in other contexts. One of the primary tenets of a rationalist philosophy should be that we should be especially skeptical about claims that we want to be true. Our personal preferences don’t have any effect on the truth, so we need to guard against confirmation bias and lazy acceptance of ideas that make us happy. One great example is the idea that we’re going to make the world a better and more rational place by telling everyone how much smarter we are than everyone else, and how evil and stupid our enemies are. The Pope’s recent actions, it seems clear, are some combination of evil and stupid. But now is just not the time for patting ourselves on the back. A lot of people have been deeply hurt, directly or indirectly, and we should be able to show just a modicum of restraint. Not giving up or keeping quiet, but picking our spots. After all, we don’t have to win by being obnoxious — we can win by being right.

In 1935, Australia introduced the cane toad to its sugar cane fields to battle beetle infestations–and the ecosystem has never been the same. The toxic toads took a liking to Australia and began spreading through the northeast, killing the native predators like crocodiles, snakes, and lizards that dined on them. A small cat-like marsupial, the quoll, was no exception. In the decades after the toads’ introduction, quoll populations in northern Australia have dipped precipitously. This year, ahead of the toads’ march into the quolls’ last stronghold, the Kimberly region, scientists have found a clever way to save the endangered marsupial: training it to detest the taste of toad so it won’t get poisoned [Los Angeles Times]. And the success of the experiment has suggested a bizarre conservation campaign.

In their research, scientists from the University of Sydney found that other predators like crocodiles and snakes can learn to avoid trouble, because one experience of snacking on a sickening poison toad is usually enough to teach them a lesson. But because the smaller quoll will die from eating a single large toad, it never learns to make that association. So the researchers decided to train the marsupials to avoid the toads using a method known as conditioned taste aversion.

In their experiments, quolls in the lab were fed small dead toads laced with a nausea-inducing drug. The animals would gobble up the toads and then feel mildly sick. After a while, they began to associate sickness with eating the toads and started avoiding them, according to results published in the Journal of Applied Ecology. The scientists speculated that the memory of the stomach-churning snack would stick with the marsupials, just as bad experiences with food can stick with humans for years [Los Angeles Times].

The researchers later released 31 “toad-smart” quolls and 31 “toad-naive” quolls into the wild and soon found that the conditioned female quolls survived nearly twice as long as their unconditioned counterparts and the conditioned male quolls lived five times longer than the clueless ones [Los Angeles Times]. Jonathan Webb, an ecologist at the University of Sydney, who led the study, remarked: “If you can teach a predator that cane toads make you sick, then that predator will leave them alone afterwards. As a result, animals like quolls can survive in the wild even in a toad infested landscape” [Times Online].

The researchers suggest that, if the quoll’s learned aversion to the toads proves to be long-lasting, the next step might be to bring the lessons to toads in the wild–via aerial toad-bombing exercises. Study coauthor Rick Shine says they may want “to refine our delivery methods – for example, perhaps wildlife agencies could aerially deploy ‘toad baits’ ahead of the cane toad invasion front to educate quolls to avoid attacking cane toads before the toads invade” [LiveScience].

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Image: Perth Zoo

They say there’s no such thing as a free lunch, but a hotel in Copenhagen lets you get closer to that goal–it just asks for sweat equity.

The Crowne Plaza Copenhagen Towers wants its guests to hit the gym, pedal on special bikes, and generate power for the hotel to help it reduce its carbon footprint. If a guest generates a certain amount of energy via pedal-power, she’ll be rewarded with a free meal.

The eco-friendly hotel is already a carbon-neutral building that’s cooled and heated by Denmark’s first ground water-based cooling and heating system, and which has a facade covered with high-tech solar panels. And starting next week, The Guardian reports, the 366-room hotel will encourage guests to help out the environment by working on on new electricity-generating exercise bikes:

The bikes have iPhones mounted on the handlebars which monitor how much power is being produced and fed into the mains supply of the hotel. Any guest producing 10 watt hours or more will be rewarded with a free meal.

Getting the free meal appears to be surprisingly easy. According to the hotel’s calculations, pedaling the bike for an hour would produce 100 watt hours–that’s enough power to fire up a 100-watt bulb for an hour. That means that just six minutes would produce the 10 watt hours that would qualify the guest for a free meal.

Some critics have scoffed that a guest who produces 100 watts of power won’t make a dent in the energy consumption of this huge hotel. Supporters counter that the effort that goes into producing 100 watts of power would make people more conscious of how difficult it is to produce energy, with Alex Randall, a spokesman for the Centre for Alternative Technology telling The Guardian:

“Realistically, this isn’t a practical way of generating a useful amount of energy, but I certainly wouldn’t criticize it…. As a lesson, and a means of public engagement, it’s excellent – if you sit someone on a bike, pedaling hard, and show them they are only generating enough to power one light bulb or TV, is makes them appreciate how difficult energy is to produce, and therefore why we should be careful not to waste it.”

The bike-for-energy program is a pilot project due to run for a year. If it’s a hit, the program will be rolled out to all 21 Crowne Plaza hotels in Britain.

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Image:Wikimedia

Not Exactly Pocket Science is a set of shorter write-ups on new stories with, where possible, links to more detailed takes elsewhere. It is meant to complement the usual fare of detailed pieces that are typical for this blog.

Tyrant leech king – a new T.rex found in the nose of a Peruvian girl

Three years ago, a nine-year-old girl was admitted to La Merced hospital in Peru with a headache that had lasted for two weeks and a strange “sliding sensation” in her nose. Her parents quickly discovered the source of the problem – a sizeable black worm lodged up her right nostril. They quickly sought medical help and it came in the form of Dr Renzo Arauco-Brown, who “with some effort” removed a seven-centimetre leech from the girl’s nose. Brown sent the animal to leech guru Mark Siddall from the American Museum of Natural History, who immediately recognised it as a new species. Uniquely among leeches, the bloodsucker had a single jaw (most have three) but it was lined with eight enormous sharp teeth. For this reason, the Siddall gave it the fanciful name of Tyrannobdella rex, or “tyrant leech king”. A new T.rex had arrived.

It turns out that T.rex has a history of feeding on humans. After describing the new species, Siddall found two other specimens. Both had been removed from the nostrils of young boys in 1997. Like the most recent case, these children had also been bathing in local lakes and streams, which is almost certainly how they picked up their tyrant vampire.

While most leeches are found on the skin, Tyrannobdella is a member of the praobdellid group, which have a disturbing propensity for entering human orifices. They have specialised at feeding on mucous membranes, such as those found in the nose, eye, vagina, anus and urethra (don’t click on these links if you’re squeamish). These bloodsuckers can stay inside for days or weeks on end. They lead to a condition called “orificial hirudiniasis” and they could be potentially life-threatening, especially if secondary infections kick in. It’s likely that many more members of this group are awaiting discovery, although finding them may be a tricky business. As Siddall slyly writes, “Our standard methods of attracting leeches to our exposed selves may prove awkward given their established propensity for particular anatomical feeding sites.”

Reference: PLoS ONE http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0010057

Why losers ejaculate more

Not every male is a fighter and, as a result, many don’t become lovers either. But for these losers, there’s another option for passing on their genes to the next generation – make sure that you ejaculate copiously when you get the chance.

The male flour beetle has to battle other males over the right to mate with a female. Kensuke Okada from Okayama University found that males who lose these fights become less aggressive and avoid fighting again. However, they make up for avoiding combat by doubling the amount of sperm they produce when they ejaculate. This extra investment is a temporary one; after five days, things were back to normal.

These results show that males can fine-tune their sexual strategies according to the competition they face. Males who triumphed in combat didn’t feel the need to produce more sperm. They are strong enough to guard females they mate with and can stop other males from displacing his sperm with their own. Losers have to move about into new territories and when they do get to mate, they run the risk that a stronger male will just flush their sperm out with his own afterwards. For those who lose physical fights, contributing to the next generation means winning the sperm wars, and doing that means producing more sperm.

Reference: Biology Letters http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2010.0225

More on sperm competition: sperm wars of ants and bees, glowing sperm races, spiky penises, traumatic insemination and frigid echidnas

Could cuttlefish “see” with their skin?

Cuttlefish and their cephalopod relatives, squid and octopuses, are capable of nature’s most spectacular acts of camouflage. They can change the colour of their skin on a whim, send moving waves of stripes down their body, and send messages to one another in shifting hues. This ability is even more incredible when you consider that, according to all evidence to date, cuttlefish are colour-blind. If they can’t actually see colour, how can they mimic it so accurately?

Now, cephalopod specialists Lydia Mäthger and Roger Hanlon have made an intriguing discovery that could potentially answer this question. They found that a gene called opsin is active all over a cuttlefish’s skin; opsin proteins are sensitive to light and an essential part of the visual system. It’s possible that these animals can sense light using their entire skin, and that their colour-changing skill is based on this distributed “sight”.

The idea isn’t without precedent. Some squid have organs on their skin that double as an extra pair of “eyes”. But so far, Mäthger and Hanlon’s idea is still a hypothesis. The skin opsins may have no significance at all and the duo has some work ahead to them to show that they actually play an important role. For a start, there’s some evidence that opsin-like genes are active in the skin of humans, and we certainly change colour without a significant amount of make-up. And the opsins in a cuttlefish’s fin, underside and retina are all the same, so it’s unlikely that they could discriminate between different colours.

However, Mäthger and Hanlon suggest that the opsins may be useful in matching brightness and contrast. They could also interact with chromatophores – the tiny, expandable sacs of pigment that underlie a cuttlefish’s colour-changing ability. Chromatophores come in different colours and they could act as filters for the opsins. Light passing through these sacs could provide information on different wavelengths of light coming in from the environment.

Reference: Biology Letters http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2010.0223

More on cephalopods: the squid with living, seeing flashlights, coconut-armoured octopuses, the mimic octopus, clever cuttlefish, and the secret signals of squid

The good news: By combining the DNA of parents with genetic material from a third person, scientists might have developed a way for women with rare genetic disorders to have healthy children. The bad news: The ethical complications involved are so messy that it might be a long time coming.

The researchers outline their work in a study in this week’s Nature. On the surface, the idea is fairly simple. They took the nuclei out of the father’s sperm and the mother’s egg, and transplanted them into a donor’s egg cell that had its nucleus removed, but whose mitochondria remained in the cell’s cytoplasm. What you get is the genetics of both parents, plus the mitochondrial DNA of the host. This technique was pioneered in monkeys last summer, but researchers have now done a proof-of-principle study with human cells.

Mitochondria are often called cellular power plants, because they provide most of the cell’s energy. They also contain their own batch of so-called mitochondrial DNA that can, when mutated, give rise to disease. “What we’ve done is like changing the battery on a laptop,” said lead author Professor Doug Turnbull. “The energy supply now works properly, but none of the information on the hard drive has been changed. A child born using this method would have correctly functioning mitochondria, but in every other respect would get all their genetic information from their father and mother” [BBC News].

In the study, which used eggs that had been fertilized abnormally and so were not usable for in-vitro fertilization, Turnbull transferred 80 nuclei and found that 18 continued to grow beyond the eight-cell stage of division, suggesting that the manipulated embryos were viable.

Only 2 percent of mitochondrial DNA transferred over to the new host, which is a big deal. People need about half of their mitochondrial DNA to be mutated to see the sorts of muscle and heart diseases the researchers are worried about. About one in 250 live births see some kind of pathogenic mutation in the mitochondrial DNA, which is passed from mother to child (that’s why scientists often use it to trace back the maternal line). “We’ve proved in principle that this sort of technique can be used to prevent transmission of mitochondrial diseases in humans,” says Turnbull [Nature News].

This Nature paper is just that, though: proof of principle. IVF clinic are not authorized to perform the procedure, and some scientists aren’t as optimistic as Turnbull, saying the procedure may never be approved. The resulting embryo would carry DNA from three parents, and to prove the technique could work in the clinic, scientists would have to try the technique in healthy human embryos — a task that would be “impossible” due to the associated ethical issues [The Scientist], argues researcher Jun-Ichi Hayashi, who wasn’t part of the project.

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Image: Turnbull et. al./ Nature

In January, I told you about a terrific new website from the National Academies called What You Need to Know About Energy. It describes the ways we use energy, where it comes from, and how energy efficiency and alternative sources can figure into our energy future. The following month I also shared the link for NASA’s new Global Climate Change site designed to explain how warming impacts our world. Apparently, I’m not the only one who noticed these are fantastic resources… What You Need To Know About Energy and Global Climate Change have both been nominated in the 14th Annual Webby Awards for ‘best science website’ and I encourage readers to go vote! Scroll waaaaay down to the bottom of the page to find ‘science’ (what gives?), and choose your favorite site working to communicate science.

Introduction

This is a bit of a long post. As such, I’ve broken it up into sections, to help me corral my thoughts, and make it more likely people will actually read what I’ve written before leaving comments.

Yes, that’s a hint. I’ve spent quite some time wrestling with these issues the past two days, and I’m interested in rebuttals as well as supporting arguments. I urge people to comment, but please read what I’ve written first, and please keep it civil.

So.

By now you’ve probably heard that the Pope is in trouble. A letter written and signed by him seems to indicate that he was complicit in, at the very least, holding up discussion on what to do with an Oakland priest who was a pedophile. That’s pretty awful, even more so when considering that it took him four years to get around to even writing this letter after he was informed of the trouble, and during that time the priest was still working with children. At worst, it looks very much like Ratzinger, at the time a Cardinal, may have actively stalled the Church’s actions against the priest.

Let me be as clear as I can here: if Pope Ratzinger in any way stalled or prevented an investigation, Church-based or otherwise, into any aspect of child molestation by priests, then he needs to be indicted and brought to trial; an international tribunal into all this is also necessary and should be demanded by every living human on the planet. Obviously, a very thorough and major investigation of the Catholic Church’s practices about this needs to be held. It is a rock solid fact that there are a lot of priests who have molested children, and it’s clear that the Church has engaged in diversionary tactics ever since this became public (like the abhorrent Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone who says homosexuality lies at the heart of this scandal).

The skeptic community has been up in arms about this, as one would expect, since organized religion is a major target of skeptical thinkers. There have been rumors and misinformation about all this, including a dumb article (one of Rupert Murdoch’s papers, natch) that said that Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchins — both noted skeptics and atheists — were going to try to arrest the Pope if he visited England. This has been debunked by Dawkins himself.

But the idea of Dawkins swooping in to arrest the Pope got a lot of people fired up, notably in the skeptic community. A lot of folks have sounded off about what the skeptic community should do about this as individuals, as organized groups, and as a whole.

But the ideas being tossed around, to me, are a bit confused. The bottom line is, what role does the skeptic movement, such as it is, have in all this?

It depends on which part of this issue you mean. First there’s the Pope’s behavior. Then there’s the Church’s behavior, and then why the Church did the things it did. Finally, there’s the issue of the skeptics’ behavior.

Here are my thoughts.

1) The Pope

This is actually pretty cut and dried.

I agree in part with Rebecca Watson’s premise that the Pope needs to be called before justice. However, I do in fact care who does it and why; more on that below. But the important thing is that there is a fair trial and justice is served.

Basically, it seems that the Pope was putting the Church before the children, children who were being sexually molested. That is so abhorrent that words fail.

However, I don’t know if this is specifically a skeptical issue. It’s more a human issue, and a criminal issue. If the Pope had said that the Bible says it’s OK to molest children, then yeah, critical thinking and skepticism come into play. But if he was trying to protect the Church and was breaking laws (moral or civil) to do it, then see my comment above re: resignation and indictment. That’s something anyone should understand, whether or not they are a skeptic.

Skepticism deals with issues of the paranormal, issues with faith, issues where scientific evidence can be used to test a claim. In this case, I don’t see skeptics needing to be involved more than any other interest group.

2) The Church

This in many ways mirrors what I said about the Pope. As an institution, it was trying to protect itself, and sacrificed a lot of children’s lives to do it. If this is the case — and it seems very likely — then again the perpetrators need to be hauled in front of a tribunal, and, if found guilty, they get to find out first hand how child molesters are treated in prison.

3) The Church’s behavior

Here’s where things get interesting to me. In this country for sure, religion gets a free pass that a lot of other institutions don’t enjoy. They live tax free. They can say all manners of bizarre things, and people just blow it off, saying that personal beliefs are sacred. And religion can get all kinds of tangled up in politics, and again it gets a pass because it’s faith-based.

If the Catholic Church covers up, stalls investigations, moves priests around, and does other reprehensible acts to save itself, that’s one thing. But if it then says the Bible commands them to do it, or uses the religious authority people invest in it to let things slide, or says that the Pope is infallible and therefore what he did must be right, then yes, absolutely, 100%, skeptics need to jump in and cry “foul!”

But that raises the question: how should this be handled by skeptics?

4) The Skeptic Response

It is no stretch at all to say that skeptics in general and atheists in particular don’t enjoy a positive reputation outside of their respective groups. More people would rather see a gay President than an atheist one, and there are many polls that show atheists to be the least trusted demographic in the United States.

So skeptics are already at a disadvantage before they even open their mouths. Worse, a lot of Catholics are bound to be very uncomfortable right about now, and possibly more than a little defensive. Imagine that you’ve believed fervently in an institution all your life, and then you found out that it is rotten from within, even at the very highest level. You’d be disenfranchised, terribly distraught, and not, perhaps, in the best frame of mind.

This is the absolute worst position a person can be in if you’re trying to convince them of something. Clearly, tactics will be needed. A ham-fisted attack on religion and the Pope will probably not make you any friends, no matter how evil a deed they’ve done.

I have seen claims thrown around that it shouldn’t matter who leads the attack, because clearly moral religious people will rally behind you. That is monumentally naive. If skeptics and atheists jump in, that will be seen as an attack from the outside, when at the very best Catholics will want to see this handled by their own.

Put yourself in their shoes. Let me make up a scenario: imagine rock-solid evidence came up that Randi had embezzled the Million Dollars, and a few days later — after all the discussion and arguments and self-immolation that would occur on the blogs and fora and the media about it — Sylvia Browne said she would be leading the charge to see him brought to trial. Tell me honestly: would you rally behind her?

Honestly?

So charging in with guns blazing is not a good idea. In her post about this, Rebecca said that skeptics jumping in cannot hurt the movement. But I think they can, if this is not done carefully and with tact.

Specifically, she said:

So is this effort going to somehow hurt the “skeptical movement?” You may notice that I use the quotation marks here, because I can’t bring myself to seriously consider a movement supposedly based on the defense of rationality that would turn its back on children who are raped by men they trust because those men claim a supernatural being gives them power, wisdom, and the keys to eternal life with a direct line to God’s ear.

I want to parse her argument carefully here. To be clear, the question isn’t whether to act at all or not; I don’t think anyone is advocating sitting back and letting the Church and Pope get away with these horrid crimes. The question is, is this a skeptic issue in the first place?

The answer, to me, is: yes, it’s a skeptic issue if the Church uses a supernatural defense. Sure, it enjoys the power bestowed on it as a faith-based entity, and I have little doubt it was the corruption of that power that allowed the rape culture to exist. That is surely something for skeptics to take on. But we have to separate out arguments based on that versus secular criminal actions the Church has undertaken, and what the skeptics should do about it. And all the while the skeptics have to tread very carefully indeed if they don’t want to tick off the rest of the world.

As Rebecca points out, if the Church is relying on blind faith, acceptance of authority, and diversion of blame (like Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone did) then those are absolutely within the skeptic realm, and something we should be talking about.

And to my point about cooperation, I also agree with Rebecca that the religious people themselves need to step up, especially leaders in the Catholic movement, and condemn what the Church has done (her calling out Bill Donahue was especially wonderful). Of course Donahue never will; he has been so vicious and so antireality for so long that he will knee jerk against any bad mouthing of the Church. And he in fact has, attacking the New York Times and defending the Pope. Shocker, I know.

But that’s my point. People will not rally behind skeptics or atheists simply because they are doing the right thing. Quite the opposite. People will attack the skeptics. And even if there is iron-clad evidence of the Pope’s wrongdoings as well as the Church’s, Catholics will not just suddenly see the light and stand beside skeptics. We know this is true from endless studies of how people behave, how they change their minds, and how defensive they get when their core beliefs are attacked. See my point about Randi and Sylvia Browne again, and search your feelings carefully about it.

Skepticism’s role in this is very delicate and very important, so we must be mindful of how we do it. If not for our own reputation, then for our ultimate goal of getting everyone to understand the real issues here. That’s what skepticism is all about, but I sometimes think a lot of skeptics forget that big picture.

And there are most definitely ways of going about this that will deeply tarnish the reputation of skeptics. I don’t think PZ Myers’ comments, for example, are helpful. They may foment (some of) the troops, but no Catholic of any stripe seeing that statement will suddenly realize the folly of their ways. Quite the opposite I’d imagine, as I pointed out above.

How we say things matters. You can argue that Catholics all over the world should be rising up and taking action — and in fact should have been all along, years ago — and obviously a strong case can be made that the culture and nature of the priesthood in Catholicism enables child molestation. But inflammatory and hyperbolic rhetoric won’t help, and is in reality contrary to the cause.

I’ll note that there are some 75 million Catholics in the U.S., a huge number. They outweigh atheists (and skeptics) by a fair margin. Ticking them off, insulting them, saying “I told you so” is not going to help, and in fact will hurt in the longer run. I would think this is patently obvious.

Conclusion

The one thing skeptics pride themselves on is the use of rationality and reason when making a case, yet it seems to me that quite a few are letting their emotions and prejudices get the best of them. If you perceive Catholicism as the enemy, then so be it. But when faced with overwhelming numbers against you, sometimes a head-on assault isn’t the best idea. I’m angry over this, damned angry, and heartbroken over the lives destroyed by it. But anger is a place to start, something from which we can draw energy and motivation, but we must not let it take over.

We don’t always need warriors. Sometimes we need diplomats.

My point, after all this, isn’t too hard to grasp: if the Pope did what he has been alleged to do, then he needs to be brought to justice. The Church itself looks to have been complicit in hushing up this scandal for years, decades. They too need to face criminal justice. And as skeptics, we need to be vocal about the methods employed by the Church, where those methods can be analyzed using critical thinking and the arsenal skeptics employ. But just attacking them because they are a religion is the wrong reason to do it, and attacking them with abandon, with insults, and with vitriol will not help.

Those 75 million American Catholics should be outraged by all this. If you think skeptics and atheists can bring down the Church’s administration and authority by alienating that population — a quarter of the people in the U.S. — then you are not applying skeptical methods at all.

All of us need to be standing up to the horrors the Church has perpetrated, just as we would if any organization did such a thing. And where skepticism applies, we should apply it, but we should have a care when doing so. If the ultimate goal is to change the hearts and minds of people, then we need to be human and humane.

I would say that’s critical.

This week marks the anniversaries of both stunning success and nearly catastrophic failures in human spaceflight—it’s been 49 years since Yuri Gugarin became the first man in space, and 40 years since the life-threatening drama on board Apollo 13. So perhaps it’s fitting that this is the week the fight over the future of NASA comes to a head. Tomorrow, President Obama will defend his new plans for manned spaceflight, which he has changed somewhat after his proposal to cancel the Constellation program was met with a flood of criticism.

When the President announced his budget in January, which came without funding for Constellation and its plans to go back to the moon and beyond, members of Congress had a fit (especially those who represent areas with jobs connected to Constellation).

Former astronauts came out of the woodwork, too, and that list of critics now includes Neil Armstrong. The first moon-walker typically shies away from media controversies, but this week issued an open letter to the President. He writes: “The availability of a commercial transport to orbit as envisioned in the President’s proposal cannot be predicted with any certainty, but is likely to take substantially longer and be more expensive than we would hope. It appears that we will have wasted our current $10-plus billion investment in Constellation” [The Times]. Armstrong also writes that if the United States finds itself without spacecraft that can travel to the Earth’s orbit and beyond, our nation will be destined “to become one of second or even third rate stature.”

In response to the criticisms, Obama plans to speak tomorrow on his plans for NASA at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and it sounds like some compromises could be in the offing. Ahead of the President’s speech, NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver spoke yesterday at the National Space Symposium and announced a restructured plan that potentially could save parts of Constellation, specifically the crew capsule called Orion. The new proposal calls for a variant of the space capsule that could be launched unmanned to station within the next couple of years to serve as a crew lifeboat. Garver said the plan would allow the agency to retain some of its multibillion-dollar investment in the program while reducing U.S. reliance on Russian Soyuz spacecraft currently used as an emergency crew escape capability on the space station [Space News].

And because Armstrong and many other said the President’s plan would leave the United States stuck in low-Earth orbit, White House officials said on Tuesday that Obama wants NASA to begin work on building a new heavy lift rocket sooner than envisioned under the canceled Constellation program, with a commitment to decide in 2015 on the specific rocket that will take astronauts deeper into space [Reuters]. Future robotic missions, the White House says, will scout out potential targets for manned missions under the new plan.

We’ll keep you posted on what Obama says tomorrow. In the meantime, his tentative policy shift has impressed some critics. At Bad Astronomy, DISCOVER blogger Phil Plait blogged Neil deGrasse Tyson’s vehement defense of NASA maintaining a bigger, bolder vision of manned space exploration than Obama’s initial plan. In response to the administration’s shift, however, Tyson wrote on Twitter, “Obama’s NASA plans looking better, as of yesterday. A reasonable person responds to reasonable argumnts [Sic].”

80beats: Obama’s NASA Plan Draws Furious Fire; The Prez Promises To Defend His Vision
80beats: Obama’s NASA Budget: So Long, Moon Missions; Hello, Private Spaceflight
80beats: New NASA Rocket May Not Be “Useful,” White House Panel Says
80beats: Presidential Panel: Space Travel Plans Are Broken
Bad Astronomy: Neil Tyson Sounds Off on NASA
Bad Astronomy: President Obama’s NASA Budget Unveiled
Bad Astronomy: Give Space a Chance

Image: NASA

I’m still a sucker for stories like this, Only Known Living Population of Rare Dwarf Lemur Discovered:

Researchers have discovered the world’s only known living population of Sibree’s Dwarf Lemur, a rare lemur known only in eastern Madagascar. The discovery of approximately a thousand of these lemurs was made by Mitchell Irwin, a Research Associate at McGill University, and colleagues from the German Primate Centre in Göttingen Germany; the University of Antananarivo in Madagascar; and the University of Massachusetts.

The species was first discovered in Madagascar in 1896, but this tiny, nocturnal dwarf lemur was never studied throughout the 20th century. Following the destruction of its only known rainforest habitat, scientists had no idea whether the species still existed in the wild — or even whether it was a distinct species….

Living today is much more awesome than the 19th century overall, but, we’ve mapped the whole world, and have a good sense of all the large animals (at least the upper bound, unfortunately the number seems to be dropping). Call me mammal-centric, but I feel that we have tapped out most of the zoological wonder of our planet. Is it too much to say that the terrestrial domain now involves mostly the counting of beetles? (I exaggerate!) But sometimes there’s a lemur in Madagascar or a rare ungulate in Vietnam, and we get a sense of the wonder which once was (along with all the -isms which we now abhor!). Could you imagine the blog posts that Carl Zimmer or Ed Yong could have written about the discovery of the Platypus? Actually, they’d probably end up narrating a special on the National Geographic Channel….

Here’s the original paper: MtDNA and nDNA corroborate existence of sympatric dwarf lemur species at Tsinjoarivo, eastern Madagascar.

Credit: Image courtesy of McGill University

More researchers are using nanoparticles to deliver lethal toxins specifically to cancer cells, leaving regular cells unharmed.

Many cat owners worry/wonder about what their buddies are up to while the humans are away at work. Are they eating the houseplants? Sleeping on the kitchen counter? Prowling next door to bother the neighbors’ pet bird?

Now, researchers in Japan hope to bridge the gap between humans and their pets by rigging cats with sensing devices that help owners track their felines’ activities.

Cat@Log, one such sensing device, allows you to snoop on your cat as he goes about his daily schedule.

You can track his movements, map his territory, and even see what he sees thanks to a bulky device that can be strapped on your kitty’s collar. The tech site Recombu says that Cat@Log comes loaded with a camera, microphone, microSD card, an accelerometer, Bluetooth, and GPS.

Recombu writes:

The GPS hooks up to Google Maps to create a territory map, showing you where your cat goes when he’s out and about, while the camera gives you a ride-along view. The accelerometer can also interpret certain actions like scratching, going up and down stairs, eating, and jumping, all of which can be used to update a Twitter-feed – or even a full-on blog – of what your cat is up to all day long.

The Cat@Log is great, especially for anxious owners who are away on holiday and wondering if the cat-sitter is doing a good job, writes Recombu. You can also be assured your cat won’t be lonely on Twitter as he’d have Sockamillion (Sockington), the famous tweeting cat, for company.

Here’s a video of Cat@Log in action:

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Discoblog: Introducing the Twettle: The Tea Kettle That Tweets
Discoblog: The Best Way to Predict Box Office Hits: Twitter Chatter
Discoblog: Your Plants Have More Twitter Followers Than You—Literally

Image: Cat@Log