Author: Discover Main Feed

In Tennessee, Kurt Zimmerman, the father of a high school student wants the biology book banned.

Guess why.

Yeah, it dismissed Biblical creationism as a myth. So he took his case to the school board and complained, asking that the book be banned. Their response was actually very cool: they said no.

One reviewer’s first impression of creationism’s definition was similar to Zimmermann’s in that “the authors must be offensively biased against this Christian view of the world,” the reviewer wrote.

“Upon further investigation, however, I quickly realized there is more than one definition of the word ‘myth.’ In this case the word is used appropriately to describe a traditional or legendary story … with or without a natural explanation,” the [school board] reviewer wrote.

Not the use of the phrase “offensively biased”, indicating to me that the reviewer him or herself may be sympathetic to creationist claims. But they still came to the correct conclusion: the word myth just means an explanatory story.

I’m glad the board dismissed Mr. Zimmerman’s claims, and I’ll take whatever victory I can when it comes to stopping the forces of antireality. But still, it makes me flinch somewhat to hear this. Sure, we can’t teach creationism in public school because it would be a clear violation of the First Amendment. But I can hope that in the future, everyone will know that we won’t teach creationism because it’s wrong.

Tip o’ the fossil to SciBuff.

The show just went up–you can stream the audio here and download to iTunes here. I have to say, I think this is the best episode of Point of Inquiry that I’ve hosted yet. But judge for yourself; here’s the write up:
For two decades now, we’ve failed to seriously address climate change. So the planet just keeps warming—and it could get very bad. Picture major droughts, calving of gigantic ice sheets, increasingly dramatic sea level rise, and much more.
Against this backdrop, the idea of a technological fix to solve the problem—like seeding the stratosphere with reflective sulfur particles, so as to reduce sunlight—starts to sound pretty attractive. Interest in so-called “geoengineering” is growing, and so is media attention to the idea. There are even conspiracy theorists who think a secret government plan to geoengineer the planet is already afoot.
Leading scientists, meanwhile, have begun to seriously study our geoengineering options—not necessarily because they want to, but because they fear there may be no other choice.
This week’s Point of Inquiry guest, Eli Kintisch, has followed these scientists’ endeavors—and their ethical quandaries—like perhaps no other journalist. He has broken stories about Bill Gates’ funding of geoengineering research, DARPA’s exploration of the idea, and …

Goddess on the mountain top
Burning like a silver flame
The summit of beauty and love
And Venus was her name
–Shocking Blue/Bananarama

Is Venus dead? Maybe not.

First, a way cool picture:

[Click to hugely embiggen.]

That’s Idunn Mons, a mountain on Venus as radar mapped a few years back by the Magellan space probe. The color overlay is a brand spanking new thermal (temperature) map using an infrared detector on the European Venus Express probe, currently orbiting our sister planet. Red is warmer, and as you can see, Idunn appears to be trying to tell us something.

But what’s it saying? OK, here’s the back story:

If you needed to write a compare-and-contrast essay about Earth and another planet, you could hardly pick a better one than Venus. It’s a lot like the Earth: it has almost the same diameter (12,100 km versus Earth’s 12,740), it possesses about the same mass (5 versus 6 x 10²⁴ kilos), it orbits the Sun a bit closer in than we do (109 million km versus 147). The total carbon content of the planet is similar to ours, too.

But it’s also a lot different. While ours is locked up in the oceans and rocks, Venus has all of its CO₂ in its atmosphere, which has caused a runaway greenhouse effect. The pressure at the surface is 90 times ours, and the surface temperature is 460° C (almost 900° F). It’s an alien planet, in every sense of the word.

We also thought it was dead, geologically speaking. Despite showing mountains and other interesting features, maps of Venus indicate that the surface hasn’t appeared to change much over geologic times. We have a pretty good grasp of how its atmosphere works, and the weathering processes it subjects the surface to — which is not be to be trifled with, since the air there is laced with sulfuric acid and a hint of fluorine and chlorine compounds, too. According to all that, the surface looks to have been pretty stable for quite some time.

But that idea might be changing. New studies indicate Venus may have been volcanically active in the recent past, and may indeed still be active!

The atmosphere of Venus is opaque to our eyes (and highly reflective, which is why Venus looks so bright to us from Earth), but the VIRTIS instrument — which stands for the Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer — on Venus Express was specifically designed to peer through the muck and look at the planet’s surface. It can see temperature differences on the ground there, and when scientists studied the maps, they found several spots where the surface appears to be slightly warmer than you’d expect.

And very interestingly, at least some of these spots on Venus are also associated with raised features (0.5 to 2.5 km (.3 to 1.8 miles)) above the average surface height — mountains, or, perhaps, volcanoes.

The image at the top of this post shows one such area, which is clearly a mountain of some kind in the Imdr Regio area of Venus. The surface on the top of the mountain is a few degrees warmer than the area around it, suggesting the existence of a hot spot under the surface. It’s very hard to look at that and not think it’s a volcano with a magma chamber under it. The data also indicate flow features that are much less weathered than expected, and therefore most likely very young.

How young is young? According to the team of scientists who took this data, this indicates that Venus was geologically active no more than 2.5 million years ago, and these features may have formed as little as 250,000 years ago! That’s very young indeed when talking about the geologic clock of a planet — that’s more recent than the last Yellowstone eruption in the American northwest, for example. And the fact that the hot spots are still around is a strong indicator that activity is still present on Venus.

Of all the planets in the solar system, Venus gets closest to Earth — it can be as little as about 40 million km (24 million miles) away, compared to Mars which can only get as close as 55 million km (33 million miles). Yet we know less about Venus than Mars. There are many reasons: Venus never strays far from the Sun in the sky, making it more difficult to observe than Mars, and as mentioned above its atmosphere is opaque.

But it’s very much worthy of our study. Why did Venus suffer such a catastrophic runaway greenhouse effect? Why is its surface apparently pretty much all one age (except for this new result)? Why are there hot spots, and are they like ours here on Earth?

Studying the Earth is obviously an incredibly and critically important job for science. And as much as we learn studying it, we need other examples of planets to help us test our ideas. When I was a kid in middle school, I hated having to write those compare-and-contrast essays. But as a scientist — and as a human living in a thin habitable bubble on a planet we have barely begun to understand — I know we need them desperately.

For the better part of a decade, the Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle has coasted through the stratosphere, surveilling vast panoramas of land below for the U.S. Air Force and Navy. Now the plane’s broad reach will serve science. NASA announced this week that it had completed the first test flight of a Global Hawk retrofitted with monitoring equipment to help scientists study the the oceans, the atmosphere, and more.

“We can go to regions we couldn’t reach or go to previously explored regions and study them for extended periods that are impossible with conventional planes,” said David Fahey, co-mission scientist and research physicist [CNN]. From the comfort of their offices in Dryden Flight Research Center in the Mojave Desert, pilots flew the plane 14 hours up to the Arctic Ocean on this test run. Though this flight lasted about 14 hours, the Global Hawk can stay aloft for 30, and reach altitudes of 60,000, or twice as high as your last commercial airline flight attained.

Instead of the high-resolution cameras and heat-seeking sensors the plane … typically carries when used in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Global Hawk was outfitted with a series of instruments capable of measuring and sampling greenhouse gases, ozone-depleting substances, and aerosols [Los Angeles Times]. However, the UAVs can be employed in a pinch for other services, too. The Air Force used the cameras on theirs, for instance, to study the impacts of the Haitian earthquake from above. For more on future applications of the military’s unmanned vehicles, check out the May issue of DISCOVER hitting newsstands now.

Another Earth observer launched this week will go even higher than NASA’s Global Hawk. The European Space Agency’s Cryosat-2, strapped to the top of a Russian intercontinental ballistic missile launched from Kazakhstan, reached orbit yesterday. Success tasted especially sweet for the Cryosat team, who lost the first satellite during a botched launch five years ago: The Russian rocket failed to separate from its third stage, and the whole assembly, including its satellite, plunged into the Arctic Ocean – the very waters whose icy secrets CryoSat had been designed to uncover [The Independent].

Cryosat-2 is so named because its decade-long mission is to study the cryosphere, the scientific name for the parts of the world covered in ice. In a polar orbit—which passes over both poles—the satellite will continually document both ice thickness and extent. CryoSat-2 has incredibly high-resolution altimeters (able to measure ice thickness to an accuracy of 1 centimeter), so we can finally gain an accurate measure of how much water is locked as ice in the poles [Discovery News].

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DISCOVER: The Ground Zero of Climate Change
DISCOVER: Who’s Flying This Thing?, on UAVs
80beats: NASA Jet Studies Haiti’s Fault Lines for Signs of Further Trouble

Image: NASA/Dryden/Carla Thomas

If you read this blog I already know you like science. If you’re human — and I hope you are; if not, my friend Seth Shostak may want to speak with you — you like art, too. And if you you actively and creatively combine the two, then please take a look at Science Fair, an art and science show that’s accepting proposals right now! This sounds like a cool project, along the lines of what Brian George did based on my book Death from the Skies!

The page doesn’t say when the actual show will be, but deadline for proposals is Monday April 12, so hop to it!

The moment you read this, volcanic eruptions could be happening on Venus.

Planetary astronomers have been debating whether Venus is or was geologically active, and whether the geologic hotspots previous missions saw mean that Venus is one of the few places in the solar system to have experienced volcanism. Now, according to data from the European Space Agency’s Venus Express mission, there’s every reason to believe that Venus not only has been geologically active and volcanic during its lifetime, but also might still be today, according to Jörn Helbert, coauthor of the study in Science. “The solidified lava flows, which radiate heat from the surface, seem hardly weathered. So we can conclude that they are younger than 2.5 million years old — and the majority are probably younger than 250,000 years…. In geological terms, this means that they are practically from the present day” [Wired.com].

Previous maps of Venus showed features that looked like large shield volcanoes, such as Hawaii’s Kilauea and Mauna Loa. Some of these rise roughly a mile above the surrounding plain and have rise diameters that span more than 1,600 miles [Christian Science Monitor]. And gravity measurements suggested large pools of magma lie beneath the surface of these formations. For this study, the Venus Express measured the composition of the surface materials near these hotspots, and found just the concentration of iron-bearing materials you’d expect from from volcanism. The researchers then used that chemical composition to estimate how long the material had been exposed to the conditions on Venus’ surface. The answer? The blink of an eye, in geologic terms.

Study coauthor Suzanne Smrekar says it’s even possible that scientists spotted a volcanic eruption on Venus last July, when a mysterious bright spot was seen in the Venusian atmosphere. Smrekar and several of her colleagues are following up on this event to see if a volcanic eruption from one of these hotspots coincides with the spot and could feasibly explain it. If so, then that link could serve as further evidence that Venus’ volcanoes are still active. “We’re kind of going from warm, warmer, warmest to maybe really hot,” Smrekar said [MSNBC].

Besides the thrill that Venus could be geologically alive, the possibility of ongoing volcanic activity could help to clear up a mystery about the planet. One need only look up at the cratered moon on a clear night to be reminded that the inner solar system has endured periods of heavy asteroid bombardment. But Venus, our probes have shown, is not a particularly puckered place, so somehow it must have been resurfaced. Because Venus lacks the water that’s apparently necessary for plate tectonics, the most likely explanation for Venus’ smoother surface (and also how heat escapes its interior) is through volcanic eruptions.

Helbert and colleagues plan to try to recreate some of the surface conditions of Venus in the lab to test out their ideas. But that might not be the only way to answer the intriguing outlying questions about our sister planet. Future landers could get better measurements of conditions there, which would aid lab experiments that try to mimic weathering processes on the sweltering planet’s surface [MSNBC].

Related Content:
80beats: New Images Suggest Hellish Venus Was Once More Like Earth
80beats: Venus May Have Once Had Oceans, But the Water Didn’t Last
80beats: Mercury Flyby Reveals Magnetic Twisters and Ancient Magma Oceans
DISCOVER: Venus Exposed explains how researchers look beneath the planet’s thick clouds

Image: NASA/JPL/ESA

The standard inkjet printer found in offices around the world is the inspiration for a new medical device that can help patients with severe burns. Researchers at Wake Forest University rigged up a device that can spray skin cells directly onto a burn victim’s wounds, and animal trials showed that the treatment healed wounds quickly and safely. The team says this printing method could be an improvement over traditional skin grafts, which often leave serious scars.

The researchers explain that the device is mounted in a frame that can be wheeled over a patient in a hospital bed. A laser then takes a reading of the wound’s size and shape so that a layer of healing cells can be precisely applied, Reuters reports.

“We literally print the cells directly onto the wound,” said student Kyle Binder, who helped design the device. “We can put specific cells where they need to go.”

In the trials, this treatment completely closed wounds in just two weeks. The “bioprinting” device has so far only been tested on mice, but the team will soon try out the technique on pigs, whose skin is similar to that of humans. Eventually, the team expects to request FDA approval for human trials.

For the treatment, the researchers first dissolved human skin cells from pieces of skin, separating out cell types like fibroblasts and keratinocytes. Reuters writes:

They put them in a nutritious solution to make them multiply and then used a system similar to a multicolor office inkjet printer to apply first a layer of fibroblasts and then a layer of keratinocytes, which form the protective outer layer of skin.

The sprayed cells not only worked themselves into the surrounding skin, they were also incorporated into the skin’s hair follicles and sebaceous glands. Researchers say this may have been possible because immature stem cells were mixed in with the sprayed cells.

Binder told Reuters:

“You have to give a lot of credit to the cells. When you put them into the wound, they know what to do.”

Related Content:

DISCOVER: 20 Things You Didn’t Know About… Skin
Discoblog: The Body Electric: Turn Your Skin Into a Touchscreen With “Skinput”
Discoblog: When Art Gets Personal: Woman with Skin Disorder Makes Her Body a Canvas
Discoblog: You Got Burned! Wristband Warns Wearers of Impending Sunburn

Image: Epson

The podcast “Are We Alone” is a great weekly ‘cast from the SETI Institute, and this week’s episode has Seth Shostak and me discussing the nonsense about Iraq using bomb-detecting dowsing rods (here’s a direct download of the MP3). These magic wands do not work, and their use has allowed cars loaded with bombs through checkpoints in the Middle East. This is a direct example of how magical, antiscientific thinking can do real harm, resulting in dangerous situations and even deaths… hundreds of them.

Adorning yourself in fake goods, be it a replica Gucci handbag or knock-off Armani sunglasses, makes a statement. It says that you want to feel, or be seen as, wealthier than you actually are. It signals an aspiration towards a richer lifestyle. Of course, such products can’t actually change a person’s status, but a new study suggests that they can change people’s behaviour, and for the worse.

Francesca Gino from the University of North Carolina has shown that counterfeit products actually make people behave more dishonestly. They cheat more in tests and they judge others as unethical with greater abandon. Even worse, they’re completely unaware of this impact. This effect is heavily ironic. People often buy fake goods to look good to other people. But Gino’s study shows that these products can affect our moral choices precisely because they make us look worse to ourselves. As she writes, “Feeling like a fraud makes people more likely to commit fraud.”

In her first experiment, Gino told volunteers that they were going to wear a pair of real of fake designer sunglasses while doing certain tasks. Their job was to test out the glasses. In reality, all the eyewear on offer was real and each cost a princely $300. But even though everyone had the same shades, the volunteers who thought they were wearing the fake ones were more likely to cheat in the tests.

First, they were given a problem-solving task where they would be paid for each correct answer. The answer sheets were anonymously posted into a box and the recruits had to write how many questions they had solved. As far as they knew, they could make up any number they liked but, in reality, Gino had coded the worksheets to give away their identity. She found that 71% of the recruits who wore fake sunglasses cheated in the test, overplaying their own successes. In contrast, just 30% of those adorned in authentic shades resorted to lies. Neither group actually scored better or worse than the other.

In a second test, they saw a square divided in two down its diagonal and had to say which of the two sides had more spots. If they said the left side, they received half a cent but if they said the right side, they got fifty cents instead. This presents a stark conflict between answering truthfully and earning the most money. And over time, the recruits who wore fake sunglasses (but not the real ones) became more and more likely to choose the right side, even when there were patently more dots on the left.

For her next experiment, Gino showed that counterfeit goods can change how people view the actions of others. Again, 79 students were given sunglasses that were ostensibly real or fake. This time, after allegedly test-driving the eyewear, they had to fill in a questionnaire about moral behaviour.

Compared to those wearing real sunglasses, volunteers who wore counterfeits said that people they knew were more likely to act dishonestly, from taking home office stationery to inflating an expenses claim. And given fictional scenarios involving moral choices, the counterfeit-wearers were more likely than their peers to think that other people would behave unethically. It seems that people who wear fake goods interpret the actions of others through a lens of dishonesty.

What’s behind this change of heart? To find out, Gino repeated the sunglasses study with 100 fresh volunteers, and a few important twists. This time, some of the recruits weren’t told anything about the sunglasses or whether they were genuine. They also had to complete a questionnaire that analysed how they felt about themselves, by asking them how far they agreed with statements such as “Right now, I feel as if I don’t know myself very well” or “Right now, I feel out of touch with the real me.”

All the volunteers did the same problem-solving test from the first experiment and they behaved much like the first lot did. Among those who thought they wore fake shades, 74% cheated, while just 30% of those who thought they wore real ones did. Out of those who weren’t told anything, 42% cheated. The questionnaires revealed that these differences were fuelled by the volunteers’ feelings about themselves. Those who wore the supposedly fake sunglasses felt personally less genuine than their peers. Because they felt like fakes, they were more likely to behave unethically.

The icing on this psychological cake is that people have no idea about this effect. When Gino asked 86 random students about the impact of fake goods, they didn’t predict any consequences on ethical behaviour. Even when asked about the experiments themselves, they didn’t think that the nature of the sunglasses would affect the volunteers’ propensity to cheat on their tests.

Gino fully admits that the real world is very different to laboratory settings but, nonetheless, she is concerned about the psychological impact of counterfeit goods at a societal level. As she says, “Individuals who buy counterfeits for themselves or give them to others may believe that they are simply getting similar products for less money, but in fact may be paying a price in terms of their long-term morality.“

Reference: Psychological Science

More on morality:

• When is attempted murder more acceptable than harming someone by accident?
• Clean smells promote generosity and fair play; dark rooms and sunglasses promote deceit and selfishness
• Will vs. Grace – are people honest because they resist temptation or because they don’t feel it?
• Our moral thermostat – why being good can give people license to misbehave
• A bad taste in your mouth – moral outrage has origins in physical disgust
• Clean thoughts can soften moral judgments

A few months back, when I read Chapter 7 of the latest NSF Science and Engineering Indicators report (PDF), I noticed that the standard section detailing Americans’ dismal views about evolution and the Big Bang was missing. But I wasn’t sure what to make of that fact, so I shrugged and moved on. But now, Science magazine has investigated, and in turns out a lot of folks are extremely upset at this omission. That includes the National Center for Science Education and even the White House. There are charges of a whitewash–that these data were cut precisely because evolution and the Big Bang are the subjects where Americans appear the most “scientifically illiterate” in comparison with citizens from other countries:
The deleted text, obtained by ScienceInsider, does not differ radically from what has appeared in previous Indicators. The section, which was part of the unedited chapter on public attitudes toward science and technology, notes that 45% of Americans in 2008 answered true to the statement, “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals.” The figure is similar to previous years and much lower than in Japan (78%), Europe (70%), China (69%), and South Korea (64%). The same …

Today, I’m very sad to say, the artist John Schoenherr passed away. Among his honors, Schoenherr earned a Caldecott Award for his paintings for the book Owl Moon. His dark, textured artwork did justice to all manner of life, from a Canada goose to a giant sandworm.

I met Jack when I was just ten years old, through his son Ian. He was not the typical father of your fifth-grade friends. He got up not long before noon, sat for a while at the kitchen table with some coffee, making a few jokes, and then headed to his barn, where he would paint till midnight or later. His barn was filled with dismantled MG’s, Japanese swords, a complete collection of National Geographics, snapping tortoise shells, camera equipment, years’ worth of paintings, and an atmosphere suffused with good cheer. We kids were always welcome, whether we wanted to ask questions about the latest painting on his easel, or if we just wanted to wander along his rough bookshelves and be alone in his company. I learned some of my most important early lessons about nature from Jack, and I also learned from him what it’s like to love the act of creation, day in and day out.

The kids in the studio eventually grew up, but kept coming back. His son Ian became a fine artist and children’s book illustrator in his own right. I’m sure that much of my interest in natural history stems from my time in that barn, too. When I got older, I was proud to come back there, where Jack was still painting, his beard gray now, his shoulders stooped, and tell him about my own encounters with walking whales and enchanting flatworms. Everyone always joked that Jack was a great bear. It wasn’t just his ursine cast that earned him that name; it was also his combination of grouchiness and loyalty. Bears are also strong, and over the past few years Jack showed amazing strength as well, as he struggled with his failing health. Now the Great Bear of Locktown has left us, but we will not forget him.

Ezra Klein references the old Shaggy hit “It wasn’t me” to characterize Alan Greenspan’s testimony yesterday. It’s not just Greenspan, Robert Rubin is pulling it too. The point isn’t that these people have plausible deniability, they don’t, the issue is that there’s no real recourse anyone has to hold them accountable. They can lie to your face because there’s no consequence. I noted below that institutional investors demand risk so that they can have an opportunity for high returns. This isn’t necessarily just from on high, pension funds need the high returns to fulfill their obligations, and those obligations were entered into by labor and management. The fact is that we don’t have the economic growth to come through over the long term through a conservative investing strategy, so the managers start rolling the dice. If they fail and it blows up, they’re fired, and if they luck out, they’re heroes for the day.

It wasn’t just the big shots. Unless you’re a prodigy (i.e., you’re a 2 year old reading this weblog) and you’re an American you lived through the real estate bubble of the mid-aughts, and you know people who treated their homes like ATMs. People who bet on a “sure thing” future which never came about. Yes, there were greedy mortgage brokers and shady speculators, but if it wasn’t for the avarice of the average man and woman it wouldn’t have been so widespread. But here’s the difference: the average American has experienced a lot of economic distress or insecurity. There have been real consequences for their bad calls. The unemployment rate is high enough that anyone who isn’t a shut-in knows someone who’s been negatively impacted. Not so for Sirs Greenspan and Rubin. The high & mighty are too big to fail, they may have their reputations tarnished but ultimately their lot is one of comfort and ease. This is of course not atypical, it’s most of human history.

I think the ultimate long term problem for American society is that many Americans now perceive the elites as rent seekers and not engines of productivity. The vision of the expanding pie is starting to recede, and once the spell is broken I fear for the well being of the “virtuous circles” which economists praise.

Anyway, I was referencing Shaggy long before Mr. Klein.

There will be a skeptic convention in northern California (specifically Berkeley) on April 24. Called Skeptical, it’s being run by the Bay Area Skeptics and the Sacramento Area Skeptics, both great groups of folks. I wish I could go; speakers include Genie Scott, Kiki Sanford, Brian Dunning, Karen Stollznow, Seth Shostak — all friends and wonderful lecturers — and I hate to miss something like this.

But you should go! It’s a one day event, and the cost is only $40. Not bad. That would only buy you like one minute on the phone with Sylvia Browne, or 0.0007 bomb-sniffing wands, or a Deepak Chopra book — all of which are worth far, far less.

“A phenomenon called group glee was studied in videotpes of 596 formal lessons in a preschool. This was characterized by joyful screaming, laughing, and intense physical acts which occurred in simultaneous bursts or which spread in a contagious fashion from one child to another. A variety of precipitating factors were identified, the most prevalent being teacher requests for volunteers, unstructured lags in lessons, gross physical-motor actions, and cognitive incongruities. Distinctions between group glee and laughter were pointed out. While most events of glee did not disrupt the ongoing lesson, those which did tended to produce a protective reaction on the part of teachers. Group glee tended to occur most often in large groups (7-9 children) and in groups containing both sexes. The latter finding was related to Darwin’s theory of differentiating vocal signals in animals and man.”

Photo: flickr/edenpictures

Related content:
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In the hot desert kingdom of Saudi Arabia, finding fresh drinking water has always been a great challenge. For decades now, the state has been providing clean water by converting millions of gallons of seawater via desalination plants that remove salts and minerals from the water. Now the country plans to use one of its most abundant resources to counter its fresh-water shortage: sunshine [Technology Review].

Working on a joint project with IBM, Saudi Arabia’s national research group King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) has announced that it will open the world’s largest solar-powered desalination plant by 2012 in the city of Al-Khafji. The pilot plant will not just supply 30,000 cubic meters of clean water per day to 100,000 people, but will also reduce operating costs in the long run by harvesting energy from sunshine. Saudi Arabia, the top desalinated water producer in the world, uses 1.5 million barrels of oil per day at its plants, according to Arab News [Technology Review].

In the new desalination plant, the Saudis hope to slash energy costs by deploying a new kind of concentrated photovoltaic technology, which uses lenses or mirrors to focus the sun’s rays onto solar panels. The technology will concentrate the sun 1,500 times on a solar cell to boost efficiency. That’s about three times the solar concentration of most concentrating photovoltaic panels currently in operation [The New York Times]. The system’s upgrade is due to a device that IBM came up with back when the company was designing mainframe computers and trying to ensure that they didn’t overheat. The device, called a liquid metal thermal interface, uses a highly conductive liquid metal to transfer heat away. In the desalination plant, the devices will serve as heat sinks to prevent the photovoltaics from breaking down under such extreme, concentrated heat.

The energy generated by these solar arrays would then power the plant’s desalination process, which will be accomplished via reverse osmosis. In this technique, seawater is forced through a polymer membrane at high pressure, which filters out salt and contaminants. The Al-Khafji plant will use an advanced nano-membrane that IBM and KACST developed, which researchers say allows water to flow through 25 to 50 percent faster than conventional membranes used in desalination plants.

The Al-Khafji desalination plant is the first of three steps in a solar-energy program launched by KACST to reduce desalination costs. The second step will be a 300,000-cubic-meter facility, and the third phase will involve several more solar-power desalination plants at various locations [Technology Review].

Related Content:
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80beats: 2 New Nanotech Super Powers: Desalinating Sea Water and Treating Cancer
80beats: San Diego Residents Will Soon Be Drinking Desalinated Seawater
DISCOVER: Water, Water Everywhere, So Let’s All Have a Drink explores the idea of offshore desalination platforms

Image: IBM

The Cassini spacecraft just had a few close encounters with some of the odder moons in the Saturn system… and given how weird Saturn is, that’s saying something. I was particularly enthralled with these two small worlds:

On the left is the moon Janus and on the right is Epimetheus. The scales are not quite the same; Janus is roughly half again as big as Epimetheus’ size of 135 x 110 x 105 km (81 x 66 x 63 miles). Cassini was a little over 100,000 km from Epimetheus and 75,000 km from Janus when these images a were taken.

These are raw image, so they haven’t been processed yet to remove cosmic ray hits, brightness variations, and so on. But they are still fascinating. Epimetheus looks to me exactly how I picture a big asteroid; beaten, battered, looming. The low angle of sunlight on the side accentuates the craters there, making this almost a caricature of what an asteroid looks like. Technically it’s not an asteroid; it’s a moon. And even if it weren’t orbiting Saturn we might not call it an asteroid; it has a high reflectivity indicating a lot of ice on the surface (and a low density consistent with that too). If it orbited the Sun on an elliptical path, we might very well call it a comet!

But there’s more to these moons. Amazingly, Janus and Epimetheus are on almost — but not quite — the same orbit around Saturn! Currently, Janus is a bit closer to Saturn than Epimetheus.

I say “currently”, because every four years these moons swap orbits! Since Janus has an orbit slightly closer to Saturn, it is moving faster around the planet than Epimetheus. It slowly but eventually catches up to the outer moon. As they approach, Janus pulls back slightly on Epimetheus, and Epimetheus pulls Janus forward. In other words, Janus steals orbital energy Epimetheus! This means Epimetheus drops into a slightly lower orbit, and Janus gets boosted into a slightly higher one, effectively swapping the orbits of the two moons. Although the two orbital paths are separated by only about 50 km (30 miles) — smaller than the radii of either moon — they never collide. The swap takes place when the moons are still more than 10,000 km apart, so they never get a chance to bump uglies.

How did this weird situation arise? Perhaps, in the distant past, there was one bigger moon orbiting Saturn, and it got whacked by an interloper. The moon disrupted, breaking into two big pieces and lots of littler ones. The debris got cleaned up by the gravity of the two big pieces and other gravitational effects, leaving these two square-dancing satellites on slightly different but still interacting paths.

However, the actual cause of this still isn’t known for sure. Cassini observations like this one may help astronomers figure out how it is these two little moons came to be, and why it is that although they can always approach each other, they can never actually touch.

Over the years of our addiction to the great idiot box, television, we’ve gradually learned to block out the pesky commercials that interrupt and interfere with our viewing pleasure with their yammering attempts to sell us things. Unfortunately, this has only led marketers to wonder how they could influence our buying decisions in more subtle ways, ushering in a new era of creepy ideas that smack of brainwashing.

The first idea was product placement, where the stars of TV shows drank a certain brand of fizzy soda or typed on a certain brand of computer. But now that most viewers are hip to these product placements, the marketers and networks have stepped it up a notch to reclaim our attention again. NBC has introduced “behavior placement,” wherein certain behaviors are written into the show’s narrative in order to foist a more nebulous kind of marketing on us.

For a week in April, NBC will use its shows to convince viewers to “get green,” compost, or otherwise save the planet. The benefits for advertisers are two-fold. Some companies simply want to link their brand to a feel-good and socially aware show, while other companies–like those that sell energy-efficient lightbulbs or organic household cleaning products–think advertising on these shows will directly boost sales.

In an in-depth article, The Wall Street Journal writes of an earlier marketing push:

In just one week on NBC, the detectives on “Law and Order” investigated a cash-for-clunkers scam, a nurse on “Mercy” organized a group bike ride, Al Gore made a guest appearance on “30 Rock,” and “The Office” turned Dwight Schrute into a cape-wearing superhero obsessed with recycling.

The marketers say they don’t want to come across as being too pushy or preachy, so getting characters in a show to plug for certain behaviors is a safer bet. NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker told The Wall Street Journal:

“People don’t want to be hit over the head with it…. Putting it in programming is what makes it resonate with viewers.”

Since fall 2007, NBC executives have asked producers of almost every prime-time and daytime show to incorporate a green storyline at least once a year. Show producers, like Tim Kring of “Heroes,” told The Journal that behavior placement was easier than incorporating a specific brand. This past fall, he said, members of a carnival in the show loaded a pickup truck with recyclables as one of the characters talked about giving back to the Earth.

“Someone has to pay for our big, expensive television shows,” Mr. Kring says.

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Image: iStockphoto

When I was 9 years old I desperately wanted to be a paleontologist, but sadly, daydreams of unearthing dinosaurs led to no significant fossil finds in my backyard. So I must confess unending respect for Matthew Berger, who, at age 9, quite by accident made a stunning scientific find. In the journal Science this week, Matthew’s father paleoanthropologist Lee Berger describes the fossils of a brand-new hominid species that they turned up in South Africa: Australopithecus sediba, which dates back to between 1.78 and 1.95 million years and could offer new hints about that era of human evolution.

Matthew was chasing his dog near a site where his father had long hunted for fossils when he tripped over the find. The bones belong to a pre-teenage boy and a woman estimated to be in her late 20s or early 30s; the individuals died at about the same time, and before their remains had fully decomposed, they were entombed in an avalanche of sediment and nearly perfectly preserved deep in the Malapa cave north of Johannesburg, South Africa [TIME]. As a result, Lee Berger says, the bones are in an astonishing state for their nearly 2-million-year age.

While such a find was bound to bring out the “missing link” cliches, we don’t know for sure where Australopithecus sediba would belong on the evolutionary tree with respect to us. “There’s no compelling evidence that this newly proposed species was ancestral to Homo,” remarks Bernard Wood of George Washington University in Washington, D.C. [Science News]. These bones date to a time when the genus Australopithecus was beginning to give way to Homo, our own. The New York Times reports, however, that while Berger’s team places its find within Australopithecus, not all anthropologists are sure it can be so easily classified.

For instance, the Australopithecus sediba arms are long like an ape’s, suggesting these hominids were competent tree climbers. But the hands are smaller, like ours. The boy’s skull is small, like Australopithecus. But his nose and cheekbones more closely resemble Homo. “They are a fascinating mosaic of features,” said Rick Potts, director of the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian Institution. “It reminds us of the combining and recombining of characteristics, the tinkering and experimentation, that go on in evolution” [The New York Times]. Donald Johanson, the discoverer of Lucy (which is classified under Australopithecus), praised the find but says Berger’s interpretation is way off. He think the fossil is a variety of Homo.

The debate over these bones will go on and on. But while Lee Berger reaps his kudos, there’s one person who’s not receiving due respect: Matthew. In an insult to 9-year-old scientists everywhere, Science reportedly shot down Lee Berger’s request to list his son as a co-author. But the younger Berger is still left with good stories to tell. On Aug. 15, 2008, when Matthew called his father to look at the bones he had found, Dr. Berger began cursing wildly as he neared his son. The boy mistook his father’s profanity for anger…. “I couldn’t believe it,” Dr. Berger giddily recalled. “I took the rock, and I turned it” and “sticking out of the back of the rock was a mandible with a tooth, a canine, sticking out. And I almost died,” he said, adding “What are the odds?” [The New York Times].

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Image: Brett Eloff

In Slate today, I take a look at the newly unveiled fossils of a strange new hominin, Australopithecus sediba. I try to separate the hype from the significance of this long-legged, long-armed, tiny-brained beast. My conclusion: let’s not turn this into another Darwinius affair!

Check it out.

[Photo by Brett Eloff courtesy of Lee Berger and University of Witwatersrand]

I am very pleased and excited to announce that I will be moderating a fascinating panel in Pasadena California on Tuesday, April 21. The topic is “The Quest for a Living World”: how modern astronomy is edging closer to finding another Earth orbiting a distant star.

[Click for a higher-res version.]

The panelists are all-stars in the field: Caltech astronomy professor John Johnson, Berkeley astronomer Gibor Basri, MIT planetary astronomer Sara Seager, and NASA Ames Research Center’s Tori Hoehler. We’ll be talking about how we’re looking for these new worlds, what the state of the art is, and perhaps toss around some of the philosophy of why we’re looking for them. You might think the answer is obvious, but I’ve found that astronomers have lots of intriguing reasons for why they do the work they do.

The event is sponsored by Discover Magazine, the Thirty Meter Telescope (yes, a project to build a telescope with a 30 meter mirror!), and Caltech. It will be at 7:30 p.m. at Caltech’s Beckman auditorium. It’s also free! Send an email to [email protected] if you want to attend.

We’ll be taking questions from the audience, and if you have a question you’d like to submit in advance then we have an online form where you can send it it.

Last year’s panel on astronomy frontiers was a lot of fun, and very well-attended. If you’re in the LA area, then I highly recommend you come! I know you’ll have a great time, and you’ll get a taste for some of the astronomical adventures in store for us in the next couple of years.