Author: Discover Main Feed

A little square that has been left blank on the periodic table for all these years might finally be filled in. A team of American and Russian scientists have just reported the synthesis of a brand new element–element 117. Says study coauthor Dawn Shaughnessy: “For a chemist, it’s so fundamentally cool” to fill a square in that table [The New York Times].

If other scientists confirm the discovery, the still-unnamed element will take its place between elements 116 and 118, both of which have already been tracked down. A paper about element 117 will soon be published in Physical Review Letters, and scientists say the new element appears to point the way toward a brew of still more massive elements with chemical properties no one can predict [The New York Times].

Element 117 was born in a particle accelerator in Russia, where the scientists smashed together calcium-48 — an isotope with 20 protons and 28 neutrons — and berkelium-249, which has 97 protons and 152 neutrons. The collisions spit out either three or four neutrons, creating two different isotopes of an element with 117 protons [Science News].

The new element 117, takes it place between two superheavy elements that scientists know to be very radioactive and that decay almost instantly. But many researchers think it is possible that even heavier elements may occupy an “island of stability” in which superheavy atoms stick around for a while [Science News]. If this theory holds up, scientists say, the work could generate an array of strange new materials with as yet unimagined scientific and practical uses [New York Times].

The excitement continues for the scientists who toiled to synthesize the new element, as they wait to hear what it will be named. Usually, a new element is named after someone or someplace involved in the research. The element berekelium, which was used in the experiment, was named after the University of California at Berkeley, where it was first synthesized, while element 112 was just recently named Copernicium in honor of the 16th century scientist Nicholas Copernicus.

So far, the scientists have been exceptionally mum about what the element might be called. Yuri Oganessian, a nuclear physicist at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia and the lead author on the paper, said in an e-mail message: “Naming elements is a serious question; in fact…This takes years” [New York Times]. His silence is reinforced by team member Shaughnessy, who was equally cagey about possible names for the new element: “We’ve never discussed names because it’s sort of like bad karma…It’s like talking about a no hitter during the no hitter. We’ve never spoken of it aloud” [New York Times].

Till the element is confirmed and it takes its formal place on the periodic table, scientists say it shall simply be referred to as element 117–or by the Latin reference to its number, ununseptium.

Related Content:
80beats: Zinc + Lead = New, Superheavy Addition to the Periodic Table
DISCOVER: Physicists Extend the Periodic Table
DISCOVER: 19: Two New Elements Discovered
DISCOVER: 10 Obscure Elements That Are More Important Than You’d Think

Image:Wikimedia

The West Virginia coal mining accident yesterday killed at least 25, and hope is starting to fade for finding the four missing miners alive. It’s the deadliest mining accident in the United States in more than a quarter-century.

A methane explosion appears to be the cause. Normally when DISCOVER covers methane scares, it has to do with the potent greenhouse gas leaking from permafrost or the ocean. But for coal miners, methane represents a more clear and present danger: Underground mines can fill up with the flammable gas, and a stray spark can light it and cause an explosion. As a result, mines are required to have giant fans that blow methane out of the working area.

Methane not only appears to have caused the accident, it also held up the rescue effort. Operations had to be suspended because of a build-up of methane in the mine. It’s hoped that they can resume later today — but it will require drilling about 1,000 feet, through two coal seams, to get to where the men might have been able to find shelter [NPR].

Methane is ubiquitous in coal mines. The gas, like coal, is a molecule made of hydrogen and carbon, and it is produced from the same raw material as coal, ancient piles of biological material, by the same processes. Much of the natural gas sold in the United States is drawn from coal seams. In undisturbed coal deposits, the methane is kept loosely attached to the coal molecules by compression; when the area is opened up by miners, the pressure is reduced and the methane bubbles out [The New York Times].

Coal mining is an unavoidably dangerous occupation, but it seems Massey Energy, owner of the mine, was far behind where it should have been in safety compliance. The U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration cited the mine for 1,342 safety violations from 2005 through Monday for a total of $1.89 million in proposed fines, according to federal records. The company has contested 422 of those violations [Washington Post]. The citations at West Virginia’s Upper Big Branch mine included some for the improper ventilation of methane.

Just why Upper Big Branch suffered such a catastrophe at this particular time remains unknown. After the incident, geologists noticed that there had been two recent episodes of small seismic activities in the area—a 3.4 magnitude earthquake on Sunday and some surface blasting on Saturday that initially registered as a 2.9 quake. USGS geophysicist Julie Dutton says that the 3.4 quake could have been strong enough to dislodge methane pockets and contribute to the accident—but only if it were closer than its distance of 100 miles. “There’s the definite possibility that that’s what could have happened, but not from this earthquake,” Dutton said. “This one was too far away and days separated. That makes a big difference” [FoxNews.com].

And from the other side of the world, some slightly better news. Yesterday rescuers saved 115 people trapped underground for eight days at the Wangjialing mine in China. The rescue was rare good news for China’s mining industry, the deadliest in the world, where accidents killed 2,631 coal miners last year. That’s down from 6,995 deaths in 2002, the most dangerous year on record [AP]. However, 32 remain stuck underground, and gas buildups are hindering the operations there, too.

Related Content:
80beats: Isn’t It Ironic: Green Tech Relies on Dirty Mining in China
80beats: New EPA Rules Clamp Down on Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining
80beats: After Massive Tennessee Ash Spill, Authorities Try to Assess the Damage
80beats: Obama & Chu Push Ahead with Clean Coal Projects Despite the Cost

Image: flickr / NIOSH

Hand motion segmentation against skin colour background in breast awareness applications.

“A hand is an essential tool used in breast self-examination, which needs to be detected and analysed during the process of breast palpation. However, the background of a woman’s moving hand is her breast that has the same or similar colour as the hand. Additionally, colour images recorded by a web camera are strongly affected by the lighting or brightness conditions. Hence, it is a challenging task to segment and track the hand against the breast without utilising any artificial markers, such as coloured nail polish. In this paper, a two-dimensional Gaussian skin colour model is employed in a particular way to identify a breast but not a hand. First, an input image is transformed to YCbCr colour space, which is less sensitive to the lighting conditions and more tolerant of skin tone. The breast, thus detected by the Gaussian skin model, is used as the baseline or framework for the hand motion.”

Photo: flickr/briser50

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Eye Tracking of Men’s Preferences for Female Breast Size and Areola Pigmentation.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: scientist…or perv?
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: wtf?

It’s a little tardy– my first book came out in 2002, after all — but Barrel of Monkeys just reviewed Bad Astronomy.

The conclusion?

In fact, I move that Bad Astronomy be a recommended text book at secondary schools everywhere, or even primary schools, for that matter. Scratch that. Everyone in the world should read this book. Phil Plait manages to break things down to an easily understandable level, so that people without a background in physics or astronomy* can grasp the core concepts.

I agree. In fact, I’d be happy to reduce my royalty to a mere one penny per book if that would make what he wishes come true. I suspect $60M would be a sufficient and acceptable paycheck. You can start now if you’d like, and if it does sell six billion copies, I’ll send you a refund for the difference^*.

Imagine a day in the future when a soldier could just roll out of bed, pull on a cotton T-shirt, and head out into a combat zone, without worrying about taking a bullet through the chest.

An international team of scientists from Switzerland, China, and the United States have moved one step closer towards the goal of a bulletproof T-shirt by combining cotton with boron carbide–the third hardest material known on earth and the stuff used to armor battle tanks.

Chemistry World reports:

Modern military forces use plates of boron carbide (B₄C) as ceramic inserts for bulletproof clothing but these can restrict mobility, so the design of a nanocomposite — where B₄C is used to reinforce another material — could provide the perfect balance of strength and flexibility.

The scientists created the new bulletproof material by cutting squares from a pure cotton T-shirt and soaking them in a solution containing boron powder and a nickel-based catalyst. Then they heated the cloth patches to 2012 degrees Fahrenheit under a stream of argon that prevented the material from burning. In the process, the cotton fibers changed to carbon fibers, which reacted with the boron powder to form “nanowires” of boron carbide. The researchers describe their breakthrough in the journal Advanced Materials.

The cloth changed color from white to black after the reaction, but remained remarkably strong, lightweight, and flexible. But cops and soldiers won’t be sporting these bulletproof T-shirts anytime soon, Chemistry World adds:

But despite the dramatic change in their properties, this type of ‘armored cotton’ is not yet ready to replace conventional bulletproof materials, such as Kevlar.

Related Content:
80beats: New Latex & Plastic Soundproofing Could Stop Even Rumbling Bass Sound
80beats: Could a Deep-Sea Snail’s Shell Inspire Next-Gen Body-Armor?
80beats: Self-Healing Coating Could Make Scratch-Proof Cars
80beats: Super-Strong Ceramic Mimics Seashells’ Tough Mother-of-Pearl Coating

Image: Xiaoding Li. The image shows the nanowire arrays in the cotton fabric, and a cross-section diagram of the carbon microfiber coated with boron carbide nanowires.

When it comes to generating clean energy, the strong offshore winds that blow in from the ocean are a great source. But while these sea breezes are often stronger than land winds, they’re not consistent; instead their force tends to ebb and flow like the tides. Wind turbines that use offshore winds to produce energy can therefore have a tough time maintaining a steady supply of power, but now scientists from the University of Delaware have proposed a novel idea on how to keep the power supply steady.

In a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Willet Kempton and his team suggest that by connecting offshore wind farms in a long network running along the entire Eastern Seaboard, power fluctuations could be cut down, as electricity from interconnected farms would be easier to manage and more valuable than from wind at a single location [BusinessWeek]. The researchers suggest that by creating a 1,550-mile-long network of wind turbines, the network could provide power from Massachusetts to North Carolina.

Kempton says linking the turbines would also help eliminate the possibility of a complete power outage should wind speeds drop in any one location. If the wind drops in North Carolina, say, power could be rerouted from somewhere else in the network where the winds are blowing strongly, scientists explain. The concept is simple: If you spread out wind stations far enough, each one will experience a different weather pattern. So it’s very unlikely that a slackening of the wind would affect all stations at once. The result is steadier power [Wired.com].

Kempton’s team proposed the idea after studying five years of offshore wind data from Florida to Maine. Simulating a series of underwater transmission cables that stretched about 1,550 miles and connected 11 stations, which they called the “Atlantic transmission grid,” scientists found that although individual stations showed erratic power supplies, the aggregate power output changed very little. Not once during the five year period studied did the overall power output drop to zero. “We took an intermittent resource and made it not intermittent anymore,” Kempton said [Wired.com].

Though the United States is the world’s largest producer of wind power, no commercial offshore wind farms are up and running yet here; Kempton’s research may provide support for the various offshore wind projects in the planning stages along the Atlantic coast. Mark Jacobson, a civil and environmental engineer at Standford University comments: “The technology’s there, the materials are there, we have the willpower to reduce carbon emissions, we have a reliable power supply that doesn’t lead to fuel shortage…. The next step is really to start implementing this on a large scale” [Wired.com]. However, installing cables like those Kempton used in his study to hypothetically connect the different turbines could cost as much as $1.4 billion.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: High-Flying Windmills Blow Away Their Ground-Based Cousins
80beats: Windmills on NYC Skyscrapers Sound Cool, but Wouldn’t Work
80beats: Wind Turbines Could Theoretically Power the Entire World, and Then Some
80beats: Will New York City Harness Wind Power?

Image: iStockphoto

It has been brought to my attention that some legitimate comments without copious linkage seem to have gotten caught in the spam filter. If your comment is legit and it isn’t showing up after a day (or, if you’ve already been approved for comments and it doesn’t show up immediately), email me.

The Space Shuttle Discovery launched successfully yesterday, and it’s on its way to the International Space Station. It will dock with ISS tomorrow, April 7.

Until then, the Orbiter has to play catch up, slowly changing its orbit until it matches the station’s. The thing is, you may be able to watch this unfold! Both the Orbiter and the ISS are easily visible to the unaided eye, and in fact the station is potentially the fourth brightest object in the sky (after the Sun, Moon, and Venus). As they approach each other, you can see them as bright(ish) stars moving rapidly across the sky.

You can find out if they are visible to you by going to a site like Heavens-Above. Enter your latitude and longitude (try Google maps to get that) and it will put you on a page that gives you times, directions, and brightnesses (in magnitudes, so a more negative number is brighter) of a lot of different satellites. Click on ISS or STS-131 to get the station or Orbiter times.

All the good passes for the next week in Boulder, for example, are in the early morning. I suspect I’ll miss them. But check your local times and see if you can catch them! It’s an amazing sight. The picture here is one I took myself using nothing more than a digital camera on a tripod — click to embiggen it. It shows a time exposure of Atlantis and the ISS from 2007, and you can see how they are on very slightly different orbits. The two were separated by a small amount; you can tell by the different end points of the trails.

There aren’t many Shuttle flights left, so get out there and observe this while you can!

Despite burning curiosity, I have no idea what the Dalai Lama writes in his personal emails. But somewhere in China, hackers know.

China-based hacking operations have moved from murmurs to the front page since the fracas between the Chinese government and Google flared up three months ago. Besides the communist government’s flagrant and unapologetic Internet censorship, the search giant also accused China of harboring hackers who were behind politically motivated cyber attacks, like the targeting of Chinese human rights activists’ Gmail accounts. This week, computer security experts at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto announced that they’ve been trailing a group of China-based attackers they dub the “Shadow Network” for eight months. And they say they can show that those hackers have stolen a plethora of politically sensitive materials.

The intruders breached the systems of independent analysts, taking reports on several Indian missile systems. They also obtained a year’s worth of the Dalai Lama’s personal e-mail messages. The intruders even stole documents related to the travel of NATO forces in Afghanistan [The New York Times]. They also took political documents that outlined India’s concerns about its relations with Africa, Russia, and the Middle East. The core servers for the operation seem to be based in the city of Chengdu in southwest China.

The report said it has no evidence of involvement by the Chinese government, but it again put Beijing on the defensive [Los Angeles Times]. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu bemoaned the widespread coverage of this, and insisted that the government has nothing to do with the attacks. But while the researchers behind the report, “Shadows in the Cloud,” don’t explicitly blame the Chinese government, they say they are watching to see whether the government takes any action to shut down these hackers.

Meanwhile, Google’s spats with governments aren’t over. As we reported last week, the company says that opponents to a bauxite mining project in Vietnam have been inadvertently downloading malware, and McAfee, the company that discovered the attack, says the malware created a botnet whose command-and-control systems were located within IP (Internet Protocol) address blocks assigned to Vietnam. “We believe that the perpetrators may have political motivations and may have some allegiance to the government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,” wrote McAfee CTO George Kurtz [PC World]. Like the Chinese government, Vietnam’s denies these allegations and calls them “groundless.”

Related Content:
80beats: Google Exposes a Cyber Attack on Vietnamese Activists
80beats: Google Defies China’s Censorship Rules; China Quickly Strikes Back
80beats: Iran Blocks Gmail; Will Offer Surveillance-Friendly National Email Instead
80beats: Hillary Clinton to China: Internet Censorship Is an “Information Curtain”
80beats: Google to China: No More Internet Censorship, or We Leave

Image: flickr / abhikrama

Welcome to this week’s installment of the From Eternity to Here book club. Today we have a look at Chapter Thirteen, “The Life of the Universe.”

Excerpt:

If our comoving patch defines an approximately closed system, the next step is to think about its space of states. General relativity tells us that space itself, the stage on which particles and matter move and interact, evolves over time. Because of this, the definition of the space of states becomes more subtle than it would have been in if spacetime were absolute. Most physicists would agree that information is conserved as the universe evolves, but the way that works is quite unclear in a cosmological context. The essential problem is that more and more things can fit into the universe as it expands, so—naively, anyway—it looks as if the space of states is getting bigger. That would be in flagrant contradiction to the usual rules of reversible, information-conserving physics, where the space of states is fixed once and for all.

Of course we’ve already looked a bit at the life of the universe, way back in Chapter Three. The difference is that we’re now focusing on how entropy evolves, given our hard-acquired understanding of what entropy is and how it works for black holes. This is where we review Roger Penrose’s well-known-yet-still-widely-ignored argument that the low entropy of the early universe is something that needs to be explained.

In a sense, this is pretty straightforward stuff, following directly from what we’ve already done in the book. But it’s also somewhat controversial among professional cosmologists. The reason why can be found in the slightly technical digression that begins on page 292, “Conservation of information in an expanding universe.”

The point is that physicists often think of “the space of states in a region of spacetime” as being equal to “the space of states we can describe by quantum field theory.” They know that’s not right, because gravity doesn’t fit into that description, but these are the states they know how to deal with. This collection of states isn’t fixed; it grows with time as the universe expands. You will therefore sometimes hear cosmologists talk about the high entropy of the early universe, under the misguided assumption that there were fewer states that could “fit” into the universe at that time. (Equivalently, that gravity can be ignored.) This approach has, in my opinion anyway, done great damage to how cosmologists think about fine-tuning problems. One of the major motivations for writing the book was to explain these issues, not only to the general reader but also to my scientist friends.

At the end of the chapter I deviate from Penrose’s argument a bit. He believes that a high-entropy state of the universe would be one that was highly inhomogeneous, full of black holes and white holes and what have you. I think that’s right if you are thinking about a very dense configuration of matter. But matter doesn’t have to be dense — the expansion of the universe can dilute it away. So I argue that the truly highest-entropy configuration is one where space is essentially empty, with nothing but vacuum energy. This is also very far from being widely accepted, and certainly relies on a bit of hand-waving. But again, I think the failure to appreciate this point has distorted how cosmologists think about the problems presented by the early universe. So hopefully they read this far in the book!

A commenter takes a microbe-lover to task. It’s on! Jonathan Eisen, we await your flying scissor kick!

[Link to comment fixed]

Over the last few days, questions surrounding the iPad have normally been along the lines of: When will I get my paws on one? What apps should I get? What if I break it? But the question over at the blender company Blendtec has been more straightforward as everyone wondered, “Will it blend?”

Over the last few years, the company has been producing videos that showcase the industrial strength of their commercial blenders. In this video, they set out to find if Apple’s tablet can be blended into an iPad smoothie by chucking it into the “Total Blender” and turning in on. Needless to say, we gripped the edges of our table and wept a little (ok, a lot) as the brand-new iPad was smashed to smithereens.

Past “Will it Blend” videos have shown objects like glow sticks or an iPhone being demolished by the roaring blender. Blendec’s website proudly states:

The Total Blender two jar package includes both the standard 2-quart BPA-free jar, as well as the new BPA-free 3-quart jar featuring a precision tuned 4” blade and a patented fifth side. This larger five sided jar / 4″ blade combination creates a more powerful blending vortex, allowing you to power through tougher blending tasks with ease in less time.

Are you ready? Then watch what happens here.

Related Content:
Discoblog:  iPad Arrives—Some Worship It, Some Critique It, HP Tries to Kill It
80beats: Apple’ iPad Tablet: It’s Here, It’s Cool, and It’s Slightly Cheaper Than Expected
Discoblog: Weird iPhone Apps (our growing compendium of the oddest apps out there)

Image: Apple

Doctors already use concentrated sound waves to see through solid tissue and take a look inside the body, as with ultrasound scans. But in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Caltech scientists say they’ve developed a metamaterial that focuses sound to such a high concentration that it could go on the offensive, targeting cancers or kidney stones while leaving the surrounding tissues alone. Oh, and one other thing: The military could use it to make weapons.

“The beauty of this system is that it’s just a bunch of ball bearings that we control with weights,” said Chiara Daraio [Discovery News], a member of the research team. Caltech’s acoustic lens relies on the same principle as Newton’s cradle—that toy your high school science teacher probably kept on his or her desk with metal balls on strings that demonstrated the conservation of energy. In this design, 21 parallel chains each contain 21 bearings. When the team strikes one end, it starts a compression wave that carries through the system. But instead of having the last ball swing out like a pendulum and bring the momentum back into the system, like the toy does, the acoustic lens focuses all the energy at the end of the system onto one spot, just a few inches away from the metamaterial.

Researcher Alessandro Spadoni says the team had medical uses in mind when they designed this acoustic lens. “In particular, tissue temperature at the focal point can be increased with high acoustic-energy density, which results from a compact focal volume and high pressure induced by sound bullets,” Spadoni adds [Scientific American]. Thus, he says, you could potentially target and heat up cancerous tissue without affecting surrounding healthy tissue. Or, if they modulated the system a different way, the researchers say it could be used to see inside the body without the possible risks related to radiation-based imaging. The paper also hints at use in defense systems, though it leaves the implications of that to the imaginations of others. Sound bullets could be used by the military to create submarine melting waves of pressure or shock waves powerful enough to destroy caves otherwise untouchable by conventional weapons [Discovery News].

The Caltech scientists are far from the first to tinker with acoustic lenses, but the simplicity of their design makes it appealing. The research model currently works in two dimensions and hasn’t been tested on living cells. But, researchers says, scaling up to 3D could focus sound waves even better, and the applications of such a technology will depend on how much sound wave intensity the team can focus into one spot.

Related Content:
80beats: New Laytex & Plastic Soundproofing Could Stop Even Rumbling Bass Sound
80beats: This May Sound Strange: Sonic Lasers and Sonic Black Holes
80beats: The 3D Invisibility Cloak: It’s Real, But It’s Really Tiny

Image: PNAS

I wish I had thought of the title of this post, but I have to give credit to the wonderful Rachel Maddow. I happened to catch a few minutes of her show while on the road the other day, and although it made my blood boil, I watched the entire segment, which is now online:

In her segment, Ms. Maddow talks about the out-and-out lying being done by so many right-wing media outlets, in this case about ACORN and Climategate. As I have been saying many times, the far right in this country have been beating the pulpit to a bloody mess with their distortions and noise-making. They will do or say just about anything to distract people from the real issues. As long as people are scared to death by this noise, they won’t think about issues, they’ll react to them.

Elizabeth Kolbert — gotta love that name — has an article in The New Yorker on a similar theme, saying how the sturm und drang over Climategate is much ado about nothing, an overtrumped, overhyped, and breathlessly hyperbolied mountain crafted entirely out of molehills. I have said exactly that myself. Twice. And as I expected when I posted those articles, there was a huge amount of noise, but the points I was making — the ones I was actually making, and not the ones denialists tried play up — still stand. The hacked emails did not show widespread conspiracy by climatologists, and in fact a parliamentary committee that convened to investigate the hacked emails cleared scientists of all wrongdoing.

I’ll note that the far right doesn’t own the copyright on this; the far left has its share of antireality. The alternative medicine movement is a fine example of this. But the right is the one currently making the most noise. I agree with some of the basic tenets of Republicanism — I’d prefer a small government over a bloated bureaucracy, and I believe in fiscal responsibility — but the GOP as it stands now is a far cry from the roots of its party. I think the unholy (so to speak) alliance it curried with fundamental religion a few decades ago has led it to the antireality stance it has today. And either way, and from whatever direction, the noise machines are in full swing.

We’ve seen this over and over again, and it will continue for as long as the media allow it, and we allow the media to allow it. I’m really glad Ms. Maddow and The New Yorker called them out on it. The blogosphere does what it can, but until the main stream media take this issue on, I fear that most people won’t see the man behind the curtain.

Global warming is real. Evolution is real. Vaccines do not cause autism. Homeopathy doesn’t work. These are facts, and they don’t care whether or not denialists spin, fold, and mutilate them. Until we face up to reality, however, they will spin, fold, and mutilate us.

So what do you think?! The Science of Kissing will be out next January and is already available for pre-order on Amazon. Here’s the description: From a noted science journalist comes a wonderfully witty and fascinating exploration of how and why we kiss. When did humans begin to kiss? Why is kissing integral to some cultures and alien to others? Do good kissers make the best lovers? And is that expensive lip-plumping gloss worth it? Sheril Kirshenbaum, a biologist and science journalist, tackles these questions and more in THE SCIENCE OF KISSING. It’s everything you always wanted to know about kissing but either haven’t asked, couldn’t find out, or didn’t realize you should understand. The book is informed by the latest studies and theories, but Kirshenbaum’s engaging voice gives the information a light touch. Topics range from the kind of kissing men like to do (as distinct from women) to what animals can teach us about the kiss to whether or not the true art of kissing was lost sometime in the Dark Ages. Drawing upon classical history, evolutionary biology, psychology, popular culture, and more, Kirshenbaum’s winning book will appeal to romantics and armchair scientists alike.

If Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens retires, and is replaced by Elena Kagan (the favorite), then the Supreme Court of the United States of America will have no Protestants on the bench. This in a nation which is 50% Protestant. Until after World War II the United States of America was in its self-identity fundamentally Protestant (see American Judaism and Catholicism and American Freedom for histories of how Jews & Catholics entered the American religious mainstream in the middle of the 20th century after a century of rejection by the Protestant establishment).* This is clear when you read about attempts to “Christianize” Roman Catholic Filipinos after the conquest of that nation from Spain in the early 20th century, or the reality that both American Catholicism and Judaism were often torn by conflicts between explicit assimilationists who wished to emulate the Protestant congregational model dominant in the United States, and those which argued for the perpetuation of a separate distinctive religious culture outside of the mainstream. And yet today this doesn’t matter much because the assimilationists won. Consider the fact that Stephen Breyer, who is Jewish, has a daughter who is an Episcopal priest (her mother is an English Anglican). Sonia Sotomayor is likely to be indistinguishable from the other Left-leaning justices, though she shares a Roman Catholic confession with the conservatives on the court. Religion in the United States by and large has become a personal label which serves as a marker toward one’s origins and one’s current loyalties, rather than a confession which indicates identity with a “thick” and exclusive subculture (the Amish, Hasidic Jews and Fundamentalist Mormons being exceptions). In this way the United States is like South Korea or many African nations, where religious pluralism and individual fluidity in choice and identity are the rule and not the exception.

The contrast with race and sex is notable. The predominance of males and whites on the bench is often commented on, but less so the fact that Roman Catholics are overrepresented by a factor of three, and Jews by nearly an order of magnitude. In fact, there seem to be a dearth of white Protestants at the pinnacles of American politics today. In the Congressional leadership Harry Reid is a Mormon, Nancy Pelosi & John Boehner are Roman Catholic. Steny Hoyer and Mitch McConnell “represent” for white Protestants, but the Vice President is a Roman Catholic.

* It is correct that many of the Founding Fathers, most famously Thomas Jefferson, were not orthodox Christians. But they were cultural Christians, more specifically cultural Protestants, and particularly of the denominations of their ancestors. Jefferson and George Washington were affiliated in some way throughout their life with the Episcopal Church of the Virginia gentry. John Adams was a Unitarian Christian whose outlook was shaped by the origins of Unitarianism in New England as a liberal reform movement within Congregational Calvinist Christianity. As such, the Founders shared Protestant suspicions of the Roman Catholic Church, whether it be due to Reform Christian antagonism of old or a newer Enlightenment anti-clericalism. Recall that one of the causa belli for colonial rebellion against the British crown was the toleration given to French Roman Catholics in Canada (this was later discretely removed from enumerations of causes because of the possibility that Quebec would join the rebellion, as well as the need for alliance with Roman Catholic France).

At the AAAS meeting a few weeks back, I sat down with Lindsay Patterson of the radio show EarthSky to talk about evolution. Here’s a new 90-second piece that’s now airing.

Effects of eye color on frisbee toss

“Light-eyed individuals generally perform better at self-paced activities while dark-eyed individuals perform better at reactive activities. Using multiple regression it was found that dark-eyed students hit a target with a frisbee more times than did light-eyed students.”

Relationship of eye color to winning horseshoe pitching contests.

“Light-eyed individuals perform some self-paced activities better while dark-eyed individuals perform reactive activities better. In horseshoe pitching contests there were, however, no differences on winning or losing between 21 light- and 25 dark-eyed men at a county fair.”

Photo: flickr/Sam Beebe/Ecotrust

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Blue is for losers.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Beware of Wii tennis.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Dizziness in discus throwers is related to motion sickness generated while spinning.

Something was different in the DISCOVER office this morning. A strange feeling (other than the unseasonable early April heat) hung in the air. When we found the box that showed up over the weekend, everything was illuminated: our iPad had arrived.

Now that we’ve crossed the threshold of the magical Apple product opening ceremony, we could give you a rundown of its neat little tricks. But as Apple sold 300,000 iPad on the first day, the Web has become super-saturated with iPad reviews since the first ones came out this weekend. The New York Times‘ is one of the best, reviewing the product first for tech nerds and then for everyone else.

For techies:

When the iPad is upright, typing on the on-screen keyboard is a horrible experience; when the iPad is turned 90 degrees, the keyboard is just barely usable (because it’s bigger).

And,

The iPad can’t play Flash video. Apple has this thing against Flash, the Web’s most popular video format; says it’s buggy, it’s not secure and depletes the battery. Well, fine, but meanwhile, thousands of Web sites show up with empty white squares on the iPad — places where videos or animations are supposed to play.

But for everyone else:

The simple act of making the multitouch screen bigger changes the whole experience. Maps become real maps, like the paper ones. Scrabble shows the whole board, without your having to zoom in and out. You see your e-mail inbox and the open message simultaneously.

While some reviewers have scoffed at the early iPad as not much more than an oversized iPhone, The Big Money points out that some of the early apps, like Pandora, Netflix, and Kindle, that will be key to the product’s early success. But what’s missing so far? The ridiculous. Here at DISCOVER we’ve been faithful chroniclers of the absurd apps for the iPhone, but thus far the pickings on the iPad are far more buttoned-down. There’s no iPad version of iFart Mobile, Koi Pond, iBeer or Bubble Wrap — yet. These simple, time-wasting apps are among the most popular programs for the iPhone and iPad Touch, but there’s no sign of anything like them in the top downloads section of the App Store [Washington Post].

Frankly, the iPad would be a much more inspired product if it contained the apps in our April Fools’ Day review. Or, if you could multitask—the initial iPad won’t let you run apps simultaneously, so as many reviewers pointed out, you couldn’t listen to Pandora while doing something else. This is a backbreaker. If this is supposed to be a replacement for netbooks, how can it possibly not have multitasking [Gizmodo]?

As iPad mania comes down a notch and more of the machine’s shortcomings become clear, competitors now stand poised to fill the gap. HP, for one, continues to leak video teasing the talents of its tablet PC, including one just released to try to steal some attention from Apple. HP’s Slate is likely to have a built-in camera, video-recording capability, USB port and a SD card reader — all features pointedly aimed at the iPad, which lacks all three [Wired.com]. Its added features ought to appeal to those looking for more than an expensive new toy or e-reader: As much as the community at large has debated the value of the iPad as a business tool–Apple failed to hold up its end. Apple was so focused on building a consumer gadget that it left off critical elements that could have let the iPad not just be used as a business tool–but dominate as a business tool [PC World].

Related Content:
Discoblog: DISCOVER’s iPad Arrived Early… And It’s AWESOME
80beats: Apple’ iPad Tablet: It’s Here, It’s Cool, and It’s Slightly Cheaper Than Expected
Discoblog: Weird iPhone Apps (our growing compendium of the oddest apps out there)

Image: Apple

Scientists have created the world’s smallest superconductor, made out of just four molecule-pairs and less than a nanometer wide. That’s far smaller than the head of a pin — which stretches across a million nanometers — and more on the order of a DNA molecule, which is about 2 nanometers wide [PopSci]. The invention, described in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, provides the first evidence that nanoscale molecular superconducting wires can be fabricated, which could be used for nanoscale electronic devices and energy applications [Xinhua]. Superconductive materials allow electrical currents to pass through with zero resistance, making them potentially useful to a wide variety of industries.

Lead author Saw-Wai Hla, a physics professor at Ohio University’s Nanoscale and Quantum Phenomena Institute, explains that earlier it was almost impossible to make nanoscale interconnects using metallic conductors because the resistance increased as the size of wire becomes smaller. “The nanowires become so hot that they can melt and destruct. That issue, Joule heating, has been a major barrier for making nanoscale devices a reality” [Xinhua], Hla says.

To get around that problem, Hla and his colleagues created molecules of an organic salt called (BETS)2-GaCl4 and placed it on a surface of silver. Then they had to bring the temperature of the molecules down to about 10 Kelvin (-442 degrees Fahrenheit). Using scanning tunneling spectroscopy, the scientists observed superconductivity in molecular chains of different lengths, raising the possibility that nanoscale electronic circuits could be produced at a larger scale. While consumer electronics obviously don’t function at such extreme cold temperatures, the news that tiny superconductor wires can be fabricated is still expected to give a boost to the development of nanoscale electronics.

And there’s yet more excitement in the world of nanotechnology, as two prototypes of motion-powered nanogenerators made of nano-sized parts were also revealed in Nature Nanotechnlogy (pdf). One of the flat, paper clip-sized “nanogenerators” is said to pump out as much energy as an AA battery, leading researchers to propose that, in the future, simply walking with your iPod in your pocket could keep it charged, and the lub-dub of your heart could power a portable blood-pressure sensor [ScienceNOW].

The two devices, created by materials scientist Zhong Lin Wang and his colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, are both plastic-encased nanogenerators whose main components are the so-called nanowires, made of crystallized zinc oxide, a piezoelectric material that converts mechanical stress into energy. Each wire is a few hundred nanometers thick (thinner than most bacteria are long) [Science NOW].

In one of the devices, the nanowires look like a bed of nails, held between layers of electricity-conducting materials. When this device is squeezed, the mechanical stress is converted to a tiny amount of energy. In the second and more powerful nanogenerator, the scientists were able to crank out more than 1.26 volts--about 60 times more than previous nanogenerator prototypes and close to a standard alkaline battery’s 1.5 volts [Science NOW].

The researchers say the nanogenerators could be used, for example, in a network of motion-powered sensors. Wang said: “In your house, you could have hundreds of nearly invisible sensors around to detect fires, floods, toxic gas leaks, or even burglars…. The sensors would wirelessly transmit data to a computer if there’s a problem, and you’d never have to charge them, plug them in, or replace a battery” [Science NOW]. However, such schemes are still far in the future. Wang and his team are now working on boosting the devices’ power and their ability to hold a charge.

Related Content:
80beats: 2 New Nanotech Super Powers: Desalinating Sea Water and Treating Cancer
80beats: Great Galloping Graphene! IBM’s New Transistor Works at Record Speed
80beats: With a Blood Sample & 20 Minutes, Nanosensors Could Detect Cancer
80beats: Nanosilver Puts the Hurt on Microbes—and Maybe Fish, Too
80beats: Scientist Smackdown: Can Nanoparticles Damage Human DNA?

Image: University of Ohio