Author: Discover Main Feed

Tonight, National Geographic is premiering a new series called “Known Universe”. I happen to know that this is a good show because, y’see, I’m in it.

Well, kinda. It’s an astronomy show, and they have lots of astronomers on talking about astronomy and astronomical things, including astronomers (I get paid every time I use the word “astronomer” I may have neglected to mention). So I will sometimes pop up when they decide that the other astronomers are too serious and interesting, and then I’ll talk about the end of the world or some other topic I’m typecast in.

The first episode is Cosmic Collisions (see?) and I’m pretty sure I’m in that one. I filmed a bunch of green-screen interviews last year with them, talking about gamma-ray bursts. Colliding neutron stars came up, so given the title, I think I’ll be in it at some point gesticulating a lot and using words like vast and titanic.

And before you ask, no, this is not the Sooper Sekrit Project. If it were, I would have titled this post something obscure, like The Sooper Sekrit Project revealed or some such. I’ll tell you more about that when I am legally obligated to.

So anyway, “Known Universe” premiers tonight at 8:00 (check your local listings). If you love it, please feel free to leave a comment. If you hate it, then try here.

For all those outdoorsy types, a Swiss army knife, preferably by Victorinox, is a must. The all-purpose knives can come packed with everything from blades to screwdrivers to tweezers, but over the years, Victorinox has upgraded its knives to give them more modern tools–like small flashlights, ball-point pens, and even USB flash drives. However, still not satisfied, the company upgraded one of its products. It now offers a knife with a removable USB flash drive with 32GB storage and enough security features to make a high-tech bank vault hang its head in shame. Like they say, this is not your grandfather’s knife.

The new Victorinox Secure’s USB stick won’t let just anybody plug it into a computer to download its contents. The memory drive features a system that first identifies your fingerprint before allowing you in. If something happens to you and your finger, um, falls off, you can’t stick the detached digit onto the device and expect to gain access, the company says. The system relies on both a fingerprint scanner and a thermal sensor, “so that the finger alone, detached from the body, will still not give access to the memory stick’s contents,” Victorinox said.

TG Daily writes:

It’s also been made tamper-proof. Any attempt to forcibly open it triggers a self-destruct mechanism that irrevocably burns its CPU and memory chip.

The company is so confident about its product, that it held a “Crack the Code” competition, where it dared contestants to breach the security of the knife. Apparently, 45 participants tried and failed. “We were so confident in the design and development of these devices, we were willing to put $100,000 on it,” Victorinox Swiss Army President, Rick Taggart, stated. “The fact that no one was able to crack the code really demonstrates the unparalleled security of these new products.”

The company is reportedly working on another version of the device that will print out of the memory stick’s contents on e-paper, writes TG Daily.

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Image: Victorinox

The ghost fleet, mothball fleet, reserve fleet—whatever you want to call the long-obsolete U.S. Navy ships that have been rusting in California’s Suisun Bay for decades, they might finally be gone this decade. The federal government’s Maritime Administration says it will spend $38 million to remove about half of the crumbling convoy from the waters near San Francisco by 2012, and dispose of the rest by 2017.

After World War II, there were thousands of surplus ships, and, in 1946, the Maritime Administration began keeping the best of them in reserve. At one time, more than 350 ships were in the fleet, including cruisers, destroyers, supply ships, transports and tankers [San Fransisco Chronicle]. The Navy dusted off some of them for use in the Korean and Vietnam wars. But the rest became relics, slowing decaying over the next six decades. And while the ghost fleet provides some nostalgia for Navy vets, it provides something less romantic for Suisun Bay: pollution. Twenty tons of lead-based paint had leached into the water.

Because of those concerns, environmental groups including the National Resources Defense Council sued the Maritime Administration, leading to this disposal plan. The 25 most decrepit ships will be removed by 2012, and stripped of loose paint, barnacles and plants before they are towed to Texas to be cut apart and recycled [The New York Times]. A federal judge still must approve this settlement, but if one does, then the Maritime Administration will remove the other 27 old vessels by 2017.

Not all the ships are headed for disposal, though. One resident of the bay is the battleship Iowa, which carried President Franklin D. Roosevelt to the Cairo and Tehran conferences in 1943. The ship was recommissioned in 1984 but was laid up again in 1990 after an explosion in a turret that killed 47 sailors. The Iowa will be retained at Suisun Bay pending disposition as a museum ship [San Fransisco Chronicle].

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Image: flickr / Ingridtalylar; NASA

“It’s a catastrophe. Relax!”

Those are the words of Michael Beard, the Nobel laureate physicist long past his prime who is the anti-hero of Ian McEwan’s new novel Solar, out this week in the United States. McEwan, no stranger to writing scientist characters or scientific themes, dives this time headlong into climate change. McEwan says he was nervous attempting to write fiction about a subject that has the potential to be, well, dull. But Solar is a laugh-out-loud read thanks to its ridiculous protagonist and willingness to make light of the apocalyptic seriousness of the conversation.

At the book’s outset, in the year 2000, Beard isn’t particularly convinced about climate change. He’s coasting on his reputation as a Nobelist, making money giving repetitive lectures and sitting on various boards, when suddenly he finds himself in charge of a shiny new British government research center out to build the next new thing in alternative energy. In the second part of “Solar,” Beard has become a believer in global warming, working on a way to get non-carbon power from artificial photosynthesis—a new application of a never-quite-explained theory that he came up with in his 20s. Unfortunately, he didn’t discover the application himself. He stole it from his dead assistant [Wall Street Journal], the marvelously enthusiastic (or at least enthusiastic until an unfortunate encounter with a coffee table) Tom Aldous.

McEwan says he’d been thinking about writing a book connected to climate change for a decade or so, but many bits of Solar capture the feel of the current climate change landscape (including some of the lunacy on both sides). Indeed, artificial photosynthesis is one of the hottest ideas in solar energy, given its potential to use up carbon dioxide in the process of making energy, just like plants do. DISCOVER will soon be covering some of the real-life scientists trying to use the sun’s energy to split water, freeing electrons that could start energy-creating chemical reactions. In the third and final part of Solar, Beard’s New Mexico artificial photosynthesis plant doesn’t turn out so well, though that has more to do with his sad personal life than his solar technology.

The running gag that might appeal most to scientist readers is Beard’s repeated failings to connect with people in the humanities. Despite his numerous personal failings, Beard regards himself as a man of rationality and can’t quite figure out how to converse with post-modernists. Science news followers will recognize the darkly comic scene in which Beard makes some politically incorrect remarks about women and becomes the subject of a media feeding frenzy, somewhat reminiscent of the 2005 imbroglio involving Lawrence H. Summers, then president of Harvard [The New York Times].

In a knowing episode that many critics praise as the book’s funniest, Beard attends one of those trips to the Arctic to see climate change firsthand, only to find himself the only scientist in a cadre of artists and activists, including one artist who carves polar animals from ice blocks and others who also balance solemnity and naivety. “All these demonstrations, like prayers, like totem-pole dances, were fashioned to deflect the course of a catastrophe,” McEwan writes. The Arctic trip is an exaggerated version of one he made himself. For example, on the real trip McEwan was preoccupied by the thought of having to urinate at -40 °C but was never desperate enough to risk it, as Beard does, only to have his penis freeze to his zipper [New Scientist].

There are spots when Solar bogs down, but they concern Beard’s train-wreck personal life (which also prevents the admittedly smart man from accomplishing his plan of saving the world and making a lot of money). McEwan does an admirable job of sliding climate change science into a novel without getting too hung up on it for the reader’s good. Says McEwan: “I think one of the reasons I find a lot of novels boring is that they’re only about the emotions; they don’t have enough muscular intelligence. I like novels that have got both. A good number of novels are just so timid, intellectually” [New Scientist].

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Image: Nan A. Talese / Doubleday

The LOST Slapdown videos are an excuse for Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, head writers on the show, to have some fun with the mythology and the fans. And occasionally the actors. Here we have Michael Emerson thinking about a spinoff for his character, Ben Linus.

Hmm, hard to say what’s what here, but it looks like the gravitas and buffoonery are both still there, which are the two aspects I really like about the character. I guess we’ll find out in a couple of weeks: the premier is Easter in the UK and a week later (April 17) here in the States!

And… “No, they’re scared of me.” Awesome.

Offshore oil and gas drilling is coming to much of the east coast. Today President Obama announced plans for energy exploration through 2017 that would open up drilling in coastal areas off the southeastern United States, and potentially some areas near Alaska.

Under the proposal, 167 million new acres in the Atlantic Ocean from Delaware to Florida, as well as new swaths in the Gulf of Mexico, would be opened to energy development. Parts of the Chukchi Sea and Beaufort Sea, both of which are north of Alaska in the Arctic Ocean, could see drilling after 2013 if viability studies give them the go-ahead. But not all areas that energy companies would like to explore are available in the plan.

No areas off the west coast would be made available. Obama also said proposed leases in Alaska’s Bristol Bay would be canceled. He would also limit any oil and gas drilling off the coast of Florida to no closer than 125 miles from the shore [USA Today]. Bristol Bay has been off-limits since the Exxon Valdez incident in 1989, when the tanker spilled at least 10 million gallons of crude oil into the ocean. President George W. Bush’s energy plan, which Obama overturned upon taking office, would have opened the bay to drilling.

In his announcement, Obama stressed that the United States should allow oil and gas drilling in new areas to reduce foreign dependence and add to the country’s energy portfolio. But just how much energy is down there is unclear. There could be as much as a three-year supply of recoverable oil and more than two years’ worth of natural gas, at current rates of consumption. But those estimates are based on seismic data that is, in some cases, more than 30 years old [The New York Times]. The first results could come from the waters off Virginia, as the first new lease could be sold there next year.

More than the country needs that oil, it might be that Obama needs the political support from drilling advocates. With health care finished, the President’s next major task is to drum up support for a bill to address climate change. The administration is pushing expanded offshore exploration as a bargaining chip in its attempts to enact sweeping legislation to curb oil imports and reduce greenhouse gas emissions [Los Angeles Times]. As another part of the energy push, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last week (viewable free on the DOE Web site) praising nuclear power, and specifically the potential for small nuclear reactors.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

A few antivax links for your amusement:

1) When challenged about their bizarre and provably false beliefs, a lot of antivaxxers claim that they have personal experience with their kid. That’s anecdotal and uses a small sample size, and so is prone to all sorts of logical failings. But what if the sample size is much larger and uses scientific reasoning? Then you get something like this good spanking of antivax nonsense by an actual pediatrician.

Tip o’ the syringe to David Whalley.

2) The Australian Vaccination Network is one of the most pernicious and awful of the antivax groups, as regular readers know. They may be on their way out — science, apparently, can inoculate us against such infections — but it’s still worth keeping up with the sort of offal they spew, since other groups do it as well. This article by The Australian Skeptics is an excellent exposé of AVN mendacity.

3) Healthday has an alarming article about the San Diego 2008 measles outbreak which exposed over 800 people because one family decided not to vaccinate their kid. Yes, one family started an minor epidemic that cost over $170,000 to contain and nearly killed one infant. I hope antivaxxers are proud of that one.

4) Orac once again leaps into the fray with a magnificent exposure of some bold antivax lies. It’s amazing to me just how low some antivaxxers are wiling to go — cheating, twisting, distorting, and out-and-out lying — to promote their agenda of bringing back preventable diseases.

They say they care about kids. Maybe they do. But making sure children get measles, rubella, pertussis, and other life-and-limb-threatening diseases is sure a funny way of showing it.

Imagine filming a movie hundreds of thousands of times with an infinitely patient crew. Every time you shoot it, you remove just one thing, be it an actor, a line of dialogue or a crew member. By comparing the resulting films, you’d soon work out which elements were vital to the movie’s success, and which could be lost without consequence. Beate Neumann, Thomas Walter and a group of scientists known as the Mitocheck Consortium have taken just such an approach to better understand one of the most fundamental processes of life.

Some directors employ inanimate objects like Keanu Reeves, but Neumann and Walter wanted to work with far more dramatic stars – DNA, proteins and the like. Their task was to work out which genes were vital for the process of mitosis, the immensely complicated operation where one cell divides into two. To do that, they systematically went through each of the 21,000 or so genes in the human genome and inactivated them, one by one, in different cells. They then filmed these subtly different actors as they divided in two.

This incredible library of around 190,000 films, all shot in time-lapse photography, is publicly available at the Mitocheck website. It’s a treasure trove of data, whose doors have been left for the entire scientific community to walk through, and no doubt they will. Name a gene, any gene, and with a couple of mouse clicks, you can find a movie that shows you what happens when it’s knocked out. You can work out if your favourite gene is essential to cell division, and you can even find other genes that have similar effects.

The study’s leader Jan Ellenberg says, “The response of human cells to silencing each gene is already pre-recorded and scientists can simply log in to our database to check the result, rather than spending weeks or months of time in the laboratory to obtain the data.”

The movies are certainly useful, but they are beautiful in their own right. For a daily and microscopic process, mitosis is an astonishingly beautiful dance. It begins with cells creating the right number of partners, by duplicating all of their chromosomes. At first, the dancers haphazardly mingle with each other but as things get underway, they separate and line up in a neat row. Then, dramatically, they shimmy across to opposite ends of the room, following long spindles of protein. Once the partners split up, the cell pinches down its middle and separates them forevermore. Without this courtly dance, you would never have been anything more than a fertilised egg. Life simply wouldn’t work.

Clearly, mitosis already has all the makings of a good drama. Neumann and Walter just needed to develop the right filming techniques. To prep their actors, they used short RNA molecules designed to silence individual genes. To sort out the cinematography, they set their microscopes to automatically record time-lapse movies as soon as the nullifying RNA molecules were introduced into cells. Finally, to get the lighting right, the duo labelled all the chromosomes in their cells using proteins that glow in the dark.

The video below shows mitosis working normally, when no genes have been silenced. Each cell is green and its chromosomes are decked out in red. It’s all very festive. Two days are condensed into 36 seconds, and two cells become eight. Once things happen, they happen very quickly, so the series of screengrabs below the video shows what happens to the bottom cell.

This next video shows the chaos that ensues when a single gene called OGG1 is turned off. No longer is mitosis the orderly tango of before; this is more like a rave. Cells fail to separate properly, leaving multiple bundles of chromosomes jangling about in the same space. Just look at what happens at 00:16.

For each inactivated gene, Neumann and Walter shot footage of around 67 cells over the course of two days, capturing an astonishing total of 19 million cell divisions. Analysing so much data would be unfeasible for a human scientist, even a graduate student, so that work fell to computers. The group created a program that analysed all their footage. Whenever mitosis wasn’t quite happening in the usual way, the program flagged the video, and even grouped together genes that had similar effects.

In the end, Neumann and Walter identified 572 genes that play a role in mitosis and less than half of these had been linked to the process before. The rest were new, and they reveal just how much we still don’t know about this most fundamental of processes.

To check that their new candidates are actually involved in mitosis, the team shoved the mouse version of each gene into the deficient cells. The mouse versions are different enough from ours that the silencing RNA molecules ignored them, but similar enough that they managed to restore some decorum to the disordered mitotic dances. These sorts of experiments are crucial because RNA-silencing experiments can sometimes go astray if the molecules deactivate genes other than their designated targets.

So the researchers have a list of 600 or so mitosis genes. The movies provide a rough idea about what these players do and which stages of mitosis they influence. Now, the real work begins in trying to pick apart their individual roles.

If there is one caveat to this study, it’s that it was done in HeLa cells, an immortal line of human cancer cells that’s commonly used in laboratory work. Being cancerous, HeLa cells already have a few faulty genes. Their style of cell division might not quite represent the “normal” situation and it’s important that the team confirms their results in other cell lines.

But already, the sheer scale of the data that have been collected is a tremendous boon to scientific research. There implications for cancer alone are huge. Cancer cells divide all too often and many cancer drugs are designed to stop them from doing so. Scientists could use the Mitocheck data to find new targets for tomorrow’s drugs or to better understand how existing drugs work. They could also work out the genetic differences that cause cancer cells to divide differently from normal cells. “Now that we have narrowed down the gene set relevant for cell division to about 600, we can systematically investigate those differences in a number of different cell types, which would not be possible across the entire genome,” says Ellenberg.

Even cell division is just the tip of the iceberg. The movie library also contains shots of cells growing, moving and dying and they can be used to understand the genes that underlie these processes too. The Mitocheck team are even working on next-generation technologies that will allow them to watch proteins interacting in living cells, revealing the dances of not just mitotic chromosomes but of all a cell’s molecular characters.

For years to come, scientists will be watching, poring over, and adding to the movies that have been unveiled today. There has surely never been a more informative or intimate video collection of our lives.

Reference: Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature08869

Images and videos: Thomas Walter & Jutta Bulkescher / EMBL

More on molecular biology:

• Stem cells produce new tissues by recruiting executioners to damage their DNA
• ‘Brainbow’ paints individual neurons with different colours
• Molecule’s constant efforts keep our memories intact
• Dinosaur proteins, cells and blood vessels recovered from Bracyhlophosaurus
• Vaccinia virus tricks its way into hosts by mimicking dead cells

Is the Vietnamese government following China’s example, and muffling online dissent to pursue its own political ends? Internet giant Google seems to think so. Writing on the company’s online security blog, Neel Mehta of Google’s security team has revealed that tens of thousands of Vietnamese computers were subject to a potent virus attack this week–and that the attack targeted activists who are opposed to a Chinese mining project in Vietnam.

Google writes that the activists mistakenly downloaded malicious software that infected their computers. The infected machines could be used to spy on the users, and were also used to attack Web sites and blogs that voiced opposition to the mining project. This cyber attack, Google says, was an attempt to “squelch” opposition to bauxite mining in Vietnam, a highly controversial issue in the country. The computer security firm, McAfee Inc, which detected the malware, went a step further, saying its creators “may have some allegiance to the government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.” The Vietnamese Foreign Ministry had no immediate comment [Moneycontrol].

Google’s current spat with China began with a similar accusation, when the company accused Beijing of hacking into and spying on Chinese activists’ gmail accounts. Just this week, journalists in China said their email accounts were compromised because of yet another spyware attack.

In Vietnam, activists were angered by state plans to allow Chinese mining company, Chinalco, to start mining in the country’s central highlands. Bauxite is used in making aluminum and is an important natural resource for Vietnam, but critics have argued that the new project will have serious environmental consequences and will also displace ethnic minorities. Online discussion of the project soon erupted. Although the discussion was mostly centered on social and environmental concerns, it veered into sensitive territory when bloggers started tapping into the country’s latent Sinophobia [Financial Times]. Some bloggers worried about the influx of Chinese workers, while others were distressed that a Chinese state-owned company would run the project. Vietnam was a tributary state of China for 1,000 years and was invaded by China in 1979, and the two countries continue to joust for sovereignty in the South China Sea [The New York Times].

Several prominent Vietnamese Internet activists have already been thrown into jail for voicing their dissent. McAfee added that the current cyber attack underscores that not every attack is motivated by data theft or money, saying: “This is likely the latest example of hacktivism and politically motivated cyberattacks, which are on the rise” [The New York Times].

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Image: iStockphoto

At age 90, James Lovelock is a bit misguided. He’s a quirky character and has had some good ideas in the past, but I hope he retires from the limelight soon and stops giving Drudge fodder for links by saying ridiculous things like trying to save the planet is ‘a lot of nonsense.’ But then again, this doomsday stuff always gets loads of press. The truth is that the world’s not ending, it’s changing. And we can still save the planet James–we just have to stop being so damn cheap and lazy about it.