Author: Discover Main Feed

In tomorrow’s New York Times I have an essay about the art of seeing Nature’s unseen–from the bestiaries of the Middle Ages to today’s images of feathered dinosaurs and upright apes. Check it out, and also check out the accompanying slide show about Conrad Gessner, a Renaissance naturalist who assembled the greatest zoological encyclopedia of his day–which included unicorns.

“In this study, we examine the identity exploration possibilities presented by online multiplayer games in which players use graphics tools and character-creation software to construct an avatar, or character. We predicted World of Warcraft players would create their main character more similar to their ideal self than the players themselves were. Our results support this idea; a sample of players rated their character as having more favorable attributes that were more favorable than their own self-rated attributes. This trend was stronger among those with lower psychological well-being, who rated themselves comparatively lower than they rated their character. Our results suggest that the game world allows players the freedom to create successful virtual selves regardless of the constraints of their actual situation.”

Photo: flickr/CavinB

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Imagine dropping a few hundred dollars for a bottle of “premium wine” only to discover it tastes like plonk! For years, collectors of fine wines have gone to great lengths to ensure that the wine they buy is indeed of the advertised quality and age. From tamper-proof caps to prevent the dilution of a premium wine with cheap stuff to an electric tongue that can distinguish fine wines, connoisseurs have tried their best not to get ripped off. Now, they have another trick at their disposal, and this one involves an atom bomb.

According to new research, collectors can avoid purchasing a faked bottle of an old vintage by running the wine through a “bomb pulse” test, which uses the radioactive material present in air to date the wine. The system is accurate enough, say scientists, to date your wine’s vintage up to a year of its production–so that a collector can be certain, for example, that a Chateau Lafite Rothschild 1982 isn’t actually a child of the aughts.

Speaking at the American Chemical Society meeting in San Francisco, chemist Graham Jones said that prior to the 1940s, all the carbon-14 in the Earth’s biosphere was produced by cosmic rays and nitrogen in the upper atmosphere. However, from the late 1940s to 1963, atomic bomb tests released radioactive material and significantly increased the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere. Ever since the atomic tests stopped in ‘63, this “bomb-pulse” C-14 has been gradually diluted by the CO2 formed by the burning of fossil fuels.

What’s all this got to do with vino? Well, when the grapes on the vine took in this CO2, they also ingested the bomb pulse C-14 and in the process, transferred minute, harmless qualities of the radioactive carbon to their wine.

PhysOrg explains:

The scientists used a highly-sensitive analytical device called an accelerator mass spectrometer to determine the C-14 levels in the alcohol components of 20 Australian red wines with vintages from 1958 to 1997 and then compared these measurements to the radioactivity levels of known atmospheric samples. They found that the method could reliably determine the vintage of wines to within the vintage year.

So much like carbon dating helps determine the age of prehistoric fossils and artifacts, the lingering traces of bomb-pulse C-14 present in wine could help determine its vintage. The scientists are hopeful that this technique will help prevent fraud in the $3 billion global wine market.

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Image:Wikimedia

It’s not that teenagers aren’t trying to learn. (Well, OK, some of them definitely aren’t trying.) But the distractions that come with being a teenager are exacerbated by the fact that teens just don’t learn as quickly as either young kids or adults, and a new study of mice that appears in Science points to specific brain changes that might help explain why.

Seeking to study spatial learning during puberty, the team devised a relatively complex task (at least for a mouse) that requires learning how to avoid a moving platform that delivers a very mild shock [TIME]. While the prepubescent mice picked up on what to avoid pretty quickly, as did adult mice, pubescent mice took considerably longer to figure it out. The key to these differences was what study leader Sheryl Smith saw in the brains of these mice.

Building on their own previous work that showed a spike in the number of chemical receptors in the brains of adolescent mice, Smith and her colleagues looked for that effect in the hippocampus, the brain region associated with learning. Sure enough, pubertal mice had seven times as many of the receptors as infant mice. In adulthood, the number of these receptors fell back to an intermediate level [New Scientist]. Smith thinks those extra receptors could be inhibiting learning by interfering with activity in the hippocampus.

While people often complain of being too stressed to learn, you need a least a little bit of pressure, and it seems the pubescent mice weren’t stressed enough. When Smith’s team gave the mice a stress steroid called THP, that reduced the learning problems. Typically THP is produced in response to stress, and has a calming influence. But in the strange brains of the pubescent mice, THP did the opposite—it slightly increased their stress levels and closed the learning gap.

It’s too early to say how well this might work on humans, since our teenagers, compared to pubescent mice, are an even more complex puzzle. It’s possible that “they’re just being difficult, it’s their hormones, or they’re doing it on purpose,” she said. “There are so many things going on in humans that we wanted to break it down in a mouse study where we could look at what’s going on in the brain” [HealthDay News].

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Futurama comes back in June on Comedy Central!

Squa.

Wheeee!

Tip o’ the brain slug to my pals at io9.

After months of party wrangling that culminated in a Sunday night political spectacle, President Obama has finally managed to push through far-reaching reform to the country’s health care system. The House voted 219-212 for final approval of the legislation, and on Tuesday the President will sign the bill into law.

The new law would require most Americans to have health insurance, would add 16 million people to the Medicaid rolls and would subsidize private coverage for low- and middle-income people, at a cost to the government of $938 billion over 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office said [The New York Times].

Here’s a primer on what some of the biggest changes will be in the current health care system. While some changes won’t come into effect till 2014, there are some things that will affect your insurance this year.

Immediate Changes (2010)

These are the changes that Obama and team call the “early deliverables,” because they would kick into effect as early as six months after the bill is signed into law. Here are a few.

• The uninsured can finally get coverage: Adults who have been denied coverage because of preexisting conditions will be able to sign on to a federally subsidized insurance program that is due to be established within 90 days. This stopgap insurance program, whose coverage isn’t expected to be comprehensive, will expire once new insurance exchanges start operating in 2014.
• Coverage for everyone: Insurance companies will not be allowed to drop people from coverage when they get sick, nor can they make health plans vastly more expensive for people with preexisting conditions. Lifetime limits on the amount of health care an insurer will pay for will be eliminated, and annual limits will be restricted.
• Coverage for kids: For parents with a sick child, there’s some relief—companies won’t be able to drop kids under the age of 19 from coverage because of pre-existing conditions. Parents can also keep their kids on a family plan till they turn 26 or get a job that offers them benefits.
• Closing the doughnut hole: An estimated 4 million Medicare beneficiaries who hit the so called “doughnut hole” in the program’s drug plan (the gap in coverage which currently begins after $2,700 is spent on drugs) will get a $250 rebate this year. The cost of drugs in the coverage gap will then drop 50 percent next year, and the hole will be closed entirely by 2020.
• Tax credits for small businesses: For small businesses with fewer than 25 employees and average wages of less than $50,000, the government will provide a tax credit of up to 35 percent of the cost of healthcare premiums so that they may provide coverage to their employees.

Short-Term Changes (2011-2014)

• Free annual wellness visit for Medicare beneficiaries: Medicare beneficiaries will get a free annual wellness visit, and the new health plans will be required to cover preventive services with little or no cost to patients. Medicare will also provide 10 percent bonus payments to primary care physicians and general surgeons.
• New Medicaid program for poor: A new Medicaid plan for the poor will allow states to provide more home- and community-based care for disabled people who would otherwise require institutional help.

Long-Term Changes (2014 onwards)

• Get insurance or face penalties: Beginning in 2014, all Americans would be expected to get insurance or face penalties. The fine depends on household income, but there’s also an upper limit; a family would pay a maximum of $2,085. Extremely low-income people will be exempt from the fines.
• Large employers must provide insurance: Big employers are also expected to provide coverage to workers or face fines. Businesses with 50 or more workers who do not provide coverage will be fined $2,000 for each uninsured employee.
• Extending Medicaid to cover low-income families: Medicaid, the state-federal program for the poor and disabled, will be expanded sharply starting 2014. People with annual incomes less than 133 percent of the poverty level ($29,326 for a family of four) will be granted subsidies so that they may purchase insurance.
• Buying insurance on state exchanges: State-based insurance marketplaces called exchanges are expected to go into effect in 2014, where people can pick and choose the plan that works best for them. Once the exchanges are up and running, insurers will be barred from rejecting applicants based on their health status. The new policies sold on the exchanges will be required to cover not just hospitalizations, doctor visits, and prescription medicines, but also maternity care and certain preventive exams.

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Cosmic Variance: Obamacare

Image: Pete Souza/ Whitehouse.Gov

I’ve said here before that the path of reality is razor-thin: there’s only one way to be right, but an infinite number of ways to be wrong.

The thing is, that narrow path is like a single, unbroken strand, but each path of unreality leads to every other. If you can chuck reality into the dustbin, then all manners of silliness seem equally plausible. You might think that believing in Santa Claus is a lot sillier than believing in homeopathy, but really they’re the same: they’re both fantasy.

For support in this thesis of mine, I present to you an article in the New York Times about how politicians who attack evolution legislatively are now also attacking global warming. This doesn’t surprise me at all, for two reason. One is that I’ve already written about dumb legislation in South Dakota and Utah trying to resolve away climate change, resolutions filled with nonsense and ridiculous assertions that fly in the face of what we know. That’s empirical proof that politicians are willing to try to legislate narrow partisan beliefs into reality.

But the other reason I’m not surprised is that, over the past decade or so in particular, we’ve seen the far right promote fantasy over reality. Abstinence-only education, creationism, global warming denialism, defunding stem cell research, the mocking of volcano research, fruit fly research, planetarium star projectors.

It shows to me that once you buy into one flavor of candy-coated nonsense, they all start to taste pretty good. But we have to be adults here, and understand that you can’t live on candy. In fact, too much makes you sick. And that’ll make walking that narrow path that much harder.

Everyone knows plants are special. They eat meat, respond to music, and of course perform the impressive feat called photosynthesis. And now, thanks to artist and smarty-pants Jonathon Keats they have entertainment. Keats has produced a documentary show just for plants. After making porn for plants featuring hardcore pollination, he has turned to more general themes. The above image is a sample of skies filmed in the United States and Europe, recently projected for a selected botanical audience at the AC Institute in NYC.

Image courtesy Jonathon Keats

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) continues through Thursday of this week, and the fallout continues today.

On Friday we reported that the bluefin tuna trade ban failed thanks in large part to Japanese diplomatic efforts, denying new protections to the endangered fish, but also noted that the question of opening the ivory trade had yet to see a vote. Over the weekend the convention voted down those ivory proposals put forth by Tanzania and Zambia, which would have allowed one-off sales of ivory from government stockpiles. The ivory trade was banned in 1989, but two sales have since been granted to nations showing effective conservation [BBC News]. However, fears that such sales encourage poaching led the meeting’s attendees to reject the new proposals.

While most conservation groups lobbied against the ivory proposal, another of their pet causes—offering more protection for corals against harvesters who sell them as jewelry—failed at CITES. The proposed restrictions would have stopped short of a trade ban but required countries to ensure better regulations and to ensure that stocks of the slow-growing corals, in the family coralliidae, were sustainably harvested [The New York Times]. The provision garnered 64 “yes” votes to 59 for “no,” but needed a two-thirds majority to pass.

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Image: flickr / wwarby

Good news and bad news last night, as the House passed health care reform.

The good news is: the House passed health care reform. The work isn’t completely done yet, of course. The House had already passed a heath care bill, months ago, but this isn’t it; last night they passed the Senate’s version of the Bill, which had some glaring flaws. Under ordinary circumstances the House and Senate would get together and hammer out a compromise between their two bills. But in the meantime Republicans picked up an extra Senate seat in Massachusetts after Teddy Kennedy died, and they had promised to filibuster the compromise package. (Because, after all, what courageous moral stand could be worth invoking arcane parliamentary procedures more than the fight to prevent millions of people from getting health insurance, especially if that was the life’s goal of the Senator whose death allowed you to improve from having twenty fewer votes than the opposition to only having eighteen fewer votes?)

So Obama will sign the Senate bill that the House just approved, and then the Senate will consider a reconciliation bill also passed by the House last night. Under even-more-arcane procedures, the reconciliation measure can be passed without threat of filibuster. It requires only “majority vote,” a quaint notion in this highly baroque age.

It’s not an especially huge bill, whatever you may have heard, but it will have an impact. Here is a list of the major impacts, and an interactive graphic to figure out how you will be affected. The most important features seem to be:

• Establish health insurance exchanges, and provide subsidies for people below four times the poverty line.
• Guarantee insurance for people with pre-existing conditions, and eliminate “rescissions” that take away insurance from people who get sick.
• Push business to provide insurance for their employees, and self-employed individuals to buy insurance for themselves.
• Close the “donut hole” in the existing Medicare payout structure.
• Implement cost controls (mostly through slowing the growth of Medicare spending), thereby lowering the budget deficit by $130 billion over the first ten years, and by another $1 trillion over the next ten years.

Overall, it’s a relatively incremental bill, placing bandages over some of the more egregious wounds in the current system, while leaving in place the essential structure through which we funnel billions of dollars to middlemen while paying far more for medical care per person than any other country without getting better results. For 90% of Americans, coverage and insurance will continue as before. Basically, this brings us a little closer to where Western Europe was a century ago.

Still, a tremendous political accomplishment — maybe not from the perspective of what we were hoping for when Democrats took control of both houses of Congress and the Presidency in 2008, but certainly from the perspective of the last couple of months, when it often seemed like we weren’t going to get anything at all. More than anyone, credit for the accomplishment goes to Nancy Pelosi, who didn’t give up when things looked grim. From now on she won’t simply be known as the first female Speaker of the House, but one of the most effective leaders in its history. Here she is marching to the Capitol yesterday, arms linked with civil-rights pioneer Representative John Lewis from Georgia, carrying the gavel that was used when Medicare was passed in 1965. An historic moment.

Which brings us to the bad news. One of the reasons why Pelosi was marching with Lewis was to demonstrate support a day after this man who had marched at Selma was repeatedly called “nigger” by protesters outside the Capitol. Ugly by itself, but worse in context: it’s becoming harder and harder to have a meaningful debate in this country without participating in a race to the rhetorical bottom.

There exist reasonable arguments against health-care reform; not arguments I agree with, but ones that at least make superficial sense. It costs money to provide insurance for the uninsured, and someone will have to pay. Asking healthy people to buy insurance will be a burden to them. There will be less extra money floating around if we cut down on unnecessary costs, which might impede the pace of medical innovation. (I didn’t say they were great arguments, just that they made superficial sense.) But these aren’t the arguments that are actually made most frequently. Instead we hear that the Democrats are abandoning the principles of representative democracy by passing legislation while they control both legislative houses and the executive; or that liberals won’t stop until they have swept away the last vestiges of personal choice in American life; or that the government wants to decide when to kill granny. Right-wing bloggers nod with approval at the idea that people are stocking up on guns, preparing for fighting in the streets. The race to find the most scary and overheated characterization of a pretty benign state of affairs is a fierce one.

The most depressing aspect of the situation is not the existence of crazy fringe elements — those will always be with us, on both sides of any issue — but of the reinforcing dynamic between the fringe and the supposedly respectable parts of the Republican party. It’s been clear for a while to most people (outside the White House, anyway) that Republicans in Congress made a clear choice that their own self-interests are served by preventing Democrats from passing any meaningful legislation, whatever that might mean for the good of the country. Speeches during House “debate” last night consistently played to the worst aspects of the protesting mob. One Congressman shouted “baby killer!” at Democrat Bart Stupak, who is staunchly anti-abortion, as he spoke to support the bill. [Update: it was Randy Neugebauer (R-Tex.).] Two protesters inside the House chamber were arrested for being disruptive — and “several Republican lawmakers stood up and cheered during the interruption.”

Lest you think this is simply concern-trolling from a liberal telling conservatives to be less intrusive, note that conservative commentators like David Frum are making the same point: the rhetoric has gotten out of hand, and it’s not good for anybody, except maybe the “conservative entertainment industry.”

I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters – but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead. The real leaders are on TV and radio, and they have very different imperatives from people in government. Talk radio thrives on confrontation and recrimination. When Rush Limbaugh said that he wanted President Obama to fail, he was intelligently explaining his own interests. What he omitted to say – but what is equally true – is that he also wants Republicans to fail. If Republicans succeed – if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office – Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less, and hear fewer ads for Sleepnumber beds.

I’m not sure what the end game is — whether it’s possible to step back to a more reasonable dialogue. Disagreement is good, and it’s important to have an active and engaged opposition party, no matter who the majority party might be. But whipping up hysteria at the cost of working together constructively isn’t in anyone’s interests. Obama campaigned on a message of hope and change and bipartisan togetherness, and I think that was a sincere message on his part; but it certainly hasn’t come to pass, and there doesn’t seem to be any indication that it will.

James Randi — one of the founders of the modern skeptical movement, a leading rationalist, thinker, and fighter of antiscience — has made a big announcement: he’s gay.

A lot of us already knew this, although I don’t know how widespread the knowledge is. I imagine this will surprise some folks, but not others. Some may wonder why he waited this long… but he makes it clear why in both his announcement on Swift as well as in his interview with JREF President (and openly gay man) D.J. Grothe on his podcast For Good Reason. D.J.’s interview with Randi is excellent; they discuss how this molded Randi’s life, his thoughts on gay marriage, his frequent mentioning of Sophia Loren (which made me smile), and how this affects (or more accurately, does not affect) the JREF’s mission.

I found out about the announcement right before a friend came to pick me up, and I told him about it. We chatted about it for a moment, and then he asked me, “What difference will this make?”

That’s a darn good question. For me it makes no difference, and wouldn’t had I known or not before the announcement. At some level it’s always interesting to find out personal information about someone you know, or someone you respect — it’s not exactly gossip, just more info that leads to a feeling of knowing someone better. I know most people, certainly an overwhelming majority, will support Randi with this. Some won’t like it, and it may be that a lot of Randi’s detractors will delight in trying to use this against him. I look forward to watching them reap that whirlwind.

In the end, it’s a good thing for the LGBT community, because now yet another person of some stature will lend his own credibility to the movement. Just being open and comfortably gay without making a point of it will establish that this is just another of the many flavors humans come in.

So to answer my friend’s question, this won’t change Randi or the JREF. But there is still a lot of prejudice about homosexuality — and certainly a lot of that comes from “cultural conservatives” as D.J. called them — and the more we have this out in the open, the more people will be used to it. As that happens, that sense of “other” diminishes, and we learn to accept differences and diversity more easily and naturally. And that is a very good thing indeed.

I’m glad Randi has talked about this, and I’m proud of him.

Rebecca posted some nice thoughts on this, too. Picture of Randi courtesy Andy Ihnatko.

So far in 2010 we’ve seen nanotubes that carry thermopower waves to create electricity, nanoparticles that latch onto only damaged cells to deliver drugs there, and more. Today there are a couple more clever uses for nanotechnology—taking the salt out of salt water, and nanobots that deliver gene therapy.

In Nature Nanotechnology, an MIT team showed they could use nanotech to desalinate water in a new way. At the moment, desalination plants employ reverse osmosis, in which pressure forces the salt ions through a membrane. But this process is an energy-gobbler and the membrane is prone to clogging, which means that de-sal plants are inevitably big, expensive, fixed pieces of kit [Sydney Morning Herald].

Instead of reverse osmosis, the MIT project uses ion channel polarization: As water flows through a channel, membranes that are ion-selective separate not only salt ions from the water, but also viruses and microorganisms. But this process actually pushes those things away from the membrane, the researchers say, which is why the membrane doesn’t have the same salt buildup or bacteria fouling problems as reverse osmosis desalination plants.

Project head Sung Jae Kim says the prototype wafer (pictured) produced for the water project is simply a proof of concept at this point. The team dreams of using the nanotech process to create portable water desalination devices that could run on solar power, but it won’t be easy. Kim says his calculations suggest that he will need to integrate some 1600 nano-units onto a 20-centimeter wafer to generate about 300 milliliters of water per minute [ScienceNOW].

Meanwhile, across the country at Caltech, another group of researchers is taking nanotech straight to the genes. In a study in Nature, the researchers describe their polymer nanobots that deliver strands of RNA to tumor cells. Once the particles find the cancer cell and get inside, they break down, releasing small interfering RNAs or siRNAs that block a gene that makes a cancer growth protein called ribonucleotide reductase [Reuters]. The researchers hypothesized that this RNA interference would keep the tumor cells from multiplying.

Mark Davis and colleagues conducted phase 1 clinical trials with 15 melanoma patients, three of whom volunteered tumor samples. At least one of the patients showed lower levels of the cancer growth protein after treatment, and patients who were given higher doses had higher levels of siRNA in their tumours. “The more we put in, the more ends up where they are supposed to be, in tumour cells,” Davis says [Nature News]. This was also a proof of principle experiment to establish that the RNA delivery system worked, the researchers say, but much more work has to be done to determine whether the treatment is safe, and whether it really does improve patient outcomes.

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Image: Sung Jae Kim/Jongyoon Han, MIT

You may think of your furry feline friend simply as a companion, but look closely and you will find that your whiskered pal also the ability to be a crime-fighting supercat.

An team of scientists has found that fur shed by cats can serve as forensic evidence, thanks to the DNA it contains. In fact, a man was recently convicted of second-degree murder in Canada after fur found on his discarded jacket matched that of Snowball–the victim’s cat. The telltale fur led to a 15-year prison sentence. Scientists say that it may soon become commonplace to use the genetic material in fur shed by cats to link perpetrators, accomplices, witnesses, and victims.

As the researchers wrote in the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics:

“Cats are fastidious groomers, and shed fur can have sufficient genetic material for trace forensic studies, allowing potential analysis of both standard short tandem repeat (STR) and mitochondrial DNA regions.”

Veterinary scientist Robert Grahn and his team have already amassed a feline DNA database containing samples drawn from 25 distinct worldwide cat populations and 26 breeds. The resultant database of 1,394 cat DNA sequences gives scientists a baseline understanding of the overall genetic diversity of cats, so they can determine where to look for unique identifiers in the cat genome, and figure out how definative a match is. The new database focuses on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which is genetic material inherited from one’s mother.

Grahn explained to Discovery News that aside from mtDNA, nuclear DNA–which is even better for identifying individuals–can also be found on those cat hairs that still retain their root bulbs or on skin particles that might stick to the oily fur when cats groom themselves.

These natural oils, along with static electricity and the sheer volume of fur, mean that people who enter a property with a resident cat are like fur magnets. It is almost impossible to avoid having one or more cat furs cling to skin, clothing, shoes, bags and more.

A forensic test using the STR technique, which looks at particular markers in the cat genome, has already has been developed by forensic geneticist John Butler. Called the “Meowplex,” that test can be used in conjunction with this new mtDNA database to help cats throws crooks behind bars.

For now, it’s the cats’ DNA database that is being built, but your doggy need not feel left out of this episode of “Paw and Order.” Scientists hope to add canine and other animal DNA into this mix later.

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Image:Wikimedia

A while back, well before I knew I would be a new host to the show, I did an episode of Point of Inquiry with D.J. Grothe to discuss the arguments and controversy engendered by Unscientific America. In the process, we got into quite a lot of detail about my views on science, religion, and free inquiry–many of which are either misunderstood or misrepresented in parts of the atheist blogosphere.

I mention this because I just noticed that a recent issue of Free Inquiry has actually printed a transcription of part of the Point of Inquiry interview, including passages like this:

FI (D.J. Grothe): In your book Unscientific America, you take on the New Atheists, even though you are an atheist. You argue that the battle should be for scientific literacy as opposed to a battle against religion. You seem to argue that when the battle is science versus religion, public scientific literacy actually suffers.

Mooney: Right. We live in an overwhelmingly religious society, and we should just admit that not all of the religious have a problem with science. It is important to refute the fundamentalists when they encroach on science education across the country in regard to evolution. But in order to do that, it is critical that we mobilize the pro-science moderates. The New Atheism, as a strategy, flies in the face of this, since it is often about attacking and alienating the religious moderates.

This is precisely what Unscientific America argues, too. D.J. continues:

FI: You say that to make a dent in the problem of scientific illiteracy, we should set aside the question of what is true about religion. Years ago, when we were both involved with the Center for Inquiry’s freethought campus outreach, you were every bit the atheist activist. As a science journalist today, isn’t truth a basic value to you? Don’t you have internal tension when you fault the atheistic scientists for pushing a scientific and naturalistic take on God and the supernatural?

Mooney: No, I don’t really feel that tension. Yes, I am an atheist, and yes, we should question religion. But we need to be aware of the context in which we’re doing it. In America today, diffusing tensions over science and religion is the best way to advance scientific literacy. My real issue with the New Atheists is their broad-brush attacks on all the religious, not just on the fundamentalists. Again, not all the religious are enemies of science. My other concern is that while it is fine to question religion, the tone in which the New Atheists have done so is highly abrasive and, at times, offensive. That doesn’t achieve anything. I think it is very important to uphold the value of a secular life and emphasize that you can be moral without God. But you cannot alienate your allies when you want to achieve better science education and literacy.

Then D.J. bores even further into my past, focusing on the days when I was the campus atheist:

FI: When you were at Yale, you were part of an atheist student group connected with CFI. Have your priorities shifted since then?

Mooney: I wouldn’t change it even if I could, because I learned so much from my atheist activism. One of the things I learned was that if you go out there angry and attack religion all the time, people won’t like you very much. I remember when the Yale campus chaplain reached out to me after I wrote a piece for one of the campus newspapers that was strongly against religion. I learned from that and other experiences that we really do need to make distinctions between religious moderates and the fundamentalists. To advance scientific literacy, we need the religious moderates on our side.

Again, you can hear the full interview here. I wanted to post this so people can see what my actual views on this subject are. D.J. was good enough to try to understand those, and I think our interview was successful as a result.

I loves me some astronomical nebulae! And the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer — WISE — can really deliver:

[Click to emblossom.]

This image shows AFGL 3193 — what looks like a rosebud — a small piece of a very complicated region of gas, dust, and stars in the constellation of Cepheus in the northern sky. This region has star formation, cold and hot dust, and even a supernova remnant (called NGC 7822). This particular part seen by WISE shows a cluster of young stars called Berkeley 59 — the stars colored blue to the right — surrounded by the gas and dust from which they formed. This cluster is less than a million years old, and the massive, hot stars are blasting out radiation that is eating away at the cocoon surrounding them.

In the false-color image from WISE, red shows the coolest dust, blue and cyan warmer material, and green reveals long-chain organic molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs. You can see how the PAHs appear to form around the rim of the nebula as the material there is compressed and warmed by the ultraviolet light and solar winds from the young stars. The filaments are testament to the forces tossed around as the stars go through their violent birth process. One of the stars in the cluster is a massive O5 star with dozens of times the mass of the Sun, and blasting out radiation at a rate 100,000 times that of the Sun!

I’m not sure just how big an area this image covers, but it’s roughly a degree across, twice the width of the Moon on the sky. The cluster is located about 3000 light years away, which is good: a lot of those stars will soon (well, in a few million years) explode, and this distance is far enough away that we’ll see a spectacular light show, but won’t wind up hurting us. Phew!

WISE is designed to survey the sky in infrared, literally spinning around and scanning the entire celestial sphere. It doesn’t have a field of view per se; the data come down in a stream and the astronomers on the ground can put them together at any scale they want, a little bit like Google maps. So expect to see lots more images of objects like this one, and you can get the whole list at the WISE gallery.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE Team

For years, scientists have debated where humanity’s sense of fairness came from. Some proposed it was a glitch in the brain’s wiring that causes people to be kind and fair to strangers, while others said it was a remnant of Stone Age thinking--that deep in our brains we see everyone we meet as part of our tiny family, and can’t imagine encountering someone who won’t ever be seen again [Wired]. But now, in a new study published in Science, scientists studying groups of people from different societies have suggested that our sense of fairness may depend on the type of society we live in.

The researchers found evidence that the more complex the society, the more developed those people’s sense of fairness. You can’t get the effects we’re seeing from genes,” said Joe Henrich, a University of British Columbia evolutionary psychologist and co-author of the study.” These are things you learn as a consequence of growing up in a particular place” [Wired].

For this study, scientists observed 2,100 people from different societies–from African herders, Colombian fishermen, and Missouri wage workers. The groups varied in size, and researchers also evaluated the people’s involvement in organized social activities like markets and religion–a common marker, scientists say, of the presence of a moral code that extends beyond kin. They then administered a series of games to study how group members viewed selfish behavior and how willing they were to punish it.

In the first game, the “dictator game,” volunteers were asked to split an amount of money with an anonymous member of his own community. They could share as much or as little as they want. So, in the pursuit of self-interest, there is really no motivation to share. In the second, the “ultimatum game,” the person was asked to split cash with an anonymous person—who could then reject the offer as unfair, in which case neither party got any money. So there is a motivation for the second player to accept any offer that was made.

In the last game, the “third-party punishment game,” the subject could make an offer to an anonymous person, which a third party judged as fair or unfair. If she deemed it unfair, then both she and the subject both lost money. In both the second and third games, punishers pay a price because they get more money if they abide by an unfair decision [ScienceNOW].

The study found that members of a large, complex society had a keener sense of fairness, with the money offered by subjects from larger societies ranging from 25 percent to 51 percent higher than the smaller groups. Scientists said the trend indicated that when people lived in larger communities, and participated more in markets and religion, they were more willing to share, and more willing to punish selfishness [Wired]; adding that actions taken by university students were vastly different than those who lived in smaller pastoral or hunter groups.

Lead researcher Joseph Henrich observed that members of smaller groups were unwilling to punish selfish behavior and were willing to keep much of the money for themselves. This may be because smaller communities lack the social norms or informal institutions like markets and religion, causing them to have narrower concepts of fairness. Henrich suggests that culture evolved toward fairness for hundreds of thousands of years before the advent of agriculture, which in turn fostered stable, ever-larger community structures that further accelerated the cultural evolution of fairness. This could have biological effects, favoring the development of linguistic and cognitive abilities, but the fundamental driver was culture [Wired].

However critics argue that in the absence of cultural context, the tests seem weak. Terming the games an “artificial situation,” evolutionary game theorists Martin Nowak and David Rand pointed out that college students are “used to [such] concepts and hunter-gatherers aren’t. Who knows how they’re understanding the game?” [ScienceNOW]

Related Content:
80beats:Dogs Demand Fair Play, or They Won’t Play at All
80beats: Even “Impartial” Jurors Use Emotion and Self-Bias in Decisions
80beats: Does Testosterone Cause Greedy Behavior? Or Do We Just Think It Does?

Image: iStockphoto

A sad but true fact:

Receiving a balloon animal is only Act 1 of an inevitable three act tragedy.

I am currently reading The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, by one of our great science writers, Deborah Blum. She will, I hope, be a guest on Point of Inquiry at some point.

Blum weaves a masterful tale of how modern forensic medicine emerged during the era of Prohibition as a doctor-toxicologist team hunt down murderers who use arsenic, mercury, and cyanide, and try to protect the public health from threats like tetraethyl lead, wood alcohol, and carbon monoxide. Move over, CSI Miami–here’s CSI 1920s New York. Just amazing stuff; no wonder Blum is at around # 240 0n Amazon right now….

I sometimes make fun of NASA for being a bit stodgy, but in truth a lot of the folks there are pretty savvy when it comes to new tech and social media. The Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity were on Facebook pretty quickly, and a flood of other space probes followed suit. Twitter is well-populated by NASA people, including astronaut Soichi Noguchi, who has been tweeting tirelessly from orbit recently, posting one amazing picture after another of cities, landscapes, and even the Moon.

One thing NASA is careful about is archiving material. They are well aware of the importance of the work they’re doing, and public outreach is a critical aspect of it. That’s why I’m happy to see a new effort on the part of the space agency to archive all their social media outlets.

It’s just started, so it’s a bit sparse, but I can see this being very useful to future historians. It may seem silly to have an online record of all the official tweets from NASA people, but in fact there is a wealth of information there. And it’s not just Twitter; it’s also Flickr for pictures, and YouTube for videos. I can see this expanding to Facebook, too, and other social networks. There’s a brief intro to the archive on the NASA images blog as well.

NASA does a pretty decent job of being transparent to its stakeholders — that’s you, folks — far better than most other government agencies, despite being online in far larger proportion than them as well. And I know that I’ll be able to use this archive for blogging; it’ll make linking to NASA efforts a whole lot easier. Not only that, but I found a couple of new Twitter streams form NASA I’m interested in, too! So take a look at the archive and dig around. I just bet you’ll find something cool there.