Author: Discover Main Feed

Measles looks to be 1000 years old. It jumped from cattle. And you can read more about it here.

In tomorrow’s New York Times I write about the afterlife of the greatest medical disaster in history. Thalidomide, a drug women took for morning sickness in the late 1950s, caused thousands of devastating birth defects, such as the failure of limbs to develop. Even after the drug was banned, scientists had no idea how it interfered with growing arms and legs. In fact, fifty years later, they’re only just starting to figure it out.

This was a particularly interesting story to write coming after a piece I wrote for the Times last year about normal limb development. Now thalidomide is revealing a new player in the limb development game, a protein that no one knew about when I wrote my 2009 article. In science, very often the only way to understand how something works is to see what happens when it goes wrong.

PS: On Google Books, you can see a 1962 issue of Life with some stunning pictures from the Thalidomide years.

[Image: Science Museum (Thalidomide is currently legal for sale for leprosy and other diseases)]

Response of brown tree snakes (Boiga irregularis) to human blood

“Ten specimens of Boiga irregularis were presented with clean or bloody tampons. The latter were used by women during menses. Trial duration was 60 sec, intertrial interval was 24 hr, and the dependent variable was rate of tongue flicking (a measure of chemosensory investigation). Bloody tampons elicited significantly more tongue flicking than did control tampons. An additional snake is shown attacking and ingesting a soiled tampon, confirming that chemosensory interest was associated with predatory behavior.”

Bonus figure legend from the main text of the paper (we decided to spare you the actual figure):

“FIG. 1. (A) A brown tree snake investigates a soiled tampon suspended into its cage.
(B) Seconds later the snake bites the tampon. (C) About 2 min following the bite, the
snake is shown with only the string remaining unswallowed. This snake then struck and
swallowed a second soiled tampon.”

Thanks to Aaron for today’s ROFL!

Photo: flickr/jurvetson

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Cooperation and individuality among man-eating lions.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Friday the 13th special: Blood and tissue spatter associated with chainsaw dismemberment.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: fun with animals.

This.

Is.

AWESOME!!!

That is a model of the USS Enterprise-D from Star Trek: The Next Generation, created using an ion beam that guides vaporized chemicals and deposits them into a given shape. The amazing thing is that this model of the Big Little-E is only 8.8 microns (millionths of a meter) long! For comparison, a human hair is about 50-100 microns across. This image is magnified 5000 times.

I wonder if it comes with a tiny Wil Wheaton, too?

Tip o’ the VISOR to Digg.

Sushi chefs in Japan are keeping a close eye on Doha, Qatar this week as delegates at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) debate the future of their beloved bluefin tuna. The fish, a delicacy in Japan that can sell for more than $100,000 apiece, is being overfished, and convention delegates aim to prevent the tuna from becoming extinct altogether. The proposal on the table: A complete ban on international trade of the fish to allow stocks to regenerate.

The bluefin tuna ban was proposed by Monaco, and the vote will probably come up next week. Japan has already dispatched a delegation to Doha with the message that Japan won’t comply with a total ban, and would instead prefer a fishing quota. But quotas have failed to help the depleted bluefin tuna stocks thus far. Japan last year pledged to help meet an accord to slash the total catch in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean by 40 percent, although environmental groups charge that such quotas are routinely exceeded [AFP].

The European Union and the United States have come out in support of a total ban, since decades of overfishing has caused the number of bluefin in the Atlantic and Mediterranean to crash by more than two-thirds. Japan, meanwhile, hopes to fend off the ban by enlisting the support of developing nations in Africa and Latin America. Tokyo said that even if a ban is implemented, it could use a treaty technicality to opt out of the agreement by expressing “reservations,” and would then continue to import from other countries.

Meanwhile, at the world’s largest fishing market in Tokyo’s Tsukiji district, bluefish tuna fishermen began collecting signatures to oppose the ban. They said measures to prevent overfishing of the tuna should be implemented instead [The Asahi Shimbun]. Traders also fear a steep price hike for the bluefin, known as “kuro maguro” or black tuna in Japan. A piece of “otoro” or fatty underbelly now costs 2,000 yen (22 dollars) at high-end Tokyo restaurants [AFP].

The other bitter battle being played out at the CITES meeting is Zambia’s and Tanzania’s proposal for a one-time sale of ivory, so that they may clean out their stockpiles of ivory–collected, they say, from elephants who died natural deaths. So far, the proposal has been resisted by countries like Kenya that argue that such sales give cover to poachers who engage in “ivory-laundering,” and would increase poaching in the region.

Zambia and Tanzania both insist that they will funnel the $18.5 million they expect to earn from the sale into conservation efforts, but that claim has been met with skepticism. A recent report in the journal Science revealed a sharp increase in poaching in recent years–with much of the ivory trafficking running through Zambia and Tanzania.

Kenya and its allies have proposed supporting a bluefin tuna ban in exchange for greater protection for the elephants. However, this horse trading is viewed as controversial: Conservationists argue that every proposal should rise or fall on the basic of scientific evidence detailing the possible extinction of individual species, not as part of a political deal [The New York Times].

Related Content:
80beats: Scientists Say Ban Atlantic Bluefin Tuna Trade–and Sushi Chefs Shudder
80beats: Human Appetite for Sharks Pushes Many Toward Extinction
80beats: Are Fish Farms the Answer to World Hunger or a Blight on the Oceans?
80beats: Documentary on Endangered Bluefin Tuna Reels in Sushi Joints & Celebrities
80beats: Elephant-Lovers Worry About Controversial Ivory Auctions in Africa
80beats: Would Importing Ivory to China Fuel the Black Market?

Image: Wikimedia

As I promised a little while back, the European Space Agency has released new extremely high-res pictures of Phobos, one of the moons of Mars! Check this out:

Yegads. Click to embiggen, and see this in all its glory. This image, taken by the Mars Express spacecraft, has a resolution of 4.4 meters per pixel, meaning objects about the size of a two-car garage can be seen on the surface of Phobos. For comparison, this lumpy, battered moon (named for the Greek word for fear, a companion to Mars) is 27×22×19 kilometers (16×13×11 miles), so even though it’s on the tiny side, this is still a fantastic map of the surface.

And an important one as well: next year, Russia will be launching a probe called Phobos-Grunt (Phobos soil) that will attempt to land on the moon, collect a sample of its surface, and send it back to Earth! These images of Phobos will help the Russians figure out the best place to land.

On the ESA page linked above, you’ll also find a cool 3D anaglyph of Phobos, and if you want to stay up to date on all this, check out the Mars Express blog, too.

Image credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)

The European Space Agency has released the latest pictures of the Martian moon Phobos, taken by the European Mars Express (MEX) probe during its recent flybys. On one flyby, MEX skimmed just 42 miles above the surface of Phobos, which is the closest any manmade object has ever gotten to the little Martian moon.

The image above is from a flyby that brought MEX within 63 miles of the surface; its High Resolution Stereo Camera took photographs that have a resolution of 14 feet per pixel. The images are being scrutinized by the Russian space agency as it tries to settle on a landing site for its ambitious Phobos-Grunt mission next year–the two potential landing sites are marked by red dots in the picture above. The Phobos-Grunt mission aims to collect a soil sample from Phobos, and then to return the sample to Earth for analysis.

Phobos is an odd little moon: it’s a potato-shaped rock measuring only 12 miles by 17 miles. Scientists believe the moon is relatively porous, but say its origin is still open to debate. Researchers suspect the moon is simply a collection of planetary rubble that coalesced around the Red Planet sometime after its formation. Another explanation is that it is a captured asteroid [BBC News]. Scientists believe that Phobos is being slowly pulled towards Mars, and tidal forces are expected to tear it apart one day.

The moon has drawn more attention lately, because it’s increasingly seen as a steppingstone for Mars-bound astronauts. Last month, NASA shifted its focus from sending humans back to the moon to a “flexible path” that includes the moons of Mars as potential destinations. The idea is that low-gravity locales such as Phobos (and Mars’ other moon, Deimos) should be easier to get to because they’re more accommodating for landing and ascent [MSNBC].

Related Content:
80beats: Photo Gallery: The Best Views From Spirit’s 6 Years of Mars Roving
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80beats: New Images Reveal Traces of Ancient (and Life-Friendly?) Martian Lakes
DISCOVER: Russia’s Dark Horse Plan to Get to Mars describes the Phobos-Grunt mission

Image: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)

When small earthquakes rumbled beneath northern Texas in 2008 and again in 2009, scientists were puzzled. While they expect to see seismic activity in active zones like Haiti, Chile, and Turkey, where disasters have already struck this year, the area around Fort Worth, Texas sees only rare and tiny seismic activity. Now, some Texas seismologists are arguing that techniques used in conjunction with natural gas exploration provide a plausible explanation for what’s going on.

North Texas sits atop the Barnett Shale, one of the several giant layers of shale in the United States believed to hold a truly massive amount of natural gas. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that 200 trillion cubic feet of natural gas may reside in shales nationwide [USA Today]. The reason these giant deposits have remained largely untapped, however, is that shale isn’t particularly porous, and so extracting it requires drillers to fracture the rock in multiple places.

However, according to seismologist Brian Stump, it’s not the actual fracturing that may be to blame in this earthquake case. Rather, he points to “injection wells,” which are a way to get rid of the waste water that this gas exploration creates. Each natural gas well produces millions of gallons of wastewater that can be contaminated with salt, chemicals and crude oil. Injection wells dispose of the waste by forcing it deep into the ground under high pressure [Houston Chronicle]. Stump’s team used records of 11 of the tiny earthquakes (which at a magnitude of about 3.0 were too small to cause damage on ground level) to narrow the search for the quakes’ source. Those records pointed them to an area near the Dallas-Fort Worth airport where an injection well sits.

Because that well is close to an old fault, Stump’s team says the heat or pressure that the massive discharge of waste water creates is a plausible explanation for Texas’ quakes. However, they are careful to note that this is simply a plausible answer, and that the link hasn’t been proven. Understandably, Chesapeake Energy, which owns the well, was quick to reiterate that latter point, though the company closed the well last year as a precaution. “A direct, causal relationship between saltwater disposal wells and seismic activity in the DFW area has not been scientifically proven,” spokesman Brian Murnahan wrote in a statement. He declined to elaborate [Houston Chronicle].

Related Content:
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80beats: Why Chile’s Massive Earthquake Could Have Been Much Worse
80beats: Where in the World Will the Next Big Earthquake Strike?
80beats: Satellite Images Show the Extent of Haiti’s Devastation
80beats: The Earth *Really* Moved: Chilean Quake Shifted a City 10 Feet to the West
80beats: Geothermal Energy Project May Have Caused an Earthquake

Image: Energy Information Administration (map of major shale gas deposits)

A wave of reports is coming in from the town of Euclid, Ohio, from folks there who are seeing a mysterious light hovering over Lake Erie and Cleveland. The light, they say, is very bright, lasts for a couple of hours, stays near the horizon, changes colors, and keeps coming back to the same spot night after night.

Here’s an MSNBC report about it:

Could it be an alien visitor from another world?

No, I don’t think so. In fact, I think it is another world. Venus, to be specific.

A Fort Wayne, Indiana website has an interview with one of the witnesses on video, and includes some still shots. Everything in his description, including the photographs, makes me think he and the others are seeing Venus.

Right now, Venus can be seen in the west — the direction to Lake Erie and Cleveland as seen in Euclid — shining brightly just after sunset. It is so bright it can be seen while the sky is still light (I’ve seen Venus in the middle of the day). It appears to hover. Changing atmospheric conditions can affect its color, especially when it’s low to the horizon. It can be seen night after night, in the same spot in the sky.

Sound familiar?

I’m not saying what these people are seeing is in fact Venus, but it sure fits everything I’ve heard in the news reports (sometimes the witnesses describe multiple lights, but when looking to the horizon, especially over a big city, it’s not too unlikely to see planes flying around). In the MSNBC report they talked to the FAA, the military, and others (including a UFO guy from England), but never talked to an astronomer. Hmmph. And note that in these news articles, Venus is never mentioned! That’s mighty peculiar, given how spectacular it is in the west after sunset. It’s really hard to miss. A likely explanation is that it’s not mentioned because it is, in fact, the culprit here.

I’m getting a kick out of just how positive so many people are that this is a flying saucer of some kind. I wonder how many of these folks actually are familiar with the night sky, and would recognize Venus when they see it? That’s why I think very few astronomers (pro or amateur) report UFOs: astronomers tend to know what they’re looking at in the sky.

The next time you hear a report like this, don’t jump to the conclusion that some interplanetary object is making a close encounter… because it may very well be interplanetary, but the encounter may not be terribly close.

Tip o’ the probe to Patrick Kent.

While there was much I liked about my Point of Inquiry interview with Andy Revkin, perhaps nothing was more striking than his direct analogy between the massively deadly 2008 Sichuan earthquake, in China, and what is likely to happen someday in Oregon. I just couldn’t believe what I was hearing from him:

In Oregon…where there’s a known, extraordinary seismic risk, cities and communities are still not doing much to gird the buildings that matter most, like schools, to make them less likely to fall down and kill thousands of kids and teachers….essentially what you saw in Sichuan province, almost unavoidably will be seen in lots of places in Oregon, where there’s that extraordinary fault offshore, the Cascadia fault, that will generate an extraordinary earthquake, most likely in this century, pretty plausibly in the next few decades, if not tomorrow–that will destroy 1,200 schools. The schools are listed, they’ve been studied, we know where they are, the ones that are very likely or certain to fall down when that quake hits. If my kids were in one of those schools, I’d be pretty energized.

Revkin goes on to discuss why we tend to ignore risks like these, even though there is no possible rational justification for it….you can listen here. The section begins around minute 23:30. And don’t forget to subscribe to Point of Inquiry on iTunes!

Meanwhile, to jon a discussion that has begun about the show, zip over here…

The CIA’s experiments with mind-control and hallucinogenic drugs are well documented. It’s hard to forget about programs like Operation Midnight Climax, in which the agency studied the effects of LSD by dosing unsuspecting clients at brothels. But did the agency go so far as to send an entire French village on an acid trip that killed a few people and institutionalized a bunch more? According to The Telegraph, the CIA did just that in 1951.

For years, people familiar with “the incident of the cursed bread” (or le pain maudit) have subscribed to the theory that villagers in Saint-Pont-Esprit in Southern France suffered massive delusions because they all ate bread contaminated by ergot, a hallucinogenic fungus. After eating bread from a local baker, the villagers reported such delusions as the conviction that they were missing body parts or had animals in their stomachs.

Now, The Telegraph reports that the incident was not “ergotism” caused by the fungus, as previously believed, but was actually a bad trip caused by the CIA, which had spiked the village bread with LSD, or maybe just sprayed LSD into the air. Quite a story, huh? Too bad it doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.

The always credulous Telegraph reports that the discovery was made by investigative journalist H. P. Albarelli Jr., who published a book on the CIA’s research. Albarelli claimed the outbreak was the result of a covert experiment carried out by the CIA and the U.S. army’s top secret Special Operations Division (SOD) at the height of the cold war.

The Telegraph reports:

Mr Albarelli came across CIA documents while investigating the suspicious suicide of Frank Olson, a biochemist working for the SOD who fell from a 13th floor window two years after the Cursed Bread incident. One note transcribes a conversation between a CIA agent and a Sandoz official who mentions the “secret of Pont-Saint-Esprit” and explains that it was not “at all” caused by mould but by diethylamide, the D in LSD.

The Telegraph’s article immediately drew sharp responses from other journalists, who dismissed the report as bunkum. David Steven of The Global Dashboard points out that Albarelli’s theories were rejected out of hand by Steven Kaplan, a history professor at Cornell University and a noted bread expert who has written a book on the incident.

Terming the report “incoherent and harebrained,” Kaplan told France 24:

I have numerous objections to this paltry evidence against the CIA. First of all, it’s clinically incoherent: LSD takes effects in just a few hours, whereas the inhabitants showed symptoms only after 36 hours or more. Furthermore, LSD does not cause the digestive ailments or the vegetative effects described by the townspeople.…

It is absurd, this idea of transmitting a very toxic drug by putting it in bread. As for pulverizing it [for ingestion through the air], that technology was not even possible at that time. Most compellingly, why would they choose the town of Pont-Saint-Esprit to conduct these tests? It was half-destroyed by the US Army during fighting with the Germans in the Second World War. It makes no sense.

The report also came under fire for not getting its science right. Derek Lowe, a chemist who has worked in several major pharmaceutical companies, points to the reporter’s assertion that the hallucinations were caused by diethylamide, the D in LSD, as incorrect.

He writes:

Laughter may now commence. For the non-chemists in the audience, diethylamide isn’t a separate compound; it’s the name of a chemical group. And LSD isn’t some sort of three-component mixture; it’s the diethylamide derivative of the parent compound, lysergic acid. (I’d like to hear this guy explain to me what the “S” stands for)

In short, neither the author of this new book, nor the people at the Telegraph, nor the supposed scientific “source” of this quote, knows anything about chemistry. This is like saying that the secret of TNT is a compound called “Tri”. Nonsense.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Whatever Happened To… Mind Control?
DISCOVER: Could an Acid Trip Cure Your OCD?
Discoblog: Worst Science Article of the Week, the archives

Image: iStockphoto

A special court set up as part of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program
has ruled that there is no evidence that thimerosal — a preservative used in vaccines, but removed from virtually all of them years ago — causes autism.

Yay!

Last year, this same court ruled that evidence presented by families claiming their children were harmed by vaccines was insufficient to show that vaccines cause autism. In fact, one judge said that the families were misled by antivax physicians.

This new ruling is a good one. Medically and scientifically, it’s been known for some time that thimerosal does not cause autism. This graph makes it pretty clear:

Since the removal of thimerosal from most vaccines, autism rates have increased. The antivax movement has frothed and railed about this, but as usual reality is firmly against them. I suggest you read Australian skeptic Maggie’s take on this topic as well.

As a parent myself, I have sympathy for parents of autistic children, I really do: no parent could deny the strong urge to defend and protect their child against all threats. But because we are so strongly emotional in cases like this, we have to be ever-more vigilant about using logic, evidence, and rationality, lest we react to a problem that doesn’t exist. The parents who brought their cases to this court are, I suspect, well-meaning and desperate for answers. But the respite they seek will not be found in an imagined link between vaccinations and autism.

This movement is doing serious damage in two ways. One, it’s scaring parents unreasonably into not vaccinating their kids, putting these children and others at risk for contracting preventable diseases. But second, this whole debacle is distracting researchers against looking for the real causes behind autism. In other words, these people are fighting against their own cause.

We need real answers about autism, and the antivax movement is wasting tremendous resources that could be far, far better spent looking at the reality of the situation. Instead, they rail against phantoms, and the real victims are children, theirs and everybody’s.

We were very pleased to come across the following news yesterday about a contest that was held for students of the CUNY system:

Altogether, 12 CUNY undergraduates–out of 101 applicants–received awards for their essays based on 2009 Nobel prize-winning work in chemistry, physiology and medicine, physics, and economics. First, second and third prizes in each category included an Apple iMac Computer, a Dell Mini 10 Netbook, and an Amazon Kindle.

The impetus for the competition, said Vice Chancellor Gillian Small in her opening remarks, came about when the 2009 Nobel winners were announced, and she was reading a recent book of essays titled Unscientific America, How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future.

“There is a distressingly large number of Americans who refuse to accept even the theory of evolution,” said Small, who envisioned the competition’s essays making Nobel work in science accessible to a larger audience.

What a wonderful idea. This is just more evidence–and it is everywhere–that despite some hold-outs, an emphasis on fixing science communication is the new trend within science itself…and these are just the kinds of initiatives that will spur along that change.

For millennia, humans have used the codeine and morphine of the poppy plant as painkillers—or recreational drugs. For the last half-century, says Peter Facchini, biologists have tried to unlock just how the plant produces these powerful chemicals, and wound up frustrated. But now, in a study in Nature Chemical Biology, Facchini’s team says it has isolated the two genes that are the key to this process, which scientists could use to create some of medicine’s most valuable chemicals without the fields of poppy plants that give rise to the trade of illegal narcotics, especially heroin.

Both of the genes produced enzymes that helped to convert precursor chemicals. One, thebaine 6-O-demethylase (T60DM), had a role in the production of codeine. The other, codeine O-demethylase (CODM) transformed codeine into morphine [Press Association]. Lead author Jillian Hegel, Facchini’s grad student, studied four different poppy relatives and sifted through a library of 23,000 genes to find these two. She put these genes into E. coli bacteria that sat overnight in a flask with a chemical called thebaine that’s present in poppy seeds to see if the bacteria would synthesize the painkillers. “When she came back the next morning, the thebaine was all gone,” says Facchini. “That’s when her eyes got big…. Finding it all had been turned into morphine — that gives a grad student a great sense of power, when they can make morphine” [Science News].

There are several upshots to Hegel and Facchini’s find. First, they say, finding both the enzymes and the genes responsible for them means that scientists are much closer to the possibility of creating these painkillers without the poppy plant, perhaps skirting the social and political morass of agricultural poppy production, the source of heroin [Science News]. Getting vats of microbes to produce the drugs could also be cheaper and more efficient than cultivating vast poppy fields.

In addition, the finding may someday sweep away the inefficient current method of making codeine. The poppy produces it naturally, but in smaller quantity than morphine, so drug-makers usually synthesize codeine from morphine. However, Facchini says, “With this discovery, we can potentially create plants that will stop production at codeine [and so not produce morphine]. We are also working towards the synthesis of codeine and other opiate drugs more efficiently and economically in controlled bioprocessing facilities” [The Independent].

Lastly, there’s the reality that about 10 times as much opium is made for the illegal heroin trade as for the legitimate manufacture of morphine and codeine [The Independent]. Theoretically, scientists could use engineered viruses to shut down the opiate-producing genes in the poppies of say, Afghanistan, to crush the illegal drug trade. But beyond the sheer difficulty of executing such a thing, the political consequences of such hubris could be unpredictable, Charles S. Helling of the State Department’s narcotics division tells Science News.

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Image: flickr / Visualdensity

[Update, 2 pm: Thanks for the big turn-out for my survey below. If you have trouble accessing it to enter your information, try again later today. I am hammering out some kinks right now. And I’ll crunch the numbers once the responses start to taper off.]

We writers, in case you didn’t know, are scratching our heads about what exactly to do next. It’s hard to figure out, because there are so many things we could do, at least in theory. If we wanted, we could write a novel in tweets, record an epic poem as a podcast, or transform a history of inorganic chemistry into an Ipad app. In fact, I’m sure that someone, somewhere, is doing all these things and more–but not all at once. Each writer has to figure out how best to use the twenty-four hours in a day.

It makes sense for writers to choose work that makes the most of their particular talents. And for writers who depend on writing to pay the mortgage, it also makes sense to write things that have a chance of being read, and perhaps (dare to dream) earn their creators some money. Ten years ago, the course for a writer wasn’t easy, but at least it had some clearly marked sign posts. You could try to break into newspapers or magazines with pitch letters and clip files. You could try to get a contract with a publishing house and write a book. Today, of course, people read in other ways as well. They read blogs, Facebook posts, Kindle editions, discussion threads, and on and on. The sign posts have been moved, turned upside down, or taken down altogether.

The writer is left to wander across a confusing landscape. This morning, for example, the Pew Research Center released a report on the foraging habits of the online reader that Gawker summed up fairly well: “Paywalls are anathema. Nobody clicks on ads. The value of news is zero dollars and zero cents.” But wait! Yesterday Business Week reported that ebooks are selling like hotcakes on the Iphone.

One thing is clear: it’s no time to sit in the monastery and continue to illuminate vellum scrolls. It’s time to try new things. Recently, for example, the novelist John Edgar Wideman skipped past traditional publishers to self-publish an e-book over at Lulu. It’s too early to know the outcome of that experiment; for actual results, one can follow the blogging of novelist JA Konrath, who is chronicling his experiences over the past year publishing short stories and rejected novels as ebooks. It’s working out well for him, and promises to get even better.

I suspect that the fate of different writers will depend, in part, on the nature of their readers. As a result, I think the Pew’s report has a fatal flaw to it: it’s based on the old-fashioned notion that readers form a homogenous swarm. If you call a few thousand phone numbers at random, you will get a meaningful picture of people’s reading habits. But if there’s anything we know for sure, it’s that the country does not sit down in front of the TV and watch Walter Cronkite en masse. The motivations of the reader matter. Some people love to read about sports online, to the point that they will pay to roll around in baseball stats like a happy pig in mud (and no disrespect intended towards baseball fans or pigs). A lot of people will not spend that money. They’ll glance at scores on Yahoo News and move on.

So this is where you, dear reader, come in. Clearly, the simple fact that you are reading this blog means that you are…well, let’s call you exceptional, shall we? You may not be a baseball nut, but you are interested in science. Right now, you’re reading a post on a blog hosted by a fine magazine and financially supported by advertising and paid subscriptions. I want to get to know the science reader in 2010 better–how you get your science fix, where you expect to be getting it, what you hope for the future, and how writers may or may not be able to supply that fix and make a living at the same time.

While the science reader may be a bit mysterious to me, I know that readers of the Loom are willing to share their opinions. Last year a bunch of readers of the Loom took part in a survey about the cover of my latest book that ended up improving it greatly. So I’m going to impose on you again to participate in a slightly scientific, extremely idiosyncratic poll. While I have built this survey for selfish reasons, I hope they’ll be of interest to other people–both other writers and readers. Once the voting tapers off, I will write a post reviewing the results and giving you my homespun analysis. If you click the link below, a window will open up with my questions.

While Polldaddy does a great job of programming surveys and such, there well may be a few bugs. Please let me know if you find any. And don’t forget–use the comment thread if the survey isn’t describing your reading habits well. Many thanks. (And thanks in particular to Scott Sigler for some brainstorming.)

[Image by the incomparable Berenice Abbott, via Flickr]

Elon Musk’s Falcon 9 rocket didn’t get off the ground this weekend, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t cause for excitement. Musk’s company SpaceX completed a successful test-fire of the rocket’s engines, paving the way for a possible real launch in less than a month.

Saturday’s 3.5-second ’static’ firing of the Falcon’s nine kerosene and liquid oxygen-burning motors took place on a refurbished oceanside launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida [ABC News]. Success came on the second try for SpaceX. The company’s first attempt came last Tuesday, but launch technicians aborted with two seconds to go. Now the company has passed the hot fire test, and it says the real Falcon 9 launch could happen as early as April 12. However, the accomplishment won’t come easy: SpaceX’s previous rocket, the Falcon 1, took four attempts before it achieved complete success.

Lots of people are already counting on Falcon 9. The 154-foot-tall rocket is the cornerstone of SpaceX’s efforts to design, build and launch new vehicles to carry pressurized cargo, and perhaps astronauts, to the International Space Station [MSNBC]. SpaceX already holds more than $1 billion in NASA contracts to execute Falcon 9 flights, and Musk’s firm is one of the leading candidates to fulfill President Barack Obama’s plan to have private companies carry NASA astronauts to low Earth orbit and perhaps beyond. Also today, SpaceX announced it entered into an agreement with Space Systems/Loral to put satellites into orbit as early as 2012.

Musk is as confident as ever: With its FAA license to launch granted last week, SpaceX is just awaiting clearance from the Air Force for Falcon 9’s emergency abort system, which would be used to terminate the launch if the rocket strayed from its projected fight path and threatened populated areas. “As soon as the tests are complete and (Air Force) has signed off, we will launch,” said Musk [ABC News].

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Image: SpaceX

Spring is approaching us here in the northern hemisphere on Earth once again, and we are experiencing the annual thaw of the winter ice.

Spring is approaching the northern hemisphere of Mars as well, and with it comes the thaw of carbon dioxide ice. Some of that dry ice sits at the tops of cliffs, and when it thaws it dislodges the material there. The rock and debris on Mars then does the same thing it would do on Earth: it falls. Fast.

And when it does, you get this slice of Martian awesomeness:

Holy scarp!

That’s another avalanche on Mars caught in the act by the HiRISE camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. I say another, because a few others have been seen, including this spectacular one two years ago, and lots of older ones that left their marks on the Red Planet’s surface.

This one is amazing! You can see the debris falling down the cliff’s edge (the top of the cliff is to the bottom left of the image, and we’re looking almost straight down the cliff’s face) and then creating a plume of dust at the bottom, hundreds of meters below. When HiRISE took this image, the slide couldn’t have been more than a minute old. If you look at the higher-res image (click the image above to embiggen) you can see that there have been a lot of avalanches here in the past, too. The bottom of the cliff has lots of material clearly deposited by fast-moving falling debris.

To be honest, it’s not completely sure that the sublimation (the change from solid directly to gas) of carbon dioxide is causing these avalanches, but it does seem the most likely explanation. Whether it’s dry ice or not, what this shows us directly is that Mars is still an active place. Certainly the surface is undergoing continual (if small scale) modification, with avalanches, meteor strikes, and other processes still occurring even, literally, today.

Mars is a very, very cool place.

If you want to learn more, check out the HiRISE blog, which always has great stuff, including explanations of these extraterrestrial rockslides.

And when you read about Mars and our exploration of it, remember this: it is an entire world, worthy of our attempts to understand it. And that is one of the grandest things we humans ever do.

This is the first in a series of guest posts by science writer Eli Kintisch, author of the forthcoming book Hack the Planet: Science’s Best Hope–or Worst Nightmare–for Averting Climate Catastrophe, and climate change reporter for Science magazine. We’ve invited Kintisch to contribute regular guest posts at the Intersection on the topic; my take on his excellent book, due out April 19 from John Wiley, is here.

I was speaking to a contact of mine on Capitol Hill and we both agreed: there’s been next to no public controversy about geoengineering yet, but the storm from enviros and others is certainly coming. But the green community is split. Some think even coming up with voluntary rules to govern work on the controversial topic is a bad idea. Most of the big organizations, even if they have kept quiet up till now, think scientists ought to begin to understand what the unthinkable would entail.

The ETC Group, an Ottawa-based civil society organization that’s been opposing various efforts in geoengineering since 2006, last week published an open letter opposing the upcoming privately organized meeting on geoengineering in Asilomar, California:

As civil society organizations and social movements working to find constructive solutions to climate change, we want to express our deep concerns with the upcoming privately organized meeting on geoengineering in Asilomar, California… The priority at this time is not to sort out the conditions under which this experimentation might take place but, rather, whether or not the community of nations and peoples believes that geoengineering is technically, legally, socially, environmentally and economically acceptable.

Without any international consensus as to whether geoengineering is an acceptable intervention in natural systems, the Climate Response Fund and its Scientific Organizing Committee’s discussion about “voluntary guidelines” is nonsensical. The Conference organizers — almost exclusively white male scientists from industrialized countries — are presuming that they have the experience, wisdom and legitimacy to determine who should or should not be invited into this conversation.

One of those people invited to the conversation was Diana Bronson of ETC. But Bronson told me in an interview that ETC “is a small organization with limited resources” and would be unable to attend. Moreover, she said, since ETC opposed the meeting’s stated goal of creating such voluntary guidelines, “there’s no reason for us to attend.”

(She also said that she had based her critique on the makeup of the meeting on who “she figured” would be attending, having not yet received the guest list. She well may be right about a racial/cultural weighting, but I note that in the same vein ETC attacked the Royal Society report last year on geoengineering before they had read a copy.)

A number of prominent environmental groups support the conference being held, including the Environmental Defense Fund. Two officials from that organization, which helped organize the meeting, will be attending, along with Steve Seidel of Pew Center on Climate, and Tom Lovejoy of the Heinz center — both centrist, nonpartisan environmental groups. In addition, Dave Hawkins of NRDC will be there, as will Paul Craig of the Sierra Club. “We thought it was important to have engagement by the NGO community,” Margaret Leinen, head of the Climate Response Fund, told me. That group is the main sponsor of the meeting.

(Friends of the Earth UK’s position on geoengineering research is here: I’ll analyze it in another post soon.)

Blogger Tim Harper of cientifica is particularly unimpressed with ETC’s stand:

There’s nothing like the mention of geoengineering to get environmental groups even madder than putting a wasps nest down their trousers and beating them with a cricket bat, and for good reason. The idea that we could do something about climate change that didn’t involve re-engineering the political system would mean that we don’t have to live in caves, grow beards and ride bicycles. More annoyingly, some kind of techno fix would deprive some groups of a platform for the various other anti capitalist/globalisation/consumer agendas that have somehow got mixed up with sustainability.

Harper’s critique might apply to ETC — I’m still trying to understand their motives, and this document, their longest explanation of their views on geoengineering, helps a little. (The document, a pretty useful summary of events to date in this fast moving field, represents an evolution of the group’s views on one key aspect: Bronson told me last year that she felt research into the concept was ok, provided that it not involve field trials. Now they say research into geoengineering “takes money away from real solutions on the ground.”)

But I don’t think it applies to the other mainstream environmental groups who have turned a wary eye toward geoengineering. As I say in Hack the Planet, environmental groups have been mostly quiet about geoengineering not for the ideological reason that they don’t want to fix the problem, but for strategic reasons. They’re worried that talk about geoengineering could distract from the solution even the biggest advocates of planethacking research want: immediate and drastic reduction of global man-made carbon emissions.

Having just signed our lease in Texas, I’m extremely disappointed with my new state’s Board of Ed. In case you missed it, they’ve voted to remove Thomas Jefferson, the Enlightenment, and more from the world history standards. And it gets much worse:

Details at The New York Times, Bad Astronomy and The Loom.

Dave writes, “Following my degree in Zoology, I worked in public aquariums for several years before becoming a lecturer in Animal Science, so I’ve always has a bit of a ‘fishy’ background! I’m also studying stress in marine fish for a research degree. I’ve always been fascinated by evolution, and to reflect this, I decided to get inked with a Haeckel – this is a medusa from ‘Art Forms in Nature’. Haeckel was clearly a proponent of evolution, and although his ideas weren’t 100% correct, the man could draw!

“The tattoo is courtesy of the always-brilliant Jon Nott of Guildford, Surrey (U.K.).”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.