Author: Discover Main Feed

Good news! My brother Ben has been appointed the new language columnist for the New York Times Magazine, taking over from the late William Safire. Expect a few more shamelessly fraternal links next week to various appearances associated with his new position.

I promise to lobby hard for science-related language columns, nefariously using my family back channels. It’s all for a good cause! Here’s an example of my subliminal big-brother mind-control–a conversation Ben and I had on Bloggingheads.tv

And here’s the press release the Times just issued:

NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–The New York Times Magazine announced today the appointment of linguist and lexicographer Ben Zimmer as the new “On Language” columnist. Mr. Zimmer succeeds William Safire who was the founding and regular columnist until his death last fall. The column is a fixture in The Times Magazine and features commentary on the many facets – from grammar to usage – of our language. “On Language” will appear bi-weekly beginning March 21.

“I look forward to continuing this fine tradition with my own take on how language shapes our past, present and future.”

In making the announcement, Gerald Marzorati, editor of the magazine said, “Ben brings both an academic’s deep knowledge and a maven’s eye, ear and passion to his commentary on the way Americans write and speak now. We welcome him to our roster and know our readers and ‘On Language’ devotees will greatly enjoy his columns.”

“It’s an honor and a privilege to be welcomed in the space that William Safire called home for thirty years,” Mr. Zimmer said. “I look forward to continuing this fine tradition with my own take on how language shapes our past, present and future.”

Mr. Zimmer is the executive producer of VisualThesaurus.com and Vocabulary.com, online destinations for learners and lovers of language. He is the former editor of American dictionaries at Oxford University Press and is a consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary. He was previously a research associate at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Research in Cognitive Science. He is a 1992 graduate of Yale University with a B.A. in linguistics. He studied linguistic anthropology at the University of Chicago and is the recipient of many fellowships including ones from the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Program and the Ford Foundation. He has taught at UCLA, Kenyon College, and Rutgers University. He was a frequent guest contributor to the “On Language” column, and his work has also appeared in The Boston Globe, Slate and several language blogs. He is on the Executive Council of the American Dialect Society and a member of the Dictionary Society of North America.

Mr. Safire served as the “On Language” columnist from its inception in 1979 until his death in 2009. In his columns he parsed words, phrases and points of grammar and usage about our written and spoken language.

An extensive study conducted on school children in Western Canada has proved that immunizing kids and adolescents goes a long way towards protecting the entire community from communicable diseases like the flu, thanks to a phenomenon known as “herd immunity.”

The findings come at a time when vaccine phobia is one of our largest public health concerns, with many parents worrying that immunizing kids can lead to adverse side affects. A recent survey revealed that one in four U.S. parents think that vaccines might cause autism, probably due in part to a 1998 paper published in the journal The Lancet that wrongly linked autism to vaccines–that paper has since been refuted, and fully retracted by the journal.

Now, scientists have more evidence that vaccines provide a public health benefit. Researchers studying youngsters in 49 remote Hutterite farming colonies in Canada found that giving flu shots to almost 80 percent of a community’s children created a herd immunity that helped protect unvaccinated older people from illness. As children often transfer viruses to each other first and then pass them along to grown-ups, the study provided solid proof that the best way to contain epidemics like the recent H1N1 outbreak is to first vaccinate all the kids. By immunizing the most germ-friendly part of the herd first, you indirectly protect the rest of the community, scientists say.

This is not the first time that scientists have found evidence that herd immunity can help protect the unvaccinated, but it’s the most definitive study on the subject yet. Researchers say this is the first such study to be conducted in such remote and isolated communities (the Hutterites‘ religious beliefs keep them separate from mainstream society), which reduced the chance that subjects could contract flu from other passing sources. Scientists say the new study provides “incontrovertible proof” that the shots themselves — rather than luck, viral mutations, hand-washing or any other factor — were the crucial protective element [The New York Times].

The study, published in The Journal of American Medical Association, focused on Hutterite farming colonies in Western Canada, where the people live in rural isolation in clusters of about 160 people. Though Hutterites drive cars and tractors, they shun radio and TV and each colony lives like a large joint family–eating together, going to a Hutterite school, and owning everything jointly.

In 25 of the colonies that joined the study, the scientists took school kids aged 3 to 15 years old and gave them flu shots in 2008. In 24 other colonies, the kids got placebo shots. In 2009, the researchers found that more than 10 percent of all the adults and children in colonies that received the placebo had had laboratory-confirmed seasonal flu. Less than 5 percent of those in the colonies that received flu shots had [The New York Times].

The study found that by vaccinating the kids against influenza, almost 60 percent of the larger community was granted “herd immunity” and protected against the illness. Carolyn Bridges, an expert in influenza epidemiology at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says the study implies that giving flu shots only to schoolchildren would protect the elderly just as well as giving flu shots to the elderly themselves. The C.D.C. would never recommend that, she cautioned, “Because you still should vaccinate high-risk people” [New York Times].

The Hutterite study’s findings are in line with a previous study conducted in 1968, in Tecumseh, Michigan. In that study, flu expert Arnold Monto vaccinated almost 85 percent of the town’s schoolchildren during flu season. At the end of season, the town had only a third as many flu cases as nearby Adrian, Mich., which received no shots. There were far fewer cases of flu in all age groups [New York Times].

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Image: iStockPhoto

The giant montane pitcher plant is a botanical predator, ruthlessly luring in prey and feasting on its victims–except when it’s not. Researchers have discovered that the carnivorous plant is mighty adaptable; when there’s no prey around, it thrives just fine on the poop of a tree shrew that lives in Borneo’s mountains.

The pitcher plant is the world’s largest meat-eating plant; in low altitudes it feeds on ants, small insects, and possibly even small rodents. The plant entices its prey with tasty nectar, and when the animals lose balance and drop into the fluid-filled pitcher, they’re drowned and ingested.

But in Borneo’s higher altitudes, there aren’t enough gullible and clumsy insects to keep the plant alive. So, evolutionary forces pressured the plant to tweak its design a bit to entice the tree shrew to pay it a visit and poop into it.

The BBC describes the unique toilet-shaped plant:

N. rapah pitchers have huge orifices, but they also grow large concave lids held at an angle of about 90 degrees away from the orifice. The inside of these lids are covered with glands that exude huge amounts of nectar. Most importantly, the distance from the front of the pitcher’s mouth to the glands corresponds exactly to the head to body length of mountain tree shrews.

The shrew perches on the plant to lick nectar from the “lid” and on most occasions it poops into the conveniently positioned toilet bowl to mark its territory. Scientists have yet to determine if the nectar has some sort of laxative qualities to it.

The feces collect at the bottom of the plant and when it rains, the nutrients get flushed into the plant, where the nitrogen and phosphorous in the poo get absorbed as plant food. This toilet bowl system is so effective that the plant satisfies almost all its nutritional needs from the shrew feces.

Jonathan Moran, one of the scientists who studied the relationship between the plant and the shrew, suggests that both parties evolved to sustain each other through a process called “mutualism.” For the shrew, the pitcher plant’s nectar is a rich source of sugar in the mountains; for the plant, the shrew’s feces is food.

You can listen to Moran explain the unique relationship in a radio program, CBC’s “Quirks and Quarks” here. And here’s a video of the tree shrew plopping into the pitcher plant for a quick snack.

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Image: Chi’en Lee

The BBC is reporting that a previously unknown potential impact crater has surfaced in the Congo. This region was heavily forested, hiding the crater, but recent widespread deforestation has revealed the ancient impact scar.

Obviously, I’m conflicted about this.

If this is an impact crater (it has not yet been confirmed), it’s about 40 km (25 miles) across, making it one of the largest seen on the Earth. We haven’t been hit by a big asteroid in a long time, and erosion has erased most of the impact craters. There’s a picture of the crater on that link above, and the crater is obviously very old.

It’s fascinating to know that such a large feature can be hidden at all, but it’s sad indeed on how it got uncovered. I can hope no one would be so crass as to suggest we should continue to deforest our planet in hopes of finding more treasures, but I have seen far worse things suggested to support unrestrained mining, drilling, and polluting. I’m glad something good came of this horrific practice, but all things told, I think I’d rather it had remained tucked away among thousands of square kilometers of trees.

Tip o’ the Whipple Shield to Ted Judah.

The theory of general relativity: It works. OK, it’s not exactly Earth-shattering news that Albert Einstein’s century-old idea works in real life. That’s been shown over and over. But what had been difficult for researchers to do until now was verify the theory on truly massive scales beyond the solar system, that of whole galaxies and clusters of galaxies. This week in Nature, Reinabelle Reyes and colleagues report that they did it, and that Einstein was proven correct once more.

While the find is a nice coup for Reyes’ team, its importance goes beyond just reaffirming the great scientists of yesteryear with yet another “Einstein was right” story. The existence of dark matter and dark energy is based on the assumption that Einstein’s gravity is affecting galaxies billions of light-years from Earth in the same way that it affects objects in our solar system [National Geographic]. However, if the study had shown that general relativity needed a slight adjustment at vast distances (like the nudge Einstein himself provided to Newton’s physics), that could have altered prevailing ideas about dark matter and energy. This research indicates those pesky ideas may be here to stay [Space.com].

Reyes’ approach combined the study of galaxies’ gravitational lensing (how much they bend the light from surrounding galaxies), their velocities, and how and where they formed clusters. All of these measurements combined created a system to test theories of gravity independent of particular parameters in the theories [Space.com]. What they found closely matched what you’d predict under general relativity. They tested two alternative gravitational theories, too. One, called tensor-vector-scalar (TeVeS), gave results beyond the study’s margin of error. Another, called f(R), didn’t work as well as general relativity. But it fell within the margin of error, so the scientists say it will take more research to disprove it.

Meanwhile, as the spirit of general relativity is reaffirmed in the pages of Nature, the pages upon which Einstein formulated the theory are going on display in Jerusalem. Elsa, his wife, gave the pages to Hebrew University, and they are currently part of 50th anniversary festivities at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Each of the 46 pages, labored over between November 1915 and their publication in May 1916, has its own case, each lighted dimly in a room that has been darkened to protect the paper. There on Page 1 is the now familiar title in German: “The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity” [The New York Times].

However, if you need more Einstein and can’t make the trip to Israel, check out his mustachioed mug on the cover of the April DISCOVER issue, on newsstands this week.

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Image: Ferdinand Schmutzer

Word from New Zealand Zimbabwe is that a religious sect there — which believes in prayer over vaccinations — may be responsible for the deaths of over one hundred children from measles.

I believe people have the right to practice their religious beliefs… up until they start to hurt others. It has been proven over and again that prayer does nothing to heal disease over the placebo effect, while vaccinations have saved hundreds of millions of people. That’s math I can do pretty easily.

If this story is true, I certainly hope that the people involved are introduced to the inside of a jail cell for a long, long time. They can happily pray there all they want, and on the outside those children can get the vaccinations that will save their lives.

A pioneering deep-sea robot, which could function unmanned and untethered to a surface ship, was lost at sea this week. The loss of the 15-year-old Autonomous Benthic Explorer, or ABE, comes as a blow to scientists who study the ocean’s floor. ABE could stay under water for an entire day; it ventured into some of the most remote and risky places on earth, making detailed maps of mid-ocean ridges and was the first autonomous vehicle to locate hydrothermal vents [The Boston Globe]. That’s why it earned a spot on Wired magazine’s list of “The 50 Best Robots Ever.”

ABE was on its 222nd research dive, studying a hydrothermal vent it had discovered off the coast of Chile on the Pacific floor, when all contact was lost with its surface vessel Melville. Scientists suspect that one of the glass spheres that helped keep ABE buoyant imploded. Scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who designed and built the $1 million vehicle, believe that this implosion–almost two miles undersea and under pressure of more than two tons per square inch-would have caused other spheres in ABE to implode, destroying on-board systems and leaving the robot stranded at the bottom of the ocean floor.

At the time of its loss, ABE, who was brought out of retirement as its replacement Sentry was on another expedition, was researching the Chile Triple Junction–the only place on Earth where a mid-ocean ridge is being pushed beneath a continent in a deep ocean trench [The Boston Globe]. Scientists and engineers on the ABE team reported that after a smooth launch, the final dive started normally. “ABE actively homed to its assigned position, reached the seafloor, released its descent weights, then leveled off to check its ballast. After this point, we received no more acoustic returns from the vehicle on either of its two transponders,” they said. This is when they think they lost ABE. Scientists clarified that this incident had nothing to do with the earthquake activity off the coast of Chile.

ABE was first launched in 1995 and revolutionized deep sea research; it was the precursor to today’s most sophisticated autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). The unmanned, untethered ABE roamed the ocean floors easily, as it was programmed to maintain a designated course but also to avoid on-course collisions. While navigating some of the most treacherous territory on earth, ABE made detailed maps of mid-ocean ridges and the 40,000-mile undersea volcanic mountain chain at the boundaries of Earth’s tectonic plates where new seafloor crust is created. It was also the first AUV to locate hydrothermal vents, where hot chemical-rich fluids spew from the seafloor and sustain lush communities of deep-sea life. ABE explored seamounts, undersea volcanoes, and other areas with harsh, rugged terrain [Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution].

Talking about ABE’s watery end, Chris German, National Deep-Submergence Facility chief scientist said: “Abe was a vehicle that we’ll always have fond memories of— it was a world-beater in its day… In a way, it’s fitting that its demise comes on the job, and that it has gone to be recycled through the Chile subduction zone” [Nature blog].

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Image: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

As the deadly facial cancer that has drastically reduced the population of Tasmanian devils continues to spread through the species, the main hope for scientists trying to save them from extinction has been to hunt for devils that might be resistant to the disease, and to try to take advantage of that immunity. Reporting in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Kathy Belov and her team say they may finally have done just that: Some devils from northwest Tasmania, they say, are genetically distinct from the rest and could be resistant to the disease.

Belov says that most Tasmanian devils have immune systems so closely related that they’re all susceptible to the disease, which spreads when the devils bite each other on the face and leave behind tumor cells. The bitten devils’ immune systems don’t recognize the tumor cells as foreign, allowing them to take hold. Scientists have given the iconic marsupial as little as 25 years left if efforts are not made to solve the cancer riddle. The population has dwindled by a whopping 70 per cent since the first reported case of devil facial tumour disease in 1996 [Sydney Morning Herald]. Previous research showed that the marsupials are more socially linked that researchers initially believed, which is bad news for those trying to contain the disease.

However, Belov’s findings provide some hope. While earlier studies had looked at devils in eastern Tasmania, this time they took a wider sampling of 400 devils across the state. Twenty percent of those were found to be genetically different from the eastern devils, and so far have not caught the disease [AP]. Belov believes these resistant devils may be able to identify the cancer cells as foreign, which triggers their immune systems to mount a defense. She notes that the situation is still dire, but adds that “now we can say that we’ve got a glimmer of hope. There may be some animals that may survive this epidemic” [AP].

Hopefully those findings will hold true; a few years ago researchers thought they’d found the first disease-resistant devil, which they named Cedric, but it didn’t pan out. Cedric caught the disease in December of 2008.

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Image: flickr/JLplusAL

The South by Southwest Interactive festival is about to roar into gear down in Austin, and DISCOVER just couldn’t miss out on the chance to mix and mingle with the leet ranks of hackers, gamers, geeks, and entrepreneurs.

So tomorrow (that’s Friday) at 5 pm, DISCOVER’s own Web editor extraordinaire, Amos Zeeberg, will moderate a panel discussion titled, “With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: The Future of Video Games.”

Video games are more popular than ever, and new games are delivering all kinds of social benefits, from video-game therapy for treating PTSD, to sims for train surgeons, to alternate-reality games that actually bring people together in real life. Will video games be a positive force for people and society in the future?

The panelists:

Lucy Bradshaw, with the video game giant Electronic Arts, worked as an executive producer for blockbuster games like Spore and The Sims 2. Spore was a favorite with science geeks, since the game characters evolve from microorganisms to complex animals before building societies and taking to space.

Tiffany Barnes, a professor of computer science, builds video games that teach introductory computer science. She’s interested in “harnessing the inherent motivation in video games” for more constructive purposes–like getting students to do their homework.

Neuroscience prof James Bower will explain why he started Whyville, a massively popular virtual world for kids. The educational site reportedly has a player base of more than 5 million users, who learn about everything from science to business to geography.

Anne Collins McLaughlin investigates how video games (including World of Warcraft and Wii Boom Box) can improve elder cognition at the Gains Through Gaming Lab.

If you’re at SXSW, stop by for insights on whether gaming can save the world!

DISCOVER hit the airwaves yesterday. First, Editor-in-Chief Corey Powell appeared on Fox News to talk NASA and Mars—specifically the agency’s idea for “Tumbleweeds,” or inexpensive round explorers that could bound around the surface of the Red Planet, tossed by the wind. Given the uncertain state of NASA funding, Powell says, the future of exploration could look a lot like these intrepid little bots:

Secondly, if you stayed up late enough to catch the end of “The Colbert Report,” you saw Sean Carroll—who writes for the DISCOVER blog Cosmic Variance—talking time, the multiverse, and his new book From Eternity to Here. Besides surviving the cauldron that is talking to Colbert while still hitting some key scientific points, Carroll also accidentally thinks up a great title for an album:

Check out Carroll’s cover story for the March issue of DISCOVER, “The Real Rules for Time Travelers.”

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The technical way to explain this odd-looking fowl is that it’s “gynandromorphous.” But if you just want to call it “one seriously confused chicken,” that works, too.

For a new study in Nature, Michael Clinton and colleagues investigated a few of these half-male, half-female chickens they obtained from chicken farms. Gynandropmorphs show up now and then not just in chickens, but also in parrots, pigeons, and some other kinds of animals. But scientists weren’t sure how the mix-up happens, since the standard idea for sex differentiation is that the sex hormones released by the gonads either masculinize or feminize the embryo. Clinton’s team discovered that bird cells don’t need to be programmed by hormones. Instead they are inherently male or female, and remain so even if they end up mixed together in the same chicken [BBC News].

The researchers had first assumed that the half-and-half chickens followed the hormone pattern, and that they were females with some sort of chromosomal problem on the male side (the lighter half of the bird in the image, which also sports a large wattle, sturdy breast musculature, and a leg spur on its male side). Instead, they found the chickens to be almost perfectly split between male and female. The hen half was, for the most part, made up of normal female cells with female chromosomes, whereas the cockerel side contained mostly normal male cells with male chromosomes [Nature News].

Since both sides experienced the same hormone exposure, that couldn’t explain what was happening. In addition, once the team believed that cell identity was at work here, and not hormones, further experiments seemed to confirm this idea. When the researchers transplanted tissues from genetically female embryos into what would become the gonads of genetically male ones and vice versa, the transplanted cells didn’t start expressing opposite-sex characteristics [Science News].

Clinton’s study is buttressed by others that suggest the standard explanation for sex determination doesn’t apply as widely as previously thought, or at least needs some tweaking. Besides the other birds mentioned previously, some marsupials and invertebrates stray from the pattern. “These funky chickens, oddities of nature that they are, will provide new perspectives on questions of sexual identity long thought to have been resolved,” wrote Duke University cell biologists Lindsey Barske and Blanche Capel in a Nature commentary accompanying the findings [Wired.com].

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Image: The Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh

The following recent comments on the “Pharyngula” blog have been brought to my attention via multple emails from readers–some of them victims of rape and sexual abuse:

Fuck them [my co-blogger, our commenters, and I] all sideways with a rusty fucking knife.

Later:

The commenters are basically wetting themselves hoping Kirshenbaum comes down hard because people are saying she should be raped with a rusty knife, and Myers “likes it that way”.

I am a big proponent of free speech, however, this thread crosses the line by advocating sexual and physical violence. I have become accustomed to ignoring much of the ridicule I receive online, but keeping silent on this particular issue, is, in my mind, acceptance. Those who contacted me do not have a platform to publicly express their disgust, but I can. Rape is not a joke or game and the fact that these remarks were not removed perpetuates the notion that they’re okay.

Adam Bly and I shared a panel in 2008 at the AAAS Forum on Science and Technology Policy where he discussed the values of Seed Media Group. Further, as a former Seed blogger with many friends still on the network, I’m quite familiar with their stated mission:

Seed Media Group is committed to strengthening public interest in science and improving public understanding of science around the world.

I cannot see how the tone of commentary contributes to this goal. However, given the volume of emails I’ve already received, I’m certain it reflects poorly on Seed, science blogging, and science broadly.

The Cassini spacecraft recently passed very near the tiny moon Helene and returned amazing pictures of it.

Helene is a dinky iceball, only about 36×32×30 km (22×19×18 miles) in size (this picture has an incredible resolution of about 113 meters (123 yards) per pixel). It circles Saturn in the same orbit as the much larger Dione, and is in fact in the larger moon’s leading Trojan point: a peculiar artifact of gravity when an object orbits another. It’s a gravitational stable point, like a valley between two mountains.

Clearly battered, Helene has an oddly smooth appearance, which may be due to the feeble gravity of the moon collecting dust also trapped in the Trojan point. At The Planetary Society Blog, Emily has more info on Helene and speculates about its appearance. She also has a good description of how the Trojan points work.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Reporting back from a hotel in midtown Manhattan, having made it through the Colbert Report basically unscathed. In fact the experience was great from beginning to end. Update: here is the clip.

Monday morning I talked on the phone with Emily Lazar, a researcher for the show. I was really impressed right from the start: it was clear that she wanted to make it easy for me to get across some substantive message, within the relatively confining parameters of what is basically a comedy show. From start to finish everyone I dealt with was a consummate pro.

We got picked up at our hotel in a car that brought us to the Colbert studio, and hustled inside under relatively high security — people whispering into lapel microphones that we had arrived and were headed to the green room. Very exciting. The green room was actually green, which is apparently unusual. I got pep talks from a couple of the staff people, who encouraged me to keep things as simple as possible. They made an interesting point about scientists: they make the perfect foils for Stephen’s character, since they actually rely on facts rather than opinions.

Stephen himself dropped by to say hi, and to explain the philosophy of his character — I suppose there still are people out there who could be guests on the show who haven’t ever actually watched it. Namely, he’s a complete idiot, and it’s my job to educate him. But it’s not my job to be funny — that’s his bailiwick. The guests are encouraged to be friendly and sincere, but not pretend to be comedians.

We got to sit in the audience as the early segments were taped, which were hilarious. I feel bad that my own interview is going to be the low point of the show, laughs-wise. But I went out on cue, and fortunately I wasn’t at all jittery — too much going on to have time to get nervous, I suppose.

I had some planned responses for what I thought were the most obvious questions. Of which, he asked zero. Right off the bat Colbert managed to catch me off guard by asking a much more subtle question than I had anticipated — isn’t the early universe actually very disorderly? That would be true if you ignored gravity, but a big part of my message is that you can’t ignore gravity! The problem was, I had promised myself that I wouldn’t use the word “entropy,” resisting the temptation to lapse into jargon. But he had immediately pinpointed an example where the association of “low entropy” with “orderly” wasn’t a perfect fit. So I had to go back on my pledge and bring up entropy, although I didn’t exactly give a careful definition.

As everyone warned me, the whole interview went by in an absolute flash, although it really lasts about five minutes. There was a fun moment when we agreed that “Wrong Turn Into Yesterday” would make a great title for a progressive-rock album. Overall, I think I could have done a better job at explaining the underlying science, but at least I hope I successfully conveyed the spirit of the endeavor. We’ll have to see how it comes across on TV.

I shouldn’t end without including some good words about the bag of swag. Not only does every guest get a goodie bag that includes a bottle of excellent tequila, it also includes a $100 gift certificate for Donors Choose. How awesome is that?

And as we left the studio, there were some young audience members lurking around hoping for a glimpse of the great man himself. They had to settle for me, but they sheepishly asked if I would pose for a picture with them. Not yet having perfected my diva act, I happily complied. I hope they take away some great memories of the night.

The 144th Carnival of Space is up at my bud Ian O’Neill’s Discovery Space News blog. Now does this post title make sense?

Anyway, go there, read it, study it, and that way you’ll pass the test. Oh, you didn’t know this will be on the test? C’mon, you’re a human, and this is life. Everything is on the test.

The April issue of Wired UK features our picks for the 10 most absurd scientific papers from the past year (at the time of selection, that meant 2009). For your enjoyment, here are the links to those posts (in no particular order)!

1.) Optimising the sensory characteristics and acceptance of canned cat food: use of a human taste panel.

2.) Effects of cocaine on honeybee dance behaviour.

3.) Swearing as a response to pain.

4.) Pigeons can discriminate “good” and “bad” paintings by children.

5.) The “booty call”: a compromise between men’s and women’s ideal mating strategies.

6.) Intermittent access to beer promotes binge-like drinking in adolescent but not adult Wistar rats.

7.) Fellatio by fruit bats prolongs copulation time.

8.) More information than you ever wanted: does Facebook bring out the green-eyed monster of jealousy?

9.) Are full or empty beer bottles sturdier and does their fracture-threshold suffice to break the human skull?

10.) The nature of navel fluff.

Photo: flickr/kerryvaughan

We gave the BBC a hard time this morning for going a little overboard in declaring the Large Hadron Collider a broken-down mess. But here’s something cool: In a new documentary, a team simulated the blast that “Underwear Bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to create on Christmas Day last year. Their finding: Even if he had blown up the bomb successfully, it wouldn’t have been enough to take down flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit.

Dr John Wyatt, an international terrorism and explosives adviser to the UN, replicated the conditions on board the Detroit flight on a decommissioned Boeing 747 at an aircraft graveyard in Gloucestershire, England [BBC News]. Wyatt used the same amount of the explosive pentaerythritol that the bomber carried, about 80 grams, which packs about the punch of a hand grenade. They put it on the same seat and lit off a controlled explosion, which sent a shock wave through the aluminum exterior.

The metal was permanently bowed out, and a handful of rivets were punched out, but no gaping holes appeared. The pressurized air inside the cabin would have slowly leaked out [Discovery News]. Wyatt and his cohorts say that wouldn’t have been life-threatening, and it wouldn’t have brought down the plane. However, the blast would probably have killed the bomber and the person next to him. And things wouldn’t have been all sunshine and roses for the survivors, either. Team member Captain J. Joseph said the noise and the smoke would have been awful, “not to mention the parts of the bodies that were disintegrated as part of the explosion” [BBC News]. Their eardrums could have ruptured, too.

This wasn’t a perfect simulation: Wyatt tested a 747, while the actual bomber flew aboard an Airbus 330. And the conditions inside were normal atmospheric pressure, not the pressurized state of a plane in flight. But Wyatt argues that the Airbus’ stronger composite materials mean it would have fared even better than his test aircraft. As for the pressure? “It’s over so quickly that the difference in pressure wouldn’t make a difference,” said Wyatt. “By the time the shock wave got to the door the pressure would have normalized” [Discovery News].

In Britain, the documentary (called “How Safe Are Our Skies?”) aired on BBC Two. You can still see it on their iPlayer. For those of us here in the United States, the Discovery Channel broadcasts it tomorrow night (Thursday) at 10 PM EST.

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You can’t cancel an enormous federal program without hitting pushback, and President Obama is hitting plenty of it over his proposal to end NASA’s Constellation program. In January his budget proposal put forth no funding for Constellation, the space shuttle successor program that included the Ares rockets, Orion crew capsule, and plans to send astronauts back to the moon by 2020. Instead, NASA would become more reliant on private companies to ferry its astronauts to the space station, and would explore new ideas for visiting Mars or nearby asteroids. But the proposal has already ruffled lots of feathers, prompting the President to say he will hold a conference to further outline his plan.

First, many high-profile space experts balked at the proposal. Former astronaut Tom Jones said Obama was surrendering human spaceflight, and Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt, one of the last men to walk on the moon, was equally displeased. “It’s bad for the country,” Schmitt said. “This administration really does not believe in American exceptionalism” [Washington Post]. Dissent wasn’t universal; DISCOVER blogger Phil Plait, for one, praised the possibilities for commercial space-faring.

But even getting the new plan in place will take plenty of political wrangling. Last week reports surfaced saying that NASA chief Charles Bolden and others inside the agency were quietly preparing a Plan B, with compromise options for the members of Congress who have objected to the President’s plan. When the news reports came out, however, Bolden flatly denied them. “The president’s budget for NASA is my budget,” General Bolden said. “I strongly support the priorities and the direction for NASA that he has put forward” [The New York Times].

One of the unhappy members of Congress is Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas. Hutchison, whose home state is one that stands to lose jobs when NASA’s space shuttle program ends, tried to thwart the Obama plan last week by introducing a bill to extend the shuttle for two more years (It’s currently due to retire this year). The bill, dubbed the Human Space Flight Capability Assurance and Enhancement Act, calls for spending an additional $3.4 billion between 2010 and 2012 to keep the space shuttle flying. It would require NASA to spread out its four remaining shuttle missions, now slated to wrap up by October, and potentially add additional flights [MSNBC]. Yesterday, shuttle program manager John Shannon said it could be done—if the country is willing to spend the money. It currently takes $200 million every month to maintain the shuttles.

Not everyone greeted the President’s proposal with sour grapes. Private space companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX, for whom the move would mean more opportunities, are understandably excited. “It’s a huge move, and in the face of a lot of congressional opposition,” Musk said when DISCOVER spoke to him for a piece in the upcoming May magazine issue. Constellation, he argues, was never going to to reach it goals. It was already vastly underfunded, and would have required an infusion of cash that Americans would never give, especially in the current economic climate. “The people that are really hardcore against the cancellation of Constellation are people who, either from a political standpoint, have a ton of money being spent in their district and they don’t really care whether this succeeds or not,” he says.

Trying to get back on top in the public relations war, Obama announced this week that he would give a conference on April 15 in Florida to spell out more of his NASA vision. Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, said he hoped Mr. Obama would use the meeting to lay out a goal and a timetable for sending astronauts to Mars [The New York Times]. Nelson, who flew on a space shuttle mission in the 1980s, is a political ally of the President’s, but represents Florida, where so much of NASA’s human spaceflight program is based. The key to political victory for Obama, he says, may be overturning the idea that the end of Constellation equals the end of ambitious manned spaceflight.

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Image: NASA

Every time a psychic gets surprised by something, the world gets a little smarter. I hope.

If that’s true, then our collective IQ went up a solid 8 points when the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a suit against “America’s Prophet” Sean David Morton on claims he’s a big ol’ phony.

If only he had spelled it “profit” instead, then he wouldn’t have been falsely advertising. And given that he made a cool $6 million off of gullible dupes, that moniker would certainly fit better.

Now, of course this doesn’t mean all psychics are knowing frauds any more than a scientist who perpetrates knowing fraud indicts all other scientists.

However, science has given us spaceflight, agriculture, computers, medicine, telescopes, and a deeper and quantitative understanding of the Universe from the quantum level out to its observable edge.

Psychics have given us, well… y’know… um… oh! They make it easier for non-critical people to carry their now much-lighter wallets around.

Right. Well, to paraphrase Philip J. Fry: psychics 0, regular science a billion.

Tip o’ the crystal ball to Dale Martin.

Over the last year, scientists have discovered that the moon isn’t a bone-dry place, as we previously imagined. Water ice has been spotted not just at the lunar south pole but also the north pole, and scientists have noted that the north pole deposits contain enough water ice to sustain a human lunar base. Now, scientists studying hundreds of pounds of moon rocks brought back by Apollo astronauts have found that samples containing the mineral apatite have minute traces of water.

The new analyses of the samples, revealed last week at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas, show that the evidence of the moon’s water was right under scientists’ noses for almost 40 years–they just didn’t have sensitive enough instruments to detect it. The water levels detected in Apollo moon rocks and volcanic glasses are in the thousands of parts per million, at most—which explains why analyses of the samples in the late 1960s and early 1970s concluded that the moon was absolutely arid [National Geographic].

Three different research teams found traces of water in apatite samples. Using a technique called secondary ion mass spectrometry, which bombards a sample with ions and then weighs the ejected secondary ions in a mass spectrometer to determine their atomic masses and abundances [New Scientist], scientists found water in minuscule quantities in the apatite–up to 6,000 parts per million. The apatite examined by one team was taken from one of the moon’s mares–the dark regions that are believed to have been formed by ancient magma oceans. This is the first time that water has been found in lunar magmatic material.

One of the research teams also found that the ratio of hydrogen isotopes in the apatite’s water differed greatly from the isotope mix found in earthly water, leading scientists to question where the water on the moon came from. Researcher James Greenwood believes comets may have crashed into the infant moon before its magma ocean crystallised, supplying the water. Or it may have come from a Mars-sized planet, dubbed Theia, that slammed into Earth 4.5 billion years ago to make the moon [New Scientist]. Another possibility proposed by geoscientist Francis McCubbin is that when that collission happened, not quite all the water was driven off when chunks of Earth were flung spaceward to form the moon—in other words, the water may be from an ancient version Earth [National Geographic].

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Image: NASA/ Lunar and Planetary Institute and G. Bacon (STScI)