Author: Discover Main Feed

An international team of researchers has discovered how to extract DNA from fossilized bird eggs–including the eggshell of the enormous elephant bird that went extinct four centuries ago.

In a research breakthrough, scientists were able to isolate DNA from the eggshells of not just the extinct giant moa bird from New Zealand, but also a 19,000-year-old emu from Australia and the extinct elephant bird of Madagascar. The elephant bird’s egg is the largest known bird egg, with 160 times the volume of a chicken’s egg [New Scientist].

The discovery of these birds’ DNA could help scientists understand how they lived, and why they became extinct. The DNA was extracted from desiccated inner membranes in fossil eggshells, found in 13 locations in Australia, Madagascar and New Zealand [PhysOrg], and the work was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

For years scientists have been trying to extract DNA from old eggshells without success, because their approach, scientists admit, was faulty. Charlotte Oskam and Michael Bunce of Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia, who isolated the DNA, say researchers (including themselves) were using techniques designed to extract DNA from bone, not eggshells. They even threw out the most DNA-hardy bits of eggshell [New Scientist]. Bunce explains that extracting DNA from bone involves sucking out the bone’s calcium and discarding it.

In the new study, the researchers figured out that the DNA was stuck in the eggshell’s calcium carbonate matrix–which they then proceeded to draw out. Because eggshells attract fewer bacteria than bone, researchers say their DNA samples from ancient eggs are less likely to be contaminated.

With this new method of extracting bird DNA in hand, scientists are hopeful that they can piece together the story of how these ancient birds lived, evolved, and went extinct. For example, the elephant bird, which weighed about 900 pounds and stood ten feet tall, became extinct at the same time that humans colonized the island of Madagascar, but there have been no signs that the birds were hunted by humans. Says archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson: “There’s not even evidence that they ate the eggs — even though each one could make omelets for 30 people” [BBC]. By studying the elephant bird’s genetics, scientists can look for clues about the bird’s physiology and diet that may help them understand what made the giant avian go the way of the dodo. But the researchers caution that so far, the new technique allows for the extraction of only a tiny amount of DNA–just 250 base pairs, the “rungs” on the ladder-like genetic code, and this is less than a fraction of one percent of the bird’s genome [PhysOrg].

So can we expect these extinct birds to be brought back to life like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park? Says Bunce: “We can reassemble the genome to get an idea of what an extinct species looked like. But (resurrecting it) is still in the realm of science fiction. It’s completely hypothetical, and frankly not a debate I really want to have.” [PhysOrg].

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Image: PhysOrg

When we think about the “meaning of life,” we tend to conjure ideas such as love, or self-actualization, or justice, or human progress. It’s an anthropocentric view; try to convince blue-green algae that self-actualization is some sort of virtue. Let’s ask instead why “life,” as a biological concept, actually exists. That is to say: we know that entropy increases as the universe evolves. But why, on the road from the simple and low-entropy early universe to the simple and high-entropy late universe, do we pass through our present era of marvelous complexity and organization, culminating in the intricate chemical reactions we know as life?

Yesterday’s book club post referred to a somewhat-whimsical vision of Maxwell’s Demon as a paradigm for life. The Demon takes in free energy and uses it to maintain a separation between hot and cold sides of a box of gas — a sustained departure from thermal equilibrium. But what if we reversed the story? Instead of thinking that the Demon takes advantage free energy to help advance its nefarious anti-thermodynamic agenda, what if we imagine that the free energy is simply using the Demon — that is, the out-of-equilibrium configurations labeled “life” — for its own pro-thermodynamic purposes?

Energy is conserved, if we put aside some subtleties associated with general relativity. But there’s useful energy, and useless energy. When you burn gasoline in your car engine, the amount of energy doesn’t really change; some of it gets converted into the motion of your car, while some gets dissipated into useless forms such as noise, heat, and exhaust, increasing entropy along the way. That’s why it’s helpful to invent the concept of “free energy” to keep track of how much energy is actually available for doing useful work, like accelerating a car. Roughly speaking, the free energy is the total energy minus entropy times temperature, so free energy is used up as entropy increases.

Because the Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that entropy increases, the history of the universe is the story of dissipation of free energy. Energy wants to be converted from useful forms to useless forms. But it might not happen automatically; sometimes a configuration with excess free energy can last a long time before something comes along to nudge it into a higher-entropy form. Gasoline and oxygen are a combustible mixture, but you still need a spark to set the fire.

This is where life comes in, at least according to one view. Apparently (I’m certainly not an expert in this stuff) there are two competing theories that attempt to explain the first steps taken toward life on Earth. One is a “replicator-first” picture, in which the key jump from chemistry to life was taken by a molecule such as RNA that was able to reproduce itself, passing information on to subsequent generations. The competitor is a “metabolism-first” picture, where the important step was a set of interactions that helped release free energy in the atmosphere of the young Earth. You can read some background about these two options in this profile of Mike Russell (pdf), one of the leading advocates of the metabolism-first view.

I was reading a bit about this stuff because I wanted to move beyond the fairly simplistic sketch I presented in my book about the relationship between entropy and life. So I did a little research and found some papers by Eric Smith at the Santa Fe Institute. Smith has taken quite an academic path; his Ph.D. was in string theory, working with Joe Polchinski, and now he applies ideas from complexity to questions as diverse as economics and the origin of life.

On Saturday I was on a long plane ride from LA to Bozeman, Montana, via Denver. So I had pulled out one of Smith’s papers and started to read it. A couple sat down next to me, and the husband said “Oh yes, Eric Smith. I know his work well.” This well-read person turned out to be none other than Mike Russell, featured in the profile above. Here I was trying to learn about entropy and the origin of life, and one of the world’s experts sits down right next to me. (Not completely a coincidence; Russell is at JPL, and we were both headed to give plenary talks at the annual IEEE Aerospace Conference.)

So I explained a little to Mike (now we are buddies) what I was trying to understand, and he immediately said “Ah, that’s easy. The purpose of life is to hydrogenate carbon dioxide.” (See figure above, taken from one of Eric Smith’s talks.)

That might be something of a colorful exaggeration, but there’s something fascinating and provocative behind the idea. An extremely simplified version of the story is that the Earth was quite a bit hotter in its early days than it is today, and the atmosphere was full of carbon dioxide. At high temperatures that’s a stable situation; but once the Earth cools, it would be energetically favorable for that CO₂ to react with hydrogen to make methane (and other hydrocarbons) and water. That is to say, there is a lot of free energy in that CO₂, just waiting to be released.

The problem is that there is a chemical barrier to actually releasing the energy. In physicist-speak: the Earth’s atmosphere was caught in a false vacuum. There’s no reaction that takes you directly from CO₂ and hydrogen to methane (CH₄) and water; you have to go through a series of reactions to get there. And the first steps along the way constitute a potential barrier: they consume energy rather than releasing it. Here’s a plot from one of Russell’s talks of the free energy per carbon atom of various steps along the way; it looks for all the world like a particle physicist’s plot of the potential energy of a field caught in a metastable vacuum. (Different curves represent different environments.)

Here is the bold hypothesis: life is Nature’s way of opening up a chemical channel to release all of that free energy bottled up in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of the young Earth. My own understanding gets a little fuzzy at this point, but the basic idea seems intelligible. While there is no simple reaction that takes CO₂ directly to hydrocarbons, there are complicated series of reactions that do so. Some sort of membrane (e.g. a cell wall) helps to segregate out the relevant chemicals; various inorganic compounds act as enzymes to speed the reactions along. The reason for the complexity of life, which is low entropy considered all by itself, is that it helps the bigger picture increase in entropy.

In ordinary statistical mechanics, we say that high-entropy configurations are more likely than low-entropy ones because there are simply more of them. But that logic doesn’t quite go through if you can’t get to the high-entropy configurations in any straightforward way. Nevertheless, a sufficiently complicated system can bounce around in configuration space, trying various different possibilities, until it hits on something that looks quite complex and unlikely, but is in fact very useful in helping the system as a whole evolve to a higher-entropy state. That’s life (as it were). It’s not so different from other cases like hurricanes or turbulence where apparent complexity arises in the natural course of events; it’s all about using up that free energy.

Obviously there is a lot missing to this story, and much of it is an absence of complete understanding on my part, although some of it is that we simply don’t know everything about life as yet. For one thing, even if you are a metabolism-first sympathizer, at some point you have to explain the origin of replication and information processing, which plays a crucial role how we think about life. For another, it’s a long road from explaining the origin of life to getting to the present day. It’s true that we know of very primitive organisms whose goal in life seems to be the conversion of CO₂ into methane and acetate — methanogens and acetogens, respectively. But animals tend to produce CO₂ rather than consume it, so it’s obviously not the whole story.

No surprise, really; whatever the story of life might be, there’s no question it’s a complicated one. But it all comes down to the elementary building blocks of Nature doing their best to fulfill the Second Law.

The tobacco plant is considered a villain of the plant world because of the harmful effects of smoking it. But now a genetically engineered tobacco plant is enjoying a moment of redemption, as scientists have discovered that tweaking a certain gene in one tobacco plant strain allows the plant to produce antibodies that disarm toxic pond scum.

Treehugger reports:

The pond scum in question is microcystin-LR (MC-LR), which makes water unsafe for drinking, swimming and fishing in many parts of the world. Upon ingestion it can cause serious liver damage, with some studies indicating a connection to causing liver and colorectal cancers.

To counter this harmful algae, lead scientist Pascal Drake inserted genes into the tobacco plants to produce an antibody to the algae. The antibody was produced in the tobacco plant’s leaves and secreted from its roots into the growth medium. When the toxin from the algae was added to the medium, the antibody immediately latched on to it.

Discovery News reports:

“Binding to the pollutant might reduce its bioavailability,” Drake said. “It might make it less dangerous and less likely to be taken up by animals and humans.”

The scientists say this is the first example of a transgenic plant making an antibody that can fight an environmental toxin. But they note that for this research to be useful in the field, they would have to genetically tweak aquatic plants instead of tobacco plants.

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Image: Flickr/Christian Haugen

Where does climate science go from here? The Copenhagen talks were a dud. Stolen e-mail correspondence has embarrassed some leading climatologists. If the science is settled and the threat is urgent, why has global warming become a soap opera? To find out, DISCOVER sought two different, important views, from Penn State’s Michael Mann and Georgia Tech’s Judith Curry.

DISCOVER: What was your reaction to the scandal over stolen e-mail?

Judith Curry: I sympathize a bit with the guys who got caught out in the e-mail hack. I know what it’s like to be under that kind of attack, and it’s not pleasant. We were attacked pretty soundly in the media [for a 2005 paper showing that the frequency of intense hurricanes has almost doubled in the past 30 years]. We had firsthand experience dealing with climate skeptics, amplified by advocacy groups like the Competitive Enterprise Institute and a lot of the think tanks that were allegedly funded by ExxonMobil and other firms. Six months later, though, we had sorted things out and were talking to scientists on the other side of the debate. We ended up making pretty good progress on the hurricane story as a result. Compare that with the “hockey stick” story, where there’s been a war for six years running.

The hockey stick—Michael Mann’s widely cited graph of average temperatures in North America over the past 1,000 years—was attacked by two prominent critics, Steven McIntyre, a former mineral company executive, and Ross McKitrick, an economics professor at the University of Guelph in Canada. Where does that dispute stand?

One would have hoped it would have an outcome similar to the hurricane story, but the hockey stick thing was exacerbated by Michael Mann’s behavior, trying to keep the data and all the information away from McIntyre, McKitrick, and other people who are skeptical of what they were doing. So we’ve just seen this blow up and blow up and blow up, and it culminated in the East Anglia hack and the e-mails that discredited those guys quite a bit. This made us reflect on the bigger issues of how scientists should be interacting with the media and how we should be dealing with skeptical arguments. I think the way that Mann and Phil Jones [the former director of the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia, who resigned over the scandal] and those guys were going about it was wrong, not just in terms of ethics. It also backfired.

What motivated you to speak out?

When this hit, I was probably more ready than many others to respond because I’d been thinking about these issues for a number of years.

Do you find it hard to get people to talk about climate change without being evangelical?

I put myself in the middle, and I’m taking fire from both sides. Neither side is happy with what I’m doing. Obviously, people like Michael Mann are offended by what I’m saying [about the shortcomings of climate science], and I have received an e-mail from one of the people involved in the East Anglia e-mails who’s not happy with what I’m doing. The so-called skeptics think I’m just trying to cover myself. But I’m not personally involved in any of this, other than that I’ve been thinking about these issues for a long time, and there are certain things I felt compelled to say.

It sounded again today like the Large Hadron Collider—previously the victim of technical failure, hackers, and avian sabateurs—was cursed. The BBC reported that the world’s largest particle collider would have to shut down at the end of 2011, possibly for an entire year, to address its mechanical problems, according to LHC director Steven Myers. The report states that the faults will delay the machine reaching its full potential for two years [BBC News].

Just one problem, though: While the information came out as another “LHC is broken” news break, Myers actually put forth the intended schedule more than a month ago. The LHC team announced that it would actually extend the physics run through until December 2011, before shutting the accelerator down for a year. The only real delay here has been to the reporting of the story [The Times]. Brian Cox, one of the project scientists, spent the morning tweeting up a storm in protest to the news handling of what he says is just a scheduled shutdown. (A typical tweet reads: “For the very last time – the #lhc story is a pile of merde, as we say at CERN. Scheduled maintenance stops are not bloody news!”)

The LHC will keep running until late next year at 7 trillion electron volts (TeV), as planned. The engineers will go in after that to carry out the planned maintenance on systems in the tunnel that have proven problematic so far; their improvements should allow the LHC to approach what was the goal from the start, doing physics at 14 TeV. In any case, the machine’s upcoming resting time isn’t an emergency shutdown. Particle accelerators are regularly shut down for re-engineering. They are huge, complex instruments, and it’s just impossible to run them full-time like a domestic boiler [The Times].

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Image: Claudia Marcelloni / CERN

The website called Today I Found Out has an interesting post on Sun factoids, including its color as designated in hex code: #FFF5F2. That code is actually taken from the site vendian.org, put together by Mitchell Charity. He has other star colors listed as well. I found the codes for different stellar types interesting.

The star type is listed, along with the RGB and hex values. The stars go from hottest at the top to coolest at the bottom, and the Sun is roughly a G2V.

The colors are relatively good, in that they are blue at the top and reddish at the bottom. But I was surprised at the lack of color saturation, and that the cooler stars aren’t as red as I would think.

I have spent a lot of time at the eyepiece. Vega, an A0 dwarf star, is distinctly and brilliantly blue, almost a sapphire to the eye. Betelgeuse, an M1 supergiant, is a ruddy orange. I’ve seen a handful of cooler red giants, and to the eye they are very red, not the pastel orangey thing seen here.

Why is this? There are lots of reasons that come to my mind. One is that the way stars shine is inherently different than the way colors are represented on your screen. Stars are hot balls of luminous plasma, glowing like a blackbody. Unless you heat your monitor to that same temperature, you can only approximate the way a star shines, and the colors will be off.

Our eye perceives color oddly, too. Seeing a star against a black sky will give you a different sense of its color than if you see it on your monitor. Even putting a differently colored star in the same field wrecks your color sense. I’ll note that Charity’s star color page has a hex code for the color of planetary nebulae, and that’s a whole nuther can o’ worms.

In my opinion, doing this is an interesting exercise, and a wonderful “teaching moment” on how stars emit light and how we perceive color. But as an exercise in actually trying to mimic star colors, it’s a whole lot tougher than you might think. I’m not saying Charity’s colors are wrong, but I am saying that trying to get hex codes for star colors is like writing down the notes to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on paper. It’s a code, and has the right information in it, but it’s not the same as hearing the orchestra.

I’ll also note that the whole point of the first site’s article is that the Sun is white. This is actually an extremely difficult topic to understand — it’s not just scattered blue light that makes the Sun look yellow to us, and I’m still not convinced the Sun does look yellow to us. Charity links to a page about the Sun’s color written by my friend the astronomer Andrew Hamilton, which has some more info on it.

I think the real lesson here is that something we think of as simple — color — is not at all simple! The way colors are emitted by an object, the way our eyes detect color, and most importantly the way our brains interpret that signal, are actually extraordinarily complex processes. I think that’s a very important concept to keep in mind when pondering pretty much any issue: what we take for granted as simple is almost never any such thing.

Tip o’ the artist’s beret to Philippe Hamel.

Rick Piltz of Climate Science Watch has taken the time to transcribe what may be the most important and revealing part of my Michael Mann Point of Inquiry interview–the end. It’s the part where, among other things, Mann refers to the “asymmetric warfare” between trained skeptics and scientists as “literally like a battle between a Marine and a Cub Scout.” And there is much more there. For those who enjoy reading rather than listening, check it out.

Emotional fluctuations in Bob Dylan’s lyrics measured by the dictionary of affect accompany events and phases in his life.

“Lyrics for Bob Dylan’s songs between 1962 and 2001 (close to 100,000 words) were scored with the help of the Dictionary of Affect in Language (Whissell, 2006). Means for Pleasantness, Activation, and Imagery are reported for 22 Blocks characterizing this time span. Significant but weak differences across Blocks were found for all three measures at the level of individual words. Emotional fluctuations in words included in Bob Dylan’s lyrics accompanied events and phases in his life, although they were not entirely dictated by these events. Dylan used more highly Imaged and more Active words at times when his work was critically acclaimed. More Passive word choices characterized times of prolonged stress, and more Pleasant choices times of experimentation. Dylan’s three popularity peaks were used to divide the singer’s career into three stages (rhetor, poet, sage) which differed in terms of pronouns used.”

Thanks to Heather for today’s ROFL!

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Contagiousness: It’s contagious! Happiness was contagious in 2008, then loneliness last year, and don’t forget being fat. Now it’s generosity that spreads like the flu across social networks, according to James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis (who were both behind the happiness study). Their new study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

To test out whether generosity spreads, the scientists devised a game. In groups of four, each person had 20 “credits,” some of which they could decide to toss into a common fund for all the players. The scoring was set up so that giving to the fund was costly unless the other players did it too: If everyone kept their money, they’d have the 20 credits, but if everyone put all they could into the fund, each player would end up with 32. However, the players had no way to know how generous the others were being. The best payoff would come if everyone gave all their money — but without knowing what others were doing, it always made sense to keep one’s money and skim from the generosity of others [Wired.com].

The researchers found that if a person was particularly generous, the people he or she played with were more likely to be generous during the next round, when they were shuffled into groups with different people. Ultimately, the initial person’s contribution was multiplied up to three times—a result in keeping with earlier findings on social contagion suggesting that this sort of ripple effect continues for three degrees of separation [TIME]. However, while kindness and generosity spread through the network of players, selfishness did too.

Certainly, these studies have their doubters. Commenters on one of our last “contagious” posts pointed to a 2008 BMJ study noting that if social networking studies weren’t careful in looking at correlations, one could plausibly find that traits like height, acne, and headaches are similarly contagious. Though Fowler and Christakis designed their experiment to try to see cause-and-effect links, not just correlation, they say the study is a general model for group behavior, and how well it fits the more convoluted real world remains to be seen.

But we talking apes are impressionable social creatures, after all, so perhaps we really do spread behaviors—and not just disgusting infectious diseases—amongst ourselves. Says Fowler, “When people benefit from kindness they ‘pay it forward’ by helping others who were not originally involved, and this creates a cascade of co-operation that influences dozens more in a social network” [The Telegraph].

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Image: flickr / Woodleywonderworks

College students holed up in the library or cramming for an exam have always relied on stimulants like coffee, but recently they’ve been increasingly turning to the off-label use of drugs like Ritalin and Modafinil to help them stay focused. Now scientists have found how Ritalin, a drug normally prescribed for children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), helps boost learning.

In a new study of rats published online in Nature Neuroscience, scientists found that Ritalin appears to boost both attention and enhance the speed of learning by increasing the activity of the chemical messenger dopamine [Technology Review]. The study also found that one type of dopamine receptor aids the ability to focus, and another type improves the learning itself [DNA].

In their study, scientists observed that rats on Ritalin learned faster than those not given the drug; the Ritalin-drugged rats understood more quickly that a flash of light and sound meant sugary treats for them. However, when the researchers used drugs to block the dopamine D1 receptors in the rats’ brains, they found Ritalin did not aid learning speed. When another dopamine receptor, D2, was blocked, the drug failed to improve focus. The scientists concluded that both receptors play a distinct role in helping Ritalin improve cognitive performance. Said lead researcher Antonello Bonci: “Since we now know that Ritalin improves behavior through two specific types of neurotransmitter receptors, the finding could help in the development of better targeted drugs, with fewer side effects, to increase focus and learning” [Technology Review].

The researchers also observed that the drug strengthened the connections between nerve cells in the brain region called the amygdala, which plays an important role in learning and emotional memory. Strengthened connections increase the efficiency of neural transmissions, which allows for faster learning.

The findings come at a time when doctors are paying more attention to the trend of using pharmaceuticals as “smart pills.” Some doctors have warned that drugs like Ritalin and Modafinil shouldn’t be abused to get a “brain boost” ahead of exams or in stressful situations, while other scientists have provocatively suggested that such medications should be available to anyone who wants a cognitive pick-me-up.

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Image: iStockphoto

How often do you go outside and look up? I mean really, just look up at the sky and stars?

With more and more people living in cities, and light pollution still a major problem, it seems that a smaller percentage of people actually get to see the stars. That’s why the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) started the GLOBE at night program, an effort to get folks outside and get them to appreciate the night sky.

The program is actually pretty simple: all you have to do is go outside and look at Orion, and compare the stars in the constellation you can see with maps showing progressively fainter stars. This tells you your “magnitude limit” which in turn s tells you how bad light pollution is in your area. You can then submit your findings on the GLOBE at Night website, where they are compiled and mapped.

It doesn’t matter if you live in the middle of the Sahara or in downtown NYC. In fact, the more people who submit their results the better, so that the GaN folks can get really good coverage of the planet. Not only does this help you get a feel for the sky and for light pollution, but it helps astronomers keep track of wasted light as well.

Light pollution destroys our view of the sky, but it also represents a lot of energy totally wasted. Cities, towns, everyone can save a lot of money by installing more efficient lighting — you can find out more at the Dark Sky Rangers site. Projects like GLOBE at Night will help a lot of people realize that, too.

The project goes from now until March 16, and the website has everything you need to get started, including resources for teachers, parents, and students. Give it a shot!

Pandora on Earth

If you’re a big Avatar fan, then James Cameron’s Oscar loss may have left your eyes swollen and your popcorn soggy. But if Avatar grabbed your attention with its story of greedy humans ravaging the alien moon Pandora for a mineral that Earth needs, then here are a handful of real-life stories, from good ol’ planet Earth, that might make the plight of Pandora’s native Na’vi seem eerily familiar.

First we have members of the Dongria Kondh tribe from Orissa, India, talking to the tribal-rights group Survival International about their quest to save their sacred mountain from a large mining company. The company wants to raze a huge part of their lush, bountiful, holy mountain to mine not “unobtanium,” but bauxite. Wait, James… are you getting this down?

Survival International took out an ad in the film industry magazine Variety to appeal directly to Cameron for help. Says Survival International director Stephen Corry: “Just as the Na’vi describe the forest of Pandora as ‘their everything,’ for the Dongria Kondh, life and land have always been deeply connected. The fundamental story of Avatar – if you take away the multi-coloured lemurs, the long-trunked horses and warring androids – is being played out today in the hills of Niyamgiri in Orissa, India.”

You are what you eat, and perhaps in some ways, what your mother ate. Back in 2003, Cheryl Rosenfeld’s team found that the diet they fed to pregnant mice caused a “striking variation” in the sex ratios of the offspring: High fat favored males, low fat favored females. Now Rosenfeld has a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that says the mother’s diet can also affect the very way genes are expressed in the placenta.

To figure this out, Rosenfeld’s team studied the placentas attached to fetal mice 12 and a half days after conception, when the mice were midway through gestation but had yet to produce sex hormones like estrogen or testosterone (those can also alter gene expression, which would have confounded the study). They found that gene activity in the placentas differed significantly depending on whether the mom was fed a high- or low-fat diet. The biggest differences were found when comparing the high- and low-fat placentas linked to female fetal mice, suggesting that placentas nourishing females do a better job of responding to diet—and potentially protecting the fetus from harmful ingredients—than do those connected to males [ScienceNOW]. Specifically, of the 700 genes that they saw behave differently between the sexes, 651 were expressed more in females than males. In all, their study saw changes in the expression of nearly 2,000 genes.

The team can’t say for sure why diet affects either sex ratio or gene expression. Indeed, the analysis turned up changes in genes that affect things like kidney function and smell, which the scientists were not expecting to see. Whatever the reason these changes happen, they say, diet during pregnancy could have long-term health effects on children. Sons and daughters are also at different risk for conditions such as obesity or diabetes later in life, apparently related to either the mother’s diet or body condition while pregnant [The Times].

Biologist Jared Friedman, who didn’t work on the current study, says this will be an interesting area for future studies, but he’s not totally sold on the conclusion of Rosenfeld’s team yet. Males, he says, seem to lag behind females in all stages of development. Maybe those olfactory genes become more active in the male placenta as the pregnancy continues, he says. “Instead of 12.5 days, go to 19.5 and see if the differences are magnified or if the males catch up” [ScienceNOW].

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Image: flickr / dizznbonn

Last year, I attended the NASA-sponsored Launch Pad Workshop, a week-long camp in Laramie, Wyoming, to help science fiction authors learn astronomy. That way, they can get ideas and write more accurate stories! It was a lot of fun, and I had a fantastic time.

Registration is open again for Launch Pad 2010, with guest speaker Kevin Grazier, who is a planetary scientist and science advisor for TV shows, including Battlestar Galactica.

Launch Pad will be from July 11 – 18, 2010, and if you’re a science fiction author you can apply to attend from now until March 31. And if you are an author, I urge you to go. It’s more than just getting the science right; it’s about inspiration, and there’s plenty to be had in astronomy. Launch Pad is a great way to meet it head on.

Brian Greene says string theory is still scientific even if it’s not falsifiable.

The magnitude 8.8 earthquake that rocked Chile on February 27th didn’t just move the Earth’s axis, thereby shortening the day by 1.26 microseconds, but it also caused entire cities to shift their geographical location.

Studying precise GPS images of the area struck by the quake, a team led by earth scientist Mike Bevis discovered that the Chilean city of Concepción had moved 10 feet to the west. The epicenter of the quake was 71 miles northeast of Concepción, which is Chile’s second largest city.

The effect was widespread: The capital city, Santiago, was wrenched 11 inches west-southwest, while Beunos Aires, located nearly 800 miles from the epicenter, jumped an inch to the west. The earthquake was the fifth largest ever to be recorded by seismographs and even caused far-off areas like Fortaleza, Brazil and the Falkland Islands to change location slightly. The changes were detected by teams from The Ohio State University, the University of Hawaii, the University of Memphis and the California Institute of Technology, as well as agencies across South America [CNN].

The area where the quake hit is of particular interest to geoscientists because it is an active subduction zone, where an oceanic plate is colliding with a continental plate and being pushed into the Earth’s molten mantle below [Wired]. The world’s five largest quakes since 1900, including the largest quake ever recorded (a Chilean quake measuring 9.5), have all occurred in subduction zones. Earth scientist Ben Brooks of the University of Hawaii declared that this “earthquake will arguably become one of the, if not the most important, great earthquakes yet studied….We now have modern, precise instruments to evaluate this event” [CNN].

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Image: University of Hawaii

When researchers rack up the carbon emitted across the world, the standard trends emerge: Europeans put less CO2 into the atmosphere than Americans, but China’s rapid ascent is sending its emissions shooting past those of the United States. However, this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Stanford University researchers attempt to rejigger the numbers to reflect not just where the emissions are produced, but who is responsible for them—who’s buying and consuming the products that cause those emissions.

After study global trade databases, Steven Davis and Ken Caldiera say that in 2004, 23 per cent of global CO2 emissions – some 6.2 gigatonnes – went in making products that were traded internationally. Most of these products were exported from China and other relatively poor countries to consumers in richer countries [New Scientist]. The researchers say that developed countries outsource about a third of the carbon dioxide emissions connected to their consumption.

When you look at the numbers this way, the per capita emissions in Europe don’t look quite as good: If those emissions were tallied on the other side of the balance sheet, it would add more than four tons of CO2 per person in several European nations [TIME]. The United States saw a lesser increase of 2.4 tons per person, though that’s not really a cause for celebration. Part of the reason is that the country has more carbon-intensive exports than Europe, the study says, and under the new accounting those emissions are going on somebody else’s books. The United States also takes in the lion’s share of China’s: 22.5% of China’s emissions are generated during production of goods and services consumed overseas, and 7.8% are embodied in exports to the US alone [BBC News].

This isn’t the first time that climate change experts have raised the question of how much responsibility consumers bear for carbon emissions produced on the other side of the globe. Other studies are trying to crack this same problem, tracking “consumption” emissions rather than just the “territorial” emissions produced inside a country’s borders. What they find could shake up how the world goes about trying to reduce emissions. The U.N. system is built around the idea of capping carbon emissions from individual nations. But which country is responsible for the carbon emitted in global trade? The buyer or the seller? [TIME]

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Image: iStockphoto

Welcome to this week’s installment of the From Eternity to Here book club. Now for something of a palate-cleanser, in the form of Chapter Nine, “Information and Life.”

Excerpt:

Schrödinger’s idea captures something important about what distinguishes life from non-life. In the back of his mind, he was certainly thinking of Clausius’s version of the Second Law: objects in thermal contact evolve toward a common temperature (thermal equilibrium). If we put an ice cube in a glass of warm water, the ice cube melts fairly quickly. Even if the two objects are made of very different substances—say, if we put a plastic “ice cube” in a glass of water—they will still come to the same temperature. More generally, nonliving physical objects tend to wind down and come to rest. A rock may roll down a hill during an avalanche, but before too long it will reach the bottom, dissipate energy through the creation of noise and heat, and come to a complete halt before very long.

Schrödinger’s point is simply that, for living organisms, this process of coming to rest can take much longer, or even be put off indefinitely. Imagine that, instead of an ice cube, we put a goldfish into our glass of water. Unlike the ice cube (whether water or plastic), the goldfish will not simply equilibrate with the water—at least, not within a few minutes or even hours. It will stay alive, doing something, swimming, exchanging material with its environment. If it’s put into a lake or a fish tank where food is available, it will keep going for much longer.

This chapter starts with something very important: the relationship between entropy and memory. Namely, the reason why we can “remember” the past and not the future is that the past features a low-entropy boundary condition, while the future does not. I don’t go into great detail about this, and we certainly don’t talk very specifically about how real memories are formed in the brain, or even in a computer. But when we get to the next chapter, about recurrences and Boltzmann brains, it will be crucial to understand how the assumption of a low-entropy boundary condition enables us to reconstruct the past. It’s hard for people to wrap their brains around the fact that, without such an assumption, our “memories” or records of the past will generally be unreliable — knowledge of the current macrostate wouldn’t allow us to reconstruct the past any better than it allows us to predict the future. (Which is only logical, since it’s only this hypothesis that breaks time-reversal symmetry.)

The rest of the chapter, meanwhile, is more about having fun and mentioning some ideas that are not directly related to our story, but certainly play a part in understanding the arrow of time. Information theory, life, complexity. I’m not an expert in any of these fields, but it was a lot of fun reading about them to pick out some things that fit into the broader narrative. The Maxwell’s Demon story, in particular, is one that every physicist should know (up through it’s relatively modern resolution), but relatively few do. And I think Jason Torchinsky did a great job with the illustrations of the Demon.

A lot of big ideas here, of course, and much of this stuff is still very much in the working-out stage, not the settled-understanding stage. We’re still arguing about basic things like the definition of “complexity” and “life.” It’s relatively easy to state the Second Law and explain how the arrow of time is related to the growth of entropy, but there’s a tremendous amount of work still to be done before we completely understand the way in which the universe actually evolves from low entropy to high.

I’m thrilled to announce that Stuart “Indy” Pimm has just been named one of two recipients of the 2010 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement: “the premier award for environmental science, environmental health and energy conferring great benefit upon mankind. Through their work, Tyler Laureates have focused worldwide attention on environmental problems by their discoveries and the solutions that resulted.”

Stuart is one of the most incredible individuals I’ve had the pleasure of working with. It has been an honor and privilege to reside in The Pimm Group and I’ll miss him most of all from Texas. He has been a mentor, a source of endless encouragement, and most of all, a friend during my time with The Family. Stuart’s research, intense curiosity, and passion to make a difference takes him from the field to the classroom and onto Capitol Hill and the big screen, yet somehow, he’s managed to maintain a terrific sense of humor along the way.

Earth is truly a better place because of scientists like Stuart Pimm and we are all lucky to have him fighting hard everyday to save the planet’s biodiversity.

From the Press Release:

Stuart Pimm has a long career in conservation research, teaching and public policy, and when Pimm’s colleagues refer to his work, they frequently cite its influence as well as its substance. His Tyler Prize award is made in recognition of his work to delineate the structures of ecological food webs, to understand the expected lifetimes of plant and animal populations, and to determine the populations that are most vulnerable to risks of extinction and those that have the capacity to recover most rapidly from disturbances. In his letter of nomination for the Tyler Prize, Edward O. Wilson, an emeritus Harvard University professor and himself a Tyler Laureate, said Pimm’s achievements “serve as an environmental conservation template.”

Pimm has studied the structure of ecological communities and the consequences of diminished species diversity across the trophic levels of ecological communities. In addition, Pimm has developed theory and empirical analysis to address the conservation of endangered species in terms of their communities and populations. Pimm has contributed to more than 200 journal articles, many of them as the lead author or sole author, has managed research projects around the world and has worked as a university-level professor for 36 years.

Pimm is well known for working beyond the scientific community as a policy advisor and source for media interviews. One of his colleagues, in a letter of support for his nomination for the Tyler Prize, said Pimm’s contributions to conservation science are notable because he cares enough to “find a way to make a difference.”

I’m delighted with this morning’s wonderful news! Stuart shares the 2010 Tyler prize with Laurie Marker, co-founder and executive director of the Cheetah Conservation Fund in Otjiwarongo, Namibia. Congratulations to both!

NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, only launched a couple of months ago, and has already done spectacular work. Gulping down huge tracts of sky every day, it has already discovered over 2000 asteroids — not seen, but actually discovered — including several that pass near the Earth (none on track to hit us, happily). It’s discovered four comets, too, and by the end of the mission in a few months will see far more.

But since it’s a survey instrument, and it sees in the far infrared, the views it gets are nothing short of spectacular! Like this one:

[Click to embiggen, or grab this ginormous 11,000×4000 TIF].

There is a lot to see here! First, the colors: all of this is far infrared, with blue being the IR wavelengths of 3.4 and 4.6 microns combined (5 and 6.5 times the wavelength the human eye sees), green is 12 microns, and red 22. Green is dominated by warm dust and big organic molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.

The glowing gassy stuff is part of the Heart Nebula, which I’ve posted about before (guess what date). But take a look a bit to the left of all that gas, and look much, much farther in distance…

Those are two galaxies, called Maffei 1 and 2. Both are actually quite close to the Milky Way, only about 10 million light years away. They’re big galaxies, and really should be among the brightest galaxies in the sky. Yet chances are you’ve never heard of them! That’s because his area of the sky is loaded with dust in our galaxy, which absorbs visible light. Another incredibly beautiful galaxy, IC 342, is also part of that group, but is hard to see in visible light as well.

Maffei 1 is right and below center, and Maffei 2 is the barred spiral one above it. For comparison, this image here is about twice the diameter of the Moon on the sky. WISE has a huge field of view, so it doesn’t get high-res images of galaxies, but it more than makes up for it in breadth and depth. Observations like this will help astronomers map the dusty content of nearby galaxies, and even get a handle on how much dust is in much more distant galaxies, though the maps won’t be quite as detailed. Still, more information is always good, and getting to study galaxies — and nebulae, and planets, and comets, and asteroids, and and and — in the far infrared will help our understanding of all these objects far better.

As an aside, I learned of this image on my pal Amy Mainzer’s WISE blog. She’s a bigwig with WISE, and when she has time away from doing nonstop firehose science she writes up fun stuff about this new and extremely cool spacecraft. That’s definitely one you want to drop into your RSS feed reader!