Author: Discover Main Feed

What’s the best way to get the attention of Google, so that the wonder-company will choose to rig your town for experimental high-speed internet? Some people think that shameless groveling might do the trick.

That must be why Topeka, Kansas changed its name to “Google” for a month; the city hopes it will be chosen as a test site for Google’s new fiber-optic network, which would give Topeka residents Internet speeds 100 times faster than what average Americans have.

On Monday, the Mayor of Topeka announced that the city shall, henceforth, be referred to as Google, Kansas, through the month of March. Google is accepting entries from communities looking for an Internet upgrade till March 26th, after which it will decide which communities will get a bump up.

Topeka’s new name is just the beginning of the city going ga-ga for Google. The local baseball team decided to step up to the plate too; the Topeka Golden Giants baseball team announced it has changed its name for March to the Google Golden Giants. Congresswoman Lynn Jenkins (R-Kansas) tweeted “Can’t wait to get home to Google this weekend,” and The Topeka Capital Journal reported that even the local barbecue stop, Boss Hawg Barbecue, was renaming itself as Boss Hawg Google-Q.

However Topeka… sorry, Google, Kansas has stiff competition from other communities like Grand Rapids, Michigan, Duluth, Minnesota, and Columbia, Missouri.

Businessweek reports that other cities are planning their own stunts:

The city of Greensboro, N.C., is preparing an “Operation Google” gift package for delivery to Google headquarters and has earmarked $50,000 for promoting a Google broadband effort.

Not just that, the magazine reports that Greensboro plans to launch a channel on Google’s own YouTube to pitch why their town needs a net upgrade. The Assistant City Manager Denise Turner told Businessweek: “The city may even temporarily rechristen itself Googlesboro “if Google were willing to come here and talk to us.”

Google, meanwhile, is loving this. An unnamed Google spokeswoman was quoted as saying that community support is certainly one of the factors the company will consider when it makes its selection.

Related Content:
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DISCOVER: Big Picture: 5 Reasons Science [Hearts] Google
DISCOVER: Google Taught Me How to Cut My Own Hair
DISCOVER: How Google Is Making Us Smarter

Image: The City of Topeka, Kansas

In this week’s Nature, researchers say they’ve analyzed a near-complete skeleton of one of the closest relatives to early dinosaurs, a silesaur called Asilisaurus. The fossil is more than 240 million years old, which is ten million years older than the earliest known fossils of true dinosaurs. The finding of this dino relative therefore suggests that dinosaurs emerged earlier than we previously believed, and it throws another surprise into the debate over their origins.

From the remains of 14 different individuals, the scientists managed to piece together what a whole skeleton looked like. However, the finished product didn’t look quite like they expected. After studying the bones for 3 years, the team concludes that Asilisaurus was about the size of a Labrador retriever. The animal walked on four legs, and the shape of its teeth suggests that it ate plants and maybe a little meat.[ScienceNOW]. That conflicted with the expectation of study coauthor Randy Irmis, who said the team would’ve thought small carnivores, and not mostly plant eaters walking on four legs, were the closest relatives to the dinosaurs.

Indeed, that question remains open. According to the Nature editor’s summary, Asilisaurus is an early member of the Ornithodira line, the “avian” group that broke off from the crocodile group during the time before dinosaur emergence. What does that mean for the dinosaur ancestry? The balance of opinion has alternated between more reptilian ancestors, which walked on all fours, and two-legged animals that had bird-shaped bodies but couldn’t fly. Recently, the idea of two-legged dino ancestors had been winning out, but the new find yanks the trend back toward quadrupeds [ScienceNOW].

Paul Barrett of London’s Natural History Museum says: “The creatures share a lot of features with dinosaurs,” he said. “They show us an intermediate step between more primitive reptiles and the more specialised dinosaurs” [BBC News]. While dinos hung around for 165 million years or so, the silesaurs like Asilisaurus lived only 45 million years before extinction. However, since silesaurs and true dinosaurs diverged from a common ancestor, the two groups should have existed during the same time frame [National Geographic]. Thus, the earliest emerging dinos might stretch back even to the time frame of this Asilisaurus, more than 240 million years ago.

Related Content:
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80beats: Early Dino Had Crazy Colored Feathers, Resembled “Spangled Hamburg Chicken”
80beats: New Analysis Reveals Color of Dinosaur Feathers for the First Time
80beats: Model Suggests 4-Winged Dino Glided Like a Flying Squirrel

Images: Sterling Nesbitt, Marlene Hill Donnelly / Field Museum

The James Webb Space Telescope is NASA’s successor to Hubble. Mind you, it’s not a replacement: JWST will see in the infrared, peering deeper into the Universe with its ginormous 6 meter unfoldable mirror than Hubble can.

But that infrared part is important. Objects that are warm give off IR light, and if you don’t cool your telescope, it’ll glow in the wavelengths you’re trying to see. It would be like having a flashlight shining down your ’scope!

So JWST has to be cooled, and since it’ll be in a spot in space where the Sun shines 24/7 (the so-called L2 point, where the Sun’s and Earth’s gravity balances), it basically needs a sunshade. And also since the ’scope is pretty big, the shade itself has to be sizable.

What engineers came up with is a multi-layered blanket of material that will sit “underneath” the telescope, blocking the sunlight and passively cooling the whole thing. The shade will be pretty big, about the size of a tennis court! To make sure it works, they created 1/3 scale model of the actual shade. This diminutive has been built, and is now undergoing tests at Goddard Space Flight Center.

[Click to deployenate]

Cool! Um. Literally.

You can also keep up with the construction of JWST using a webcam mounted in the clean room. I remember that room well; though I never got in I used to watch them work on Hubble cameras there.

Also, to give you an idea of just how big JWST will be… In 2007, I was at an astronomy meeting where a frakkin’ full-scale JWST model made an appearance. Here’s a video I made about it:

I did my best with this video considering the day before I was dying from a norovirus. Man, I love Seattle, but that was a rough week.

Anyway, JWST is still planning a 2014 launch. If you like Hubble images, JWST will blow you away. Just the galaxy shots it will produce will be spectacular beyond compare. And the deep field images will go much farther than Hubble can, if you can imagine that! JWST is a revolution in astronomy waiting to happen, every bit as much as Hubble was. Let’s hope these tests go well, and we can get that bird flying.

Load carrying during locomotion in the barnacle goose (Branta leucopsis): The effect of load placement and size.

“Load carrying has been used to study the energetics and mechanics of locomotion in a range of taxa. Here we investigated the energetic and kinematic effects of trunk and limb loading in walking barnacle geese (Branta leucopsis). A directly proportional relationship between increasing back load mass and metabolic rate was established, indicating that the barnacle goose can carry back loads (up to 20% of body mass) more economically than the majority of mammals… Sternal loads up to 15% of body mass were approximately twice as expensive to carry as back loads… Loading the distal limb with 5% extra mass incurred the greatest proportional rise in metabolism, and also caused increases in stride length, swing duration and stride frequency during locomotion. The increased work required to move the loaded limb may explain the high cost of walking.”

A cache of ostrich eggshell fragments discovered by archaeologists in South Africa could be instrumental in understanding how humans approached art and symbolism as early as the Stone Age. The eggshells, engraved with geometric designs, may indicate the existence of a symbolic communication system around 60,000 years ago among African hunter-gatherers [Discovery News].

At a site known as the Diepkloof Rock Shelter, a team led by archaeologist Pierre-Jean Texier discovered fragments of 25 ostrich eggs that date back 55,000 to 65,000 years. In an online paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the archeologists revealed that the eggshell fragments were etched with several kinds of motifs, including parallel lines with cross-hatches and repetitive non-parallel lines [ScienceNow]. The scientists are confident that the markings are almost certainly a form of messaging — of graphic communication [BBC].

Further study of the fragments revealed that a hole had been drilled at the top of some eggshells, suggesting that the hunter-gatherers could have used them as water containers during long hunts in arid regions, as the Kalahari hunter-gatherers were known to do in more recent history. Scientists estimate that each egg could have held one liter of water. The patterns on the shells, they propose, could have been a symbolic way of acknowledging the individual who used the canteen, or which community or family the user belonged to. For scientists studying human origins, the capacity for symbolic thought is considered a giant leap in human evolution, and [what] sets our species apart from the rest of the animal world [BBC].

These eggshells are not the first items that suggest symbolic thinking among stone age people. Archaeologists working in Blombos Cave in South Africa found engraved red ochre, incised bone and pierced shells that were strung and presumably worn on the body—all from layers dated to 75,000 years ago; three shell beads from Israel and Algeria are said to date to more than 100,000 years ago; dozens of pieces of red ochre–many of which were ground for use as pigment–turned up in layers dating to 165,000 years ago in a cave at Pinnacle Point in South Africa [Scientific American]. But some contrary researchers have argued that early engravings and body decorations may have been done for aesthetic purposes unrelated to symbolism.

Still, Texier says the Diepkloof eggshells are special, because so many fragments were found with similar designs, and because engraving the tough ostrich shells would have been a hard task–showing that the designs were not merely scratched-in doodles. The hunter-gatherers also colored their shells by baking them.

Related Content:
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DISCOVER: The Dawn of Abstract Art
DISCOVER: Learning to Love Neanderthals

Image: P.J. Texier

This is awesome.

Also, logical.

I scream, you scream, we all scream… for the medicine given to recovering cancer patients.

The Scientist reports that LactoPharma, (a “collaborative research venture between the University of Aukland, the New Zealand government, and the country’s largest dairy company, Fonterra Ltd.”) has created a therapeutic, strawberry-flavored ice cream called ReCharge.

ReCharge ice cream has gone through a string of taste-tests to ensure that the product satisfies the palette. However, one ingredient is a mandatory keeper: Lactoferrin, a protein found in milk that possesses the power to impede tumor growth and improve intestinal immune response. Because side effects of chemotherapy include the destruction of neutrophils (while blood cells) and intestinal cells, which often leads to infection and digestive problems, University of Auckland biologist Geoff Krissansen decided to test bovine lactoferrin on chemotherapy patients to see whether it could counter these side effects.

The Scientist reports on the results:

Indeed, when fed to mice two weeks prior to chemotherapy, bovine lactoferrin helped increase immunoresponsive cytokines in the intestine, decreasing cell damage caused by chemo, and restored both red blood cell and neutrophil numbers…. The researchers also found that another bioactive component present naturally in milk—a type of “lipid fraction,” according to Krissansen—demonstrated similar results in mice. The scientists expect to publish these results in 2010.

But why serve up the lactoferrin in ice cream-form? Kate Palmano of the Fonterra Research Center explains: “We needed to formulate a product that was acceptable and palatable to patients, but that was also suitable for the bioactives.” The bioactive in question, lactoferrin, is a protein that can change form and function in warmer temperatures. “Plus,” Palmano adds, “people going through chemotherapy typically lose their appetite. Why not give them a treat like ice cream?”

LactoPharma plans to develop more foods and pharmaceuticals incorporating milk’s protective mechanisms.

Related Content:
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Discoblog: Not Freezing Ice Cream Would Help the Environment; Not Eating It Would, Too

Image: flickr / joyosity

I’m very excited to announce the advent of SETIcon, a convention about astronomy, SETI, and Star Trek!

Yeah, you read that right. SETIcon guests will include many astronomers from the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, including David Morrison, Seth Shostak, Frank Drake, and Jill Tarter. Other astronomers will include my friends Alex Filippenko, Debra Fischer, and Kevin Grazier, and Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweikart.

Oh! And me. I’ll be there, too.

But besides astronomers and astronomy and hardcore science talks, there will also be several actors from the scifi genre there, including John Billingsley (Dr. Phlox from Enterprise; I met him at Dragon*Con and he is smart, funny, and just a generally nice guy) and Tim Russ (Tuvok from Voyager, who is an amateur astronomer). More guests have been invited, and I’m hoping to have one or two cool announcements concerning them as they confirm.

There will be panels, talks (I’ll most likely give my Death from the Skies! talk) and I just bet Kevin and I will do one of our famous panels where we nitpick movies and each other. Mostly each other. That’s a lot of fun.

SETIcon will be August 13 – 15 in Santa Clara, California. Unbelievably, tickets are only $20 a day or $35 for the weekend. That’s really cheap for something like this! Of course, more expensive tickets get you more stuff, so explore your options. I’m really looking forward to it. It’ll be fun, and I hope to see lots of BABloggees there.

The human genome may have been sequenced back in 2004, but that was a far cry from documenting all the genes inside us. Our bodies are home to a dizzying number and variety of bacteria, and in a study published in this week’s Nature, researchers have used metagenomic sequencing to catalog the genes that belong to the microbes living in our guts.

The project, which sampled 124 European people, found that each individual had at least 160 species of bacteria living in his or her digestive tract, and there’s a lot of overlap between our guts. At least 57 species of bacteria were present in just about everybody. Overall, the researchers cataloged about 1,000 different bacteria species and figure there’s another 150 or so they haven’t found [AP].

Researcher Jeroen Raes reminds us that no matter if we’re grossed out by the fact that bacteria infest our body, we depend on them. “The bacteria help digest food, provide vitamins, protect us from invading pathogens. If there’s a disturbance, people get all sorts of diseases such as Crohn’s disease, Ulcerative colitis, and a link has also been made to obesity” [BBC News]. In addition, he says, we have 10 times the number of bacterial cells in our bodies than human cells, and 100 times bacterial genes than our own. So we’re pretty much walking bacteria farms.

It’ll take time to sort out the tangled web of data from all those microbial species. Study coauthor Wang Jun says one of the ultimate goals is to pin down relationships between bacteria and diseases like those that Raes listed. “If you just tackle these bacteria, it is easier than treating the human body itself. If you find that a certain bug is responsible for a certain disease and you kill it, then you kill the disease,” Wang said [Reuters]. Wang is currently working on a similar study in China.

In the meantime, some, like outside researcher Elaine Holmes, were just impressed that this feat could be achieved. “It uses a large number of participants and therefore one assumes it is more representative of the ‘real’ microbial composition than previous studies. Also, it is an amazing feat of data processing” [BBC News].

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80beats: Mutations That Kill: First Cancer Genomes Sequenced
DISCOVER: Your Genome, Now Available for a (Relative) Discount

Image: iStockphoto

This is the seventh in a series of guest posts by Joel Barkan, a previous contributor to “The Intersection” and a graduate student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The renowned Scripps marine biologist Jeremy Jackson is teaching his famed “Marine Science, Economics, and Policy” course for what may be the last time this year (along with Jennifer Jacquet), and Joel will be reporting each week on the contents of the course.

I don’t want to write a post all about climate change on Chris and Sheril’s blog because my fire-retardant suit is at the cleaners. So I won’t. But I will write about what marine scientists can learn from what climate scientists are doing (no “Oceangate” jokes, please).

Each week, I write in this space about a different threat that will inevitably doom our oceans if we fail to act. But which threat is the most critical? At least climate scientists have agreed on a general consensus: most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely due to increased greenhouse gas concentrations as a result of human activities. UC San Diego’s own Naomi Oreskes, in a 2004 Science essay, analyzed nearly a thousand abstracts published in the ISI database between 1993 and 2003 that contained the keywords “climate change.” Three-quarters of them accepted the consensus view and not a single one challenged it. This means climate scientists know the problem (greenhouse gas emissions) and how to address it (reduce emissions). Of course, it’s not that simple, but it’s a basic cause and effect that advocates can rally behind.

It’s not quite so straightforward for marine scientists. Ask one why the oceans are in danger and he’ll say it’s because of overfishing. Ask another and she’ll say it’s because of pollution. Ask a third and the reason will be coastal development. We know we have problems, but we struggle to agree on the most pressing. Marine scientists also don’t have something like the Keeling Curve to present as a simple, obvious symbol of human impacts on the oceans. Most importantly, the world lacks something like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to assess ocean health and inform policy decisions. As a result, the marine conservation movement often feels as unorganized and unfocused as a third grade recess.

Dr. Jackson and Dr. Jacquet have challenged us to brainstorm creative solutions for marine management. The student presenters in this week’s class offered some thought-provoking ideas. They cooked up the “Intergovernmental Panel on the Degradation of the Marine Environment,” though Dr. Jacquet suggested substituting “Ocean” for “Marine Environment” to create the snazzy acronym IPDO. Like IPCC does for climate change, IPDO would evaluate the state of the marine environment as a basis for informed policy action. IPDO would also consolidate marine management into a single group, as opposed to the current bewildering myriad of agencies with jurisdiction. The students gave IPDO the hypothetical power to sanction or fine countries for violating certain standards of marine ecosystem health. IPDO would also maintain a points system to evaluate countries based on their protection (or abuse) of the oceans. Every five years or so, IPDO would publish a report on the state of our oceans, much like the IPCC’s Synthesis Report, and reveal which nations were champions of ocean conservation and which were the culprits for ocean degradation. Could the public, international shame of such a ranking motivate the offending countries to change their ways?

At one point, it was suggested that the IPDO could even collaborate with the International Olympic Committee to ban countries from the Games for particularly brazen acts of ocean destruction. Can you imagine if China had been barred from the Vancouver Games for its taste for shark fin soup, or Iceland for its high seas bottom trawling? It’s a crazy idea, but it’s going to take a lot of crazy ideas to thwart the barrage of threats to our oceans.

The Trinity Site in New Mexico is safer than you’d think, and you have to look hard to see the signs of its momentous place in history.

If you came across the number 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is a one followed by 27 zeroes, won’t you say that’s a hella lot of numbers?

UC Davis student Austin Sendek seems to think so. He has initiated a Facebook campaign to designate a scientifically accepted prefix for this number, 10^27. The prefix he chose is “hella” because it is “a hell of a lot” of numbers. It is also his way of mixing homegrown California slang with science. Sendek thinks the new prefix would be the best way to acknowledge the Golden State’s hella hot contributions to science.

If Sendek’s proposal is accepted, then hella would come right after “yotta.”

Physics World reports:

Yotta (10²⁴), which was established in 2001, is currently the largest number established in the International System of Units (SI) — the world’s most widely used system of measurement — with zeta (10²¹), exa (10¹⁸) and peta (10¹⁵) following close behind.

Already, Sendek’s Facebook fan page for the new designator has racked up a huge following, with more than 30,000 fans.

Yeah, Zach’s pretty close on this one…

… but who knows? Maybe things’ll change for science on TV. Maybe sometime soon.

After 12 years of refusing to let any new genetically modified food crops take root in the European Union, the EU has finally given the go-ahead to an engineered potato. However, the GM potatoes won’t end up in French pomme frites or German potato dumplings, as they’ve been approved only for industrial or animal feed purposes. Regulators say the high-starch spuds will likely be used by paper and textile companies.

The Amflora potato was created by the German chemical company BASF and will be cultivated this year on a commercial scale of 250 hectares in the Czech Republic, Sweden, and Germany. Before Amflora, only one other GMO had been approved for cultivation in the EU — Monsanto’s MON810 maize, in 1998 — in spite of repeated findings from the European Food Safety Authority that such products did not pose health risks [Financial Times]. And even though that GM maize variety was officially approved by the EU, a number of European countries have banned its cultivation.

The EU’s decision to allow cultivation of the GM potatoes was met with considerable opposition. Heike Moldenhauer, of Friends of the Earth, said the potato carried a controversial antibiotic resistant gene that could cause problems if it enters the food chain through feeding the industrial pulp from the potatoes to livestock [The Telegraph]. Unlike the United States, where GM crops are widely cultivated, many of the European Union’s member countries remain staunchly opposed to their use, with critics particularly vocal in France, Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Greece.

John Dalli, EU Health and Consumer Policy Commissioner, said the decision to allow the GM potatoes was based on “sound science.” The approval, coming after a dozen years of official hostility to GM crops, may signal a larger shift in policy. The decision also raises the possibility that other GM crops could soon win cultivation approval…. Along with the cultivation approval, the commission announced that it would proceed with plans to allow European countries to independently decide if GM crops can be grown in their borders [Greenwire].

Related Content:
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80beats: New Biotech Corn Gives Triple Vitamin Boost; Protesters Unmoved
80beats: Germany Joins the European Mutiny of Genetically Modified Crops
DISCOVER: “Frankenfoods” That Could Feed the World
DISCOVER: Genetically Altered Corn, and how GM corn not intended for humans got into the food supply

Image: Wikimedia

First a programming notice: turns out I will not be on the Colbert Report tonight. Never fear — I was just bumped back to next week, Wednesday March 10 (11:30 p.m., 10:30 Central). Business as usual in TV land, no big deal. I was hoping that I was nudged in favor of a newly medaled Olympic hero, or at least minor royalty, but it looks like tonight’s guest will be Garry Wills. He’s one of my favorite writers, but still. Obviously some Catholic favoritism going on here.

Small scheduling glitches aside, the Colbert Report and the Daily Show remain two of the best places to hear interviews with interesting academics on TV, especially with scientists. In USA Today, Dan Vergano writes about this curious state of affairs. Neil deGrasse Tyson brings up a good point, that Johnny Carson’s version of the Tonight Show used to feature interviews with heavyweights such as Carl Sagan and Margaret Mead. These days, not many non-satirical network news shows bring on scientists (or anthropologists, or for that matter philosophers or English professors) as a regular event.

When Conan O’Brian took over the Tonight Show, the Science and Entertainment Exchange received a request from the producers to suggest some entertaining (and hopefully enlightening) scientists they could consider bringing on as guests. I don’t know if they ever followed up on that idea, and now I guess we’ll never know. Hopefully the success of Stewart and Colbert will convince the networks that Americans don’t necessarily turn the channel when faced with people who think carefully about the universe.

If you’re tired of squinting into your tiny iPod or phone screen, then how about switching to a whole new system that uses your skin’s surface as a screen? Enter “Skinput,” a new prototype that allows you to use your skin as both a touchscreen and an input device.

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft’s Redmond lab found that jabbing at body parts like the forearm created acoustic waves that could be detected higher up in the arm by a bunch of sensors strapped onto an armband. As bone densities and the amount of soft tissue varies at different locations in the body, the vibrations produced by the jabbing motion were different at various locations. So, if you press a bunch of “buttons” being projected on your skin by a tiny projector on the armband, the device can track your inputs precisely.

PhysOrg explains:

Their software matches sound frequencies to specific skin locations, allowing the system to determine which “skin button” the user pressed. The prototype system then uses wireless technology like Bluetooth to transmit the commands to the device being controlled, such as a phone, iPod, or computer.

20 volunteers that tried out the prototype said it was easy to use, and the researchers are due to present their paper (pdf) in April at the Computer-Human Interaction conference in Atlanta. Here’s a video explaining how Skinput works:

Related Content:
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Image: Skinput

Male animals often use their horns to fight over females, but at least one species’ females use their horns to fight over excrement.

The species, no surprise, is the dung beetle. Unlike many of the animals we usually associate with elaborate horns, antlers, or other head weaponry—in which the male has the most impressive set—dung beetle females have horns that put the male version to shame. The reason, says a new study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, is that females must battle one another for that precious manure. Nicola Watson and Leigh Simmons of the University of Western Australia, Perth, pitted female dung beetles (Onthophagus sagittarius) against each other in a race for dung – a valuable resource that provides nutrients for their eggs. Matched for body size, females with bigger horns managed to collect more dung and so provide better for their offspring [New Scientist].

Dung beetles aren’t the only species whose females grow horns: Small antelopes called duikers, for instance, have them for self-defense or territorial struggles. But the beetle horns are special, Stankowich says. Female duiker horns generally look like the males’, but female dung beetles grow another type of horn altogether [Science News]. Thus, the researchers argue, the female beetle horns (on the right in the image) aren’t some kind of crossover from the kind of horns that the males grow (left), but rather an independently evolved feature. And, they say, finding out that a feature like this evolved for female reproductive competition rather than defense against predators is exceedingly rare.

You might think there’d be enough poop to go around, and that fighting over it wouldn’t be necessary. However, there’s a distinct advantage toward getting the very best dung to make the balls in which the beetles lay their eggs. “Dung loses its usability quickly, so they have to seize it fast,” says Watson. Female beetles have been found to steal dung, raid other brood balls, and replace existing eggs with their own [New Scientist].

Related Content:
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The Loom: An Inordinate Fondness For Beetle Horns

Image: Sean Stankowski

Three iPhone apps recently came out that pertain to some favorite topics on this blog, so here’s a quick roundup of them.

1) John Cook, like me, got tired of hearing the same old long-debunked claims from global warming deniers being used over and over again, so he created an app debunking these claims. Called Skeptical Science, it divides the claims into three categories: It’s not happening, It’s not us, and It’s not bad. Under each heading are quite a few claims I’ve seen made repeatedly by the deniers, and Cook includes detailed rebuttals.

Overall I like this app, and it’s bound to be handy if you find yourself in a situation where someone is using these same claims (it’s the Sun, the hockey stick graph is flawed, Al Gore is boring, and so on). I might quibble with some of the details — for example, it talks about 1934 being the warmest year on record, but doesn’t mention that 1998, the second warmest, trails behind by a statistically insignificant 0.02 degrees. There’s more like that, but this is such a small detail it really comes down to a matter of style; an “I woulda done it different” kind of thing. The content is good and links are provided for further info.

I recommend having this one handy, so here’s the direct download link.

2) Next up is a NASA app called 3D Sun. And not to trick you or anything, but it’s an app that displays the Sun in 3D. Put out by the folks behind the STEREO probes, it’s a pretty cool gizmo that reports new sunspots and aurorae, lets you look at movies of solar events like plumes, filaments, and coronal mass ejections, and gives you the latest solar news.

The best thing is the 3D Sun itself. It displays the current solar disk, and you can look at it in different wavelengths (UV shows more violent activity) and from different solar observatories. You can zoom in, out, rotate the view, and pretend you’re on a spaceship roaring past our nearby star.

Now that the Sun is finally starting to show some life again, this app is pretty useful so you know what’s the latest. Here’s the direct download link.

3) The third app is called Lunar Electric Rover, and it’s also put out by NASA. Of the three, I think this is the weakest. It’s essentially a game where you command a lunar rover to traverse the Moon to get to different goals. Now, to be fair, I’m not really partial to these kinds of games, so if they’re your thing, you may love this. I found it to be a bit slow and tedious, and the narration was stilted and difficult to hear over the background sound effects. But again, I’m not a big fan of the “go over here and do this” kinds of games. I’ll note that after I took my own notes on the app, I went to the iTunes listings and the ratings are not all that great; out of 102 ratings, 130 scored it as average or below and 62 above average or great. Lots of folks thought the same things I did.

However, I do think some younger kids will enjoy this. The graphics are quite good, and there is real information displayed and used in the game that provide lots of teachable moments. Here’s the download link.

So, do you agree, disagree? All three apps are free, so I encourage readers to grab ‘em, play with ‘em, and leave your own comments below!

There are now over 60 comments at the Point of Inquiry forums on the latest show. So this one has clearly produced a lot of dialogue.

I want to continue to blog about some of the most memorable content–and in this respect, there was nothing like the show’s closing. I asked for Mann’s final words, and boy did I get them. He pointed out that the strength of climate science alone was clearly insufficient to stop the denial movement, and said that we probably should have expected a revival of that movement in the past three months–although even he didn’t expect how low it would go:

Despite all the talk a few years ago about ‘the debate being over’…the forces of anti-scientific disinformation were just lying dormant. But they would be back. And so this didn’t surprise me at all, and in fact, I fully expected that, in advance of the Copenhagen summit, that we would see an increased number of in attacks.

I guess what we all underestimated was the degree, the depth of dishonesty, dirtiness, and cynicism to which the climate change denial movement would be willing to stoop to advance their agenda. That’s the only thing that I think surprised many of us.

You can catch it all at around minute 39-40. Meanwhile, if you haven’t yet, I encourage you to listen to the Mike Mann interview here, and to subscribe to the Point of Inquiry podcast via iTunes.

“A man exhibited typical features of semantic dementia with onset at age 52. At age 55, he became infatuated with polka music. He would sit in his car in the garage and listen to polka on the radio or on cassettes, often for as long as 12 to 18 hours. Whereas some may argue that enjoying polka music is in itself pathologic, we view this patient’s new appreciation of polka similar to that recently described with pop music in two patients with frontotemporal dementia. Thus, heterogeneity in musical taste is yet one more dimension bridging semantic dementia and frontotemporal dementia.”

Thanks to Ace for today’s ROFL!
Photo: flickr/grenade

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