Author: Discover Main Feed

A new game may help soldiers in that problematic campaign–winning the hearts and minds of people in occupied countries. The game, developed by the University of Texas and backed by the U.S. Army, gives American soldiers deployed abroad some lessons in foreign customs and cultures. This is the opposite of a first-person shooter game; the Pentagon calls it a “first-person cultural trainer” game.

Air-dropped into foreign lands, soldiers often find themselves at a loss, knowing neither the local language nor the cultural conventions. The new 3D simulation game is intended for soldiers to learn the niceties in Iraq and Afghanistan, where a friendly relations with locals could make the difference between life and death.

Wired reports:

It’s a project that’s been in the works for three years, and uses cultural data provided by the military. The goal of the game is to enter a village, learn about the social structures and relevant issues, and then “work with the community” to successfully finish assigned missions.

The player’s main goal is to avoid alienating or scandalizing the community, and to win people over instead. The player also has to rate the characters he meets on the missions on a scale of four emotions: anger, fear, gladness and neutrality. The game developers have worked to make the characters’ reactions realistic, but the game’s critics still worry that soldiers who learn virtually will fail to understand real cultural cues, which are often more complex and nuanced.

The Pentagon has lately made a serious push into what some call “militainment.” The U.S. military, which spends about $6 billion each year on developing games, had a surprise hit when it created the game “America’s Army” to help in its recruitment process. The game, which can be downloaded for free, tracks U.S. soldiers as they duck and weave through dangerous enemy territory. Players fire AK-47’s and kill the bad guys, but unlike real life, anyone who gets shot in the game can start over. And as Peter Singer points out in a report for the Brookings Institution, 70,000 young Americans signed up for the army last year, but almost 4.7 million people spent Veterans Day playing war at home.

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Image: University of Texas

MILD SPOILERS FOR THE NEW DOCTOR WHO. If you want to remain Whoally pure, then go away.

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I just got word that the new series of Doctor Who will start on BBC America here in the States on April 17. All I know about the UK premier is that it’ll be around Easter (I may know more next week). The BBC confirms that the first three episode titles will be The Eleventh Hour and The Beast Below, both by Steven Moffat, and Victory of the Daleks by Mark Gatiss. Guest stars include Alex Kingston (River Song is back!), Sophie Okonedo, and Tony Curran.

Yay!

The invention of the microscope allowed scientists to peer into the tiniest of cells. Now, imagine a device that can not just look into minute cells, but can also listen in on their activities.

A team of scientists is building a “micro-ear” that uses tiny beads and lasers to amplify and measure vibrations on a molecular scale. The team hopes the new device will become standard lab equipment soon, allowing scientists to listen to the movement of bacteria such as E. coli as well as microorganisms that cause diseases like sleeping sickness [The Daily Beast].

The micro-ear is based on an established technology that uses laser light to measure tiny forces. The “optical tweezers” work by suspending very small glass or plastic beads in a beam of laser light. Measuring the movement of these beads as they are jostled by tiny objects allows measurements of tiny forces that operate at molecular scales [BBC]. The optical tweezer is so sensitive, it can measure a piconewton force, which is a millionth of the force that a grain of salt exerts when resting on a tabletop [BBC]. But unlike the optical tweezer, where one single laser beam measures the forces exerted by tiny objects, the micro-ear would use a circle of bead-bearing laser beams to listen to the object in question.

Scientists say this circle of laser beams can pick up the motion caused by bacteria as they use their flagella to motor forward. That motion causes the ring of electrically-charged beads to wobble by different amounts, and all those wobbles are measured using a high speed camera. That output is then connected to a speaker, so that researchers can hear the bacteria’s vibrations. The device has already picked up Brownian motion, letting researchers listen to atoms and molecules sloshing about in a fluid. The new micro-ear could also help scientists understand how harmful bacteria move, and how drugs can be used to stop them in their tracks.

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Image: iStockphoto

This is totally cool: an animated simulator that lets you make model solar systems! It’s put together by the PhET Interactive Simulations group at — hey! — the University of Colorado at Boulder.

All you have to do is put in the masses, locations, and initial velocities of the objects (up to four) and then hit “go”. What you’ll probably find is that for almost any parameters you use, you won’t get a stable system. You’ll fling off the tiny moon, or drop a planet into the star, or collide two planets (when you do, one survives after a brief comical flash). There are preset conditions that will put together a stable simulation, so I suggest you start there and then tweak the numbers. The most fun thing is to fiddle with the mass and see what happens.

You’ll note a slider that says Accurate vs. Fast. That has to do with bin size. Basically, a simulation like this calculates the force of gravity of each object on every other object using Newton’s law. But it needs a time interval to do this: where will all the objects be after some period of time? You can pick that time step, but the smaller the time step the more accurate it will be. That’s because gravity works continuously. If you take the Earth’s current position and velocity and ask where it will be a year from now by just adding a year to the program, it’ll extrapolate the Earth’s current velocity direction! The program will take that velocity (about 30 km/sec) and multiply it by one year, and get a distance of about a billion kilometers. It’ll then place the Earth there. But that’s not right, because the Earth orbits the Sun; the Sun’s gravity is continuously changing the direction of Earth’s motion. So the smaller the time step, the more accurate the program will be.

At least, I think that’s what’s going on here. I’ve fiddled with programs like this before, and that’s what I’ve found. Roundoff error can be bad too; because the program can’t do the calculations exactly — the decimal value has to cut off somewhere — every step has a little bit of error in it. That adds up, and after a few orbits things can go wonky. This one does a pretty good job of that, it looks like.

Anyway, go play god with your very own cosmic erector set. It’s fun, and before you know it a long time will have passed… but you might get a feel for orbital mechanics. It’s worth it.

There are now some 51 comments at the Point of Inquiry forums on the latest show. But so far none are getting into what I found most intriguing in my interview with Mike Mann.

When I asked his views on the “really energized global warming movement on the web” at around minute 31:30, Mann suggested something that has been on a lot of our minds—namely, that although it may appear that online climate deniers are really fired up right now on the web (hence all the comments on everybody’s blog), he suspects some of it is astroturfing:

The anti-science industry has fully exploited the resources made available by the World Wide Web. So it isn’t coincidental. It isn’t like that’s an organic thing that has emerged from grassroots anti-climate change activists….

In the exchange, which runs about 2 minutes, I tell Mann I too have my suspicions, but at the same time, am skeptical and would want to see some solid proof before I fully buy into this idea. After all, there really is a groundswell on the political right at the moment (see the Tea Party movement) and that is surely also spilling over into the climate denial blogosphere. And that would be, I guess, “organic.” So the question is, how could we tell the two apart?

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.

When it comes to packaging a precious TV or even a pricey vase, mushrooms aren’t the first things that pop to mind as a durable alternative to Styrofoam or cardboard. But a company called Ecovative Design has used mushroom roots, the part of the fungus that’s called the mycelium, as a sturdy material that can be used for packaging. The creators say that the process is so simple, they grew the first samples under their beds.

The first step in creating the packaging, called the “Eco Cradle,” is to grow the thin, hair-like mycelia by feeding them agricultural waste like buckwheat hulls, rice hulls, or cotton burrs.

Discovery News reports:

After about a week or so, tons of tiny white fibers appear. The material is then dried to halt the growing process, creating packaging with impressive durability that is also biodegradable and compostable.

The creators claim the entire process uses about 10 times less energy per unit of material than the manufacturing of synthetic foams–making this fungal product an environmentally friendly option to Styrofoam. They add that the packaging can also be molded into different shapes, providing the best protection for delicate objects. Ecovative says it will start making packaging for two Fortune 500 companies this spring.

While the all-natural material is made from mushroom parts, Ecovative notes that the stuff shouldn’t be tossed into your stir-fry. You could eat it, the company notes in its FAQ, “but it’s non-nutritious and doesn’t taste very good, so we don’t recommend it.”

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Image: Ecovative Design

Less than two months after the earthquake that shook Haiti, and only hours after a quake causing small tsunamis occurred near Japan, the largest of 2010’s seeming barrage of big seismic events hit Chile. The 8.8 earthquake is the fifth largest since 1900. “We call them great earthquakes. Everybody else calls them horrible,” said USGS geophysicist Ken Hudnut. “There’s only a few in this league” [AP].

According to seismologists, the confluence of earthquakes these last couple months are probably coincidental; they’re all separated by too great a distance to be directly related. However, some say the latest quake is related to the 1960 quake in Chile that remains the largest ever recorded, a 9.5 on the Richter scale. Both earthquakes took place along a fault zone where the Nazca tectonic plate, the section of the earth’s crust that lies under the Eastern Pacific Ocean south of the Equator, is sliding beneath another section, the South American plate [The New York Times]. That massive event increased stress on other parts of the fault line, which continued to increase as the two plates converged at three and a half inches per year.

As of this writing, the Chilean death toll has soared past 700 and led to a state of emergency in the country. But despite the fact that the quake carried hundreds of times more power than the January quake in Haiti that killed more than 200,000 people, Chile will probably see far fewer casualties. One difference, experts say, is that Chile’s seismic history has caused the country to enforce stricter building codes than Haiti did. “Earthquakes don’t kill people, buildings kill people” [Wall Street Journal], says David Wald of the USGS. In addition, the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince was only eight miles from the epicenter of its devastating quake. Chile’s major cities were about three times further away.

Luckily, people in the Pacific were also spared a deadly tsunami, which are common with this kind of quake. Unlike the Haiti episode, which was caused by a laterally moving slip-strike fault, Chile’s was a thrust-fault quake, says seismologist David Schwartz, noting that the vertical motion produced by thrust-fault quakes often produces tsunamis. “When they slip, the fault that causes the earthquake breaks the surface, and pushes the water up,” he said. “It pushes an awful lot of water. And that water has to go somewhere” [The New York Times].

It’s still not entirely clear why this quake only generated modest tsunamis–researchers measured a 4-foot water rise in Japan, waves 6.5 feet higher than usual in Tonga, and tsunamis of only 3 feet in Hawaii, where authorities evacuated coastal populations as a precaution. Geophysicist Emile Okal speculates that part of the reason may be that the tsunami was generated in a relatively shallow part of the Pacific off Chile. “Locally this doesn’t change anything,” he said. “But as the tsunami propagates into the really deep water of the Pacific Basin, [the shallower origin] does decrease its amplitude somewhat” [National Geographic News].

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Image: CIA World Factbook

Jane McGonigal thinks they can help. She’s a game designer who gave a talk at the TED conference this year (although her talk isn’t up yet).

McGonigal makes some good points in this short video, especially about how dealing with things in a video-game environment — like failure, or social interactions — can be greatly helpful when one eventually has to deal with them in the real world. She also helped put together Urgent Evoke, a large-scale multiperson game where you collect achievements by performing world-saving tasks.

The kids these days, they love their gaming. So it makes sense to ask how that passion can be put to good use. Personally I’m fascinated by the prospects of using games to teach people science. Not just facts and features of the real world — although those are important — but the scientific method of hypothesis-testing and experiment. Games already feature exactly those features, of course; everyone who figures out the “laws of nature” in the game world is secretly doing science. It wouldn’t be that hard to tweak things here and there so that the techniques they were practicing connected more directly with science in the non-virtual reality.

Over at Universe Today, Nancy Atkinson has written an interesting piece on whether NASA should consider extending the Shuttle program, which is currently planned to end in September of this year (or thereabouts, depending on delays). After that, NASA will rely heavily on private companies to ferry cargo to orbit, and eventually humans as well.

My thoughts on this are already a matter of record: I don’t think NASA should be in the business of doing anything routine, and several companies are gearing up to take over flights to low-Earth orbit (or LEO as it’s called). Space X may be ready as early as late this year for unmanned trips to the space station.

However, no private company has yet made a cargo launch capable of reaching ISS, and there may still be a gap in our ability to get into space. Extending the Shuttle program sounds like a good idea, but I have three concerns: safety, money, and NASA’s ability to extend it.

1) Safety. As far as that goes, I’m no expert, but the people on the blue-ribbon Augustine Commission certainly were. In their report last year to President Obama they said:

However, one option [we examined] does provide for an extension of the Shuttle at a minimum safe flight rate to preserve U.S. capability to launch astronauts into space. If that option is selected, there should be a thorough review of Shuttle recertification and overall Shuttle reliability to ensure that the risk associated with that extension would be acceptable.

In other words, as long as it’s safe, and the schedule isn’t too fast to preclude handling safety concerns, it’s not so bad (and in the UT article, Shuttle Integration Manager Mike Moses agrees). OK, so perhaps that’s an option. However, even so…

2) Money. The Shuttle is very expensive, and there isn’t a lot of money for it in the budget, even if we radically overhaul what the President submitted. I’m not sure I see how we can give money to the private companies so they can develop their tech at the same time we keep the Shuttle running. That would delay the companies’ advancement, which would extend the Shuttle further. That’s a snake eating its own tail.

Still, some folks want to fight to extend the Shuttle in the budget. I had to smile a bit when I read this quote by U.S. Representative Suzanne Kosmas:

President Barack Obama’s budget proposal was not acceptable as is because it would cede the United States’ leadership position in spaceflight in the short term — and possibly the long term.

I disagree with this statement, since within a year we’ll be using U.S. companies to send cargo to the ISS, and humans in three. We already can’t put humans in space all that often with the Shuttle, and once it retires this year (a plan that has been in effect a while now, since the Bush Administration) there will be a long gap before NASA could put people in space anyway. But I also happen to be a tad skeptical about opinions from politicians when their districts include NASA centers. I’m not saying I don’t trust her, but I am saying that the most vocal people I have heard in Congress are from folks who fall into that category (such as Alabama politicians).

However, that looming gap in space capable launches is almost on us. Extending the Shuttle might have traction politically, which means financially. But…

3) Ability. Can NASA even do this? The program has been winding down for some time; even one launch pad has been converted to use by Constellation, which itself may never get past the blueprint stage (I disregard here the Ares 1-X which many consider to be nothing more than a publicity stunt). Lots of workers have been looking for other jobs. And I wonder if the administrative side of NASA would even be able to figure out how to put together another launch or series of launches in time before Space X can start lofting cargo. I’m not clear on how quickly they could turn this around, even if Congress told them “Go” today. And, of course, Congress is not known for being light on its feet either.

So my thinking is that even if it’s safe, and politically expedient, I’m not clear on its worth. It depends on how much it would cost, how possible it is logistically, and if it makes sense to spend a billion or so per launch of the Shuttle when it would be far cheaper to hitch a ride on a Soyuz or three while we wait for industry to catch up.

So I’m not sure how this would work out. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays in Congress, and as it does, I’ll be paying attention.

In our book Unscientific America, we devoted an entire chapter to discussing the merits and limitations of science blogging. Here’s an excerpt:

The single-biggest blogging negative, however, is the grouping together of people who already agree about everything, and who then proceed to square and cube their agreements, becoming increasingly self-assured and intolerant of other viewpoints. Thus, blogging about science has brought out, in some cases, the loud, angry, nasty, and profanity-strewing minority of the science world that denounces the rest of America for its ignorance and superstition. This ideological content, which inflames audiences, is often the most likely to draw attention outside of the science-centric blogosphere—meaning that out of the many contributions made by science blogging, the posts that non-scientists (or people who don’t follow science regularly) will probably come across are those skewering religion.

Needless to say, while I was not surprised at the response to Chris’ announcement, I am extremely dismayed. Discussion of each post is anticipated, but baseless personal attacks demonstrate the trouble with blogging.

Chris has been blogging for nine years and I began in 2006. The blogosphere is changing, growing, and evolving. In just the past few years, we’ve watched the number of science bloggers swell, while the tone of much of the commentary changed. Most disheartening, the relationships between bloggers fractured across once cohesive networks as small friendly communities chose sides in a growing culture war. (Those involved understand what I mean).

Science blogs themselves continue to afford a wonderful medium for scientists and science writers to reach broad audiences, but they also tend to result in groupthink and often deconstructive or off-topic, rather than constructive discussions. Recently, several science blogs and popular discussion forums such as RichardDawkins.net have been grappling with how to go forward. Multiple science bloggers I admire have retired their sites after frustration with the status quo. So I’ve been pondering the value of science blogging itself.

Much of the time, the blogs have become sport and spectacle. The highest traffic ensues when shots are fired between folks who like to spat angrily across their sites from behind the safety of their desktop. The funny thing is, we assuredly agree on far more than whatever we’re at odds over on any given day. So in the big picture, I often wonder if all the in-fighting does science a great disservice.

What do readers think? Do the positives outweigh the negatives?

“The “Monty Hall Dilemma” (MHD) is a well known probability puzzle in which a player tries to guess which of three doors conceals a desirable prize. After an initial choice is made, one of the remaining doors is opened, revealing no prize. The player is then given the option of staying with their initial guess or switching to the other unopened door. Most people opt to stay with their initial guess, despite the fact that switching doubles the probability of winning. A series of experiments investigated whether pigeons (Columba livia), like most humans, would fail to maximize their expected winnings in a version of the MHD. Birds completed multiple trials of a standard MHD, with the three response keys in an operant chamber serving as the three doors and access to mixed grain as the prize. Across experiments, the probability of gaining reinforcement for switching and staying was manipulated, and birds adjusted their probability of switching and staying to approximate the optimal strategy. Replication of the procedure with human participants showed that humans failed to adopt optimal strategies, even with extensive training.”

Thanks to Rebecca for today’s ROFL!

Image: flickr/Let_Ideas_Compete

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I know mentioning Al Gore, let alone linking to him, is like throwing red meat into the pit of denialists, but Gore’s Op Ed in today’s New York Times is really quite good. I wonder if he reads my blog? He hits a lot of the points I have the past few days… though he doesn’t mention the troglodytes in the South Dakota and Utah legislative bodies.

The only point he makes I’m not sure about is the capping of carbon emissions, simply because I haven’t looked into the issue. One more thing on my to-do list.

Anyway, I will be much amused, I’m sure in a schadenfreudelicious sort of way, about the comments that will ensue below. I know! Let’s make it a game! Score ten points for every comment that makes fun of “Inconvenient Truth” without addressing the content of the Op Ed, 20 points for anyone who clearly didn’t read the Op Ed but comments anyway, 30 points for a comment thoroughly rebutted by science (either previously known or pointed out in a subsequent comment) but ignored by the commenter, and 100 points for someone who comments making fun of Gore’s name. First person to 1000 points wins!

What do you win? A planet 1° Fahrenheit warmer than it was a century ago! Hurray!

This week’s addition to The Science of Kissing Gallery features the first comic book! This kiss was drawn by artist Benjamin Marra and appears in Night Business. He writes:

In this particular scene we have Leonard Masterson, boyfriend to one of the main characters and soap-opera actor, on the set of his soap “The Lives We Live,” kissing his costar, while taping an episode.

Check out more of Marra’s fantastic artwork here. My personal favorite is the fold-out featured in Rolling Stone.

Submit your photograph or artwork to the Science of Kissing Gallery and remember to include relevant links.

43: Percentage of American freight that moves between cities by rail, the Association of American Railroads reports. One train can carry the same load as 280 trucks. Freight trains can move a ton of cargo 457 miles on a gallon of fuel, versus 130 miles for a full-size tractor trailer.

1: Percentage of all passenger intercity trips of more than 50 miles made by rail in the United States. Ninety percent of them are by car, 7 percent by air, and 2 percent by bus.

There are two skeptical events coming up you should know about:

1) The first Skepchicamp, a skepticamp thrown by the Skepchicks, will be held on Saturday, March 6 in Chicago. You can get more details here. Skepticamps are audience-participation events, where everyone can help in some way. They’re fun, so if you’re in Chicago then, give it a shot.

2) GenCon is a gaming convention held in Indianapolis, and this year there will be a skeptic track. That’s from August 5-8.

I’m glad to see more grassroots skeptical events getting put together. They’re great ways to meet like-minded folks, to learn new things, and to have a lot of fun.

There were many quotable moments in my Point of Inquiry interview with Michael Mann. I’ll be posting those, and further reflections on the interview, throughout the coming week. But I’ll start with a particularly memorable exchange that occurs around minute 34:

Mooney: Can the scientific community fight harder, or must it draw the line somewhere? You’ve got someone out there like Marc Morano, who is incredibly effective at doing what he does, his website is ClimateDepot, it is very high traffic….the scientific community does not have its equivalent. And the question is, should it, or is that crossing some sort of line?

Mann: Well, it’s the old line about getting into a fight with a pig: “you’ll get dirty, and the pig enjoys it.” There’s some truth to that.

Listen to more of the interview–and subscribe–here….also, the CFI forums are getting pretty active now in discussing the interview.

The web is abuzz about an interview antivax activist and public health threat Jenny McCarthy did with Time magazine. A lot of folks seem to think that McCarthy is backtracking on her claims that vaccines cause autism.

Let me be very clear: that simply isn’t true. McCarthy is still making the same debunked, discredited, and dangerous claims:

Each of these theories [proposed by antivaxxers] has been thoroughly discredited by scientific research, but that has done nothing to silence McCarthy and her Generation Rescue colleagues. “Come and see our kids,” says McCarthy. “Why won’t the CDC come and talk to the mothers, talk to the families? Then tell us there isn’t a link.”

Sounds to me like she’s up to the same old health-hazard hijinks. So why are so many people saying she’s changed her mind? In some of the emails I’ve received and on a few websites, they’re claiming that McCarthy has admitted that her son never was autistic, and instead had Landau-Kleffner syndrome, a neurological disorder. But that’s wrong; she never admits that in the article — the author suggests that Evan’s symptoms are similar to Landau-Kleffner, but that’s it.

As recently as three weeks ago, McCarthy and her equally deluded boyfriend Jim Carrey both publicly defended Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced doctor credited for starting the modern movement claiming vaccines cause autism. You can find that statement on the Natural News website, run by the equally wrong Mike Adams, who couldn’t find reality with three sherpas and a GPS.

So why is this misinformation that McCarthy has changed her mind being spread so much? Part of the problem is an article in Hollywood Life, which obviously mischaracterizes the Time interview, saying:

And she is also reversing her initial position that the MMR shots caused Evan’s autism.

Nowhere in the Time interview does she reverse her position! Hollywood Life is wrong, plain and simple. In fact, the Time article author says plainly:

…[McCarthy] blames the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine for giving her son autism.

I don’t see how this could be any more clear.

[Note: the URL for the Hollywood life article is even a misstatement: “http://www.hollywoodlife.com/2010/02/26/jenny-mccarthy-says-her-son-evan-never-had-autism/”; McCarthy said no such thing in the interview.]

So she is still standing by her earlier claims. Mind you, she still says she “cured” her son of his disorder by putting him on a gluten-free diet, which, to be clear, is nonsense. In fact, a lot of people have wondered if her son was ever autistic, and is now simply doing better as he ages; many disorders mitigate with time.

Also, this is a person who claims we are injecting our kids with too many vaccines, but has no issue injecting herself with the most dangerous protein known to humanity, so clearly her viewpoint is somewhat skewed from reality.

I urge people to read the article from Time magazine in its entirety; the author is clear he thinks McCarthy is wrong, that all of science and reality are stacked against her, and he even states simply that she is “dangerous”.

I agree. She is a terrible influence on people; her science is wrong, her medical advice is dangerous, and she gives people false hope.

There is hope for parents with autistic children, but that hope comes through understanding the situation, using real evidence and data, and in knowing that thousands upon thousands of doctors are trying to understand autism as well. If there’s hope, it’s through science.

I know that McCarthy loves her son, and I do think she’s trying to help. But I also know that her claims about vaccines and autism are completely wrong, and instead of helping she’s making things far worse — not just for kids with autism and their parents, but for the population as a whole because vaccinations rates have dropped and we’re seeing a resurgence of preventable diseases.

This misinformation being spread about her isn’t helping. Her stance has not changed, and she is still a force for antireality. People listening to her are not helping their own children, and if they don’t vaccinate their kids they are putting everyone else in danger as well.

[Update: Surly Amy at Skepchick has similar thoughts on this.]

So, yes, since everybody seems to want to know: I am a Templeton Cambridge journalism fellow for 2010, and details on the program are here. I didn’t know when the new fellowship recipients’ names were going to be announced, but I guess the answer is yesterday.

The fellowship is basically two months long, with three weeks in Cambridge and two at “home” (wherever that is, in my case), during which one reads and studies up on the subject of science and religion.

Past fellows include Sandra Blakeslee, Juliet Eilperin, Marc Kaufman, Rob Stein, William Saletan, John Horgan, George Johnson, Shankar Vedantam, and many other top science journalists. I’m honored to join their number, and am looking forward to seeing the new crew–which includes folks like Ron Rosenbaum from Slate and Peter Scoblic from The New Republic–alongside the river Cam.

And thanks, everyone, for the congrats that have come in so far.

Last night at 06:34 UTC, a huge earthquake struck on the coast of Chile, with a reported magnitude of a numbing 8.8 — making it one of the largest earthquakes recorded on Earth since 1900.

A tsunami warning has been issued for the entire Pacific ocean. This is no joke; the tsunami gauges in the deep ocean have registered a wave spreading from the quake. I don’t know how big the amplitude is, but there have been confirmed reports of waves a meter high in Chile. That may not sound like much, but water weighs a ton per cubic meter/yard, so a wave that high has a lot of destructive power.

The tsunami should hit Hawaii around 11:05 local time, and it’s not clear at all how big it will be. In 1960, a larger earthquake happened off Chile and a tsunami hit Hilo, Hawaii causing quite a bit of damage. If you live anywhere near a Pacific coast, please check the local news and the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. Also, a live stream of news from Hawaii is on HawaiiTsunami.com. I’ve been listening and the coverage is pretty good.

If you live in Hawaii, now might be a good time to check out that higher ground you hear so much about. At the very least, stay away from the beaches! People are already starting to evacuate the coasts, so if you choose to get out, the earlier you get moving, the better. Traffic is bound to get snarled. Please please please don’t panic. Stay calm, and keep focused.

It’s unclear if this will be a big wave or not. But if you’re in Hawaii you should consider moving to higher ground.

Here is a map by the NOAA of the modeled energy wave expected from the earthquake:

It’s unclear to me just how big a wave this means in terms of real height (it’s a model, not an actual measurement), but it should bring home that you should take this seriously.

I’ll note that the magnitude scale doesn’t translate perfectly to energy released, but roughly speaking an 8.8 quake releases the energy equivalent of 20 billion tons of TNT, or 400 time the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated (Tsar Bomba, a 50 megaton test done by the USSR in 1961). If the measurement hold up, this will be the fifth or sixth strongest earthquake recorded since 1900. The strongest ever recorded, in 1977 1960, was magnitude 9.5, also in Chile — the one that caused the tsunami in Hilo.

Thanks to Sean Carroll for the link to the energy map. Note also, in this post I referred to the Richter scale, which is no longer used. I corrected that.

Before another person emails me this article, yes I’ve seen it.

(CNN) — Political, religious and sexual behaviors may be reflections of intelligence, a new study finds.

Anyone who follows the blog should already know I’m highly skeptical about such stories and their purported findings (although I am confident they result in lots of traffic online at the url). I have not seen the primary source, but want to respond to the emails I’m receiving.

In short, the reason this troubles me very much is because–regardless of what the actual study says–the way it’s been written up as a ‘news‘ item is misleading (especially for those who don’t read past the headline). Of course many of the factors considered will show interesting correlations in a sample, but correlation does not equal causation. Each is extremely dependent on social mores, cultural norms, hormones, relationships, socieoeconomic status, and much, much, more. Still, I would be interested to see the data and read the methodology.

That said, I can’t help but wonder if this is a classic example of ‘The Science News Cycle‘.