Author: Discover Main Feed

There was no “Shamu Show” at SeaWorld today as people at the park mourned the death of Dawn Brancheau, the 40-year-old trainer apparently pulled to her death by Tilikum, one of the multiple killer whales the park uses under the name Shamu. As details continue to surface, park owners must decide what to do with the 12,000-pound aquatic animal.

First off, the public should keep in mind that this incident is highly unusual, says Wayne Perryman of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He studies orcas (another name for killer whales) in the wild and says that they’ve never been known to attack a person as Tilikum has done, pulling Brancheau under water until she drowned. Perryman points out that other captive animals are known to snap and turn on their trainers—not just killer whales. “I think this isn’t really a killer whale issue,” he said. “It’s when you’re dealing with large mammals in a captive situation’” [National Geographic].

Nancy Black of California’s Monterey Bay Whale Watch notes that Tilikum had a more aggressive track record than other orcas, perhaps because of his history. He was captured near Iceland in November 1983, according to Discovery News, and kept in small tanks for most of his life. “I’m sure it was a high stress situation,” says Ms. Black. “Being kept in a small tank like that, especially because he was originally from the wild” [Christian Science Monitor]. And this is the third human death with which the killer whale has been linked. The first was in 1991, when a trainer at Sealand of the Pacific fell into the tank with Tilikum and two other orcas. In 1999, a homeless man sneaked into the whale tank at Sea World in Orlando after hours. The man died of hypothermia, although bruises and bite marks suggest that the orca may have had a role in his death [Christian Science Monitor]. This time, though, a crowd of people was on hand for the tragedy.

SeaWorld has said it will evaluate the orca, but added that it has no plans to euthanize the animal. And Brancheau’s friends say that though they miss her, she knew the danger of her job. Earlier today, Jack Hanna, a well-known animal expert with ties to Central Florida, spoke on national television about the tragedy, saying animal experts such as Brancheau are aware of the risks, as well as the benefits, of working with live animals [Orlando Sentinel].

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Image: iStockphoto

It’s a robot that could change the way scientists gather data from underwater sources. Researchers from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in California have developed a new autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), and like other AUVs this sophisticated robot can slip under the waves, sweep the ocean floor, collect data, and perform programmed tasks. But the “Gulper” goes one step further–it doesn’t just follow its program, it can also make decisions on its own, and can plan its own route, avoiding hazardous currents and obstacles [BBC].

Explaining how the robot functions, Kim Fulton-Bennett from MBARI said: “We tell it, ‘here’s the range of tasks that we want you to perform’, and it goes off and assesses what is happening in the ocean, making decisions about how much of the range it will cover to get back the data we want” [BBC]. The ocean-going bot has also been described as “a microbiology laboratory in a can,” because it can analyze some samples in situ. The ‘ecogenomic sensor’, which is packed into a roughly 1-metre-long canister, can test for proteins released by microorganisms and even run DNA tests match DNA to determine which species are present [Nature News]. Findings can instantly be relayed to the shore, saving scientists the cumbersome task of transferring samples from site to lab.

Describing the ocean robot at the Ocean Sciences meeting in Portland, the research team explained that the AUV’s software is similar to that used on NASA’s Mars rovers. The software, called “T rex,” allows the machine to detect and avoid obstacles in its path. However, the scientists noted that unlike the Mars Rovers, the AUV has to function at great depths and in total darkness, so it relies less on visual cues. The researchers also modified the software for maximum flexibility so that the robot could decide how to get the best samples. So if a scientist wanted to study the microorganisms living on each side of a temperature gradient, the AUV would find the boundary, follow it, and pick the best spot to take samples [Nature News].

For now, the scientists hope to use the AUV to detect harmful algal blooms which can shut down beaches and cause a downward spike in seaside businesses. They expect to soon find many more applications for the AUV in deep-ocean research.

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Image:MBARI

My friend Glenn Schneider is an astronomer with a not-so-peculiar obsession for those of us in this trade: he’s an umbraphile, a shadow lover, an eclipse chaser. He’s seen 27 solar eclipses… at last count. I know if that’s wrong he’ll be quick to correct me.

One thing he’s been doing for the past few eclipses is to watch them from airplanes, which has lots of advantages over seeing them from the ground. For one thing, you can fly above clouds, so there’s no chance of weather screwing up the view. Plus, you can make the eclipse last longer! The moon passes in front of the Sun in a solar eclipse, casting a shadow on the ground. But the Moon orbits the Earth, and the Earth is spinning, so the shadow of the Moon moves across the planet. In an airplane, you can follow it! In general the shadow is moving too quickly to keep up, but you can certainly prolong the experience.

Your view, should you accept this mission.

On July 11 of this year, there will be a solar eclipse over the Pacific Ocean, about 2500 km east of Tahiti. Now get this: Glenn has commissioned an entire airplane to view this eclipse, and he’s looking for people who want to come along^*. Not only that, they will strip out the seats on the side of the plane facing the eclipse, giving more room for people to watch. And finally, the really astonishing part: by following the shadow in an airplane, passengers will experience the eclipse lasting an incredible nine and a half minutes! That is actually a solid two minutes longer than the maximum duration of a solar eclipse as seen from the ground.

If this sounds like something you want to do, then all the actual trip details (pricing, what you need, etc.) are on Rick Brown’s Eclipse Safari website. The contact details for both Glenn and Rick are on their respective sites. I’ll note that this eclipse happens during TAM 8, so I cannot go. Someday, though, I swear I’ll see a total eclipse. Glenn keeps twisting my arm, so I suspect when I do see one, he’ll be right there. And I’ll have bruises on my arm.

Images courtesy Glenn Schneider

A few questions came up during the webinar this afternoon that we didn’t have a chance to get to.

1. I talked about a poll of Texans about evolution. Someone asked for the source of the chart I showed. Here it is. I used this poll mainly to illustrate the fact that being a journalist who writes about evolution in the United States is an inherently interesting job. (You get really interesting comments, for example.) But I don’t think that Texas warrants singling out, judging by nationwide polls.

I also get annoyed when pollsters ask questions that demonstrate that they don’t understand evolution very well. Walk into a museum with a good dinosaur exhibit, and you’ll discover that birds are dinosaurs. And so, if someone changed that statement to “Humans and dinosaurs live at the same time,” and asked me if I agreed with it, I’d say, “You betcha!”

2. Another person asked how much space in The Tangled Bank I spend on the mechanisms of evolution, such as epistasis, fitness landscapes, evolvability, modularity, and genotype-phenotype maps. The answer is that I lay out some of the fundamental mechanisms, such as selection and drift, and try to delve into mechanisms that have been investigated more recently–without turning the book into a textbook for biology majors, instead of the non-majors book that it is. So, rather than deriving theorems, I tend to use illustrations, metaphors, and specific biological examples to get the concepts across.

3. A third person mentioned that she does research on the teaching and learning of evolution, and wondered if I would consider writing a book specifically for teachers to help them teach evolution. I’m no expert on pedagogy (which is why I had a board of advisers for The Tangled Bank made up of scientists who not only do important research on evolution but also teach non-majors). Fortunately, there are already lots of resources out there intended specifically for teachers, such as Understanding Evolution. (Full disclosure: I wrote the history sections on the site, and my chapter on evolutionary medicine can be downloaded for free there.)

Thanks again to AIBS, Chris Mooney, and all the people who joined us. It was my first webinar experience, and it was not only painless, but downright enjoyable. And congratulations to the people who won copies of our books!

Update: 8:15 pm. Jamie Vernon left a comment worth replying to at length:

Hi Carl,
I truly respect what you have done for science communication, however I must take exception to your implication that humans walk with dinosaurs. Dinosaurs? Really? “Terrible lizards?” You see, I live and teach in Texas so I see on a regular basis the problems of improper science education. Now, I can appreciate the humor in that statement and the provocative nature of it, but for those who clearly don’t understand evolution, it can be confusing and misleading. I assume when you agree that “humans walk with dinosaurs” meaning birds, you intend to provoke the question, “Really? How? Where?” Unfortunately, not everyone is as inquisitive as you might think. This leaves us, teachers, to clean up the mess. The statement isn’t anymore true than someone who says, “humans descended from chimpanzees.” So, the least you could do is clarify by stating that “humans walk with the descendants of dinosaurs.” Eh?

No, humans walk with dinosaurs.

It would not be true to say that humans walk with other species of dinosaurs, such as Tyrannosaurus rex or Velociraptor. But birds are dinosaurs, too. That is, they belong to the group of species defined as dinosaurs by paleontologists, based on their shared common ancestry. The statement “humans walk with dinosaurs” is not analogous to “humans descended from chimpanzees.” That would be like saying “birds descended from Tyrannosaurus rex.” Birds are dinosaurs in the same way humans are mammals.

This statement is not misleading, nor is it intended merely to provoke. It’s just an accurate depiction of the state of the science today. It problably comes as a surprise to many students, but that makes it–as they say–a teachable moment. The link to the American Museum of Natural History web site I provided above offers some good information to help students understand this statement. It’s also something I discuss in The Tangled Bank. Here’s an evolutionary tree I put together with the help of paleontologists to get this across…

From 2002 until a lawsuit last year, the state of Texas took the small blood samples taken from newborns to screen for diseases, and saved them without the parents’ consent. Texas always said it did this for research purposes, of which there are many. But there was a wee detail about all this that didn’t come to light until an investigation published this week in the Texas Tribune. According to the Tribune, between 2003 and 2007, Texas quietly handed over 800 of those samples to the military for a project to create a database of mitochondrial DNA, which people inherit from their mother.

Like virtually every state, Texas routinely screens almost all newborns for rare diseases, collecting a few drops of blood at birth. In recent years many states, Texas included, have stored the samples and offered them up for research, mainly in pediatrics [ScienceInsider]. Because the samples are anonymous, researchers decided it was okay to use them without parental consent. However, the Tribune’s investigation uncovered emails showing Texas state officials publicized the use of DNA taken from newborns in studies on childhood disease, but deliberately dissuaded state employees from divulging the use of baby blood in establishing a DNA database [Popular Science].

These newborn blood samples already had a long and winding legal history in Texas. In 2002 the state stopped throwing out the samples after testing and began to store them indefinitely. State health officials never notified parents of the changes; they didn’t need consent for the birth-defect screening, so they didn’t ask for it for research purposes [Texas Tribune]. When the practice came to light, lawsuits followed. The Texas Civil Rights Project sued in March, but in May, the state legislature passed a law specifically allowing health officials to store the samples for research if the parents don’t object. In December, the civil rights group settled its lawsuit when the state agreed to destroy all the samples it gathered before May 2009, the time the new law passed.

However, Jim Harrington of the Texas Civil Rights Project says nobody at the Department of State Health Services bothered to tell him about the military’s database, or that Texas was giving anonymous samples to it. According to the Tribune investigation, the state settled the case with such expedience that it never reached the discovery phase, so neither Harrington nor his clients saw any database documents. “This is the worst case of bad faith I have dealt with as a lawyer,” he said Monday [Austin American-Statesman]. The state fired back and called Harrington some names, but he says he might sue again, this time over the database.

Some worry that Texas’s lousy handling of this case will create a backlash—with parents declining to screen their kids (who may end up much sicker because their disease wasn’t caught early), and with the spots no longer made available for valuable pediatrics research, such as tracing the origins of childhood leukemia [ScienceInsider].

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Image: iStockphoto

Ever wonder why buffalo wings always smell so awesome when a football game is blaring in the room? Scientists have proposed that the way food smells could possibly be related to the sounds we hear when we consume them.

They note that there could be a connection between smell and sound, a hybrid sense they call “smound.” The theory is in findings published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Daniel Wesson made the possible neural connection quite by accident when he was studying the olfactory tubercle, a structure at the base of the brain that aids odor detection. He was observing mice when he put his coffee mug down. The clunk of the mug hitting the desk produced a spike in the mice’s olfactory tubercle activity.

Studying the tubercle further, Wesson and his colleague Donald Wilson first confirmed that 65 percent of tubercle cells were activated by at least one of the five odors presented to the mice. Then the cells were presented with only a tone–and 19 percent fired.

Then they took the experiment to the final step, Wesson explained to Scientific American:

The next set of recordings “really changes the way we think about smell,” Wesson says. He and Wilson repeatedly sent a mix of both odors and tones into tubercle cells and saw that responses from 29 percent became either enhanced or suppressed depending on the presence or absence of the second stimulus. One cell, for example, appeared not to care for either smell or sound but responded robustly to the combination.

The existence of smound, Wesson says could aid in the development of new technologies, like a gadget he envisions for bomb-sniffing dogs. A small device would emit a tone into the dog’s ears as he sniffs objects, which could potentially make him more sensitive to the smell of things like explosives.

On a day to day basis, smound could possibly be used to pair food and music, potentially augmenting our appreciation of these stimuli.

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Image: Wikimedia/Stef Yau

Once again, laziness pays off. When microbiologist Lars Peter Nielsen and his team were studying marine sediments, they got a little sloppy about cleaning their beakers. But after letting samples sit around in the lab for a few weeks, they began to see weird chemical patterns in them that you just wouldn’t expect. As they saw changes in the surface of the mud quickly trigger other changes down below, the scientists came upon a startling idea: that the bacteria in the top layer and those deep down were somehow electrically linked. Their paper appears this week in Nature.

Specifically, Nielsen saw that hydrogen sulfide buried below the sediment’s surface (the stuff that makes it smell bad) was oxidizing and changing color. One problem, though: That shouldn’t be happening. Below the sediment surface there is plenty of hydrogen sulfide and carbon for bacteria to consume via oxidation, or removing electrons [Scientific American]. But the reaction can’t be sustained without access to dissolved oxygen, which carries away electrons produced by the reaction, and in these samples the oxygen was all up at the sediment’s surface. So the researchers hypothesize that the buried bacteria form a conductive chain to ferry the electrons up to the surface.

At first the team tried alternative explanations, but none seemed to fit. The distance was so great, and the response time so quick, that usual methods of chemical transport — molecular diffusion, or a slow drift from high to low concentration — couldn’t explain it [Wired.com]. For him, only the electrical linkage could explain a connection between bacteria separated by as much as a half inch (if you compare distance to body size, that half inch for a bacterium feels like what 12 miles would feel like to us humans).

How is this even possible? Researchers recently discovered that some bacteria have so-called nanowires, hair-like extensions on the cells’ surface that can conduct electricity. Nielsen and his colleagues speculate that these nanowires are responsible for conducting the electrons [The Scientist]. However, those tiny wires don’t explain how the connection bridges such great distances (in bacterial terms). Researchers outside the study told The Scientist that pyrite grains embedded in the mud could aid conductivity, or that some yet to be discovered mechanism is responsible.

The discovery has raised comparisons to the biological networks that wire the forest in the 3D blockbuster Avatar, and Nielsen admits it’s pretty cool. “One of my colleagues saw this, and immediately sent me a message: ‘You’ve discovered the secret of Avatar! Go see it!’ The similarities are quite striking” [Wired.com].

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Image: Nils Risgaard-Petersen

My niece, Lindsey, is weird.

Shocker, I know, given her DNA. But there you go. And to prove my point, here’s what she’s doing: she’s growing a mustache, kinda, for charity. She works for a group called 826, which promotes reading and writing for local kids. Lindsey’s in Boston, and for the month of February she’s somehow going to increase her lip warmer to help get money for the program. You can read more about this program on the 826 main site, at Boston.com, and the Boston Phoenix.

So yes, I’m using my great and terrible powers of blogging to help a family member. But y’see, I already have a mustache. This is all I can do. My logic is infallible. And, of course, I’m all about promoting the hirsute of happiness.

Up north in the Canadian province of Manitoba, polar bears are receiving some unwelcome guests. Researchers have seen grizzly bears moving into the area for the first time, and that might not be good news for the already-troubled polar bears.

Linda Gormezano and her team, who are publishing the study (pdf) in Canadian Field-Naturalist, weren’t even looking for grizzlies when they started to spot the huge mammals; they were flying around counting fox dens. Before 1996, there was no evidence that grizzly bears encroached on polar bear territory. From that year on, however, there have been at least 12 sightings, negating the prior theory that the barren landscape north of the Hudson Bay was impassable, in terms of resources, for migrating grizzly bears [Discovery News]. If grizzlies can survive there, Gormezano says, they’ll probably want to stay, because there’s a bevy of caribou, fish, and other good things to eat.

This worries Gormezano. She says, “Grizzlies would likely hibernate in polar bear maternity denning habitat. They would come out of hibernation at the same time and can kill polar cubs” [BBC News]. In addition, the geographical proximity would make it more likely that polar and grizzly bears would produce hybrid offspring, labeled “pizzly,” “prizzly,” or “grolar” bears.

Of course, a story about competing grizzlies and polar bears can lead to only one place: nerd-tastic arguments over which would win in a fight. While debating this at length, Canada’s The Globe and Mail asks the experts. Manitoba Wildlands director Gaile Whelan Enns sees the grizzlies with the advantage: “The grizzly is more accustomed to the predator-prey relationship, whereas the polar bears are not quite as aggressive” [The Globe and Mail]. However, she notes, polar bears have the size advantage, outweighing their competitors by hundreds of pounds.

Study author Robert Rockwell says that the two bear species would most likely meet when the polar bears take to their dens to give birth, which could give the grizzlies an easy target. “If it’s a fight between a 1,200-pound male polar bear and a 600-pound grizzly, I think we know who would win,” Dr. Rockwell said. “But in this likeliest of cases, it’s debatable. There are actually reports in the literature where grizzlies have killed denning polar bear females” [The Globe and Mail].

Both kinds of bear receive protection from the province of Manitoba, and Canada lists both as species of special concern. Whether they have special concern for each other should their territories collide remains to be seen.

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DISCOVER: The Electronic Grizzly, mapping the majestic creatures

Image: Wikimedia Commons / Shellie

No, not Terra the Earth, Terra the satellite. NASA’s Earth-observing bird first opened its eyes on February 24, 2000, and for the past decade has been dutifully watching our planet. It has looked upon us at different wavelengths, different resolutions, at different times of day, and different times of year. It has tracked changes, and reported back what it has seen.

And oh, what it has seen! Here is a map made almost entirely of Terra data (small gaps in some coverage were filled with data from GOES weather satellites):

Click to get the massive 85Mb 5400×2700 pixel image. It’s totally worth it. Our planet is very, very pretty.

But Terra is more than just a camera. The data it returns track a lot of key environmental factors for our world. Here are representations of some of the data it takes: growing vegetation, carbon monoxide, aerosols (pollution), elevation, and net radiation (energy in from the Sun and energy radiated away as heat).

Again, click through to see how lovely data can be, or at least how it can be represented.

These maps, these observations, help us understand our own world, how it works, and how we’re changing it. These are all matters related to our very survival, and I’m very glad we have tools like Terra helping us ensure that.


Image credits: Marit Jentoft-Nilsen (image) and Robert Simmon (globes)

“Nasal leech infestation rarely occurs in society today and it is usually reported as an anecdote. In this study, we present seven nasal leeches in six patients from 1984 to 2008… Four patients were less than 8 years old and two patients were older than 60 years old. All patients had spent time in rural streams 2 weeks to 2 months before the symptoms occurred. All of the seven leeches were removed smoothly and one leech migrated to the oropharynx during the operation. The length of the leeches ranged from 2 to 12 cm with an average length of 4.6 cm. Attention should be given to nasal leech infestation, especially in children and senior citizens who have visited rural streams and have been exposed to freshwater. One of our patients had two leeches lodged in his nasal cavities. Therefore, it is also important to re-examine both nasal cavities after the removal of one leech.”

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Monogamy isn’t popular in the amphibian world. From frogs to salamanders, life in cold blood is all about meeting new ladies and hitting the road once the kids are born. So the male of a species of Peruvian poison frog (Ranitomeya imitator) stands out by proving that he is quite the keeper. He’s not only the first monogamous frog ever found, he also stays home and makes sure the tadpoles are fed.

Scientists studying these frogs say this unusual behavior–monogamy and co-operative parenting–could be directly attributed to the limited resources available to the frogs. They note that a broad study of 404 frog species show that species that deal with reduced food availability and greater difficulty in tadpole-rearing are more likely to have frog couples that work together to raise the young.

These findings could possibly shed some light on the way our hunter-gatherer ancestors approached monogamy. Details of the findings are to be published in the April issue of The American Naturalist.

Scientists studying the mating and parenting habits of R. imitator frogs found that the female frog lays her eggs on leaves for the male to fertilize. When the fertilized eggs hatch into tadpoles, males of other frog species like Ranitomeya vairabilis normally hop away, thinking their job is done. But the R.imitator male sticks around to carry the tadpoles on his back to individual pools of water where they can grow in safety, under dad’s watchful eye. The female frog stays behind, but is summoned to service by the male once a week for a few months; she hops to the tadpole-rearing pools to lay unfertilized eggs for the hungry tadpoles to eat.

Evolutionary ecologist Kyle Summers was studying the frogs, and wondered if the size of the pool had anything to with the way the frogs approached joint parenting. R. variabilis favors larger pools, whereas R. imitator frogs place their young in less than 2 tablespoons of nutrient-poor water, perhaps because R. variabilis as a species snagged the prime pools first [ScienceNow Daily News]. Using available data on 404 frog species, scientists observed that frog species that raised their tadpoles in small pools were likely to be more doting parents; the findings suggest that if the pools were bigger, the frogs wouldn’t have to remain faithful, as they wouldn’t be tied by their need to work together to raise their brood [BBC].

To make sure that the frogs were truly being faithful to their partners, the researchers took DNA from the toes of parent frogs and the tails of their tadpoles and found that 11 out of the 12 seemingly monogamous couples they monitored over the mating season had been sexually faithful making R. variabilis the first known monogamous amphibian [ScienceNow Daily News].

The scientists say that studying the frogs could give us insight into the role that resources play in monogamy, and suggest that when human hunter-gatherers had to scramble for food and warmth, they were less likely to stray.

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Image: Flickr/Phrakt

Chinese citizens hoping to share dirty jokes or flirtation via text message will now be subject to Beijing’s all-seeing eyes. After policing the Internet and censoring online dissent, the Chinese government has stepped up its monitoring of cell phone messages in the country. The government is encouraging people to be mindful of the texts they send, and is asking them to refrain from writing or forwarding any smutty messages or pornographic content.

State controlled-media has reported on the new effort to clean up cell phone messages. Mobile service providers in Guangzhou, Beijing, and Shanghai are reportedly trying a text-filtering system, looking for porn or sexual content in short messages–which the Chinese refer to as “yellow texts.”

The Economist reports on the new message-filtering initiative:

Those caught sending yellow ones risked having their phone’s text function blocked. Restoring it would require a visit to the police and a written pledge not to text smut again.

The move is provoking howls of protest among texters and online users. The Economist writes that one popular blogger said he would continue sending text messages until he found out what words caught the attention of the administration’s censors. A newspaper article complained that the filtering was unconstitutional, prompting one official in Guangzhou to clarify only those who send an estimated 300 smutty messages an hour were likely to be penalized (huh, huh).

Beijing has also decided to fight back against the profusion of “yellow texts” by launching a “red text” campaign–encouraging texters to send politically correct “red texts,” which normally consist of Mao’s sayings or party propaganda.

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Image: Flickr/Madhatrk

Water, water everywhere. Another pass of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, made by the Cassini spacecraft last November, shows at least 30 geysers blasting water from the moon’s south pole. That’s 20 more than were previously known at that location. In addition, the most detailed infrared map of one of the south pole’s fissures, where jets emanate, indicates that the surface temperature there might be as high as 200 kelvins (-73º Celsius), or about 20 kelvins warmer than previously estimated [Discovery News]. Cassini drew to within about 1,000 miles of Enceladus to measure this geological feature, which is a fracture–one of the moon’s so-called “tiger stripes”–about a quarter-mile deep officially called Baghdad Sulcus.

While 200 kelvins is still a frigid temperature for we humans, research team member John Spencer said it could make a big difference on Enceladus. “The huge amount of heat pouring out of the tiger stripe fractures may be enough to melt the ice underground,” Spencer said. ”Results like this make Enceladus one of the most exciting places we’ve found in the solar system” [Wired.com].

For more info (and some spectacular photos), check out DISCOVER blogger Phil Plait’s post at Bad Astronomy. And see 80beats’ previous coverage of Enceladus below:

Bad Astronomy: Enceladus Is Erupting!
80beats: Cassini Probe Finds “Ingredients For Life” on Saturn’s Moon Enceladus
80beats: Antifreeze Might Allow For Oceans—And Life—On Enceladus
80beats: Does Enceladus, Saturn’s Geyser-Spouting Moon, Have Liquid Oceans?
80beats: New Evidence of Hospitable Conditions for Life on Saturn’s Moons
80beats: Geysers From Saturn’s Moon May Indicate Liquid Lakes, and a Chance for Life
80beats: Cassini Spacecraft Snaps Pictures of Saturn’s Geyser-Spouting Moon

Image: NASA/JPL/GSFC/SWRI/SSI

I have no idea why I converted the number of this week’s Carnival of Space into binary, except that I did a ternary conversion on Twitter recently and it was fun.

Yes, I’m a dork. But you laughed, so you are too.

In summer 2008, DISCOVER set sail for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, that Texas-sized soup of tiny plastic bits that might now be an intractable mess in the middle of the ocean. With appearances in newspapers, magazines, and even “Good Morning America,” the Pacific patch became the newest target for environmental hand-wringing, and raised questions over whether it would even be possible to clean up. However, the ocean currents that cause the Pacific gyre don’t just happen in the North Pacific. Scientists at the Sea Education Association just finished a two-decade-long study of the North Atlantic and found similarly sad results.

The team dragged nets half-in and half-out of the water to take a trash census. The researchers carried out 6,100 tows in areas of the Caribbean and the North Atlantic — off the coast of the U.S. More than half of these expeditions revealed floating pieces of plastic on the water surface [BBC News]. Like the Pacific gyre, the Atlantic one—located mostly between 22 and 38 degrees north latitude—contains a dizzying number of small plastic pieces that used to be bags, bottles, and other consumer products. Lead researcher Kara Lavendar Law says it’s difficult to compare the two, but researchers in both places collected more than 1,000 pieces during a single tow of a net [The New York Times].

This similarity is no surprise, according to ocean researchers Marcus Eriksen and Anna Cummins. Both gyres are areas of little to no ocean currents, surrounded by strong ocean currents that prevent trash from escaping once it arrives. Worldwide, there exist five major oceanic gyres and it is hypothesized by Eriksen and Cummins that all of these gyres will collect marine debris, much in the same way that the North Pacific does [Huffington Post]. You can see the locations in the above image. The North Atlantic gyre that SEA studied also contains the Sargasso Sea, so the plastic is mixed up with the seaweed that grows there.

Most depressingly, reports from the Pacific gyre indicate that fish are beginning to ingest the plastic as pieces get smaller and smaller. And Captain Charles Moore, who discovered the Pacific patch in the 1990s, says cleaning up so many pieces spread out so far would be an impossibly difficult and expensive task. Besides, if people don’t stop throwing away plastic, it wouldn’t do much good.

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Image: NOAA

An Italian court in Milan has just convicted three Google executives of criminal charges. The court found them liable for an online video that they did not appear it, film, or have any role in posting, and which the company promptly removed when complaints about it were raised. The Italian court, however, still held them responsible for the video and sentenced them to suspended six-month sentences. Experts say the case sets a dangerous precedent, and could dramatically restrict online content in Italy.

Thousands of people post videos each hour on YouTube and Google Video, and various court cases have questioned whether Google, which owns YouTube, is liable for every video that infringes on someone’s copyright or is deemed offensive to its viewers. Google has argued that it’s only liable if offensive material stays up on its site despite complaints against it, and says that if the company takes complained-about videos down, it has no legal liability–like the rules it faces under U.S. law. Italy apparently disagrees.

The case pertains to a video that was posted to Google Video in 2006 showing four youths in Turin bulling a 17-year old who suffers either from Down Syndrome or autism (reports vary). The video received 12,000 views before the Italian police brought it to Google’s notice. The company immediately took it down, and Google then helped the cops find the person who uploaded it, resulting in the identification (and school expulsion) of the four bullies. But the Google executives, who include David Drummond, Google’s senior vice president and chief legal officer, and George Reyes, Google’s former chief financial officer, were charged and convicted for criminal defamation and a failure to protect the privacy of the bullied teen.

Google plans to appeal the conviction but worries that it sets a bad legal precedent–none of the accused directly handled the video, and the video had been removed after Google received complaints; however, the prosecutors claim that Google should never have allowed the video to be posted in the first place [Mashable].

In a post on its corporate blog, Google wrote that this conviction attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built, and argued that the person who uploaded the offensive video was responsible for its content. The company declared: If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear [The Official Google Blog].

Internet analysts say the Italy conviction implies that Google must start pre-screening all videos uploaded to YouTube before allowing them to go live–or at least it must start doing so in Italy if the convinction stands. That site sees more than 20 hours of video being posted every minute worldwide, which would make the screening process if not entirely impossible, then extremely cumbersome and expensive.

This isn’t the first time Italy has cracked down severely on a tech company. Its tax authorities have demanded that eBay should hand over information about its customers relating to goods sold on the site between 2004 and 2007; Yahoo was fined €12,000 last year after Milan’s public prosecutor demanded information about private emails sent by suspected criminals; and the Italian interior ministry has required Facebook to hand over personal information about users who created groups said to “glorify” Mafia bosses, and again last October over a group said to promote the violent death of Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister [Guardian].

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Image: Flickr/Manfrys

Here is a question for the ages: who would win in a Treknobabble fight, Wil Wheaton or Sheldon Cooper?

My first thought was that Sheldon might trip up because he is so well-versed in physics that it might actually impede his ability to analyze Trek science. However, we know that his analysis of comic books is fearsome in its depth and grasp of minutiae.

Wil, on the other hand, ate my lunch when I attacked him over Trek physics. In fact, I still haven’t forgiven him. So I should add the obligatory CURSE YOU WIL WHEATON!

Which makes me think that perhaps I should side with Sheldon, if only because we have both been bested by Wil. But sadly, in this case, my skepticism has me at an impasse. I simply don’t know.

So, BABloggees, what say you? Would the Enterprising young Wheaton outmaneuver the Big Banger Sheldon? Perhaps we’ll find out soon enough.

Tip o’ the nacelle to Francis Fletcher.

Augmented reality, the blending of real-life environments with computer generated imagery, has provided a bunch of creative applications, including a virtual tattoo. Now, the same technology can be used to identify virtual strangers.

A new app called Recognizr, developed by the Swedish mobile software firm The Astonishing Tribe, lets you find out more about a person–including what social networks they are on and in some cases their phone numbers–simply by pointing your camera-phone at them (see video below). The app works by mashing up the latest in facial recognition software, cloud computing, and augmented reality.

But before privacy advocates storm the offices of The Astonishing Tribe, we should note that the app only works on people who have opted in to the system. People have to sign onto this service, submit a profile, and upload a picture to be picked up by Recognizr. So you needn’t scramble to delete all your pictures on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, since Recognizr works only by mining information off its own database.

Describing how the app works, PopSci writes:

Face recognition software creates a 3-D model of the person’s mug and sends it across a server where it’s matched with an identity in the database. A cloud server conducts the facial recognition … and sends back the subject’s name as well as links to any social networking sites the person has provided access to.

The app will work with iPhones and phones running on the Android operating system.

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Image: Recognizer

Is this the face of an alien?

According to a new study, the answer is probably yes.

That’s Palomar 5, a globular cluster very roughly 75,000 light years away. Globulars are ball-shaped collections of hundreds of thousands of stars, and surround many large galaxies, kinda like bees swarming around a hive. There are at least 150 orbiting our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

The question is, how many of these formed here, along with our galaxy 12 billion years ago, and how many formed around other galaxies and were subsequently subsumed into us?

The Milky Way is a giant galaxy, and we know it got that way by eating — astronomers call it cannibalizing, because we’re zombie fans — smaller galaxies. We see the remnants of some of those meals as streams of stars that got torn out of the galaxies as they got digested, and sometimes we see the residual core of stars from the galaxy itself still somewhat intact — indigestible bit of chewing gum, you might say.

So the astronomers in the new study asked themselves: just how many of the Milky Way’s globular clusters formed along with the original Milky Way, and how many came from other galaxies that were eaten? The answer they found was surprisingly high: it may be as many as 1/4 of them!

They examined what’s called the Age-Metallicity Relation in the clusters, a way of figuring out the age of a cluster by looking at the relative numbers of heavy elements in it (astronomers call any element heavier than helium a metal). What they found is that most of the globular clusters in and around the Milky Way are about the same age as the galaxy itself: 12 billion years, give or take. However, quite a few are much younger, by several billion years.

Some we already know about, and are associated with known cannibal events (the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy upon which we’re currently dining, for one). But still, something like 30 – 50 clusters still remain that are too young to have been native to the Milky Way — and Palomar 5 (in the picture above) is among them.

This implies something like 6 – 8 galaxies have been eaten by our galaxy to make it what it is today. That’s pretty neat. I’ve often wondered just how many galaxies were sacrificed to make the Milky Way one of the biggest galaxies in the Universe — and it really is; while there are plenty that are bigger, and some that are a lot bigger, we’re still in the upper echelons of the cosmos if you rate galaxies by sheer size and mass. Now it looks like we had to eat a half dozen less fortunate galaxies to get where we are today.

And we’re not done yet. In a billion years, maybe two, it’s likely that the Milky Way and the massive Andromeda galaxy will collide — perhaps not directly at first, but over hundreds of millions of years they’ll merge into one even more gianter galaxy, potentially igniting a burst of star formation and tossing around stars like bugs in the wind. We may wind up consuming the score of dwarf galaxies in our own Local Group as well.

What I find interesting is that the Sun will still be around then; it won’t go red giant on us for another few billion years after the galactic merger. We may very well get a pretty good view of the coming cosmic collision. Well, maybe not us in particular, but whoever’s still around in a billion years. What a view they’ll have!

Image credit: Sloan Digital Sky Survey