Author: Discover Main Feed

Dinosaurs and explosives—science stories don’t get much cooler than this.

Researchers in Utah have excavated two complete and two partial skulls of a dino called Abydosaurus mcintoshi, a 105-million-year-old sauropod, which the scientists think might have descended from the brachiosaurus family. “It is amazing. You can hold the skull in your hands and look into the eyes of something that lived a very long time ago” [USA Today], says paleontologist Brooks Britt, co-author of the study that appeared in the journal Naturwissenschaften.

Click through the photo gallery for more pictures from the dig, and for the whole story.

Image: Brigham Young University

A new website by NASA features videos, images, and articles about climate change. A Warming World has been designed to help all of us understand what warming means and how it impacts our world. Here’s a sample:

Each year, scientists at NASA’S Goddard Institute for Space Studies analyze global temperature data. The past year, 2009, tied as the second warmest year since global instrumental temperature records began 130 years ago. Worldwide, the mean temperature was 0.57°C (1.03°F) warmer than the 1951-1980 base period. And January 2000 to December 2009 came out as the warmest decade on record.

Everyone is linking to this Guardian article collecting advice from fiction writers. My favorite list comes from Richard Ford — not that I necessarily agree with every rule:

1 Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer’s a good idea.

2 Don’t have children.

3 Don’t read your reviews.

4 Don’t write reviews. (Your judgment’s always tainted.)

5 Don’t have arguments with your wife in the morning, or late at night.

6 Don’t drink and write at the same time.

7 Don’t write letters to the editor. (No one cares.)

8 Don’t wish ill on your colleagues.

9 Try to think of others’ good luck as encouragement to yourself.

10 Don’t take any shit if you can ­possibly help it.

There’s an entire blog devoted to listing the daily routines of writers. It’s a funny business — the people who do it can’t imagine doing anything else, but they still rely on all sorts of gimmicks to keep their work flowing smoothly. Maybe that’s part of the difference between styling one’s self as a writer and actually writing.

The Earth is warming up. That’s a fact. Denialists will deny (and no doubt will amp up the noise in the comments below) but the truth is the Earth has warmed on average over a degree Fahrenheit in the past century or so, and the past decade, 2000 – 2009, was the warmest on record.

NASA is not taking this lightly. Our space agency has a fleet of satellites in orbit which examine the Earth, taking its temperature and measuring the effects of this global rise in heat. They have a website called A Warming World, which does a really good job discussing the reality of global warming, and debunking some of the bigger claims of the denialists.

A video they put online discusses things like how changing solar input might affect the Earth, how much of this energy from the Sun is reflected, and how much is trapped. It’s done simply, elegantly, and with excellent graphics that show just how the Earth is warming up.

They’ve also put online a devastating series of images depicting what’s happening on our warming world. Here’s one of the Bering Glacier, taken by Landsat 7 in 2002:

In the past century, rising temperatures have caused this glacier’s terminus to retreat 12 km (7+ miles), and the ice has thinned by several hundred meters. They have many other images there as well showing what’s going on.

If I were to say what the biggest problem we have with all this, it’s that, ironically, while the warming is happening rapidly on a geological timescale, and too rapidly for us to wait much longer to take action, the changes are happening too slowly to shake people out of their complacence. I’m certainly not wishing the effects were accelerated! But it’s far too easy for political maneuvering and loud noise-making to distract people from a very real and very serious issue.

I have a lot of confidence in humans. We’re smart, and even better, we’re clever. There are solutions to global warming, and a lot of them are engineering and technology-driven — I think we can advance technology greatly while actually fighting the climate change. But we also have to change our behavior, and part of that is facing reality and accepting that this really is happening, and that we have to get off our fat cans and do something about it.

The noise machine will rattle cages and distract and sling mud and do a grave disservice to everyone. But I’ll be here to fight them along with thousands and thousands of other scientists. And you know what? I have a hope: if we must battle over this for the next hundred years, we’ll have a nice, cool world in which to do it.

Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

My laziness notwithstanding, I will not be outdone by this timely post of Carl’s. Participants in this virtual book party, sponsored by the American Institute of Biological Sciences, may stand the chance to win a copy of Carl’s The Tangled Bank–but I have just confirmed that 3-5 publisher’s copies of Unscientific America will also be on offer.

Let’s quote Carl on all the event details, so I don’t have to try to write them up better than he does:

What’s a virtual book party you ask? In this case, fellow Discover blogger Chris Mooney and I will each give a 15 minute talk about our new books. From the slipper-and-pajama’d comfort of your home or office (if you wear slippers and pajamas at the office), you can listen to us speak and behold our slide presentations in real time. After we’re through, there will be time for a virtual conversation between you and us. The event (which will last about an hour) is hosted by the American Institute of Biological Sciences.

Carl speaks first, then me. And my slide show won’t have the usual bells and whistles. But, sign up now, I hear they are going fast….

Many animals have evolved camouflage, but nobody quite pulls it off as beautifully as the octopus and its tentacled cousin the cuttlefish. These invertebrates, which belong to a group called cephalopods, are covered in microscopic pigment organs that they can squeeze and stretch to take on the patterns around them. They can curl their tentacles to assume different shapes, and they can even change the texture of their skin to bumpy or smooth, as necessity demands.

Nobody knows the tricks of cephalopods better than Roger Hanlon, a biologist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. As I wrote in this New York Times profile of Hanlon, he has documented their powers of disguise both in the wild and in his lab. You can see some of the cephalopods in action in this Times video I narrated, as well as in these videos at Hanlon’s web site. Hanlon has carefully documented how cephalopods can melt away into their backgrounds; he’s also shown that male cuttlefishes can disguise themselves as females to sneak past bigger males to get a chance to mate. There’s still a lot Hanlon has yet to study about cephalopod camouflage, though; many of the most spectacular displays of shape-shifting are one-offs that Hanlon or a wildlife videographer happened to catch on a few seconds of video.

The video shown here is the latest addition to the repertoire of cepahlopod camouflage. As Hanlon and his colleagues write in a paper to be published in Biological Bulletin, the Atlantic longarm octopus (Macrotritopus defilippi) does an uncanny impression of a flounder.

Hanlon first saw this trick before he actually knew what it was. In the early 1980s, he captured a young Atlantic longarm octopus and reared it in a tank at Texas A&M University. It was the first time anyone had ever paid close attention to the biology of this obscure creature, which lives on sandy expanses of the Caribbean sea floor. While observing the octopus, Hanlon noticed that sometimes it would flatten out its tentacles and swim close to the bottom of the tank. At the time he didn’t know what to make of it.

In 2000 wildlife photographers took pictures of Atlantic shortarm octopuses in their natural habitat and suggested that they took on the strange shape to mimic flounders. Four years later, Hanlon took another picture that showed the octopus not just flat against the sea floor, but assuming the pattern of the surrounding sand–a trick that flounder use as well. The next year Hanlon and his colleagues spent 51 hours diving of the coast of the island of Saba searching for the octopuses on the sand plains. They managed to film one animal apparently pretending to be a flounder. And since then, professional photographers have supplied Hanlon with still more videos.

Hanlon and his colleagues have compared the footage of the octopus to footage of the peacock flounder, which lives in the same waters. The similarities are uncanny. Flounders hug the sandy bottom as they swim, even following the sand’s ripples. So do octopuses. The octopuses swim in the same short bouts as the flounder, and at about the same speed. They form their tentacles into a sheet-like mass with the same body outline as the flounder. The big difference between the octopus and the flounder is the way they blend into the background. The flounder are relatively slow at matching their surroundings, while the octopuses can change their skin quickly and with great precision. If there are white rocks scattered around on the sandy plain, Hanlon has noticed, a stationary octopus will produce a white spot on its body as well.

The Atlantic longarm octopus is not the only octopus to pretend to be a flounder. On the other side of the world, off the coast of Indonesia, Hanlon and his colleagues have documented two other species that pull off the same trick. (Here’s a video of one of the Indonesian species.) Pretending to be a flounder is such a useful strategy that three distantly related species of octopus have independently evolved it.

With flounder-mimicking octopuses now firmly established in the Atlantic Ocean as well as the Pacific, it’s high time to ask what is so great about flounders? Sandy plains are dangerous places for soft-bodied octopuses. Predators can spot them as they move across the open expanses. It’s possible that octopuses are not mimicking flounders per se, but are just taking advantage of the same kind of camouflage. But it’s also possible that small fish that do spot the octopus may leave it alone because it looks like a flounder. While a small fish could easily take a bite out of a soft, fleshy octopus tentacle, a tough, scaly flounder would pose a threat.

Oh, FFSMS. After countless tests showing them useless, articles about them being useless, challenges from Randi and others to prove they are not useless, and the company head arrested for suspicion of fraud because they’re useless, Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki has ordered that the (useless) magic wand dowsing rod bomb-sniffers should still be utilized.

FFSMS.

At least al-Maliki wanted them tested. Still. This angers me:

The survey, ordered by Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, found the British device, known as ADE651, generally worked. However some of the gadgets, found to be ineff­ective, would be replaced.

A government spokesman later said only 50% of the devices worked.

“Replaced?” With what, fairy dust? Unicorn horns? And I’d love to know how those tests were done. I bet it would’ve been cheaper to send a dozen of the wands to Randi and let him take a look. And if they did work, not only would Iraq get the wands back, but Randi would include a check for a million bucks which they could use to buy more of the kits.

I have to say, it’s been a good year for skeptics, but we clearly have a long way to go. Thailand and Iraq are both relying on provably worthless junk to find bombs, and what will happen instead is that those bombs will find people. Hundreds of them, thousands. That’s what happens when we turn their backs on reality and instead rely on superstition and antiscience. It’s way too late in this world to do such a thing, and when people in power do it, a lot of lives will be lost.

“We would like to report our observations upon a new gastrointestinal syndrome, which we shall refer to by the acronym HAFE (high altitude flatus expulsion). This phenomenon was most recently witnessed by us during an expedition in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado, with similar experiences during excursions past. The syndrome is strictly associated with ascent, and is characterized by an increase in both the volume and the frequency of the passage of flatus, which spontaneously occurs while climbing to altitudes of 11,000 feet or greater. The eructations (known to veteran back-packers as “Rocky Mountain barking spiders”) do not appear to vary with exercise, but may well be closely linked to diet. The fact that the syndrome invariably abated on descent leads us to postulate a mechanism whereby the victim is afflicted by the expansion of colonic gas at the decreased atmospheric pressure of high altitude. This is somewhat analogous to the rapid intravascular expansion of nitrogen which afflicts deep-sea divers and triggers decompression illness. While not as catastrophic as barotrauma nor as debilitating as HAPE (high altitude pulmonary edema), HAFE nonetheless represents a significant inconvenience to those who prefer to hike in company.”

Thanks to John for today’s ROFL!

Photo: flickr/.hln.

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Skeptic and journalist Simon Singh appeared before the High Court today in a hearing about accusations of libel. This case is critical for journalism, medicine, science, and skepticism, and you can get the background info on it in an earlier post I wrote. But basically, Simon was sued by the British Chiropractic Association over an article he wrote in The Guardian, and Simon has appealed, which is what today’s case was about.

His lawyer and that of the BCA presented their cases in front of three judges. According to reports by Jack of Kent and Crispian Jago (NSFW language in the latter), things went pretty well, though of course we can’t know until the judges actually rule. According to both reports, though, the judges seemed far more sympathetic to Simon’s arguments than to the BCA’s.

However, as Jack of Kent wrote:

Nonetheless, Simon may still lose: the Court of Appeal may decide that even if the High Court ruling is incorrect, it is not so incorrect that they should disturb the judgment.

In other words, it seems that they may disagree with the original ruling, but may feel it wasn’t so wrong that it’s worth the effort to overturn.

I of course hope they do. And once this case is won, we can then move on to the far, far bigger picture: reforming the UK’s horrible and draconian libel laws, which are unfair, and I think reasonable to characterize as backward and medieval. The way it’s set up, the burden of proof is on the accused to show what they said was not libel, rather than on the accuser to show that it is libel. That’s ridiculous, and what it winds up doing is making it hard for journalists to fairly write about many issues, because they may be scared of being sued and having to spend literally millions of dollars in defense.

That’s why I strongly support the reform effort.

I’ll be keeping my eyes on this, and you can stay on it as well by checking in on the blogs of Jack of Kent and Crispian Jago as well.

Forgetting an umbrella or the location of a parking spot may be annoying, but scientists have suggested that for healthy brains to function well, they need to forget. By forgetting, scientists say, the brain makes space for new memories. In an intriguing breakthrough, researchers from the United States and China have identified the protein responsible for forgetting in fruit flies. By tweaking a protein called Rac, researchers were able to speed up and slow down the erasure of painful memories [New Scientist]. The findings were published in the journal Cell.

Scientists have been unable to pinpoint why people forget. Some have suggested that new memories are ephemeral and vanish over time, while others thought that interference caused earlier short-term memories to be overridden as new information comes in [Science Daily]. While both of these notions seem to suggest that forgetting is a passive mechanism, the new study suggests that forgetting is far more active, and that Rac works to inhibit the formation of more long-term memories.

The scientists studied fruit flies that were exposed to two fly-repellent odors, the second of which came with an electric shock. The flies quickly learned to head to the odor that didn’t cause them pain. Then the scientists switched the set-up, linking the first odor to the shock instead. Regular flies quickly noted the change, discarding the old memory of which odor came with a shock and learning to head towards the now-safe second odor. But when the experiment was repeated after the memory-eroding protein [Rac] was blocked, there was utter confusion. The flies had not erased their first memory, and had made a second memory. Unable to pick which odor to fly toward, they zigzagged back and forth [The New York Times].

The researchers determined that when Rac was switched on, newly formed memories faded fast, allowing new memories to come in and solidify. When Rac was switched off in the fruit flies, new memories lingered longer, extending from the normal limit of just a few hours to more than a day.

The scientists next hope to test the effects of meddling with the proteins in mice. If this mechanism holds true in mammals, it could shed light on the molecular basis of forgetting in humans [New Scientist], as humans also have the Rac protein. The researchers suggest that the identification of this protein could potentially help create techniques to enhance cherished memories or to forget painful episodes, which could be a boon to those who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Until now approaches to erasing unwanted memories have largely focused on interfering with the laying-down of memories, rather than our natural ability to forget [New Scientist].

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DISCOVER: 33. How to Erase a Single Memory
DISCOVER:How Much of Your Memory Is True?
DISCOVER: Disremembrance of Things Past

Image: flickr / Image Editor

On November 21, 2009, the Cassini spacecraft sliced past Saturn’s moon Enceladus, shaving the iceball at a distance of 1600 km (1000 miles). From that distance, the view was astonishing…

It’s been known for some time that the south pole of Enceladus is lousy with geysers, erupting water into space (though the ultimate source of the water is still a bit of a mystery). But this new pass shows 30 geysers, 20 more than were previously seen! One major geyser also appears to have waned a bit since the last pass, showing that not only is stuff going on, but things are changing, too.

This mosaic of the surface of Enceladus overlays a high-res optical image with thermal hot-spots. You can see that the hottest parts — which are actually at -90° C (-140° F), so I guess “hot” is in the (frozen) eye of the beholder — line up along a huge fracture in the moon’s surface. The fracture is called Baghdad Sulcus and is one of the places on the moon erupting water geysers. The fracture is about 500 meters (roughly 1/4 mile) deep, and this image shows about a 40 km (25 mile) swath along it. There’s evidence of particles from the geysers re-falling here, and also house-sized icy blocks that may be rubble that has been seismically shaken and settled downslope.

There’s a lot of science in those images, and in the others returned from that close pass. But I think my favorite from these is one that may also have scientific value, but, like almost everything Cassini sends back, is perhaps more striking for its artistry.

That’s a crescent Enceladus, replete with geysers, and its parent planet Saturn in the foreground. Wow, that’s pretty. I love how gray Enceladus looks and how much brighter Saturn is. I was thrown for a moment; Enceladus has a reflectivity of nearly 100%, meaning it reflects nearly all the light hitting it, while Saturn only reflects 30-50% of the light that hits it (depending on how you measure it). But this depends on the viewing geometry! Enceladus is thin crescent, so the light is hitting it at a very low angle. A lot of the light hitting the moon is sent straight back toward the source (the Sun), so not much of that light gets sent off in other directions. It’s not that Enceladus is intrinsically fainter than Saturn, it’s just that the light is reflected off in another direction, and not towards Cassini in this image.

As in life, sometimes what you see depends on how you look.

Cassini has been orbiting Saturn since 2004, and in all that time it has not disappointed. It continues to return a veritable bounty of information about Saturn and its fleet of moons. If you want to stay on top of Cassini news, subscribe to the email list, and follow imaging team leader Carolyn Porco on Twitter!

For everyone out there who’d like to hear a little less of their amorous neighbors, not to mention their kid badly playing the violin, there may be hope: Hong Kong scientists have devised a delightfully simple material made of latex and plastic that they say could one day reduce the racket at noisy places like airports. The paper appears in Applied Physics Letters.

Zhiyu Yang and colleagues devised a system of thin tiles that, when assembled into a large sheet, could cancel out noise in a huge range, including the bass frequencies that tend to breach the walls of our apartments and houses with ease. Each panel is just three millimeters thick, and less than half an inch wide, with the weighted plastic button in the middle. When sound waves hit the panel, the membrane and weighted buttons resonate at difference frequencies. “The inner part of the membrane vibrates in opposite phase to the outer region,” says Yang. That means the sound waves cancel each other out and no sound gets through [New Scientist]. The large pieces of foam that insulate most modern houses can block out many sounds, but unfortunately, low-frequency sound waves usually will penetrate them. That’s because bass sounds in the air can be several yards in wavelength and get longer in a solid. Creating a thin soundproofing material that can block low-frequency sounds has proven extremely difficult. For instance, a thin latex membrane by itself cannot resonate at the right frequency to either absorb or reflect the bass rumble of a jet taking off [Popular Science].

But, Yang says, each thin layer can be tuned to cancel sound waves of particular frequencies by changing the weight of the button. So several layers stacked on top of one another could create a surface impervious to sounds at a wide range. And the panel’s weight is equivalent to ceramic bathroom tiles, “although it’s slightly thicker at 15 millimetres”, he adds [New Scientist].

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This Thursday at 2 pm EST, I will be taking part in a virtual book party. The slots are filling up, but there are still some left. Register here.

What’s a virtual book party you ask? In this case, fellow Discover blogger Chris Mooney and I will each give a 15 minute talk about our new books. From the slipper-and-pajama’d comfort of your home or office (if you wear slippers and pajamas at the office), you can listen to us speak and behold our slide presentations in real time. After we’re through, there will be time for a virtual conversation between you and us.

The event (which will last about an hour) is hosted by the American Institute of Biological Sciences. They’ll be giving away copies of The Tangled Bank to two lucky audience members. Hope to some Loom readers can join us!

Pediatricians have declared that the trusty ol’ hot dog is in need of a makeover, setting the stage for one of the biggest engineering challenges known to man and causing some to worry, “Is it the end of the hot dog as we know it?”

The cylindrical sausage has been deemed a choking hazard by the American Academy of Pediatrics, which published an official statement on choking risks in the journal Pediatrics that included concerns about the snack clogging a child’s wind pipe. The pediatricians pointed out that 17 percent of all food-related asphyxiations among children are caused by hot dogs.

Talking about the proposal for a choke-proof hot dog, a doctor explains to USA Today:

“If you were to take the best engineers in the world and try to design the perfect plug for a child’s airway, it would be a hot dog,” says statement author Gary Smith, director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. “I’m a pediatric emergency doctor, and to try to get them out once they’re wedged in, it’s almost impossible.”

But Smith admitted that he doesn’t know how the sausage could be redesigned to be safer, adding somewhat lamely that he’s “certain that some savvy inventor will find a way.”

The doctors didn’t just suggest that the wiener needs a design re-think, they also asked that the snack come with a warning label. But the hot dog redesign debate got, uh, hotter when the president of the National Hot Dog & Sausage Council, Janet Riley, retorted that most of the sausage packages sold in stores already come with some sort of a warning label, advising parents to cut the hot dogs into small pieces before feeding them to their kids.

And then pediatrician Alan Greene, author of Feeding Baby Green, found a bigger fault with the pediatricians’ concerns over the high-fat, high-sodium, preservative-packed food item. He told USA Today: “The last thing we need is to redesign candy and junk food with cool shapes, so we can give them to kids even younger.”

So, no star-shaped mini hot dogs anytime soon? Damn.

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Image: Wikimedia

Open Laboratory 2009, an anthology of science blogging goodness, is out! Get your copy now. (Full disclosure–I’m in there.)

It’s a big year for South Africa: Less than four months remain until the first matches of the World Cup, when much of the planet’s attention will turn to the country. But being under the spotlight of international sport makes it difficult to hide a country’s less glamorous bits, as China and Canada have found out trying to shield pollution and addiction problems from the glare of the last couple Olympiads. In June, the microscope will turn to South Africa and its ongoing AIDS crisis.

This month one of the country’s health leaders has renewed his call for blanket HIV testing and anti-retroviral drug dispersal to all patients, which he says can stop the AIDS epidemic once and for all–without having to find a vaccine against the virus or a cure for the disease.

Brian Williams’s idea isn’t new. The former World Health Organization figure, who is now one of South Africa’s top health officials, came out with a paper more than a year ago explaining his model for how effective universal testing and immediate therapy could be. But this week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in San Diego he expounded on his proposal: “The epidemic of HIV is really one of the worst plagues of human history…. I hope we can get to the starting line in one to two years and get complete coverage of patients in five years. Maybe that’s being optimistic, but we’re facing Armageddon” [The Guardian].

The anti-retrovirals given to HIV-positive people have saved millions of lives, Williams says, but have done little to stop transmission, partly because of how many people don’t know they have HIV. Facing such a tall order, Williams is optimistic. If a full-on testing and treatment project were to begin today, he says we could stop the transmission of the disease within five years. If patients take [anti-retrovirals] when they should, the amount of virus in their bodies can fall by 10,000 times, to a level at which they are extremely unlikely to pass the virus on [The Guardian].

However, he knows the price of testing and treating everyone. The cost in South Africa alone would be $3 billion to $4 billion per year, he said. But the plan would save money from the first day because of all of the people today who have to be hospitalized, and because of all of the young people who die in the prime of their lives, he said [CNN]. South Africa already has the world’s largest program of giving out anti-retroviral drugs to treat AIDS, because the country has the world’s largest caseload.

While more health officials consider Williams’ idealistic strategy, he and his colleagues stress that it should be done in conjunction with ongoing research into new treatments and practical measures, like South Africa’s efforts to beef up its condom supply in preparation for the footballers and their supporters who will descend on the country this summer.

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Image: flickr / troismarteaux

“More science, less fiction” is the message from the scientific community to Hollywood, even as the sci-fi film Avatar continues to rake in cash at the box office. Physics professor Sidney Perkowitz took to the stage at last week’s meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science to encourage more science in movies, but also to beg filmmakers not to bungle up their facts. For example, a movie should only be permitted to break one law of physics, he suggested.

Perkowitz, a member of the Science and Entertainment Exchange set up to advise Hollywood, singled out the giant space bugs in the film Starship Troopers for special scrutiny. He pointed out that if a real bug was scaled up to the size of the on-screen insects, it would collapse under its own weight. Perkowitz has come up with a set of scientific guidelines for Hollywood, and also encourages filmmakers to fact-check their scripts in a more deliberate manner so that audiences don’t dismiss a movie as absurd and stay away from the box office.

The Guardian reports:

The proposals are intended to curb the film industry’s worst abuses of science by confining scriptwriters to plotlines that embrace the suspension of disbelief but stop short of demanding it in every scene.

Perkotwitz hopes the new guidelines will prevent studio execs from making script snafus like those in the movie The Core, in which scientists drill to the center of the Earth to detonate a nuclear device aimed at restarting the rotation of the planet’s core. Perkotwitz said the science in the film “was out to lunch,” and blamed its obviously unsound premise for its box office failure. Many scientists have noted that the idea that the Earth’s core could stop spinning is deeply implausible, and have also reminded audiences that anyone who traveled to the core would be instantly vaporized by the heat.

The Tom Hanks vehicle Angels and Demons also got an “F” from Perkowitz for its science. In that movie, Hanks’ character, Robert Langdon, has to protect the Vatican from going kaboom. The weapon in question is an antimatter bomb, confined in a glass vial by a magnetic field produced by a small battery. Perkowitz told The Guardian: “The amount of antimatter they had was more than we will make in a million years of running a high-energy particle collider…. You can’t contain it using an iPod battery.”

TV shows that scored low on the science-o-meter included Heroes, for its dubious claims on invisibility. Meanwhile, Lost did well for its depiction of time travel.

And how did James Cameron’s visual extravaganza about blue-skinned Na’avi flying about on multi-colored prehistoric-looking birds fare? Avatar was actually pretty good, according to Perkowitz, and joins films like Gattaca on his list of movies that “reflect real issues of science and society, such as genetic engineering.”

Related Content:
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Image: Starship Troopers

Recent reports on the health benefits of fish oil sound almost too good to be true. The omega-3 fatty acids that it contains have been shown to reduce the risk of heart attacks and strokes and slow the formation of plaques in the arteries, and they may also lower blood pressure. Accordingly, the American Heart Association now recommends that healthy people eat fatty fish at least twice a week (individuals with heart disease should consume 1,000 milligrams of omega-3s per day and may want to discuss capsule supplements with their doctors). The latest studies go even further, demonstrating that the benefits of omega-3s extend beyond the heart and exploring exactly how these fatty acids do their good work in our bodies.

Some people cannot learn.

Thai army chief General Anupong Paojinda is defending the use of what are essentially magic wands to detect bombs, even though the specific device they use has been tested repeatedly and failed to perform. This device is essentially the same as the ones used in Iraq and Afghanistan which have been proven worthless, and for which the head of the manufacturing company, Jim McCormick, has been arrested for suspicion of fraud.

Paojinda is convinced the dowsing rods work, even though it’s little more than an antenna glued to a plastic box. In the meantime, thousands of people are dying in bomb attacks in Thailand near the Malaysian border. Incredibly, the devices cost millions of dollars, when it would be far cheaper and far more effective to employ sniffing dogs at the checkpoints.

Antiscience kills. You might think that dowsing rods are a cute diversion or at worst a waste of money, but in fact believing in them is leading directly to the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of people across the world.

Tip o’ the crystal pendulum to BABloggees Claude Works and Jimmy Reynolds.

Last fall, I described a book I was highly anticipating called The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. And unless you’ve been hiding under a rock somewhere, you’ve no doubt already read excerpts and phenomenal reviews, seen it covered on television, heard Rebecca on air, and watched it climb the New York Times bestseller list during these first weeks since publication. All of the praise is more than deserved, and I would add that the story of Henrietta Lacks, her family, the immortal HeLa cell line, and the many dimensions to the story that Rebecca does such an extraordinary job of reporting, may just be one of the greatest true stories ever told.

Henrietta’s life wasn’t easy. She lost her parents by the age of four and worked hard alongside her cousins on a tobacco farm while facing the challenge of growing up as an African American woman in the south. After marrying young and having five children, Henrietta died at age 31 from cervical cancer. But around the time of her diagnosis, cancer cells from her cervix—famously known around the world as HeLa cells—were taken from her tumor to be used in research without her knowledge or consent.

HeLa cells were the first living human cells to be successfully grown in culture. They were distributed to scientists around the world and led to the vaccine for polio and many other diseases. HeLa taught scientists about chromosomes and genetic diseases like Down syndrome. They were launched into space to observe how space travel would affect human cells. They were inundated with toxins to understand cell response to different substances. They led to advances such as in vitro fertilization and helped win many Nobel Prizes. Over time, HeLa cells were cultured and copied and shipped and sold so many times, it’s estimated combined they would weigh over 50 million metric tons (equal to at least 100 Empire State Buildings).

Henrietta’s family was not told any of this for years. Her children and husband did not hear how their mother’s cells revolutionized medicine over and over as they were tested by researchers for seemingly ambiguous reasons. For-profit companies made billions off Henrietta’s cells, while those she cared about most often couldn’t even afford healthcare.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is about the life, death, and legacy of one of history’s most important individuals who all but lost her identity. Rebecca elegantly shares her true story which deals with science, ethics, and equality. The book spans nearly a century, and reflects the changing landscape of medicine, and the good, bad, and ugly side of research.

Most of all, it’s a human story that touches all of us. It’s beautiful, poignant, interdisciplinary, and should be required reading for every high school student.

I will have more to say about this wonderful book soon, but for now I leave readers with a single suggestion: Read it.