Author: Discover Main Feed

Following this discussion thread at the CFI/Point of Inquiry forums, I’ve decided to announce my show’s guest a week early from now on, and call for audience questions for him/her. I’ll take a sampling from those questions that appear on the forums, and ask them on the air.

The guest for Friday is going to be Penn State University climatologist Michael Mann, and we’ll be talking about the unprecedented wave of recent attacks on climate research–and climate scientists. So I am sure there will be many, many questions that folks will come up with. Don’t leave them in comments here–although comments are open. Leave them on this CFI forum thread if you want me to consider them. (Note that I believe you’ll be required to register over there.)

Michael E. Mann is Director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State, and author of the famous “hockey stick” study, as well as dozens of other peer reviewed papers. He’s also a contributor to RealClimate.org, and is the author, with Lee R. Kump, of Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming:

So any questions for Michael Mann? If so, leave them here–and they may just make their way into the interview!

Also, compose your questions sooner rather than later, as we’ll be recording fairly early on this week…..

A year ago this month, George Will wrote a howler of a column in the Washington Post about global warming, loaded with scientific errors and profoundly illogical arguments. It would not have survived even the most perfunctory fact-checking–despite claims from the Washington Post that his columns go through a “multi-layered fact checking process.” In subsequent months, Will has continued to offer new climate howlers, and this Sunday he provided us all with a dubious one-year birthday gift.

In Will’s latest piece, he yet again declares global warming a construction of hysterical climate scientists who, in his words, “compound their delusions of intellectual adequacy with messiah complexes.” This time, he claims that climate scientists themselves are finally confessing that it’s all been a whole lot of hooey.

Will backs up this claim with a link to a BBC interview last week with Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia. A BBC journalist asked Jones questions, some of which had been submitted by unnamed climate skeptics, including this one:

Q: Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?

A: Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.

This statement then got run through a sausage grinder run by journalists who are apparently both innumerate and illiterate. The Daily Mail declared,

“This week the unit’s former head Professor Phil Jones, performed a majot [sic] u-turn and admitted there had been no ’statistically significant’ global warming in the last 15 years.”

This version of the story, which makes Jones sound like he was making a confession under enhanced interrogation techniques, ended up on the Wall Street Journal editorial page and today in George Will’s column:

Global warming skeptics, too, have erred. They have said there has been no statistically significant warming for 10 years. Phil Jones, former director of Britain’s Climatic Research Unit, source of the leaked documents, admits it has been 15 years.

Will doesn’t tell us exactly who these skeptics are who claimed there had been no “statistically significant warming” for 10 years. I have no way of knowing if they in fact exist. Will himself has been loudly beating the “no-warming-for-a-long-time” drum over the past year. But he has backed up this claim simply by searching for the hottest single year in recent history. “According to statistics published by the World Meteorological Organization, there has not been a warmer year on record than 1998,” he wrote in April. Will continued to claim that global warming has stopped since 1998 even after the secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization wrote into the Post to explain why Will was wrong.

In his latest column, Will added the fancy, shiny new term “statistically significant” to his claim that there has been no global warming. But in doing so, he misleads his readers about what statistical significance actually means.

To see why, take a look at this graph. NASA scientists have been building it for years now, using weather records from around the world. Other graphs built by other teams of scientists have produced similar patterns. If you only look at a small vertical slice of the graph, you’ll see the temperature jump up and down and up again. That’s the sort of pattern you’d expect from a system as big and noisy as the planet’s climate. There are lots of sources of variations in the average global temperature, such as El Nino, a natural oscillation in the movement of heat in the oceans.

Sometimes these hopping temperatures don’t seem to go anywhere in particular. In other cases, there appear to be trends lurking under the noise. To test a hypothesis like this, scientists estimate how likely it would be for an apparent trend to be nothing more than the noise in the climate system. They then set a threshold for those odds.

In many branches of science, researchers set that threshold at 5%. In other words, if there’s only a 5% chance that a particular pattern of temperatures was the result of pure noise, scientists will call the trend “statistically significant.” If, on the other hand, the probability turns out to be 5.1%, the trend is still likely not to be the result of noise, but it’s not officially statistically significant.

“The boundary of .05 should be seen as a guide to interpretation, not as a clear boundary between truth and fiction,” Michael Whitlock and Dolph Schluter write in their book, The Analysis of Biological Data.

Just because a trend over a particular stretch of time doesn’t quite meet the 5% cutoff doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not real. It just means that scientists cannot reject the null hypothesis that noise is the cause. One way scientists can deal with this challenge is to look at longer sets of records. In the case of climate, looking at longer stretches of time reveals that there is indeed a real trend of warming temperatures. Just because the BBC’s questioner arbitrarily set the cutoff for analyzing the climate at 1995 doesn’t change that fact. Jones openly addressed this fact, but George Will conveniently omitted it.

Significance is one of the basic concepts of statistics that everybody should learn about. We rely on these concepts to judge not just the state of the climate, but also the meaning of clinical trials of drugs, the conclusions of psychology experiments that help reveal the inner workings of the mind, and all manner of other discoveries. In today’s column, George Will isn’t just making misleading statements in the service of trying to foster doubt about climate change. He’s also helping to muddle our collective scientific literacy. Why the editors of the Washington Post’s editorial page want to be a party to this is a mystery to me.

[See Skeptical Science and Tamino for more.]

GC/MS based identification of skunk spray maliciously deployed as “biological weapon” to harm civilians.

“Our laboratory has been asked to elucidate the origin of a strong “toxic smell” present in a prominent politician’s office, private house and motorcar. This stinky and pungent atmosphere has caused serious nausea and vomiting to several individuals. Urine samples were collected from the persons presenting symptoms of nausea for toxicological analysis. Drops, paper and cotton swabs of an oily liquid found at the implicated places were submitted by police to our laboratory for investigation… Several volatile sulphur-containing compounds have been identified with the HS-GC/MS system. Detailed examination of the spectra as well as GC/MS analysis of commercially available skunk secret allowed us to relate the identified compounds to those present in the defence spray of skunks. No health sequels were observed for any of the persons implicated in this case.”

Photo: flickr/artindeepkoma

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This week’s submission to the Science of Kissing Gallery features a special story that makes me smile. Steve Silberman is a science writer for Wired and other magazines, and his husband Keith is a middle-school science teacher in the Bay Area. This kiss took place during their marriage, which Steve describes in his piece Happily Ever After featured in the Shambhala Sun. Here’s an excerpt:

Suddenly Keith and I found ourselves at the flash point of a raging culture war. Did we have to call it marriage? Wasn’t that an unnecessary provocation for those who take that word to mean getting to the church on time? What about framing our commitment with a less confrontational term like “civil union?”

Certain words, however, have alchemical power. A humble noun or verb can become a transformative mantra. Embracing the word “marriage” had a subtle but profound effect on our relationship, like unlocking a door to a secret garden that only other married people know about. Now our job was to care for that garden together—to nourish it, weed it when necessary, and give it the compassion and space it needs to grow and flourish.

Read the full piece–and happy ending–here. Congratulations Steve and Keith!

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

My stance on climate change is clear: the scientific evidence that we’re getting warmer is overwhelming, and the most likely cause is that it’s human-produced. The first is fact, the second is a conclusion based on a lot of evidence.

Climategate showed us that the noise machine is in full swing; nothing in those emails takes away from the fact that there are multiple and independent lines of evidence that we’re warming up. And the talking heads on Fox and other right-wing media saying that the harsh winter is evidence against global warming shows how dumb of an argument they’re willing to make.

But it’s not just the stuffed shirts in the media making their own reality as they go along; some people in the government are trying to legislate it. Climate change deniers in both Utah and South Dakota have passed resolutions essentially condemning the science and reality of climate change. In Utah it was just a broadside at the science; in South Dakota it’s aimed at a “balanced teaching of global warming in the public schools.”

Yeah, sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Besides the creationist analogies, the South Dakota resolution sounds like something out of 1984:

WHEREAS, the earth has been cooling for the last eight years despite small increases in anthropogenic carbon dioxide;

Wrong! The Earth has been warming overall, and the last decade was the warmest on record, with records going back to 1880.

WHEREAS, there is no evidence of atmospheric warming in the troposphere where the majority of warming would be taking place;

Wrong! The troposphere is warming.

WHEREAS, historical climatological data shows without question the earth has gone through trends where the climate was much warmer than in our present age.

Yes, and the Earth went through a period of heavy bombardment from asteroids and comets a few hundred million years after it formed. Just because something happened once doesn’t make it safe.

WHEREAS, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but rather a highly beneficial ingredient for all plant life on earth. Many scientists refer to carbon dioxide as “the gas of life”;

Wow. I mean, wow. Let’s lock these guys in a room filled with CO₂ for an hour or two and see how much life is left in them. And I love the “many scientists” line. You know what? A whole lot more scientists call it a greenhouse gas.

Wow.

WHEREAS, more than 31,000 American scientists collectively signed a petition to President Obama stating: “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, or methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the earth’s climate…”

This petition has been thoroughly debunked before; it’s nothing more than an attempt to muddy the waters by deniers.

However, my absolute favorite part of the South Dakota resolution is this next bit. Are you sitting down? Good:

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED […]
(2) That there are a variety of climatological, meteorological, astrological, thermological, cosmological, and ecological dynamics that can affect world weather phenomena and that the significance and interrelativity of these factors is largely speculative; and

Wait, what? Did those guys in the South Dakota legislature actually say astrological?

Geez, no wonder they can’t figure out that global warming is real. They think they’re reading their horoscopes! It makes me wonder if they just want the planet to warm up so that their state has milder winters.

It angers me that the science of so many topics has been warped and mutilated by people with a political agenda. I have no such agenda, except to speak the truth as I see it. I make no money if global change is real, I get no power, no thrill. In fact, the idea of a substantially warmer planet scares me, if not for myself, then for my daughter and everyone destined to live in that environment.

The politicians who would vote yes on these resolutions are doing so out of a near-religious belief that global warming is not real — they’re the otter in that picture. Contacting them probably won’t help; I suspect that if every last constituent they had contacted them, they would still cleave to their beliefs.

But I urge people to write their congressional representatives anyway. And spread the word; if these two states deny reality this blatantly, then others will follow. Bet on it.

So:

And if other states follow suit, they may doom all of us.

Cecilia writes, “I am working on my PhD in wildlife population genetics, and I can trace my passion for my research to a moment when I was in elementary school and we learned about the extinct dodo bird from Mauritius Island. At first, I could not understand what “extinct” meant, but as the concept sunk in that I would never see this bird, and no one else would ever see it again, I felt a deep sadness and sense of loss. Recently, as I was slogging through field and lab work and my ambition started sagging, I decided to get a dodo tattoo to remind myself why I chose this path. Extinction is forever, and we never know what we’ve lost until it’s gone. Some researchers believe that the dodo was the prime seed disperser for the tambalacoque tree that is declining in numbers because there hasn’t been a dodo around for over 300 years to abrade the seeds. If this is true, it would be a succinct example of how extinctions reverberate through ecosystems. I hope that my work will help prevent future extinctions of wildlife.”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

The teaser trailer for the upcoming Doctor Who Series 5 is now online (there’s an ad first for about 30 seconds). Spoilers ahoy, of course!

Well, it’s not subtle! I like the other trailer better, to be honest, but taken as a whole I have to admit the upcoming series looks pretty good. Mind you, I was unhappy when David Tennant took over for Christopher Eccleston, and that turned out pretty well, so I’ll be a good skeptic and make up my mind when the show actually airs. This looks promising!

No word on the actual air date for the first episode, but it’ll be in the spring.

This is one of the main stories here at the AAAS meeting in San Diego:

SAN DIEGO—A symposium organized here at the last minute by two of the world’s most prominent scientific organizations addressed recent attacks on an increasingly beleaguered climate science community. The panel met in the uncertain aftermath of the release of e-mails stolen from prominent climate scientists and critiques of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The panel of academics was convened by National Academy of Science President Ralph Cicerone, in conjunction with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (which publishes ScienceNOW), which is holding its annual meeting here. At a time when the biggest headlines on science have been over the flaws or legitimacy of climate science, said Cicerone, recent skirmishes over climate research “have really shaken the confidence of the public in the conduct of science [overall].” He cited a number of recent polls, which show a “degradation” in the respect of the public for science in general.

Climate researchers have taken the biggest hit. They are feeling the brunt of what IPCC author Chris Field has described as a “feeding frenzy” since the November e-mail release. “The situation is completely out of hand,” said Texas A&M climate scientist Gerald North. “One guy e-mailed me to say I’m a ‘whore for the global warming crowd.’ ” His PowerPoint presentation included a slide quoting conservative talk show host Glenn Beck: “If the IPCC had been done by Japanese scientists, there’s not enough knives on planet Earth for hara-kiri that should have occurred.”

I get the sense that scientists and their institutions are so concerned over what has occurred in the past few months that there are going to be very real changes made, so as to ensure that better defenses of science are mounted in the future. It will be very interesting to watch what develops on this front…

Recently the UK paper The Guardian posted an article stating — without a shred of skepticism — that Noah’s Ark may have been round.

Sigh. OK, fine. But it gets better.

The Institute for Creation Research — given just their name, you might guess they haven’t found a scientific fact they couldn’t spin, fold, or mutilate… and you’d be right — claims the article is wrong.

Why?

Because a round ark makes no sense.

And…

BANG!

There goes my irony gland again. Luckily it grows back quickly, because in this line of work I seem to need it a lot.

[Update: Without any comment, I’ll just add this link here. The connection should be obvious enough.]

If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to hang out near the Cassini Saturn spacecraft and get the same view it does, then put on your red/green glasses and check out this anaglyph of the moon Prometheus:

Mmmm, threedeealicious. Click to enjovianate.

Prometheus is a bit weird. OK, it’s a lot weird. It’s an irregularly-shaped elongated spud of a moon, measuring about 119 x 87 x 61 km (71 x 52 x 37 miles) in size. The long axis always points toward Saturn due to tides; basically the change in Saturn’s gravity from the front end of Prometheus to the back end acts like a stretching force on the moon, keeping it aligned. The tip on the right always points toward Saturn, and the long side we see in the image is the leading half of the moon, always facing ahead into the direction it orbits. Think of it as facing into the wind if that helps any.

Prometheus is a shepherd satellite, meaning its orbit gets it near Saturn’s F ring, where it helps keep the ring particles in place. It does this along with Pandora, another smallish moon. Prometheus orbits Saturn inside the F ring. When it gets close to the ring, it gives a little bit of its orbital energy to any ring particles that are on the inside edge of the ring, which boosts them to a slightly higher, slower orbit. Pandora does the opposite; it orbits outside the ring, and it steals energy from ring particles on the outside edge, which drops them into a slightly lower, faster orbit. Together, the two moons shepherd the F ring particles, corralling them and keeping the ring narrow. The animation shows the effects of Prometheus on the inner edge of the ring.

Just so you know, I think this is one of the coolest things ever. Shepherding moons were theoretically discussed for a long time, but we didn’t have any evidence of them until Voyager swept past Saturn a few decades ago, and now Cassini has the chance to study them in detail. It’s such a weird thing, and there it is playing out in the solar system for us to examine! It’s a good reminder that Nature is sneaky, and a lot more clever than we are. I’m glad we’re clever enough to catch up with it, too.

Things I have thought about today, in no particular order:

---

Gamma-ray bursts

Lightning

A heretofore undetected but potentially densely-populated class of objects in the solar system

Laundry

Why my phone sometimes rings audibly and other times chooses not to

The electron column density in a magnetic bubble after a nuclear detonation in the upper atmosphere

Ice cream sandwiches

Mars

Social networking and astronomy

Temporarily misplacing my wallet last night

Suborbital rockets and their potential for astronomy and tourism

My cat

---

Feel free to do with this information as you wish.

We’re a week into the Vancouver Olympics, and if you haven’t had your fill of world-class athletes frolicking on the ice in frilly clothing, playing ice shuffleboard with 4o-plus-pound stones, or hurtling downhill at terrifying speed, don’t worry: There’s more than a week left to go. And there will be feats of dizzying daring and velocity, since Olympians don’t settle for just terrifying speed when there’s a chance to attain ridiculous speed, or even ludicrous speed. Thankfully, the Olympics are a bastion of technology, not just sport.

Take bobsledding. Team USA has been working with the Exa Corporation to develop the most aerodynamic sled possible, by computationally mapping fluid dynamics of air rushing past the sled. Says Exa’s Brad Duncan, “We’ve heard that some other countries are using more traditional processes where they do testing in wind tunnels…. That’s where the U.S. team was able to leapfrog the competition, was to do digital testing” [LiveScience]. The sleds could reach up to 95 miles an hour in the race, and designer Bob Cuneo says the sled design is a huge factor. Ultimately, Cuneo estimates that about a third of the team’s success in Vancouver comes down to engineering [Popular Mechanics].

Then there’s curling. Every time the winter Olympics roll around the game attracts weird curiosity and lame participatory journalism (and this time even a Simpsons episode). Scientists have started investigating the science behind guiding the stone down the ice to its target, the house, through the player’s vigorous sweeping. According to exercise physiologist John Bradley, sweepers can get their heart rates up to 170 to 200 beats per minute. Still, curlers’ physiques usually draw some chuckles. “Since most of the curlers in the world are in colder climates, you’re not going to see bronzed, beach physiques curling very often,” said Jonathan Reeser, a sports injury epidemiologist, [Fox News] who engages in curling himself.

The reason curling sweepers do all that sweeping is to change the temperature of the ice in front of the stone, and Bradley’s research helped to show the ideal way to do it. When the stone is traveling faster it is more effective to sweep faster because it enables sweepers to cover the same spot of ice more than once and raise its temperature higher. “And if the stone’s traveling slower then you can begin to put more downward pressure into the ice” [Fox News], he says.

One could go on and on, as all the Olympic sports are intertwined with technology. But there are a mountain of other tech stories, because even putting on the Olympics is a huge technological achievement (as one sees when things go wrong, like the glitches that began during the opening ceremony and that have continued to plague the games). CNET reports that it will take more than 40,000 Ethernet ports and 7,000 two-way radios to keep the games going. In addition, this year’s Games make a significant change in the technology setup. In past years, organizers set up separate data and voice networks, but this year all the video, data, and voice will traverse one massive Internet Protocol network set up by Atos Origin, Bell Canada, Avaya, and others [CNET].

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Image: flickr / Bensonkua

Anyone who uses Facebook or Twitter is probably familiar with Bit.ly or TinyURL.com–Web services that shortens lengthy Web addresses to fit within limited character counts. These truncated URLs don’t make it clear what page the link redirects to, but most people have gotten used to that fact; users happily click a shortened URL without worrying that it might actually send you to a site that starts a computer virus download.

Now, a new website called ShadyURL.com is generating a few laughs for its service that claims to “make your Twitter followers a little more uneasy.” The web service shortens web addresses into “suspicious and frightening” links that would anyone think hard before clicking on.

For example:
Facebook.com became http://5z8.info/56-DEPLOY-TROJAN-287.mw9—-_i6f3e__init_download
Twitter.com turned into http://5z8.info/trojan_j7r7z_inject_worm

When we typed in DiscoverMagazine.com, here’s what we got:
http://5z8.info/friendster-of-sex_m8×9r_-OPEN-WEBCAM—START-RECORD–

Rest assured, these URLs don’t actually send you to sites where trojan horses will be deployed, worms will be injected, and webcams will start recording. Then again, we wonder how long it will be before someone puts an actual virus in a ShadyURL that looks obviously shady but that people will assume is a safe URL cloaked in false shadiness.

Damn your logical puzzles, Internet.

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Image: iStockphoto

I am an authority and I argue that Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is my favorite web comic because it is the best. Therefore it must be true and if you disagree the terrorists have won.

Tip o’ the Einstein hair to all the people who say I should stick with astronomy.

Is Apple trying to sweep sex under the rug? Online reports suggest that the tech giant is looking to purge the App Store’s shelves of sex-themed apps. Some tech sites have noticed that sexy apps like “Sexy Women” and “Exotic Positions” that were previously available are now missing from the App Store.

The case of the missing sex-apps surfaced when the developer behind adult-themed app “Wobble iBoobs,” Jon Atherton, received a notification from Apple saying his app was being removed from the App Store for being too graphic.

TechCrunch reports on the email Atherton received from Apple:

Your application, Wobble iBoobs (Premium Uncensored), contains content that we had originally believed to be suitable for distribution. However, we have recently received numerous complaints from our customers about this type of content, and have changed our guidelines appropriately.

We have decided to remove any overtly sexual content from the App Store, which includes your application.

However, TechCrunch points out that other racy apps like “Beautiful Boobs” and “Sex Strip” are still around, suggesting that the apps that have been pulled from the store may be those that Apple judged too graphic, or apps that have been the subject of consumer complaints. On the other hand, maybe Apple just hasn’t gotten around to removing apps like “Epic boobs” yet.

Apple has had a murky relationship vis-a-vis sexy apps. When the App Store was launched in 2008, the company took a hard line on risque apps, but later decided to allow some adult-themed apps so long as they weren’t explicitly pornographic. Apple has yet to comment on whether its latest move constitutes a major shift in its policy, but it seems likely that the company is swinging back in the direction of modesty and discretion.

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Image: Apple

Doctors who are torn over how aggressively to treat a cancer patient, not knowing whether a tumor has fully regressed or is coming back, might someday be able to find out just by testing the patient’s blood. In a study forthcoming his week in Science Translational Medicine, John Hopkins researchers say they have tested a way to spot the “fingerprint” of cancer–the changes to the DNA inside cells that make up cancerous tumors.

Jeffery Schloss of the National Human Genome Research Institute, who wasn’t involved in the study, likened the approach to drawing a map. Sequencing the letters of the genetic code would be akin to plotting every house in a large neighborhood. The Hopkins team was looking only for neighborhoods—in particular, neighborhoods out of place compared with where they would be in normal tissue [Wall Street Journal]. The researchers in the study looked at tissue from people with breast or bowel cancer, and found multiple DNA rearrangements in each of the samples of cancerous tissue.

In each patient, the genetic changes in the cancerous cells amount to a unique marker of the patient’s tumor, the researchers say. Using blood samples from two of the colorectal cancer patients, they found the test was sensitive enough to detect this marker or “fingerprint” DNA that had been shed by tumours into the bloodstream [BBC News].

The study’s approach could be invaluable for tracking the progress of a tumor. When a cancer is operated on or treated with radio- or chemotherapy, the levels of the fingerprint should fall, and vanish altogether if the tumour has been eradicated [The Guardian]. Indeed, in one of their patients, the study authors saw the cancer biomarker drop after surgery but then rise again, suggesting to them that the cancer wasn’t fully eradicated.

Because the technique requires sequencing a person’s whole genome, it’s not coming to a hospital near you in the immediate future, says study author Bert Vogelstein: “This is really personalized medicine. This is not something off the shelf…. This is something that has to be designed for each individual patient” [Reuters]. But with the cost of genome sequencing rapidly coming down in price, this kind of approach might not be too far away, and doctors could use it to catch a recurring cancer before it’s large enough to be visible to other methods, like CT scans.

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Image: iStockphoto

I know I just posted a volcano image from the Terra Earth-observing satellite, but another just came in and it’s so beautiful I can’t help myself. So here’s a little bit of awesome for your Friday afternoon. Behold!

See? Told you.

What we have here are two volcanoes on February 13 erupting simultaneously in Kamchatka. The northern one, Klyuchevskaya, is the tallest and most active in the region. The other one, Bezymianny, is 10 km (6 miles) to the south, and is much smaller (2900 meters/9500 feet vs. 4800 m/15,900 feet) for Klyuchevskaya). Both are spewing a plume high into the air; from the whitish color it appears to be more steam than ash, though the northern, larger volcano is reported to be sending out lava and rock fountains as well. Between the two you can see some clouds, too.

I don’t suppose too many folks live near these two monsters, which is a good thing. I can’t imagine what it must look like to be, say, 10 kilometers east of the two and see them both blasting out plumes reaching up 6 kilometers (3.5 miles) high. But one day I’d love to witness something like that! Maybe from farther away, though. Wow.

Image credit: by Jesse Allen, using data provided courtesy of NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team

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

It seems simple enough: we should manage our marine resources to protect the whole ecosystem, not just a single species. That’s the basic premise of ecosystem-based management (EBM), the topic of this week’s class at Scripps (Read a previous post on EBM by Sheril here). EBM is all about interactions: between predator and prey, parasite and host, nutrients and phytoplankton, humans and our environment. The need for EBM comes from too many cases of a single-species management practice resulting in unintended impacts on the surrounding environment.

Take the Atlantic cod, for example, a fish that supported America’s most lucrative fishery in the 19th and most of the 20th century. Atlantic cod was overfished so heavily that its stocks are now virtually commercially extinct. We’ve all eaten cod, but you might not know what it looks like: it’s a voracious predator with an impressive set of teeth. Its jaws are powerful enough to easily crack the shell of all but the biggest, feistiest Maine lobsters. When cod stocks were depleted, the lobster populations boomed, free from the threat of one of their only predators. Now the North Atlantic lobster fishery thrives, while the cod fishery lays dormant. Lobsters are lured into traps by dead, smelly fish, which means millions of tons of Atlantic herring are caught every year and sold to lobstermen as bait. My personal research has indicated that increased herring fishing effort may have driven humpback and fin whales away from their traditional feeding grounds in the Gulf of Maine in search of a different food source.

Did you follow that? We went from cod to lobster to herring to humpbacks. To be fair, even the most fervent supporter of EBM would have struggled to predict that exploiting cod might eventually affect whales. But if the theory of EBM had been around during the heyday of the North Atlantic cod fishery (EBM has only entered the mainstream consciousness within the past two decades), someone likely would have at least raised a red flag. At its core, EBM is about taking a precautionary approach to management. Marine resource managers have historically thrown caution to the wind, even in the face of scientific uncertainty. This reckless style may become a thing of the past—NOAA chief Jane Lubchenco is one of EBM’s most prominent supporters.

EBM is a great idea in theory, but the practice is difficult to implement and even define. I just spent a three hour class learning and talking about it, but before writing this, I still had to brush up on the topic with NOAA’s 1998 Report to Congress on EBM. We can attribute the haziness of EBM to its relative infancy as a concept. As more scientists and policymakers continue to embrace EBM, we may see it transition from merely a good idea to a realistic strategy.

Here’s a neat dolphin trick that doesn’t involve jumping through hoops. While dolphins sleep overnight (with half their brains and one eye at a time), they begin to show signs of the kind of insulin resistance that marks type 2 diabetes in humans. But when they wake up and have their breakfast, they switch back to their normal state. A research team led by Stephanie Venn-Watson announced the findings at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in San Diego, and said that dolphins’ apparent ability to switch insulin resistance on and off could lead to better understanding of the disease in humans.

Insulin helps people control their levels of blood sugar, and the resistance to it inherent in type 2 diabetes means those levels can get way too high. The dolphins, though, switch on this temporary insulin resistance to their advantage, boosting blood sugar levels overnight. “Bottlenose dolphins have large brains that need sugar,” Dr Venn-Watson explained. Since their diet is very low in sugar, “it works to their advantage to have a condition that keeps blood sugar in the body… to keep the brain well fed” [BBC News].

However, while dolphins can turn this resistance off once they start their day and revert to a normal state, they can have metabolic problems similar to diabetes, too. For 21 weeks, Venn-Watson and her colleagues measured insulin levels in six dolphins two hours after the animals ate. One dolphin that had especially high insulin levels compared to others, also had a 10-year history of iron overload, or hemochromatosis. Iron overload is associated with type 2 diabetes in people, Venn-Watson noted [Science News].

No other animal has symptoms relating to diabetes so similar to humans, and the connection between the two species is probably our big, glucose-demanding brains. So, Venn-Watson says, studying them could help researchers figure out how to confront insulin resistance in humans: “There is no desire to make a dolphin a lab animal, but what we can do is compare their genes with human genes and look for evidence of a genetic switch” [The Guardian].

Related Content:
80beats: The Cove Effect: 70 Dolphins Are Saved From Japan’s Slaughter
80beats: Sponge-Wielding Dolphins Teach Their Daughters How to Use Tools
80beats: Great Minds Think Alike: Bats & Dolphins Evolved the Same Gene For Echolocation
80beats: Stem Cells May Eventually Replace Needles for Some Diabetics

Image: flickr / Ken Lund

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After more than six years of exploring the Red Planet, the Mars rover Spirit will rove no more. The robotic adventurer is mired in a sand bed, and NASA has officially given up on trying to extricate it.

While it will continue to operate as a “stationary research platform” for the time being, there’s no denying that the rover’s swashbuckling days are over. No longer will Spirit spot an interesting landmark in the distance and gamely trek towards it, with the possibility of a fresh scientific discovery around every corner and under every rock. This photo gallery is a well-deserved eulogy for Spirit, in which we’ll survey its travels and achievements.

In 2003, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory launched Spirit and its twin rover, Opportunity, on a three-month mission to investigate Martian terrain and atmosphere on opposite sides of the planet. The solar-powered rovers surpassed NASA’s wildest dreams, extending their missions by nearly 25 times their anticipated lengths.

Since landing on Mars in January 2004, Spirit has snapped more than 127,000 pictures. The robot probed beneath the worn surface of Mars, analyzing the microstructure of rocks and soil with a sophisticated array of instruments: spectrometers, microscopic imagers, and other tools. Spirit has also gathered strong evidence that water once flowed on the Martian surface, which could have created a hospitable environment for microbial life.

Spirit and its twin rover (which is still traveling on) will be replaced by more advanced machines that will roll onto the Martian soil in the coming decades. But Spirit will be remembered long after its operating system flickers off for good. Like a robotic Neil Armstrong, the rover has earned its place in the space explorers’ hall of heroes.

All text by Aline Reynolds. Image: NASA/JPL/Cornell

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