Author: Discover Main Feed

A team of scientists led by Mark Raizen at the University of Texas at Austin had the gumption to take on Einstein. And according to their new paper in Science, they won. The point of contention? The lovechild of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics: Brownian motion.

Here’s how they did it.

Step 1. Learning the Moves

In the 1820s, Scottish botanist Robert Brown looked through a microscope at plant bits floating in water, and wrote [PDF]:

“I observed many of them very evidently in motion . . . [these motions] arose neither from currents in the fluid, nor from its gradual evaporation, but belonged to the particle itself.”

To make sure that the pollen wasn’t alive–actually swimming around–Brown tried it with coal dust. Dust had the same moves.

Today, we understand that Brownian motion, the random break dance of these tiny particles, comes from the water molecules bumping against them. In 1907, Einstein determined the properties of the liquid and the particles that would help describe their wanderings and the motion of molecules. But he also said that it was “impossible” to determine at any moment the speed and direction of a single particle during this dance.

Step 2. Water Into Air

The reason for Einstein’s doubt? The particles bumped around too quickly to ever measure their speed and direction:

He believed that it would be impossible in practice to track this motion, given the incredibly short timescales over which the Brownian fluctuations take place. [PhysicsWorld]

How quick is too quick? A very tiny glass sphere (think micrometers) in water would change direction almost every 100 nanoseconds (about the time it takes light to travel 30 meters). Raizen wanted to make the time between moves longer, so they didn’t use water. They put the glass beads on a dance floor with fewer partners, using a medium whose molecules are farther apart: air.

Step 3. Floating on Air

Pollen doesn’t float on air. Neither does a micrometer-sized glass bead. Raizen’s team needed something to hold the glass up. They decided that the answer was light particles in a pair of laser chopsticks:

In 1907, Einstein likely did not foresee a time when dust-sized particles of glass could be trapped and suspended in air by dual laser beam “optical tweezers.” Nor would he have known that ultrasonic vibrations . . . would shake those glass beads into the air to be tweezed and measured as they moved in suspension. [ScienceDaily]

They could control a glass bead’s motion to the precise point where it was still dancing the Brownian, but not too fast to follow. But the lasers allowed them to do more than suspend the glass: By looking at how the glass bead deflected the light while it was buffeted by air molecules and bounced about on the chopsticks, the researchers could determine what Einstein dubbed impossible, a bead’s instantaneous direction and speed.

Step 4. Future Directions

Understanding these discrete steps will help wherever Brownian motion rules: everywhere from cell guts to the scent of perfume wafting through apparently stagnant air.

“It is certainly an important achievement to be able to directly measure the velocity of the Brownian particle at these short times,” says Christoph Schmidt of the University of Göttingen in Germany. “Technically it is now becoming possible to track individual particles with very high time and spatial resolution, limited in the end only by how many photons per second one can get to interact with the particle.” [New Scientist]

Related content:
80beats: Putting “Ears” on a Microscope Lets Reseachers Listen to Bacteria
Cosmic Variance: The Cell is Like Tron!
DISCOVER: Einstein’s Gift for Simplicity
DISCOVER: Einstein’s Lonely Path

Image: Science / AAAS

As opposed to simply energy, the universe is also made of stuff. Not a whole lot of stuff, mind you, at least if you compare the matter we experience to the vast emptiness of space or the preponderance of dark matter. But enough.

The continued prevalence of matter has long been one of my favorite attributes of the universe, given that it allows for the existence of galaxies, and Guinness. However, it’s the source of confusion to physicists. In short, there should have been equal amounts of matter and antimatter present at the creation of the universe, which doesn’t make sense:

If matter and antimatter had come out even in those first moments, they would have instantly destroyed each other, leaving nothing but energy behind [TIME].

But they didn’t; as sure as I’m sitting here, matter won out. And this week, at the Tevatron particle smasher in Illinois, a new clue to the problem has emerged. In a study for Physical Review D, physicist Dmitri Denisov and his colleagues explain that in long-running proton-antiproton collisions (nearly 8 years of them), they saw a slight favoritism toward normal matter in a particular place:

“While colliding protons and antiprotons, which creates neutral B mesons, we would expect that when they decay we will see equal amounts of matter and antimatter,” Denisov says. “For whatever reason, there are more negative muons, which are matter, than positive muons, which are antimatter.” According to DZero member Gustaaf Brooijmans, a physicist at Columbia University, “We observe an asymmetry that is close to 1 percent.” [Scientific American].

The Tevatron team doesn’t know why this asymmetry is there; they just know that it doesn’t make sense based on the current understanding of the universe. And scientists love it when there’s a puzzle to solve. Says team member and particle physicist Stefan Soldner-Rembold:

‘Many of us felt goosebumps when we saw the result,” Soldner-Rembold said. “We knew we were seeing something beyond what we have seen before — and beyond what current theories can explain” [Chicago Sun-Times].

The physics can’t rule out that a new particle would explain this weirdness. And there’s an obvious place to look for it: Europe’s shiny new Large Hadron Collider.

If it turns out that a new particle is in fact responsible for the odd tendency of B mesons to favor matter over antimatter, it might be unmasked in the unprecedented high-energy collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC. But don’t count out the workhorse stateside, which has a head start of many years—and reams of well-understood data—on its more powerful European counterpart [Scientific American].

Related Content:
DISCOVER: The 11 Great Unanswered Questions of Physics
Cosmic Variance: Matter v. Antimatter 1: The Baryon Asymmetry
80beats: Ghost in the Machine? Physicists May Have Detected a New Particle at Fermilab
80beats: Rumors of the LHC’s Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated
80beats: Physicists Shoot Neutrinos Across Japan to an Experiment in an Abandoned Mine

Image: Fermilab

Butterfly in the sky, researchers wonder how you fly. To this end, Harvard University’s Hiroto Tanaka and the University of Tokyo’s Isao Shimoyama have built a butterfly doppelganger by combining angelic plastic wings, balsa wood, and rubber bands. The exact model for this “ornithopter” is the swallowtail: Tanaka and Shimoyama mimicked the exact size and weight of a flesh-and-blood member of the Papilionidae family. They even made detailed plastic veins on their butterfly’s polymer wings. As the BBC reports, a high-speed video of their model’s flight allowed Tanaka and Shimoyama to calculate the forces on the insect’s wings. Also, by constructing the butterfly themselves, they could determine the essential bug pieces for forward flight. They found, for example, that those pretty veins are a must, but that the creatures need not continually adjust their wings during flight as other insects do. Bioinspiration & Biomimetics will publish their complete paper in June. Given existing robotic caterpillars, is anyone thinking Transformer? Related content:
80beats: Monarch Butterflies Navigate With Sun-Sensing Antennae
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Caterpillars must walk before they can anally scrape
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Butterflies evolve resistance to male-killing bacteria in record time
DISCOVER: The Calculating Beauty of Butterflies (photo gallery)

It might seem like a tautology — and that’s because it is — but sometimes the only word you can use to describe an image from the Cassini Saturn probe is otherwordly:

[Click to engasgiantize.]

This otherworldy picture was taken on March 24, 2010. The big moon is Rhea, seen from 1.2 million kilometers (750,000 miles) away, and the little one below it is Epimetheus, from 1.6 million km (990,000 miles) away. Perspective makes them look right next to each other, but in reality the distance between them is the same as the Moon from the Earth! Saturn and its rings provide the backdrop for this stunning alien portrait.

To me, the most striking thing about this picture is the difference between the two moons. Rhea is a ball, a sphere, while Epimetheus is clearly a lumpy rock. Rhea is also clearly a lot bigger, even accounting for perspective in the picture; it’s about 1520 km (940 miles) across, while Epimetheus is 144 x 108 x 98 km (86 x 64 x 58 miles) in size.

Why is Rhea round, and Epimetheus lumpy? Gravity. Rhea, being so much bigger, has a lot more mass, so its gravity is much stronger. Objects bigger than a few hundred kilometers across have enough mass that self-gravity becomes important in shaping them. A rock you might see lying on the ground is small and has very little gravity, so the important things that shape it are its chemistry, the crystal structure inside it, and its history (getting banged by another rock, erosion, and so on).

But as the mass increases, so does the influence of gravity. Eventually, gravity wins: it doesn’t matter what the composition is (metal, ice, rock) or the history (getting knocked around), because gravity is strong enough to shape the object into a sphere. Sure, other forces can be at play (for example, rotation can flatten an object out a bit), but gravity is the one with the biggest influence.

Gravity is an inward force, trying to draw everything into the center of the mass. That’s why big objects are spheres; anything large enough to stick up very far gets pulled down. Look at mountains on Earth: they can only get to a certain size before slumping. They can’t support their own weight! Olympus Mons on Mars is much bigger than any mountain could ever be on Earth, because Mars has less gravity.

So this is more than just a beautiful picture from Cassini; it’s an object lesson in gravity. And as science tells us over and again, size matters.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

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Related posts:

Rhea:
Happy Valentines Day. Love Rhea
A marvelous night for a (Saturn) moon dance
Peek-a-moon
Epimetheus:
The real Pandora, and two mooning brothers
Cassini eavesdrops on orbit-swapping moons

Venus, meet Japan. Today the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched a rocket carrying several different missions bound for our boiling-hot sister planet. Here’s what they want to learn.

Atmospheric Tag Team

Akatsuki, the Venus climate probe, will arrive at the second planet from the sun in December. There it will team up with the European Space Agency’s Venus Express probe, using five cameras to peer down into the turbulent atmosphere and study Venus‘ maniacal meteorology.

One of the main goals is to understand the “super-rotation” of the Venus atmosphere, where violent winds drive storms and clouds at speeds of more than 220 mph (360 kilometers per hour), 60 times faster than the planet itself rotates [MSNBC].

The Venus Express’ own findings since it reached the planet in 2006 have bolstered the idea that Venus was once alive with plate tectonics, oceans, and continents—that is, it was once much more Earth-like than its current, sweaty incarnation. In fact, Venus may still be active.

Volcanoes?

It’s alive! It’s alive! (Maybe.)

Just last month, scientists working with the Venus Express reported seeing lava flows on the surface that barely showed signs of weathering. They’re young. The team argued that this is more evidence Venus is not just a shadow of its formerly active self, but could still be alive with volcanism.

The thick Venusian atmosphere is opaque to instruments that operate at visible wavelengths and so the Japanese probe carries five cameras that are sensitive in the infrared and ultraviolet parts of the electromagnetic spectrum [BBC News].

They’ll use these capabilities—infrared in particular—to scan the surface of Venus for any active volcanism.

Can We Fly This Solar Sail?

Japan’s H-IIA rocket also carried into space Japan’s solar sail project “Ikaros,” the Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation of the Sun. As DISCOVER noted last month, when the sail (seen above) deploys, it will be 66 feet in diagonal distance, yet thinner than a human hair. Ikaros, named for the ill-fated mythological figure, actually has two propulsion systems. The “sail” part refers to its ability to use the tiny pressure of sunlight the way a sailboat uses the wind. But the craft is also equipped with photovoltaic cells to generate solar electricity.

The hardest part is just deploying such a large sail, project leader Osamu Mori says, which they will attempt in a few days. Ground tests of this feature proved… difficult.

“We even sent it high up in the sky in a big balloon, to spread the film in a near-vacuum environment. We experienced many failures, but we kept searching for the most reliable deployment method, and that led us to the model we’ve now built. I believe it will be successful” [BBC News].

Follow DISCOVER (@DiscoverMag) on Twitter

Related Content:
80beats: Japan’s “Solar Yacht” Is Ready to Ride Sunbeams Through Space
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80beats: Volcanoes on Venus Could Be Alive & Ready To Erupt
DISCOVER: One Giant Step for a Small, Crowded Country, on Japan’s moon aspirations
DISCOVER: Japan Sets Sail in Space

Image: JAXA

Robots are becoming ever more ubiquitous, from rescue missions to toddlers’ rooms to other planets, but they haven’t become much more like us.

If you don’t read Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, then you are a pinko commie^*. Or a socialist. I dunno; I get these political epithets mixed up.

Anyway, today’s was great, as usual. But I wonder who this Professor Thorne is…?

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^* Zach Weiner, it turns out, is a feudal anarchist. Serf’s up!

When Walgreens, the nation’s biggest drugstore chain, announced last week that personal genomics tests would join diet soda and pregnancy tests in its aisles, we gave some reasons that might not be such a great thing. We weren’t the only ones concerned: The Food and Drug Administration said it would investigate the tests, and now Congress is involved. It opened an investigation into personal genomics tests yesterday.

House Committee on Energy and Commerce, chaired by Rep. Henry A. Waxman, just sent out official requests for information to the big three personal genomics companies—23andMe, Navigenics, and Pathway Genomics.

Waxman’s interest was piqued by the move—quickly rescinded last week after the FDA objected—by Pathway to sell its DNA-collection kits in Walgreen’s drugstores. The letters ask the companies for information on, among other things, how they analyze test results to determine someone’s risk for any disease or drug response, and how accurately the DNA tests identify genetic risks [Newsweek].

That’s important because while sequencing someone’s genome is a rather objective task, interpreting it is not. The companies have been loath to divulge how they do the latter part, which is what Waxman’s committee wants to know. (Check out the DISCOVER Magazine feature in which our reporter has her DNA analyzed by three different companies.)

Walgreens has now delayed the introduction the Pathway tests onto its shelves. So has CVS, which planned to offer the same product beginning in August.

The kits would allow buyers to send a saliva sample to Pathway, based in San Diego, for analysis. The company’s testing fee would be based on the information the consumer wants. Pathway says its testing allows buyers to learn whether they are at risk for a range of diseases, including breast cancer and Alzheimer’s. But questions have been raised about whether most consumers would be able to interpret the results [UPI].

Meanwhile, across the country from Washington D.C., another personal DNA testing argument is in full force. On Tuesday we brought you the story that UC Berkeley will ask incoming freshmen this fall to give a DNA sample, which the university says it will use for simple tests to determine alcohol metabolism or lactose intolerance. The program is voluntary and anonymous, but the Center for Genetics and Society, also of Berkeley, cited the Walgreens case as more reason to argue the university ought to stop the program.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: How Much Can You Learn from a Home DNA Test?
80beats: 5 Reasons Walgreens Selling Personal DNA Tests Might Be a Bad Idea
80beats: No Gattaca Here: Genetic Anti-Discrimination Law Goes Into Effect
Discoblog: Welcome, UC Berkeley Freshmen! Now Hand Over Your DNA Samples

Image: Pathway Genomics

Craig Venter has taken yet another step towards his goal of creating synthetic life forms. He’s synthesized the genome of a microbe and then implanted that piece of DNA into a DNA-free cell of another species. And that…that thing…can grow and divide. It’s hard to say whether this is “life from scratch,” because the boundary between such a thing and ordinary life (and non-life) is actually blurry. For example, you could say that this is still a nature hybrid, because its DNA is based on the sequence of an existing species of bacteria. If Venter made up a sequence from scratch, maybe we’d have crossed to a new terrain.

Anyway–this news just hit the wires thanks to an embargo break, so I don’t have time to go into more detail. Joe Palca at NPR has posted his article on the subject. For background, please check out these stories I’ve written about this general area of research:

Tinker, Tailor: Can Venter Stitch Together A Genome From Scratch?

The Meaning of Life

The Six Most Important Experiments In The World

Artificial Life? Old News.

The High-Tech Search For A Cleaner Biofuel Alternative

On the Origin of Tomorrow

My Bloggingheads interview with Venter

Update: The scientists are in a live press conference that started a 1 pm.

600 light years away, in the constellation of Auriga, there is a star in some ways similar to our Sun. It’s a shade hotter (by about 800° C), more massive, and older. Oddly, it appears to be laced with heavy elements: more oxygen, aluminum, and so on, than might be expected. A puzzle.

The, last year, it was discovered that this star had a planet orbiting it. A project called WASP – Wide Area Search for Planets, a UK telescope system that searches for exoplanets — noticed that the star underwent periodic dips in its light. This indicates that a planet circles the star, and when the planet gets between the star and us, it blocks a tiny fraction of the starlight.

The planet is a weirdo, for many reasons… but it won’t be weird for too much longer. That’s because the star is eating it.

What WASP 12b may look like.

OK, first, the planet. Called WASP 12b, it was instantly pegged as an oddball. The orbit is only 1.1 days long! Compare that to our own 365 day orbit, or even Mercury’s 88 days to circle the Sun. This incredibly short orbital period means this planet is practically touching the surface of its star as it sweeps around at over 220 km/sec (130 miles/sec)! That also means it must be very hot; models indicate that the temperature at its cloud tops would be in excess of 2200°C (4000° F).

Not only that, but other numbers were odd, too. WASP 12b was found to be a bit more massive and bigger than Jupiter; about 1.8 times its size and 1.4 times its mass. That’s too big! Models indicate that planets this massive have a funny state of matter in them; they are so compressible that if you add mass, the planet doesn’t really get bigger, it just gets denser. In other words, you could double Jupiter’s mass and its size wouldn’t increase appreciably, but since the mass goes up, so would its density.

But WASP 12b isn’t like that. In fact, it has a lower density than Jupiter, and is a lot bigger! Something must be going on… and when you see a lot of weird things all sitting in one place, it makes sense to assume they’re connected. In this case it’s true: that planet is frakking hot, and that’s at the heart of this mess. Heating a planet that much would not exactly be conducive to its well-being. When you heat a gas it expands, which would explain WASP 12b’s big size. It’s puffy! But being all bloated that close to a star turns out to be bad for your health.

Astronomers used Hubble to observe the planet in the ultraviolet and found clear signs of all sorts of heavy elements, including sodium, tin, aluminum, magnesium, and manganese, as well as, weirdly, ytterbium^*. Moreover, they could tell from the data that these elements existed in a cloud surrounding the planet, like an extended atmosphere going outward for hundreds of thousands of kilometers.

That’s a long way from the planet. Any atom of, say, manganese that far from the planet would be caught in a tug-of-war between the gravity of the planet and the star… and the star would win. The gravity of the star is drawing material off the planet in a vast stream, or, in other words, the planet is getting slowly eaten by its star. If astronomers ever get around to giving this planet an actual name, I suggest Sarlacc^†.

This explains the peculiar high abundance of heavy metals in the star I mentioned at the beginning of this post; they come from the planet! But not for long. Given the mass of the planet and the density of the stream, it looks like it has roughly ten million years left. At that point, supper’s over: there won’t be anything left for the star to eat. In reality it’s hard to say exactly what will happen; there may be a rocky/metal core to the planet that will survive. But even that is so close to the star that it will be a molten blob of goo. The way orbits work, the way the dance of gravity plays out over time, the planet itself may actually be drawn inexorably closer to its star. Remember, too, the star is old, and will soon start to expand into a red giant. So the planet is falling and the star is rising; eventually the too will meet and the planet will meet a fiery death.

All in all, it sucks to be WASP 12b.

But it’s cool to be an astronomer! Only 15 years ago we had no idea that there were other planets orbiting Sunlike stars, and now we know of over 400, and a lot of them are really, really bizarro. When I was a kid I watched Star Trek and read a lot of science fiction, and I remember thinking that the planets in them were too weird; there was no way anything like them could actually exist.

Ha! The Universe, as usual, is smarter and more clever than we are. There’s a lot of strange out there, and the more we look, the more we find.

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^* Admit it: you didn’t even know that was an element.

^† Yes, I know, Star Wars fanbois, that that would be a better name for the star and not the planet, since Sarlacc was the creature that did the digesting, and was not itself digested. But if the star were Sarlacc, the planet would have to be named Bobba Fett, and that’s just silly.

Artwork credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)

Large Hadron Collider physicists have heard the voice of the “god particle,” the Higgs boson, and it sounds a bit like a child’s music box. Lily Asquith, a physicist searching for the Higgs boson–the elementary particle believed to give everything in the universe mass–is using more than her eyes. With artists and other physicists, she started the LHCsound project to hear subatomic particles. New Scientist reports that the idea arose from a conversation between Asquith and percussionist Eddie Real:
“I was actually doing impersonations of different particles and trying to get him to develop them on his electronic drum kit.”
They decided to use real data about particles (and theoretical data for the yet unseen Higgs) to make some noise. In the process that Asquith calls “sonification,” the researchers match, for example, the particle’s momentum and energy to pitch and volume. The project’s various simulations demonstrate that Higgs won’t be auditioning for Glee anytime soon. Still, Asquith believes that physicists might use her particle music as an analysis tool, since human ears can detect small differences in a sound’s direction (within around three degrees) and frequency (around 0.3 percent). The aim of the project is to combine each particle’s data from the LHC’s ATLAS detector into …

Two males red-eyed tree frogs square off over a female. Fisticuffs will soon ensue and as a final challenge to each other, the males… er… vigorously shake their bums at each other. Their quivering buttocks shake the plants they sit on, sending threatening vibrations towards their rival. This secret line of communication has just been uncovered by Michael Caldwell from Boston University. To decipher these messages, he has used a hi-tech combination of infrared cameras, saplings rigged with accelerometers and even a cybernetic Robofrog.

During mating season, male red-eyed tree frogs gather in the rainforests of Panama to compete for females with dramatic multimedia performances, involving calls and visual signals. Studying these messages can be difficult because the frogs communicate at night. A white lamp would kill their natural behaviour, prompting males to become far more restrained than usual, save in the presence of females. Instead, Caldwell watched them under an infrared light. He pitted 38 pairs of frogs against each other, on plants fitted with accelerometers.

The frogs made two types of calls (chuckles and chacks), raised their bodies off their leaves and kicked out with their legs. And in every aggressive encounter, they also rapidly shook their bums, producing vibrations with a consistent high-pitched tone. The contests would last for anywhere from a minute to an hour. If the signalling didn’t work, the time was talk was over and violence ensued. Males would wrestle with each other, sometimes for hours on end (see right).

The vibrations, or ‘tremulations’, were clearly very important and were usually the last line of negotiation before battle commenced. The victor almost always shook for more time, created longer-lasting vibrations and was more likely to have the last shake. The frequencies of the vibrations were fairly constant although victors tended to produce higher-pitched tremulations if they were smaller than their rivals or similarly sized.

Of course, the sight of a frog shaking its bum is also quite striking, but Caldwell found that a male was no more likely to tremulate when his opponent was facing him than when he was turned away. This strongly suggests that the vibrations themselves were carrying information. In fact, every part of the male’s repertoire sends distinctive tremors through the plant, including his chuckles. Even the kicking legs seem to brush past the plant stems in the style of a musician plucking a guitar string.

Caldwell’s observations had been informative but he wanted to test the frogs’ behaviour. Enter Robofrog – a model equipped with an electric shaker and a prime directive is to provoke other males. When he made his own vibrations, living males responded accordingly and aggressively. By contrast, nothing happened when he sat still, when he made visual signs without tremulating, or when Caldwell exposed the test frogs to white noise vibrations in Robofrog’s absence.

All in all, these experiments show that competing red tree frogs use a secret channel of communication that most human observers would be completely unaware of. Vibrations are an excellent way of conveying messages in the rainforest, when the combination of darkness and dense foliage might prevent the conversers from seeing each other clearly. Exactly what they say is unclear, but they could provide information about the contender’s motivation or size. And they’re undoubtedly aggressive – the tree frog’s version of smack-talk.

So far, the red-eyed tree frog is the first back-boned animal that’s been clearly shown to communicate by shaking the surface it sits on. But Caldwell suspects that it’s far from the only one, especially since many other species are highly sensitive to vibrations. Tree-dwellers are probably particularly good at this, especially ones with larger bodies that can shake their supports more strongly.

Candidates include the male veiled chameleon, which shakes the branches it sits on in the presence of a female, and the female South Asian common tree frog, which seems to attract mates by tapping her toes on the plants that encircle their breeding sites. On the ground, and on a much bigger scale, elephants could also use vibrations as a sort of ‘seismic signal’. Nature is probably full of such hidden conversations, spoken in rumbles and tremors.

Reference: Current Biology http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2010.03.069

Photos and videos by Michael Caldwell

More on frogs:

• Seven habits of highly successful toads
• South African wildlife – Foamy nest frog
• Common pesticide is good news for parasites, bad news for frogs
• ‘Wolverine’ frogs pop retractable claws from their toes
• First lungless frog discovered in Borneo

These boys are all dressed up with no place to go.

Two weeks from today, a team—made of three Russians, two Europeans, and one Chinese (with a Russian as an alternate)—will begin the longest trip to nowhere any of them has ever taken. These men will be locked in isolation for 520 days to simulate what astronauts would endure on a trip to Mars, part of a project called Mars500. It follows a 105-day test that the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems (IBMP) ran last year.

“The biggest risk of such an isolation is psychological,” said researcher Alexander Suvorov who is leading the experiment at the IBMP. “Of course relations between the crew will not always be harmonious, some will get on with others, others will not. But the priority is to be able to carry out tasks in spite of this” [AFP].

Five hundred and twenty days. By the time the team emerges from its five-module, 18,000-square foot cocoon located on the outskirts of Moscow, it’ll be early November 2011. Here in the United States, next year’s World Series will be wrapping up. The 2012 presidential candidates will be hitting the campaign trail in force. The isolation weary-crew may re-enter a world filled with high-pitched squeals as the new “Twilight” book and film come out.

The six-man crew of the Mars-500 project, which is partly funded by the European Space Agency, will spend the first 250 days in a mock spaceship to replicate the amount of time it would take to reach Mars with current technology. After reaching the [simulated] planet, three crewmembers will spend 30 days “exploring and colonizing” the planet before returning to the ship for the 240-day flight home, Belakovsky said [BusinessWeek].

The simulation will introduce other difficulties expected with a Mars mission, like communication lag. The crew members can email the outside world, but they’ll experience disruptions and delays of up to 40 minutes. Even inside the complex it won’t be easy.

All crew members have a varying command of English, but not all speak Russian, another working language during the trip. “If we fail to understand each other, we will employ body language,” quipped Russian crew member Sukhrob Kamolov [ABC News].

Nevertheless, 6,000 people from 40 countries applied to be test subjects; it doesn’t hurt that the “astronauts” will all make at least $99,000 for their troubles. However, none of the participants from last year’s 105-day mission applied for this one, so perhaps being locked in the isolation of pretend space once is enough.

Related Content:
80beats: After Three Months in a Tin Can, Three Men End Simulated Mars Mission
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DISCOVER: Russia’s Dark Horse Plan to Get to Mars
DISCOVER: For the Love of Mars explores the Mars Society’s frontier vision

Image: IBMP/Oleg Voloshin

NEXT> If you feel like Christmas keeps creeping earlier every year, consider the companies who are trying to get their products ready for the holiday season. Yesterday, May 19, many companies showed off their wares at the Holiday Gift Guide Show in Times Square. There are plenty of new gizmos to buy when the calendar turn to December, don’t worry. But we wanted to bring you a few of the delightfully odd or unexpected entries now. Why wait? Some are old, some are new, some are resurrected, and one is, well, blue. Thanks to the Forever White headset by Beaming White, my dream has finally come true: I can listen to the White Stripes while I whiten my teeth, all without whitening strips. Just put the hydrogen peroxide gel on your teeth, then strap on the headset and subject the gel to blue LED. All the while you can be pumping music through the headset. NEXT>

As of this writing, the “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” Facebook page has nearly 83,000 likes and is rising steadily. Presumably, none of those fans are in the government of Pakistan, as the page prompted the conservative Muslim country to block first Facebook, but then also YouTube, parts of Wikipedia, and other Web sites—more than 450 in all.

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) keeps itself busy scanning the Internet for material that it says would offend its population, the second-largest Muslim population of any country. Two years ago it temporarily banned YouTube until the site removed cartoons of Mohammed. Typically the PTA bans particular links, but this week it complained that the amount of objectionable material on Web was increasing and decided to cut off it citizens from some of the biggest sites on the Web. The ban is said to run through the end of May, giving Web sites the chance to remove offending materials if they choose.

Social networking sites are extremely popular in Pakistan, a country of 170 million, where more than 60 percent of the population is under the age of 25. Pakistan has about 25 million Internet users, almost all of them young, according to Adnan Rehmat, a media analyst in Islamabad [The New York Times].

The Facebook page in question, which itself was prompted by the South Park controversy in which Comedy Central censored an episode that would have depicted the Muslim prophet, encourages people to draw Mohammed today in a show of free speech.

Islam strictly prohibits the depiction of any prophet as blasphemous and Muslims all over the world staged angry protests over the publication of satirical cartoons of Mohammed in European newspapers in 2006 [AFP].

Also, extremists threatened South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone over the episode. From the description on the “Everybody Draw Mohammad” Facebook page:

We simply want to show the extremists that threaten to harm people because of their Mohammed depictions, that we’re not afraid of them. That they can’t take away our right to freedom of speech by trying to scare us to silence.

If you’re over at Facebook today, check out Discover Magazine’s page.

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Image: flickr / benstein

Last week, I wrote about a second investigation clearing climate change scientists from any wrongdoing in the horrid manufactured controversy of climategate. In that post, and an earlier one, I mentioned that Virginia State Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli was starting a witch hunt, investigating the work of scientist Michael Mann while he was at the University of Virginia. Cuccinelli’s actions are transparently driven by political bias; Mann has been shown repeatedly to have worked honestly and above-board.

I’m not the only one who thinks that. Chris Mooney at The Intersection has quotes and links from a scathing Washington Post editorial, condemning Cuccinelli for his actions. And the Post doesn’t hold back, even calling UVa out, telling them to get a spine and stand up to this attack. Chris put up a second post about how scientists themselves have picked up this banner. Oh, and here’s a third post about the AAAS condemning Cuccinelli as well.

Ironically, Cuccinelli claims his investigation is because he thinks tax money was wasted or that Mann defrauded the tax payers… but it’s Cuccinelli’s investigation that’s the true waste of taxpayer money. This attack by him started after Mann was already exonerated, making Cuccinelli’s motives pretty clear. Oh, did I say “ironically”? I meant Orwellian.

On top of the Washington Post’s call, over 250 members of the National Academy of Sciences — the U.S.’s premier and most prestigious organization for science — have publicly condemned these attacks as well:

Many recent assaults on climate science and, more disturbingly, on climate scientists by climate change deniers, are typically driven by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. I urge everyone to read both the WashPo article and the full statement by the NAS.

And for you deniers who plague the comments of every blog post I make on this topic, loading it with obfuscation, noise, and distraction from the actual topic: these posts by me are not politically driven. In fact, given the opportunities for new businesses and new technology, preventing global climate change should be a major plank of the Republican Party, which claims to stand for such things.

So instead of blindly assaulting me with trivially ridiculous accusations, you might want to examine the motivations behind the political attacks on real science. Many of you claim to be skeptics. Well then, be skeptical, but be real skeptics. I am, and always have been — I’ve examined the claims, the science, and the techniques, and have come to the conclusion that global warming is real, and that humans are overwhelmingly the most likely cause of its recent acceleration.

I know I can say this all I want and it won’t help; the Noise Machine is impervious to logic and reality. But when you read those comments, you might want to keep this image in the back of your mind:

The Atlantic hurricane season begins June 1, and forecasts suggest an above average year. And as we all know, Atlantic hurricanes are deadliest when they get into the warm Gulf of Mexico. It is almost like a hurricane jumping on a trampoline. They can go from Category 1 to Category 5 in 24 hours in such a favorable environment. But this year, as we also know, there is something different about the Gulf. It is full of oil. What are the implications of this fact for hurricanes? And conversely, what might a powerful hurricane do to the oil spill if it were to run across it? This is a topic I’ve been thinking about, and I don’t have definitive answers yet. I’d like to do more research and interview some experts–but for now, let’s take a rough and dirty approach to the issue, based on what is already out there. And let’s tackle the first question first: What would an oil slick do to a hurricane? According to storm ace Jeff Masters, the answer is not very much. Here’s what Masters is thinking. It’s certainly true that oil on the surface of the ocean could inhibit a hurricane’s access to its fuel source–the warm seawater …

In that their demographic history is complicated. The Origin and Genetic Variation of Domestic Chickens with Special Reference to Junglefowls Gallus g. gallus and G. varius:

… domestic chickens diverged from red junglefowl 58,000±16,000 years ago, well before the archeological dating of domestication, and that their common ancestor in turn diverged from green junglefowl 3.6 million years ago. Several shared haplotypes nonetheless found between green junglefowl and chickens are attributed to recent unidirectional introgression of chickens into green junglefowl. Shared haplotypes are more frequently found between red junglefowl and chickens, which are attributed to both introgression and ancestral polymorphisms. Within each chicken breed, there is an excess of homozygosity, but there is no significant reduction in the nucleotide diversity. Phenotypic modifications of chicken breeds as a result of artificial selection appear to stem from ancestral polymorphisms at a limited number of genetic loci.

I wonder if domesticates in particular exhibit these more complex reticulated patterns in their phylogenies because they spread along human trade routes.

In a 261-148 vote that went almost exactly along party lines, the America COMPETES act was defeated. Over $40 billion dollars was designated in that bill to go toward science and technology innovation, and to provide a lot of jobs to meet our nation’s needs for the future.

As I wrote earlier, Representative Ralph Hall (R-TX) added language to the bill basically forcing Democrats to withdraw — by adding a provision that punishes people who used government computers to view pornography. The Democrats backed down, putting the bill back in Committee, which accepted the new language and further compromised with the Republicans by cutting back funding from five years down to three… which was on top of already cutting back spending about 10%. The cutback by two years dropped the funding from about $85B down to $47B, but apparently even that wasn’t enough.

Every Democrat in the House voted for the bill, but only 15 Republicans (fewer than 10%) joined them. The bill got a simple majority, but needed to get a 2/3 majority to pass — that was a gamble by the Democrats; it was the only way to bring it to a vote without having the Republicans change the language yet again. After acquiescing to the demands of the Republicans I imagine it seemed like a fair bet.

It wasn’t. And the Republicans defeated an important and necessary authorization of funding.

Lest you think I’m not being fair, here is a quote from the House Science Committee page:

Over 750 organizations endorsed reauthorization of COMPETES, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Business Roundtable, the Council on Competitiveness, the Association of American Universities, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, the National Venture Capital Association, TechAmerica, the Biotechnology Industry Organization, the American Chemical Society, and others, including nearly 100 universities and colleges.

There is still some hope, though. According to the AP (via Talking Points Memo):

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said in a statement that he was “extremely disappointed Republicans continued to play political games, voting against a job-creating measure that had bipartisan support.” He said he planned to bring the bill back to the floor soon under normal rules requiring only a majority for passage.

I am not sure how that can be done once a measure has been voted down, and unfortunately Congressional offices on the east coast are closed as I write this. I’ll see if I can find out more on Thursday (unless someone knows how and can comment below).

I have friends who were (are? I can still hope it’s “are”) depending on this funding to continue to educate the next generation of scientists. I certainly hope the House Democrats find a way to get this bill back to the Floor, get it passed so that funding is reauthorized, and in this way make sure our country has a chance to continue to stand tall in the world when it comes to our scientific capabilities.

Geeks, meta-Geeks, and gender trouble: activism, identity, and low-power FM radio. “In this paper, I consider the activities of a group of individuals who tinker with and build radio hardware in an informal setting called ‘Geek Group’. They conceive of Geek Group as a radical pedagogical activity, which constitutes an aspect of activism surrounding citizen access to low-power FM radio. They are also concerned with combating the gendered nature of hardware skills, yet in spite of their efforts men tend to have more skill and familiarity with radio hardware than women. Radio tinkering has a long history as a masculine undertaking and a site of masculine identity construction. I argue that this case represents an interplay between geek, activist, and gendered identities, all of which are salient for this group, but which do not occur together without some tension.” Photo: flikr/Extra Ketchup Related content:
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