Author: Discover Main Feed

In my new brain column for Discover, I take a look at recent research on fear. As dread turns to terror, our brains look an awful lot like the brain of a mouse as it realizes the feline end is nigh. Check it out.

If you’ve been dying to get a kick-ass dragon tattoo but feel like it might not go over well with prospective employers or your mom, then here’s a sneaky, roundabout way to satisfy your yearning. You can get the tattoo using augmented reality–and for an extra dose of kick-ass, the dragon will flap its leathery wings.

The concept was developed by a Buenos Aires-based software company called ThinkAnApp. In the video below, you’ll see a guy’s arm tattooed with what looks like a plain rectangular box. But that box is essentially a barcode. The company has devised a camera with special software that reads this barcode, and then superimposes an animated image.

Dvice reports:

When viewed through a specially equipped camera, the seemingly plain box design suddenly displays a three-dimension dragon. The possibilities for art projects, information distribution, and social engineering via body art inherent in this idea are fascinating.

Related Content:
The Loom: Science Tattoo Emporium
Science, Not Fiction: Seeing The Future, Literally
Discoblog: One Small Step Closer to Superhuman Cyborg Vision
Discoblog: Will the Laptops of the Future Be a Pair of Eye Glasses?

Image: ThinkAnApp

It’s been nearly ten years since President Bill Clinton stood on the White House lawn with a team of scientists to announce the completion of the first survey of the human genome. “Today, we celebrate the revelation of the first draft of the human book of life,” he said. It’s a pleasing metaphor, but it’s deeply flawed. There is not a single Human Book of Life. If there were, after all, Clinton and the scientists and all the rest of us would all be identical clones.

There is a vast amount of genetic variation from person to person, and from one continent to another. The survey that Clinton was announcing was a cobbling-together of DNA from several individuals. Since then, researchers have produced much higher-quality reads of the genomes of actual people. They’ve learned a lot from those studies, but, in the scope of human genetic diversity, these studies have been timid ventures. If you compare someone from South Korea to someone of northern European descent, you’re only capturing a small sliver of the variation in our species. If you really want to get into the thick of it, there’s really one place to go: Africa.

This chart helps to illustrate why. If you trace the origins of the genetic material in our species, you end up in Africa. One reason we know this is that human populations outside of Africa share some genetic markers that Africans lack. That’s consistent with the hypothesis that Homo sapiens evolved in Africa, and then a small group of Africans migrated off the continent and gave rise to all the other populations of humans alive today. Another clue is in the genetic diversity of Africans themselves. Looking at relatively small collections of DNA, scientists have found much more genetic diversity in Africa than elsewhere. That would make sense if African populations have existed longer than populations elsewhere, giving them more time to accrue new mutations.

Africa is, of course, a huge continent, with a billion people and 2000 distinct ethno-linguistic groups. Some of those groups, including some of the most populous ones, are relatively young. In some cases, they expanded over large areas as they developed agriculture. Some smaller ethnic groups are only distantly related to other Africans, since their ancestors split off a long time ago. Those groups are crucial to a full-spectrum picture not just of African diversity, but the diversity of all humanity.

So it’s heartening to find that today scientists are publishing a genome of a man from one of those deeply diverging groups–the Khoisan of southern Africa, also known as the Bushmen of the Kalahari.

The Khoisan are not a single group of Africans, but a large number of small groups. They originally probably spanned much of southern Africa, making a living by hunting and foraging for food. Bantu farmers moved into southern Africa much later, taking up a lot of the arable land. Most Khoisan live now in Botswana and Namibia, eking out a precarious existence.

A team of scientists from the United States, Australia, and Africa sequenced the complete genome of a Khoisan named !Gubi (far left in the top photos). They also sequenced portions of the genomes of three other Khoisans from Namibia to gauge the diversity within the group. And, for comparison, they also sequenced the genome of a Bantu from South Africa. Not just any Bantu, mind you, but none other than Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

The survey confirmed the conclusion of earlier studies: Khoisans have a lot of genetic diversity. On average, each pair of the Khoisans differed at 1.2 out of every 1000 nucleotides (the “letters” of DNA). On average, a European and an Asian differ at 1 out of every 1000.

Khoisans lack some key adaptations that arose in Africans who have taken up agriculture. For example, they lack a mutation that allows adults to digest milk. They also lack a common mutation that provides resistance to malaria–a disease that took off when parasite-carrying mosquitoes could lay eggs in farm fields and bite farmers sleeping in nearby huts. But these absences don’t mean that Khoisans are primitive cavemen, or that their genomes are a time capsule from antiquity. Most of the distinctive features of their genomes arose only after their ancestors split off from the ancestors of other humans. A number of those new mutations show some indications of being adaptations for life in the desert, such as controlling levels of salt in the blood.

Understanding the genome of Khoisans is not just interesting in itself, but important to the well-being of all people on Earth. To figure out the effects of genes on our health, scientists scan DNA from lots of people, looking for variations that are strongly linked to certain diseases. As I wrote last year in Newsweek, it’s been a struggle. One reason is that the list of genetic variations we’ve been using has, until now, been too short. In the new study, the scientists found 1.3 million differences between Khosians and the reference human genome against which all human DNA is compared. Just as intriguing are some of the variants that Khoisans have that are found in other populations. Some of these familiar variants have been linked to serious diseases. Yet all the Khoisans who were tested in the new study were around 80 years old and in excellent physical shape. The effect of these variants may actually depend on variations in other genes. To figure out what any one human genome means for a person’s health, scientists need to look at a full spectrum of human genomes. The Book of Life is not enough. We need to read the Library of Life.

[Images: Schuster et al, “Complete Khoisan and Bantu genomes from Southern Africa,” Nature, doi: 10.1038/nature08795, Campell and Tishkoff]

A peek through the International Space Station’s new windows [PIC].

Are these the first steps to a nuclear renaissance? Yesterday the White House said it would give more than $8 billion in loan guarantees to make sure that construction of two new nuclear power plants gets under way in Georgia. If these plants go ahead, they would be the first new nuclear plants built in the country in more than three decades.

The loan guarantee is conditional. It hinges on the utility, the Southern Co., receiving a license from the US Nuclear Regulatory Agency to build and operate the new reactors. Based on the current timeline, the utility expects to receive its license during the second half of 2011, says David Ratcliffe, its chairman and chief executive officer [Christian Science Monitor]. The two reactors would each produce more than 1,000 megawatts, and would work with two existing reactors at a site near Waynesboro, Georgia.

The loan guarantees will allow Southern Co. to get massive construction loans from its bankers without assuming the risk; if the power plants aren’t profitable and if the company defaults on its loans, the federal government will pay back the money to the banks instead. Despite the government support, the new Georgia reactors are far from a done deal: their design has not yet been fully approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, whose staff has raised questions about whether changes made to harden the plant against aircraft attack had made it more vulnerable to earthquakes [The New York Times].

The loan guarantees are a provision in the 2005 Energy Policy Act, installed because nuclear power backers say new projects would be too great a financial risk to go forward without government support. Energy secretary Steven Chu announced that there’s more of this to come: The administration will ask for $36 billion in nuclear loan guarantees for 2011. However, ramping up the money could end up pouring good money after bad, skeptics argue. The guarantees represent money for “a limited set of reactors from a small number of first-movers,” says Ellen Vankco, a specialist on energy issues with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington [Christian Science Monitor].

The announcement garnered the expected political reaction. Republicans and nuclear power advocates praised the move, while many environmentalists balked at expanding nuclear power and free-market activists balked at the spending, saying taxpayers could get stuck with the bill if projects fail. However, green groups haven’t complained as loudly as one might expect, because of the political reality: Many large conservation groups appear to be tacitly accepting the need to increase federal nuclear support — along with offshore oil and gas drilling, another environmentalist anathema — to attract Republican votes for a measure to limit greenhouse gas emissions [Los Angeles Times].

And then there’s the issue the Obama Administration would probably rather not talk about as it makes this nuclear push: waste. Given the litany of the problems with the proposed Yucca Mountain waste storage site in Nevada—transporting waste across the country, the possibility of a fault line running underneath it, and so on—Obama axed the idea of using it. With no viable alternatives, all that’s left is continuing to store on site. Currently, 70,000 tons of radioactive waste are stored at more than 100 nuclear sites around the country, and 2,000 tons are added every year [CNN].

Related Content:
DISCOVER: New Tech Could Make Nuclear the Best Weapon Against Climate Change
80beats: Yucca Mountain Ruled Out for Storing Nuke Waste. Now What?
80beats: Scientist Smackdown: Is Chernobyl Animal Dead Zone or Post-Apocalyptic Earth?
80beats: Chernobyl’s Radioactive Fallout Produces Tough, Post-Nuclear Soybeans
80beats: Could a New Generation of Power Plants Turn Nuclear Waster Into Clean Fuel?

Image: iStockphoto

We’ve collected enough data in our What Got You Interested in Science? poll to draw some conclusions. Not very firm conclusions, of course, as the whole process was wildly non-scientific, and there’s no reason to expect that the respondents were a representative sample in any sense. (The numbers were not bad; the smallest category, “the internet,” received 62 votes so far.) But conclusions, nonetheless!

And the main conclusion is: there are many different things that get young proto-scientists interested in the field. Books, both non-fiction and fiction, play an important role, but no one thing really stands out.

That’s interesting, and not really what I would have expected. Given that there certainly are many things that could get someone interested in science, I wouldn’t have been surprised if there was a dominant source for the pipeline, but instead it’s quite a diverse porfolio.

If we think getting people interested in science is a good thing, the lesson is: there aren’t any magic bullets. A broad-based strategy seems appropriate. Interesting books, educational classes, encouraging relatives, engrossing hobbies and school activities, inspiring movies and TV shows. I approve.

NASA’s fledgling Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) opened its eyes a few weeks ago, and astronomers have just released the first of a torrent of spectacular images from it.

Since its launch last December, WISE has been surveying the sky, taking data continuously as it spins on its axis and orbits the Earth. A few images have been released before, but these new ones are fully processed, scientifically-calibrated, and gorgeous.

I have to start with this one, because it’s just so pretty! Behold Comet C/2007 Q3, aka Siding Spring:

Holy dirty snowballs! That’s gorgeous, a classic comet. When this image was taken, on January 10, 2010, the comet was 340 million kilometers (200 million miles) from Earth. That’s a good ways off, so I’m impressed with the detail of this image! It’s actually a four-color image: blue is 3.6 microns (about 5 times the reddest wavelength the human eye can see, so well out into the infrared), green is 4.6, orange is 12, and red is 22 microns.

Since the temperature of an objects determines the kind of light it emits, we can estimate the temperature of the comet just by eyeballing this picture. It’s mostly orange, meaning the comet is pouring out light at 12 microns. A human being radiates infrared from about 7 to 14 microns, so this means the parts of the comet emitting IR (and therefore seen by WISE in this image) are around the same temperature as a person! Well, in physics terms; in human terms it’s pretty cold, about -40 Celsius. And it’ll get even colder now since it’s on its way out of the inner solar system, away from the Sun’s warmth. It’ll dim as it cools, too, returning back to invisibility once again.

WISE is expected to see quite a few comets, and in fact discovered its first just a few days ago. I wonder how many it’ll find, and if they’ll all be this pretty…?

Let’s take a step farther out for the next WISE image:

Recognize that galaxy? I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t, but it’s Andromeda! That’s the nearest large spiral to our Milky Way. It’s roughly 2.9 million light years away (estimates vary) and can be seen by the naked eye from a dark site. This stunning photo really accentuates how amazing WISE is: the field of view is 5 degrees across, the width of ten full Moons. The Hubble camera I used to work with would barely cover a pixel in this image!

Remember, this image is all infrared. What looks blue here is actually cold stuff compared to what we’re used to: old red stars, for example. The colors are a little different than in the comet image, but red is still the coolest material: dust. These complex molecules are created when massive stars are born and when they die. Since massive stars don’t live long, they tend to die near where they were born, so you see the dust constrained to very narrow areas where star formation occurs. Less hefty stars (like the Sun) live long enough to drift away from their nursery over billions of years, so they fill the galaxy’s disk (in blue). That’s why the dust is so vivid and tightly defined in this image.

If you look closely, you can see the left side of the galaxy is a bit distorted. That’s called a warp, and is probably caused by a nearby pass of another galaxy, or one Andromeda actually absorbed. The fuzzy blob just below the main galaxy is a dwarf elliptical companion to Andromeda, orbiting it like the Moon orbits the Earth. It’s mostly composed of old stars that look red to our eye, so again it’s blue in this false color image.

OK, one more. I like this one a lot: NGC 3603, a star-forming region about 20,000 light years from Earth:

It may not look familiar, but if you’ve been reading my blog for more than a couple of weeks, you’ve seen it: I wrote about a Hubble image of this very nebula. Now, if you’re like me, you’ll click that link, look at the Hubble image, and then try to figure out where it fits in this WISE shot. Pbbbt. Don’t bother. The Hubble image is only a tiny portion of this vast vista, a blip right in the middle of the brightest part of the WISE image. The S in WISE is for “Survey”, which means it takes pictures of ginormous swaths of sky, far more than Hubble can do. In fact, Hubble could take picture after picture for weeks and not get a view of the sky as large as WISE does in a few minutes (of course, the Hubble image would be a whole lot more detailed…).

In this image, as before, red is warm dust, and blue is hotter material like stars. The green is what gets me though: at 12 microns, that reveals PAHs, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. These complex organic compounds form in cool conditions in nebulae, which are lousy with them. They’re everywhere where the temperature isn’t too high to disintegrate them. They can form even larger molecules, and some people think they may be important in creating the molecules necessary for life on Earth. That’s not to say those molecules form in nebulae like NGC 3603 and then somehow get here; they most likely form right here as well. The point is, they look like they’re pretty easy to make if conditions are right… on Earth as it is in the heavens.

And the sheer size and breadth of the nebula is simply stunning! I’m so used to narrow fields of view that I forget sometimes just how large these objects are. This nebula is dozens of light years across, forming thousands upon thousands of stars. It’s among the biggest such star factories in our galaxy, and is certainly easily visible from other galaxies as well. Even from 20,000 light years away — 1/5 of the way across our entire galaxy — it’s clearly a formidable object.

And that’s the strength of WISE. It can see large objects, investigate the bigger picture of the sky, and do it in the longest regions of the infrared spectrum, light that we simply cannot explore from the ground — our air absorbs it, and all the warm objects around us glow fiercely at those energies. It would be like trying to find a firefly against the Sun! So we must launch observatories into space to peer at the far infrared light from cosmic objects, and WISE will be our eyes to do just that.

And from these images it looks like it’ll do a fine job. I’m impressed with these images. I’ve seen a few early release observations in my time — I’ve made a few myself! — and these are excellent. The whole mission is only supposed to last a few months; there is coolant on board for the detectors that can only go so far. In that short time it has a whole sky to observe, and that’s a lot of space. But that also means there’s a lot to see: galaxies, asteroids, comets, nebulae… maybe even a gamma-ray burst or two. The next few months will be very exciting for infrared astronomy!

Related posts:
WISE uncovers its first near-Earth asteroid
First light for WISE
The terrible beauty of chaotic starbirth
Spitzer peeks under a cradle’s blanket

Images credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

Once again, to the bane of myth-makers and fans of historical intrigue, the simplest explanation may be the best: Scientists analyzing the DNA of the world-famous mummy of Tutankhamen say that he wasn’t done in by murder nor any of the exotic diseases put forth as explanations for his death at the age of 19. Rather, they say in the Journal of the American Medical Association, it was likely complications of malaria that killed King Tut, who was already frail thanks to royal inbreeding.

The team led by Egypt’s top archaeologist, Zahi Hawass, spent years taking CT scans and conducting genetic tests on mummies from the royal tombs. They say they confirmed that Tut was the son of Akhenaten, which is what scholars have long believed, but it hints at something else: It also identifies some of his grandparents and great-grandparents for the first time and suggests that his mother was Akhenaten’s sister [The Times]. A brother-sister pair wasn’t unusual during this period in ancient Egypt, medical historian Howard Markel says. Pharaohs were thought of as deities, so it makes sense that the only prospective mates who’d pass muster would be other deities [AP].

Unfortunately for King Tut, that incestuous tradition made him more susceptible to degenerative bone diseases. He may have had Koehler’s disease, as well as a club foot. Earlier discoveries had hinted at Tutankhamen’s frailty, including the 100-plus walking sticks that Howard Carter found when he unearthed the tomb in 1922. “This is confirmed by images that show him sitting while shooting an arrow, which normally would have been done standing up,” says Hawass. “He cannot stand” [TIME].

The researchers also found that Tut and his family were infected by a parasite that often brought with it a virulent form of malaria. If the young Tut was already frail and had a weakened immune system, a malarial infection could have been life-threatening, the team hypothesizes. Not everyone buys the parasite bit, however, including parasite scientist Sanjeev Krishna. “If you have the parasite and you get to the age of 19, the chances are you’ve developed some kind of immunity,” he said [The Times].

But while a sickly minor king who could barely walk isn’t exactly as romantic as the King Tut of popular culture, James Phillips of Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History says we shouldn’t expect the emerging facts to crush the myth. “Reality is reality, but it’s not going to change his place in the folk heroism of popular culture,” Phillips said. “The way he was found, what was found in his grave — even though he was a minor king, it has excited the imagination of people since 1922″ [AP].

Related Content:
DISCOVER: 5 Questions for the Mummy Doctor
80beats: Egypt Finds Tombs of Pyramid Builders, And More Evidence They Were Free Men
80beats: X-Rayed Mummies Reveal That Ancient Egyptians Had Heart Disease
Cosmic Variance: Tut-Tutting at Tut Tat

Image: flickr / Steve Evans

The next time, you’re taking shots straight out of a bottle of mezcal, the potent Mexican alcohol made from the agave or a maguey plant, remember what you’re drinking. Swirling in your mouth is not just the strong smoky alcohol guaranteed to knock you out, but also caterpillar DNA from the “worm” that is often found at the bottom of the bottle.

The worm is actually the larval form of the moth Hypopta agavis that lives on the agave plant and really has no business being in the bottle except to serve as a marketing gimmick. Still, many a drinker has set out to prove his iron will and iron stomach by swallowing the booze-soaked insect at the bottom. Turns out there’s no need for such dramatic gestures. Researchers have found that DNA from the caterpillar can be extracted from the alcohol it’s preserved in.

Ars technica reports on the scientists findings:

“We hypothesized that DNA from a preserved specimen can leak into its preservative medium, allowing the medium itself to be directly PCR amplified” the authors write. “We successfully tested this idea on mezcal—the alcoholic beverage famous for the ‘worm’ (a caterpillar) that is placed in the bottle of many brands—and indeed obtained amplifiable quantities of caterpillar DNA.”

This is great news for researchers trying to extract DNA samples from old specimens preserved in alcohol. Now, they don’t have to take pieces from a crumbling specimen and risk destroying it in the bargain, but can instead use the preservative liquid to obtain and sequence DNA. The scientists, however, warned that different specimens should not be placed in the same jar, as residual DNA would all swirl together.

So no mixing worms, snakes, and scorpions.

Related Content:
Discoblog: Caterpillars Beware: Parasitic Wasps Come in a Wide Variety
NCBI ROFL: NCBI ROFL: Lost in the sauce: the effects of alcohol on mind wandering

Image: Wikimedia

Around this time last year, an unexpected trip to the hospital led to an anesthesia mistake giving me aspiration pneumonia. Although I recognized how serious the situation was, I was also very sad to miss my favorite annual science event: The 2009 AAAS meeting in Chicago–including The Science of Kissing symposium I had helped organize for Valentine’s Day.

As you can imagine, one year later I’m extremely grateful to be healthy, fully recovered, and on my way to attend the 2010 meeting with David. And I’m also delighted to be joining the AAAS program committee. Most of all, I’m looking forward to catching up with friends in science, journalism, policy–and especially, a few former Sea Grant Fellows. And CM too of course.

Blogging may be light during the conference, but expect some upcoming posts on what’s happening in San Diego…

This is beyond brilliant. It is head-asplodey meta-hyper geekariffic.

If you aren’t familiar with the Hitler parody videos you can catch up here, but you really have to watch a few before seeing this, the transformative end-of-the-meme bringer. Anyone making a Downfall parody after this is basically an SEO professional getting a Twitter account now.

Ausgezeichnet.

[Update: The comments for this post have been… interesting. Opinions are all over the place on this. I know the Humor tag is small and easy to overlook, but I pretty much figured the tone of this post made it clear I was just being silly. Either I missed the mark, or I have a lot of commenters who did. Given that choice, I’ll just assume I’m funny. Actually, rereading it, the skydiver I mentioned threw off the vibe of the post, so I removed it. Hopefully that’ll bring the tone more to where I wanted it to be, and I certainly hope no one was offended.

Anyway, to be clear, I was kidding. This sounds like a fun sport, and it would be awesome to watch. However, I stand by the whole I’d-never-do-it-in-a-million-years thing. It takes a special kind of crazy to load a rocket motor onto the back of a plane. I’m happy it’s being done, and a lot happier people other than me are doing it!]

I just received a very odd press release: the Tulsa Air and Space Museum is partnering with something called the Rocket Racing League to create — get this — a rocket racing show. Like an air show, but with rocket-powered vehicles. They have a poster and everything:

Now, as soon as I read this press release I had three thoughts barrel through my brain, willy-nilly, right on top of each other. They were, in order:

1) This must be a hoax.
2) No, I think this is real, and we live in THE FUTURE.
3) This is a really bad idea.

I’ve been to a few air shows. They make me nervous, not the least reason for which is all the footage you ever see of air shows on TV is when two planes slam into each other or the ground or the spectators or some other obstacle like a goose, the main feature of all these being the slamming.

So, doing this with a rocket motor strapped to your backside just strikes me as being, well, a terrible, terrible idea. Apparently they have some sort of course the rocketeers must go through — ostensibly without the circa 1991 Jennifer Connelly waiting for them when they land^* — and the audience at the show can follow along on giant TV screens using some sort of augmented reality system. People watching on TV can, according to the press release, “have the unique sensation of riding right alongside famed Rocket Racing League pilots.”

Yeah, not so much for me. I think I’ll watch Spongebob reruns. Much safer. And that way I can just wait for the highlights on “America’s Funniest Rockets Slamming into Things Way Faster Than a Plane Can”.

---

^* Yes, I am assuming all the rocketeers are men (well, heterosexual men if you want to be really specific). It’s not sexist; it’s because all the women I know are far too smart to strap a rocket to their backside in this manner.

(If you haven’t yet heard the first episode of the new Point of Inquiry, you can listen here, and I also strongly encourage you to subscribe via iTunes from the same page.)

Perhaps the most alarming part of my conversation with Paul Offit came when he argued we’re already seeing many scary diseases return, thanks to reduced vaccination rates in certain communities around the U.S. I wasn’t sure whether there was clear evidence of this yet (save the obvious case of the measles in the UK). But Offit certainly sounded sure. I asked him the following question, “The public health fear is that diseases that were once vanquished or rare will return. How much evidence is there that that’s happening?” Here is his reply around minute 25:30:

Abundant evidence. I would have said ten years ago it was theoretical. And certainly, if we had immunization rates that dropped from 98 percent to 95 percent, or 94 percent, you wouldn’t see what we’re seeing now.

And frankly, just to take a step back, if you look at nationwide immunization rates, they’re excellent. And I think our country frankly asks a lot of its citizens when it asks children to receive vaccines against 14 different diseases in the first few years of life, which can mean 26 inoculations in the first few years, and as many as five shots at one time. I think that’s a lot to ask of parents, and for the most part, our immunization rates are excellent.

The problem is, there are certain communities or districts where the immunization rates are quite low: Ashland, Oregon; Vashon Island off Washington State; Southern California; Hasidic Jews in New York state. And so what you’re starting to see now is outbreaks of infectious diseases. Specifically, we had a measles epidemic in 2008 that was bigger than anything we’ve seen in more than a decade. We have outbreaks of pertussis now, or whooping cough, one of which occurred in Delaware in 2006, where the epidemiological pattern was exactly like one would see in the pre-vaccine era, meaning primarily 5 to 9 year olds. And we’ve had cases of bacterial meningitis, one particular type that is perfectly preventable by vaccines, that has caused deaths–one in Minnesota, three in the Philadelphia era.

I used to say that I think that the tide will turn when people start to see children die of these diseases. They’re seeing children die of these diseases. And so now I’ve changed to, “when enough children die.” But I think it is perfectly possible for diseases like polio to come back in the United States. Because it still occurs in the world, and only about 1 of every 200 to 500 people with polio actually becomes paralyzed with it, most people have no symptoms, but still are contagious. So let enough people stop getting vaccinated against polio, and there is every reason to believe it will come back.

Scary, scary stuff.

Again, you can listen to the podcast and subscribe here. And don’t forget to buy Paul Offit’s book Autism’s False Prophets if you don’t already own it…

A few thoughtful readers have emailed optical illusions since I posted Tsang Cheung Shing’s incredible coffee kiss last week. This my favorite so far (and I have a hunch the lovely Dr. Isis will approve!). Reader ‘Sue’ explains:

“this Christian Louboutin heel was painted on a woman’s bare foot by John Maurad and Jenai Chin when New York Magazine featured an article entitled, You Walk Wrong.“

On the Carribean island of Montserrat is the Soufrière Hills volcano. This is the very same one that erupted in 1997 and did so much damage to the small island (and killed 19 people).

On February 11, just a few days ago, the growing lave dome on the volcano partially collapsed, sending a plume 15,000 meters (more than 8 miles!) into the air. A few hours later, the plume was caught by NASA’s Aqua satellite:

Holy, well, Haleakala! Click to Envesuvianate (and to see the full frame picture).

The plume is obvious, as is its shadow to the northeast. Two smaller, lower plumes can be seen rocketing out over the sea to the north and south, and the wind is carrying ash in beautiful eddies to the east, too.

From this view, high above the Earth, it’s eerily beautiful. I imagine seeing the pyroclastic flows from this event would have been underpants-soilingly terrifying from the ground, however. I’m not seeing much news about this, even though it happened days ago, and I haven’t heard of any deaths resulting from it.

When I see images like this, I have to lean back and revel at the forbidding power and terrible beauty of volcanic eruptions like this one. I’m fascinated by them, and hope one day to see an active volcano (though from a safe distance). It’s a good reminder that as much as we rail and froth, we are hardly the lords and masters of this planet. We live on its thin skin by the graces of geology and the whims of random events, and that can be taken away just as easily.

The good news is, by studying events like these, and learning all we can about the natural world around us, we can understand what makes these dangerous giants tick. I mentioned that when Soufrière Hills blew in 1997, nineteen people died. That’s on an island with a population of over 4000… so why were so few killed? Because volcanologists — scientists — knew the warning signs and were able to get most of the people out of harm’s way.

Science. It’s cool, and it makes our lives better. It sometimes even saves them outright.

Image credit: NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC.

Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials.

“OBJECTIVES: To determine whether parachutes are effective in preventing major trauma related to gravitational challenge. DESIGN: Systematic review of randomised controlled trials. DATA SOURCES: Medline, Web of Science, Embase, and the Cochrane Library databases; appropriate internet sites and citation lists. STUDY SELECTION: Studies showing the effects of using a parachute during free fall. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE: Death or major trauma, defined as an injury severity score > 15. RESULTS: We were unable to identify any randomised controlled trials of parachute intervention. CONCLUSIONS: As with many interventions intended to prevent ill health, the effectiveness of parachutes has not been subjected to rigorous evaluation by using randomised controlled trials. Advocates of evidence based medicine have criticised the adoption of interventions evaluated by using only observational data. We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute.”

Read the full article here.

Thanks to Janneke, Eugene, Andy, Christy, and Ann for today’s ROFL!

Image: flickr/The U.S. Army

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Hijacking a plane flown by euthanized pigs: a beginner’s manual.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: BMJ week.

When scientists first created induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) three years ago, they were hailed as a game-changing advance for medicine: Scientists hoped the engineered cells could duplicate the talents of embryonic stem cells, which can develop into any kind of cell in the body, while avoiding the destruction of embryos. However, a new study by one of the leading U.S. cell labs suggests that iPS cells, at least right now, have serious problems keeping them from reaching their potential.

Advanced Cell Technologies, the Massachusetts lab led by stem cell guru Robert Lanza, released a study of 25 embryonic lines and eight iPS lines in the journal Stem Cells last week. At first they found that human iPS cells could indeed generate blood vessel, blood precursor and retinal cells with characteristics similar to ones derived from embryonic stem cells, albeit with significantly reduced efficiency [Scientific American]. But the blood and retinal cells showed much higher rates of cell death and premature aging. According to Lanza, “there was a 1,000- to 5,000-fold difference” between the iPS cells’ ability to keep growing and dividing and the true embryonic cells’ ability, he says. “In terms of whether you can use the cells therapeutically or to study disease, that’s the difference between getting the study to work and being dead in the water” [Newsweek].

So what’s the problem? Lanza suspects that it comes from the use of viruses to insert genes into cells and make them revert to that pluripotent state. But, Newsweek reports, there are other ways to create iPS that show promise for creating healthier cells. Biologist Maria Blasco says that perhaps telomeres are the issue: These lengths of genetic material that protect genes from damage each time they reproduce may be shortened in induced cells. “If telomere length is not fully reprogrammed to that of embryonic stem cells during induced cell generation, this could be certainly a possible explanation for the difference” [USA Today].

Whatever is happening, it’s a major setback for iPS research. Lanza’s team had wanted to apply to use iPS cells in clinical trials, but now, he says, that’s not going to happen. While scientists had already tried to test drugs on iPS cells, this level of cell death and early aging means that researchers can’t know for sure whether effects they see in experiments come from problems with the drugs or the cells. And it means that fights over embryonic stem cells could intensify once more. Says Lanza, “it would be premature to abandon research using embryonic stem cells until we fully understand what’s causing these problems” [Newsweek].

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Fighting For the Right to Clone
DISCOVER: Have We Entered the Stem Cell Era?
DISCOVER: Second Act For Stem Cells
80beats: Bring on the Research: NIH Approves New Embryonic Stem Cell Lines
80beats: Obama’s Guidelines for Stem Cell Research Dodge Controversial Bullets
80beats: A Safer Way to Transform Skin Cells Into Stem Cells Brings Medical Trials Closer

Image: iStockphoto

After being bypassed and outclassed by other companies in the mobile-technology space, Microsoft has announced plans to chuck its old Windows Mobile operating system and start afresh with the Windows 7 Phone Series. Judging by company’s big reveal at the Mobile World Congress–and the ensuing buzz in the blogosphere–the rebooted Microsoft phone may already be a surprisingly strong contender.

After the successful launch of Windows 7 operating system last year, Microsoft announced on Monday that the company will soon be launching its Windows 7 Phone Series. No date was mentioned at the Barcelona announcement yesterday, but some expect the phones to be out in late 2010–just in time to be a holiday offering. The Windows Phone 7 launch caps a year of product launches met with critical praise. There was the launch of Microsoft’s impressive new search engine (Bing), a popular new operating system suite of cloud-based products (Office Web Apps), and a revitalized Web presence (MSN.com) [PCWorld].

At the phone’s launch at Mobile World Congress 2010, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said the operating system will integrate deeply not just with current social networking sites likes Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn but will also bring Xbox LIVE games and the Zune music and video experience to the mobile phone. With this phone, the world’s largest software manufacturer hopes to make a serious dent in a consumer market already populated with Apple’s iPhone, RIM’s Blackberry, and phones using Google’s Android operating software.

A few bloggers who got their hands on the Windows 7 Phone Series report breathlessly that the display is like nothing they have seen before. The interface, they say, is clean and simple with no busy backgrounds, no drop-shadows, shaded icons, or faux 3-D. The whole look is strangely reminiscent of a terminal display (maybe Microsoft is recalling its DOS roots here) — almost Tron-like in its primary color simplicity[Engadget].

Content is organized in “hubs”–and unlike the iPhone, where users have to switch between different apps for Facebook and Twitter, you can use one “hub” for different accounts without leaving the home page. Hit up a contact in the People hub and you have everything relevant, from their contact details (tap to call) to their Facebook or Twitter status. It’s surprisingly natural [Wired]. The “Pictures” hub integrates pictures from your social networks and your PC, making them all available in one single place–your Windows 7 phone.

The Windows 7 phone also delivers the first and only official Xbox LIVE experience on a phone which allows access to games and other sources of entertainment (like Netflix) that can be streamed using Xbox LIVE. However, Microsoft will be relying on the likes of Dell, HTC, HP, LG, Samsung, Sony-Ericsson, and Toshiba to build phones around its software. Microsoft has laid down some guidelines on what the phones that are built around its software will look like. Each of these companies, however, will want to make its product unique. That could make the iPhone’s tight integration between software and hardware difficult to replicate [Forbes].

Microsoft says the phone is still a work-in-progress, and though it doesn’t appear to be quite the game-changer that the iPhone was, experts say the new phone is cool enough to shake up the smartphone market. They also predict that the big gainer in all of this will be Microsoft’s own search engine Bing, which ties in with the new phone and also, according to rumors, may become the iPhone’s default search engine.

Check out the hands-on preview here:

Related Content:
80beats: Google Buzz: The Search Giant’s Attempt at a Facebook-Killer
80beats: Apple’s “iPad” Tablet: It’s Here, It’s Cool, and It’s Slightly Cheaper Than Expected
80beats: 5 Buzz-Worthy Storylines from the Consumer Electronics Show
80beats: Amazon’s New Kindle E-Reader Aims to Shake Up Academia and Journalism
Discoblog: Weird iPhone Apps (our growing compendium of the oddest apps out there)

Image: Microsoft

My Hive Overmind co-blogger Chris Mooney was on the Morning Joe show with Dr. Nancy Snyderman to talk about all the recent news about vaccines and autism. They hit all the high points: there is no connection, the science is unequivocable, the antivaxxers are letting emotions take over when they should be looking at the evidence, and how hostility toward science is making this worse.

It’s really good to see the mainstream media not only taking on this issue, but doing it correctly too: no antivaxxers spreading their lies to give a notion of “balance”, just calm, clear, rational discourse on a critical issue where the noise tends to swallow up the signal. Well done!

Does your diabetes medication smell like dead fish or smelly socks? You’re not alone.

Many patients who took the common diabetes drug metformin report being so disgusted by its smell that they stopped taking it altogether, doctors say. Patients who do take the drug often feel nauseated and report burping up an unpleasant after-taste.

The problem of the malodorous medicine came to light after scientists decided to check whether nausea, commonly reported among patients on metformin, was a physical side effect caused by the drug’s ingredients or simply a result of the stink the pill was raising. Their results, published in the February issue of Annals of Internal Medicine, revealed that the tablet’s smell just made people want to throw up.

Researcher J. Russell May told HealthDay News:

“Metformin is an excellent drug, but the immediate-release formulation may have an odor to it. The smell is fishy or like the inside of an inner tube, and in a patient’s mind, because it smells like something that has gone bad, they may think the drug isn’t good.”

The doctors observed that patients who took the coated, extended-release version of the medication did not report any trouble with smell or unpleasant after-taste, but the ones who took the regular version were loathe to swallow the stinky pill. Some pharmacists said they recognized metformin by its unique “old locker-room sweat sock” odor.

Doctors suggest that instead of turning away from the medication altogether, patients could ask for an extended-release version of metformin. If that’s not available and if they don’t want to switch medications, they may have to suck it up, hold their noses, and swallow their fishy-smelling pills.

Related Content:
Discoblog: Rare Genetic Condition Makes Woman Smell Like Fish
Discoblog: Go To Jail—You Smell Like Drugs
DISCOVER: A Pill for Diabetics

Image: Flickr/mahalie