Author: Discover Main Feed

Many people are confused about the relationship between weather and climate, and Jeff Masters did a nice job of explaining the difference today on NPR’s Morning Edition:

Meteorologist Jeff Masters, with the Web site Weather Underground, says it’s average temperatures — not snowfall — that really measure climate change.

“Because if it’s cold enough to snow, you will get snow,” Masters says. “We still have winter even if temperatures have warmed on average, oh, about 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past 100 years.”

Masters say that 1 degree average warming is not enough to eliminate winter. Or storms.

A storm is part of what scientists classify as weather. Weather is largely influenced by local conditions and changes week to week. It’s fickle — fraught with wild ups and downs.

Climate is the long-term trend of atmospheric conditions across large regions, even the whole planet. Changes in climate are slow and measured in decades, not weeks.

Go listen to the full clip by Christopher Joyce here.

Rocking the thermometer at 4 trillion degrees Celsius, a subatomic soup that might reflect the state of matter shortly after the Big Bang has set a new world record: It’s the hottest substance ever created in a lab. The previous record, recorded at Sandia National Lab in 2006, was a balmy 2 billion degrees Celsius. The core of the sun burns at a chill 15 million degrees.

The uber-hot brew is created at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. The lab’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, RHIC, accelerates gold particles to nearly the speed of light before slamming them together to see what they’re made of. When the energy of the colliding gold particles is transferred into heat, the temperature soars. Scientists with the Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interaction eXperiment, PHENIX, who took the temperature measurement, announced a value of 4 trillion, but that’s only an average over the lifetime of the substance. At its hottest stage, the infusion may reach 7 trillion degrees Celsius.

“Matter as we know it shouldn’t exist at that temperature,” says PHENIX Spokesperson Barbara Jacak. And from what they can tell, it doesn’t really.

The warming climate may earn carbon dioxide all the headlines (including ones about senators who can’t tell the difference between a couple blizzards and a 130-year climate record), but the gas is having another effect that’s less familiar but no less devastating. Some of the carbon dioxide we pump into the air gets sucked into the ocean, where it lowers the pH of seawater. We’ve already dropped the pH of the ocean measurably, and as we burn more fossil fuels we will drop it more. Ocean acidification has the potential to wreak world-wide havoc on marine life.

Today in Yale Environment 360, I write about scientists comparing today’s ocean acidification to the last time something comparable happened–55 million years ago. Short answer: today’s is big. Really, really big. Check it out.

In the United States, we need a religious bill of rights about as much as we need a white people’s bill of rights, or a men’s bill of rights. That is, not at all: when 90+ percent of the country claims to be religious, you pretty much run the joint anyway. Worse, we hardly need something like this for public schools. There already are pretty clear laws about how religion can and cannot be treated in the schools.

Still, that hasn’t stopped people in Colorado from proposing just such a bill for public schools in the state legislature, a bill which may be presented to the Judiciary Committee as early as Monday, today. Note that this bill represents an act and not a law. Nothing in it is legally enforceable, as far as I can tell. Good thing, too.

The bill is ridiculous in a lot of ways, but two things stand out: one is that it simply isn’t needed — most of the rights it seems so concerned over are already guaranteed and under no threat at all — and the other is that it oversteps the bounds maintained by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.

Below are some choice bits of the bill, with what I think is my more reality-based opinion on them. The bill itself IS IN ALL CAPS, so you can read it as if the person is shouting at you if you’d like. I won’t bother debunking the basis claimed for the need for such a bill — they claim religion is under attack in this country, which is patently ridiculous. Instead, here is an example of a bit that is unneeded:

THE RELIGIOUS BILL OF RIGHTS FOR PUBLIC SCHOOL STUDENTS AND THEIR PARENTS OR GUARDIANS SHALL INCLUDE, BUT NEED NOT BE LIMITED TO, A DECLARATION THAT A PUBLIC SCHOOL STUDENT HAS AN INALIENABLE RIGHT TO:

(I) EXPRESS HIS OR HER RELIGIOUS BELIEFS ON A PUBLIC SCHOOL CAMPUS OR AT A SCHOOL-SPONSORED EVENT TO THE SAME EXTENT AS HE OR SHE MAY EXPRESS A PERSONAL SECULAR VIEWPOINT;

There are many such statements in the bill, and I’m cool with them, since all of them fall under a student’s Constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech. Stating this is like stating they should be allowed to breathe or have their heart beat. By putting that up front and center, the bill crafters make it seem like this freedom is in jeopardy. It isn’t.

However, if a teacher or other school official were to do this, that would be a different matter entirely. As we’ll see below.

[Students also have the inalienable right to] WEAR RELIGIOUS GARB ON A PUBLIC SCHOOL CAMPUS, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO CLOTHING WITH A RELIGIOUS MESSAGE;

Now this one’s interesting! I wonder how the folks sponsoring this bill would feel if a kid wore a “Satan rules my soul!” shirt to class. Or a turban.

Anyway, here’s where it gets sticky:

[A student may] EXPRESS HIS OR HER RELIGIOUS BELIEFS OR SELECT RELIGIOUS MATERIALS WHEN RESPONDING TO A SCHOOL ASSIGNMENT IF HIS OR HER RESPONSE REASONABLY MEETS THE EDUCATIONAL PURPOSE OF THE ASSIGNMENT;

Yeah, that word “reasonably” opens a can of worms. What happens when a creationist kid doesn’t want to say anything about evolution or the Big Bang? If I were a science teacher and a student said the Universe is 6000 years old, I would mark that answer as wrong (why? Because it is). That will lead to some fun with the parents, no doubt. Now again, the student already has the ability to do this. But this somewhat amplifies the situation, and will lead to students thinking they have a right to not be marked down for wrong answers if they are religiously-based. Think I’m overly extrapolating this? Think again.

But the biggest grievance I have with this ridiculous declaration is this one:

[A teacher shall] NOT BE REQUIRED TO TEACH A TOPIC THAT VIOLATES HIS OR HER RELIGIOUS BELIEFS AND NOT BE DISCIPLINED FOR REFUSING TO TEACH THE TOPIC;

To be blunt, this is unacceptable. If you are a biology teacher and refuse to teach evolution, then you should be disciplined at the very least. If you still refuse to teach it, then you can either be given a different class to teach, or face termination. Teachers are obligated by their job duties to teach standards-based curricula, and if they refuse, they are in dereliction of their duty as teachers.

Teachers have certain religious rights, of course, but don’t have the right to not teach a kid something that is true because of their own religion. There are religions that teach that women are inferior, that blacks are inferior. Will a history teacher refuse to teach about the women’s rights movement, or the civil rights movement, because of their own beliefs? Some religions — I won’t name names here — believe that sexual education is eeevil. If you’re a health teacher and refuse to teach about reproductive health, then in my opinion you should face the consequences of your decision.

This is where I think declarations of rights like this are dangerous. It’s a slippery slope, and a steep one. And the most pernicious part of all this is it’s clear that the motivation behind this bill is not in the name of religious freedom and tolerance, it’s in the name of freedom and tolerance for one specific religion. As I point out above, I don’t think a radical Muslim would be treated the same way under this declaration as a Christian would. While that may be outside the scope of the bill, it’s important to keep in mind.

In the end, this bill doesn’t have the weight of law, but by simply proposing it — and enacting it, which will take time and materials — it’s a waste of taxpayer money, especially when the vast majority of what it’s stating is already within the existing legislation. If the religious groups are so worried about this sort of thing, then they should pay for this effort on their own time, and give out flyers in church. Doing this through the legislative branch — and, in fact, the whole bill itself — is a bad idea.

If this bill gets out of the Judiciary Committee it will be presented to the Senate for debate and eventually a vote. I’ve already contacted my local Senator about this. If you live in Colorado, I urge you to do likewise.

Remember:

Tip o’ the wall o’ separation to the Boulder Atheists

(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.)

There were many aspects of my interview with Paul Offit that I found very informative, even surprising, and I thought I would highlight some of them here on the blog this week. Perhaps the first was Dr. Offit’s response to my second question–when I asked him, around minute 6, about all the hate mail he receives (including some death threats). I was expecting dire tales of the extremism that had been directed at my guest; but instead, Offit opened up about the incredibly positive response his book has received:

When I wrote the book, I assumed it would merely galvanize those who didn’t agree with my point of view, and who would angrily write to me, hatefully–but that wasn’t true. I think what surprised me with this book, after I wrote it, is that I have received hundreds of emails, probably about 800 emails, from parents of children with autism, including severe autism, that have said, “Thank you, I never thought it was vaccines, Jenny McCarthy presumes to represent me, but she doesn’t.” This book is going to be coming out in paperback in April, and in the introduction, the revised introduction as a preface to the new paperback edition, I basically apologize to parents; I feel like, whenever I heard a parent of a child with autism I would sort of cringe at some level, thinking they would be anti-vaccine. That’s not true. I think frankly, most of them don’t feel that way at all.

Offit went on to talk about the “silent majority out there of parents that don’t buy into this vaccine-autism debate, and frankly are angry about it.” To me, it’s just another sign that the worm is turning on vaccine-autism claims. The movement may even be courting some serious backlash at this point.

In any case, that’s the first of many insights from the Offit interview, and I’ll be blogging more of them this week. Once again, you can listen to the podcast and subscribe here. And don’t forget to pick up a copy of Paul Offit’s book, Autism’s False Prophets, if you don’t already own it: Just follow the link below:

Recently at 80beats we’ve covered some of troubles China has had with toxins leaking into its waterways from petroleum spills and the environmental degradation caused by mining for rare Earth metals. But in a study this week in Science, Zhang Fusuo raises another concern: The country’s soil is on the path to being dangerously acidic.

Zhang’s team looked at the government’s research data for soil over 30 years, and also compared a survey of China’s soil conducted in the 2000s to one from the 1980s. For nearly all soil types found in China, soil pH has dropped 0.13 to 0.80 units since the early 1980s [ScienceNOW]. When soil lowers in pH and therefore becomes more acidic, it becomes more of a haven for pests and nematodes and less of one for plants—most plants prefer the neutral range between a pH of 6 and 8. If the trend continues, Zhang argues that China could have trouble producing enough food for its population.

Zhang points his finger at the overuse of fertilizer; the amount used in China has increased more than 50 percent since the early 1980s, a rapid ramp-up that he says is driving the change. “The average pH in all of China has decreased by 0.5 unit in the last 20 years. Left to nature, a single unit change needs hundreds of years or even over 1,000 years, but we have got this change now due to fertilizer overuse,” Zhang said [Reuters]. Acid rain can also contribute to acidity, but Zhang says the evidence points to fertilizer as the primary culprit. ScienceNOW cites a few dissenting scientists who say that Zhang’s team’s data needs to be more site-specific, and not just taken from samples strewn across the country, to be truly vital. But they agree with him that fertilizer use in China can and should be cut sharply.

According to Zhang, farmers overused fertilizer in a somewhat haphazard fashion over the years, hoping to increase their yields. But what they got instead, he says, was air pollution and soil dwindling in productivity because of its pH drop. The acidification has already lessened crop production by 30-50% in some areas, Zhang says. If the trend continues, some regions could eventually see the soil pH drop to as low as 3. “No crop can grow at this level of acidification,” he warns [Nature News].

Related Content:
80beats: 40,000-Gallon Diesel Spill Reaches China’s Yellow River
80beats: 1/3 of China’s Yellow River Not Even Fit for Industrial Use
80beats: Dams May Degrade One of China’s Remaining Healthy Rivers
80beats: Isn’t it Ironic: Green Tech Relies on Dirty Mining in China
Discoblog: A Year After the Olympics, Beijing’s Air Quality Back at Square One

Image: flickr / kevincure

It was just announced on their Twitter feed, so that’s pretty official.

The subject is vaccination, and I’ll be appearing with Dr. Nancy Snyderman, NBC’s chief medical editor.

My segment is around 8:40 am ET.

For those who want to check out my last Morning Joe appearance, meanwhile, you can watch it here.

It’s BMJ week on NCBI ROFL! Each day this week we will feature a fun article from a British Medical Journal holiday issue. Enjoy!

Ice cream evoked headaches (ICE-H) study: randomised trial of accelerated versus cautious ice cream eating regimen

“Cold stimulus headache, also known as ice cream headache, is a common problem and is reported to occur in about a third of a randomly selected population. It was further suggested that the ice cream headache could be induced only in hot weather… we compared the effect of two ice cream eating regimens on the incidence of ice cream induced headaches in a prospective randomised manner. The study was carried out during the winter to test whether this phenomenon was restricted to hot weather only…Participants who received green dot questionnaires were given 100 ml of ice cream and were told to eat it in >30 seconds. They were further instructed to have about half their ice cream left after 30 seconds and then to continue at their own pace. Participants who received red dot questionnaires were given 100 ml of ice cream but were instructed to eat it in <5 seconds. The temperature of the ice cream was not formally regulated throughout the study… Twenty (27%) of 73 students in the accelerated eating group reported ice cream headache compared with 9 (13%) of 72 students in the cautious eating group.”

Read the full article here.

Image: flickr/HurleyFamily

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: A moment on your lips, forever in your intestine.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Competitive speed eating: truth and consequences.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: eat me.

Feeling like Valentine’s Day is a little too cutesy for an intellectual heavyweight such as yourself? Nonsense; the heart may have its reasons, but reason can certainly figure them out, given sufficient grant funding and some diligent graduate students. Jennifer Ouellette points to a talk by Mary Roach that is safe for TED but arguably not safe for work, and shares some brain scans to prove that love is really blind.

If all that biology is a bit too squishy, Sarah Kavassalis does the math. Here you will find the right functions to use to draw hearts — my favorite is the fourth heart curve from Wolfram|Alpha, shown at right — and how to construct topologically nontrivial versions out of construction paper and scissors. Who says mathematicians aren’t practical? Nor are they above venturing into the realm of the literary.

Roses are red.
Violets are approximately blue.
A paracompact manifold with a Lorentzian metric,
can be a spacetime, if it has dimension greater than or equal to two.

Shakespeare, maybe not. But the course of true science never did run smooth.

A final cosmic Valentine’s Day wish from the wonderful Sixty Symbols site: a video valentine.

Check out the other videos at the Sixty Symbols site, too. The woman introducing the video is my friend astronomer Amanda Bauer, aka Astropixie, and you should read her blog as well. She’s pretty cool.

Charlie writes, “I am a scientist at the University of Minnesota. In 1999, as an undergrad on a plant science internship, a friend and I were sitting on our dorm roof, wondering what the best nerdy science tattoo would be. The double helix down the leg or back was suggested, but we concluded that a chloroplast was a better fit for our scientific interests. As the photon-collecting organelle in plants, it’s the source of energy for nearly all plant life and a fascinating biochemical machine. At that point in our careers, we found something that would represent our fascination with plants, no matter what field we chose to pursue. He is in botanical education (and didn’t go through with the tattoo), I’m in horticulture.”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

Same shape, different moon…

An interplanetary dedication of love for all you starry-eyed geeks:

This is an image from Cassini. It’s a closeup of a crater on Rhea, a moon of Saturn about half the size of our own natural satellite. I love how the small crater and ridge inside the bigger crater make it look like the heart is winking!

In the full size image you can see what looks like a ridge to the left of the heart, but in fact that’s the edge of a vast crater on the surface of Rhea. You can see it better in this image of the whole moon, where I’ve marked the location of the heart:

I don’t know exactly what’s going on with this heart; is it a crater that expanded when the walls collapsed around it, so it’s no longer round? Or is it a sink hole, where the whole thing is a collapse feature? I love pictures like this, showing us the diversity and cool-factor of other worlds in our solar system.

And, of course: Happy Valentine’s Day.

Related posts:
Have a cosmic Valentine’s Day
Scientific Valentines
The beating heart of W5
Have an astronomical Valentine’s Day

Hmmm, not all VDs are happy: this strip from xkcd is a little bit of a downer, but I have a hard time disagreeing with his message. Hover your mouse over the strip to see what he means.

This particular strip reminds me of Robert Sheckley’s “The Language of Love”. I have to say, I’m rather fond of his writing.

I would do anything for my Valentine. Even give her the Moon. Or at least a part of it.

Nothing says love like a cardioid-shaped lunar impact remnant 120 meters across surrounded by an ejecta blanket.

We’re still laughing at the photo sent by Melody Hensley in honor of the recent Celebrity Doppelganger Week on Facebook. She writes, “Do these two remind you of anyone?”

Hmmm… They do look kind of familiar. What do you think?

The suggestion sparked a discussion on who else our look-a-likes might be.

SK picked for Chris.

CM chose for Sheril.

So now we open the floor to readers… who might you suggest for our doppelgangers?

In what can only be described as the cutest submission so far, Erin Shank writes:

I’m a Missouri wildlife biologist, mother of three (in the photo from L to R: Emmett, Willa Mae, and Calum), self-described humanist, and mommy blogger.

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

The Shuttle Endeavour launched into orbit last week, blazing upward on its penultimate mission to the International Space Station. As it approached, astronauts onboard the now nearly-complete station snapped this dramatic photo of the Orbiter:

Stunning. And while I am a scientist and a realist, I can’t help but see the poetic and metaphoric nature of this shot. With just four remaining flights of the Space Shuttle, we soon really will be seeing it riding off into the sunset.

In a report that doesn’t surprise me in the least, people online tend to send each other more science stories than headline news stories.

Well, read the title of this post.

The thing about people online is, geeks still run the joint. Sure, lots of normal people are online, I assume to buy pet products and find out if Abe Vigoda is still alive. (Yes). But geeks use the web. We share information on the web. We read stuff and send it around, and we like science.

The only real mystery here is, if all this is true, why do the Bloggie awards still not have a science category?

A couple foreign editions of Microcosm have arrived. They got me thinking about book design across the globe. The Chinese edition takes my world-within-a-microbe metaphor to cosmic extremes.

All of my Japanese editions have covers that are both cute and relevant. Their edition of Microcosm is no exception. Who thought E. coli could have the delicacy of a crane?

The Front:

And one more for the back:

After 50 years together, it’s easy to see changes in your spouse. But what do the changes mean?