Author: Discover Main Feed

This optical illusion is so cool, you’ll swear you’ve just damaged your brain. From Michael Bach’s peerless collection.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Stephen Colbert is the twenty-first century Mister Wizard. He’s had guests on to talk about great experiments in physics and shock their fingers, addressed the thorny issue of species delimitation, reveled in microbes, and even screamed in horror at the sight of tongue-eating parasites. If you still doubt me, look at the list of videos at Colbert Nation tagged “science.”

What? You think science is a thing of the past on the show? Well, consider this: Sean Carroll of Cosmic Variance will be on March 3, and Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, will be on in the second week of March. Tune in.

There have been some reports of a possible meteorite in Mexico — here is one news report translated into English.

[UPDATE (16:00 Mountain Time): A new article is saying this may be a piece of space junk, specifically the remains of a Russian Cosmos 2421 satellite, re-entering. The reports of a crater may be wrong; I heard from someone who knows a reporter in the area (I know, this is uncredited and FOAF so take it with a grain of salt) that no crater has been found. Bear in mind the early report of a crater was totally without any citations at all; no picture, no witnesses, no names, nothing. So it’s looking now that it was a bright fireball from space junk, but no actual impact — but we don’t have definitive answers yet. Again, I’ll report more as I find it out.]

Reports are a bit sketchy right now, but apparently a bright flaming object was seen coming down about 100 miles northeast of Mexico City on Wednesday around 18:30 local time. There was a roar that was loud enough to shake buildings. Another news article is reporting a crater 30 meters in diameter was found.

At the moment this is all I know. It’s not clear if this was actually an impact event from a meteorite or some terrestrial event. In 2007 a small meteorite struck in Peru, causing a lot of confusion (with me at least!) over the source of the event; there was a lot of speculation before an actual meteorite impact was confirmed. Before that impact, it was not considered likely that a small meteorite could actually hit the ground fast enough to make a crater in the ten-meter size range (they slow down or break up high in the atmosphere), so the Peru event was a surprise. It’s still not completely understood how the meteoroid survived to hit the ground.

So it’s possible this Mexico event is a meteorite, but we don’t know yet. I’ll post more information as I find it.

For the first time, the genome of an ancient man has been analyzed, providing clues about what humans were up to 4,000 years ago. As reported in Nature, Danish researchers were able to study the preserved swatch of a Greenlander’s hair that had been first excavated in 1986–suspected to have been discarded after a trim.

From just this small sample sealed in hair keratin, scientists obtained clues about the way he looked and his susceptibility to certain diseases. For example, they expect he had thick hair, brown eyes, dry earwax, and was at risk for baldness. By employing advanced DNA sequencing technology, the hair provides us a more revealing glimpse into our past than ever before possible. But perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this research is that we have new evidence for a migration of ancient humans about 5,500 years ago from Siberia to Greenland. Check out the editor’s summary here and listen to the Nature Podcast for details.

I have a hunch we’ll be hearing a lot more about the DNA of much older humans very soon…

Every scientist who writes a popular-level book harbors a secret (or maybe not-so-secret) ambition: to be invited on the Colbert Report. Not only because Stephen Colbert is a funny guy, and it’s a good way to sell books — although there is that. The truth is that Colbert (and the Daily Show) love talking to scientists. The sad part of that truth is that more people are exposed to real scientists doing cutting-edge research by watching Comedy Central than by watching, shall we say, certain channels you might have thought more appropriate venues for such conversations. But the happy part is that Colbert and Jon Stewart help bring some fun to science, and expose it to an audience it might not otherwise reach.

So, mark your calendars: I’m going to be on Colbert on Wednesday, March 3. (Scheduled to be, anyway — updates as events warrant.) I have a book to sell, not that I would have turned down the opportunity otherwise.

The precedents are pretty formidable — below the fold I’ve put some of Colbert’s recent interviews with some famous physics/astronomy types. Two things seem immediately obvious: (1) for scientists, these folks are very good at doing entertaining interviews, and (2) Stephen Colbert is an amazingly good interviewer, managing to mix topical jokes and his usual schtick with some really good questions, and more than a bit of real background knowledge. I think this is going to take some preparation.

Anyone want to venture some guesses as to what questions he might ask? Every little bit of anticipation helps.

(Note on above link to the Onion: “Punkin Chunkin,” “Manhunter,” and “Heavy Metal Taskforce” are all real Science Channel shows. “Extreme Gravity” is, as far as I can tell, not.)

Brian Greene

The Colbert Report	Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Brian Greene
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy

Janna Levin

The Colbert Report	Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Janna Levin
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy

Mark Devlin

The Colbert Report	Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Mark Devlin
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy

Lisa Randall

The Colbert Report	Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Lisa Randall
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy

Brian Cox

The Colbert Report	Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Brian Cox
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy

George Johnson

The Colbert Report	Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
George Johnson
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy

Neil deGrasse Tyson

The Colbert Report	Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Neil deGrasse Tyson
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy

The Iranian government announced yesterday that Google’s email service, Gmail, will be permanently shut down in the country, and will be replaced by a new state-run email service.

The announcement from the Iranian telecommunications agency came on the eve of the 31st anniversary of the Islamic Republic, when anti-government protesters were expected to take to the streets. Less than a year ago, thousands of protesters came out in huge rallies protesting the disputed June presidential election. The protests plunged Iran into its biggest internal crisis since the victory of Islamic revolution in 1979 which toppled the Shah [Reuters]. The opposition rallies were watched across the world on YouTube videos, and protesters not only blogged about the events but were also very vocal on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Tehran insists locking down Gmail is meant to boost local development of Internet technology and to build trust between people and the government [Wall Street Journal]. Meanwhile, Google confirmed a sharp drop in traffic in Iran and announced that many Iranians appeared to be having trouble accessing Gmail. The company added that Google strongly believes that people everywhere should be able to communicate freely online.

Internet experts have warned that Tehran’s latest move is yet another attempt to manipulate the flow of information within the country. The government already has control over Iranian TV, radio and newspapers. Richard Stiennon, founder of the Internet security firm IT-Harvest, said, “If the government can induce the population to use a state-controlled email service, it would have access to the content of all of those emails” [Wall Street Journal].

Tehran’s blocking of Gmail is yet another blow to the Internet giant’s global ambitions–Google recently announced that it will pull out of China after a cyber attack and concerns over censorship. The current suspension of services in Iran also pulls Google into a discussion about online freedom; Internet experts now wonder if Google will try to find new ways to make its services available in places where it is banned.

Iran’s move has also drawn concerns that Venezuela might take a cue from the authoritarian regime and be the next country to ban Gmail. President [Hugo] Chavez continues to crack down on the [opposition] protests, announcing that anyone using Twitter was guilty of an act of terrorism against the government [ZDNet].

Related Content:
80beats: The Tweets Heard Round the World: Twitter Spreads Word of Iranian Protests
80beats: Google to China: No More Internet Censorship, or We Leave
80beats: Is Google the Guardian Angel of Rainforests?
80beats: Googlefest Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: 3 New Ways Google Will Take Over Your Life
80beats: China’s Internet Users Force Government to Back Down on Censorship

Image: Flickr/ Manfrys

Have you seen this man? Probably not: He lived 4,000 years ago.

The image to the left is not a wanted poster, but rather an artist’s impression of Inuk, the name given to him by the scientists who sequenced his genome. It’s the first time the genetic code of an ancient human has been deciphered this completely, and the researchers published their results this week in Nature.

Inuk died on an island off Greenland called Qeqertasussuk. Researchers don’t know the cause of death, but they do know he left bits of hair and bone that the permafrost preserved. Scientists found the thick clumps of hair—which could be the remnants of a 4,000-year-old haircut—in the 1980s, and stored them in the National Museum of Denmark. Today’s DNA sequencing technology allowed them to look back in time at what he may have been like. Inuk’s genes reveal he was a fairly young man, robustly built to exist in a frigid climate, with A-positive blood, dark skin, brown eyes, and thick, black hair on a scalp genetically susceptible to baldness [San Francisco Chronicle].

And, as DISCOVER covered the last time ancient hair from Greenland was in the news, Inuk’s genome also injected a surprise into the contentious debate over which groups of early peoples migrated to the Americas, and when. Inuk’s people, the Saqqaq, are the first known humans to have lived in Greenland. The origins of the culture are hotly debated by scientists, though most believe the Saqqaq’s ancestors were migrants from neighbouring populations, such as the Na-Dene of North America or the Inuit of the New World Arctic [The Guardian]. Not so, say the Inuk researchers. They say he was more closely related to people of eastern Siberia. However, since the Bering land bridge was long gone by the time Inuk’s people split from the Siberians 5,500 years ago, the researchers suggest they may have moved via boat or winter ice first to Alaska, and then across the Arctic to Greenland.

Since Inuk seems to have had plenty of hair despite his genome containing the codes for baldness, the researchers propose that he died young. Ancient hair is hard to find, but when scientists do unearth samples, they’re extremely helpful. Unlike the DNA found in ancient skin or bone, genes housed in hair can be recovered relatively free of contamination from the genes of fungi or bacteria [National Geographic]. Thus, the Inuk team says it was able to accurately decode about 80 percent of his genome.

Related Content:
80beats: We May Soon Be Able To Clone Neanderthals. But Should We?
80beats: Was Europe Occupied By Cannibals 7,000 Years Ago?
80beats: Ancient Hair Reveals Origin of Early Greenlanders
80beats: A Woolly Mammoth Evolutionary Smackdown

Image: Nuka Godfredsen

Something nasty is in the air in China, and it isn’t the infamous smog. Sweeping the country is a new paranoia, in which men become convinced that they’ve contracted HIV, often blaming their infection on a visit to a prostitute. Hundreds of Chinese men have reportedly been visiting doctors and have refused to believe the evidence of negative HIV tests. So strong is their fear that some men wear masks or refuse to interact with their families for fear of transmitting the disease.

Although the men say they feel sick, doctors don’t believe they’re dealing with a hitherto unknown virus, explains the BBC:

They suspect extreme guilt or anxiety about an act the men are ashamed of — sex with a prostitute — is affecting their immune systems, making them feel ill.

Chinese hospital authorities like Cai Weiping, who works in the southern province of Guangdong, are mildly annoyed at the steady trickle of patients who are paranoid that they are HIV positive.

The BBC reports:

“They come to have tests again and again, wasting money. A real HIV sufferer may take 15 minutes to deal with. A patient with the phobia can take at least an hour, or as much as half a day of arguing before they go away.”

Though other countries have also had their fair share of AIDS paranoia, some experts say what is happening in China is the unique result of the country’s medical history: China’s government has covered up or underplayed the effects of infectious disease outbreaks in the past, like the SARS epidemic of 2003 or the avian flu. Others note that the Internet fans people’s paranoia and offers them a way to constantly air their troubles–real or otherwise.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: China’s Syndrome
DISCOVER: Worrying About Killer Flu

Image: iStockphoto

Need a new desktop image? Yeah, the ESO’s got you covered.

Holy Haleakala. Click to Orionate.

That jaw-dropper is the view of Orion as seen by the European Southern Observatory’s phenomenal VISTA telescope, a 4.1 meter telescope equipped with an infrared camera that can take pictures of enormous chunks of the night sky. This 1 x 1.5 degree view — bigger than 8 full Moons on the sky! — show the entirety of Orion’s dagger^*, the group of stars dangling below the Hunter’s belt.

Obviously, they’re not all stars! In the center is the famous Orion Nebula, a star-forming factory that is among the biggest in the entire Milky Way. As fortune would have it, we’re actually rather close to it, only 1500 light years away (the galaxy is 100,000 light years across, so that qualifies as close). It’s visible to the naked eye, and binoculars show it as a fuzzy blob. Telescopes reveal its true shape and color, and our view is enhanced even more when we look in the infrared, as VISTA can, because IR light can pierce the veil of the thick dust shed by newborn stars, revealing what lies beneath.

And what’s hidden there are more stars, the young’uns blowing the gas and dust themselves. You can see the reddish streamers (really they are IR in this false-color image) showing the matter as it screams out from stars at a numbing 200 kilometers per second (120 miles/sec). That’s fast enough to cross the continental United States in 30 seconds, if that gives you any idea of the enormous velocity.

This junk slams into more material outside the star, lighting it up. Just above the main nebula you can see a horizontal stretch of matter; that’s probably bipolar emission — literally, blowing out of the two poles of a star — glowing as it moves through the thin wisp of material between the stars.

One thing I very much like about this image is the semi-illusion of the nebula being hollow. This is really best where you see bright white stars; the main bulk of the nebula itself and a smaller round region just above it. I call this a semi-illusion because it’s based on reality! There are clutches of extremely massive newborn stars there. They flood the gas around them with ultraviolet radiation as well as blowing fierce winds of material, and these carve a cavity in the nebula, creating enormous bubbles light years across. In visible light pictures this activity is hard to see, but in this infrared image it’s more obvious, since we’re seeing past the dust blocking our visible view.

That’s the power of multi-wavelength observations! By looking at objects in literally a different light, we see them in, well, a different light. Even an object as familiar as the Orion Nebula can be seen with a different perspective when viewed with new instruments like VISTA.

Right now as I write this, Orion is high in the sky at sunset. Go outside and find it; it’s easy to spot. Look to his dagger, what the hunter in myth and song used to pierce the skin of his prey, and think that we mere humans can do the same to the skin of the nebula itself, and nourish our minds with what we find inside.

---

^* I used to point that out to students when I was in grad school, and for some reason my roommate would always chuckle and say, “Yeah, his dagger.” I never did understand why.

Love is in the air at NCBI ROFL! Tuesday-Friday this week, we will feature research articles about love in its most physical form (okay, we just mean plain ol’ sex). Enjoy!

Genetic and Environmental Influences on self-reported G-Spots in Women: A Twin Study.

“There is an ongoing debate around the existence of the G-spot-an allegedly highly sensitive area on the anterior wall of the human vagina. The existence of the G-spot seems to be widely accepted among women, despite the failure of numerous behavioral, anatomical, and biochemical studies to prove its existence. Heritability has been demonstrated in all other genuine anatomical traits studied so far. Aim: To investigate whether the self-reported G-spot has an underlying genetic basis. Methods. 1804 unselected female twins aged 22-83 completed a questionnaire that included questions about female sexuality and asked about the presence or absence of a G-spot. The relative contribution of genetic and environmental factors to variation in the reported existence of a G-spot was assessed… …We found 56% of women reported having a G-spot. The prevalence decreased with age. Variance component analyses revealed that variation in G-spot reported frequency is almost entirely a result of individual experiences and random measurement error (>89%) with no detectable genetic influence. Correlations with associated general sexual behavior, relationship satisfaction, and attitudes toward sexuality suggest that the self-reported G-spot is to be a secondary pseudo-phenomenon… …A possible explanation for the lack of heritability may be that women differ in their ability to detect their own (true) G-spots. However, we postulate that the reason for the lack of genetic variation-in contrast to other anatomical and physiological traits studied-is that there is no physiological or physical basis for the G-spot.”

Thanks to Cameron for today’s ROFL!

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: A woman’s history of vaginal orgasm is discernible from her walk.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Weak with sex: sexual intercourse as a trigger for cataplexy.

Suddenly this obscure, blind cave dweller has become extremely interesting. It turns out to be a close cousin of the most diverse group of animals on Earth, the insects.

Insects–all one-million-plus-species of them–belong to a lineage of animals called arthropods. The arthropods emerged early in the history of animals, and while many of the early arthropods such as trilobites disappeared long ago, a vast diversity thrive on Earth today. Living arthropods share a number of traits in common, such as a hardened, segmented exoskeleton and compound eyes. But they’ve evolved into lots of different forms, ranging from scorpions to horseshoe crabs to centipedes to daddy longlegs to butterflies. They fly through the sky, plunge to the bottom of the sea, thrive in scorching deserts, and hang out in your kitchen.

In order to understand how the arthropods evolved into all this diversity, scientists have labored for many decades to figure out how they are related to one another. It has been a tricky undertaking for many reasons. For one thing, different lineages of arthropods have frequently evolved the same traits independently. So just because two species have long stalk-shaped eyes doesn’t mean that they share a close stalk-shaped ancestor. It’s possible they might have each evolved from two separate ancestors with ordinary eyes.

When scientists started to sequence DNA from arthropods, they hoped that they would be able to get a sharper picture of arthropod evolution. It has helped clear up some things. For example, for a long time scientists believed that insects were closely related to centipedes and millipedes. Along with their anatomical similarities, these two groups are also both mainly land-dwellers. But studies on DNA have pretty clearly demonstrated that, in fact, insects are closer to crustaceans like lobsters and shrimp than they are to centipedes and millipedes. So the two groups descend from two separate invasions of land.

However, studies on DNA did not immediately make all the uncertainties about arthropods disappear. And there’s no reason to have expected it would. DNA is not magic. It’s a great repository of information about the history of life, but it’s not perfect. For example, just as two insects may independently evolve stalk eyes, two lineages may evolve a similar sequence in a particular stretch of DNA. Another problem arises with groups like arthropods that blossomed very quickly into many lineages a long time ago. It’s hard to tease apart the ordering of the branches, just as it’s hard to tease apart distant galaxies in a telescope.

So scientists have been gathering more arthropod DNA and analyzing it in new ways, in order to find strong evidence for kinships. In Nature today, a team of scientists at the University of Maryland, Duke University, and the Natural History of Museum in LA have presented a particularly massive analysis. They lined up 41,000 bases of DNA from 62 genes in 75 species spanning the diversity of arthropods. They found that a number of the branches of the tree held up under a number of different statistical tests. The tree, in all its full glory, is reproduced at the bottom of this post.

In some respects, it supports a lot of traditional taxonomy. For example, everything we call an insect are closer to each other than to any arthropod not considered an insect. But there are also some intriguing surprises.

The one I’ll mention here is the cave-dwelling critter I mentioned at the top of the post. It’s called Speleonectes tulumensis. It lives only in the pitch-black, oxygen-free waters at the bottom of deep caves in the Bahamas. It belongs to a group of arthropods, which the authors of the new study dub Xenocarida, that have mystified scientists ever since they were discovered in the 1980s. Some researchers argued that they were the most primitive of all crustaceans. Yet some xenocarids have remarkably elaborate brains. Thanks to the fact that they live at the bottom of deep caves, scientists haven’t given them quite the attention they’ve lavished on fruit flies and honeybees and other arthropods in easier reach.

According to the new study, however, they deserve the attention of anyone interested in where insects came from. That’s because they are the closest living relative to the insects (along with springtails and other six-legged arthropods, the hexapods). They can therefore offer clues to what the forerunners of insects were like. Insects may not have evolved out of deep caves–it’s possible that xenocarids lived in other parts of the ocean in the past but have only survived in one extreme habitat. But before there were insects, this new study suggests, the proto-insects may have looked like this. It’s yet another demonstration of the knowledge that we can get even from rare, obscure species. If we had accidentally wiped out the xenocarids, no one would have ever known the important place they have in the history of this arthropod-dominated world.

Physicist Michael Roukes and his colleagues at Caltech have developed a microscopic device that can measure the mass of a single molecule in real time. Chemists use such sensitive weighings to help determine the chemical identities of unknown substances. The Caltech team says that its system could eventually allow scientists to analyze thousands of different proteins in a matter of milliseconds using much smaller samples than before.

While the Obama administration hashes out plans for cutting future carbon emissions, engineers are quietly working on schemes to deal with carbon by putting it back where it came from: underground. The concept of storing carbon in rock—known as geologic carbon sequestration —has been dogged by concerns about cost, stability, and environmental impact. But recent findings suggest that it could be an effective way to clean up the carbon mess.

This is cool: recent tech advances have lowered the cost of making aerogel sufficiently that it can be used for home insulation!

I’ve written about his bizzaro stuff before: it’s a silica gel that has so many air pockets in it it is essentially barely more dense than air itself. It has a lot of uses, like putting on board spacecraft to catch particles from comets. But it’s such a good insulator that it may very well revolutionize the industry.

It’s been around since before the space program, so we can’t attribute this invention to space age tech, but it does have a lot of uses, and I bet as the price lowers people will find lots of other ways to use it.

I love living in the future.

Last year DISCOVER asked the question, “Did We Mate With Neanderthals, or Did We Murder Them?” Now, Zach Zorich at Archaeology magazine is asking another big question about our hominid siblings: Should we bring them back?

Thanks to a slew of recent advances, the possibility is getting closer. 80beats reported a year ago that researchers had published the rough draft of the Neanderthal genome. However, that’s likely to contain many errors because it’s so difficult to reconstruct ancient DNA. Within hours of death, cells begin to break down in a process called apoptosis. The dying cells release enzymes that chop up DNA into tiny pieces. In a human cell, this means that the entire three-billion-base-pair genome is reduced to fragments about 50 base-pairs long [Archaeology].

Even if scientists succeed in figuring out the entire Neanderthal genome, they’d be faced with another problem before they could even consider the possibility of cloning one of these ancient hominids: We don’t have any living Neanderthal cells to work with. Thus, researchers will have to figure out how to put DNA into chromosomes, and how to get those chromosomes into the nucleus of a cell. What about altering the DNA inside a living human cell, and tweaking our genetic code to match the Neanderthal’s? This kind of genetic engineering can already be done, but very few changes can be made at one time. To clone a Neanderthal, thousands or possibly millions of changes would have to be made to a human cell’s DNA [Archaeology].

Even if scientists manage to put Neanderthal DNA in a cell nucleus, their problems aren’t over. The next step in creating a baby clone is to move the cell nucleus into the egg of a related species in a technique called nuclear transfer, and then implanting the altered egg in a female who can bear it to term. But in this process, which has been extensively tested on animals, cells often get sick or die, causing fetuses to die in the womb or clones to die young. That’s why the vast majority of scientists oppose using this method on people. Even if nuclear transfer cloning could be perfected in humans or Neanderthals, it would likely require a horrifying period of trial and error [Archaeology].

But Archaeology suggests that many of these obstacles will eventually be overcome, and proposes another cloning option: making Neanderthal stem cells. Last year researchers managed to turn mouse skin cells back into a pluripotent state, where they can act like stem cells, and used those to create a cloned mouse. Cloning a Neanderthal is a lot different than cloning a mouse, but if the process worked, a cloned Neanderthal would grow up with their genes expressing they way they were meant to.

That’s the “could we.” But what about the “should we?” More work has been done on this than you might think. In 1997, Stuart Newman, a biology professor at New York Medical School attempted to patent the genome of a chimpanzee-human as a means of preventing anyone from creating such a creature [Archaeology]. But he lost his case because the patent office said it would violate the 13th amendment prohibitions against slavery. And since Neanderthals would be even more human, it stands to reason that they’d receive at least some human rights protections.

Rightfully so. But as the bioethicist Bernard Rollin points out in the Archaeology piece, there’s more to worry about than the law. While Neanderthals are our close relatives on the evolutionary tree, you’d know one if you saw one. Tulane anthropologist Trenton Holliday argues that they could talk and act like us, therefore eventually they’d fit in. But that seems like wishful thinking. With no culture, no peers, and an unknown capacity to cope with the modern world mentally or physically, a Neanderthal would be adrift—caught between a zoo animal and a human being. The main point in cloning one would be for scientists to study it, but as law professor Lori Andrews says, a Neanderthal could be granted enough legal protection to make doing extensive research on it illegal, not just unethical.

That’s not to say there would be no benefits to science. But some things are best left in the past.

Related Content:
80beats: Did Spear-Throwing Humans Kill Neanderthals?
80beats: Controversial Study Suggests Early Humans Feasted on Neanderthals
80beats: Neanderthal DNA Shows They Rarely Interbred With Us Very Different Humans
80beats: Give Neanderthals Some Credit: They Made Nice Tools
80beats: Scientists Reprogram Skin Cells To Create Cloned Mice
DISCOVER: Will We Ever Clone a Caveman?
DISCOVER: Did We Mate With Neanderthals, or Did We Murder Them?

Image: Wikimedia Commons

After much debate over balancing the need for independent scientific testing and the needs of poor Indian farmers, the Indian government has decided to put on hold the introduction of genetically modified eggplant in the country. The move hampers the expansion of seed makers including Monsanto Co. in the world’s second-most populous nation [BusinessWeek]. The government said there was no overriding food security argument for GM eggplant, and added that more safety studies needed to be done before the ban could be reconsidered.

There is little evidence that GMO eggplant would cause harm to people eating it, but the crop is consumed very often in India, and some scientists and regulators argued that they needed more proof that long-term consumption wouldn’t cause a problem. “It is my duty to adopt a cautious, precautionary principle-based approach and impose a moratorium on the release of Bt Brinjal till such time independent scientific studies establish, to the satisfaction of both the public and professionals, the safety of the product” [Daily News and Analysis], said the environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, who delivered the announcement.

The eggplant had been genetically modified by introducing a gene called cry1Ac from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt. The gene instructs the plant to produce a protein toxic to certain insects, so the GM eggplants would have been able to fend off common borer pests. The Bt was sourced from Monsanto, which already sells Bt corn and Bt cotton seeds in the United States. In the 1990s, Monsanto triggered a huge debate in India by introducing genetically modified cotton.

Alhough the GM eggplant (or brinjal, as it is called in India) was cleared by a federal agency, the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC), the government put the roll-out on hold. Ramesh also said the national bureau of plant genetic resources had found that India’s diversity rich regions were likely to be affected by the introduction of Bt Brinjal due to gene flow [Daily News and Analysis]—the tendency of crops to cross-breed and share genetic traits with other plants.

Related Content:
80beats: Genetically Modified Tomatoes Can Last 45 Days on the Shelf
80beats: GM Corn & Organ Failure: Lots of Sensationalism, Few Facts
80beats: GM Corn Leads to Organ Failure!? Not So Fast
80beats: New Biotech Corn Gives Triple Vitamin Boost; Protesters Unmoved
80beats: Germany Joins the European Mutiny of Genetically Modified Crops
DISCOVER: “Frankenfoods” That Could Feed the World
DISCOVER: Genetically Altered Corn, and how GM corn not intended for humans got into the food supply

Image: Wikmedia / David. Monniaux

Nature’s Nicola Jones interviewed me about the art and business of writing books, and you can read it in this week’s issue. It’s part of a series of interviews about books that will be appearing this month.

For folks who already spend most of their time updating Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts, here is one more site to add to the mix. None other than Google has decided to jump into the social networking fray by launching Google Buzz–a social networking tool that is also integrated with email and mobile phones.

Buzz can be accessed through any Gmail account and lets users share updates, photos, links, or anything else with their Gmail contacts. Bloggers have likened it to Twitter, except that it dwells within your Gmail. Google has already rolled out Buzz to some journalists, and Gmail users can expect to see it within their inboxes over the next couple of days.

The Buzz tab will be located right below your inbox tab. To get someone started with Buzz, Gmail is expected to pull info about the user’s contacts to create a list of people who the user frequently emails and instant messages with. This list becomes the blueprint for the people the user “follows.” The user can then “buzz” them, sharing pictures and links. When a user posts to Google Buzz, he can share publicly to followers and his Google profile, or privately to his existing Gmail groups or custom groups. Notifications of shares and comments will appear in a user’s inbox with a special Buzz icon next to those items. Comments will appear in real time [ReadWriteWeb].

It may seem that Google is late to the social networking party–and indeed, it may be tough to convince Facebook’s 350 million active users to switch to a new platform. But Google Buzz does have one edge, in that it aims to be the easiest, most functional social networking tool for smart phones. If you log onto Google Buzz on your smart phone, the company will find you via your GPS, translate that from lat-long coordinates into English, “I’m outside Waldorf-Astoria,” and use that for all sorts of services. Your friends can now see where you are and hook up for a chance meeting…. If you’re looking for a good nearby restaurant, Google Buzz will let you scan all the public posts about establishments in your area [The Big Money].

There is a downside to this utility. Since Buzz will garner so many details about a user’s movements, some worry that our entire lives will be in Google’s database, making us active targets for advertisers. And with Buzz’s deep-embedded real-time tap on your life and both passive and pushed advertising, alongside its arch-rival Apple’s extensive plans for location-aware ads, the upshot is that there may not be a moment in your day when you’re not sharing deeply-personal data with Google, and having personalized ads thrust upon you [Fast Company].

It’s also worth noting that Facebook, the current ruler of the social networking universe, won’t just be standing by and watching Google tempt away its users. Facebook is reportedly working on a “Gmail-killer” tool of its own. Facebook is completely rewriting their messaging product and is preparing to launch a fully featured webmail product in its place, according to a source with knowledge of the product. Internally it’s known as Project Titan [TechCrunch].

To get a sense of how Buzz works, take a look at this demo video.

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Image: Google

Here at Fortress Zimmer, we’re gradually getting buried under the latest Snowmageddon, Blizzaster, SnOMG, or whatever you want to call it. The real spectacle so far has been the giddiness of local meteorologists on television and on weather blogs. My wife Grace reminded me of this excellent 1954 essay by E.B. White, in which he described listening to the radio about Hurrican Edna. Suddenly, I feel linked to history.

It became evident to me after a few fast rounds with the radio that the broadcasters had opened up on Edna awfully far in advance, before she had come out of her corner, and were spending themselves at a reckless rate. During the morning hours, they were having a tough time keeping Edna going at the velocity demanded of emergency broadcasting. I heard one fellow from, I think, Riverhead, Long Island, interviewing his out-of-doors man, who had been sent abroad in a car to look over conditions on the eastern end of the island.

“How would you say the roads were?” asked the tense voice.

“They were wet,” replied the reporter, who seemed to be in a sulk.

“Would you say the spray from the puddles was dashing up around the mudguards?” inquired the desperate radioman.

“Yeah,” replied the reporter.

It was one of those confused moments, emotionally, when the listener could not be quite sure what position radio was taking–for hurricanes or against them.

Last week, the Harvard Kennedy School had a great event on just why it is that we are up such a creek with respect to global warming, politics, and the U.S. public. The featured speakers were Andrew Revkin and Matt Nisbet. Nisbet has a long post providing the audio of the event and a summary of its contents.

He was also kind enough to summarize a question I asked at the end; as the author of The Republican War on Science, I feared my wares were being misused, and the tables unfortunately turned, as now the anti-science folks are crusading at climate scientists and the Obama administration on allegedly scientific grounds:

3. A third important question came from friend and journalist Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science and blogger at Discover’s The Intersection. Mooney noted that in his own book, he had plied the public accountability frame to draw attention to perceived political wrong doing on the part of the Bush administration and conservatives. This message was also taken up by many liberal advocates and organizations. Now that the Obama administration is in power, observed Mooney, shouldn’t we have been prepared that climate skeptics were going to turn to the public accountability message to leverage their own political goals?

I must confess that unfortunately, I wasn’t prepared enough. I fell for the enthusiasm after Obama’s promise to restore science to its “rightful place” in American life. I myself wrote at Slate that the “war on science” was over. That was wrong.

Granted, in a certain sense the “war” I wrote about did indeed end with the Bush administration. For there is no longer any systematic attempt to undermine scientific integrity coming from within the federal government–and that was the chief characteristic of the Bush “war on science.”

However, what I and many others failed to anticipate was that a kind of guerilla war on science–and especially climate science–would take its place, driven by blogs like Climate Depot and Watts Up With That. This war springs from the same politics, but it is coming from those who are out in the wilderness, rather than running the government.

As a result, this war hits harder, and is much more personal—aimed at discrediting individual researchers, by sifting through their emails and accusing them of scandalous wrongdoing. And it is draws its momentum from the vast numbers of online commenters who closely follow the climate “scandal” stories and then show up at this blog, and other ones, to leave comments attacking scientists like Mann, and institutions like the IPCC.

And how do we counter this war? Well, that’s something I’ll ask readers to ponder…..