Author: Discover Main Feed

We live in the future.

Don’t believe me? Then why not sit back, relax, and watch this live video stream from frakking space.

That’s right: we can now watch video, live, from the International Space Station.

<Futurama voice>Welcome to the world of TOMORROW!</Futurama voice>

This is very cool. You can watch live as the astronauts on board do their duty, see shots outside the portal to view the station components, and even watch as the Earth rolls by under the station at 8 kilometers per second. Wow.

This is precisely the kind of thing I’ve been harassing my friends at NASA media to implement for years. I’m glad they’ve finally done it!

Now, if only they’d allow embedding…

The more people yell about Facebook, Google, and Twitter, the more I think back to Mark Twain, and his 1880 sketch, “A Telephonic Conversation.”

I consider that a conversation by telephone—when you are simply sitting by and not taking any part in that conversation—is one of the solemnest curiosities of this modern life. Yesterday I was writing a deep article on a sublime philosophical subject while such a conversation was going on in the room. I notice that one can always write best when somebody is talking through a telephone close by. Well, the thing began in this way. A member of our household came in and asked me to have our house put into communication with Mr. Bagley’s, down town. I have observed, in many cities, that the gentle sex always shrink from calling up the central office themselves. I don’t know why, but they do. So I touched the bell, and this talk ensued:—

Central Office. [Gruffly.] Hello!

I. Is it the Central Office?

C. 0. Of course it is. What do you want ?

I. Will you switch me on to the Bagleys, please ?

C. 0. All right. Just keep your ear to the telephone.

Then I heard, k-look, k-look, k’look— klook-klook-klook-look-look! then a horrible “gritting” of teeth, and finally a piping female voice: Y-e-s? [Rising inflection.] Did you wish to speak to me?”

Without answering, I handed the telephone to the applicant, and sat down. Then followed that queerest of all the queer things in this world,—a conversation with only one end to it. You hear questions asked; you don’t hear the answer. You hear invitations given; you hear no thanks in return. You have listening pauses of dead silence, followed by apparently irrelevant and unjustifiable exclamations of glad surprise, or sorrow, or dismay. You can’t make head or tail of the talk, because you never hear anything that the person at the other end of the wire says. Well, I heard the following remarkable series of observations, all from the one tongue, and all shouted,—for you can’t ever persuade the gentle sex to speak gently into a telephone:—

Yes? Why, how did that happen?

Pause.

What did you say?

Pause.

Oh, no, I don’t think it was.

Pause.

No! Oh, no, I didn’t mean that. I meant, put it in while it is still boiling,—or just before it comes to a boil.

Pause.

WHAT?

Pause.

I turned it over with a back stitch on the selvage edge.

Pause.

Yes, I like that way, too; but I think it ’s better to baste it on with Valenciennes or bombazine, or something of that sort. It gives it such an air,—and attracts so much notice.

Pause.

It ’s forty-ninth Deuteronomy, sixty-fourth to ninety-seventh inclusive. I think we ought all to read it often.

Pause.

Perhaps so; I generally use a hair-pin…

You can read the rest of sketch online (horrors!) in the archives of the Atlantic.

[Image: Wikipedia]

Perceptions of the Jackson-Timberlake Super Bowl incident: role of sexism and erotophobia.

“201 college women’s and 179 men’s impressions of the Jackson-Timberlake Super Bowl incident were related to measures of benevolent sexism, hostile sexism, and erotophobia. For both women and men high benevolent sexism was correlated (.17-.24) to perceptions that the incident was degrading and that agents (e.g., MTV, NFL, Hollywood) other than the actors were responsible for the incident, whereas high erotophobia was correlated (.29-.39) to perceptions that the incident was degrading, attributable to others, and personally upsetting.”

Birth and evolution of the football helmet.

“OBJECTIVE: To review the advent and evolution of the football helmet through historical, physiological, and biomechanical analysis… Significant correlation exists between head injuries and the advent of the football helmet in 1896, through its evolution in the early to mid-1900s, and regulatory standards for both helmet use and design and tackling rules and regulations. With the implementation of National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment standards, fatalities decreased by 74% and serious head injuries decreased from 4.25 per 100,000 to 0.68 per 100,000. Not only is the material used important, but the protective design also proves essential in head injury prevention. Competition among leading helmet manufacturers has benefited the ultimate goal of injury prevention. However, just as significant in decreasing the incidence and severity of head injury is the implementation of newer rules and regulations in teaching, coaching, and governing tackling techniques. CONCLUSION: Helmet use in conjunction with more stringent head injury guidelines and rules has had a tremendous impact in decreasing head injury severity in football.”

Thanks to Daniel for today’s ROFL!
Photo: flickr/quinnanya

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: I wonder if this paper was cheer-reviewed.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: The mystery of the missing viking helmets.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Dizziness in discus throwers is related to motion sickness generated while spinning.

I’m heading out for a series of Unscientific America talks this Friday/Monday, as long as the weather permits for the second leg of the journey:

Houston, TX
Lunch Discussion and Book Signing
Friday, February 5
12:30 PM–2:30 PM
Event sponsored by the Science and Technology Policy Program, James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy
Dore Commons
James A. Baker Hall
Rice University
Houston, TX
Web site

Bethesda, MD
Speech at the National Institutes of Health
Monday, February 8
10:00 AM–11:00 AM
National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine
NIH Clinical Research Center
(Building 10)
Bethesda, MD
Web site

Stop in if you live/are going to be in these areas….

P.S.: I am revising the talk to contain a bit more ethos and pathos, because like many science-focused or intellectual talks, it currently has too much logos. Jokes are still good though…

Today would have been Dana McCaffery’s first birthday.

It is in her memory that we must all stand up to unreason. It is in her memory that we must never tire, and never fail.

[Updated to add: By coincidence, there is an outbreak of pertussis in British Columbia right now; 19 confirmed cases in an area with low vaccination rates, well below what’s needed for herd immunity. Wakefield may be disgraced, and Dorey gone, but this fight will continue.]

A few months ago, Belgian man Rom Houben hit the headlines for a misdiagnosis that lasted 23 years. Houben was thought to have lost all brain function in a horrific car accident, and was believed to be in a persistent vegetative state. New evaluations helped determine that Houben actually had normal brain activity, and was yearning to communicate–although the “facilitated communication” his family used to allow Houben to tell his story quickly kicked up a kerfuffle over the validity of the whole tale.

Now, a new study published in The New England Journal of Medicine gives credence to the notion that some patients who have been classified as vegetative are actually conscious, and a rare few may be able to communicate.

The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan patients’ brains, and to record any activity generated in the patients’ brains following verbal prompts and questions from the doctors. They found signs of awareness in four patients, one of whom was able to answer basic yes or no questions by activating different parts of his brain. Experts said Wednesday that the finding could alter the way some severe head injuries were diagnosed — and could raise troubling ethical questions about whether to consult severely disabled patients on their care [The New York Times].

Between November 2005 and January 2009, researchers in Britain and Belgium used FMRI to study 23 patients who were considered to be in a “vegetative state.” In 2006, the scientists ran a series of tests to check if the brains of the 23 patients would show any response to certain questions. One of the patients started to show some promise. When doctors asked her to think of playing tennis, areas of her motor cortex leapt to life. When asked to think of being in her house, spatial areas in the brain became active [The New York Times]. Further testing revealed three other “vegetative” patients who showed similar responses.

Then researchers took it one step farther. To open a channel of communication, they instructed one of them, the 29-year-old man, to associate thoughts about tennis with “yes” and thoughts about being in his house with “no” [The New York Times]. They asked the man simple biographical questions like “Is your father’s name Thomas?” Then they checked his brain scans against the answers, and found that he was indicating the correct response each time. To ensure that the patient was making conscious choices, they switched the rules and asked the patient to associate tennis with “no” and his house with “yes.” The patient’s brain scans kept on coinciding with the correct answer.

The results show how much we still have to learn about consciousness. The work “changes everything”, says Nicholas Schiff, a neurologist at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, who is carrying out similar work on patients with consciousness disorders. “Knowing that someone could persist in a state like this and not show evidence of the fact that they can answer yes/no questions should be extremely disturbing to our clinical practice” [New Scientist].

If more vegetative patients are found to be capable of willfully modulating their brain activity, doctors could potentially communicate with them by asking simple questions requiring a “yes” or “no” response. As fascinating as this development is, problems may arise if doctors ask bigger questions that have ethical implications. “If you ask a patient whether he or she wants to live or die, and the answer is die, would you be convinced that that answer was sufficient?” said Dr. Joseph J. Fins, chief of the medical ethics division at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. “We don’t know that. We know they’re responding, but they may not understand the question. Their answer might be ‘Yes, but’ — and we haven’t given them the opportunity to say the ‘but’ [The New York Times].

Related Content:
80beats: A Silent Hell: For 23 Years, Man Was Misdiagnosed as a Coma Patient
80beats: Vegetative Coma Patients Can Still Learn–a Tiny Bit
DISCOVER: Vital Signs: Locked in Place

Image: iStockphoto

The primary reactions in photosynthesis—the first steps in plants’ conversion of sunlight energy into energy stored in carbohydrates—are incredibly efficient. And in a new study in Nature, chemists reveal that they may have found part of the reason why: quantum mechanics.

A couple years ago, scientists first showed in bacteria proteins that the electrons were moving according to a quantum mechanical phenomenon called coherence, rather than abiding by the classical laws of physics. But where those early experiments had been cooled to 77 kelvins (–196 degrees Celsius)—this experiment was the first conducted at room temperature, 294 K, to replicate such effects [Scientific American]. Thus, the new study, which was done on marine algae, suggests this phenomenon can occur in a living biological system.

Quantum coherence occurs when an electron interacts with more than one molecule at a time, entering a multi-state kind of existence. Study leader Greg Scholes explains this quantum trick in a slightly simpler way: “The analogy I like is if you have three ways of driving home through rush hour traffic. On any given day, you take only one. You don’t know if the other routes would be quicker or slower. But in quantum mechanics, you can take all three of these routes simultaneously. You don’t specify where you are until you arrive, so you always choose the quickest route” [Wired.com].

To see if this was happening in their test algae, the scientists targeted lasers onto antenna proteins, which play the role of routing the solar energy the plant receives to places where the photosynthetic reactions are taking place. The incredibly short laser bursts sent electrons spinning that the team could track. Sure enough, the energy passed simultaneously through multiple pathways, the team says, showing coherence at work.

The researchers can’t yet say how widespread this trick is in the plant kingdom. But if coherence happens in many different plants, it could help to explain why photosynthesis is so efficient. “That vibrating electron could put some feelers out and see which path to take,” Scholes says [Science News].

Related Content:
80beats: Quantum Teleportation Is a Go!
80beats: Quantum Cryptography Takes a Step Toward Mainstream Use
80beats: Crazy Chlorophyll-Using Sea Slug Is Part-Animal, Part-Plant
80beats: Inside a Tree Leaf, It’s Always a Balmy 70 Degrees

Image: NASA

I’ve been watching the video from ScienceOnline2010 on ScienceInTheTriangle’s youtube channel, where I also found this short interview I did last summer with Sabine Vollmer about Unscientific America. This is part 2 of our informal discussion, which took place after my first UA talk ever at Quail Ridge Books and Music:

Pity poor Pluto. The debate over its planethood has caused much consternation over the years. Part of the problem is that it’s so dinky and so far away! If it were closer, or bigger, we almost certainly wouldn’t be having this debate.

But whether or not you think Pluto should be part of the gang or not, one thing is certain: it’s a world unto itself. And to bring this point literally home, the Hubble Space Telescope has revealed the changing face of this tiny iceball:

These images, just released today (but taken in 2002), represent the most detailed surface map of Pluto ever taken. Even in Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys Pluto is only a few pixels across, but it’s possible using sophisticated image processing techniques to tease out the detail seen.

Here’s a nifty animation of Pluto rotating using these maps:

Very cool. But these maps are more than just eye candy. They show significant changes on Pluto’s surface since the last maps were made using Hubble 16 years ago. Pluto’s north pole is brighter and the south pole darker, implying that material has migrated from one pole to the other, or at least that the poles are changing in different ways. Pluto orbits the Sun “on its side”, dramatically more tilted than Earth’s mere 23.5°. Right now, the north pole of the world is facing the Sun, meaning it’s summer on Pluto’s northern hemisphere (as it’ll remain for a long time, given Pluto’s 248 Earth-year long year).

Not only that, these images show that Pluto has reddened quite a bit in the past few years. This is one reason it took so long to release the images; Marc Buie, the astronomer who took them, saw some things in the data that were difficult to understand, and wanted to make sure they were correct. These images are composites of pictures taken using a blue and a green filter. During the time these observations were made, in 2000 – 2002, Pluto got much darker in blue, which was unexpected. Pluto’s moon, Charon, did not get any bluer, indicating that the cause was something intrinsic to Pluto and not that something weird happened with Hubble.

So why is Pluto redder now? That’s not clear. In general, ultraviolet light from the Sun interacts with the chemicals on Pluto, creating reddish organic molecules; this is seen on lots of distant, icy objects in the Kuiper Belt (the region past Neptune where Pluto orbits). Incredibly, even at the numbing distance of over 4 billion kilometers (3 billion miles) from the Sun, Pluto is still strongly affected by it. But this is happening while overall the northern hemisphere got brighter and the southern darker. You’d expect Pluto to get darker if it gets redder, so clearly there’s more going on here than meets the eye.

These maps will prove crucial in planning the imaging run of the New Horizons probe, which will scream past Pluto in 2015. Having even a crude map in advance of the encounter will help scientists plan their limited time more carefully.

Plus, these Hubble images may very well be the best view we’ll get until New Horizons gets to Pluto, for that matter. And whether you think Pluto is the littlest planet or one of the biggest of the Kuiper Belt Objects, it’s a fascinating place worthy of a lot more study. And in just a little more than five years we’ll see fantastic images of it, too. I can’t wait!

Video courtesy Emily Lakdawalla (and my thanks to her for a helpful conversation). Image and video credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Buie (SwRI)

Just so’s you know, the NYC Skeptics and NESS are throwing a big skeptic meeting in New Yawk called the Northeast Conference on Science & Skepticism, and registration just opened. This will be a really fun event with lots of cool people like George Hrab, Jamy Ian Swiss, the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe wackos, and apparently someone named D.J. Grothe who is also apparently the President of JREF.

Oh yeah: Randi will be there too! You can see the entire speaker list here.

I really really want to go to NECSS, but I don’t know if my schedule will allow it. Be assured that if I can, I’ll let y’all know here. And if so, see you there!

I seem to have ended up as the Dinosaur Feather Color Bureau Chief at the New York Times. After discovering colors in fossil bird feathers, scientists found colors in dinosaurs last week. But this week another group of scientists has got the color pattern across a dinosaur’s entire body.

Imagine: Silver Spangled Hamburgs of the Jurassic!

Image courtesy of National Geographic. Check out their 3-D version.

You might decorate your ears, eyebrows, nose, or other body parts with piercings to make an external statement about your personality, but would you do the same to your dog or cat or hamster?

Dog groomer Holly Crawford didn’t think there was anything wrong with piercing her kittens and then marketing them on e-Bay as “Goth Kitties” for hundreds of dollars. She had no qualms about piercing the kittens’ necks, ears, and tails with a 14-gauge needle, typically used to pierce the skin of cattle.

In a not-surprising development, Crawford was charged with animal cruelty after her Pennsylvania premises were raided last month. Crawford’s trial began earlier this week in a Pennsylvania court.

Crawford pleaded not guilty to the charges, saying she used sterile needles and surgical soap while she pierced her kittens. But a veterinarian who testified at the hearings said the kittens had been maimed, had their hearing altered, and could have died due to infections. The piercings at the back of the kittens’ necks and tails would also have hampered their balance and jumping, she said. On Wednesday, the court found Crawford guilty on one charge of animal cruelty.

The Sun reports on Crawford’s utter incomprehension over the furor about the pierced kittens:

Crawford said: “When I did it, it wasn’t with any cruel intentions. They were definitely loved, well-fed, no fleas, clipped nails. And they were happy.”

Daphna Nachminovitch, vice president for PETA, called the piercings “barbaric”.

“There’s no excuse for inflicting such pain on an animal that’s the size of your palm,” she said.

The defense argued that parents take their kids to have their ears pierced, so we shouldn’t make a fuss about pierced kittens; Crawford’s legal team said we shouldn’t have higher standards for cats. But last time we checked, little girls and boys don’t use a tail to balance when they jump off walls and trees. (Of course, the lives of animals in the average factory farm are probably far worse, but in that case, the cruelty is so widespread that it’s accepted by society—and it’s so easy to punish the one woman selling Goth Kitties.)

Crawford also lamented to the press that her dog grooming business, Pawside Parlor, had lost business since the “Goth Kitty” trial.

Related Content:
Discoblog: Oscar The Death Cat: I Haz Sniffed Many Deaths
Discoblog: Is Pollution in China Causing Cats to Grow “Wings?”
Discoblog: Animal Heroics: Parrot Honored for Saving Choking Baby

Image: The Daily Mail

As I’ll now be hosting two episodes of Point of Inquiry per month, there will be much to cover. My central area of focus will be the intersection of science and public policy–the issues where we need better literacy and citizen awareness, and less politics, to get the right answers.

I may as well make clear I am not going into this with the goal of having big arguments with leading New Atheists about science and religion. My position on this topic is well known, but as a host, my goal is not to advance it, but to create interesting, informative content. I am not ruling out covering evolution and religion, but the show also has another host, Robert Price, who, as D.J. Grothe points out, specializes in religious skepticism.

In any case, I want to make a public call for topics that Point of Inquiry, with me as host, ought to cover. What do you want to hear about?

As the count of known planets in distant star systems continues to grow (the number now exceeds 400), so too does the number of ways we have to learn about them. Reporting in Nature this week, a team of astronomers say they have measured the makeup of an exoplanet’s atmosphere using an Earth-based telescope for the first time.

Mark Swain’s team directed NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility toward HD 189733 b, a planet 63 light years away, discovered back in 2005. HD 189733 b was already known from space-borne observations to harbor several specific molecules in its atmosphere: water, methane, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide [Scientific American]. Swain’s analysis confirmed those previous findings using spectrography, in which the light from an object is broken down into its component wavelengths, allowing the identification of atoms or molecules by their unique emission or absorption properties [Scientific American]. Swain’s team also turned up something else—a spike in emissions at a very particular wavelength of light, 3.3 microns, that the earlier observations didn’t detect and that Swain’s team can’t explain–at least not yet.

While these and other researchers will likely hurry to investigate the mystery spike, the really important part of Swain’s study is that it shows it is indeed possible to analyze extremely distant planets from telescopes right here on Earth. To do it, they looked for what’s called a secondary eclipse. At its heart, the approach takes the light received on Earth when HD 189733b is behind its parent star and subtracts it from the light received when it is between its star and the Earth. What results is the light due solely to the planet [BBC News]. However, our own atmosphere obscures this information, so Swain team had to study at the exoplanet in infrared and correct for the errors our own planet introduces.

Despite showing signs of the molecules we associate with life, HD 189733 b isn’t a good candidate for life as we know it. It’s among the group called “hot Jupiters”: gas giants orbiting scaldingly close to their stars. However, refining Swain’s method could give astronomers another tool beyond space telescopes like the Kepler mission to search for a world that not only possesses the ingredients for life but also resides at an appropriate orbital distance. This approach vastly increases the number of instruments – far larger than the 3m telescope used in the Nature work – that could be trained on exoplanet atmospheres [BBC News].

Related Content:
80beats: Kepler Telescope Spies Its First 5 Exoplanets, Including “Styrofoam” World
80beats: New Super-Earth: Hot, Watery, and Nearby
80beats: Meet the New Neighbors: Earth-Like Worlds Orbiting Nearby Stars
80beats: Don’t Pack Your Bags Yet—New Planet-Finder Hobbled By Electronic Glitch
80beats: Kepler Sends Postcards Home: It’s Beautiful Out Here
DISCOVER: How Long Until We Find a Second Earth?
Bad Astronomy: Kepler Works!

Image: ESA, NASA, G. Tinetti (University College London, UK & ESA) and M. Kornmesser (ESA/Hubble)

This has already made the rounds of the blogoverse, but it’s so cool: video of a leukocyte chasing down and eating a bacterium.

I know it’s just biochemicals in action, a billion years of evolution writ small. But it’s still creepy and amazing.

And I learned a new word: this type of white blood cell is called a polymorphonuclear leukocyte, or, for short… a neutrophil.

That is so cool! And it will be my new superhero name.

In brightest day, in blackest night,
No bacterium shall escape my sight
Let those who worship microscopic evil,
Beware my power… NEUTROPHIL!

Hmm, that needs work. But not now, for there are microorganisms to ingest! Away!

Tip o’ the pseudopod to Orac.

Super Bowl Sunday is, of course, the great American holiday. Past years have seen inspirational performances by Joe Namath, Joe Montana, and Janet Jackson. This year pits the New Orleans Saints against the Indianapolis Colts. New Orleans, of course, is known as a city of saintly behavior, while Indianapolis’s claim to fame involves horsepower in some tangential way.

When faced with contests of ritualized violence, we like to look for the science. So check out this video of Saints quarterback Drew Brees participating in a rigorous laboratory experiment by throwing the ol’ pigskin at an archery target. Joking aside, that is some pretty sick accuracy there.

Impressive that a human arm beats a bow and arrow for accuracy (although it’s not completely clear that the distances and conditions were perfectly analogous). All in the wobble, apparently. But if I were defending my castle from the barbarian hordes or something, I’d still prefer archers over some guys throwing footballs.

On Wednesday, Iran launched a rocket into space–with a special and somewhat wriggly payload.

One mouse, two turtles and some worms were packed into the “experimental capsule” in the “Kovoshgar 3″ (Explorer 3) rocket and were given a one way ticket into the great yonder. The rat, nicknamed Helmz 1, and his buddies will now live out the rest of their lives on the rocket, their movements monitored by live video relayed from the space ark.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad exulted over the success, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, saying:

“We are two more steps away from reaching a point of no return. To a point where we bring all the skies under the domain of Iranian scientists.”

The Iranian Government, long suspected of having an illegal nuclear arms program, has insisted that Iran’s space program is for “peaceful means” only. But the West worries that the rockets built for the space program could be repurposed as delivery systems for nuclear warheads.

Watch a video of the launch here:

Related Content:
Discoblog: Mammals Attack the Middle East, Part II
Discoblog: Today’s Animal Mystery: Indian Mouse Problem Solved by…Rats
80beats: Iran Gets Its Sputnik Moment With First Successful Satellite Launch
80beats: Pentagon Disputes Iran’s Boast of Sending a Rocket Into Orbit

Image: iStockphoto

I’m having fun exploring iWASwondering.org: A site about science and scientists for girls developed by the National Academies. There’s too much to describe so here’s a screenshot:

They’ve certainly highlighted some incredibly ‘cool scientists‘ like Amy Vedder and Marta Tienda and I’d love to see this online list expand to include women like Bonnie Bassler, Sylvia Earle, and many more. So far I’m impressed with how easy this site is to navigate as well as the animated character Lia who provides information. Go check it out for yourself and props to NAS for encouraging girls to pursue careers in science!

The Web site iWASwondering.org is inspired by Women’s Adventures in Science, a biography series for middle-school-aged students co-published by the Joseph Henry Press and Scholastic Library Publishing. Women’s Adventures in Science chronicles the lives of contemporary, working scientists. Despite their varied backgrounds and life stories, these remarkable women all share one important belief: the work they do is important and it can make the world a better place.

Each of the women profiled in the series participated in her book’s creation by sharing important details about her life, providing personal photographs to help illustrate the story, making family, friends, and colleagues available for interviews, and explaining her scientific specialty in ways that will inform and engage young readers. The scientists also participated directly in the creation of the Web site.

H/T Carl

You’ve probably heard about the extraordinary strength of many kinds of spider silk, but researchers in China say they’ve figured out another fascinating property of the silk—how it catches water in the air—and created their own copycat material.

For a study in Nature, Chinese scientists looked at the small, non-poisonous cribellate spider’s silk. The secret, revealed by scanning electron microscope, lies in the silk’s tail-shaped protein fibres which change structure in response to water. Once in contact with humidity, tiny sections of the thread scrunge up into knots, whose randomly arranged nano-fibres provide a roughly, knobbly texture [AFP]. In between these knots are smooth areas where the fibers are neatly aligned, allowing water to slide along until it hits a knot, where dewdrops accumulate.

Armed with this knowledge, Jiang’s team then replicated the spider fibres using polymethyl methacrylate, a synthetic polymer that was chosen because it bonds well with water molecules [Physics World]. The researchers report that their creation succeeded in gathering water the same way that spider silk does.

Still, they don’t know for sure why spiders developed this elaborate water-catching system. Jiang says that the purpose could be to gather drinking water so they don’t have to go looking for it, or to “refresh” the web to make it stronger and more robust. There’s also the possibility that the weight of too much water could destroy a web, but the spider’s water system allows droplets to coalesce and then fall off, relieving the web of that weight.

Whatever the reason, Jiang’s team says materials designed to mimic this capacity of spider silk could have benefits like speeding up chemical or industrial processes, or in a simpler sense, helping people in dry areas catch more water. Fog collection entails stretching out nets or canvas on poles and using the mesh to catch moisture from the breeze. The runoff is collected in a pipe or a trough on the ground. The technique, pioneered in the coastal Andes, is being encouraged in poor, dry parts of the world, such as Nepal [AFP].

Related Content:
80beats: Metal Injections Make a Spider Silk That Superman Would Envy
80beats: Spider Ancestor Made Silk—Possibly Using it for Sex—But Couldn’t Spin a Web
DISCOVER: Unraveling Spider Silk

Image: Wikimedia Commons / Fir0002

How on Earth did the moon come into being? If you subscribe to the latest theory, the moon was born out of a nuclear explosion on Earth that sent a chunk of mass flying from the planet’s core into orbit, where it finally became the moon. But cool as that sounds, some killjoy scientists are pooh-poohing the hypothesis, calling it “unnecessary,” “nonsensical,” and “not physically sensible.”

The standard theory of the moon’s origin holds that a giant space object, possibly an asteroid, banged into Earth and sent a large piece of the planet flying into space. That piece eventually became the moon. But the composition of the moon doesn’t seem to support this theory. Researchers say if an asteroid or some such object smashed away part of the Earth, the Moon ought to be composed of about 80 percent of that object’s constituent material and about 20 percent of the Earth’s. But the makeup of moon rock closely mirrors that of the Earth [Popular Science].

An alternate theory, known as the fission theory, suggests that the moon spun out of the rapidly spinning blob of molten rock that would later become Earth [Popular Science]. But no one has been able to explain what caused a huge chunk of earth to spin away and become the moon. Now, researchers Rob de Meijer and Wim van Westrenem have proposed in an online paper that centrifugal forces may have concentrated heavy, radioactive elements like uranium and thorium at the boundary between the Earth’s mantle and its core. Then, they propose, a massive nuclear explosion occurred at the edge of Earth’s core, flinging red-hot, liquid rock into space. The orbiting detritus gradually congealed into what is now our planet’s lone satellite [Discovery News].

Such “georeactors” have existed on Earth before, albeit on a smaller scale than these researchers propose. But de Meijer and van Westrenem have gotten little support for their hypothesis, and plenty of scorn.

Geophysicist Marvin Herndon, who has previously espoused the controversial idea that uranium once sunk to the earth’s core and formed a georeactor there, isn’t buying into the new theory. He says he’s skeptical of a georeactor’s existence at the earth’s core-mantle boundary, explaining that uranium is so heavy that when it liquefies in a nuclear reaction, it should fall to the Earth’s core [New Scientist].

Other scientists asked how the researchers had modeled this kind of explosion, as Princeton University astrophysicist Richard Gott pointed out: “How do they really know it would produce a thin jet of matter?” [New Scientist]. Gott adds that if indeed the georeactor hypothesis was right, then Venus, which is similar in mass and composition to Earth, should have formed its own moon in a similar process–but it didn’t. For further evidence, points out to Pluto, asking “how do you explain Charon, the big icy moon of Pluto? That would require an ‘ice-reactor’, which is a nonsensical idea!”[New Scientist]. David Stevenson, a planetary physicist at Caltech, blew the whole theory right back into space, saying: “The whole idea is not physically sensible,” he says. “Life is too short to spend on things like this” [New Scientist].

The researchers, however, aren’t backing down. They say the best way to test this idea is to look for isotopic signatures on the Moon left over from when the “georeactor” exploded. If they’re there, it’s a good chance that Earth once went critical in a huge way, and our ghostly galleon was tossed into the heavens by the world’s first nuclear detonation [Discovery News].

Related Content:

80beats: Scientist Smackdowns
80beats: Obama’s NASA Budget: So Long, Moon Missions; Hello, Private Spaceflight
Bad Astronomy: NASA Finds Reservoir of Water Ice on the Moon!
80beats: Lunar Impact! NASA Probe Slams into Moon to Search for Water
80beats: So What Exactly Happened with that Crashing Moon Probe?
80beats: Moon Plume Detected! NASA’s Lunar Crash Wasn’t a Flop, After All

Image: NASA