Author: Discover Main Feed

Speaking of comics to mock pseudoscience… today’s Calamities of Nature pretty much nails it. Not much to add here.

Tip o’ the ecliptic to Scott Romanowski.

In the comments below a question was asked in regards to “fundamentalist” vs. agnostic Jews. I put the quotations around fundamentalist because the term means different things in different religions. As for the idea of an agnostic Jew, remember that Jews are a nation (ethnicity) as well as a religion, and that religious belief has traditionally been less explicitly emphasized than religious practice.

It wasn’t too hard to find some answers in the GSS. I used the somewhat crude “BIBLE” variable again. Remember that BIBLE asks if the respondent believes that the Bible is the literal and inerrant Word of God, the inspired Word of God, or a book of fables. I reclassified these as Fundamentalist, Moderate, and Liberal, respectively. There are two variables I used in the first chart, JEW and RELIG. The former looks just as Jews, and breaks down by Orthodox, Conservative and Reform. The latter I combined with BIBLE to bracket out Fundamentalists, Moderates and Liberals of each religious group. The vocabulary test scores are from WORDSUM. Remember that they correlate 0.71 with adult IQ. Because the sample size for Jews was so small I included 95% intervals so you can modulate confidence appropriately. I limited the sample to whites.

Jewish readers can correct me if I’m wrong, but I am to understand that the gap between Conservative and Reform is actually not very large in terms of belief and practice today, as it may have been in earlier decades. In fact the two movements emerge as much from cultural differences between earlier German Jewish immigrants and the later Eastern European migration. And Orthodoxy and a Protestant understanding of “fundamentalism” do not necessarily overlap. It is notable that for the other groups the Fundamentalist segment had smaller vocabularies. This probably aligns with our intuition. But I was curious, is the pattern among Protestants a regional effect? It isn’t. When I controlled for region the same pattern exists. So rather than plotting that chart, I decided to look at the combination of educational attainment and Fundamentalist orientation for white Protestants only (the sample sizes here are large).

To some extent the pattern is as you’d expect. Those with less education have smaller vocabularies. But notice the step-wise pattern. Fundamentalists with a greater level of education than religious liberals do not necessarily have much larger vocabularies. That’s interesting to know.

Gap cards and cell phones and, quite possibly, kittens. These are a few of Todd Davis’s favorite things. Actually, not. These are the favorite things of the thirteen criminals who stole Davis’s identity and used it to apply for credit cards and cell phone accounts. Davis’s true delight is plastering billboards with his social security number to demonstrate his confidence in his identity theft protection company, LifeLock. Obviously, his company’s services leave a little something to be desired. On Tuesday the Federal Trade Commission promised Davis that he’ll be doing more than blushing—LifeLock must pay twelve million dollars for deceptive advertising and for failing to secure customer data.
Wired reports: “In truth, the protection they provided left such a large hole … that you could drive that truck through it,” said FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz, referring to a LifeLock TV ad showing a truck painted with Davis’s Social Security number driving around city streets.
For only ten dollars per month, LifeLock’s first services consisted of placing fraud alerts on consumers’ personal credit files every ninety days—something that anyone with a phone or a computer could do, for free. As covered extensively by the Phoenix NewTimes, the U.S. District Judge Andrew Guilford ruled last May that this …

The implants of the future will be powered by the energy sources already inside your body. Last week we saw scientists take a step toward this vision by developing a transistor that used the fuel from our cells (a molecule called ATP). And now, a French team has announced the development of a fuel cell that can use the glucose (sugar) inside an animal to produce electricity. Their paper is available free at the journal PLoS One.

The team surgically implanted the device in the abdominal cavity of two rats. The maximum power of the device was 6.5 microwatts, which approaches the 10 microwatts required by pacemakers [Technology Review].

Philippe Cinquin and his team created the cell, in which graphite electrodes are coated with enzymes that oxidize glucose to produce energy. Then connectors carry the electricity from the cell to whatever it’s powering.

Unfortunately, the enzymes used in past glucose biofuel cells were not suitable for implants, because they either required highly acidic conditions to work or were inhibited by a variety of ions found in the body. The newly developed devices lack these constraints and are the first functional implantable glucose biofuel cells, with prototypes in rats stably generating power for at least three months [Scientific American].

The great benefit of these systems would be that they are long-lasting and self-sufficient: Who wants to sit around while a pacemaker recharges, or be cut open so its battery can be replaced? That kind of durability, however, remains a ways away for these biofuel cells.

The technology could be used for a range of applications, such as neural and bone-growth stimulators, drug delivery devices, insulin pumps, and biosensors, says Eileen Yu, a chemical engineer at Newcastle University. But whether enzymes remain stable for a long period of time is a concern, she says [Technology Review].

Related Content:
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DISCOVER: Wirehaired Bacteria

Image: Wikimedia Commons

I’ve written about the misdeeds of Andrew Wakefield, the founder of the modern antivax movement, in the past — the links in this post will give you an idea of this guy. But I’m smart enough to know that I can write until I’m blue in the face about him, and the poison antivaxxers spread will still be accepted by people.

That’s why I’m glad there are different ways of getting the truth out there. One of them is in the form of comics; somehow, adding art to the discussion makes it easier to understand, and easier to absorb.

On his LiveJournal page, Tallguywrites has created a comic book style deconstruction of the Wakefield affair. I urge you to read the whole thing, and keep it in mind when some mouthpiece like Jenny McCarthy praises what Wakefield has done. What they tend not to mention is what the antivax movement has really done: erode deserved confidence in the medical system, help cause outbreaks of measles and pertussis, and put us all in danger of contracting preventable diseases.

Tip o’ the syringe to sydk.

Don’t be deceived by the peaceful look of a newborn baby asleep in a crib–that little tyke may actually be hard at work, soaking up information about the world. A new study has found that newborns are capable of a rudimentary form of learning while they’re asleep, which may be an important process, considering that infants spend between 16 to 18 hours a day in the land of Nod.

Researchers recruited one- and two-day-old infants for the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. With each sleeping baby, the researchers played a musical tone and followed that by a puff of air to the eyes, a mild annoyance that caused the infant to automatically scrunch up its eyes. As this sequence of events was repeated, the sleeping babies learned to associate the air puff with the tone, and soon began to to tighten their eyelids as soon as they heard the musical note, even if the air puff didn’t follow. Electrodes stuck to their scalps also showed activity in the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in memory.

“It’s surprising how quickly they learned — the study took 30 minutes, but I think they actually learned this in half that time,” said researcher William Fifer, a developmental neuroscientist at Columbia University in New York. “We knew that a baby’s job is to be an information gatherer, a data sponge, but I don’t think we realized this also happens when they’re sound asleep.”

This research is reminiscent of another experiment done by a different set of researchers last year, which found that some coma patients are capable of the same learned response (associating a tone with a puff of air to the eye). Neuroscientist Tristan Bekinschtein, who conducted the study on coma patients, says the work on infants suggests that there may be more gradations of consciousness than we understand.

Unlike adults, who are unconscious when they sleep, he suggests that sleeping babies may be in a semi-conscious state, allowing them to learn. “We do not know much about sleep in babies but it does not look like sleep in adults,” he says [New Scientist].

Related Content:
80beats: Vegetative Coma Patients Can Still Learn–a Tiny Bit
80beats: Mother Tongue, Indeed: Newborn’s Cries Mimic Mama’s Accent
80beats: Even Newborn Infants Can Feel the Beat

Image: Eve Vagg

The European Southern Observatory just released a new image of the spiral galaxy M83, and it’s a pretty cool shot:

[Click to embiggen, or

[Again, click to enspiralate, and to get much huger pix.]

See why I was confused? They look pretty different, and not just due to the colors. In the visible light image on the right, the spiral arms are lit up by really hot stars (some many times hotter than the Sun), and the glowy pink and red parts are clouds of gas where stars are being born. The hydrogen in the clouds gets heated up (astronomers call that being “excited”, a gentle reminder that we’re dorks) and emits a lot of light, making them very showy and obvious. Those regions are punctuated by long streamers of darkness, the dust clouds scattered along the arms. They are essentially gone from the IR image on the left! The star forming regions are hard to see as well; they don’t emit nearly as much IR as visible light, so they fade into the background.

I’ll note that just because these images are in the infrared doesn’t mean they’re tracking heat; at least, not like what you normally think of when you think “infrared”. A lot of folks equate IR with heat, but that’s not really the case. When you see images from a thermal camera (like in those awful ghost hunting shows) those are way way farther out than what your eye sees, like at 10 – 20 microns. Objects at human body temperature glow at those wavelengths. The picture of M83 was at 2.2 microns, which is where objects at about 1000°C (1800° F) glow. So in a sense we’re still seeing heat, but from objects much hotter than even an oven set to broil — this IR light is from red stars, like giants and supergiants near the ends of their lives.

Looking in the IR tells us a lot about galaxies, more than we’d know otherwise just looking in the visible part of the spectrum. And while the image from the VLT is pretty cool, I have to admit I like the one in visible light better aesthetically. It’s prettier. And it just goes to show you: we need our dark side. It provides contrast against which to see our warmer side.

Image credits: ESO/M. Gieles. Acknowledgment: Mischa Schirmer

In my new podcast I take a look at Darwinian agriculture–how farmers can improve their crops by taking advantage of evolutionary history. I talk to Ford Denison of the University of Minnesota, who has done fascinating work plants such as soybeans and the bacteria that live in their roots and supply them with essential nitrogen. It’s a complicated relationship, full of cooperation, conflict, cheating, and punishment. Check it out.

Our bodies are under siege, constantly fighting back assaults from disease-causing bacteria. But we are also home to many harmless bacterial species that are share our bodies to no ill effects. Now, it seems that these ‘commensals’ could be our hidden allies against their harmful cousins. In one such ally, a group of scientists has just discovered a potential new weapon against Staphylococcus aureus.

S.aureus is incredibly common, colonising the noses of a third of people in the USA, UK, Japan and other countries. Often, these colonies do nothing untoward, but if a full-blown infection sets in, the result can include life-threatening diseases like pneumonia, meningitis, toxic shock syndrome, endocarditis and sepsis. With the rise of MRSA and other staph strains that shrug off our most common antibiotics, the threat posed by this common nose bug has never been greater.

But S.aureus doesn’t have our noses to itself. It has to jostle for space with a close relative called Staphylococcus epidermidis. It’s the most common commensal in our noses and, indeed, the most common contaminating bacterium in laboratory equipment. S.epidermidis is harmless, except in people whose immune systems have been compromised. But more interestingly, it has the ability to stunt the growth of its more infamous cousin. Now, Tadayuki Iwase from Jikei University has isolated the protein it uses to do so.

Iwase swapped the noses of 88 volunteers and found that virtually all of them were colonised by S.epidermidis. However, S.aureus had only set up shop in just under a third. On the whole, the two bacteria seem to be able to co-exist in harmony, but Iwase found that some strains of S.epidermidis are anathemas to S.aureus.

Specifically, they caused problems for S.aureus’s ability to set up biofilms, the bacterial equivalent of cities. Thousands of bacteria swarm within these communities, embedded in a slimy matrix of DNA, proteins and sugars. Within biofilms, bacteria are harder to kill, making them an important public health challenge. But according to Iwase, some strains of S.epidermidis not only prevent S.aureus from creating biofilms, they also destroy existing ones. People who were colonised by these defensive strains were around 70% less likely to be colonised by S.aureus.

To work out the weapon that was keeping the rival bacteria are bay, Iwase let cultures of S.epidermidis cut a swath through S.aureus biofilms and analysed their secretions when the destruction had reached its peak. He managed to isolate a single protein called Esp or ‘S.epidermidis serine protease’ in full. The protein was absent from strains that couldn’t wipe out S.aureus biofilms and present in strains that could. If Iwase gave the latter bacteria them a chemical that negates the Esp protein, or if he removed the esp gene from them entirely, they lost their competitive edge against S.aureus.

Esp even works in tandem with our own defensive proteins, including one called hBD2 (human beta-defensin 2) that’s secreted by our skin cells. Alone, hBD2 can kill bacteria but it’s a bit of a wimp about it, while Esp (for obvious reasons) has no bacteria-killing ability of its own. But together, their powers are far greater, and they effectively kill S.aureus, even when it was under the protection of biofilms. (The idea that the two proteins have co-evolved with one another is an intriguing question for another time.)

As a final test, Iwase introduced the competitive strains of S.epidermidis into the noses of volunteers who were already colonised by S.aureus. Sure enough, these transplanted bacteria eliminated their evolutionary cousins. Even a purified dose of Esp alone did the trick.

These experiments are very exciting. Humans are fighting a pitched (possibly losing) battle against staph and MRSA in particular, and our antibiotic arsenal is falling short. What better source of new weapons than other bacteria that have been fighting the same fight for millennia? Obviously, there’s a lot of work to do to turn Esp into a viable treatment, but this study is a promising first step.

Even better, it seems that, for some unclear reason, S.aureus can’t evolve resistance to Esp. With its biofilms under attack, you would expect S.aureus to quickly adapt, but after a year of culturing the two species together, Iwase couldn’t find any evidence that of resistance.

Reference: Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature09074

More on Staphylococcus:

• How humans started a bacterial pandemic in chickens
• The bacterial zoo living on your skin
• MRSA in pigs and pig farmers

If you need a breather from all the bad news coming out of the Gulf of Mexico, take a look way up north. In Canada this week, environmental groups and big industry—timber, in this case—actually agreed on something. With the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement, the groups reached a truce in their fight over the forests of Northern Canada. The breakthrough could protect vast swaths of forest that, if added up, would be bigger than the state of Nevada.

Signatories include AbitibiBowater, one of the world’s biggest newsprint producers; Seattle-based Weyerhaeuser, and Canfor, British Columbia’s biggest softwood lumber producer, as well as nine environmental groups such as Greenpeace, the Nature Conservancy and Forest Ethics [Financial Times].

The environmental groups agreed to suspend their “don’t buy” campaigns in exchange for timber firms agreeing not to cut down forests that constitute endangered caribou habitat until at least the end of 2012. In the meantime, the parties will try to hash out a long-term plan. If this step does result in a more permanent conservation plan, it could have benefits not just for the caribou, but for the planet as well.

Over the past decade, boreal-forest preservation has increasingly been seen to be as vital as tropical-forest preservation in efforts to combat global warming. Although tropical forests cover more of Earth’s surface than boreal forests, boreal forests store nearly twice as much carbon, mainly in their soils [Christian Science Monitor].

As you can see in the map here, Canada is home to one of the two great belts of boreal forest in the world; the other stretches across Russia. The timber companies involved in this pact have government-approved leases to 178 million acres of the forests. This agreement covers roughly 72 million acres, and the companies will suspend logging and road-building immediately in 29 million of those acres (the light green portions seen on the map above), with rules for the remaining 43 million acres to come.

While a reasoned truce is nice to see, this fight will go on. Chloe O’Loughlin of Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society argues that the Canadian governments need to restrict other industrial development in the areas to ensure they remain pristine.

She said there was no way forest companies would abide by the new agreement unless oil and gas companies were also required to respect the habitat. “I’m sure they wouldn’t agree to defer something and then see it thrashed by the oil and gas industry,” she said. “Put it off limits to forestry and then put it off limits to oil and gas” [The Province].

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Forests in the Gas
Discoblog: Just like Avatar: Scenes from India, Canada, China, and Hawaii
80beats: Bear Fight! Grizzlies Are Creeping into Polar Bears’ Canadian Turf
80beats: British Jury Says Greenpeace Protesters Were Right to Vandalize Coal Plant

Image: Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has a great blog where they post images from the hi-res camera onboard. I was perusing a recent image, and was a bit befuddled:

What the heck? Is this a plateau of some kind? Is that a small dome just below the center of it? The whole thing looks pitted around the edge, too, like some sort of erosion has taken place. But that can’t be right!

Happily, being an old hand with optical illusions, I knew exactly what to do. I flipped the image over, and all became clear:

Ah, that’s better. Now you can see what’s what: it’s a crater with boulders in it. The small dome is now clearly a tiny meteorite impact crater. What looked like pitting is now obviously rocks and rubble that have slid down the slope of the crater wall.

This is an old illusion. Having evolved on the surface of a planet, we interpret our surroundings assuming sunlight is coming from above. If we see a picture rotated such that the sunlight is coming from below, it plays tricks on our perception. Shadows point the wrong way, making craters look like domes. Flip the picture over, and voila! All is as it should be.

This image is a wonderful example of this illusion (though I’ve never run across a name for it. I suggest “Plait’s Plateau”). You can take lots of lunar pictures and see it if you rotate them. I suggest you check out the LRO archive, because it’s a terrific lesson that what you see is not always what you get (and also because the images are simply too cool). It’s incredibly easy to fool our brains, and if more people realized that then it would be a lot easier for them to be skeptical of what they see, and of claims from other people about what they see!

Less than two percent of the human genome is made up of protein-coding genes. Fifty years ago, scientists launched an expedition of the other 98 percent. It has been a slow march for much of that time, but in recent years the pace has picked up, thanks to advances such as new ways to sequence DNA. Scientists are now generally agreed that some of the non-coding DNA falls into several categories, including

–sites where proteins can bind in order to switch nearby genes on and off

–genes for RNA molecules. Instead of just serving as a template for turning genes into proteins, RNA actually plays lots of roles in the cell, such as sensing levels of different molecules in the cell and interfering with other RNA molecules to control levels of protein.

–old viruses and other genomic parasites. Some viruses can insert their genetic material into our genomes so that it becomes a permanent part of our DNA. These viruses and other parasitic stretches of DNA can, from time to time, make copies of themselves, which then get inserted back into the genome. In a few cases, these genomic parasites may be domesticated, evolving to do valuable things like help build placentas or fight off viruses. But for the most part they’re either useless or downright harmful–just like any other source of mutation.

–Hobbled or dead genes. Sometimes mutations strike genes so that they can no longer produce proteins. Sometimes these mutations are fatal. Other times, we’re able to survive without a particular gene. The pseudogene, as it’s known, may linger on in the genome for millions of years. In a few cases, pseudogenes may still be able to produce useful RNA molecules. But for the most part, they’re just baggage.

The first two categories include stretches of DNA that are useful. The second two include stretches that are useless. Now comes the hard part: figuring out just how much of the genome is made up of each. The question goes beyond mere census-taking, because it will help us understand how the genome works, in its entirety. And it will also reveal how much of the genome provides no benefit at all.

I wrote an article about this line of research for the New York Times in November 2008. I described some scientists who were betting that most of the genome wouldn’t be good for much, and others who believed that most of it was serving important functions. The latter group pointed to studies in which scientists tallied up all the RNA transcripts produced by one chunk of the genome. They found that most of the DNA they analyzed produced RNA. John Mattick, a member of the research team who works at the University of Queensland in Australia, claimed that most of that DNA encoded useful molecules. “My bet is the vast majority of it — I don’t know whether that’s 80 or 90 percent,” he said.

But it was just a bet. A lot of work remained to figure out what all that RNA really signified. This week scientists at the University of Toronto published a study that suggests, contrary to Mattick, it’s full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. They used new methods to survey the RNA produced by the genome and compared their results to the ones from older methods. They found that most of their RNA came from regions of the genome that are already known to be protein-coding genes. Very little RNA came from elsewhere in the genome. They argue that the older methods were crude, so studies based on them were loaded with false positives. Protein-coding genes are not the only source of RNA transcripts in the genome, but a lot of the extra ones may just be the result of sloppiness. When proteins slide down DNA, making RNA transcripts, they sometimes grab onto the wrong stretches. The extra RNA gets broken down quickly–as useless and as inevitable as sparks flying off a grinding wheel.

Nature News has a nice write-up, as does PLOS Biology (from which I shamelessly lifted my Macbeth).

[Image: MIT]

I notice that a peculiar piece of datum from First Things contributor David Goldman is being passed around, repeated by Ross Douthat no less. Goldman states:

Beinart offers a condescending glance at the “warmth” and “learning” of Orthodox Jews, but neglects to mention the most startling factoid in Jewish demographics: a third of Jews aged 18 to 34 self-identify as Orthodox. “Secular Jew” is not quite an oxymoron–the Jews are a nation as well as a religion–but in the United States, at least, secular Jews have a fertility barely above 1 and an intermarriage rate of 50 percent, which means their numbers will decline by 75 percent per generation. It is tragic that the Jewish people stand to lose such a large proportion of their numbers, but they are lost to Judaism in general, not only to Zionism. That puts a different light on the matter.

A reader of Goldman’s who happens not to be stupid and can actually read observes that 34% of Orthodox Jews are 18 to 24 according to the original source Goldman was citing. No surprise that Goldman makes such an error, he has a way with faux erudition which amazes the dull and dumb. In fact, the American Jewish Survey reports that 16% of Jews between the ages of 18 to 29 self-identify as Orthodox.

With that small error out of the way, in regards to the future of the American Jewry I think the story outlined in Amos Elon’s The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933 may serve as a possible vision of the future. Elon notes that almost the whole of the German Jewish elite of the late 18th and early 19th century converted to Christianity. Moses Mendelssohn’s last Jewish descendant died before the 20th century; the rest of his descendants had become Christians. Karl Marx and Heinrich Heine were not atypical. But there was a large German Jewish community in the early 20th century, though even that was being eroded by intermarriage and conversion. If Elon is correct that the bulk of the 19th century Jewry became Christian, where did the Jews of the 20th century come from? It seems that as the German Jewish burghers abandoned the Reform temples for Lutheran churches, their spots were filled by assimilating Eastern European Jews who were immigrating into Germany and taking over the institutions which the earlier community had built. They were heirs in spirit, if not blood, to Moses Mendelssohn. In other words, a large bumper crop of Orthodox youth may be the salvation for the Reform and Conservative movements. There may be no third generation Reform, but not all third generations beyond Orthodoxy remain Orthodox either.

With no end to BP’s gushing oil leak in sight, attention has turned to trying to ascertain just how damaging the spill could be for wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico. Yesterday the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) doubled the size of the fishing ban in the Gulf. Now nearly 20 percent of the water is off-limits because of the expanding oil slick.

Because so much oil is under the surface, and diluted but still dangerous, it’s hard to get a handle on just how bad things will be. But turtles seem to be the bellwether for worries about sea life. Since April 30, marine biologists have recorded more than 150 sea turtle deaths, and while they can’t immediately say all those were directly related to the oil spill, it’s a much higher number of deaths that is usual for this time of the year.

Necropsies, the animal equivalent of an autopsy, have been performed on 40 turtles so far. And tissue samples taken from as many specimens as possible are being analyzed for abnormally high chemical levels associated with oil contamination. Initial necropsy results are expected in a few days, but laboratory tests of the tissue samples will likely take weeks to complete. In many cases these results are needed to make a conclusive finding about the cause of an animal’s death [Reuters].

Turtles raise special concern because all five species that live in the Gulf region are endangered. And as spring turns to summer, they could be more in the path of danger.

The nesting season for the sea turtles runs until mid-July, and for most of that time the mothers will remain off Padre Island and the beaches of Mexico, where there is currently no oil. But then things become more chancy, as new sea turtle babies go off to sea, floating on currents in the gulf or on seaweed patches that could be covered by crude [The New York Times].

Meanwhile, back at the leak site, BP says that the siphon it successfully installed last week is now carrying 2,000 barrels of oil per day to a tanker on the surface. While the company trumpeted this as capturing 40 percent of the estimated 5,000 barrels of oil per day leaking in the Gulf, we noted last week that the 5,000 figure could be a gross underestimation. If the leak is truly 50,000 barrels and not 5,000, then the 2,000 currently being captured is barely a drop in the bucket.

In Washington, Democrats in the Senate are pushing a plan to raise the cap on liability for a spill from its present $75 million to at least $10 billion—a more than 130-fold increase. Republicans have blocked the measure thus far.

And in Florida, people are left to wait and see if Gulf currents bring oil their way.

Florida Democrat Senator Bill Nelson released a forecast by University of South Florida College of Marine Science experts who said part of the oil slick may reach the Keys in five to six days, and possibly Miami five days after that. “While I always hope for the best, this is looking like really out-of-control bad,” Nelson said in a statement before another round of congressional hearings on Tuesday [Reuters].

Recent posts on the BP oil spill:
80beats: Good News: BP’s Oil Siphon Is Working. Bad News: Florida Keys Are in Danger
80beats: Scientists Say Gulf Spill Is Way Worse Than Estimated. How’d We Get It So Wrong?
80beats: Testimony Highlights 3 Major Failures That Caused Gulf Spill
80beats: 5 Offshore Oil Hotspots Beyond the Gulf That Could Boom—Or Go Boom
80beats: Gulf Oil Spill: Do Chemical Dispersants Pose Their Own Environmental Risk?

Image: U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Justin Stumberg; U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Patrick Kelley.

Tomorrow evening, I’ll be appearing at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences for this event: “Who Will Tell the People? Science and Sustainability in the News” Scientists who study the environment and global warming warn us at every turn that dramatic changes are afoot. Why don’t media headlines convey a sense of urgency? What is the best way to get the climate change message to citizens? What obligations do the media have? What prevents them from telling the story? The May Urban Sustainability Forum will take a look at how the media covers issues of science, how shrinking budgets and disappearing science desks are impacting coverage, and how niche media sources are filling a void in sharing vital information. Beth McConnell, Executive Director of the Media and Democracy Coalition, will be speaking on the topic of media consolidation and its effects on journalism, specifically sustainability. Chris Mooney is a 2009-2010 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT and author of three books, including Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum). Mr. Mooney and Ms. Kirshenbaum also co-write The Intersection blog for Discovermagazine.com, a contributing editor to Science Progress, and a senior correspondent for The American Prospect magazine. He has been …

Rod Dreher mulls his bias toward declinism while evaluating Matt Ridley’s new book The Rational Optimist. Here’s a portion of Ridley’s argument:

But with new hubs of innovation emerging elsewhere, and with ideas spreading faster than ever on the Internet, Dr. Ridley expects bottom-up innovators to prevail. His prediction for the rest of the century: “Prosperity spreads, technology progresses, poverty declines, disease retreats, fecundity falls, happiness increases, violence atrophies, freedom grows, knowledge flourishes, the environment improves and wilderness expands.”

Dreher gloomily observes:

Well, I would certainly love to be wrong; neither I nor my descendants gain anything out of a world of decline. But it would be useful to go back and look at how 19th-century progressives expected the 20th century to be a wonderland of peace, prosperity and progress. Didn’t quite work out that way. I suspect the truth is that nobody knows anything about tomorrow, and that we can only make our best educated guesses based on history and the wisdom of experience.

Looking at the imaginings of past futurists is often pretty amusing. And Ridley’s projections of plentitude and prosperity seem to involve an extrapolation of the conditions of the past 200 years, whereby a greater and greater proportion of humanity has broken the shackles of the Malthusian trap. The reality is that for most of human history innovation was always immediately counter-balanced by population growth so that median wealth never increased. Only in the 19th century did a new social pattern and demographic dynamic emerge whereby prosperous individuals did not reproduce to a greater extent in keeping with their greater wealth. Rather, societies went through the “demographic transition”, and greater wealth for future generations became the new norm. There’s no reason that this doesn’t have to be a transient state between long epochs of Malthusianism, so I think assuming that the new normal is the normal forever more is a step too far.

That being said, it seems to me that we do truly live in a utopia in any objective terms when viewed from the 19th or early 20th centuries. The Dickensian lot of the poor no longer characterize the lower classes of the developed world, and obesity is actually a feature of the lives of the poor, as opposed to starvation. The period between 1800 and 1970 witnessed a massive shift in earning power to the working classes, and a closing of the wage gap between skilled and unskilled workers. Infection has not been abolished, but it is no longer so deadly. Violence has decreased, despite the periodic outbreaks of industrialized genocide. And so on.

Utopia is always over the hill, and the new normal was the aspiration of the past, not the bliss of the present. But the past and the present and the future are actually instantiated simultaneously. Consider three airports which I have sharp experiences of. Dhaka airport is the past. John F Kennedy airport is the present. And Munich airport is the future. If you took a flight from Dhaka to Munich you would have thought that you’d been transported to utopia.

I don’t take these utopian dreams as an injunction toward complacency. Rather, we should appreciate all that modern science, technology and government has achieved, and be vigilant. Before we despair at all which might be lost, remember this famous chart:

I have some good news, and a mea culpa of sorts.

First, the good stuff: the COMPETES act may go to the Floor of the House of Representatives for voting as early as today! This act will fund a lot of scientific innovation and education, and is sorely needed if we are to invest in our future as a country. I’m very happy this is happening — assuming it passes, which I think it will. The original act passed in 2007, and much of this new bill authorizes funding to be extended.

Now, regular readers may be wondering, “Wait! Didn’t you say this bill was dead?”

Yes, I did. You can read that earlier post to get the background, but basically this bill passed through committee, but at the last second a Representative from Texas, Ralph Hall, added some language to it using a parliamentary procedure called a Motion to Recommit. As I understood it at the time, this meant that Congressmen had two choices: overturn the Motion and let the bill be voted upon, or send the bill back to committee where it would almost certainly be tabled indefinitely, the usual outcome of such an event.

The problem was that overturning the Motion was a political landmine; the language Hall added punished people who were downloading porn on their government computers, saying that no money from the act could be used to pay those people’s salaries. So overturning the Motion meant Democrats would basically be handing the far-right media spin machine gasoline for the fire: they would claim the Democrats weren’t punishing the people looking at porn.

So they voted to send the bill back to committee. This is where I made my mistake: everything I had read said that this meant the bill would stagnate and die. However, this is incorrect: the bill can be reintroduced to the House Floor “under suspension”, which means as-is with the new language included (technically, this is because the Motion was submitted “with instructions”). This was not clear to me before — the rules can be quite Byzantine — and I readily admit that.

However — and this is a big however — it does NOT change the fact that Hall held this bill hostage by throwing in the non sequitur of the porn addendum. He wanted some changes made to it dealing with funding levels and for how long it would be funded. The committee has apparently acquiesced to this demand… but I’ll note that the shameful language about pornography is still in the bill!

It seems obvious that the Democrats on the committee had to back off on this, or else Hall or someone like him would use some other procedure to hamstring the bill again.

I know that a lot of riders are added to bills when they’re created. Usually, though, it’s done as a pet project that gets attached to some bill that everyone will vote yea on, thus getting that pet project approved. That stinks, in many cases, but at least the major bill gets passed. In this case, though, the language was added in an attempt to stop the bill. This may also be done on a regular basis in Congress, but I still say that it was done in an underhanded way, and done cynically to a bill that we desperately need if we are to compete in the global marketplace of science and technology.

Don’t ignore the manipulative actions of Representative Hall because of my error on the status of the bill. The bulk and the meat of what I wrote in that earlier post still stands.

But… I’ll take a deep breath. The good news to focus on is that the COMPETES reauthorization will get its day in court. I just hope that Democrats — and the American people — learn a lesson from this.

Thanks to Dan Vergano for tweeting about this. Image credit: kevindooley’s Flickr photostream, used under the Creative Commons license.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science is now the latest organization to instruct Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli in how science works. In particular, I liked this aspect of the AAAS board statement: Scientists should not be subjected to fraud investigations simply for providing scientific results that may be controversial or inconvenient, particularly on high profile topics of interest to society. The way to resolve controversies of this nature is through scientific review and additional research. In the majority of cases, scientific disagreements are unrelated to any kind of fraud and are considered a legitimate and normal part of the process of scientific progress. The scientific community takes seriously their responsibility for policing scientific misconduct, and extensive procedures exist to ensure the credibility of the research enterprise. Unless founded on some openly discussed evidence of potential misconduct, investigations such as that targeting Professor Mann could have a long-lasting and chilling effect on a broad spectrum of research fields that are critical to a range of national interests from public health to national security to the environment. Unless more clearly justified, Attorney General Cuccinelli’s apparently political action should be withdrawn. That’s right–the AAAS just called Cuccinelli’s investigation “political.” It is, of course–but …

Sex Lives of Supreme Court Justices:

Now that the sex lives of Supreme Court justices have become grist for commentators, we are finally free to discuss a question formerly only whispered about in the shadows: Why does Justice Antonin Scalia, by common consent the leading intellectual force on the Court, have nine children? Is this normal? Or should I say “normal,” as some people choose to define it? Can he represent the views of ordinary Americans when he practices such a minority lifestyle? After all, having nine children is far more unusual in this country than, say, being a lesbian.

The GSS can answer this question. Sort of. It turns out that the highest number of children it asks about are “8 or more.” Limiting the sample to 1998-2008 so it has some contemporary relevance, ~1% of respondents in the GSS has 8 or more children. But that’s not quite fair, since many respondents are young adults, or just starting their families. Limiting the sample to those who are 60 years or older you have ~3.5%. Limiting to 70 and above it goes up to ~4.5%. Scalia is 74 years old, so I think it might be appropriate to judge him by his generation, though the relative gerontocracy of the Supreme Court, and American politics in general, might warrant examination. In 2008 in the GSS asked about sexual orientation, and ~2% of women stated they were lesbian, gay or homosexual. So whether Scalia is more abnormal than a lesbian measured against the general population depends on the reference population you use. For his generation, probably not, but for this generation, perhaps.

Hint: It makes your hard drive work and also makes pretty colors in the sky.