I’ve been following the research of primatologist Frans de Waal on peacemaking among primates for a long time. Earlier this month I finally got to meet him in New York, where we had a conversation about his new book, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society.
I’ve embedded the first of a series of excerpts you can watch on YouTube. You can find all the excerpts here.
My new-espresso-machine wave function has not yet collapsed. In the meantime, via Cynical-C, here are two videos from Intelligentsia Coffee in Venice (CA, not Italy). Making espresso, and making siphon (or “syphon,” apparently) coffee.
Suffice it to say that my level of coffee-making care doesn’t really compete.
If you’ve been expecting to hear from a far-off alien civilization, don’t hold your breath, suggests Frank Drake, the founder of Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)–the odds of ET phoning Earth may be diminishing. And your digital TV might well be to blame.
Speaking at a meeting of the Royal Society in London, Drake said that digital transmissions are effectively “gagging” the planet. In the fast-fading analog age, TV and radio signals transmitted around the world escaped into space. At present, the Earth is surrounded by a 50 light year-wide ‘’shell” of radiation from analogue TV, radio and radar transmissions, he said [The Telegraph]. Those signals reach distant stars, which means that if someone is home at any of those stars, they could heard us.
But Drake says that phasing out analog transmissions from TV, radio and radar is making our planet electronically invisible from outer space. While an old-style TV transmitter might generate one million watts, Drake says the power of a digital satellite signal is around 20 watts. He added that present-day satellites tend to point towards the earth rather than old-school transmitters which beam their signals all over the place [The Guardian], and notes that digital cable is even more impossible to detect from space. He also said that if Earth is making itself “invisible,” albeit unintentionally, then other civilizations are probably doing the same. And he further hypothesizes that in some cases it might even be deliberate; a proverbial drawing of the kitchen blinds, so to speak [Wired].
Drake says he’s still convinced that intelligent life does exist somewhere in the universe, but added that because the transmissions that signal the presence of life may be weaker, we might need to look for them harder. “We’re going to have to search many more stars and many more frequencies” [The Telegraph].
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DISCOVER: 20 Things You Didn’t Know About… Aliens
Image: iStockphoto
After ten months of trying to extricate the Mars rover Spirit from a sandy patch on the Red Planet, NASA has finally given up. The space agency said Tuesday that Spirit will no longer be a fully mobile robot, roving over an alien planet. It will instead be a stationary science platform–which means a sedentary life for the robot geologist [that] has taken thousands of images and found evidence in Mars’ rocks of a wetter, warmer past [BBC].
Ten months ago, as Spirit was driving south beside the western edge of a low plateau called Home Plate, its wheels broke through a crusty surface and churned into soft sand hidden underneath [NASA]. The rover has been stuck there ever since, and now only four of its six wheels are functioning. Since all the maneuvers that the NASA instructed the rover to try have failed to free it, the sandpit known as “Troy” will be Spirit’s final resting place.
Spirit may stop roving, but hopefully it won’t stop working. In the coming weeks, NASA will focus on tilting the rover to the north so that more sunlight will fall on its solar panels during the long, cold Martian winter. Even if the rover does settle into a better position, it is likely Spirit will maintain so little energy in its batteries that it will go into hibernation, perhaps as soon as April. It will not emerge from that state until August or September, when the Sun gets high enough in the Martian sky to power up the rover’s systems [BBC News].
If Spirit does make it through the winter (when temperatures are expected to reach -55 degrees Fahrenheit), it can resume studying the tiny wobbles in the rotation of Mars to gain insight about the planet’s core. This requires months of radio-tracking the motion of a point on the surface of Mars to calculate long-term motion with an accuracy of a few inches [NASA]. This would help determine if the core of Mars is liquid or solid. Tools on Spirit’s robotic arm are also expected to study variations in the composition of nearby soil and see how they’re affected by water. Stationary science also includes watching how wind moves soil particles and monitoring the Martian atmosphere [NASA].
Since landing on Mars in 2004, Spirit has trekked nearly five miles and climbed a mountain as tall as the Statue of Liberty. Its twin, Opportunity, continues to drive and explore [Associated Press]. So far, NASA has spent more than $900 million on its Mars exploration rover program and the data acquired by the vehicles has generated about 100 scholarly papers, including special editions of the leading international journals Science and Nature.
Related Content:
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80beats: Will This Mars Rover Ever Rove Again? Spirit Get Stuck in the Sand
80beats: Mars Rover Spirit Shows Signs of Age, Including Senior Moments
DISCOVER: Mars Rover Delves Into Crater
DISCOVER: Those Mars Rovers Keep Going and Going…
Image: NASA/ JPL-Caltech
Scholars debate why opera doesn’t seem to hold much appeal for modern audiences, but they’ve overlooked a glaringly obvious answer: The Zeiss Universarium astronomical projector isn’t involved. Or at least, it wasn’t, until now.
The Gotham Chamber Opera has set out to give the genre some geek awesomeness with its presentation of Haydn’s Il Mondo Della Luna (The World on the Moon) at the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium.
The opera follows the exploits of the love-stricken Ecclitico, who poses as an astronomer to impress Buonafede, the strict father of his beloved. Ecclitico and his two romance-minded accomplices, smitten with Buonafede’s other daughter and maidservant, use a sleeping potion to convince the gullible old man that he has been transported to the moon. There, Buonafede can no longer impede the young lovers’ relationships, and the lunar emperor (a servant in disguise, resplendent in imperial glowsticks) commands the three happy pairs to marry.
The acoustics of the planetarium don’t lend themselves to live performance, but the singers and orchestra give an impressive performance in spite of the dead space. The costumes and occasional choreography revel in a burlesque take on Haydn, complete with a bawdy French-maid character, the fake astronomer incarnated as a cross between an 18th century dandy and Dr. Horrible, and plenty of booty-shaking all around. Well-integrated projections on the planetarium’s domed screen contribute swirling nebulae and lunar landscapes that take the audience along for Buonafede’s boozy trip.
Performances continue nightly through this Thursday, January 28. Tickets here.
Bats and dolphins are two of the most celebrated users of echolocation, employing high-frequency sounds to locate prey, find their way, or to communicate. Now a new set of findings in Current Biology show that not only do the two different kinds of mammals use the same method, they also evolved nearly the exact same molecular means for hearing at high frequencies.
That second part was a surprise, study author Stephen Rossiter says: “It’s common on a morphological scale but it’s assumed not to occur at a DNA level because there are so many different ways to arrive at the same solution” [BBC News]. That is, while it’s quite common for different species to separately evolve similar features—like the tusks of elephants and walruses—it’s quite unlikely that natural selection working in separate species would settle an essentially identical gene and protein for growing tusks, hearing high-frequency sounds, or anything else. Or so the thinking went.
The gene in question, and the protein it encodes, are both called prestin. It’s present in the short hairs of the inner ear, the researchers say. Prestin changes shape when exposed to high-frequency sound, and this in turn deforms the fine hair cells, setting off an electrical impulse to the brain. So the protein has the important jobs of detecting and selecting high-frequency sounds for amplification [New Scientist]. Prestin is common across mammals, although many different variants exist; mutations of the human version cause people to lose high-frequency hearing. But the prestin proteins that echolocating dolphins and bats evolved are almost identical, the study says. By contrast, bats that don’t use sonar don’t have that version of the protein, despite the fact that they’re much more closely related to their fellow bats than dolphins are.
For biologist David Pollock, who wasn’t involved in the study, this new could open a new window to understanding protein evolution. These findings, combined with a previously identified example of molecular convergence in snake and lizard mitochondrial genomes, suggest that molecular convergence may be more common than scientists realize — “it’s [just] not always easy to detect,” Pollock said [The Scientist].
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The Loom: How to Be a Bat [with high-speed video]
DISCOVER: Killing Whales with Sound
DISCOVER: How To Weave a Dolphin-Friendly Net
Image: flickr / Ken Lund
Some people say the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster was a joke made up to satirize creationism and the incursion of fundamentalist religion into politics. Other people seem to see their religious icons everywhere they look. Still others promote their beliefs through the military.
I think these folks ought to get together. Or maybe they already did:
People say there are no atheists in foxholes… but maybe there is a higher authority.
Tip o’ the noodly appendage to Jay Sinclair.
Credit: US Air Force and Tech. Sergeant Russell E. Cooley IV
Now we know what students do for fun over at Stanford University. If this video is to be believed, they wave their iPhones around while wearing speakers strapped to their hands. (Actually, the whole production seems kind of like using a weirding module, so maybe they’re onto something.) The speakers amplify the different sounds produced by various iPhone apps to create a glorious symphony, courtesy of the MoPho (Mobile Phone) Orchestra.
Some of the music apps are quite fun–like the one called the “Ocarina” that transforms your iPhone into a 12,000-year-old wind instrument (but with more apps). Check out the video below for a demonstration of both ancient music and modern compositions played on the iPhone, from Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics.
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My friend Nancy Atkinson usually blogs over at Universe Today, but has started her own personal-type blog. To inaugurate it she’s hosting the 138th Carnival of Space. So why not go over there and read up on the latest astronomy and space happenings?
Until or unless we can create a Jurassic Park and build dinosaurs from DNA, the best way to study them may be to build dino models using materials like balsa wood, carbon fiber, and rubber bands.
That’s what a team did for a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences. To figure out how the 120-million-year-old winged dinosaur Microraptor gui took to the skies, the researchers used a well-preserved fossil to build their own. “We went back and forth. We thought, maybe we’ll do 3-D graphics and it’ll look really cool. But it’s more accurate to do the modeling directly from the specimen,” said Dave Burnham, a paleontologist at the University of Kansas [Wired.com].
The micoraptor’s flight configuration has confounded scientists studying it, because no modern vertebrate flies with the hind legs “functioning as independent, fully developed wings,” so there’s no living analog for comparison. Previous studies suggested that the animal walked on the ground, but Burnham’s team argues that the feathered back legs would have prevented this. A 2007 study, also in PNAS, said the dino probably flew with its two sets of legs set parallel, like a biplane. But Burnham, whose team did glider tests with their model microraptor’s wings in three different positions, says the biplane formation would have put too much weight on the creature’s head.
Instead, he argues, the dinosaur would’ve taken off from the trees and glided like a flying squirrel. “The controversy was that these animals couldn’t spread their hind wings to glide,” Burnham says. “But we’ve been able to articulate the bones in their hip socket to show that they could fly” [LiveScience].
The study adds to the debate over how flight evolved in the earliest ancestors of birds–did flight begin when some ground-dwelling creatures hopped and leaped upwards, or when tree-dwelling creatures began to glide between branches? This new study of the microraptor, which is poised on the boundary between dinosaurs and birds, suggests that the arboreal, or tree-living, idea may be correct [LiveScience]. However, co-author David Alexander notes, the controversy probably won’t end here.
Related Content:
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DISCOVER: Plucking Apart the Dino-Birds
Image: University of Kansas
What do your cell-phone and a brain scan have in common? Both need clear signals for optimal efficacy.
Doctors often have to work with sketchy data when it comes to brain scans–but the solution to that problem isn’t one that many patients will clamor to try. A new study to be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience says the best way to get clearer EEG brain scans is to remove a part of the skull.
For years, doctors have been treating patients who have suffered severe head trauma like a gunshot or knife wound by cutting out a chunk of the skull–a procedure called a hemicraniectomy. This gives the brain room to swell, and when the wound heals they re-attach the chunk of skull.
Neuroscientist Bradley Voytek of the University of California at Berkeley, the lead author of this study, worked with hemicraniectomy patients and utilized this window to see how the skull acts as a barrier to EEG’s–a brain scan that is done to assess the brain’s electrical activity.
Wired reports that the patients were instructed to peform simple tasks:
During these tasks the team measured a patient’s brain waves on both sides of his head. On one side, just a thin flap of skin separated the brain from the EEG electrode, while on the other side the skull was intact. Signals from the skull-free side were, unsurprisingly, much stronger, less noisy and easier to pinpoint to a specific task and region of the brain.
The study not only offers a creepy way to get clearer brain scans, it also suggests another way to situate neural implants, like the kind that may one day be used by paralyzed people to relay their brain signals to prosthetic limbs. Researchers note that it’s difficult to maintain a long-term electrode in the brain, but some delicate brain signals aren’t strong enough to be read from outside the skull. By drilling a small hole into the skull and placing the electrode on the outermost surface of the brain, the researchers think they might obtain better brain signals.
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DISCOVER: Brains Don’t Lie
Image: Bradley Voytek
Welcome to this week’s installment of the From Eternity to Here book club. Today we look at Chapter Two, “The Heavy Hand of Entropy.”
[By the way: are we going too slowly? If there is overwhelming sentiment to move to two chapters per week, that would be no problem. But if sentiment is non-overwhelming, we’ll stick to the original plan.]
Excerpt:
While it’s true that the presence of the Earth beneath our feet picks out an “arrow of space” by distinguishing up from down, it’s pretty clear that this is a local, parochial phenomenon, rather than a reflection of the underlying laws of nature. We can easily imagine ourselves out in space where there is no preferred direction. But the underlying laws of nature do not pick out a preferred direction of time, any more than they pick out a preferred direction in space. If we confine our attention to very simple systems with just a few moving parts, whose motion reflects the basic laws of physics rather than our messy local conditions, there is no arrow of time—we can’t tell when a movie is being run backward…
The arrow of time, therefore, is not a feature of the underlying laws of physics, at least as far as we know. Rather, like the up/down orientation space picked out by the Earth, the preferred direction of time is also a consequence of features of our environment. In the case of time, it’s not that we live in the spatial vicinity of an influential object, it’s that we live in the temporal vicinity of an influential event: the birth of the universe. The beginning of our observable universe, the hot dense state known as the Big Bang, had a very low entropy. The influence of that event orients us in time, just as the presence of the Earth orients us in space.
This chapter serves an obvious purpose — it explains in basic terms the ideas of irreversibility, entropy, and the arrow of time. It’s a whirlwind overview of concepts that will be developed in greater detail in the rest of the book, especially in Part Three. As a consequence, there are a few statements that may seem like bald assertions that really deserve more careful justification — hopefully that justification will come later.
Here’s where I got to use those “incompatible arrows” stories I blogged about some time back (I, II, III, IV). The fact that the arrow of time is so strongly ingrained in the way we think about the world makes it an interesting target for fiction — what would happen if the arrow of time ran backwards? The straightforward answer, of course, is “absolutely nothing” — there is no prior notion of “backwards” or “forwards.” As long as there is an arrow of time that is consistent for everyone, things would appear normal to us; there is one direction of time we all remember, which we call “the past,” when the entropy was lower. It’s when different interacting subsystems of the universe have different arrows of time that things get interesting. So we look briefly at stories by Lewis Carroll, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Martin Amis, all of which use that trick. (Does anyone know of a reversed-arrow story that predates Through the Looking Glass?) Of course these are all fantasies, because it can’t happen in the real world, but that’s part of the speculative fun.
Then we go into entropy and the Second Law, from Sadi Carnot and Rudolf Clausius to Ludwig Boltzmann, followed by some discussion of different manifestations of time’s arrow. All at lightning speed, I’m afraid — there’s a tremendous amount of fascinating history here that I don’t cover in anywhere near the detail it deserves. But the real point of the chapter isn’t to tell the historical stories, it’s to emphasize the ubiquity of the arrow of time. It’s not just about stirring eggs to make omelets — it has to do with metabolism and the structure of life, why we remember the past and not the future, and why we think we have free will. Man, someone should write a book about this stuff!
With one week until the premiere of the final season of LOST, let’s consider the possibilities for what might happen next…
At this point in the story, the island has stopped jumping through time, but some survivors stuck in the past have just detonated–or attempted to detonate–a conveniently placed nuclear bomb. If successful, they could change everything.
Their plan was first concocted by the island’s resident physicist, Daniel Faraday, who figured out that variables (i.e., time travelers) may be able to alter the future, but unfortunately, he was shot by his own mother–who was pregnant with him at the time. So the other survivors took up Faraday’s mission to change what’s to come, reasoning that if the island and its mysterious energy no longer existed, their plane would not have crashed, they would not meet each other, and the entire first five seasons would never take place!
Where are we now? It also seems that master manipulator Benjamin Linus was just a pawn for the even greater master manipulating smoke monster (a.k.a., the Egyptian god Set?) who found his loophole to kill Jacob in John Locke. However, we suspect Jacob anticipated what would take place and set a series of events in motion by visiting each of the main characters before they reached the island, possibly derailing the smoke monster’s plan so his own murder would never happen. Further, it appears that this is a sort of game the two play: Endlessly calling travelers to their island to move them about like chess pieces. And Jacob always triumphs… so far.
Still with me? So this thread’s just for fun for all of the LOST fans out there. Let’s speculate on what’s to come in the final season and whether Jughead can actually change the future–or if it’s all been done before. What do readers think? I’ll get us started with a similar question to one I posed last year:
If you theoretically travel back in time to change the future–only to realize you’ve already been there and failed–might free will result in different choices leading to new and alternative realities?
Eric Berger of the Houston Chronicle has a really important article out about how, basically, the good guys lost a major battle in the climate war over the past few months. Some combination of the weather, ClimateGate, the relative failure of Copenhagen, and now, the decreasing likelihood of the U.S. Senate passing cap and trade have shifted a mood of climate optimism–which I certainly felt about a year ago–to one of deep despair. “The climate surrounding climate change has changed, and not for the better for those seeking to reduce carbon dioxide emissions,” writes Berger. Sadly, I have to agree.
What went wrong? That’s a very long story, and Berger relates much of it. For my part, I am convinced the fundamental factor is that our camp egregiously misunderestimated the skeptic/denial camp and what it was capable of. Our thinking went something like this: “the science keeps getting stronger, and now we have Obama…the tide has turned.” And so we were lulled into a false sense of security. Now, there is a hell of a lot of regrouping to do, and I am not even sure where to begin. But one thing is certain: We should never again assume that science alone is going to make the political difference on this issue, no matter how strong it gets.
“The desire of many to look young for their age has led to the establishment of a large cosmetics industry. However, the features of appearance that primarily determine how old women look for their age and whether genetic or environmental factors predominately influence such features are largely unknown. We studied the facial appearance of 102 pairs of female Danish twins aged 59 to 81 as well as 162 British females aged 45 to 75. Skin wrinkling, hair graying and lip height were significantly and independently associated with how old the women looked for their age. The appearance of facial sun-damage was also found to be significantly correlated to how old women look for their age and was primarily due to its commonality with the appearance of skin wrinkles. There was also considerable variation in the perceived age data that was unaccounted for… …These findings indicate that women who look young for their age have large lips, avoid sun-exposure and possess genetic factors that protect against the development of gray hair and skin wrinkles. The findings also demonstrate that perceived age is a better biomarker of skin, hair and facial aging than chronological age.”
Thanks to Günther for today’s ROFL!
Image: Wikimedia
Autism research is progressing quickly, but without a solid diagnosis, some still blame vaccines.
After the end of the disastrous space shuttle program, it’s not at all clear where the space agency is going—or if it has enough money, skills, or buy-in to get there.
A big analysis of the 4.4-million-year-old fossil shows that humans left the trees before leaving the forest and getting much smarter.
Obama brought a big policy improvement, and researchers made big leaps with the science.
A scary build-up leads to a mostly mild conclusion.
