Author: Discover Main Feed

If you’re out shopping today and happen to pass your friendly neighborhood newsstand, then may I suggest you pick up a copy of the winter special issue of Discover Magazine? The theme is “Extreme Universe”, with articles about the Big Bang, quantum mechanics, particle physics, and lots more.

Of course, included in that “lots more ” is, well, me. I wrote the introductory essay to the issue, and also have a list of my favorite good and bad science moments in movies. The Hive Overmind Discover Magazine has a gallery up, too, with pictures and my descriptions of the movies.

I was surprised how hard it was to make the list, given a) I’ve seen almost every science fiction movie ever made, and 2) you’d think examples would abound. But finding specific scenes turned out to be tough, also given the criterion that it has to be in a movie lots of people have actually seen; calling out the lava flow sequence in “Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet” (1965) won’t get you terribly far. But I think I did OK.

Got a favorite bad or good scene in a movie? Discuss.

It always helps to have good timing. And no one seems to understand that better than the tobacco plant Nicotiana attenuata, which grows in Western United States and flowers at night [The New York Times]. Normally, the tobacco plant is pollinated by hawkmoths that visits its flowers every night. But when these hawkmoths leave eggs behind that develop into leaf-chomping caterpillars, the plant’s self-defense snaps into place and switches to flowering in the day. That attracts a different pollinator, the hummingbird.

Ecologist Danny Kessler noticed this change when he was trying to get a picture of the plant being pollinated for a study. He saw that the plant was not just flowering in the day but also that they had changed their flowers to make them more attractive to hummingbirds: they emitted less of a chemical that attracts moths; they had less sugar in the nectar, which is the way hummingbirds prefer it; and they were more tube-shaped, making them friendly to a hummingbird’s long, thin beak [ScienceNOW Daily News].

Kessler and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute, including ecologist Ian Baldwin, wondered if this change of flowering time and pollinator had anything to with being eaten by caterpillars. They decided to check it out. He [Kessler] put caterpillars on plants that had not been attacked and found that after 8 days, 35% of their flowers opened in the morning–compared with 11% on unmolested plants. Plants responded the same way when Kessler wounded the leaves and put caterpillar spit on them [ScienceNOW Daily News]. Their results were published in Current Biology.

The researchers said the plant’s responses show it remains hyper-alert for voracious caterpillars, while other scientists note that these alterations suggest that plants can adapt their flowers to suit changing conditions. It also makes us think differently, say the researchers, about how to deal with pests that attack plants. Instead of just spraying bug-spray, they point out that there may be other ways to deal with the problem–making a plant less attractive to the mothers of the predators, for example [ScienceNOW Daily News].

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80beats: Orchid Lures in Hornets With the Smell of Bee Fear
80beats: Non-Slip Cells on Flower Petals Help Bees Get a Grip
80beats: Tobacco Plants Control Pollinators by Dosing Their Nectar With Nicotine

Image: Danny Kessler

It’s been little over a week since the beginning of the spat between Google and China over censorship and hacking attacks. But that was more than enough time for the fracas to escalate into international political tensions and name-calling.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joined in today. In a wide-ranging speech in Washington, Mrs Clinton said the internet had been a “source of tremendous progress” in China but that any country which restricted free access to information risked “walling themselves off from the progress of the next century” [BBC News]. In taking a foreign policy stand on information freedom, she also singled out other countries that she says harass bloggers or promote censorship and called on other companies to follow Google’s lead in taking a stand against restrictive governments.

“A new information curtain is descending across much of the world,” she said, calling growing Internet curbs the modern equivalent of the Berlin Wall [Reuters].

China, unamused at being called out, shot back. Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu this morning warned, “The U.S. side had criticized China’s policies on Internet administration, alluding that China restricts Internet freedom. We firmly oppose such words and deeds, which were against the facts and would harm the China-U.S. relations” [ABC News]. The Chinese government referred to Clinton’s foreign policy stand as “information imperialism,” and called her allegations groundless.

The public strife started last week when Google threatened to pull out of China if the country didn’t change its censorship policies or do something about the China-based attacks against Google and other American tech companies. That was an about-face from 2006, when Google agreed to censorship demands to enter the Chinese market. But Google may not have realized then that the Chinese government would alter the bargain by demanding stricter censorship or blocking other Google services — or that Chinese hackers would launch a widespread, well-orchestrated series of attacks on its computers [Washington Post].

For some observers, Sec. Clinton telling China to tear down this firewall is a struggle that will go far beyond the two nations. This fight is about much more than China vs. the U.S, or even China vs. Google. It is about a future of nation-states, corporations and other nonstate actors struggling to define liberty on the Internet [Forbes].

Related Content:
80beats: Google to China: No More Internet Censorship, Or We Leave
80beats: Is Google the Guardian Angel of Rainforests?
80beats: Googlefest Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: 3 New Ways Google Will Take Over Your Life
80beats: China Bans Electroshock Therapy for “Internet Addiction”
80beats: China’s Internet Users Force Government to Back Down on Censorship

Image: Wikimedia Commons / M. Weitzel

I am very, very pleased to write about two wins for the military and skepticism today:

Story the first:

Remember the company that made millions by selling totally worthless bomb-sniffing magic wands to the military, detectors that were used at checkpoints in Iraq to search cars, and which failed to detect the terrorist bombs used to kill 155 people in October and 120 more in December last year?

Yeah, well, Jim McCormick, the head of the company that sold those useless dowsing rods, just got arrested for — oh, let me savor typing these words — “suspicion of fraud”.

Wait, wait. That felt so good to write, let me do it again: Jim McCormick, who sold provably worthless dowsing rods to the military, has been arrested for suspicion of fraud.

Ahhhhh. That was just as good to type the second time.

This has been reported in The Register as well as The Times Online, which mentions Randi for an added bonus! The BBC has an in-depth analysis of this as well.

In the courts, you are presumed innocent until proven guilty. But in this case, we have scientific evidence that the kits sold by the company are 100% garbage, and I hope this guy gets everything he deserves.

And is McCormick penitent? Of course not! With apparently no sense of Teh Stoopid, he said:

We have been dealing with doubters for ten years. One of the problems we have is that the machine does look a little primitive. We are working on a new model that has flashing lights.

Holy wow. Serously, dude? I mean, really? Here’s a clue, Mr. McCormick: it’s not that your dowsing rods lack doodads and flair and blinking lights. It’s that they don’t frakking work, and because the Iraqi military swallowed your story people have died.

I hope that’s clear now.

Story the second:

Our second news item is also quite satisfying, and also has a bit of the cluelessness from a company that sells things to the military. Trijicon, the company that inscribed references to Bible quotations on rifle scopes sold to the military, has announced that they will no longer inscribe them, and will provide kits to the military to remove the references in existing scopes.

Very cool. The military has rules forbidding proselytizing in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the rifle scopes were in clear violation of this. Of course, the company did this because of their concern over our troops and for the appearance of the military overseas, right? About that, the President of Trijicon, Stephen Bindon, said this:

Trijicon has proudly served the U.S. military for more than two decades, and our decision to offer to voluntarily remove these references is both prudent and appropriate.

As I read that, it translated in my head as, “We did this because we were suddenly getting tons of bad press, and had to do something about this PR disaster, so we can can make it look like we’re being all altruistic and everything.” Here’s another free hint to the head of a company selling stuff to the military: don’t thump your own chest and say how cool you are when we all know better. Simply admit your mistake, and let people know you’re honestly sorry. Telling everyone what a great move this was on your part is maybe just a wee bit oily.

So I’m really thrilled that rational and critical thinking has had two victories today. The fight continues, because the forces of irrationality are always, always on the march. So, for those of us fighting for reality:

Corporations can now spend freely in federal elections. Given the US government is supposed to represent its constituents, I fear we’ve just taken an disastrous great leap in the other direction.

It’s Friday and science keeps getting in the way of blogging, but here’s one of the more useful posts you’ll ever get from us: via FlowingData, the Engineer’s Guide to Drinks. Yes, there is a full-sized pdf at the original post.

That’s a slightly crazy Martini — 2:1 gin to vermouth. I think the pendulum has swung too far towards “dry,” but please.

When scientists talk up learning about transportation networks from nature, it’s often ants that get the praise for being so much more organized and efficient than we humans with our silly gridlock. But a team of Japanese researchers found, for a new study in Science, that you don’t even need a brain to be to a traffic genius. Single-celled slime molds, they found, can build networks as complex as the Tokyo subway system.

The yellow slime mold Physarum polycephalum grows as a single cell that is big enough to be seen with the naked eye. When it encounters numerous food sources separated in space, the slime mold cell surrounds the food and creates tunnels to distribute the nutrients [Science News]. To test how efficient the mold could be, Toshiyuki Nakagaki’s team duplicated the layout of the area around Tokyo: They placed the slime mold in the position of the city, and dispersed bits of oat around the “map” in the locations of 36 surrounding towns.

The mold explored slowly at first, but like any good transportation engineer it began to figure out traffic patterns. To continue growing and exploring, the slime mold transforms its Byzantine pattern of thin tendrils into a simpler, more-efficient network of tubes: Those carrying a high volume of nutrients gradually expand, while those that are little used slowly contract and eventually disappear [ScienceNOW Daily News]. When the mold got its system settled, researchers say, it looked rather similar to the actual Tokyo subway system, as you can see in the illustration.

The scientists didn’t just marvel at the slime mold’s mapped-out network; they also tried to capture its technique in math, Wolfgang Marwan added in an accompanying piece in Science. Marwan called the mathematical model “beautifully useful.” He added that: “It quantitatively mimics phenomena that can be neither captured nor quantified by verbal description alone” [Scientific American]. But will slime mold subways start to show us how we ought to be building our transport systems or other networks? Perhaps not so fast, says Portland State University’s Melanie Mitchell. “This paper uses only one relatively simple example,” she cautions. “It’s not obvious that similar experiments would work as well for matching other transport networks” [ScienceNOW Daily News].

Related Content:
Discoblog: Ant Intelligence Could Help Us Steer Clear of Traffic Jams
DISCOVER: Slime Molds Show Surprising Degree of Intelligence
DISCOVER: The Truth About Traffic

Image: Science/AAAS

This is the second in a series of guest posts by Joel Barkan, a previous contributor to “The Intersection” and a graduate student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The renowned Scripps marine biologist Jeremy Jackson is teaching his famed “Marine Science, Economics, and Policy” course for what may be the last time this year (along with Jennifer Jacquet), and Joel will be reporting each week on the contents of the course.

Here in Southern California, we’re enduring an extended period of heavy rains and high winds, or as Floridians would call it, “July.” People from harsher climates may laugh at our predicament, but the truth is that San Diego and its residents are ill-equipped to deal with rain. Streets flood almost immediately because drainage is almost non-existent. Traffic slows to the kind of crawl I experienced during white-out blizzards while growing up in Maine.

Most San Diegans know not to swim in the ocean during and after a storm. The rain washes an assortment of chemicals, fertilizers, oil, and garbage straight down the hills and into the sea. How would you feel knowing the fish you ate for dinner came from a farm that similarly inundated the surrounding waters with bacteria? The discharge of waste is just one of many controversial issues concerning aquaculture, our most recent class topic here at Scripps.

Globally, aquaculture is the fastest-growing food production system, increasing by 8.8% per year since 1985, according to a 2007 report by the FAO. Aquaculture already accounts for around one-third of global fish production and may soon rival wild-caught fisheries as our primary source for fish. A shift to reliance on farmed fish could also lessen the burden on over-exploited wild stocks. It’s difficult to talk about aquaculture without mentioning the growing human population: simply put, we’re going to need more protein to feed an estimated 9.2 billion people by 2050. Proponents of aquaculture call it a possible solution to our potential food crisis.

Unfortunately, aquaculture is not the silver bullet that will magically save us from overfishing and global food shortages. Unless the farms are a closed system, effluent from fish pens will pollute the surrounding waters. Escapees can transmit diseases to wild stocks—they become parasite-bearing fish on the lamb, terrorizing the innocent locals. Plus, we need to catch millions of tons of wild fish, like the Peruvian anchoveta, to grind into fish meal to feed the farmed fish. It’s like hunting seagulls off the coast of Africa and using the gull meat to feed chickens on a farm in Arkansas. Despite these problems, we’re going to have to find ways to lessen the environmental impact of aquaculture as the industry continues to grow.

It was pointed out in class that a variety of U.S. government agencies regulate aquaculture, depending on where you are and why you’re doing it. A good start to better management of aquaculture in our country would be to streamline the regulatory power to a single agency. Then we can shift our focus to the rest of the world: to China, to India, to Chile, and every other country hoping to feed its people with farmed fish.

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In the aftermath of Haiti’s devastating earthquake, nervous citizens can be forgiven for wondering where the next Big One will hit. Major quakes strike with alarming regularity: Earthquakes of magnitude 7 or greater occur approximately 18 times a year worldwide. They usually originate near faults where tectonic plates —tremendous fragments of the earth’s crust—collide or push above or below each other.

Geologists suspect that Haiti’s destructive quake resulted from 250 years of seismic stress that has been building up between the North American and Caribbean tectonic plates. In fact, a group of U.S. geologists presented a study in the Dominican Republic (which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti) in 2008 saying that the region was at risk of an earthquake potentially even bigger than last week’s magnitude 7.0 quake. Part of their presentation is particularly chilling in light of what would happen less than two years later: “This means that the level of built-up stress and energy in the earth could one day be released resulting in an earthquake measuring 7.2 or more on the Richter Scale. This would be an event of catastrophic proportions in a city [Port-au-Prince] with loose building codes, and an abundance of shanty-towns built in ravines and other undesirable locations.”

Earthquakes are still impossible to predict with precision; in the words of one of the geologists who predicted the Haiti quake, “It could have been the next day, it could have been 10 years, it could have been 100… This is not an exact science.” But researchers have identified a handful of seismic zones around the globe that are storing up especial amounts of stress and are particularly hazardous. Browse through the gallery for a world tour of the planet’s most seismically vulnerable regions.

By Aline Reynolds

Image: USGS

NEXT>

You’ve seen this ad before.

Weight loss program Jenny Craig’s spokeswoman, actress Valerie Bertinelli, is hanging out in a gleaming white “lab,” surrounded by guys in thick-framed glasses and lab coats. She gleefully announces that people on the Jenny diet lost two times as much weight as those who were on the other big diet program (read: Weight Watchers). She also claims that the results were an outcome of a “major clinical trial run by serious lab geeks.”

Now, Weight Watchers has lashed back, dragging Jenny to court–alleging that the ad campaign makes “deceptive claims” about its success rate.

The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, according to AdWeek, and it said in part:

“The trials cited by Jenny Craig (available on its Web site) are, in fact, two separate studies, conducted 10 years apart for entirely different purposes than comparing the efficacy of the Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers weight-loss programs … The Jenny Craig ‘trials’ do not relate to WW’s current offerings.”

So a New York court has now granted Weight Watchers International a temporary restraining order and has prohibited Jenny Craig from using these comparative claims of superiority in its current ads.

In the ad, Bertinelli cheerfully declares, “I love science.” We might suggest she say instead, “I love putting a patina of scientific authority on whatever flimsy claim our marketing people are peddling today.”

Related Content:
Discoblog: Fast Food Joints Lie About Calories (Denny’s, We’re Looking at You)
Discoblog: Heart-Stopping Cinematic Excitement: Guess How Much Fat Is in Movie Popcorn?
80beats: Diet and Exercise in a Pill: Experimental Anti-Obesity Drug Could “Trick” the Body
80beats: A Victory for the Atkin’s Diet? Not so Fast.

Video: Jenny Craig

[Kari, Grant, and Tory from The Mythbusters will be on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson tonight, so it seems like a good time to post this.]

In case anyone was wondering if I would succumb to the bright lights of Hollywood, the answer is, of course: duh.

Last week I attended a wonderful party in Pasadena, thrown by the Discovery Channel for their 25th anniversary (my pictures from the party are on Flickr). My friend Katherine Nelson secured an invite for me; she does PR for the channel and we met at Comic Con in 2008 when I was tagging along with My Close Personal Friend Adam Savage™. Last week I happened to be in LA working on my sooper sekrit project, and that timing happily coincided with the party.

I’m not used to high-end parties, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I decided to go all out and wear a tie. Go me.

I got to the hotel, located somewhere down twisty passages in Pasadena all of which look alike, and started wending my way to the party itself. As I randomly walked, I wondered to myself what celebs might be here, and at that very moment happened to see Ed Begley, Jr.

OK then.

When I finally reached the actual party location, I was happy to see Katherine taking pictures of Kari Byron, Grant Imahara, and Tory Belecci from Mythbusters! I hadn’t seen Kari in a couple of years (I moderated a panel with three of them in Canada), but I saw Grant and Tory at Comic Con last year. It was nice to see them again. I hung out a bit with them, and, as always, found them to be fun and charming and pretty much what you see on TV. At least, they’re nice enough to a dork like me.

There were lots of Discovery Network celebs there (as well as a giraffe). I was completely unashamed to horn in on Stacey and Clinton from “What Not to Wear” and chat for a second. I was thrilled to get a chance to talk with Annabelle Gurwitch, who is on Planet Green now, but I know her from watching “Dinner and a Movie” on TBS a few years ago, and she was exactly as I had hoped: funny and sassy and totally approachable. Also? A doll. There, I said it.

I also dorked a bit when I got a chance to say hi to Kat von D from “L.A. Ink”, since she wasn’t in the shop the day I got my tattoo. It was totally cool to show her my tattoo (patience; my show is supposed to air next month) and thank her for the experience. We swapped a couple of stories, and I found she was like everyone else I met at the party: approachable, open, and interesting.

In fact, if there was any disappointment with the party (besides not being allowed to actually eat the cakes made by the bakery from “Cake Boss” and realizing after I had gotten back to my hotel that the Meteorite Men were there and I missed them) it was of the snarky variety; that is, no one was a jerk. I mean, c’mon! This was a Hollywood party! No cocaine? No obnoxious divas?

Could it be that the portrayal of Hollywood in Hollywood films has been Hollywooded? Hmmm.

So all in all it was a fabulous event with a lot of people having lots of fun. It makes me wonder… could it be that because there is a science bent to the networks (not all the shows, but many) the party was more about the fun and less about the personalities? Hmmm again.

Maybe not. But still. Science is cool.

As a parent, I spend a lot of time worrying about my daughter. That’s part of the job description. But what they don’t tell you is exactly how to figure out what to worry about.

I suspect that in Fluvanna County, Virginia, that’s a problem too. It’s there, you see, that a bunch of parents are upset about an abstinence-only sex education class. Now, I’d certainly be upset if they offered such nonsense in my daughter’s school, since it has been shown repeatedly that sexual education based on abstinence only doesn’t work at all.

But that’s not what has Fluvanna County parents unhappy. Instead, it’s that they will be more open to STDs and teen pregnancies.

The program in question is called Worth Your Wait. I looked over their website, and will readily admit that a lot of the advice they give is fine: self-control is important, it’s best to wait until you’re ready, and so on. But that hardly matters, since the very basis of what they’re saying is known not to work. It’s like having a website saying drinking a glass a water a day will cure AIDS, and it’ll also hydrate you. Sure, the latter is true, but the overall message is bunk.

It’s too bad, because it’s an enticing idea: teach your kids to not have sex, and like magic, they won’t! But it’s a crock. It’s worse than that, really, because study after study show this very clearly: kids still get pregnant, kids still get STDs, and in fact with abstinence-only education they tend not to get educated on how to practice safe sex, so pregnancies and incidents of STDs actually go up for AO educated children.

But why let research and reality get in the way of dogma?

Tip o’ the chastity belt to Nicole Gluggerflurnaven.

“A 45-year-old man was referred for investigation of an undescended right testis by computed tomography (CT). An ultra-sound scan showed a normal testis and epididymis on the left side. The right testis was not visualized in the scrotal sac or in the right inguinal region. On CT scanning of the abdomen and pelvis, the right testis was not identified but the left side of the scrotum seemed to be occupied by a screaming ghost-like apparition (Figure 1). By chance, the distribution of normal anatomical structures within the left side of the scrotum had combined to produce this image. What of the undescended right testis? None was found. If you were a right testis, would you want to share the scrotum with that?”

And for your enjoyment, Figure 1 (the free PDF is available here):

Thanks to Tom for today’s ROFL!

I recently appeared on this show, and I wasn’t the only one. Here’s the guest list:

Stewart Brand – author of the newly published Whole Earth Discipline
Dr Janet Rowley – human geneticist at the University of Chicago
Chris Mooney – author of The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America
Reverend Robert Sirico – founder of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty
Professor Jared Diamond – Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs and Steel: How Human Societies Fail
Oliver Morton – Energy and Environment Editor for The Economist
Dr Brent Blackwelder – President Emeritus of Friends of the Earth, United States

All in all, I have to say it made for a crowded, but very interesting, debate about science, politics, and society in the U.S., exactly one year after President Obama promised to restore science to its “rightful place,” & c & c.

I found that I agree with Stewart Brand about a lot. I also found that I agree with Robert Sirco about pretty much zero–and the same goes for Brent Blackwelder, at least based on what I heard on the show.

Oliver Morton’s comments on science and the American frontier were either deep or brilliant, I’m not sure which. But they gave me a little chill.

Based on his comments, I think Jared Diamond would like Unscientific America.

Oh, and Janet Rowley: Loved her comments on Leon Kass assigning an anti-science short story, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Birth-Mark, at the first meeting of the President’s Council on Bioethics under Bush…an episode that should never be forgotten.

Listen to the whole program here.

In my book Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life, I describe how this humble germ helped make modern biology possible–and, in the process, has been engineered to do all sorts of remarkable things. In 2008, I blogged a fresh example, courtesy of Jeff Hasty and his colleagues. They retooled the bacteria to flash in clock-like rhythms. Now Hasty has taken another step forward, rejiggering E. coli so that millions of bacteria can flash in waves. The new paper’s in Nature, and the journal put together a lovely video of the bacteria in hive-mind performance. Check it out below.

One small step for flashing bacteria, one giant leap for synthetic biology. In a new Nature study, molecular biologist Jeff Hasty and his team say they have created a line of E. coli bacteria that flash in fluorescent light and keep time like a clock.

Previously, scientists had engineered only single cells to become oscillators — devices that could count time by performing a particular activity on a cyclical schedule [Nature News]. Back in 2008, Hasty and his team created an oscillator for single cells that could be set to temperature or chemical triggers. But now the researchers have induced a whole host of bacteria to work together to keep time by taking advantage of the way they collaborate naturally: quorom sensing.

Quorum sensing enables bacteria to change their behaviour once they reach a critical density. For example, at high densities, the bacterium Vibrio fischeri, which lives on the skin of squid, starts to light up, helping to camouflage the squid, but V. fischeri living in isolation don’t glow, saving their energy for swimming instead [New Scientist]. Hasty’s engineered bacteria express three new proteins: a sort of catalyst molecule called AHL, a fluorescent protein, and a chemical “off switch.” When just a few engineered E coli clump together, they produce AHL but nothing else happens. When enough bacteria congregate, the AHL causes the cells to produce the the next two proteins, and the fluorescent protein causes them to be suffused with a bright glow. However, when the concentrations of the chemical “off switch” get high enough the whole system shuts down, which it why it oscillates like a clock.

But while the video of this is very cool, it’s not all fun and games. “The ability to synchronize activity among cells in a population could be an important building block for many applications, from biomedicine to bioenergy,” says Ron Weiss, a … bioengineer at MIT who was not involved in the research. For example, the bacteria could be engineered to detect a specific toxin, with the frequency of the fluorescence indicating its concentration in the environment [Technology Review]. Other applications of such synthetic biology could include time-sensitive drug delivery.

Related Content:
80beats: Synthetic Life By Year’s End? Yes, Proclaims Craig Venter
80beats: On the Quest for Synthetic Life, Scientists Build Their Own Cellular Protein Factory
80beats: Researcher’s Artificial DNA Works Almost Like the Real Thing
DISCOVER: A Synthetic Genome Is Built From Scratch

Video: Nature

America seems to be more and more linked to Asia–not just by complicated financial ties, but also by currents of air pollution that are boosting smog levels in American skies. For years scientists wondered why some rural areas in the western United States had high levels of ozone, when the areas had very little industry or automobile traffic. The answer, apparently, was blowing in the wind.

A new study, published in Nature reveals that springtime ozone levels in western North America are on the rise, because of air pollution coming in from south and east Asia.

The study, led by Owen R. Cooper, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado, examined nearly 100,000 observations two to five miles above ground — in a region known as the free troposphere — gathered from aircraft, balloons and ground-based lasers [Los Angeles Times]. This is the area between the stratosphere, that contains a thin layer of ozone to filter out harmful UV rays, and the ground. Researchers found that ozone levels in the monitored area jumped 14 percent between 1995 and 2008. When data were included for 1984, the year with the lowest average ozone level, the increase from that date up to 2008 was a whopping 29 percent [AFP].

The researchers haven’t yet determined exactly how much of the ozone increase comes from Asia but they found that the increase was about twice as much when prevailing winds came from South and East Asia [Los Angeles Times]. Researchers say this spike in ozone could make it hard for the United States to stay under pollution limits for ground level air set by the Clean Air Act. Ground-level ozone is also linked to serious health problems, and can cause or aggravate heart and lung conditions.

The rising ozone levels in the free troposphere may also have repercussions that go beyond local air quality. In a Nature commentary that accompanied the study, atmospheric chemist Kathy Law wrote that higher ozone levels “certainly have implications for climate change, causing warming either at the mid-latitudes where ozone forms, or in sensitive regions such as the Arctic to which ozone might be transported” [Los Angeles Times].

Related Content:
80beats: Today’s Biggest Threat to the Ozone Layer: Laughing Gas
80beats: Ozone Hole + Global Warming = More Ice Here, Less Ice There
80beats: Forests Are Dying in the American West: Global Warming Is Likely to Blame
DISCOVER: The Hole Story
DISCOVER: Son of Ozone Hole

Image: iStockphoto

A small meteorite, about the size of a tennis ball or so, crashed into a Lorton, Virginia doctor’s office on Monday, according to several reports including one in the Washington Post. No one was hurt, but there was some damage — not surprising, since it must have hit at a couple of hundred kilometers per hour (it’s a Hollywood myth that small rocks hit at huge speeds with flames drawn out behind them; they slow down to highway-like speeds while they are still dozens of kilometers off the ground). The Maryland Weather blog has a picture of the interplanetary interloper — there’s a clear fusion crust (the blackening of the surface from heat), which is a giveaway it’s a meteorite.

There were hundreds of eyewitness reports of the fireball reaching as far north as New Jersey, so the rock must have been traveling southward. There may be other pieces along the path, most likely near where this one hit. I wonder if there were other people who may have seen small debris hit but haven’t put the story together? If you live in that area (it’s actually near where I grew up, which is neither here nor there, but still makes me faintly jealous) then keep your eyes and ears open for any stories. It’s still pretty rare to be able to collect specimens from recent falls, making this a very valuable find– both scientifically and financially!

[Update: Nancy Atkinson has video on Universe Today, too.]

Tip o’ the Whipple Shield to Bill Smith.

Discoblog readers: We need your help.

If you’ve been reading the DISCOVER blogs this week, you might have caught 80beats’ coverage of the study out suggesting the ultra-tough shell of a deep-sea snail could inspire the next generation of body armor. For reasons that could only be described as “dropping the ball,” we didn’t include the illustration provided by the National Science Foundation. It’s not every day that you get to see a samurai attacking a giant snail, though he probably should’ve brought his Hattori Hanzō sword rather than this spear.

Samurai vs. Snail:

Not to be outdone, the Nature study we covered today, arguing Madagascar’s mammals arrived there via flotilla, came with its own illustration. In it, the happy lemur wins the boat race to the island while the sad hippos and lions, too fat to ride, stay on the mainland.

The Great Animal Boat Race:

More awesomely bizarre? Please, help us decide:

Related Content:
80beats: Could a Deep Sea Snail’s Shell Inspire Next-Gen Body Armor?
80beats: Study: Madagascar’s Weird Mammals Got There On Rafts

Images: NSF; Luci Betti Nash

Flashy tits equals stronger sperm–at least in the bird world.

A recent study of the birds known as great tits, by evolutionary ecologist Fabrice Helfenstein at the University of Bern, Switzerland, found that the more colorful and bright a male tit’s plumage, the stronger the bird’s sperm is.

The study, published in Ecology Letters, explains that the plumage of some birds contains caretenoids–important antioxidants that can help the bird combat cellular damage caused by stress from predators or feeding babies. A higher amount of caretenoids also results in intensely colored plumage in males, signaling the bird’s increased capacity to ward off stress and preserve its sperm from damage.

New Scientist reports:

[Fabrice Helfenstein] tested this by upping the parental workload of wild male great tits, Parus major – which have yellow breast plumage – by adding two extra chicks to their nests. After five days of looking after their big brood, males with paler plumage suffered a greater reduction in sperm motility than more colorful males. Supplementing the birds’ diet with carotenoids markedly improved the sperm quality of the paler males.

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Image: iStockphoto