Author: Discover Main Feed

More than two decades have passed since the Exxon Valdez spilled 38,000 tons of crude oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound, but despite cleanup efforts and time, thousands of gallons of oil remain stuck in the region’s beaches. A new Nature Geoscience study offers an explanation for why the oil has been so slow to disperse: it’s the composition of the beaches themselves.

According to study leader Michel C. Boufadel, natural forces have created beaches in Prince William Sound with two distinct layers, and water moves 1,000 times slower through the bottom layer than the top. Once the oil entered the lower level, conditions were right to keep it there, he said. Tidal forces worked to compact the finer-grained gravel even more, creating a nearly oxygen-free environment with low nutrient levels that slowed the ability of the oil to biodegrade [AP].

Boufadel began his study to explain why the oil from Valdez spill, which happened in March 1989, was lingering longer than most scientists expected. Most clean-up operations in the area ended in 1992 because the remaining oil was expected to disperse within a few years. A later study discovered that the oil was disappearing at a rate of just 4% each year, and that an estimated 20,000 gallons remained in the beaches [BBC News]. The researchers dug pits several feet deep all around Eleanor Island to investigate, and found that the two-tiered beaches has allowed plenty of crude to sink down and get stuck. In their field studies, Dr. Boufadel said, when they would dig into deeper sediments, “the whole place would smell of oil” [The New York Times]. If environmental agencies want to finish the cleanup, Boufadel suggests that chemicals could be injected into the lower sediment layer to speed up the oil’s biodegradation.

This study of a 21-year-old oil shipping disaster coincides with a current scare in the same locale; an Exxon ship briefly lost power in Alaskan waters Sunday, but two tugs towed it to safety. This tanker has quickly become a poster child for pending federal legislation to beef up protection for Prince William Sound oil shipments [Anchorage Daily News].

Related Content:
80beats: 20 Years After Valdez Spill, Eagles Are Healthy; 7 Other Species Still Hurting
80beats: “Nanosponge” Could Soak Up Oil Spills
Discoblog: Whither the Valdez? ExxonMobil Cuts Cash for Global Warming Deniers
DISCOVER: Whatever Happened To… The Exxon Valdez?

Image: NOAA

“Individuals’ faces communicate a great deal of information about them. Although some of this information tends to be perceptually obvious (such as race and sex), much of it is perceptually ambiguous, without clear or obvious visual cues… …Here we found that individuals’ political affiliations could be accurately discerned from their faces. In Study 1, perceivers were able to accurately distinguish whether U.S. Senate candidates were either Democrats or Republicans based on photos of their faces. Study 2 showed that these effects extended to Democrat and Republican college students, based on their senior yearbook photos. Study 3 then showed that these judgments were related to differences in perceived traits among the Democrat and Republican faces. Republicans were perceived as more powerful than Democrats. Moreover, as individual targets were perceived to be more powerful, they were more likely to be perceived as Republicans by others. Similarly, as individual targets were perceived to be warmer, they were more likely to be perceived as Democrats… …These data suggest that perceivers’ beliefs about who is a Democrat and Republican may be based on perceptions of traits stereotypically associated with the two political parties and that, indeed, the guidance of these stereotypes may lead to categorizations of others’ political affiliations at rates significantly more accurate than chance guessing.”

But the real question is, who’s more good-looking?

Thanks to Mary for today’s ROFL!

[Update: some commenters are saying this bill is dead in the water. That’s music to my ears! Let’s hope that info is correct. We’ll see soon enough.]

Mississippi state representative Gary Chism has decided that science is stupid. After all, he submitted House Bill 586 to the legislature, which is in part,

AN ACT TO REQUIRE LOCAL SCHOOL BOARDS TO INCLUDE AN INSTRUCTIONAL LESSON ON THE EVOLUTION OF HUMANITY IN ITS HIGH SCHOOL BIOLOGY CURRICULUM, WHICH SHALL BE TAUGHT AT THE BEGINNING OF THE BIOLOGY COURSE; TO REQUIRE THAT THE CURRICULUM BE BASED ON CERTAIN EVIDENTIARY FACTS AND SCIENTIFIC DATA; TO REQUIRE THAT THE LESSON NOT BE BIASED THROUGH SELECTIVE INSTRUCTION; TO REQUIRE THAT THE LESSON HAVE EQUAL INSTRUCTION FROM EDUCATIONAL MATERIALS THAT PRESENT ARGUMENTS FROM BOTH PROTAGONISTS AND ANTAGONISTS OF THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION

[ALL THAT SHOUTING is in the original bill.]

This is obviously another attempt by antireality anti-Constitution creationists to ram their religion down the throats of students. Chism, by the way, tried to get a disclaimer put into biology textbooks last year because he has mistaken the Bible for a science textbook. Anyway, if this bill passes, Mississippi will join the lofty ranks of such places as Texas, Kansas, and Dover, Pennsylvania as the laughing stocks of the nation and the world at large.

But there’s a funny thing in the bill. About teaching evolution, it says:

The lesson provided to students shall not evidence bias through selective instruction on the theory of evolution, but rather, shall have proportionately equal instruction from educational materials that present scientifically sound arguments by protagonists and antagonists of the theory of evolution.

Well, hey, I agree with that! Let them pass this bill! Because, of course, there is no scientifically sound argument by antagonists of evolution.

Creationists. Is there no dumbosity they can’t surpass?

The NCSE has more info. And if you live in Mississippi, especially District 37 where Chism supposedly represents the people, you may want to make your voice heard.

But if this bill does pass, then, of course:

Related posts:
Oklahoma: Doomed
Louisiana: Well, that’s it then
Texas: Careening toward doom
Sorry Texas, you’re still doomed

Tip o’ the Old Man River to Chad Gardner.

After the last post concerning Chad Orzel’s position on science and religion, I want to explore the central policy question here that seems to get everyone exercised, namely: What should the science/religion stance be for top science organizations like the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Center for Science Education, etc?

Many “New Atheists” would argue that such organizations should stay silent on the question, and not lend credence to the view that science and religion can be compatible (even though they certainly can be for individual people, even if not in some grand philosophical way, as Orzel explains). Let me explain why I find the NA position to be exceedingly bad advice.

If you’re working in America today to promote the teaching or the public understanding of evolution, you are constantly going to be dealing with religious people–in various localities across the country; in regular queries through your website and by phone, and so on. Much of America is, after all, religious.

And that’s not all. Much of religious America has also been told, from various pulpits, by various friends, and by sundry New Atheists, that evolutionary science is incompatible with religion. This prevailing notion creates an incredible blockade preventing the acceptance of evolutionary science. For as we know from reams of polling data, in the United States, when you pit science against religion, science often loses.

Aware of this context, groups like the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) take a stance likely to help some religious believers reject what they’ve been told from the pulpit, and move toward a more moderate stance on science and religion–in essence, from anti-science fundamentalism to middle-ground reconciliationism. To this end, NCSE states something factually true and indeed, undeniable: that not every religious person thinks science and religion are incompatible.

The veracity of this statement is not really open to debate. The issue here is simply whether such people exist, and of that there’s no doubt whatsoever. In this blunt factual sense, at least, science and religion are compatible–they are reconciled all the time by actual living, breathing human beings. You might take issue with the logical basis for such reconciliation in a particular mind, but you can’t deny that it happens regularly.

Moreover, if religion is the mental block that prevents a wider understanding and acceptance of evolution, then by seeking to remove that mental block, a group like NCSE is simply striving to be effective. Why should its hands be tied in this regard?

They shouldn’t. I mean, just picture the kind of conversations a representative of NCSE would have to have with a concerned religious believer if New Atheists were setting its policy:

Religious believer: I know you say that evolution is good science, but I’m afraid of what my pastor says–that accepting it is the road to damnation.

NCSE: As a policy, we only talk about science and to not take any stance on religion. So we couldn’t comment on that.

Religious believer: I do have one friend who accepts evolution, but he stopped going to church too and that worries me.

NCSE: All we can really tell you is that evolution is the bedrock of modern biology, and universally accepted within the scientific community.

Religious believer: And I’m worried about my children. If I let them learn about evolution in school, will they come home one day and tell me that we’re all nothing but matter in motion?

NCSE: ….

You get the point, I think. To me, it is obvious that, far from enforcing an unnecessary purism, a group like NCSE should be encouraged to speak with religious believers in terms they can understand, and in a way that will help them accept evolutionary science. The same goes for other science organizations.

With the arrival of a certain book (selling like hotcakes on Amazon!), Sean has generously sent out thank you gifts to all deserving participants of the DonorsChoose challenge.

The final tally was 36 donors contributing $12,125, reaching a total of 3,112 students across the nation. These are incredible numbers! We can all feel proud that we have had a tangible impact on so many lives. And who knows, maybe one of the kids we have reached will now be inspired to become the next Einstein?

As promised, we’re doling out loot. 13 people gave over $100, and 4 gave over $500 (with 2 giving over $1k each!). Here is the list of recipients:
>$100: copy of Sean’s book
Raymundo in College Station, TX
James in New York, NY
Pete in St. Paul, MN
Paul in Dearborn, MI

>$500: copy of Sean’s lectures
Kitty’s Coffee in Cincinnati, OH
Sili in Odense, Denmark

There are many people that “qualified”, but haven’t sent me their addresses (of special note were Meghan in Melbourne, FL and Herbert in Bahama, NC, who were especially generous). If you would like to receive a token of our appreciation, please contact me.

Thank you again to everyone for participating!

Hey, this week’s Carnival of Space is on my friend Nicole Glarvenharbennargen’s blog One Astronomer’s Noise. At least, I think that’s how she pronounces her last name. That’s what I always hear when she says it. Anyway, she’s cool, and so is the carnival. Go read it.

The Science Tattoo Emporium continues to thrive, long after I first wondered aloud in August 2007 whether scientists had any cool tattoos of their research hidden under their lab coats. I continue to get photos at a regular rate, and as I post new ones, they continue to get noticed anew by places like Digg and Boing Boing.

Initially, I was so stunned by the influx of photos that I posted just about anything that came my way. But as the emporium has grown, I’ve become choosier about which ones I post. So if you are considering sending in your own scientific ink, please read these guidelines:

1. I’m most interested in tatoos that tell a story. The most interesting stories are the ones about how people became scientists. I love this one, for example.

2. When you send in pictures, please include a paragraph in which you tell me who you are and explain the significance of the tattoo. I prefer people to tell the story of their tattoo in their own words.

3. If you’ve been so inspired by the emporium that you’ve dashed out and gotten a tattoo of your own, do NOT immediately take a picture and send it to me. I don’t enjoy staring at raw, bruised flesh. Neither do readers of the Loom. Let yourself heal before grabbing the camera.

4. Make sure the photograph is well lit and at high resolution.

My pal Amanda Bauer — aka Astropixie — has been posting a great series of short videos called Sixty Symbols, where scientists discuss the meanings of a given symbol in science, and the story behind them. In the latest, she tackles the pronunciation of the planet name Uranus — the name is Greek, so I think the title of this post is correct — but the video she made has lots of info on the planet, and I thoroughly enjoyed watching it.

Related post (and to pre-empt any Futurama jokes):
Yes, yes, rings around Uranus, haha

I’m just back from ScienceOnline 2010, a conference unlike anything I’ve been to before. I usually go to conferences where my role is the journalistic fly on the wall, gathering story leads from presentations and hallway chats. Sometimes I go to meetings of fellow science writers, where it’s mostly hard-core job talk (with sporadic wailing and gnashing of teeth). ScienceOnline was a strange merging, where scientists talk about how to blog from a research vessel in the middle of the Pacific and journalists talked about how to teach Hollywood producers about quantum physics.

It is futile for me to distill all the stuff I learned into a blog post. There’s just too much, from the inspiring to the mundane. For example, for good podcasting sound quality, why not sit in a closet with a towel draped over your head? I’m also spending much of today surfing around to new web sites I heard about. Allow me to give a shout-out to fellow Discover-ite Darlene Cavalier’s newly launched Science For Citizens. It’s like Amazon.com for all sorts of possibilities for doing cool citizen science (such as studying fireflies).

Fortunately, later this week you can watch just about all the sessions on this YouTube channel. In the meantime, some audience members have already started uploading their own recordings. Embedded below is my seven-minute spiel. I was part of a panel on “rebooting science journalism.” Moments before I stood up to dispense my wisdom, I decided that nothing summed up the situation today with science journalism better than duck sex. And, as I discovered, ScienceOnline is just the sort of place where the audience gets it.

[More on Uff da here]

There might just be some truth to the notion that excessive indulgence in the “interweb” makes people a tad–just a wee bit–cuckoo.

Research being conducted by the Clalit Health Maintenance Organization, Israel’s largest HMO, points to a possible connection between unrestricted Internet use and the occurrence of psychotic episodes.

According to the Israeli paper Haaretz, researchers presented three cases of individuals who experienced psychotic episodes in the wake of intensive, prolonged Web surfing that included the development of a close online relationship with another person. All the three subjects were women between the ages of 30 and 50 with no significant psychiatric history. Two of them had no previous history of mental problems, although one had been treated for anxiety in the past.

Each of the three ladies had experienced an unsatisfactory intimate relationship in the past, and developed a dependent relationship with a man over the Internet without ever meeting him face-to-face.

As Haaretz explains:

The subjects’ psychoses included a total disconnection from reality, and in the case of one of the women also involved tactile hallucinations; she imagined that she could feel the man with whom she was having a “virtual relationship” touching her.

Creepy. But here comes the scary part: The researchers said all three required psychiatric care in the past year after undergoing uncontrollable psychotic episodes accompanied by delusions and hallucinations. One of the women was referred to emergency psychiatric care, while two checked into clinics. All three needed anti-psychotic drugs to stop the episodes.

Happily, all three women recovered and are reportedly fine now.

Researcher Uzi Nitzan said that while a casual relationship cannot be established between internet use and psychotic episodes, the women in the study told researchers that their conditions intensified as they got increasingly involved with their cyber-amours.

Internet-related psychosis hasn’t yet appeared very much in scientific literature, but there have been some instances of internet delusions in individuals with a history of mental disorders.

Haaretz quotes Nitzan as saying:

“There are descriptions of patients who have developed delusions inspired by computer software or hardware, such as one man who believes that someone is trying to poison his fingers through his computer keyboard or to implant certain thoughts in his mind.”

OK, logging off now.

Related Content:
80beats: China Bans Electroshock Therapy For “Internet Addiction”
80beats: Have You Consumed Your 34-Gigabytes of Information Today
80beats: Cheescake is like Heroin to Rats on a Junk Food Diet

Image: Flickr/Mandiberg

The James Randi Educational Foundation has teamed up with the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science and a dozen other secular groups to set up a way to donate money to help out the people of Haiti after the huge earthquake last week.

As Randi says,

We at the JREF are very proud to be part of the concerted effort to aid Haiti to recover from this catastrophic event. To my mind, there is nothing more disturbing than hearing the distressed cries of children who are subjected to grief and/or injury, and my personal contribution has already been added to the encouraging total that mounts hour by hour. Please be generous and help us to reach out to Haitians of all ages, of any and all philosophical orientations.

Richard Dawkins will cover $10,000 of PayPal fees, so if you use that method 100% of your donation will go to help.

You can donate here. Please help.

I was thrilled to attend this fast-growing conference and get to see great peeps like Sheril K, Darlene Cavalier, Carl Zimmer, Tom Levenson, Isis, SciCurious, Jennifer Ouellette, and many, many more.

I didn’t always attend the panels (and only spoke on one, last minute) but I did have some reflections:

1. Science and Entertainment: Beyond Blogging – Tamara Krinsky and Jennifer Ouellette: Hollywood getting into science = definitely cool. But will Hollywood’s ace marketers ever see a real need to court science bloggers to get the word out about films, given the relatively small size of our audiences and the vastness of their ad budgets? Not clear to me how much *we* matter, at least so far.

2. Trust and Critical Thinking – Stephanie Zvan, PZ Myers, Desiree Schell, Greg Laden, Kirsten Sanford. Yes, science on the web is a total mess. But trying to “certify” good/accurate science bloggers, vs. bad/biased ones, is an idea that poses more problems than solutions. And anyway, bloggers aren’t the gold standard of scientific accuracy–scientific societies, the NAS, the IPCC, etc, are. Science bloggers should raise the profile of these organizations, and prop up the sense of their credibility, rather than slapping quality labels on various science blogs.

3. Broader Impact Done Right – Karen James, Kevin Zelnio, Miriam Goldstein, Jeff Ives and Beth Beck. It is exciting to learn how some recipients of federal research grants have built websites that have been effective at public outreach and thus at fulfilling the “broader impacts” stipulation of the grant. However, I seriously doubt that most grant recipients are innovating in these ways. Throwing up a website is not, generally, a good way of publicizing research, unless you really know what you’re doing, and plan to carefully measure your traffic and influence. More generally, why on earth do we have vast scores of different grant recipients all called upon to publicize their individual research projects separately? Why isn’t there some joining of forces, and some decisionmaking about what science really needs highlighting before the public, and which scientific teams are best equipped to do so?

Those are my semi-random opinions from ScienceOnline 2010. I’m so glad that I attended, and hope to do so again next year!

John Boswell, the musician and producer of the wonderful Symphony of Science remixes, has created a new one, the fourth in the series: The Unbroken Thread. It features our man Carl Sagan, with David Attenborough and Jane Goodall. I like this one quite a bit.

I hope Boswell keeps making these. They’re very well done! The music is pleasant, the meaning is deep, and the words, of course, are beautiful and something everyone should hear.

If you hand your grandma an iPod and tell her to “shuffle,” chances are she’ll jump to her feet and start doing a shuffling two-step. So we don’t blame this 13-year-old kid from Britain, who took three whole days to realize that there was a Side B to the tape he popped in his dad’s old Walkman.

In an article for BBC’s magazine, 13-year-old Scott Campbell explains how he traded his iPod for a Sony Walkman for one week. He was clearly shocked by what his dad told him was “the iPod of its day” when it was introduced 30 years ago. He is also mildly appalled at the sheer bulk of the contraption. Scott writes:

From a practical point of view, the Walkman is rather cumbersome, and it is certainly not pocket-sized, unless you have large pockets. It comes with a handy belt clip screwed on to the back, yet the weight of the unit is enough to haul down a low-slung pair of combats.

Scott eventually gets over the Walkman’s bulk, but is annoyed by the “buttons that protrude on the top and on the side.” However, he does come around to the player’s one unique feature.

The Walkman actually has two headphone sockets, labeled A and B, meaning the little music that I have, I can share with friends. To plug two pairs of headphones in to an iPod, you have to buy a special adapter.

See? The eighties weren’t that bad.

Related Content:
80beats: Specially Modified Music Can Re-wire Brain and Alleviate Tinnitus
80beats: Clubbers More Likely to Give Cigarettes If You Ask Their Right Ears
80beats: A Penny-Sized Nuclear Battery Keeps Going, and Going…

Image: Wikipedia

The Science of Kissing Gallery is now live thanks to our talented colleagues at Discover!

This week’s kiss comes from reader Chad Gardner and I can’t help but smile at such a happy couple! Submit your original photo or artwork to the gallery here and remember to include relevant links to blogs and events.

I’m a fan of the Colorado Children’s Immunization Coalition, whose purpose is to make sure my home state’s kids are healthy and not susceptible to preventable diseases (they’re on Twitter, too!). Last Thanksgiving, they had a “Thanks-a-thon”, letting Coloradans post their messages and stories about their kids. It’s a great read, with lots of heart-warming — and some harrowing — stories.

And while I’m at it, here is a great immunization FAQ posted by the American Academy of Pediatrics. In it you’ll see something very hard to find on the web: actual science-based facts about vaccinations, without the scare tactics employed constantly by the antivax (what some people call the pro-disease) crowd. If you’re wondering about getting yourself or your kids vaccinated, please check out that site and read it carefully. You may be saving not only your child’s life, but the lives of other children as well.

This is phenomenal footage, showing what an eagle sees as it flies courtesy a very small and light camera attached to the bird.

Wow. I have to find a copy of that whole show. That’s really amazing footage!

Tip o’ the flight feathers to Fark.

I haven’t done a Caturday post in awhile, but I found an old photo with a story I wanted to share.

In 2009 I filmed a documentary for the show “Engineering the Universe” (this was with the same crew that helped me Kill A Planet). We wanted to make a scale model of the solar system that people could instantly grasp, so we went to the Denver Broncos’ Mile High Stadium to use the football field there. We put the Sun on one end and Pluto at the other… but I won’t spoil it. It’ll air eventually!

Anyway, as we walked onto the field through the corridor between bleachers, this cutie was guarding the way:

But what was she guarding? If you look down on the right near the end of the corridor, you’ll see a blue metal door ajar with a green bin in front of it. I saw some movement, so I peered in… and got a surprise.

I guess Guard Cat was actually Mama Guard Cat! She was very skittish, but the kittens were friendly and adorable. The whole crew wanted to take them home, but we decided they had a pretty good life right here. I’m sure they get fed, and had plenty of rodents and such to choose from. The stadium is huge and no doubt is the cat equivalent of a food court.

Happy Caturday!

Some parasitic wasps may be no bigger than the head of a pin, but their genetics have plenty to teach us, a new study in Science says.

A research team has sequenced the genomes of three different species of parasitic wasp. Why bother with these tiny insects? For starters, genetics is easy. Females, like humans, carry two copies of every chromosome. But males develop from unfertilized eggs, which only carry one of each. With only one copy, even recessive mutations will be easy to identify and characterize [Ars Technica].

Parasitic wasps, then, make for an interesting science experiment. But their genetics could hold practical secrets, too. These wasps are deadly to many insects that bother us by attacking crops or livestock. “If we can harness their full potential, they would be vastly preferable to chemical pesticides which broadly kill or poison many organisms in the environment, including us,” Werren said in a statement [San Francisco Chronicle].

Also, don’t be surprised if other surprises turn up. Scientists have already documented that parasitic wasps have genes related to smallpox and other viruses, though they aren’t certain exactly what those genes do. A different Science study earlier in the year, though, said that some parasitic wasps may have gotten their poison from ancient viruses.

Parasitic wasps are nasty creatures—DISCOVER has documented their creepy habit of turning other animals in zombies. But nastiness aside, lead research John Werren says, we ought to be thankful for these wasps and their bloodlust: “There are over 600,000 species of these amazing critters, and we owe them a lot. If it weren’t for parasitoids and other natural enemies, we would be knee-deep in pest insects” [AFP].

Related Links:
80beats: Parasitic Wasps Got Their Poison From an Ancient Virus
80beats: Caterpillars Beware: Parasitic Wasps Come in a Wide Variety
DISCOVER: Zombie Animals and the Parasites That Control Them, a gallery of great creepiness

Image: flickr / wormwould

I’m probably the last person to mention this, but there is an interesting article on Gizmodo about the physics of space battles. It goes over some of the basics of how to think about such events, discussing attacks, maneuvering, defense, and so on.

I’ve been thinking of writing something similar for a long time. The problem is, the more I think about it, the more stuff I think of! That means writing, essentially, an infinitely long essay, and I don’t have the time for that. Seriously, there is so much fascinating material here that it’s hard to know what to leave in and what to leave out.

Still, it would be fun. Just navigating in space is a whole science fiction topic with such depth and complexity that it would take weeks to write it up… but those would be fun weeks. And there are other topics I’ve thought about as well. Someday, someday.