Author: Discover Main Feed

The Environmental Protection Agency has announced its proposal to toughen up the standards for smog-causing pollutants, which would replace the standards set during the Bush administration.

The Obama administration’s proposal sets a primary standard for ground-level ozone of no more than 0.060 to 0.070 parts per million, to be phased in over two decades. Regions with the worst smog pollution, including much of the Northeast, Southern and Central California and the Chicago and Houston areas, would have more time than other areas to come into compliance [The New York Times]. The previous standard was 0.075 parts per million, set in 2008 despite government scientists’ objection that it was not strict enough. Smog is formed when a stew of nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, carbon monoxide, and methane is baked in sunlight.

The new standard won’t be cheap, but proponents say it will save money, and lives, in the long run. The EPA estimates that by 2020 the proposal will cost $19 billion to $90 billion to implement and will yield health benefits worth $13 billion to $100 billion. The proposal would result in 1,500 to 12,000 avoided premature deaths by 2020, though the precise number depends on what limit the agency adopts [Washington Post]. Smog is linked to a wide variety of heart and respiratory diseases. Currently, a majority of the counties that are required to monitor ozone levels would not meet the new standard. If the 0.070 limit is adopted, 515 of the 675 counties that monitor ozone levels would be out of compliance.

Factories, oil and gas refineries, and power companies would be required to clean up their acts. “Coal-burning power plants are the 800-pound gorilla in the room,” John Walke, a clean air lawyer at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said about the industry that could get hit hardest. He said airplanes, ships, locomotives and off-road vehicles would also be targeted, perhaps more than automobiles, which have had to cut pollution since the 1970s [Reuters].

If approved, the new rules wouldn’t be phased in for several years. Whatever limit is selected, by the end of 2013, states must submit plans showing how areas that do not attain the new standard will be brought into compliance. The new rules would be phased in between 2014 and 2031, with deadlines depending on how dirty the air is in a given region [The New York Times]. The EPA will announce the new standard at the end of a 60 period to allow for public comment.

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Image: flickr / jonlclark

My high school physical education teacher had a nickname for everyone. (Mine was “Little One” because I was the runt of the class. Better than “Chicken Bones,” as one scrawny boy was dubbed.) It didn’t bother me, but according to research recently published in Qualitative Research in Sport and Exercise, I dodged a bullet–or maybe the dodgeball.

Billy Strean, a professor at the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Physical Education and Recreation, says “a negative lifelong attitude towards physical activity can be determined by either a good or a bad experience, based on the personal characteristics of the coach or instructor. For example, negative experiences may come from a teacher who has low energy, is unfair and/or someone who embarrasses students.”

One person in Strean’s study shared this: “I am a 51-year-old-woman whose childhood experiences with sports, particularly as handled in school, were so negative that even as I write this my hands are sweating and I feel on the verge of tears. I have never experienced the humiliation nor felt the antipathy toward any other aspect of life as I do toward sports.”

To help combat the obesity epidemic and give people a healthier attitude towards exercise, Strean suggests coaches and teachers emphasize fun and, until kids are in their teens, consider not keeping scores.

Not sure how my high school classmate “Ace” would have felt about that….

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Image: iStockphoto

Leo Igwe is a skeptic in Africa who has tirelessly and heroically fought the forces of unreason. He is director of the Centre for Inquiry in Nigeria and executive director of the Nigerian Humanist Movement, and has battled against female genital mutilation, the oppression of women in Africa, witch hunters, and all manners of religious-based (generally Sharia law) woe in that continent.

But he’s in trouble. Igwe accused a man of raping a ten-year-old girl in Nigeria. This man has turned around and accused Igwe and his father of murdering another person — an apparently false charge, since the man was examined and found to have died due to an HIV/AIDS related illness. Igwe was arrested, temporarily imprisoned, and then let out on bail. But the pressure is on, and the Nigerian government is not doing a whole lot to help.

Please note all this is alleged, but is coming from multiple sources. You can find more information on on the Think Humanism forum. Also, Kylie Sturgess has been on this since it started, and has more information on this case with updates and what can be done to help.

Cleaner fish have a pretty good little business going. These select species of small underwater inhabitants set up “cleaning stations” where they eat parasites and dead tissue off larger fish. Sure, it might not be a gourmet meal, but in exchange for the service the large fish don’t eat the cleaners.

In some cases a pair of fish work in tandem, and a new study has found that males will punish their female partners if the females go overboard and eat more of the client than they should. While the research shows that fish, like people, can be aggrieved on behalf of a third party, don’t be too impressed with the males’ altruism—they get plenty out of the deal.

For a study in Science, researchers looked at the fish Labroides dimidiatus, whose females usually play by the rules of the cleaning business. But the females can sometimes be too greedy and “bite the flesh of the fish they are cleaning in a bid to get to the mucus, which is more tasty than the parasites on the surface,” researcher Redouan Bshary found. The male fishes, which are bigger in size, would then step in to chase the females away [AFP].

To simulate and examine this aquatic arrangement in the lab, Bshary’s team set out a plate that took the place of the “client” fish. It featured the options of fish flakes and prawns for the cleaner fish to eat—the flakes as a stand-in for the parasites the fish are supposed to eat, and the prawns acting as the more desirable mucus. However, the researchers took away the plate if any of the fish ate a prawn (as if the client were to swim away). They saw that the male cleaner fish — even in this unfamiliar lab setting — would punish, or chase away, the female fish if the females ate a prawn [LiveScience].

Why so serious, male fish? On the one hand, it’s just good business. If the females eat the client fish’s mucus, researchers say, it scurries off, and the cleaner fish team loses a customer. But there’s more to it than that: The males are really just cutthroat capitalists, looking out for themselves at their partners’ expense. “The male’s dinner leaves if the female cheats,” explained lead scientist Nichola Raihani from the The Zoological Society of London. “By punishing cheating females, the males are not really sticking up for the clients but are making sure that they get a decent meal” [BBC News].

Altruistic or not, it’s hard to fault the males for keeping up appearances. A Nature study back in 2006 suggested that client fish are choosy shoppers, spying on cleaner fish to see who runs the best service. With all the cheating going on, they’d be fools not to. Not only do cleaners cheat their clients and go for the mucus, but there are also impostor cleaners—fish that mimic the appearance of cleaners to capitalize on that whole “not getting eaten” thing.

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Image: Richard Smith

Australia has a cane toad problem. The little leapers are devastating the Aussie ecosystem (Australia has no native toads). They’re gobbling up native insects and poising any animal that attempts to prey on them. One group thought they had a humane way to stop the toads’ spread—suffocate captured toads by putting them in bags filled with carbon dioxide. But now government officials are saying “not so fast,” and have declared that kill method inhumane. From The Scientist:

The Kimberley Toad Busters (KTB) have been using carbon dioxide exposure to euthanize the toads for five years, successfully eliminating more than half a million pests. But last year, after the cane toad populations made their way into Western Australia (WA), the Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC) — a department of the WA government — announced that they would not support the use of CO2 until further trials had been done, leaving the KTB nearly weaponless against the rapidly spreading invasion just as the first major wet season rains are starting to fall.

So what does the DEC suggest as a humane way to kill the invasive toads? The agency requests that the Toad Busters use blunt trauma for brain destruction.

Guess it’s time for the Toad Busters to break out their whacking sticks.

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Image: flickr / Sam Fraser-Smith

As his friends flocked to social networks like Facebook and MySpace, Alessandro Acquisti, an associate professor of information technology at Carnegie Mellon University, worried about the downside of all this online sharing. “The personal information is not particularly sensitive, but what happens when you combine those pieces together?” he asks. “You can come up with something that is much more sensitive than the individual pieces.”

Acquisti tested his idea in a study, reported earlier this year in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He took seemingly innocuous pieces of personal data that many people put online (birthplace and date of birth, both frequently posted on social networking sites) and combined them with information from the Death Master File, a public database from the U.S. Social Security Administration. With a little clever analysis, he found he could determine, in as few as 1,000 tries, someone’s Social Security number 8.5 percent of the time. Data thieves could easily do the same thing: They could keep hitting the log-on page of a bank account until they got one right, then go on a spending spree. With an automated program, making thousands of attempts is no trouble at all.

The problem, Acquisti found, is that the way the Death Master File numbers are created is predictable. Typically the first three digits of a Social Security number, the “area number,” are based on the zip code of the person’s birthplace; the next two, the “group number,” are assigned in a predetermined order within a particular area-number group; and the final four, the “serial number,” are assigned consecutively within each group number. When Acquisti plotted the birth information and corresponding Social Security numbers on a graph, he found that the set of possible IDs that could be assigned to a person with a given date and place of birth fell within a restricted range, making it fairly simple to sift through all of the possibilities.

Welcome to the unnerving world of data mining, the fine art (some might say black art) of extracting important or sensitive pieces from the growing cloud of information that surrounds almost all of us. Since data persist essentially forever online—just check out the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, the repository of almost everything that ever appeared on the Internet—some bit of seemingly harmless information that you post today could easily come back to haunt you years from now.

The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe is one of my favorite podcasts. It’s funny, informative, goofy, but most importantly goes right to the heart of a lot of issues important to the critical thinker.

I’ve done a lot of interviews with them, and sometimes they call me at the last minute when there’s some breaking astronomy news. So a couple of weeks ago I wasn’t too surprised when Steve Novella sent me a note asking if I could record with them that evening for their annual year-end wrapup episode.

What did surprise me is why they wanted me on: the SGU listeners had voted for me as Skeptic of the Year!

Well, wow! I was really floored when they told me this during the interview. It was totally unexpected, and quite an honor. I made some jokes about it in the interview, but now that I’ve had some time to think about it, I want to reiterate how honored I am. It was a great year for skepticism and skeptics themselves, with Simon Singh publicly defending himself from craven chiropractors who tried to sue him into silence, Amy Wallace writing about antivaxxers in Wired magazine, the Australian Skeptics heroically taking on (and being attacked by) the awful antivax guru Meryl Dorey, Randi publicly fighting his cancer with medical science, and so many more.

In that company, I stand paradoxically humbled and proud. My sincere thanks to everyone who cast their vote my way on the SGU forums.

I always really like the SGU year-end wrapup; it’s fun to listen in on the rogues reminiscing on the past year. This one in particular is a great episode. Here’s a direct link to the MP3 of the show, and if you don’t already subscribe to SGU, then go do it now!

It snowed and snowed and snowed in Britain this week, enough that many people in the country got stuck at home. But some of those people still had a good time. A Web site intended to help restless married people meet one another called IllicitEncounters.com reports a surge in new members over the last few days—more than 2,500 in the last six days—particularly from areas hit hard by the wintry weather, like Hampshire and Berkshire. From Reuters:

“In light of these figures, I’d be interested to see how much work those ‘working from home’ have actually done,” IlicitEncounters.com spokeswoman Sara Hartley said in a statement.

“Perhaps these wives and husbands have just been waiting for a time when they could join, away from the eyes of their work colleagues and, most importantly, their partners…”

Hartley reports that IlicitEncounters.com has taken on extra workers to meet the rush. Apparently, adultery is about the only thing driving job growth anymore.

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Image: flickr / spratmackrel

I’ve been a skeptic a long time, maybe 25 years or more now. It didn’t happen all at once, though there have been sudden world-shift moments for me. I’ve been an active skeptic — outspoken, that is, willing to talk about this stuff — for about 10 years now.

But now, finally, I feel that I have arrived at the Holy Grail of skepticism: a goofball antiscience promoter has quote mined me.

Quote mining is a tradition among the antireality crowd: they find something a scientist has said, and then leave out certain words, or edit out the context, making it look like the quote is the opposite of what the actual intention was. Creationists are notorious for this, but others do it as well.

On a bulletin board site called Christian Forums, there is a user who goes by the name “Agonaces of Susa”, and this person has the usual antiscience CV stocked with creationism and such, but also, apparently, is a supporter of Velikovsky’s ridiculous and long-ago-debunked claims about astronomy.

For those of you who are happily unaware, Immanuel Velikovsky wrote a series of books decades ago saying that the events in the Bible were literally true, and caused by various astronomical things like planets careening around the solar system like billiard balls, interacting in impossible ways, and doing many impossible things. He’d have been better off just saying those were all miracles of God, but still, a lot of people swallowed his nonsense whole. It’s mostly dead now, with just a few reality-denying holdouts. I wrote a chapter in my first book, Bad Astronomy, dealing with the Velikovsky affair.

In this post on the forums, AoS says this little gem:

You trust the pseudoscientist Phil Plait that, these are his words, “Magnetism is…a joke in astronomy”?

Wow! That makes it seem like astronomers are idiots, doesn’t it? As if we don’t believe in magnetism at all, and that we think it has no role in astrophysics. But wait! Look at what he wrote. It has the magic wand of quote mining pseudoscience: the ellipsis! That means he left something out of what I said. And so what was it he left out?

Magnetism is a very important topic in astrophysics (despite some pseudoscientists lying and saying this force is ignored), but it’s not well-understood. It’s fiendishly complex, so much so that it’s a joke in astronomy: when giving a colloquium about an astronomical object’s weird features, saying it’s due to magnetism will always get a chuckle out of an audience. And it’s a standard joke that if you want to derail a talk, ask the speaker about the effects of magnetism. In three dimensions, magnetism is ferociously difficult to model.

I bolded the part that was quote mined, and as you can see, AoS completely took out of context what I was saying. He also misinterprets what I said about Velikovsky. While I did say that Velikovsky was wrong about everything, I meant that he was wrong about his science. Sure, he said Venus would be hot, but the reason he said it would be hot was completely wrong (Velikovsky claimed it was ejected whole from Jupiter, which is about the wrongest wrong you can ever wrongly wrongify). Even if you drop a shotgun you might have one pellet hit the target, but that ain’t skill.

That thread on the forum goes on and on, and AoS is joined by others who appear to willfully misunderstand what I’m saying, or at least pick and choose from what I’ve said to make it look like I’m wrong. That might work for the flock (or the Simpsons), but the rest of the world sees right through them.

But will these people listen? Of course not! Because this is their arguing tactic:

Still, it’s an honor to have been quote mined. Thank you, gentlemen, for reminding me just why I fight this fight every single day.

In my latest podcast, I speak to Penny Chisholm, an MIT microbiologist who studies the marine microbes that make a lot of the oxygen on which we survive, and who sees the ocean as a giant sea of virus-shuffled genes for harvesting sunlight. Check it out.

Mountaintop removal—the aptly-named mining practice that blasts away peaks and leaves piles of rubble—must stop, a group of researchers write this week in the journal Science. Taking an unusually political stance, a group of hydrologists, engineers and ecologists called for an immediate end to the practice.

“Until somebody can show that the water [that runs off mine sites] can be cleaned up . . . this has got to be stopped,’’ said Margaret Palmer, a professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science who is the study’s lead author. For now, Palmer said, “there is no evidence that things like this can be fixed” [Boston Globe]. The researchers contend that mountaintop removal destroys forests in the Appalachians and taints water through toxic runoff.

Mining companies have responded that mountaintop removal is better and safer than deep-shaft mining. And to the surprise of no one, they went on the offensive against the scientists’ paper. National Mining Association spokeswoman Carol Raulston also argues the scientists chose data selectively, ignoring water-quality information that didn’t support its theories. While they’re entitled to their opinion, she said, “they’re incorrect in saying this review of the literature points to any new conclusions” [ABC News].

While the scientists called on the Obama administration to halt all permits on mountaintop mining, the Environmental Protection Agency hasn’t gone quite that far. In September the agency put a hold on 79 new projects pending further review, but this week it approved one of those in West Virginia. The EPA doesn’t seem like it’s going to hold all the rest back, either, especially given the political touchiness involved. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said, “Our role … is to ensure that mining companies avoid environmental degradation and protect water quality so that Appalachian communities don’t have to choose between jobs and their health. Our goal is to ensure Americans living in coal country are protected from environmental, health and economic damage” [Reuters].

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Image: Wikimedia Commons / JW Randolph

Steven Newton, a project director for the wonderful National Center for Science Education — a group that fights creationists who want to shred the Constitution — has written a nice article about science denialism in, of all places, the Huffington Post. Generally, HuffPo is a wretched hive of scum and villainy a repository of antivax and alt-med nonsense, but it’s nice to see that some of the contributors are pro-science. Full disclosure: I wrote several astronomy articles on HuffPo, but stopped when the antivaxxers became the darlings of the site.

Newton’s article talks about how science learns, but denialists remain firm in their denial. It’s a good read.

Speaking of which, I just finished reading Michael Specter’s book Denialism. It’s an interesting look into the attitudes of people who deny obvious reality — people like antivaxxers, creationists, and so on. The book is mostly specific examples of these folks. Specter does discuss a bit why some people are denialists, and it’s mostly what you’d expect: it’s safe, it’s comforting, we have a tendency to believe pre-conceived notions and look for confirmation. I’ll note the book goes off the rails a bit in the last two chapters where he talks about genomics; it becomes more pro-genomics than a refutation of denialism. He pulls it out in the last few pages though, and all in all I’d recommend the book.

All of us — especially skeptics, but all of us — need to understand why people deny reality. In many cases the only thing these people damage are themselves. But they also vote, and cause health problems, and never forget that not only do they run for political office, they often win. Denialism is safe and comforting, and while science is more important in the long run, the denialists are getting more and sometimes better press.

We can deny that all we want, but what does that make us?

Scientists have figured out a way to switch brain cells on and off like light bulbs, but instead of using a clapper, they’re using microbial proteins and lasers. Ed Boyden, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has developed a way to shut down parts of a brain just by shining light on them. When the light is turned off, the brain switches back on [Forbes].

The research team says their technology will help neuroscientists probe the brain’s circuitry by silencing certain regions and studying the effects. The technique, which was described in the journal Nature, could one day be used to shut down overactive regions of the brain often found in people with epilepsy, depression, Parkinson’s disease, and blindness.

A bit of fancy genetic tinkering is required to prime the brain to respond to light. Neurons fire when electrically charged atoms – ions – flood in and out of them, creating a tiny electric potential across their membranes [New Scientist]. Using this knowledge, the MIT researchers built upon Boyden’s 2005 discovery that demonstrated that certain microbial proteins can create a stimulating effect when genetically engineered into neurons and blasted with light. Boyden has now found a similar pair of bacterial and fungi proteins that also respond to light, but respond by shutting off their neuron hosts.

What’s more, one of the proteins responds to yellow light, while the other reacts to blue. A far-off hope, especially of those who study artificial intelligence, is that using a combination of [the two new proteins] to turn off certain types of neurons along with using Boyden’s earlier method of activating neurons, the brain could be manipulated in complex ways. Researchers could then learn much about how the brain processes information, better copy it and, maybe, better control it [Forbes].

Obviously, using optogenetics to treat humans is years, and maybe decades, away from reality. However, even if the technology never makes its way into medical treatments for human brains, it will certainly prove useful as a research tool for basic scientific research on brain circuitry.

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Image: flickr / etwood

The guy in this Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal cartoon looks familiar, but I can’t quite place him. Still, he’s obviously extremely handsome, brilliant, funny, and charming. And a good parent. After all, we don’t want our folks filling our heads with nonsense and an over-indulgent sense of self-worth.

There’s nothing like the round number at the start of a new decade to get everyone prognosticating (yes, we know some of you are in the crowd that says the new decade doesn’t begin until 2011; OK, fine). To predict what the scientific scene will be like in 2020, the journal Nature brought in experts from 18 fields. Though the collection doesn’t encapsulate the “world of tomorrow” feel of, say, the old Omni magazine, it’s still packed with sunny (and scary) forecasts. Some show lingering uncertainty, some unbridled optimism, and some give warnings to the world to make a much-needed course correction. Here are five we thought were particularly telling.

1. In 2020, Google defines your reality (even more than it does already).

Peter Norvig, Google’s director of research, tackles the question of where search will be a decade hence. Advanced, he says, but also troublesome: Most searches will be spoken rather than typed, and designers will be experimenting with search systems that read your brain waves. “Users will decide how much of their lives they want to share with search engines, and in what ways”—such is Norvig’s polite description of a world with even less digital privacy than today’s.

What search engines give you back will change, too. Particularly, he says, they will come up with a way to judge relevance and quality that doesn’t rely on popularity: “Thus, a site that claims that the Moon landings were a hoax and seems to have a coherent argument structure will be judged to be lower quality than a legitimate astronomy site, because the premises of the hoax argument are at odds with reality.”

2. Designer babies? Just you try and stand against the tide.

From geneticist David B. Goldstein of Duke University, making a “confident but uncomfortable” prediction for 2o2o:

“The identification of major risk factors for disease is bound to substantially increase interest in embryonic and other screening programmes. Society has largely accepted this principle for mutations that lead inevitably to serious health conditions. Will it be so accommodating to those who want to screen out embryos that carry, say, a twentyfold increased risk of serious but unspecified neuropsychiatric disease?”

3. Astronomy sweats the dark stuff.

Adam Burrows of U.S. National Research Council enumerates a short to-do list for the next decade of astronomy—finding more exoplanets (especially ones like Earth), figuring some lingering mysteries of stellar formation, and funding all the satellites and other projects on the table. But there’s one thing that has to be cleared up before the field goes headlong into the future: sorting out what dark matter, which makes up the majority of matter in the universe, is made of, and thus avoiding ignominy. “It would be a major embarrassment if the dark matter paradigm was not verified within 40 years of its inception by the direct detection of the associated weakly interacting particles,” he writes.

4. Farming goes back to the future.

Nature’s prediction for the future of energy is like a lot you’ve already seen—the world needs to be well on the road to a post-carbon renewable energy future by 2020. But one consequence that sometimes escapes mention is that the energy revolution must drive another agricultural revolution. From the University of Washington’s David Montgomery: “In a post-petroleum world, as the era of cheap fossil-fuel-produced fertilizers comes to an end, conventional, high-input agriculture is neither sustainable nor resilient. Ensuring future food security and environmental protection will require thoughtfully tailoring farming practices to the soils of individual landscapes and farms, rather than continuing to rely on erosive practices and fertilizer from a bag.”

5. Nobody’s optimistic like laser experts are optimistic.

Many of the scientists who described the future in Nature held it close to the vest, offering more descriptions of the challenges in their field and fewer bombastic predictions of success to come. And then there are laser researchers. Meet Thomas Baer and Nicholas Bigelow. By 2020, they say, lasers with tiny apertures—the size of a single molecule—will help directly sequence DNA and RNA. Laser-based clocks will take note of the “drift in fundamental constants as the Universe expands.”

And that’s not all: “Next-generation lasers will allow the creation of new states of matter, compressing and heating materials to temperatures found only in the centres of massive stars, and at pressures that can squeeze hydrogen atoms together in a density 50 times greater than that of lead. The resulting fusion reactions may one day be harnessed to provide almost limitless carbon-free energy.”

Related content from DISCOVER’s attempts in 2000 to predict 2020:
What You Need to Know in 2020 That You Don’t Know Now
20 Things That Will Be Obsolete in 20 Years
20 Things That Won’t Change
20 Species We Might Lose
And, to go out on a cheery note, 20 Ways the World Could End

Image: Wiki Commons / Jay Dugger

Avatar’s success at the box office has 3-D technology on everybody’s minds these days. Now, television manufacturers are looking into bringing that same technology to your living room.

Top TV makers including Sony Corp, Panasonic Corp, LC Electronics Inc and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd will feature 3D screen advances at the Consumer Electronics Show this week, hoping the new technology will be as big a boost for the industry as the transition to color TVs from black and white [Reuters]. A few 3-D sets are already on the market and retail for around $1,000 for a 42-inch screen (a 42-inch high-definition LCD television costs around $600).

At a time when many households are finally ponying up the cash for an HD LCD TV, some investors are skeptical that people will be willing to turn right back around and buy a 3D television, especially since they require special glasses. Manufacturers are hopeful that consumers that have been slow to jump on the HDTV bandwagon will simply opt straight for the 3-D TV when they decide to upgrade. Market analysts think consumers will catch on as well. By 2014, 45% of all U.S. households will have a TV that can handle 3D, up from just 3% this year, research firm Futuresource Consulting forecasts [USA Today].

One major hurdle for 3D TV is the lack of programming. However, that will soon change. Leading the charge into the third dimension will be the sports network ESPN. ESPN 3D will showcase a minimum of 85 live sporting events during its first year, beginning June 11 with the first 2010 FIFA World Cup match, featuring South Africa versus Mexico [ESPN]. Discovery Chanel has also announced it will launch a 3D network sometime in 2011. DirecTV is launching three HDTV channels in 3D in June, featuring movies, sports and other content.

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Image: flickr / Phillie Casablanca

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I attended the first few days of the American Astronomical Society meeting this week. I went as a member of the press, as I have for the past few years. The press room is a fun place; lots of old friends, banter across the table, and, of course, the press releases.

I had a stack in my mailbox, so I poked through them. One in particular caught my eye. And how could it not? In oversized, bold print the headline ran: “THE LONG OVERDUE RECURRENT NOVA T PYXIDIS: SOON TO BE A TYPE Ia SUPERNOVA?”

Hmmm. Recurrent novae are binary systems, where a dense white dwarf is stealing matter from its companion. The matter piles up, and eventually detonates, causing a huge flash of light (that’s the nova part). After time, the system settles down, the matter starts piling up, and the cycle starts again (that’s the recurrent part). Lots of recurrent novae are known, and are fairly well understood.

T Pyxidis is a fairly regular nova, blowing its lid every 20 years or so. It’s currently overdue, since the last event was in 1967. Using ultraviolet observations and new models of the system, astronomer Edward Sion and his team concluded it may actually explode soon as a supernova, an event far more energetic than a mere nova. Worse, their models indicate the system is “much closer” than previously thought: about 3300 light years away. In the last paragraph of their press release, it says:

An interesting, if a bit scary, speculative sidelight is that if a Type Ia supernova explosion occurs within [that distance] of Earth, then the gamma radiation emitted by the supernova would fry the Earth, dumping as much gamma radiation (~100,000 erg/square centimeter) into our planet [sic], which is equivalent to the gamma ray input of 1000 solar flares simultaneously.

AIIIIEEEEE!!! We’re all gonna die!

Hubble’s view of T Pyxidis from 1997, showing a shell of expanding matter from an earlier eruption.

Ahem. Except, really, no. I rolled my eyes when I read that bit. A Type Ia does put out more high-energy radiation than a Type II supernova, which is caused when a massive star’s core collapses and the outer layers are ejected. That’s what most people think of when they hear about a supernova. Those have to be really close to hurt us, certainly closer than 25 light years. But even with their added power, a Type Ia just doesn’t have the oomph needed to destroy our ozone layer (as the press release indicates) from 3300 light years away. It would have to be far closer than that.

I missed that press conference, but oh, how I wish I had been there! My friend Ian O’Neill was able to track down some details, and found out that astronomers (including another friend, Alex Filippenko, who is an expert’s expert on supernovae) at the meeting took Sion to task for this claim. It looks like Sion used the wrong numbers for the gamma ray emission for a Type Ia event, instead using the emission from a gamma-ray burst… a far, far, far more energetic event, and dangerous from several thousand light years away.

I don’t generally have too big an issue with a scientist getting a number wrong, but it depends on the circumstance. Issuing a press release saying, essentially, we’re all gonna die means they should do some due diligence. And in this specific case — they used the phrase “fry the Earth” for Pete’s sake! — means I am less willing to cut them slack. People get scared from stuff like this, and it’s simply wrong to feed that fire without making really sure you have your numbers straight first.

I’ll note that scientists tend not to write press releases, and it can be hard to rein in the PR author if they are not that familiar with the science (which I’ve seen many times). But even if the numbers in the PR were correct, the phrasing of that last paragraph is unacceptable. Whoever wrote the release should have known the media would zero in on that phrase.

My buddy Ian O’Neil, in his post at Discovery News, points out The Daily Telegraph did just that, printing an article with the headline, “Earth ‘to be wiped out’ by supernova explosion”. The UK paper The Sun — which is so awful fish complain when you wrap them in it — had a similar article with the tagline, “A star primed to explode in a blast that could wipe out the Earth was revealed by astronomers yesterday.”

Sheesh.

It’s too bad. There was no need to disaster-porn this release up the way it was done. Recurrent novae and Type Ia supernovae are fascinating, well worth our attention for any number of reasons including of course their potential danger. But it’s a not-too-fine line between piquing interest and tarting up the science.

Artwork credits: Casey Reed, Dana Berry.

As I write this, it’s about -15 C outside where I live in Boulder, and even the snow looks like it’s shivering. So I’m not sure if I’m happy to share the grief or feel badly about the weather for folks in the UK, who generally don’t get (metric, I suppose) tons of snow. But then I saw this image from NASA’s Earth observing Terra satellite:

Holy Haleakala, that’s gorgeous! I won’t say I’m exactly glad they got lots of snow, but still, wow. Sorry, my anglic friends, but your suffering has produced this stunning beauty.

The image was taken on January 7, 2010 at around noon local time. The image above has 1 km pixels, but you can also grab the image in higher-res 500 meter and 250 meter versions, too.

#15: In which painful condition does your body literally start eating yourself from within?

Ladies and gentlemen, for your viewing and listening pleasure, it’s the fourth installment of “Symphony of Science.” If you missed the first three iterations of John Boswell’s creation, he auto-tunes the syncopated scientific stylings of Carl Sagan’s monologues from “Cosmos,” combined with guest stars like Stephen Hawking, Neil deGrasse Tyson (of DISCOVER’s StarTalk podcast, among many other media ventures), and Richard Feynman. If you need to catch up, all four are available on Boswell’s site. The first can even be had on vinyl through the label of the White Stripes’ Jack White—Third Man Records.

Here’s the newest, “The Unbroken Thread.” Watch and enjoy.

Related Content:
Cosmic Variance: AutoTuned Sagan
The Loom: The Continuing Return of Carl Sagan
Bad Astronomy: What I Learned from Carl Sagan