Author: Discover Main Feed

You could’ve seen this one coming a mile away—the high seas tensions between Japanese whalers and the environmental groups that harass them degenerated into downright naval warfare this week. A Japanese whaling ship collided with a environmental group’s boat in waters near Antarctica yesterday, sparking finger-pointing, international bickering, and even more bad blood.

The collision late yesterday damaged the Ady Gil, a powerboat that is part of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society protest against the Japan’s annual whaling expedition to the Southern Ocean. Six crew members were rescued by another protest vessel and the boat may sink, Sea Shepherd said in a statement [Business Week]. The governments of Australia and New Zealand say they plan to investigate the crash; the Ady Gil is registered in New Zealand, which opposes the Japanese whaling.

Unsurprisingly, each sides blamed the other. The Japanese boat released a video shot from its deck. The video shows a frothy wake coming from the stern of the Ady Gil, although it is unclear whether the trimaran (the Ady Gil) was moving. The Shonan Maru 2 was directing a water cannon at the Ady Gil before and during the collision, which is clearly seen on the video, and the bow of the Ady Gil was sheared off [The New York Times]. However, the Sea Shepherd people released their own video which shows the whalers veering to intercept. Take a look:

Sea Shepherd boats routinely dog the Japanese whaling vessels, which operate under a loophole in the international moratorium on whaling that allows a certain amount of whale killings for research purposes. DISCOVER has documented complaints by American scientists that killing whales isn’t necessary for the research Japanese scientists are conducting, and also the stealthy killings of other cetaceans, like bottlenose dolphins. The International Whaling Commission continues to try to figure out how to amend its rules to contain Japan’s whaling efforts, thus far without success.

No one on board the Ady Gil died this time around, but one activist reported cracked ribs. The vessel’s six crew members were rescued from the stricken craft by the crew of the Bob Barker, a former Norwegian whaler recently purchased and refitted with a $5-million donation from Bob Barker, who hosted the TV game show “The Price Is Right” for 35 years [Los Angeles Times]. In the aftermath of the close call, a détente seems far out of reach. Sea Shepherd spokesman Paul Watson said the incident had turned the confrontations into a “real whale war” [BBC News].

Related Content:
80beats: Is the Whaling Ban Really the Best Way to Save the Whales?
80beats: Controversial Deal Could Allow Japan To Hunt More Whales
80beats: Commando Filmmakers Expose Secret Dolphin Slaughter in Japan
Discoblog: Japan Whaling Redux: American Scientists Say Slaughter Was Unnecessary
Discoblog: Say What? Japanese Whaling Ships Accuse Animal Planet of Eco-Terrorism

Surprise, surprise…. Fast food restaurants might be lying to your face.

According to the Los Angeles Times health blog, Booster Shots:

Researchers from Tufts University took commercially prepared foods — both prepackaged and from restaurants — and analyzed them in a bomb calorimeter. The measured energy values of 10 frozen meals purchased from supermarkets averaged 8% more than originally stated, and foods from 29 restaurants (both fast-food and sit-down venues) were on average 18% more than reported.

The most egregious offender? Denny’s, whose dry toast is advertised to contain 92 calories but actually packs a diet-busting 283 calories! If they can’t even get the numbers on toast right, just imagine the true caloric content of one of their Grand Slamwiches.

So if your New Year’s resolution includes getting back in shape, help yourself out by resolving to stop eating fast food and frozen meals all together.

Related Content:
Discoblog: Food Fraud: High Schoolers Use DNA Tests to Expose Fake Caviar
Discoblog: Fiber-Filled, Antioxidant-Packed Ice Cream—Brilliant? Sacrilegious? Nasty?
Discoblog: Heart-Stopping Cinematic Excitement: Guess How Much Fat Is in Movie Popcorn?

Image: flickr / fotographix.ca

Four hundred years ago tonight, a man from Pisa, Italy took a newly-made telescope with a magnifying power of 33X, pointed it at one of the brighter lights in the sky, and changed mankind forever.

The man, of course, was Galileo, and the light he observed on January 7, 1610 was Jupiter. He spotted “three fixed stars” that were invisible to the eye near the planet, and a fourth a few days later.

Here is how he drew this, 400 years ago:

He noted the stars moved around Jupiter as they followed it across the sky, and so was the first to figure out that other planets had moons like our own. It wasn’t an easy observation; his telescope was still small, the field of view narrow (so not all the moons were visible at the same time), and the moons faint next to Jupiter’s brilliant glare. But Galileo persisted, and figured it out. We call these four the Galilean moons in his honor: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.

Here’s how we see them today:

The image above [click to embiggen] is from the New Horizons spacecraft as it shot past Jupiter in early 2007, showing all four moons. Each is scaled to show its true relative size to the others. It’s impossible not to wonder what Galileo would have thought, knowing that just shy of 400 years after he made his first observations, we would fling our robotic proxies out into the solar system and get close up views of the objects he discovered.

Think of it! For all of time before, Jupiter was just a light in the sky. And then, forever after that night forty decades ago, it was a world, surrounded by more worlds.

[See more pictures of Jupiter and its moons in a gallery over at 80 Beats.]

Galileo went on to observe craters on the Moon, spots on the Sun, and the phases of Venus. It was that last that may have been his crowning achievement, because the way Venus showed phases meant it could not possibly orbit the Earth, and that it must orbit the Sun. The geocentric theory had held sway for over a thousand years, but Galileo proved it was wrong almost overnight. Of course, the Church wasn’t thrilled with this, though I suspect they might have rolled with it if Galileo hadn’t been such an arrogant jerk and published a manuscript insulting the Pope, a man who used to be his friend and supporter.

If there is a lesson in there, I leave it to my readers to suss it out.

Now, all these years later, a lot of legends exist over the man. He didn’t invent the telescope, he wasn’t the first to point it at the sky, and he wasn’t even the first to publish his drawings. But he was a merciless self-promoter, and because of that we do remember him now (again, any lessons learned here are up to you). And it’s not entirely unfair to do so; he was a tireless observer, a wonderful artist, a great inventor (he may not have been the first to build a telescope, but he made his far better than its predecessors) and a brilliant scientist who, even if he hadn’t done so much for astronomy, would still be remembered today for his other work.

Tonight, just after sunset, Jupiter will be a glowing white beacon in the southwest. I have a Galileoscope, an inexpensive telescope created as part of the International Year of Astronomy 2009, an effort to get as many people on Earth to look up as possible. I think perhaps it would be fitting if I brave the subzero temperature outside, maybe for just a few minutes, and take a look at the mighty planet. Tonight’s display is better than Galileo himself had it: all four moons will be perfectly arrayed, two on each side of Jupiter’s face.

I’m not a very religious man, nor am I a very spiritual man. But I know there will still be a sense of connection, a sense of wonder that I will have tonight that I will share with a man long dead, but whose life and achievements still echo through time.

On January 7, 1610, Galileo Galilei pointed his “spyglass” to the heavens and stared up at Jupiter, one of the brightest lights in the evening sky, and noted what he at first assumed to be three bright stars near the planet. But over the following nights, he realized that those three bright bodies weren’t fixed in the heavens like stars, but rather seemed to dance around Jupiter along with a fourth, smaller body.

Galileo triumphantly announced his discovery of four “planets” that revolved around Jupiter in his March treatise, Starry Messenger [pdf]. Thinking of his pocketbook, he dutifully proposed naming them the Medicean Stars in honor of his patron, Cosimo de Medici. But the name didn’t stick, and today we honor the scientist rather than the patron by calling Jupiter’s four largest satellites the Galilean moons.

The discovery dealt a death blow to the Ptolemaic understanding of the universe, in which all planets and stars were believed to orbit the Earth. For, as Galileo wrote in his treatise, “our own eyes show us four stars which wander around Jupiter as does the moon around the earth.”

In the 400 years that have passed since Galileo first laid eyes on them, we’ve learned a great deal about the moons Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto (all named after the mythological paramours of Jupiter). If all goes according to plan we’ll soon get to know them much more intimately–NASA and the European Space Agency are currently planning missions to closely observe three of the moons. Click though this gallery to view NASA’s most stunning photos of the four satellites, and to find out what we’ve discovered in the four centuries since Galileo began the work.

(For more on Galileo’s discovery and what it meant to science, check out this post from DISCOVER’s Phil Plait.)

Image: NASA/JPL/DLR

Back and forth go the studies investigating whether cell phone uses increases the risk of brain cancer (the latest one to get major press, released last month, found nothing there). This week, though, new research has grabbed the headlines by declaring that our ubiquitous communication and time-wasting devices could actually provide a health benefit.

In a study set to come out today in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease (and funded in part by the National Institute on Aging), a group led by Gary Arendash argues that the radiation from cell phones that we’ve been worrying about could protect against Alzheimer’s Disease. But it’s far too soon to advise people to start medicating themselves by talking even longer on the phone.

Researchers at the Florida Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center arranged about 70 mouse cages in a circle around a central antenna that emitted electromagnetic waves typical of what would emanate from a phone pressed to a human head. They were exposed to the radiation for two hours a day over seven to nine months. About two dozen other mice served as controls [Los Angeles Times]. Arendash’s team used mice they had genetically engineered to develop the brain buildups and memory problems typical of Alzheimer’s when they got older. The team says that the memory problems of those mice exposed to the radiation began to disappear during the study. Not only that, but normal mice (that hadn’t been genetically engineered) also showed memory improvements after exposure.

Why? The researchers showed that exposing old Alzheimer’s mice to the electromagnetic waves generated by cell phones erased brain deposits of beta-amyloid, a protein strongly associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Clumps of beta-amyloid form so-called brain plaques that are a hallmark of the disease [LiveScience]. According to the scientists, the slight increase in brain temperature brought on by the radiation could’ve caused the mouse brains to release those plaques.

Arendash surprised himself, saying that before the study he’d expected to see that cell phone use would make dementia worse. “Quite to the contrary, those mice were protected if the cell phone exposure was stared [sic] in early adulthood. Or if the cellphone exposure was started after they were already memory- impaired, it reversed that impairment,” Arendash said [Reuters]. When the benefits for the mice continued without any noticeable detriments, he was sold.

Glowing from success, Arendash and USF colleagues said future research could determine the best “dosage” of radiation for targeting these brain plaque deposits: the 918 megaHerz in US mobile phones, 800 megaHerz in European phones, or another frequency — and how long effective “treatment” would have to be [AFP].

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, though. The work by Arendash opens up all kinds of avenues for possible research, but research on the health effects of cell phones seems prone to long, drawn out studies and occasionally contradictory headlines, like those we see about red wine or coffee being good or bad. William Thies, chief medical and scientific officer of the Alzheimer’s Association, warned against self-medicating with extra cell use based on these findings. (And just yesterday we covered the scientist smackdown over whether a virus truly causes chronic fatigue syndrome, with the British researchers now arguing that the link isn’t proven, and warning people not to seek out antiretroviral drugs.)

The next steps: Other researchers will try to replicate Arendash results in mice, and if they do so, scientists can go on to test whether electromagnetic waves have the same effect on humans.

Related Content:
80beats: Can You Fear Me Now? Cell Phone Use Not Linked to Brain Cancer
80beats: Cancer Doctor Issues Warning About Cell Phones, And Causes Panic
80beats: Scientist Smackdown: Is a Virus Really the Cause of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?
80beats: Lack of ZZZZs Linked to Alzheimer’s in Mice
80beats: Electrical Brain Stimulation Prompts Big Hopes—And a Dash of Concern

Image: University of South Florida

And here you thought the holidays were over. Silly you. Today is the greatest holiday of all: Book Release Day!

That’s right — From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time is out today. That means you could head over to Amazon.com and buy the book right now:

From Eternity to Here at Amazon

Don’t worry, we’ll wait. Of course you could also buy it later, but there are benefits to having a great first day, and we’re aiming to get as many Amazon purchases as we can. So you might want to take Lee Billings’s advice:

Just drafted a micro-review of @seanmcarroll’s “From Eternity to Here”. It’s really quite good–I suggest you all buy several copies.

I’m excited, anyway. You can find various goodies on the web page, including a reprint of the prologue, an annotated table of contents, a list of upcoming events, links to blurbs and reviews and other commentary, and a collection of related articles. Heck, I even went out and made a video:

I don’t think Spielberg is checking his rear-view mirror, but my budget was a bit lower.

Looking back through my old emails, I was first talking seriously about writing a book on the arrow of time in August, 2006. The contract with Dutton was agreed upon in May, 2007. Worked on it on and off, and finally started working in earnest in mid/late-2008. I emailed the manuscript to the publisher at 2:42 a.m. on Friday, May 8, 2009. And now it’s released to the world.

Writing the book was actually a lot of fun. If you write a very long blog post or medium-length magazine article, you’re talking 3,000 words. This book is 180,000 words, including footnotes. Room to stretch a bit and explain things the right way! Part of the fun was learning new things — I dug into the history a bit, reading papers by Boltzmann and his contemporaries, and also looked into interesting topics like complexity and information theory. But perhaps even more enjoyable was the challenge of explaining really deep ideas in an understandable way. I have a whole chapter that tries to work through the ideas of determinism and reversibility from the ground up — something that most physics books just zoom right past. There are a lot of places where I really took care to explain something basic in a fresh and accessible way — or tried to, anyway. The proof of the pudding is in the tasting, so we’ll see what people think.

One thing I learned is that producing a book is very much a collaborative effort. I owe a lot to Stephen Morrow, Tala Oszkay, Katinka Matson, and John Brockman, who provided invaluable guidance and steered me in the right direction more than once. Jason Torchinsky contributed the charming illustrations. And of course to my wife Jennifer, for many reasons, but it doesn’t hurt to have an expert writer and editor right there in the house when you embark on a project like this. Many people were gracious enough to read through the book and point out where it could be improved — with embarrassing accuracy, I may add. (Special thanks to Scott Aaronson and George Musser, for their detailed and substantive critiques.) And I was fortunate enough get a dream team of physicist-writers to provide blurbs for the back of the book: Lisa Randall, Brian Greene, Kip Thorne, and Roger Penrose. I won’t reproduce them all here (that’s what the web page is for), but here’s Penrose:

Sean Carroll’s From Eternity to Here provides a wonderfully accessible account of some of the most profound mysteries of modern physics. While you may not agree with all his conclusions, you will find the discussion fascinating, and taken to much deeper levels than is normal in a work of popular science.

Of course everyone will agree with all my conclusions … eventually.

Enough of the folderol of writing and publishing the damn book — time to talk about the science! Next week I’ll post the schedule for a weekly book club right here at Cosmic Variance; the discussions will officially begin on January 19, and will continue every subsequent Tuesday. I’m going to try to participate as much as I can in the discussions — I want to hear how people react to the book, but I’m also expecting to learn a lot. Time and the origin of the universe — pretty big subjects, always room to understand more.

Back in 2005, NASA’s Deep Impact probe slammed a hunk of copper into the comet Tempel 1 to determine what was under its surface, as well as to see what happens in a hypervelocity collision.

The copper block vaporized in the high-energy impact, but the spacecraft lived on. It’s now on an extended mission called EPOXI, and one part of that is EPOCh: Extrasolar Planet Observations and Characterization, designed to look back at the Earth and see what a habitable and inhabited planet looks like from a distance. The idea is to see what we can observe about our own world that can be used to look at worlds orbiting other stars.

One hope was that the spacecraft would see sun glints; flashes of light from standing water on Earth (much like Cassini did with Titan). And see them it did! Check out the video below. It’s short, so you can watch it a few times; there are several glints, and I labeled the region of Earth where they occur.

That video was put together by Don Lindler (my old boss back in the STIS/Hubble days) using images from Deep Impact. It shows a full rotation of the Earth as seen above the north pole, taken when Deep Impact was still 18 million kilometers (11 million miles) from home (that’s 75 times the distance to the Moon!). Another video, from a different part of Deep Impact’s travels, shows the view as seen from the south. Due to the geometry of the Sun, Earth, and spacecraft, the glints all appear on the same place on the Earth’s face, though the location on the Earth’s surface changes as it rotates.

These images were taken in the infrared, where the contrast between land and water is highest. There may come a day when our spacecraft observe other planets orbiting other stars, and glints like these may be the tell-tale signs of liquid on their surface. In those cases, the planet may not be more than an unresolved dot, but the sudden increase in brightness may be the giveaway we’re looking for.

There’s been speculation lately that some extrasolar planets may be water worlds. We can’t know for sure just yet, but EPOXI may be showing us one way we might be able to find out.

Related post: HOLY FRAK! Moon transits Earth!

Yesterday, my latest blog post for Science Progress went live. It is about an attempt by Senators John McCain and Tom Coburn to pick through the scientific grants that resulted from the massive economic stimulus legislation, and try to pretend (baselessly) that this is wasted government spending. But of course, funding science creates jobs.

Consider, for example, a nearly $1 million NIH stimulus grant to Johns Hopkins University for a study on treatment options for drug abuse following inpatient care (such as counseling and follow-up care), which brought with it 86 jobs to support the large project. In other words, in this instance, medical knowledge and economic recovery will advance simultaneously.

And that’s just one of many such stories helpfully compiled on the ScienceWorksForUs website. It is important to remember that whenever major research projects get funded, the dollars tend to create a variety of university-based support jobs and graduate student livelihoods to carry out all aspects of the work. They also enable the retention of existing jobs that may otherwise have gone away, and perhaps also the hiring of professors and researchers.

McCain and Coburn ignore this context. Instead, they essentially mock various grants…

For instance, a malt liquor and marijuana study in Buffalo, New York, funded to the tune of $389,357. Coburn and McCain turn this entirely legitimate public health research inquiry into a joke, simply because the substances may have particular lifestyles associated with them. But so what? Young adults abuse these substances, and it is quite legitimate to study the associated effects. This is particularly the case for malt liquor, as the grant reports that it has received little research attention. Understanding early alcohol abuse patterns, as well as the deaths and injuries that result from drug abuse among young men, are clear public health benefits. Moreover, as with any major medical study, it’s inevitable that jobs will be created to support the work.

Something similar goes for another NIH-funded study on sexual behaviors of young women in college, determining whether they are more likely to “hook up” after drinking—once again, public health research that is greeted by McCain and Coburn only with a sneer. And on it goes: They dismiss a public health study on why young males don’t like wearing condoms, along with research on the “Icelandic Arctic Environment in the Viking Age,” the “Learning Patterns of Honeybees,” and so on.

Basically, the McCain Coburn approach is to point and laugh at various scientific studies, without showing either that they are bad science or that they won’t produce jobs. It’s a rather pathetic exercise….about which you can read more here.

Last month I wrote an essay about the future of evolution for Science. I paid particularly close attention to what will happen to our own species, describing some recent research and ideas from scientists. Natural selection will not stop, nor will the emergence of new, neutral mutations.

But this week, the evolutionary biologist Michael Lynch has published a provocative paper (to mark his inauguration into the National Academy of Sciences) in which he makes another kind of forecast. Our future evolution, he warns, is going to lead to a devastating decline in our health.

The idea is not new. Hermann Muller, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on mutations, first raised the specter of evolutionary decline in 1950. He pointed out that many mutations that arise in a population are harmful. They can cause various diseases, cutting lives short or making it harder for organisms to reproduce. Left to themselves, these mutations can drive down the reproductive rate of a population. But their harmful effects can be balanced by natural selection. If individuals with harmful mutations have fewer offspring than other individuals, the mutations become less common. Overall, the population can continue to reproduce at a healthy rate.

As Lynch points out, Muller’s argument depended on the actual rate of mutations and other vital statistics that no one in the 1950s could know with much precision. But in his new paper, Lynch surveys recent studies that make it possible to know the mutation rate quite well. Lynch concludes that every gamete (a sperm or egg) acquires the following:

–38 base-substitution mutations (a single “letter” of DNA changes to another one).

–3 small insertions or deletions of a stretch of DNA

–1 splicing mutation (which changes the combination of segments of a gene that cells use to build proteins)

–Plus some assorted other mutations (gene duplications, insertions of DNA copied by transposable elements, and so on).

All told, Lynch estimates a total of 50 to 100 mutations.

Compared to other species, Lynch points out, we mutate a lot. Any base in our DNA is twice as likely to mutate as a base in a fruit fly’s DNA, for example. Part of our special burden is our long life. As sperm divide rapidly during a man’s life, they pick up lots of new mutations. We are also left prone to cancer, as our skin, intestines, and other tissues continue to divide and sometimes pick up new mutations.

A lot of the new mutations in every new baby are harmless. But each baby may acquire a few harmful ones. These mutations rarely cause a swift death. Instead, in their totality, they slice off a tiny fraction of the total offspring an entire population can produce. Lynch estimates that mutations to protein-coding DNA cause the fitness of a population to decline by 1%. That’s assuming natural selection does not favor other mutations over these harmful ones.

Lynch acknowledges that natural selection is still in effect in humans, particularly in places where people never see doctors, let alone get clean drinking water. But as the world’s standard of living goes up, he argues, more and more people are being shielded from natural selection’s most intense effects–and harmful mutations are piling up.

In a matter of a few centuries, Lynch predicts, industrialized societies may experience a huge increase in harmful genes–”with significant incapacitation at the morphological, physiological, and neurobiological levels,” he writes.

Battling this decline won’t be easy, says Lynch. Rather than a few big mutations causing the trouble, the decline will be brought about by a vast number of mutations, each with a very small effect. The fantasies of selective breeding dreamed of by eugenicists aren’t just loathesome–they’re also useless. Instead, Lynch argues for something that would make the eugenicists crazy. “Ironically, the genetic future of mankind may reside predominantly in the gene pools of the least industrialized segments of society,” he writes.

Image: IU

Scientists are pushing back the date that the first land-walkers stepped foot on solid ground. Thanks to the discovery of prehistoric footprints from an 8-foot-long animal, scientists now say creatures strolled the Earth 20 million years earlier than previously thought. The prints were made by tetrapods—animals with backbones and four limbs—and could rewrite the history of when, where, and why fish evolved limbs and first walked onto land, the study says [National Geographic News]. The researchers published their results in the journal Nature.

Dozens of the fossilized footprints were found in an abandoned quarry in Poland, and the researchers say that the area was probably a lagoon or an intertidal flat when the tetrapod wandered across it about 395 million years ago. Researchers say the footprints in such old rock was a big surprise: They’re about 10 million years older than body fossils of creatures such as Tiktaalik and Panderichthys, … believed to represent the transition from lobe-finned fish to creatures fully adapted to life on land [Science News].

The tracks were made by several four-limbed creatures sporting prehistoric toes. There are distinct “hand” and “foot” prints, with no evidence of a dragging body or tail, because the animals’ body weight would have been partly supported by water [Guardian]. The results highlight how little scientists really know about the early history of land vertebrates, the researchers say, and the find pushes back the evolutionary fork where tetrapods split from fish. The discovery will force scientists to reexamine what they know about water-to-land transition during vertebrate evolution, say the study’s authors.

Related Content:
80beats: Early Mini-Whale Slurped up Mud to Find Hidden Prey
80beats: In Galapagos Finches, Biologists Catch Evolution in the Act
80beats: New Fossil Suggests Dinosaur World Domination Started in S. America

Image: Per Ahlberg et al.

The often misunderstood symbiote can poison wolves, break down rocks, and live for thousands of years.

An estimated three in 1,000 people suffers from the mysterious affliction chronic fatigue syndrome. Those people were probably enthusiastic in October when a team of U.S. medical researchers released a study arguing that not only is the syndrome real (some doctors dismissed it as purely psychological “yuppie flu”), but also that they’d connected it to a specific virus. DISCOVER covered the hubbub after the paper came out in the journal Science.

But now, in a study in PLoS One, a British research team has cast doubt on the American team’s findings, saying there’s no conclusive link between the virus and chronic fatigue syndrome, which is also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis.

The U.S. team’s findings sounded robust when they came out. They found the murine leukaemia virus-related virus (XMRV) in blood samples of 68 of 101 patients diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. Just eight out of 101 healthy “controls” drawn at random from the same parts of the US also tested positive, suggesting that XMRV played a key role in triggering the condition [The Independent]. When the scientists from Imperial and Kings colleges in London attempted to replicate these findings, however, they found nothing of the sort. Of the 186 people with the syndrome that this team tested, not one showed signs of XMRV, or of any related virus.

Study coauthor Myra McClure of the Imperial College also criticized the U.S. team and the journal Science for rushing the findings into print in October. “When you’ve got such a stunning result you want to be absolutely clear that you are 1,000 per cent right and there are things in that [previous study] I would not have done. I would have waited. I would have stalled a little” [The Independent], she said.

As for the new study conducted in London, McClure declared: “We used very sensitive testing methods to look for the virus. If it had been there, we would have found it…. We are confident our results show there is no link between XMRV and CFS, at least in the UK” [The Guardian]. But the U.K. team says its contradictory findings could have resulted from differences in patients. According to the new study, the discrepancy “may be a result of population differences between North America and Europe regarding the general prevalence of XMRV infection, and might also explain the fact that two US groups found XMRV in prostate cancer tissue, while two European studies did not.”

Though McClure and her colleagues can’t say for sure how they and the Americans came to such different results, they wanted to put a stop to the rush of patients who started seeking antiretroviral treatments for chronic fatigue after the Science paper came out in October (XMRV is a retrovirus, like HIV). They say potent antiretroviral drugs should not be used to treat CFS because there is not enough evidence that this is necessary or helpful. The drugs may do more harm than good, they say [BBC News].

This might throw a wrench into the plans of Judy A. Mikovits, the lead author of the U.S. paper, to go ahead with antiretroviral testing. But the “avalanche of subsequent studies” that one medical researcher predicted to The New York Times after Mikovits’ paper is sure to continue.

Related Content:
80beats: Scientist Smackdowns
80beats: “Yuppie Flu” Isn’t Just in the Head: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Linked to a Virus
80beats: Could Prostate Cancer Be Caused by a Sexually Transmitted Virus?
Discoblog: What’s in a Name? Real Diseases Suffer from Silly Name Syndrome

Image: Whittemore Peterson Institute

Researchers from the Charles Darwin University in Darwin, Australia (they really like Darwin there, apparently) thought they had schemed up a clever way to study how Australian Green Tree Frogs regulate their body temperature.

They surgically implanted temperature-sensitive radio transmitters inside the frogs’ bellies, but months later when they went to retrieve the frogs, the scientists found the transmitters scattered on the ground. Like so many great scientific discoveries, the researchers eventually went from “huh?” to “aha!” according to Nature News:

Researchers have discovered that these amphibians can absorb foreign objects from their body cavities into their bladders and excrete them through urination.

For the frogs, this means that any thorns or spiny insects they swallow while hopping around trees are safely (but painfully?) removed from the body.

This is the first time this phenomenon has been observed in an animal’s bladder, but some fish and snake species can absorb objects into their intestines from their body cavity and remove them by defecation.

Talk about adaptations that would make Darwin proud.

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Image: flickr / VannaGocaraRupa

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has seen first light — in other words, taken its first image from space!

[Click to embiggen and get access to a big TIFF version.]

Nice. It may not look as pretty as a Hubble or Spitzer shot at first glance, but to an astronomer it’s the Mona Lisa. The images are sharp (it’s in focus), the stars are not overexposed, diffuse sources are detected, and the diffraction spikes (the crosshairs centered on stars) are clean.

In other words: bingo!

This is an engineering image, not a science one. So it’s not supposed to be gorgeous or ready for publication or anything like that. It’s more like an aliveness test, to make sure the spacecraft is operating as expected. And it is!

This image is an 8-second exposure of a region in the constellation Carina. Normally, WISE will always be on the move, constantly sweeping the sky and taking data. But in this case, they pointed it at one spot to make sure everything was working. WISE works in the infrared, and this picture is actually a composite of three images: blue represents light at 3.4 microns (about 5 times longer than what we can see with our eyes), green is 4.6 microns, and red is 12 microns. This is well into the IR, and shows stars and warm dust in that region.

To give you an idea of the scale, the image covers the same area of the sky as three full Moons, so WISE takes big swaths of the sky when it looks around. That’s why it’s called a survey explorer. It will take millions of images of the sky, which can be stitched together to make mosaics.

WISE launched last December, and we’ve been waiting for news that it’s working. This image shows it is, so we can expect very cool stuff coming from the orbiting observatory in the future. The mission is actually quite short, only 10 months long. In October, it’s expected run out of the frozen hydrogen (!) being used to cool the detectors — warm objects emit infrared light, and you don’t want your telescope glowing in the light you want to see. In this case, the hydrogen keeps WISE’s cameras at a bone-crushing 8 Kelvin, or -445° F.

You can read more about this in my earlier post about WISE. My congrats to the team!

African chimpanzees know how to handle wildfire, as DISCOVER noted last month. But lava is a different deal. Nyamulagira, a volcano in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, began to erupt over the weekend and threatened not only the people nearby, but also the endangered primates that live in the area. The southerly lava flow appears to have spared most human settlements and the mountain gorillas of Virunga National Park, but the native chimps haven’t been so lucky.

The 40 eastern chimpanzees that live on Nyamulagira itself could still be at risk if they are surrounded by lava, and as the plants they rely on for food become coated by abrasive volcanic ash. Park officials hope animals in the lava’s path will simply move away from it [New Scientist]. United Nations peacekeepers, who are in the Congo to protect civilians from the seemingly unending war there, have offered the country’s leaders the use of UN planes and helicopters to monitor the situation.

Innocent Mburanumwe, a warden of the nature reserve, didn’t even recognize the disaster at first. “I thought there was fighting again near our park station,” he said, referring to the conflicts which have wracked eastern DR Congo. “Then I saw the mountain was on fire with sparks flying” [BBC News]. Due in large part to that Congolese warfare, the chimp population was already in decline before this eruption. The so-called “Tonga group” of chimps most directly affected by the eruption is estimated to have been reduced to as few as 40 animals prior to the latest threat [The Independent]. No official count is available, though, because it’s simply too dangerous for conservationists to work in the area.

Virunga National Park is Africa’s oldest, and its mountain gorillas account for 200 of the 720 remaining in the world. But this has always been a precarious area. Nyamulagira tends to erupt every three or four years; its last explosion came in 2006.

In happier volcano news, the lingering threat to the Philippines seems to be waning. For weeks Mt. Mayon threatened to erupt, sending many people scrambling to get away. But the government says that volcanic earthquakes have diminished in number, and officials reduced the alert level for Mayon. Still, the volcano may yet emit many tons of sulfur dioxide as it degases.

Related Content:
80beats: Chimps Don’t Run From Fire—They Dance with It
80beats: Do Hot, Dry Conditions Cause More African Civil Wars?
80beats: Drilling Into a Stirring Volcano Is (Probably) Safe
DISCOVER: 20 Species We Might Lose, including mountain gorillas
DISCOVER: Gorillas Learn to Keep the Peace

Image: iStockphoto

It’s a classic case of bolting the barn door after the horses are gone. Politicians are angry that the “crotch bomber” (who tried to blow up an airplane of Christmas day) got through airport security with his explosives undetected, and have demanded that full-body scanners be placed in all airports. So far, 19 U.S. airports are using the scanners, and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) hopes to put hundreds more in airports across the country.

Proponents of this technology argue that it’s worth sacrificing privacy (and modesty) for safety. But in their rush to do something policymakers be ignoring five big problems with rolling out this technology:

1. Manufacturers aren’t willing to fill orders. According to a spokesperson for Smiths Detection, a manufacturer of millimeter-wave body scanners, the scanner technology has not yet been certified as fit for purpose by national governments – and manufacturers will not invest in mass production until it has [New Scientist]. Until the TSA and the European Union certify the technology, don’t expect manufactures to rush into production, seeing as how the scanners cost around $125,000 each.

2. They won’t actually catch that many threats. According to a spokesperson for QinetiQ, another body scanner manufacturer, airport body scanners would be “unlikely” to detect many of the explosive devices used by terrorist groups [BBC News]. QinetiQ said the technology probably wouldn’t have detected the Christmas day underwear bomb. Neither would the scanners have caught the explosives from the 2006 airliner liquid bomb plot, nor the explosives used in the 2005 London Tube train bombing. The body scanners aren’t very useful for detecting liquids and plastics and can only help spotlight irregularities under a person’s clothes, said the spokesperson. Singling out every irregularity for further screening will place a heavy burden on airport security (read: bring a pillow with you to the airport).

3. The scanners may violate child pornography laws. A trial run of the scanners in Britain was only allowed to proceed after children under 18 were exempt from screening. The decision followed a warning from Terri Dowty, of Action for Rights of Children, that the scanners could breach the Protection of Children Act 1978, under which it is illegal to create an indecent image or a “pseudo-image” of a child [Guardian]. It’s not clear if children would continue to be exempt from screening should the scanners become widely used, or where the United States stands on screening children. (And then there’s other types of pornography to worry about–imagine the media frenzy that would ensue should a celebrity body scan make its way to the tabloids. The images are not supposed to be stored after their creation, but many critics say the security personnel analyzing the images are poorly monitored to ensure the scans are disposed properly.)

4. Other countries won’t use them. A year ago, Germany said “nein” to the idea of using full body scanners in its airports, saying the technology is little more than security theater. There is some indication that the German government has recently softened its stance, but its new position has a lot of “ifs.” German Interior Minister Thomas de Mazière said he is ready to introduce full body scanners if they are safe and “fully guarantee” the privacy rights of passengers. Wolfgang Bosbach, Bundestag interior committee chief, told Germany’s Tagesspiegel: “If this technology [full body scanners] has demonstrated its usefulness in practice, i.e. it works reliably and is quick, we should use it” [Christian Science Monitor]. See reasons 2 and 3 above.

5. Full body scanners can’t see inside your body. Generally, the machines can’t find items stashed in a body cavity. So the scanners wouldn’t stop at least one common smuggling method used by drug traffickers [New York Daily News]. It’s not hard to imagine terrorists following in drug smugglers’ footsteps–in fact, one already has. In September, an Al Qaeda suicide bomber hid explosives in his rectum in an attempt to kill a Saudi Prince (but because the bomber’s flesh absorbed most of the blast, he died and the prince survived).

The bottom line? Playing catch-up with evildoers probably won’t do much good, which is essentially what the TSA is doing with its embrace of full body scanning technology–along with its current rules about liquids and removing one’s shoes, for that matter.

Related Content:
80beats: Editing Goof Puts TSA Airport Screening Secrets on the Web
80beats: Are Digital Strip Searches Coming Soon To Every Airport Near You?
80beats: TSA Threatens Bloggers Who Published Security Info, Then Backs Off

Image: TSA

You may have heard the recent news that an expert panel of pediatricians reviewed the literature on gastrointestinal disorders and autism, and found no link between them. A key phrase in their findings was

The existence of a gastrointestinal disturbance specific to persons with ASDs (eg, “autistic enterocolitis”) has not been established.

They also found that there was no evidence that special diets help autistic kids. Mind you, this was a panel of 28 experts, scientists who have devoted their careers and lives to investigating autism.

So if you were a reporter at ABC News, who would you turn to to get an opinion on this? If you said Jenny McCarthy, then give yourself a gold star, because that’s just what ABC News did. Go and watch that interview (have some antacid ready). In it, she says that scientists need to take anecdotes seriously, a statement so awful it’s hard to know where to start with it.

First of all, scientists did take the anecdotes seriously. That’s why they investigated any possible links between GI disorders, diets, and autism. What they found was that there is no link.

Second, McCarthy confuses anecdotes with data. As I have said before, anecdotes are where you start an investigation, not where you finish one. That’s the difference between science (aka reality) and nonsense. You can convince yourself of all manners of silliness through personal experience. I decide to whistle before drinking my coffee one morning, and I find a $20 bill in the street. So does that mean if I whistle every morning before my java I will find money? No, of course not. But that’s precisely the type of thinking McCarthy is promoting.

Getting back to ABC News, they also posted a story that tries to throw all sorts of doubt on the results of the report by the pediatric experts. I suppose they’re trying to find balance and all that in this issue, but again, as I have said before, sometimes stories don’t have two sides. There is reality, and there’s fantasy.

Should they post a rebuttal by an astrologer every time we find a new extrasolar planet? How about getting a creationist’s opinion on a new malaria vaccine?

Sadly, Jenny McCarthy is news because she’s the voice of a group of people who listen to her, but that’s at least in part due to the fact that the news organizations treat her seriously. It’s a self-fulfilling news cycle, and ABC News just gave it another nice little boost.

Shame on you, ABC News. Shame.

Happily, not every news outlet is so gullible. USA Today just posted a great article about the dangers of not vaccinating your kids, and they don’t pull any punches. Because people like Jenny McCarthy muddy the waters and add so much noise to the real science, people are turning away from real medicine and embracing “alternative” methods that we know don’t work.

The result it not just that kids who need help aren’t getting it (the so-called “what’s the harm?” fallacy). The result is that kids are getting sick, and some of them are dying. When you reject reality and turn to nonsense, it has real effects. And it’s not just affecting your kids, it affects all kids.

Talk to your physician about vaccines, autism, and diets. Read the real work being done.

Tip o’ the syringe to Gary Schwitzer.

Pictured: A generator at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in France powers what are known as “kicker magnets,” which help direct beams of high-energy electrons that whiz around the facility at high speeds. Other magnets wiggle the circulating particle beams, causing them to emit intense X-rays. ESRF’s accelerator is the most powerful synchrotron light source in Europe. Researchers at the facility use this energetic radiation to probe the structures of diverse targets that include superstrong glass, fossils trapped in amber, and proteins produced by malaria parasites.

When it comes to peculiar penises, there’s no shortage in the animal kingdom. Just last month DISCOVER blogger Carl Zimmer documented new research into why many male ducks have such an extravagant spiral-shaped phallus. This week, in a paper (in press) in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the study of goofy genitalia follows fruit flies.

The male fruit fly has a penis that resembles a medieval weapon, dotted with hooks and spines. Are those barbs there to remove rival sperm, or pierce the female’s genital tract to allow sperm a shortcut, or something else? There was one way to find out: lasers.

Scientists used lasers to shave the extra equipment off male fruit flies’ penises and set them free to try to mate. And, as it turned out, the hooks and spines simply help a male hang onto a female for the whole 10 minutes it take them to mate; without them, he didn’t do so well. From “Not Exactly Rocket Science”:

They found that a partial shave did nothing, but the full treatment significantly reduced the odds of the males mating with females. With the spines, they were virtually guaranteed to mate if a female was around; without them, their chances fell to around 20%. It wasn’t for lack of trying either – all of the shorn males tried to woo a female and almost all tried to mate. They simply failed. They did all the right things – mounting, placing their genitals in the right place – but it was for nought. And if the spineless males were placed in direct competition with a normal one over a female, they almost always lost.

Related Content:
Discoblog: The Strange, Violent Sex Lives of Fruit Flies & Beeltes
80beats: Meet the Sexually Irresistible Fruit Fly
The Loom: Kinkiness Beyond Kinky

Image: Wikimedia Commons / André Karwath

A few weeks ago the American Museum of Natural History posted a video showing a voyage from the surface of the Earth to the last-scattering surface (at the “edge” of the Universe). What makes the video unique is that it is based on real data, not an artist’s conception. The thin ellipses represent actual satellites orbiting the Earth; the dots represent the location of actual quasars billions of lightyears away. (No, the Universe is not composed of pie slices of galaxies, as in the movie. They used data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which is one of our most comprehensive views of the Universe, but which has only surveyed certain areas of the sky.) Perhaps most amazingly, the video has gone viral–with over 1.9 million views and thousands of comments to date.

I was lucky enough to see an (interactive) preview of this video while I was in New York attending the Amaldi meeting. It is a modern retelling of the Powers of Ten video by Charles and Ray Eames (who, as it happens, also designed fabulous furniture; I’ve been lusting after an Eames recliner for years [how many pieces of furniture have their own wikipedia entry?]). The videos help us develop a healthy perspective, which is a good way to start off the New Year. It is humbling, after all, to realize how insignificant we really are. Yes, we have the gall to change our planet, and threaten all living beings on its fragile surface. But, still, in the grand scheme of things, we’re a grain of sand in a vast and beautiful ocean. We’re totally irrelevant. I find this to be oddly reassuring and calming.