Author: Discover Main Feed

This past Sunday was the sixth anniversary of the NASA rover Spirit’s landing on Mars and the beginning of its adventures on the red planet. However, this anniversary is shaping up to be its last. As we’ve previously covered here at DISCOVER, Spirit has gotten itself into a jam.

A sand trap and balky wheels are challenges to Spirit’s mobility that could prevent NASA’s rover team from using a key survival strategy for the rover. The team may not be able to position the robot’s solar panels to tilt toward the sun to collect power for heat to survive the severe Martian winter [NASA]. The rover has been stuck in the Martian sand for nine months with only four of its six wheels functioning. Now, NASA says the rover may run out of power and shut down by May.

NASA is close to throwing in the towel on its attempts to extract Spirit from its rut, so the sandpit known as “Troy” may be Spirit’s final resting place. To conserve power, the rescue operation may come to a halt this month. Unless Sprit can angle its solar arrays to capture the maximum possible sunlight, it faces the prospect of freezing to death when winter arrives in five months, since it won’t be able to power the internal heaters which protect its electronics. NASA explains that the current tilt is “nearly five degrees toward the south”, which is “unfavorable because the winter sun crosses low in the northern sky” [Register].

Whether or not Spirit can break free of the sand trap, the rover has already exceeded expectations with its research on Mars’ environment–it was initially scheduled to perform only a 90-day mission. In fact, until it kicks the bucket, Spirit can keep gathering data while bogged down in the sand. NASA scientists believe they can use the rover to gather data about the interior of Mars, Martian weather, and any interesting deposits near the rover’s wheels.

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Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

This fall, I gave a number of lectures about the evolution of swine flu. By the time I got to the end of the talk, I could tell that a lot of people in the audience were feeling a bit resigned, given the way evolution allows viruses like the flu to evade our best attacks. (Here’s the full video of my lecture at the University of British Columbia.)

To try to cheer up the crowd, I’d offer a note of hope–the notion that we could turn the evolution of viruses against them, by pushing them into mutation overdrive. (This slide gets across the basic idea–the flu virus is like a sports car. Going fast is cool. Going too fast–not so cool.)

In tomorrow’s New York Times, I lay out this intriguing idea, that goes by the profoundly cool name of lethal mutagenesis. Check it out.

I received a mysterious email recently, promoting what to me sounds like a great idea: a concerted effort in the UK to increase the public awareness that homeopathy is quackery, pure and simple. It’s called the 10:23 Campaign, and it’s being promoted by various skeptic groups in Britain. The website is a placeholder for now, but you can sign up there for updates.

Why do this? Well, as they say,

Homeopathy is an ancient, pre-scientific and absurd pseudoscience. Yet it persists today as an accepted complementary medicine, largely because people don’t know what it is.

The 10:23 Campaign aims to show the public what homeopathy is and explain how we know it doesn’t work. It will launch in early 2010.

Excellent. And why call it the 10:23 Campaign? Well, happily I have a mole who informs me of such things.

Remember the embarrassment that the Transportation Security Administration suffered last month, when a bout of lax editing allowed the TSA standard operating manual to leak across the Web? Last week, the TSA inflicted another public relations snafu upon itself. Agents subpoenaed two travel bloggers who published the organization’s temporary procedures in the wake of the attempted Christmas Day airline bombing, only to drop the subpoenas shortly thereafter.

The document, which the two bloggers published within minutes of each other Dec. 27, was sent by TSA to airlines and airports around the world and described temporary new requirements for screening passengers through Dec. 30, including conducting “pat-downs” of legs and torsos. The document, which was not classified, was posted by numerous bloggers. Information from it was also published on some airline websites [Wired.com]. Still, the TSA (which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS) decided to target the two bloggers, Chris Elliott and Steven Frischling, to make them reveal who leaked the information to them. And the strong-arm tactics the agency used quickly made it look draconian and repressive.

After both men published accounts (Elliott, Frischling) of the TSA threats on their blogs, media outlets picked up the story and the TSA dropped both subpoenas. Public embarrassment could have induced the TSA to leave the bloggers be, but the agency may have already had what it wanted by the time the story broke. DHS officials returned to Mr Frischling’s home on Wednesday morning and forced him to hand over his laptop computer. The TSA has since dropped both subpoenas, but it’s certainly possible that the agency was able to discern the leaker’s identity by sifting through the information on Mr Frischling’s computer [The Economist].

Perhaps the TSA simply wanted to find out who sends its info to members of the media, even though the information in this case wasn’t actually classified. In a statement Friday, the the agency wrote, “TSA takes any breach in security very seriously. In light of the posting of sensitive security information on the web, TSA sought to identify where the information came from. The investigation is nearing a successful conclusion and the subpoenas are no longer in effect” [CNN]. Frischling said the TSA also apologized to him, but only after taking the laptop and threatening to get him fired from his job writing a blog for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Wired.com reports. Frischling also says the TSA agents indicated that they could have him declared a security risk, which presumably meant he’d be flagged for additional screening at airports.

The TSA’s public stance, expecting privacy for information sent to thousands of people around the world (and posted on some airline Web sites), smacks of the same unfair finger-pointing that the U.S. Senate was guilty of when it lambasted the TSA in response to the leak of the standard operation manual in early December. At that time, the TSA lacked an official head because of a political fight in the Senate over nominee Erroll Southers, led by Senator Jim DeMint. The South Carolina Republican wants Mr. Southers to promise that he would oppose granting collective-bargaining rights to the TSA’s tens of thousands of employees [Wall Street Journal]. A month later, that fight still goes on, and the TSA remains without a Senate-approved leader.

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Image: TSA

Relax, Indiana Jones. Snakes aren’t so scary… as long as you’re wearing a good pair of jeans.

According to research done by scientists in California, denim provides more than classic American fashion statement. While this may seem somewhat obvious, the researchers are happy to announce that covering your legs with jeans doesn’t just reduce the amount of venom that a snakebite can inject into your system—it reduces it by a lot. From Reuters:

Drs. Shelton S. Herbert and William K. Hayes used latex gloves filled with saline to simulate a human appendage, then exposed the gloves to bites from small and large southern Pacific rattlesnakes. Some of the latex “limbs” were covered in a layer of denim.

The researchers found that compared with the jeans-less gloves, those covered in denim absorbed about two-thirds less venom from the rattlesnake bites. Instead, a high proportion of the venom “spilled harmlessly” onto the denim, the researchers report in the Annals of Emergency Medicine.

Two things come to mind as a result of this study. One: Yes, scientists will study anything. And two: If you’re planning to hike in rattlesnake country, forget about working on your leg tan and just throw on those old Levi’s.

Come to think of it, perhaps this explains President Obama wearing those thick, high-waisted “mom jeans” to throw out the first pitch at this summer’s Major League Baseball All-Star Game. The St. Louis Cardinals’ home stadium is presumably free of venomous snakes, but the Secret Service takes nothing for granted.

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Image: flickr / Marcy Reiford

1. A tower in Dubai that opens today has earned the title of world’s tallest building with a height of 2,717 feet (828 meters). That’s more than half a mile high. Actually, it grabbed that title during construction back in July 2007 when it passed Taipei 101, which stands 500 meters tall.

2. Until its official opening today, the building’s exact height was a closely held secret known by only a few people. The building’s architects, Chicago-based Skidmore, Owings, and Merril, speculated last week that someone might try to steal the thunder from the big announcement by measuring the building’s shadow to figure out its height.

3. The opening ceremony included another surprise. The tower, which had been known as the Burj Dubai, was renamed the Burj Khalifa, in honor of Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the president of the neighboring emirate Abu Dhabi. The last-minute switch carries a symbolic weight in light of the billions of dollars oil-rich Abu Dhabi has poured into Dubai in order to cover its debts [The New York Times].

4. The Burj is not only the tallest building in the world, it’s also home to the highest observation deck, swimming pool, elevator, restaurant, and fountain in the world.

5. Speaking of the acrophobia inducing elevator, it travels at speeds roughly 40 miles per hour (65 kilometers per hour) and reaches the observation deck in about 2 minutes.

6. Once at the top, visitors can enjoy temperatures that are nearly 15 degrees cooler than at the building’s base.

7. Dubai is built in the middle of the desert, so to withstand the UAE’s 120-degree blistering summer heat the tower is covered with 24,348 cladding panels.

8. Many skyscrapers are built to bend with the wind—the Burj, which will be exposed to strong desert winds, more than others. According to lead architect George Efstathiou, “the building is tuned to sway slowly so your middle ear doesn’t pick it up,” Efstathiou explained. “They tune it just like a musical instrument so that the harmonics of the building don’t coincide with the harmonics caused by the wind…. We tune it so that on the floors where people are going to be, you don’t feel it that much” [CNN].

9. Before all those floors fill up with people, Burj Khalifa has an empty weight of 500,000 tons.

10. The building won’t be empty much longer, however. So if you want in, you better hurry; 90 percent of the 900 residences (not including the soon-to-open Giorgio Armani-designed hotel) have been sold.

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Image: flickr / joi

Long known for their obliterating power, black holes may also have been a creative force: New evidence suggests that they gave order to the chaotic mess produced by the Big Bang.

When quarterback Tom Brady tore a knee ligament last year, the New England Patriots got a rude lesson in the limits of modern medicine: Repairing injured ligaments, tendons, and cartilage is difficult, much trickier than mending a broken bone. When tendons—essential connectors between muscle and bone—are severed, surgical attempts to anchor the tendon to bone often fail because the materials are so different. The problem is akin to joining a rope to a cement wall.

It’s been simultaneously amusing and horrifying to read through the comments on my post about the misguided atheist holiday display in Illinois. This is still the Internet after all, and “reading comprehension” is not a highly valued skill, even among subsamples self-selected for their logic and reasoning abilities.

In brief: thinking that atheists shouldn’t be needlessly obnoxious doesn’t make me a “faithiest” or an “accommodationist” or someone without the courage of my convictions. Those would be hard charges to support against someone who wrote this or this or this or this. I just think it’s possible to have convictions without being a jerk about them. “I disagree with you” and “You are a contemptible idiot” are not logically equivalent.

Phil just pointed to a good post by Steve Cumo about precisely the same issue, with “atheism” replaced by “skepticism.” A lot of skeptics/atheists are truly excited and passionate about their worldviews, and that’s unquestionably a good thing. But it can turn into a bad thing if we allow that passion to manifest itself as contempt for everyone who disagrees with us. (For certain worthy targets, sure.) There’s certainly a place for telling jokes, or calling a crackpot a crackpot; being too afraid of stepping on people’s toes is just as bad as stomping on feet for the sheer joy of it. But there’s also a place for letting things slide, living to dispute another day.

We atheists/skeptics have a huge advantage when it comes to reasonable, evidence-based argumentation: we’re right. (Provisionally, with appropriate humble caveats about those aspects of the natural world we don’t yet understand.) We don’t need to stoop to insults to win debates; reality is on our side. And there are many people out there who are willing to listen to logic and evidence, when presented reasonably and in good faith. We should always presume that people who disagree with us are amenable to reasonable discussion, until proven otherwise. (Cf. the Grid of Disputation. See also Dr. Free-Ride.)

That’s very different than “accommodationism,” which holds that science and religion aren’t really in conflict. The problem with accommodationism isn’t that its adherents aren’t sufficiently macho or strident; it’s that they’re wrong. And when respected organizations like the National Academy of Sciences, the National Center for Science Education, or the American Association for the Advancement of Science go on record as claiming that science and religion are completely compatible, as if they were speaking for scientists, that’s unconscionable and should be stopped. They don’t have to go on at great length about how a scientific worldview undermines religious belief, even if it’s true; they can just choose not to say anything at all about religion. That’s not their job.

It’s also wrong to fetishize politeness for its own sake. Some people manage to forfeit the right to be taken seriously or treated politely. But that shouldn’t be the default position. And being polite doesn’t make you more likely to be correct, or vice-versa. And — to keep piling on the caveats — being “polite” doesn’t mean “keeping quiet,” at least as a general principle. We all know people who will resort to a cowardly tactic of claiming to be “offended” when you say something perfectly reasonable with which they happen to disagree. There’s no reason to give into that; but the solution is not to valorize obnoxiousness for its own sake.

The irony is that the pro-obnoxious crowd (obnoxionists?) is ultimately making the same mistake as the accommodationist crowd. Namely: blurring the lines between the truth of a claim and the manner in which the claim is presented. Accommodationists slide from “we can work together, in a spirit of mutual respect, with religious people on issues about which we agree” to “we should pretend that science and religion are compatible.” But obnoxionists tend to slide from “we disagree with those people” to “we should treat those people with contempt.” Neither move is really logically supportable.

A lot of the pro-obnoxiousness sentiment stems from a feeling that atheism is a disrespected minority viewpoint in our culture, and I have some sympathy with that. Atheists should never be ashamed of their beliefs, or afraid to support them vigorously. And — let’s be honest — there’s a certain amount of pleasure to be found in being part of a group where everyone sits around congratulating each other on their superior intellect and reasoning abilities, while deriding their opponents with terms like “superstition” and “brain damage” and “child abuse.” But these are temptations to be avoided, not badges of honor.

Within the self-reinforcing culture of vocal non-believers, it’s gotten to the point where saying that someone is “nice” has become an insult. Let me hereby stake out a brave, contrarian position: in favor of being nice. I think that folks in the reality-based community should be the paragons of reasonableness and even niceness, while not yielding an inch on the correctness of their views. We should be the good guys. We are in possession of some incredible truths about this amazing universe in which we live, and we should be promoting positive messages about the liberating aspects of a life in which human beings are responsible for creating justice and beauty, rather than having them handed to us by supernatural overseers. Remarkably, I think it’s possible to be positive and nice (when appropriate) and say true things at the same time. But maybe that’s just my crazy utopian streak.

The mysterious and deadly facial cancer that has sent populations of Tasmanian devils crashing now has a known source, according to findings published last week in the journal Science. The ailment originated in nerve cells of the devils themselves.

A genetic analysis of tumors from Tasmanian devils widely separated geographically shows that all the tumors are virtually identical and distinct from the animals’ own genomes…. The tumors probably arose from Schwann cells, which normally play a role in protecting and cushioning nerves [Los Angeles Times]. Tasmanian devils have a lot of nerves on their faces near their whiskers, the researchers note, and therefore have Schwann cells there. Team member Jenny Graves says the tumor could have arisen in one cell in one animal two decades ago, and then passed from devil to devil as they bit each other. The disease has already killed 60 percent of the population.

Graves says the findings have real practical value. “The good news is that one of the active proteins is easy to detect and it will give us the chance to diagnose the cancer early, which is important for setting up cancer-free ‘insurance populations’,” she added. “It also allows us to study the way the cancer changes over a long period, which potentially offers new insights for all cancer research” [The Times]. Hopefully new insights for these marsupials will come fast; at present rates the cancer could wipe out all Tasmanian devils in 30 to 50 years.

Tasmanian devils are an easy target for such a plague because they’re such a small, inbred population. Tasmanian devils are so genetically similar to one another that their immune systems don’t recognize infectious cancer cells from another individual as foreign [Science News]. The same kind of phenomenon showed up in 2006 in dogs.

For more on the Tasmanian devil paper, check out DISCOVER blogger Carl Zimmer’s post at The Loom.

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Image: flickr / JLplusAL

Deep in the heart of a globular cluster orbiting an elliptical galaxy, it looks very much as if a massive black hole is in the process of tearing apart and devouring the remnant of an old star. And how do we know we’re witnessing this violent stellar demise? Black holes are messy eaters.

The discovery comes from the Chandra Observatory, a telescope in space designed to detect X-rays. This high-energy form of light can only be generated by violent events, things like exploding stars, strong magnetic fields, or extremely hot objects. Astronomers (including Jimmy Irwin, an old friend I went to grad school with!) using Chandra detected an unusually bright source of X-rays coming from a globular cluster — a tightly packed collection of stars — belonging to NGC 1399, a galaxy 65 million light years away. In the picture above (a combination of Chandra X-ray images and optical images from the huge Magellan telescopes in Chile), the galaxy is the bright blob on the right, and the new object — called a ULX for Ultra Luminous X-ray source — is marked with the red lines.

We know black holes exist in globular clusters, so that’s nothing new. We also know stars are so jam-packed in globulars that it’s not only possible but relative common (on a cosmic scale) for these stars to interact gravitationally. When a star gets too near a black hole, it can have matter pulled from its surface, which falls into the black hole. As it plummets to its death, it can first pile up just outside The Point of No Return, whipping madly around the hole, and heating up so violently it can emit X-rays.

That sort of thing has been seen before. What’s new here is that first, the type of X-ray emission seen from this event indicates that the star isn’t simply giving up matter slowly to the black hole; it’s actually getting torn apart, physically shredded by the vast gravity of the black hole. Second, what the astronomers have seen is that the emission is rich in the element of oxygen, but oddly missing hydrogen. Hydrogen is the most common element in the Universe, and all normal stars are almost entirely made of the stuff (the Sun is, for example). Not seeing it means the star getting eaten up by the black hole is most likely a white dwarf, the dense remnant of a dead star’s core. After a lifetime of fusing hydrogen into helium, there typically isn’t any hydrogen left in a star’s core. Once the star dies, the remaining core becomes a white dwarf, devoid of hydrogen but also commonly rich in oxygen.

So not only is this possibly the first time a black hole has been caught in the act of viciously ripping a star apart, the star itself is a bit of an oddball.

And there’s more, too. Looking at spectra taken of the object reveals how fast the material is moving as it orbits the black hole, and that in turn tells us how massive the black hole is. What astronomers found is that this particular black hole must have a mass of a thousand times that of the Sun! Because of the way black holes form, it’s common to see them have a few times the mass of the Sun, or even as much as 20 or so. We also see truly gigantic ones with millions or billions of times the Sun’s mass. But it’s recently been theorized that intermediate-mass black holes exist as well, with hundreds or thousands of times our Sun’s mass. Observations have been tantalizing about these objects, and this new evidence from Chandra adds to the idea that middle-weight black holes exist.

I think observations like this are very exciting. When a new type of object is suspected, or even found, we usually get incremental supporting evidence for them. But it’s rare to get a twofer: not only does this support the existence of intermediate mass black holes, but we caught one in the act of violently tearing apart its dead neighbor. In a hundred years or so, the last morsels of the white dwarf will fall into the black hole, never to be seen again. Not even crumbs will be left, so it’s pretty cool we were able to see this when we did.

In what sounds like a medical mystery suitable for Dr. House, doctors in Leeds couldn’t figure out why antibiotic treatment wasn’t working for a 29-year-old British man with a three week history of a red, watery, and light-sensitive eye. As the doctors soon discovered, this wasn’t your normal case of pink eye, according to the Los Angeles Times:

Once examined under high magnification lenses, hair-like projections were spotted at varying depths within the cornea. When these details were discussed with the patient, he immediately recalled an incident that had preceded the onset of his symptoms. 3 weeks earlier, he had been cleaning the glass tank of his pet, a Chilean Rose tarantula. While his attention was focused on a stubborn stain, he sensed movement in the terrarium. He turned his head and found that the tarantula, which was in close proximity, had released “a mist of hairs” which hit his eyes and face.

It’s hard to believe a blast of projectile hairs to his eyeball slipped the patient’s mind.

In hindsight, protective goggles would have been a good investment considering that Chilean Rose tarantulas are known to launch their barbed hairs at attackers in self-defense. The hairs were too tiny to be removed by microforceps, so the spider owner is left with taking steroid eye drops to clear up his symptoms.

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Image: flickr / Furryscaly

In just two weeks, I’m looking forward to participating in a discussion at ScienceOnline ‘10 with two of my favorite science bloggers: Janet and Isis. Our panel–as the title of this post suggests–is “Online Civility and Its (Muppethugging) Discontents.” As you can imagine, the session outta be good! Over the weekend, we chatted about the plan–and that’s where you come in…

Janet has posted the following terrific questions over at her place, and I encourage readers to read through them while thinking about the meaning of online ‘civility‘. We invite you to contribute with your perspective in comments below or at the ScienceOnline’10 wiki.

– Is there some special problem of online civility (vs. offline civility)?

• Is being civil online essentially the same as being civil in offline engagements (whether dialogues, debates, street fights, more unidirectional communications, or interactions not primarily aimed at communication)?
• Is being civil online fundamentally different than being civil in offline engagements? (If so, why? How?)
• Is being civil online different from being civil online, but only in degree? (Again, if so, why? How?)

– To the extent that online communities and venues for interaction reproduce the norms* off offline communities and venues for interaction in terms of expectations for civility and politeness (including agreed upon definitions of “civility” and “politeness”), is this a good thing or a bad thing? (For whom?)

*Here “norms” means “what people in the community recognize they ought to do, or not to do” rather than “whatever most people actually do”. (This is a distinction we’ve discussed before.)

That last question, of course, opens up the tempting and possibly-related subject of online spaces as an opportunity to remake the offline world. In such a project of making a new world, different people are bound to have different desiderata, at least some of them related to their different experiences of the offline world.

Which is to say, asking a question about what we think counts as civil or uncivil online is bound to prompt a response along the lines of “What do you mean we, Kemosabe?” (I first heard this question on a Bill Cosby comedy LP, but at the moment the Google-fu required to nail down which one to give a proper attribution is failing me.)

– What do we mean by “we” in these discussion of online civility?

– What does it mean to be “on the same team,” or members of the same “community,” at least from the point of view of feeling like we’re entitled to expect a certain level of regard or kind of treatment from each other?

– What are the prospects for successful coalition building across fairly significant differences (which might include differences in preferred level of “politeness” or “civility”)?

– What are the prospects for successful coalition building when the differences include not respecting other people’s feelings and/or prioritizing one’s own insulation against feeling bad above everything else?

– Are calls to be civil, discussions of tone, etc., primarily about hurt feelings? Is casting them this way dismissive, marginalizing, and/or factually incorrect?

– Are there particular issues for which you have no realistic expectation that it’s possible to discuss them civilly (either online, offline, or both)? What are they, and why do you think discussing them civilly is so frackin’ hard?

Last week, while the world gearing up to ring in a new year, China was quietly reeling from a new pollution scare. A pipeline operated by the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC)—the country’s number one oil producer—ruptured and spilled 40,000 gallons of diesel in the northern part of the country.

The spill occurred in the Wei River, a tributary of the Yellow River–which is the source of fresh water for millions of Chinese. Over the weekend, workers threw 17 floating dams across the Wei to block the toxic diesel and save the Yellow River. But scientists discovered diesel traces in a reservoir behind a dam in Sanmenxia, a city about 100 kilometers (62 miles) downstream from the point where the Wei meets the Yellow River, an official in the Henan provincial environmental protection bureau said on Monday [Wall Street Journal].

CNPC claimed the spill wasn’t its fault. The company blamed the spill on a construction company building a project near the underground pipeline that transported diesel from northwestern China’s Gansu to central Hunan province [AFP]. Chinese government officials have been typically tight-lipped with details, but BBC News reports that officials have warned the people of three counties in the Shaanxi province not to drink river water.

While workers scramble to protect the Yellow River, the 3,400-mile-long waterway already is in bad shape. Chinese research last year found that at least one-third of the Yellow River was unfit for even industrial use. The accident mirrors a 2005 explosion that released 100 tons of toxic benzene into the Songhua river in northeastern China, tainting the water supply for several million residents of the city of Harbin [TIME]. That incident also sparked tensions with Russia, where the Songhua eventually flows.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons / André Holdrinet

Speaking of being a skeptic…

The skeptic who goes by the name QualiaSoup on YouTube posts fantastic short videos outlining why critical thinking is important, and his new one is no exception:

This one isn’t as hard-hitting as some of his others, but it outlines just why we need to think critically, and his message at the end is particularly apt.

35,000 years ago, humans in what’s now Germany were making sophisticated flutes from the bones of griffon vultures.

Myriad Genetics owns the patent over certain breast cancer genes, effectively giving them ownership over any test involving the genes.

The CERN theoretical physicist looks ahead to what will happen when the LHC gets cranked up to full power.

This week’s contribution to The Science of Kissing Gallery comes from a particularly gorgeous woman I adore in the science blogosphere. Thanks to her for contributing what can only be described as the steamiest image so far. Submit your original photo or artwork here.

Steve Cuno is a skeptic as well as man who knows his marketing — he’s a professional. He’s spoken at two TAMs, both times about how better to market and brand skepticism. His points have hit home with me, because what he says about how we behave as skeptics is something I have seen countless times to be true. He thinks — and I agree — that we need to be more positive about what we know to be true. Instead of only saying “the antivax movement is baloney,” (which we know to be a correct statement) we need to promote actual medicine and talk about why vaccinations are important. I try to do that here on the blog, because I know full well how skeptics are seen outside our own circles: naysayers, pointy-headed ivory tower academics, and so on. By being positive, we promote ourselves much better to the public.

Steve Cuno wrote an article for the JREF’s Swift blog which has many excellent points about how we as skeptics need to think about ourselves and our behavior. I think everyone who has ever sat next to an astrology buff at a dinner party or written anything on the web dealing with skeptical topics should read what Steve wrote, and pay attention to it. We could do a lot worse than to follow the lead he’s laid out.