Author: Discover Main Feed

Big money awaits innovators who can build rockets, sequence genomes, predict people’s movie preferences, harvest energy from the tides, or explore the Moon.

How does a scientist study a million genes? In my latest podcast I talk to John Wooley, a leading figure in the new science of metagenomics. Check it out.

Who needs to dream of a white Christmas when you live in Boulder? But as a devoted astronomer, I need a little polychromaticism in my life, too.

Enjoy a fun and happy holiday, folks.

P.S. Last year’s holiday message still holds, too.

One of the reasons I love this time of year is that Mrs. BA is a fantastic cook and baker. She was making cutout cookies the the day, and asked if I wanted anything special.

Well, duh.

Who wouldn’t want a cookie that’s bigger on the inside than the outside?

And of course, more apropos of the season:

MMMmmmmmm. Sacrilicious.

Modern whale babies come out tail first to prevent drowning. A new fossil suggests ancestral whales came out the other way.

In the harsh dry air, the hermit crab-like animals needed shields to keep their gills warm.

OK, this is it. Last day to buy stuff in a panic before Christmas. What to do?

I suggest the bookstore. Who doesn’t like books? And it just so happens I have a few to recommend.

---

Death from the Skies!
You may not know this, but I wrote a book. Nothing says holiday cheer like a trillion ton asteroid barreling down on the Earth at 45,000 kph. And it has a happy ending! The entire Universe dissolves.

This book may not save Christmas, but it might save your life. All your friends need copies. Even strangers. Buy 50.

---

Don’t Be Such a Scientist
This book, by Randy Olson, is a primer for how scientists and science-types should communicate with the public. As someone whose job it is to do that, I found it readable, funny, and of great use. I chuckled a lot reading it, seeing many people I know being described in its pages. Not specifically, of course, just in general.

At first I was thrown a bit by his comparison of science to Hollywood, but it soon became clear that the lessons Olson learned in Tinseltown really do need to translate to the way we talk about science, at least on TV and in movies. Books are still books, and blogs still blogs, but if we science supporters want to reach millions of people all at once, then we could do a lot worse than heed Olson’s advice when we’re on camera or in front of a microphone.

And if his name is familiar, it’s because he created the mockumentaries “Flock of Dodos” and “Sizzle, A Global Warming Comedy”. If you’ve seen those, you know what the book will be like! If you’ve ever been in a conversation with someone and you’ve tried to explain something scientific, this book is a good one for you.

---

Unscientific America
Speaking of communicating science to the public, my Hive Overmind co-bloggers Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum wrote Unscientific America as a call to arms for scientists everywhere. This book doesn’t complain about how the public doesn’t get science, it actually has advice — good advice — for how people can take up this charge.

It’s aimed at science lovers, but also at scientists themselves. Chris and Sheril are careful to show just where things have gone wrong: a public with a short attention span, media all too willing to make that worse (and to screw up science every chance they get, through ignorance or greed), antiscience promoters, but also scientists themselves. I see a whole lot of scientists trying to communicate science, but honestly not that many are good at it. That should be self-evident, even to scientists themselves; some are theorists, some experimentalists, some field workers, and so on; the point being we all have our areas of expertise. Not everyone is good in front of a camera, and we need to find the ones who are and groom them.

Chris and Sheril took a lot of heat from scientists about this claim, most of which I found ridiculous and unfair. Scientists need to accept our share of the burden of blame for where we are in America right now — we do own part of it, folks — and we need to shoulder that blame and do something about it. Also, there is a section in the book taking the so-called “New Atheists” to task for fanning the religious flames in America. Although the situation is pretty complicated, I think there is truth to what Chris and Sheril wrote, and I also think that this part of the book should be read by skeptics and atheists very carefully. I won’t go into details here — I’ll save it for a lengthier post sometime — but I think what they’ve written is salient and should be considered by everyone.

---

Atheist’s Guide to Christmas
Speaking of which, this is a good book for the non-believer in your circle of friends and family. I’ll simply point you to my previous exhortations about it and remind you that all proceeds go to the UK HIV charity Terrence Higgins Trust, a secular group that provides information, advice, and support for HIV positive people in the UK.

[UPDATE: The outspoken ZOMGitsCriss has put up a video plugging Atheist’s Guide, and says very nice things about my essay in the book. Thanks Criss!]

---

Why Does E=mc²
Regular readers know about my friend Brian Cox, a particle physicist with CERN who has dastardly plans to destroy the Earth using the LHC is charming, funny, and an excellent spokesman for science. This book is a wonderful explanation of relativity, one of the best I’ve read. It was inspired by his awesome wife Gia, who asked him the title question one day.

You’ll need to think while reading this; it’s not a breezy beach thriller. But I found it to be a very enjoyable and fascinating primer on, exactly, why energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. It explains things in ways that hadn’t occurred to me before, and I found myself nodding my head as I suddenly understood concepts that had always bugged me (like, why do massless particles travel at the speed of light, and just why is that the ultimate speed limit of the Universe?). It’s a great book, and I highly recommend it.

---

7th Son
J. C. Hutchins is a science fiction writer and podcaster. He’s among the new group of writers who serialize their fiction and give it away as audiocasts. Once an audience is built up, they can then turn their serialization into book form. I won’t give away the plot of the book, but it’s an engaging read involving some fun science fiction concepts. My only complaint is that he needs to write the sequel yesterday. Too bad it’s not a time travel book!

If you’re curious, Hugo-winning author John Scalzi has a blog post up about J. C. and the book that’ll entice you, too.

---

There are lots of other books I could recommend, but I’ll cut it off here. Do you have ideas? Post ‘em in the comments! I’m sure we all have books we love and would recommend. Tell us!

Atheists can be such uptight downers. And I say that completely seriously and non-sarcastically, despite being a card-carrying atheist myself.

The latest example appears at the Illinois State Capitol, where someone from Freedom From Religion Foundation had the genius idea of erecting this sign among the holiday displays (via PZ):

At the time of the winter solstice, let reason prevail. There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is just myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.

Well now, there’s an uplifting and positive message. I’m sure that lots of religious folks came along to read that sign, and immediately thought “Gee, whoever wrote that sounds so much smarter and more correct than me! I will throw off my superstitious shackles and join them in the celebration of reason.”

There is a place to argue for one’s worldview — but not every single place. I happen to agree with all of the sentences on the sign above, but the decision to put in front and center in a holiday display merits a giant face-palm. (So does calling it “hate speech,” of course.) It’s like you’re introduced to someone at a party, and they immediately say “Wow, you’re ugly. And your clothes look like they were stolen off a homeless person. And you’re drinking a domestic beer, which shows a complete lack of sophistication.” I don’t know about you, but I’d be thinking — “Such taste and discernment! Here’s someone I need to get to know better.”

Until atheists learn that they don’t need to take every possible opportunity to proclaim their own rationality in the face of everyone else’s stupidity, they will have a reputation as tiresome bores. They could have put up a sign that just gave some sort of joyful, positive message. Or something light-hearted and amusing. Or they could have just left the display alone entirely, and restrained the urge to argue in favor of waiting for some more appropriate venue. (Maybe they could start a blog or something.)

Understanding how the real world works is an important skill. So is understanding human beings.

I have been saying for years that a) most UFOs are simply misidentified mundane phenomena (satellites, meteors, balloons, Venus, weird clouds, even the Moon) and that 2) if they were real, astronomers — who spend a lot more time looking at the sky than your average person — should be reporting most of them.

My musings on this have been twisted and distorted by UFO folks — shocker! — even though I’ve been pretty clear about what I would count as evidence. But now we may have a way to cut through the garbage. A new website has been started for professional and amateur astronomers to report Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. I rather like this new UAP acronym, since it avoids the UFO/flying saucer baggage. Anyway, it was set up as part of IYA 2009 to help astronomers report things in the sky they may not immediately understand. Better yet, it has links to handy guides that will help people who might otherwise misidentify normal things like sundogs and other weather phenomena.

The website is the brainchild of Philippe Ailleris:

Despite the controversy surrounding the topic, he believes that it is possible to approach the UAP field from a professional, rational, and scientific angle without any a priori. He considers that UAP studies my increase the scientific understanding of today poorly understood natural phenomenon, and ultimately he even sees the potential for Science to discover new unknown phenomena, therefore making such study invaluable. His research therefore focuses on attempting to raise the interest of the scientific community and to bridge various fields to devise what he believes is the necessary multidisciplinary approach to studying the phenomena.

I agree. As Carl Sagan said, whether UFOs are real and we’re being visited, or they’re a mass social phenomenon due to the way our brains work, either aspect is fascinating and worthy of actual study.

The 134th Carnival of Space blog festival has been posted at Cumbrian Sky, and it’s the Christmas edition! So expect lots of cool blog posts collected about space and astronomy, just like usual, except now with 52% more Christmasy stuff. So it’ll give you something to do when things get a little too Yuley at home and you just need to get away for a few minutes.

Nobody is yet plotting to shrink Raquel Welch and inject her into your veins, but engineers are making notable progress toward the Fantastic Voyage vision: creating miniature probes that could dart around in your blood and treat disease from the inside.

Millions of years ago, a koala looked more like a possum. By studying rare skulls of the famous marsupial that date between 5 and 24 million years old, a team of Australian researchers propose how it got to looking like it does today, with findings published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Food was one driver, they say—millions of years ago koalas ate a variety of foods. The dietary switch to an exclusive eucalypt diet seems to have occurred during the late Miocene period, some 12 to five million years ago, when a drying climate made eucalyptus the dominant forest species [Canberra Times]. As a result, they lost their snouts and developed powerful jaw muscles.

But while koalas need to adapt to the changing food supply, they also needed to stay in communication, and began to develop the low-frequency calls that today can travel half a mile. The researchers hypothesize that the ancient koalas evolved their communication system at a time when the Australian continent was drying out and the koala habitat becoming less dense. By lowering the frequency of their calls, they were able to maintain communication in the sparser forests [Wired.com]. And to hear those low-frequency calls, koalas developed a middle ear with high volume compared to other marsupials.

“The unique cranial configuration of the modern koala is therefore the result of accommodating their masticatory adaptations without compromising their auditory system,” write the researchers [Wired.com]. In other words: you put those two things together and you get today’s adorable but strange marsupial.

Related Content:
80beats: Worsening Drought Threatens Australia’s “Food Bowl”
Discoblog: Rat Risotto And Emu Chips: Thing Not To Eat in Australia
DISCOVER: One Marsupial Too Many

Image: flickr / tinyfroglet

This is simply too cool: the shadow of Saturn’s rings moving across the face of its tiny moon Janus.

This animation is made up of images taken by Cassini (of course) in August. At that time, it was the equinox on Saturn, so the Sun was shining straight down on Saturn’s equator… which happens to be the plane of the orbit for both the rings and the moons. In other words, the Sun was shining straight along the rings. During this brief time, twice per Saturn orbit of 29 years, the moons can cast long shadows across the rings, and the rings can cast shadows on the moons.

Janus really is dinky, just 179 km (111 miles) across, which is why it’s not really all that round. Its gravity isn’t strong enough to crush itself into a sphere. Other moons are bigger, of course, and the Cassini folks just released several other astonishing animations of them as well, showing the moons dancing and eclipsing each other, with Satrun’s rings as the backdrop. This one showing Rhea and Janus is particularly beautiful.

What more can I add? Cassini continues to deliver, over and again. Amazing.

Related posts:
Behold, Saturn
Ringless
Titan’s Shadow
Saturn’s rings do the wave

Photographer Alex Wild picks his favorite images of insects from the year. Bugilicious.

Some people are simply addicted to Facebook, even those that should keep a low profile, according to CNN:

Craig Lynch, 28, escaped Hollesley Bay open prison near Suffolk, eastern England, back in September, but has continued to update his Facebook status regularly — describing everything from his meals to who his next girlfriend will be.

On his Facebook page, Lynch, who was sentenced to seven years for aggravated burglary, is literally giving the finger to the law. The police have spoken with Facebook and are following his status updates like bread crumbs in an attempt to track him down. Then again, ”We’re taking what he’s saying on Facebook with a pinch of salt because he’s now aware that people may be reading what he’s writing,” says one cop.

Uh, not to tell you how to do your job, officers, but maybe you should try tracking the data packets back to the computer he’s using rather than just hoping he’ll make slip up and tell you where he’s hiding out.

Related Content:
Discoblog: Are Happy Facebook Pics Proof That You Aren’t Depressed?
Discoblog: Computer Program Can “Out” Gay Facebook Users
Discoblog: Desperate For Facebook Friends? Buy Some!

One research group has found that an iron-based catalyst works just as well as the platinum catalysts used in fuel cells today.

Four years ago, when Lawrence Summers suggested that the scarcity of prominent female scientists and engineers was in part because there are fewer women on the extremes of the range of innate math ability—fewer geniuses and fewer duds—he stirred up a lot of misguided arguments about gender differences in the brain. Although the former president of Harvard University and current director of the National Economic Council may have been right on a few details, he was wrong on his major point.

Men’s and women’s brains are different, but those distinctions are much smaller than we typically think, and few of them are innate. Rather, the slight asymmetries present at birth, shaped and molded by interests, predilections, and the cues of parents and teachers, grow into more significant gender gaps in adulthood. This divergence is an example of plasticity, the brain’s marvelous ability to adapt and change. “Most differences in behavior develop through experience,” says neuroscientist Lise Eliot of Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science in Chicago. “Nature sets the ball rolling, biasing boys and girls toward different interests, but the gaps themselves are largely due to learning and plasticity.”

I have a tale of death, near death, and undeath to weave for you, but first, gaze upon the jewel-like beauty of the glittering denizens of M30:

This image was taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys on board the Hubble Space Telescope. I had to cut it and compress it drastically to get it to fit on the blog, so you very much want to click on it to embiggen it massively and see it in its fully resolved glory.

The image is of the insanely beautiful globular cluster M30, an ancient city of a few hundred thousand stars located 28,000 light years away in the constellation of Capricornus. The cluster is ancient, about 13 billion years old, making it as old or even older than the Milky Way itself. The core of the cluster is unusually dense as such things go, which is why it was studied. Where better to find vampires and thrillseekers?

Like people, stars are born, age, and die. Stars born with more mass tend to die off more quickly, consuming their fuel at far higher rates than their lower-mass brethren. These stars tend to be blue, so in an old cluster like M30 you’d expect to see no blue stars at all; they should all be long gone. And yet, there are quite a few — astronomers call them blue stragglers. Where did they come from?

One theory, which has been borne out by observations, is that blue stragglers are in tight binary systems, with a dead star in such close proximity to a normal star that it can siphon off the normal star’s gas, using it to rejuvenate itself. This would make them vampires, of course, sucking the life force of other stars in an attempt to stay young.

But another idea was that dead stars might also physically collide with other stars and merge, forming a single star that would burn blue and bright. In an environment like that near our own Sun this kind of collision can almost literally never happen; even considering the entire Milky Way Galaxy over its entire lifetime a head on collision has probably never happened out here in the stellar suburbs.

But that cluster M30 is pretty densely populated with stars, and collisions are far more likely. What observations like this one of the cluster (and also of an ancient cluster called NGC 188) have shown is that the blue stragglers appear to have two different sub-groups; one that appears to have come from the vampire stars, and another from stars that have collided: thrill-seekers, stars that have physically slammed into each other and merged, their combined mass separating them from the other blue straggler group.

Blue stragglers have been known since the 1950s, and the idea that they were pulling gas off nearby stars was proposed to explain them, too, but it’s only with our modern instrumentation that we can not only show that this is true, but that a second, far-fetched-sounding scenario of collisions also contributes.

I find it wonderful and extremely uplifting that an image as spectacular and gorgeous as the one above — it became my desktop wallpaper as soon as I saw it! — not only satisfies our desire for beauty and art, but can also be tapped to deliver incredible science that boosts our awe of what Nature can do. I love that we can understand such things, but you know what I love even more? The idea that we have only begun to understand the Universe.

Thanks to our sweat, anxiety—and maybe also other emotions—can be chemically transferred between people.

Come to Kazakhstan—specifically the ice-cold capital of Astana—said Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev in an annual speech yesterday. Here is part of his pitch to diplomats and government officials, via Reuters:

“Well today it’s only -30 C (-22 F). It only strengthens our spirit,” Nazarbayev, in power for 20 years, told diplomats at his lavish marble-and-turquoise presidential palace.

“This city is so sterile. Even germs can’t survive in this weather. So we can enjoy living long lives here. Well, maybe not as long as those of mammoths, but still quite long.”

Great success! Nazarbayev thinks Astana is so extreme that he moved Kazakhstan’s capital there in 1997, which makes Astana the second-coldest capital city in the world. Watch your back, Ulaanbaatar!

Related Content:
Discoblog: Say Nyet to Snow! Moscow Mayor Plans to Engineer the Weather
Discoblog: Migraine Sufferers’ Redemption: The Weather Does Cause Headaches
Discoblog: How to Forecast the Weather from a Half-Mile Underground: Watch for Muons