Nerds and Words: Week 11

I have dug through the Internet this week and uncovered all this geeky goodness. You can find the thousands of links from previous weeks here.

I have marked my favorite links with a 8. Enjoy.

Science to Read, Watch

Take a breath, thank a sponge? Following the chain of events back to the origin of oxygenated animals

When you screw with your sense of self, it’s harder to form memories

8 Do lobsters feel pain when we cook them, alive, like monsters? Maybe. Scientists disagree

“The science of cognitive training has not kept up with the hype” (i.e., they don’t work).

15 minutes of “pit stop science” with a great white is something I’ll always want to do

The “new car smell” became a status marker after WWI, but the chemicals have toxic roots

On the physics of flying snakes and our unhappiness with them on our planes

8 How repetition lets music work its magic, work its magic, magic

If you’re an unfortunate wasp, you might have junk in your trunk. It’s not fat. It’s a hellish parasite.

Hard Science updates a classic science demo with DUBSTEP. Put this in your classroom

The enemy of my enemy is a spider-eating ant

Spiders building in the city get spun over (read: screwed over) twice

Sorting through a new study that claims light exposure may help memory

Putting the cancer cases around Fukushima into (important) epidemiological perspective

Really hope that when astronomers see this gas cloud pass by the galactic core, it dies spectacularly like this

An animation that is like an open house for a small slice of the universe

This terror bird was the hangover for the small mammals having their “yay no more dinosaurs” party

How do you find a planet without a star (and maybe with native laser-sharks)?

8 Figuring out when whales evolved the ability to sing through their noses to see

Looking for the right genetic factors for obesity in the wrong place

8 The fascinating (and controversial) physics of curling

Naming a new tyrannosaur after the polar bear

Elephants are so much smarter than most of us think. Just check out how they hear human voices

What is the resolution of the human eye? It’s a tricky question that doesn’t have a great answer

Eating a certain plant makes rabbit’s pee blue

Practicing 10,000 hours doesn’t necessarily make perfect, says new study

How cracking something can make it stronger (even your teeth!)

8 To study asteroid impacts, sometimes we film metal balls hitting sand in slo-mo. It’s so, so beautiful

Extreme Nerdery

This scifi short–Project Skyborn–is better than anything on the Syfy channel right now. Go ahead and check

8 My proudest moment as a writer: We Finally Have A Name For Scooby Doo’s Speech Disorder

Scooby’s real name is “Scoobert”. Cookie Monster’s name is Sid, you know, before he got addicted.

Only 1, maybe 2 situations in life where you will need this, so here it is: Riker and Picard being awesome for 10 hours

“Why do you try to make something magical scientific?” I could not agree more with this author’s answers

We think we want intelligent AI in our video games but, “Most players still take the bait like tween girls on Edward Cullen”

8 Dad-of-the-year contender spends 6 months animating himself and his son into Dragon Ball Z

What if “radar enforced” really meant stopping a car with pure, terrible radiation? A lot of car-plasma

#TrueDetectiveSeason2

Garfield Minus Garfield is a comic that shows one man’s descent into absolute madness

Sciencey GIFs and Images

8 Have you ever really looked at an animal who has a relatively long neck swallow something? It’s awesome/bizarre

I prefer anatomical drawings where our lungs are filled with flowers and our muscles writhe with snakes

The Smithsonian captured this incredible footage of a bird’s flight dexterity and I can’t stop watching

Holy crap, this parrot is actually a woman posing in bodypaint

Astronomy is paradoxically one of the few places where lay people can overestimate large numbers

And that is how Pi is related to the circumference of a circle!

8 I have never seen a pelican spider before. Jeez are they bizarre

Angler catches albino marlin before its defect got it killed by something else

One of my favorite all-time GIFs has to be of the “Prince Rupert’s Drop” by Smarter Every Day

Extremely effective graphic shows the scale of the search for flight MH370

The Wellcome Image award winner is amazing, and a kidney stone is an alien world (#2)

8 How do you test the impact force on an F-4 Phantom? Get a rocket sled and watch the fireworks

Always an amazing story: A leopard seal “feeds” a photographer

Jasper Nance took this incredible photo of some (unidentified) pupa

The best visualization of a sonic boom you will ever see, thanks to VHS and a very low-flying jet

When an ice cap on Mars looks like a cerebral cortex

Nature’s NSA

When you release a spacesuit into space, it looks like a terrifying, real-life ‘Gravity’

Hard to look at violin playing the same way after watching this

8 Alexander Semenov is the undisputed king of underwater photography. These worms prove it

More things (read: fluid dynamics) happen to airplane wings than you get to see

I know we want to commercialize spider silk and all, but I feel bad for this spider

One way to visualize ALL the RGB colors without repeating. A new color in each pixel

Pop Culture Happenings

8 The top five YouTube gamers have more subscribers than Peru has people. They make millions

Pre-ordering the hell out of xkcd’s upcoming “What If” book

What is Vi Hart doing? We don’t know but we keep watching

Are You Better Than The Average American At Science? (It isn’t hard to be)

What’s the best animal analog for these awesome “strandbeest” toys? A robo-crab?

8 60 GIFs of the part in infomercials where the people can’t do anything right

Homeopathy judged useless and unethical

Does the new Cosmos really get how science is communicated today? Maybe not

Pharmacist prescribes “anti-monster spray”, wins internet

“After you die, a piece of you may end up in an aeroplane, a wind turbine, or even another person.”

Snail-eating worm threatens escargot supply

Hmm. Cosmos may have picked the wrong “hero” for independent, critical thought

The president did Between Two Ferns and it’s pretty funny

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View the original article here

From Neo-Fascism To Neurophysiology: The Strange Story of the INPP

Will Mandy drew my attention to a worrying piece of neurosensationalism at BBC News:

Modern life damaging infant brains, charity warns

The charity is called Watch? and it seems fairly inoffensive, but one of the speakers at the Watch? conference (which prompted the article) is Sally Goodard Blythe from the ‘Institute for Neuro-Physiological Psychology’ (INPP) in Chester, England. This latter organisation has a rather remarkable history.

The INPP’s About Us page says

The INPP was set up in 1975 by Psychologist Peter Blythe PhD*. to research into the effects of immaturity in the functioning of the central nervous system on learning outcomes, emotional functioning and behaviour.

That * leads us to a footnote which reads

INPP is an apolitical organization. It does not reflect or support any political, cultural, social or religious ideology or the personal views of its members or former members.

Well, that’s good to hear. Because if they did reflect the ideology of their members, let’s say, of their founder, then they would be a fascist organization. Quite literally. For, according to his Telegraph obituary, their late founder Peter Huxley-Blythe (his full name) was an active neo-fascist:

A vehement anti-communist who admired strong leadership, after WW2 Huxley-Blythe became involved in various extreme-Right groups. He became an associate of the American political thinker Francis Parker Yockey, founder of the European Liberation Front (ELF, a small neo-fascist group that split from Mosley’s British Union Movement in 1948), and of Guy Chesham and Baroness von Pflugl who helped to finance the publication of Yockey’s Imperium (1948), in which he argued for the creation of a fascist united Europe to defend Western culture.

The ELF’s “12-point plan” demanded “the immediate expulsion of all Jews and other parasitic aliens from the Soil of Europe” and the “cleansing of the Soul of Europe from the ethical syphilis of Hollywood”. Huxley-Blythe became the editor of Frontfighter, the ELF’s journal, and later on, in the 1950s, published the newsletter of a British-German group Natinform (Nationalist Information Bureau)…

In addition, with Roger Pearson, he helped to organise the Northern League, a neo-Nazi organisation dedicated to saving the “Nordic race” from the “annihilation of our kind” and to fighting for survival “against forces which would mongrelise our race and civilisation” (leading members included the former Nazi eugenicist Hans Günther)…

…Peter Huxley-Blythe is survived by his wife, Sally [Goddard Blythe, current director of INPP International].

Still, that was a long time ago. Perhaps we should instead judge the INPP by their current supporters. Unfortunately, there are a number of eyebrow-raising individuals associated with the INPP. In recent years, their conference has hosted speakers such as…

* Dr Richard Halvorsen, a British doctor who writes about vaccines causing autism.

If we are to allow the human soul to dwell within its connection to the creative mind of God, it is self evident that society must turn its attention to children because their energies are the most susceptible to change.

She also believes that Energy and Memory are what give stem cells their power:

In a sentence, the ability of stem cells to re-generate, re-engage and re-organize damaged structures of FORM and FUNCTION are directly dependant on the templates of Memories and the Energies that give life to and drive Body, Mind and Soul.

* “Dr.” Curtis T. Cripe, “PhD.” , or Mr. Cripe as the US Bankruptcy Appeals Court of the Ninth Circuit (judgement of 20th Feb 2014) more accurately calls him:

[In 2001] the Cripes [Mr. Cripe and his wife] represented … that Mr. Cripe held a Masters Degree in Clinical Psychology from the University of California at Los Angeles and a Ph.D. in Psychology from Saybrook Institute…

[however] although Mr. Cripe ultimately did obtain a Ph. D. in November 2003, that degree was from Barrington University, a non-accredited school. Mr. Cripe’s faculty advisor for his dissertation in psychology held degrees in Interior Design, not psychology. Mr. Cripe’s “attendance” was completely on-line.

When Cripe’s business partner found out about this, around 2008, she broke off relations with him. This set in motion a series of legal claims and counterclaims, the outcome of which was that Cripe filed for bankruptcy protection in 2011. Cripe spoke not once but twice at the INPP conference, in 2007 and in 2009. He’s also listed on some websites as a representative of the INPP franchise in the USA.

Oh dear. But then again, just because INPP are linked to some dubious people, that doesn’t mean that their ideas are wrong. Their idea is that many childhood problems (including ADHD, Asperger’s, difficulty riding bikes, and problems learning maths) can be caused by ‘neurodevelopmental delay’ (NDD), a failure of the maturing brain to appropriately inhibit the primitive motor reflexes, seen in babies, that are normally switched off later in life. INPP offer ‘interventions‘ (prices: by request only) to try to fix these imbalances.

I will leave it to others to evaluate these claims – perhaps neuroblogger and developmental psychologist Prof Dorothy Bishop, who wrote about Sally Goddard Blythe and her claims about parenting previously. Bishop wrote that…

Mrs Goddard Blythe is entitled to her views. My concern is with the blurring of the distinction between opinion and evidence. When a view about effects of parenting is widely promulgated on national media, and is expressed by someone who is described as a consultant in neurodevelopmental education and Director of an Institute, the natural assumption is made that (a) they are speaking from a position of authority, and (b) they have some hard evidence. In this case, neither appears to be true.

A link to that article appears, strangely, on the INPP’s website, and even more strangely it appears under the heading “Published articles by Sally Goddard Blythe”.

View the original article here

Here We Go Again: Massive Dust Storms Pummel High Plains

Two huge dust storms are visible in Colorado and Texas in this mosaic of satellite images captured on Tuesday, March 18, 2014 by NASA’s Terra satellite. (Source: NASA)

Just a week ago, I posted some imagery of an intense dust storm sweeping south through the High Plains. Well, here we go again…

Today, high winds triggered two dust storms, one in Colorado stretching into Kansas and the Oklahoma Panhandle, and the other in the Texas Panhandle — the same region as last week’s storm. They were so big that they are clearly visible in a mosaic of images from NASA’s Terra satellite showing almost all of the United States. (See above.)

Here’s an animation of two close-up images of the Colorado dust storm, the first taken by Terra and the second taken later in the day by the spacecraft’s sister satellite, Aqua:

An animation of two satellite images shows the spreading Colorado dust storm. (Images: NASA. Animation: Tom Yulsman)

Here’s what it looked like on the ground today in Holly, Colorado:

Holly, Colorado. RT @rickenstrom: Near zero visibility in dust storm near Holly today. #cowx pic.twitter.com/9kDh4a1iBF

— Anthony Sagliani (@anthonywx) March 18, 2014

As I mentioned last week, the March 11 U.S. Drought Monitor map shows this region in the grips of severe drought.

Echoes of the Dust Bowl…

View the original article here

Oldest Case of Cancer Discovered in Ancient Skeleton

Lesions in the right scapula of a 3,200-year-old skeleton indicate the presence of cancer. Credit: Trustees of the British Museum

We tend to think of cancer as a modern disease, a result of our unhealthy lifestyles, environment and our sheer longevity. But it appears ancient humans weren’t unfamiliar with the disease. British researchers recently uncovered the oldest example of human cancer in a 3,200-year-old male skeleton.

The skeleton was found last year at an archeological site in northern Sudan. Researchers estimate that the man was 25 to 35 years old at the time of death, and was laid to rest in 1200 B.C. Their analysis of the skeleton has since revealed evidence of metastatic carcinoma throughout the body. Metastatic carcinoma is a type of cancer that originates in epithelial tissue and has spread to other parts of the body.

This is the oldest complete skeleton of a human displaying metastatic cancer. Scientists have previously discovered several older examples of cancer in skeletal fragments, but there are doubts regarding diagnosis in these specimens, the researchers say. The finding could help researchers learn more about the underlying causes of cancer in ancient populations, and could shed light on the evolution of the disease.

The skeleton of the adult male excavated from Sudan. Courtesy: Trustees of the British Museum

Researchers detected small bone lesions in the man’s skeleton using radiography and a scanning electron microscope. Based on the shape of the lesions, they determined the only likely cause was a malignant soft-tissue tumor. Imaging of the skeleton showed tumors on the man’s collarbone, upper arms, shoulder blades and several other locations throughout the body. The researchers published their findings Monday in the journal PLOS One.

The exact origin of the cancer is impossible to determine, researchers said in a news release. Further, the cause of the man’s cancer is purely speculative, but researchers posit two possible explanations. First, carcinogenic effects of smoke are well known, and ancient houses in that region of Sudan featured hearths and bread ovens in small, poorly ventilated spaces. It’s possible that long-term exposure to smoke doomed the young man.

Researchers also cited infectious disease as a plausible cause for the man’s cancer. Some infections can lead to cancer, and an infection called schistosomiasis has plagued inhabitants of that region since at least 1500 B.C. Schistosomiasis is a disease caused by parasitic worms that affects the urinary tract or intestines. The disease is now recognized as a common cause of bladder cancer.

An ancient Egyptian medical text, called the Edwin Smyth Papyrus, dates back to 1600 B.C. and is widely believed to contain the earliest known reference to a cancerous tumor.  There’s evidence of cancer in roughly 200 individuals in the human fossil record, which seems like a very small number. It’s led to speculation that the disease didn’t ravage ancient peoples like it does modern ones.

But although archaeological evidence is rare, it doesn’t mean cancer was nonexistent in ancient times, as George Johnson explained in a recent Discover article:

Except for a few rare cases in mummies, only bone tumors will be found — those originating in skeletal tissue or spreading there from other sites.  These count for only a small fraction of all cancers. About 90 percent are carcinomas, tumors forming in the epithelial tissues that line the organs and cavities of the body and form the skin.

Even when cancer digs into the bones, Johnson said, the telltale lesions might not survive the test of time. Thus, we could be underestimating the rates of cancer in early civilizations.

When you factor out carcinogens in cigarettes, processed food, chemical factories and poor diets that bombard us today, the baseline cancer rate is probably similar to what it was thousands of years ago, Johnson wrote.

View the original article here

Here We Go Again: Massive Dust Storms Pummel High Plains

Two huge dust storms are visible in Colorado and Texas in this mosaic of satellite images captured on Tuesday, March 18, 2014 by NASA’s Terra satellite. (Source: NASA)

Just a week ago, I posted some imagery of an intense dust storm sweeping south through the High Plains. Well, here we go again…

Today, high winds triggered two dust storms, one in Colorado stretching into Kansas and the Oklahoma Panhandle, and the other in the Texas Panhandle — the same region as last week’s storm. They were so big that they are clearly visible in a mosaic of images from NASA’s Terra satellite showing almost all of the United States. (See above.)

Here’s an animation of two close-up images of the Colorado dust storm, the first taken by Terra and the second taken later in the day by the spacecraft’s sister satellite, Aqua:

An animation of two satellite images shows the spreading Colorado dust storm. (Images: NASA. Animation: Tom Yulsman)

Here’s what it looked like on the ground today in Holly, Colorado:

Holly, Colorado. RT @rickenstrom: Near zero visibility in dust storm near Holly today. #cowx pic.twitter.com/9kDh4a1iBF

— Anthony Sagliani (@anthonywx) March 18, 2014

As I mentioned last week, the March 11 U.S. Drought Monitor map shows this region in the grips of severe drought.

Echoes of the Dust Bowl…

View the original article here

The Power of Conscious Intention Proven At Last?

A neuroscience paper published before Christmas draw my eye with the expansive title: “How Thoughts Give Rise to Action“

Subtitled “Conscious Motor Intention Increases the Excitability of Target-Specific Motor Circuits”, the article’s abstract was no less bold, concluding that:

These results indicate that conscious intentions govern motor function… until today, it was unclear whether conscious motor intention exists prior to movement, or whether the brain constructs such an intention after movement initiation.

The authors, Zschorlich and Köhling of the University of Rostock, Germany, are weighing into a long-standing debate in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, concerning the role of consciousness in controlling our actions.

To simplify, one school of thought holds that (at least some of the time), our intentions or plans control our actions. Many people would say that this is what common sense teaches us as well.

But there’s an alternative view, in which our consciously-experienced intentions are not causes of our actions but are actually products of them, being generated after the action has already begun. This view is certainly counterintuitive, and many find it disturbing as it seems to undermine ‘free will’.

That’s the background. Zschorlich and Köhling say that they’ve demonstrated that conscious intentions do exist, prior to motor actions, and that these intentions are accompanied by particular changes in brain activity. They claim to have done this using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a way of causing a localized modulation of brain electrical activity.

TMS of the motor cortex can cause muscle twitches, because this part of the brain controls our muscles. In 14 healthy volunteers, Zschorlich and Köhling aimed TMS at the area responsible for controlling movements of the left arm. Importantly, they adjusted the strength of the pulse so that it was only just strong enough to cause a tiny twitch (as measured using electrodes over the muscles of the left wrist themselves).

Remarkably, however, they found that if people were ‘consciously intending’ to flex their wrist, the same weak TMS pulse prompted a strong flexion response. Whereas if the volunteer was intending to extend their wrist, the very same pulse caused an extension movement.

Here’s an example from one representative subject, showing the differences in muscle activity in the flexing (FCR) and extending (ECR) muscles of the wrist following the TMS pulses:

The authors hypothesize that the brain’s ‘intention network’ prepares desired actions by increasing the excitability of the cells in the motor cortex that can produce the movement intended. On this view, a weak TMS pulse provides just enough extra activation to trigger those pre-excited cells into firing, while being too weak to activate cells that govern other movements.

It’s an interesting model and these are striking results, from a beautifully simple experiment. My only concern is that it might be too simple. There was no control condition for the TMS: every TMS pulse was real.

It would have been better to have used a control, either a ‘sham’ pulse, or a real TMS pulse over a different part of the brain. I say that because – unless I’m missing something here – we don’t actually know that the TMS pulse was triggering the wrist movements. The volunteers got to trigger the TMS themselves:

Volunteers were asked to develop an intention [...] and to trigger the TMS with the right index finger if the urge to move was greatest before any overt motor output at the wrist.

As far as I can see, volunteers could simply have been pressing the TMS button and then moving their wrist of their own accord. Ironically, they might not have consciously intended to do this; they might have really believed that their movements were being externally triggered (by the TMS) even though they themselves were generating them. This can happen: it’s called the ideomotor phenomenon, and is probably the explanation for why people believe in ‘dowsing’ amongst other things.

All we know for sure, as I understand it, is that 1. their right hand pushed a button, 2. TMS happened, and 3. their left wrist moved. We don’t know that 2 caused 3. A control TMS condition would have allowed us to know whether the TMS was really involved – and, perhaps, whether conscious intention or unconscious ideomotor acts were governing those errant wrists.

Zschorlich VR, & Köhling R (2013). How thoughts give rise to action – conscious motor intention increases the excitability of target-specific motor circuits. PloS ONE, 8 (12) PMID: 24386291

View the original article here

Battle of the "Cosmos," Round 3

The new Cosmos show is doing an inspirational job bringing the wonders of science to a mass audience. There was one segment of the first episode where I thought the writers went off-track, however. In an earlier post I described my concern about how that episode  depicts philosopher Giordano Bruno and his role in the discovery of the infinite universe. My column prompted a reply from Cosmos co-writer Steven Soter, along with my further thoughts.

The Spaceship of the Imagination voyages out to distant galaxies and into the mysteries of DNA in the new Cosmos. (Credit: Fox)

Now, the third and final round: Soter offers some closing commentary on the matter, which appear below.

Inevitably, this dialogue has grown increasingly detailed, focused on the thoughts and actions of men who lived more than 400 years ago. To some readers the whole discussion may seem like nitpicking (a few have said as much in the comments), but I think it is greatly important. It offers a rare opportunity to debate the evolving relationship between science and religion. It is a window into the dramatic ways our conception of the universe has changed in modern times. And I must say, it is a tribute to Soter–and the whole Cosmos project–that he is taking the time to respond and share these ideas with the whole world.

The Case for Bruno, by Steven Soter

Your suggestion that Giordano Bruno was not the first to realize that the stars are suns is mistaken. You cited his predecessor Nicolas of Cusa, who referred in one passage to “the earth, the sun, or another star.” But Cusa did not mean that the sun is another star as we understand the term. Throughout his book, he used the word “star” indifferently to refer to the earth, the moon, the sun and the planets, as was common in his time. He also distinguished them from the “fixed stars” on the surface of the eighth celestial sphere. His pre-Copernican conception of the solar system was antithetical to any notion of the stars as other suns.

You claimed that “Cosmos confusingly presents Bruno’s infinite cosmology as a physical theory of the universe”, because Bruno believed the planets and stars had souls. It is true that Bruno’s worldview was vitalistic and magical. He imagined that the Earth had a soul like the other planets. But he passionately believed in the physical reality of the planets and suns, all made of the same material elements as understood in his time. He wrote:

“. . . every one of those bodies, stars, worlds and eternal lights is composed of that which is named earth, water, air and fire . . . Those in whose composition fire predominates will be called sun, bright in itself. If water predominates, we give the name telluric body, moon or such like which shines by borrowed light . . .” Bruno was the first to recognize this fundamental distinction between stars and planets.

Bruno described a universe of  “innumerable globes like this one on which we live and grow . . . In it are an infinity of worlds similar to our own, and of the same kind.” He urged his readers to “dissolve the notion that our earth is unique . . . we may perceive the likeness of our own and of all other stars . . . the substance of the other worlds throughout the ether is even as that of our own world.” Bruno made it as clear as he could, using the rudimentary understanding of matter available in his time, that this was a physical theory of the universe.

You said that Bruno took “a big step backward by interpreting the universe more in theological than mathematical terms.” Bruno was neither a mathematician nor a scientist, and his mind was not modern by any means. But he was without doubt the first to imagine a universe resembling the one we know today.

Again, you claimed that Bruno’s cosmology “was not a correct scientific idea, nor was it even a guess as Cosmos asserts. It was a religious and philosophical statement.” However you characterize Bruno’s cosmology has no bearing on its essential correctness. Can we expect a philosopher living in a world steeped in mysticism, groping in the dark at the dawn of modern science, to see things in modern terms? Scattered among his many pages of metaphysical nonsense are nuggets of pure gold. We should be grateful for them and not expect more.

Finally you claimed that Thomas Digges, “far more than Bruno, built on the tradition of Copernicus and sought to bring more of the universe into the grasp of math and geometry.” Digges made a major contribution by extending the realm of the stars into infinite space, but he then veered back from reality by describing the stars as “the palace of felicity . . . the very court of celestial angels, devoid of grief and replenished with perfect endless joy.” He is talking about the traditional theological heaven, not the material universe.

It was Bruno who used the opening made by Copernicus to give us the first glimpse of the modern astrophysical cosmos. And that was no incremental step. It was a giant leap.

Some Closing Reflections, by Corey S. Powell

It is crucial to remember that neither Bruno nor Digges was thinking about the universe in modern terms. This is, I think, one of the most meaningful upshots of this whole conversation. There is a natural tendency to project our current conceptions onto people who lived long ago. That leads to two kinds of errors.

First, we sometimes regard ourselves as inherently smarter than those in the past, simply because we start from a place of greater understanding. Such casual arrogance overlooks the incredible efforts required by people like Bruno, Digges, and thousands–no, millions–of others who have contributed to science and to the great march of human knowledge.

Second, there is a tempting inclination to view the past as a prelude toward an inevitable present. This attitude, which has been known to afflict academics as well, is known as Whig history. I still think Cosmos fell prey to this error, in trying to make Bruno’s universe look too much like our own. Seen in clear-eyed historical context, Bruno’s views still strongly resembled the spiritually ordered Church universe of the time–not to mention the philosophies of his ancient Greek influences, Lucretius and Anaxagoras.

Soter beautifully describes Bruno as “steeped in mysticism, groping in the dark.” In that context, his conception of an infinite universe full of stars and planets was an astonishing leap of insight–but it was still a theological one more than a conceptual one. Conversely, Digges made brave moves to create a cosmological model that blended the idea of a sun-centered solar system with infinite space–but he still regarded the expanse beyond our solar system as the realm of the angels.

In truth, it took both Bruno and Digges (and their many successors) to build–slowly, incrementally, with many stumbles along the way–toward our modern understanding of the universe. My biggest concern is that, in presenting Bruno as a lone hero and a lone martyr, Cosmos missed a fabulous opportunity to convey this communal and cumulative aspect of science.

In taking time to share his thoughts here, though, Soter has filled in many of those missing details. He has also shown a generous commitment to participating in the grand process of exploring the world through science. That is one of the happiest results of this whole exchange.

For more, watch the next episode of Cosmos and then join our Cosmos Rewind Google Hangout on Tuesday, March 18, at 8PM EDT. And follow me on Twitter: @coreyspowell

CATEGORIZED UNDER: astronomy, cosmology, dark energy, dark matter, exoplanets, moons, select, solar system, space, space flight, stars, sun, Top Posts, Uncategorized

View the original article here

Ripples in Space Are Evidence of Universe's Early Growth Spurt

When the universe expanded tremendously after the Big Bang, the resulting gravity waves interacted with the cosmic microwave background to produce this characteristic “B-mode” pattern. Credit: BICEP2 Collaboration

Big news in the cosmos today! Researchers from the BICEP2 south pole telescope have found ancient proof that the universe expanded tremendously after the Big Bang, a theory known as inflation. The discovery tells us (albeit indirectly) about an even earlier stage of the universe than we’ve ever before observed, and it provides crucial evidence that inflation did indeed occur. In so doing, it extends our model of the early universe from about one second after the Big Bang right back to less than 10-37 seconds after the event — a stunning leap forward (or backward, as the case may be).

To understand this, let’s back up 13.8 billion years or so, to the Big Bang. Also known as the birth of the cosmos and the origins of time and space, this burst of everything set the universe in motion. But a few niggling issues cast some doubts on the Big Bang theory — one of which was the mystery of how the universe came to be so uniformly spread out.

Enter the idea of inflation, in 1980, which suggested that just a few instants after the big moment, the universe suddenly grew enormously. This addition to the cosmic timeline explained why the universe was relatively uniform and it fit nicely with what we already knew about the universe’s earliest moments. However, cosmologists had no direct proof of inflation.

One way to prove inflation occurred, physicists thought, would be to look for gravitational waves created in its wake. These are basically ripples in the “fabric” of space-time — what the universe is made out of. Gravity is a relatively weak force, though, so we could only hope to detect the largest waves out there, caused by huge interactions like black holes colliding. Even though inflation was a relatively huge thing — it literally shaped the whole universe — the gravity waves it produced are now too weak to measure directly.

So instead, researchers were looking for the effect of inflation’s gravity waves on light. And not just any light, but the cosmic microwave background, “echoes” of light leftover from the Big Bang’s energy, created when the universe was just 380,000 years old. When this light interacted with the gravity waves, the theories said, it would have produced a distinctive pattern, called the B mode, in the light’s polarization. Such a pattern would be direct evidence that the gravity waves caused by inflation were real, and thus a key proof of inflation. And today, scientists announced they’d found it.

Assuming the finding is confirmed (and that looks likely — the team apparently spent 3 years going over their own data to make sure it was sound before coming forward with it), that’s huge news for cosmology. Direct evidence for inflation has been sought after for decades. Nature quotes Alan Guth, the main “inventor” of inflation, as saying, “This is a totally new, independent piece of cosmological evidence that the inflationary picture fits together,” and adding that the findings are “definitely” Nobel prize-worthy.

But it’s also big news for a couple of other reasons. First, in addition to being the first evidence for inflation, it’s also the first direct evidence for gravitational waves. Even though some observatories have been (and will continue!) looking for these gravitational waves, they’re still incredibly hard to find. The more data we have on these weird, space-time warping ripples, the more we’ll be able to understand the universe itself, and this is a great step in that direction. 

And the other bit of significance to this has to do with understanding gravity in the first place. It’s currently the only one of the four fundamental forces not to play nice with quantum mechanics, which explains how things work on the tiniest scales. At high temperatures (like those found shortly after the Big Bang), the other three even begin to unify into a single super-force. One of the biggest issues in physics today is figuring out how (or if) gravity fits into this picture, and the findings that gravitational waves can result from inflation, a fundamentally quantum phenomenon, suggests that quantum gravity might indeed be possible.

A glimpse into the very first milliseconds of our universe, plus bigger questions ahead — all in all, it’s a pretty good day for science.

View the original article here

"What We Know" Climate Report From Leading Science Organization Seeks to Persuade Citizens. #FAIL.

The “What We Know” report about climate change issued today by the august American Association for the Advancement of Science is intended to persuade ordinary people that our climate really is changing, we’re largely responsible, and we need to do something about it. Soon.

The report features clear, straight-forward language without overly complex and opaque scientific jargon.

And as the black non-image at the top of this ImaGeo post symbolizes, there is another thing that the report lacks as well: imagery.

In fact, there is not a single image in the report — not one visualization to help us understand what’s happening to our world, not a single photograph to dramatize the impact of climate change on people, not even one little graphic to show a trend in, oh, I don’t know, temperature maybe.

Okay, I exaggerate just a little. The title page does have one ambiguous photograph of someone using a surveying instrument on some ice sheet somewhere, for what reason God only knows.

And true, the “What We Know” web site includes, in addition to the report, a number of videos. One is actually mildly entertaining and effective. It features a mountain biker racing down a trail to symbolize the perilous path ahead and the need to slow down. (Our carbon emissions, of course.)

But the rest consist of talking heads (scientists telling us what they know) intercut with what broadcast journalists call “B-roll” — time lapse video of cars, smoke pouring out of stacks, a little snippet of water pouring into the New York City subway system during Hurricane Sandy —  you get the idea.

So here’s some unsolicited advice to the creators of “What We Know” from someone who thinks visual communication is actually an incredibly powerful way to communicate complex information and also connect with the heart as well as the mind: Cliché B-roll can’t change the fact that a talking head is still a talking head. Nor will people necessarily listen, let alone understand or care, simply because those talking heads happen to be scientists.

I’ve never written a post like this here at ImaGeo. I felt compelled to do it because I’m simply dumbfounded that one of the leading scientific organizations in the world decided to launch a public persuasion campaign that lacks one of the most important ways that humans beings can be persuaded: through visual communication.

Is the AAAS not aware that imagery can convey emotion far more powerfully than the written or spoken word, no matter how clear, concise, and free of jargon those words may be? Do they not know that visuals provide an incredible capacity to tell compelling, persuasive stories? Can it possibly be that they haven’t heard about the synergy made possible by the use of words and images together?

And did they not bother to read the literature on visual communication and persuasion?

To offer just one example: “Visual Persuasion,” which appeared in the journal Communication Research Trends in 1999. Here’s a relevant snippet:

…visual images in persuasive messages reduce the information processing burden, make a message more attention-getting, and reinforce message arguments. Also, it is believed that visual images have the superiority in memory over words.

If any of the people responsible for the “What We Know” report read this post, I have a suggestion for you: Try “Google.” It can be really helpful. With the search terms “visual communication and persuasion” you’ll find a lot of helpful tips there for your next campaign.

View the original article here

Scientists Ask Why There Are So Many Freaking Huge Ants

An ant is not exactly the picture you see in the dictionary next to “rule-breaker.” Colonial ants work together to collect food and generally act in the best interest of the group. Yet certain enormous ants in South America break a basic rule in biology: as you move up the food chain, you should find a smaller group of organisms at each step. These ants are top predators that take up far more than their fair share of space. To find out what their secret is, scientists staked out the forest floor.

“We’re all ant nerds,” says Chad Tillberg, a biologist at Linfield College in Oregon, of himself and his coauthors. So when they started visiting a park in northeastern Argentina and noticed what seemed like a whole lot of Dinoponera australis ants, they thought it might be an illusion created by their excitement. Plus, Tillberg points out, “Dinoponera are huge.” The seven species in this genus, which can be more than an inch long, are some of the largest ants in the world.

There are many plentiful bugs in the rainforest, of course. But an abundance of this particular ant—which locals call hormiga tigre, the “tiger ant”—demands an explanation. That’s because the species is known as a top predator of the soil. Other champion carnivores—like, say, an actual tiger—are rare, compared to the things they eat.

To see why, imagine that in a given area, you could gather every individual plant or animal of one species and pile it onto a huge scale. Usually, as you moved up a food chain, each group of living things would tip the scales less. It takes a large mass of plants to feed a moderate mass of herbivores, which can satisfy a smaller mass of carnivores. If the animals are bulky, it will take fewer of them to make up their species’ allotted weight on the scale. Dinoponera australis ants are both hefty and high up on the food chain—so something about them must be out of the ordinary.

Maybe, for a start, they’re not as abundant as they seem. To find out, “we started mapping and digging up colonies,” Tillberg says. First the researchers found ant nests by spotting ants on the park trail and following them home. (He notes that this type of research would be harder if the ants weren’t “so enormous.”) Within three plots of land, they marked the location of each nest and calculated how close the ants lived to their neighbors. They also left “pitfall” traps—like buckets for bugs to stumble into—along other trails in the area.

They found that D. australis ants aren’t equally dense everywhere in the rainforest. But within the study plots, there were lots and lots of them—about 180 underground nests per hectare (a hectare is about two and a half acres), holding almost 8,000 ants. Each ant weighs about 320 milligrams. That means the “biomass” of these animals (their total on that huge imaginary scale) is more than 2,500 grams, or 5.5 pounds, per hectare. That’s at least four times the biomass of other predatory rainforest ants.

The ants were as abundant as they’d seemed. But could they be lower on the food chain than scientists thought—not truly the tigers of the soil? To find out, the researchers stole the food from the jaws of worker ants returning to their nests. Almost all of it was the bodies of other insects they’d hunted. “They weren’t secretly collecting lots of nectar or honeydew,” Tillberg says.

Another way to find out where an animal sits on a food chain is to chemically analyze its body. Heavy nitrogen isotopes start out in plants at the bottom of the food chain, then accumulate in the bodies of animals that eat them, and build up even more in animals that eat those animals, and so on. The researchers measured nitrogen isotopes in the ants’ bodies and compared them to other insects and food items around them. This confirmed the status of la hormiga tigre: not only were these ants top predators, but they probably ate other predatory insects as well.

D. australis is just what it seems—a huge, predatory ant that roams the rainforest in huge numbers. How does it break the biomass rule? Taking one more stab at solving the mystery, Tillberg and his coauthors used paint to make distinguishing marks on the backs of ants. Then they staked out the ants’ nests. “We were marking workers and watching nest entrances for hours and hours every day,” Tillberg says. Each time an ant left the nest, the researchers recorded where it went.

They saw that most ants stuck to a single hunting route. Rather than roaming freely, each ant set out on the same path whenever it looked for food.

This behavior may make the whole ant colony more efficient. “Different individuals head in different directions from each other,” Tillberg says, “so on the whole, the entire surrounding habitat of a nest gets searched.”

There may be other factors that let D. australis ants take up so much room in the forest—a lack of competition from other predators, for example, maybe because other species can’t thrive in this disturbed habitat. But Tillberg says he thinks their hunting efficiency is “at least part of the story explaining their abundance.” It seems that if you want to take over the forest floor, it pays to be efficient as well as ruthless.

Image: by Alex Wild (via Wikimedia Commons)

Tillberg, C., Edmonds, B., Freauff, A., Hanisch, P., Paris, C., Smith, C., Tsutsui, N., Wills, B., Wittman, S., & Suarez, A. (2014). Foraging Ecology of the Tropical Giant Hunting Ant (Hymenoptera Formicidae)-Evaluating Mechanisms for High Abundance. Biotropica, 46 (2), 229-237 DOI: 10.1111/btp.12097

View the original article here

Can The Doppler Effect Help You Beat The Speed Camera?

The shortest answer is no.

Thanks to the curiosities of physics, there is this paradoxical yet plausible notion that you could beat a camera meant to photograph you speeding by going so fast that it won’t pick you up. In theory there is some speed at which the very light reflected off of your car will become undetectable to the human eye. But how fast would that be?

Don’t have time to read? Listen to the whole post below!

When you hear an ambulance headed your way, the blaring sirens increase in pitch* until the vehicle reaches you, and the pitch slides back down as it passes. This is “Doppler Effect.” Sound waves traveling in the same direction can “bunch up,” making them seem at a higher pitch. The same thing can happen with light. Edwin Hubble, the astronomer whose name christened the Hubble Telescope, discovered that galaxies moving away from us had light waves that were stretching apart. Like a fading sound, the light from the galaxies was getting redder—being “red shifted.” What happens as the galaxies gallop away from us means that if you were to go fast enough, there is some point were the light reflecting off your car would be red-shifted below human (or camera) detection.

In a paper from the Journal of Physics Special Topics, authors Worthy, Garner, and Taylor-Ashley do the Doppler number crunching. They assumed that a car would be moving away from the camera when the photo was taken, that the average license plate reflects basically yellow light, and that a license plate is undetectable when the light is red-shifted below 430 terahertz—the human limit.

Using those values and this equation, the authors concluded that the minimum velocity to beat the speed camera with the Doppler Effect is about 0.178c, or 18 percent the speed of light. Unfortunately for your outstanding tickets, even in the fastest supercar ever built, you have no hope of getting to this speed. 18 percent the speed of light is over 33,000 miles per second—if you crashed your car at this speed you would be obliterated by 10 times more energy than was released by the supervolcano Krakatoa.

So no, you can’t red-shift your way out of a ticket. But you could still speed your way out of one.

The Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters actually established that you could outrun the speed camera. So long as you passed the camera at 300 miles per hour or more, you would be far outside of the camera’s range as the photo snapped. If you want to break the law but now the laws of physics, invest in a dragster.

–

More Geeky Science:

What The Nerdiest Chart of Sci-Fi Ships Says About Our Dreams of Space

Excerpts From The Mad Scientist’s Handbook: So You’re Ready to Vaporize a Human

The Coroner Report: Weekend at Bernie’s

Getting the God of Thunder’s Science Straight

What Really Happens When Lightning Strikes Sand: The Science Behind a Viral Photo

–

Image Credit: Roads At Night: She’s Gone by Cayusa on Flickr

Paper Link: Red-Shifted Speed Cameras

Reference: Worthy, D., Garner, R., Gregory, J., & Taylor-Ashley, J. (2013, November 19). Red-shifted Speed Cameras. Journal of Physics Special Topics, 1-2.

*An earlier version of this post incorrectly linked the Doppler Effect to changes in amplitude, not pitch.

View the original article here

About that Popular Guardian Story on the Collapse of Industrial Civilization

The end of the world, like everything worth knowing these days, will be tweeted:

NASA-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for ‘irreversible collapse’? | Nafeez Ahmed http://t.co/nWqOcD3UkB

— Guardian Environment (@guardianeco) March 14, 2014

If a study with the imprimatur of a major U.S. government agency thinks civilization may soon be destined to fall apart, I want to know more about that.

Click.

The piece cuts to the chase in the opener:

A new study sponsored by Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilization could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.

What follows is a straightforward summary of the paper, which the Guardian writer tells us has been accepted for publication in a peer reviewed journal called Ecological Economics.

I’m going to discuss the actual paper separately in the second part of this post. First, let’s talk about the Guardian write-up, its author, and how his piece went global, the latter of which is a sad commentary on journalism today.

Technically, the story appears on a blog in the environment section of the Guardian. The blog’s host is Nafeez Ahmed, who in his Guardian bio describes himself as “a bestselling author, investigative journalist and international security scholar.”

Since joining the Guardian’s blogging network in 2013, Ahmed has carved out what I would call the doomsday beat. He highlights individuals and academic papers that reinforce the thesis of his 2011 documentary, “The Crisis of Civilization,” which is about

how global crises like ecological disaster, financial meltdown, dwindling oil reserves, terrorism and food shortages are converging symptoms of a single, failed global system.

In a post last year, I briefly mentioned him, saying, “If you want a tour guide to the apocalypse, Ahmed is your guy.” Understandably, he didn’t appreciate this backhanded compliment.

In fairness to him, there is a seemingly never-ending supply of journal papers with apocalyptic themes to choose from.

A good example, of course, is the collapse paper he disingenuously hyped as being “NASA-sponsored.” (You’ll soon understand why that was deceptive.) Evidently, Ahmed  was shown the paper by its authors ahead of publication, which he turned into an article/post with this headline:

Nasa-funded study: Industrial civilization headed for ‘irreversible collapse’?

Ahmed thinks of himself as a journalist, so he writes many of his blog posts in a superficial news story format. He even refers to some of his posts as “exclusives,” which is how he characterized his write-up on the supposedly funded NASA study. Journalistic gloss, however, doesn’t mask fundamental journalistic shortcomings.

In the collapse paper Ahmed wrote about last week, he explains how the authors came to their conclusions, sprinkling in quotes from the paper. But he provides no reaction to the study from independent experts. If he questioned the three co-authors themselves, you wouldn’t know, since they are not quoted in his piece. To Ahmed, getting an exclusive apparently means not having to do any actual reporting.

On twitter, Ahmed was challenged to respond to rebuttals of the study he uncritically accepted. He demurred: “I’m just the reporter- ask the study authors.”

Chew on that for a second.

Ahmed’s summary of the soon-to-be published Ecological Economics paper at his Guardian blog–which he thought of as a big scoop–wouldn’t pass Journalism 101. Nonetheless, it was picked up by many other outlets around the world and became a sensation on social media. He was thrilled:

My NASA study exclusive has not just gone viral, it’s gone global and is making headlines in national newspapers all over

— Nafeez Ahmed (@NafeezAhmed) March 17, 2014

Naturally, the Daily Mail jumped all over it, as did the New York Post, which headlined its piece, “NASA Predicts the End of Western Civilization.”

Other headlines included: The National Journal: “Here’s How NASA Thinks Society Will Collapse”; The Times of India: “NASA-Funded Study Warns of Collapse of Civilization in Coming Decades”; and Popular Science: “NASA-Sponsored Study Warns of Possible Collapse of Civilization.”

Do you notice anything familiar about those headlines? NASA did and was pretty steamed. It recently issued a statement saying that the collapse paper

was not solicited, directed or reviewed by NASA. It is an independent study by the university researchers utilizing research tools developed for a separate NASA activity. As is the case with all independent research, the views and conclusions in the paper are those of the authors alone. NASA does not endorse the paper or its conclusions.

So much for the sexy NASA angle that was undoubtedly a big selling point. Not that it matters anymore. The marginal NASA connection was played up and successfully dangled as click bait. Mission Accomplished, Guardian editors and Ahmed.

So what else fell through the cracks on this story? Well, if you bother to read through all the herd-like media coverage of the study, you’ll notice that every piece essentially duplicates what the Guardian published. As far as I can tell, all the other similarly sensationalist articles did was reproduce or restate what appeared in the Guardian. And we know how much reporting went into that big exclusive!

Nobody from these other outlets talked to the study’s authors or solicited opinion from independent experts. Everyone willingly ceded the story to the Guardian. After teasing its readers with a few excerpts, PopSci gushed:

You should really head over to the Guardian for the full story; it’s worth reading.

This was not an isolated sentiment. Many people retweeted the story, including journalists in my twitter feed. There were a couple of skeptical outliers, some folks who know about mathematical models and were incredulous after reading both the study and the Guardian story. One is Robert Wilson, a UK Mathematical Ecology PhD Student who wrote up his impressions at his personal blog. Another is the U.S. science journalist David Appell, who offered his thoughts on the study’s model and (like Wilson) also took note of Ahmed’s conspiracy theorist leanings.

The huge, uncritical pick-up of the Guardian story perturbed me. Why was everyone so quick and seemingly content to parrot a story that contained no actual reporting? After all, it was just a blogger’s interpretive summary of an unpublished journal paper. Why didn’t anyone reach out to the paper’s authors or bother to call a few sources to examine the merits of the study?

So I thought I’d fill that journalistic vacuum myself. In part two of this post, I’ll report what the authors of the paper had to say after I contacted them, and what numerous, highly regarded experts think of their study. This is completed. I’m just proofing the material and breaking it out into a separate post.

Check back in several hours for part two.

View the original article here

How Sea Snakes Survive Without Water to Drink

Earth is awfully wet: about 70 percent of the planet is covered by deep, blue expanses of water. But to ocean-faring sea snakes, their briny habitat is an oxymoron: Home is a vast aquatic desert.

Creatures like the sea snake were thought to live completely independent of fresh water, by quenching their thirsts through some type of saltwater adaptation like other marine animals. But now researchers have discovered that one species, the yellow-bellied sea snake, in fact relies on rainfalls for drinking water, and in between rains is able to make do in an extreme state of dehydration.

Scientists have recently started questioning whether marine vertebrates, such as the sea snake, truly live independently of fresh water. Several species of animals, including sea turtles, bony fishes, dolphins and whales developed specialized adaptations to thrive in saltwater. For example, birds and some marine reptiles have salt glands to excrete excess salts from the water they drink. 

It was commonly believed that sea snakes adapted to their environment in a similar fashion. But several studies published within the past few years have shown a link between fresh water availability and the distribution of sea snake populations. The only sources of fresh water in the open sea are narrow bands of freshwater lenses that are known to form on the surface of the ocean following heavy rainfalls. Since sea snake populations are often concentrated around these bands of freshwater, researchers believed they depend on the water for survival.

If this was true, it must mean that sea snakes can survive extreme dehydration. To see if this was indeed the case, researchers captured 500 yellow-bellied sea snakes on the Guanacaste coast off of Costa Rica. They wanted to test if the snakes would drink fresh water immediately following capture. If the snake was thirsty, it was a good sign that it was also dehydrated.

The researchers dried the snakes off, weighed them and measured them before giving them fresh water to drink. They found that snakes tended to drink more following periods of low rainfall, and the lighter they were (and thus the more dehydrated they were), the more they drank.

Their findings show that sea snakes live in a dehydrated state for several months at a time, due to the length of the dry season on the Guanacaste coast (December through May or June). The researchers published their results this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The results show both the tenacity and fragility of yellow-bellied sea snakes, and perhaps other marine snakes. Dehydration at sea could be a unique challenge to marine vertebrates like the sea snake, and may explain their rapidly declining populations in some parts of the world.

Further study of these thirsty reptiles could help scientists determine how changing precipitation patterns in tropical oceans will impact these animals.

Photo credit: RobHamm/Shutterstock

View the original article here

Humans Made Conchs Shrink (And One Kid Saw It Coming)

The classic, swirling shell of a conch helps protect it from hungry birds and sea creatures, but when a human decides to pluck one from shallow water and boil it for supper, there’s not much the animal can do. Its only defense is to evolve, as a species, to be smaller and less appealing to people. That’s what conchs in the Caribbean have done—today’s humans get 40 percent less food out of a conch than our ancestors did. But that’s not so surprising to a 12-year-old girl who described almost the same thing in a piece of fiction.

To explain the fictional version, I have to insert myself into this story—hello! In my day job I edit a kids’ science magazine called Muse. We recently ran a contest that asked readers to write a brief, made-up story in the style of the magazine’s science news page. (The results were sometimes hilarious. “Too Much Coffee Makes Adults Feel Young” was an office favorite.)

One winner of this contest was a 12-year-old named Madeline. Her submission was about a new species, the “broken-shelled hermit snail” (Mendacious latibulum), discovered on the beaches of North America. It had gone undetected until now, the story went, by evolving a mangled-looking shell that kept human collectors away.

“She is almost certainly right in theory,” says Aaron O’Dea, a marine historical ecologist and paleobiologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. As long as the mollusk were still alive while on the beach and vulnerable to collection, evolving an ugly shell could help it survive. O’Dea knows all about mollusks evolving to avoid humans; he recently discovered that the West Indian fighting conch (Strombus pugilis) has done exactly that.

O’Dea and his coauthors studied conchs living on the Caribbean side of Panama. To see how the animals had changed over time, they gathered shells from three general time periods.

The first was modern shells, which they collected by snorkeling, visiting tourist shops where the shells are sold as souvenirs, and sampling trash piles left by locals who eat the animals. (People sometimes denied gathering conchs for food, even when heaps of shells under their homes told a different story. The authors explain that there’s a regional stigma around eating the conch, nicknamed el raton del mar or “the sea mouse.” In Brazil, though, it’s sold as an aphrodisiac. Earmuffs, Madeline.)

Prehistoric conch shells, from humans’ earlier days living in the region, came from an archaeological site with material dating from around 690 to 1410 AD. In these days humans probably hunted the conch as they do today, wading into the shallows whenever they needed some for dinner. Finally the authors looked at local fossils, about 7,000 years old, to see conchs that had never met a human.

The researchers measured the length and width of the shells, as well as the thickness of each shell’s “lip,” the part overhanging the opening. O’Dea explains that this reveals whether a conch is a juvenile or an adult. When they’re young, conchs hide under the sand, slowly growing the spiky whorls of their shells. When they’ve stopped growing and are ready to emerge and find a mate, conchs develop the final portion of their shell, a thickened lip that makes it harder for predators to get inside.

By measuring the lip thickness of each shell, the scientists could tell whether a conch was mature. They found that over time, conchs have grown smaller and begun reaching maturity at a smaller size. The shells shrank between the 7,000-year-old fossils and the 1,500-year-old archaeological samples, and again between the archaeological samples and today. For as long as humans have been gathering conch, we’ve been driving their evolution.

“I had seen the conch in the field and noticed size differences,” O’Dea says, “but when I put it together empirically it was astounding!” Using each shell’s dimensions to estimate the size of the animal inside, he found that ancient conchs contained a “truly impressive” two-thirds more meat than modern ones. Today’s humans need more animals to make a meal than their ancestors did.

Conch sizes varied somewhat among the five modern areas the researchers sampled. The smallest mature shells came from a reef surrounded by homes with shell piles. Another group of small conchs came from a site that sells many shells to tourists. The largest conchs lived in a lagoon where no one is known to eat them. Other larger shells were found at a site surrounded by humans who prefer farmed meat to shellfish, and another site that’s been protected in recent years by scientists.

This shows that the conchs may be able to bounce back in size when people hunt them less. Still, none of these populations was as large as the ancient conchs. O’Dea says it’s not clear whether shrinking has hurt the species as a whole. Conchs may have initially evolved to be large, he speculates, because it helps them win fights for mates. He hopes to find the answer by comparing the fitness of larger and smaller conchs.

O’Dea says that Madeline’s broken-shelled snail story may be coming true in other ways. For example, “There is evidence that the desire for big, impressive antlers for trophies by deer hunters has led to the evolution of less impressive, or less ‘beautiful,’ antlers,” he says. “This is exactly what this girl is talking about, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we start to see fish or anything else that is selected against by humans for a certain trait follow suit.”

I tracked down Madeline herself to tell her the story of the fighting conch. She wrote back to say, “It’s really cool that something similar to what I thought might be plausible as an adaptation really works.”

Madeline says it’s funny that humans can alter the evolution of a whole species without knowing it. But given how easily we reshaped the conch, she’s more concerned about how many other, still-unseen effects we’re having on the world. Focusing on the single example of the conch while ignoring the rest, she says, “would be making a mountain out of a mole-usk hill.”

Image: by Loren Sztajer (via Flickr)

O’Dea, A., Shaffer, M., Doughty, D., Wake, T., & Rodriguez, F. (2014). Evidence of size-selective evolution in the fighting conch from prehistoric subsistence harvesting Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 281 (1782), 20140159-20140159 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2014.0159

View the original article here

About that Popular Guardian Story on the Collapse of Industrial Civilization

The end of the world, like everything worth knowing these days, will be tweeted:

NASA-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for ‘irreversible collapse’? | Nafeez Ahmed http://t.co/nWqOcD3UkB

— Guardian Environment (@guardianeco) March 14, 2014

If a study with the imprimatur of a major U.S. government agency thinks civilization may soon be destined to fall apart, I want to know more about that.

Click.

The piece cuts to the chase in the opener:

A new study sponsored by Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilization could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.

What follows is a straightforward summary of the paper, which the Guardian writer tells us has been accepted for publication in a peer reviewed journal called Ecological Economics.

I’m going to discuss the actual paper separately in the second part of this post. First, let’s talk about the Guardian write-up, its author, and how his piece went global, the latter of which is a sad commentary on journalism today.

Technically, the story appears on a blog in the environment section of the Guardian. The blog’s host is Nafeez Ahmed, who in his Guardian bio describes himself as “a bestselling author, investigative journalist and international security scholar.”

Since joining the Guardian’s blogging network in 2013, Ahmed has carved out what I would call the doomsday beat. He highlights individuals and academic papers that reinforce the thesis of his 2011 documentary, “The Crisis of Civilization,” which is about

how global crises like ecological disaster, financial meltdown, dwindling oil reserves, terrorism and food shortages are converging symptoms of a single, failed global system.

In a post last year, I briefly mentioned him, saying, “If you want a tour guide to the apocalypse, Ahmed is your guy.” Understandably, he didn’t appreciate this backhanded compliment.

In fairness to him, there is a seemingly never-ending supply of journal papers with apocalyptic themes to choose from.

A good example, of course, is the collapse paper he disingenuously hyped as being “NASA-sponsored.” (You’ll soon understand why that was deceptive.) Evidently, Ahmed  was shown the paper by its authors ahead of publication, which he turned into an article/post with this headline:

Nasa-funded study: Industrial civilization headed for ‘irreversible collapse’?

Ahmed thinks of himself as a journalist, so he writes many of his blog posts in a superficial news story format. He even refers to some of his posts as “exclusives,” which is how he characterized his write-up on the supposedly funded NASA study. Journalistic gloss, however, doesn’t mask fundamental journalistic shortcomings.

In the collapse paper Ahmed wrote about last week, he explains how the authors came to their conclusions, sprinkling in quotes from the paper. But he provides no reaction to the study from independent experts. If he questioned the three co-authors themselves, you wouldn’t know, since they are not quoted in his piece. To Ahmed, getting an exclusive apparently means not having to do any actual reporting.

On twitter, Ahmed was challenged to respond to rebuttals of the study he uncritically accepted. He demurred: “I’m just the reporter- ask the study authors.”

Chew on that for a second.

Ahmed’s summary of the soon-to-be published Ecological Economics paper at his Guardian blog–which he thought of as a big scoop–wouldn’t pass Journalism 101. Nonetheless, it was picked up by many other outlets around the world and became a sensation on social media. He was thrilled:

My NASA study exclusive has not just gone viral, it’s gone global and is making headlines in national newspapers all over

— Nafeez Ahmed (@NafeezAhmed) March 17, 2014

Naturally, the Daily Mail jumped all over it, as did the New York Post, which headlined its piece, “NASA Predicts the End of Western Civilization.”

Other headlines included: The National Journal: “Here’s How NASA Thinks Society Will Collapse”; The Times of India: “NASA-Funded Study Warns of Collapse of Civilization in Coming Decades”; and Popular Science: “NASA-Sponsored Study Warns of Possible Collapse of Civilization.”

Do you notice anything familiar about those headlines? NASA did and was pretty steamed. It recently issued a statement saying that the collapse paper

was not solicited, directed or reviewed by NASA. It is an independent study by the university researchers utilizing research tools developed for a separate NASA activity. As is the case with all independent research, the views and conclusions in the paper are those of the authors alone. NASA does not endorse the paper or its conclusions.

So much for the sexy NASA angle that was undoubtedly a big selling point. Not that it matters anymore. The marginal NASA connection was played up and successfully dangled as click bait. Mission Accomplished, Guardian editors and Ahmed.

So what else fell through the cracks on this story? Well, if you bother to read through all the herd-like media coverage of the study, you’ll notice that every piece essentially duplicates what the Guardian published. As far as I can tell, all the other similarly sensationalist articles did was reproduce or restate what appeared in the Guardian. And we know how much reporting went into that big exclusive!

Nobody from these other outlets talked to the study’s authors or solicited opinion from independent experts. Everyone willingly ceded the story to the Guardian. After teasing its readers with a few excerpts, PopSci gushed:

You should really head over to the Guardian for the full story; it’s worth reading.

This was not an isolated sentiment. Many people retweeted the story, including journalists in my twitter feed. There were a couple of skeptical outliers, some folks who know about mathematical models and were incredulous after reading both the study and the Guardian story. One is Robert Wilson, a UK Mathematical Ecology PhD Student who wrote up his impressions at his personal blog. Another is the U.S. science journalist David Appell, who offered his thoughts on the study’s model and (like Wilson) also took note of Ahmed’s conspiracy theorist leanings.

The huge, uncritical pick-up of the Guardian story perturbed me. Why was everyone so quick and seemingly content to parrot a story that contained no actual reporting? After all, it was just a blogger’s interpretive summary of an unpublished journal paper. Why didn’t anyone reach out to the paper’s authors or bother to call a few sources to examine the merits of the study?

So I thought I’d fill that journalistic vacuum myself. In part two of this post, I’ll report what the authors of the paper had to say after I contacted them, and what numerous, highly regarded experts think of their study. This is completed. I’m just proofing the material and breaking it out into a separate post.

Check back in several hours for part two.

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Satellite Images Show Floating Objects in Indian Ocean

Satellite images released by the Australian government show possible objects floating in the Indian Ocean that could be wreckage from Malaysian Airlines flight 370. The images are of the same object. One is panchromatic, meaning it is based on all wavelengths of light falling on each pixel. The other is multispectral, meaning it is based on specific wavelengths. (Source: Australian Maritime Safety Authority)

Could floating objects seen in satellite images of the Indian Ocean off the coast of Australia be wreckage from the missing Malaysian Airlines jet that disappeared on March 8?

The Australian government thought the satellite images above, and another pair lower down in this post, warranted a search by aircraft. But the first try has turned up nothing — because of limited visibility due to clouds and rain, as this Tweet from the Australian Maritime Safety Authority states:

RAAF P3 crew unable to locate debris. Cloud & rain limited visbility. Further aircraft to continue search for #MH370

— AMSA News (@AMSA_News) March 20, 2014

Here’s a map of the area in the Indian Ocean that was searched by the Australians today:

Source: Australian Maritime Safety Authority

And here’s what that area of the Indian Ocean looked like to NASA’s Aqua satellite today:

Extensive cloudiness obscures parts of the Indian Ocean off the west coast of Australia, as seen in this image based on data from NASA’s Aqua satellite. (Source: NASA)

To my eye it appears that the area being searched is underneath that big patch of cloudiness seen this image. Let’s hope it clears.

Lastly, another pair of images showing another a second possible object:

Source: Australian Maritime Safety Authority

As more remote sensing and other kinds of imagery come in, I’ll post them here at ImaGeo. So stay tuned.

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The March of Climate Determinism

In the late 2000s, a new climate change story line emerged in the media.

The seeds for this narrative were perhaps sown ten years ago, when a worst-case scenario report commissioned by the Pentagon triggered breathless headlines about a research field known as “abrupt climate change.” Perhaps you saw the 2004 movie.

The sensationalist portrayal of a sudden climate-induced doomsday was dismissed in scientific circles as implausible, but the film caught people’s attention.

What followed was a more sober analysis from Beltway think tanks assessing the linkages between climate change and geopolitical strife. Congress held hearings on the climate/national security nexus and the issue –while politically contentious–was taken seriously in the U.S. military and intelligence communities. Indeed, climate change was projected to be a major driver of future conflicts and instability around the world.

I wrote about this emerging issue on numerous occasions in the late 2000s, including in this space. (Here’s a more recent round-up of high profile studies.)

In the last several years, some scholars and influential pundits have argued that global warming played a major role in the Arab Spring. The notion that climate change sparked Syria’s hellish civil war has also gained currency in some circles.

When we get to this point–when famines and wars with deeply rooted socio-political causes–are attributed to climate change–we are approaching the same territory inhabited by those who routinely cast every severe weather event and catastrophe in the context of climate change. (This unfortunate tendency is rued by some in the climate community.)

Researchers who study the environment/security intersection–and who strive to remain unbiased–know that the climate change-security discourse has taken a problematic direction. (Indeed, some warned about it.) At the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security program, read this new post by Francois Gemenne, who writes:

Debate on the human security dimensions of climate change has often been cast from a deterministic perspective, where global warming will automatically translate into mass migrations, competition for resources and land, and ultimately conflict and devastation. There are two problems with this rhetoric.

To understand those problems, read the whole commentary. And when you’re done, check out this 2007 piece by Mike Hulme, who also warned about the seduction of climate determinism.

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White House Launches Climate Change Communication Tool that Treats Citizens Like Adults

Screenshot of an interactive map accessible from data.gov/climate showing expected inundation of areas of New York City based on different projections of sea level. (Source: NOAA and data.gov/climate)

A day after a major scientific organization released an embarrassingly ineffective report aimed at communicating the realities of climate change, the White House has launched something entirely different — and better.

For now, it is a web portal that serves as a kind of clearinghouse for all manner of information on how sea level rise is remaking our coasts and posing risks to those who live and work along them.

The screenshot above shows one of the interactive tools available on the site, data.gov/climate. In stunning graphic detail, it shows areas in the New York metro area that would become inundated in the future based on different projections of sea level rise. It’s one of just dozens of such tools available right now on the site.

And according to the White House, it is just the start of a major effort at climate change communication. The effort is designed to enable citizens to see how climate change is affecting them where they live and work, and what they might expect in the future, through interactive, graphics-based digital tools.

Yesterday’s report by the American Association for the Advancement of Science was, at its heart, a “We’re scientists, so listen to what we say” effort. In contrast, the initiative launched by the White House today treats people like grownups and gives them powerful tools to learn for themselves what’s happening. And unlike the AAAS report, its ultimate goal is to take full advantage of the power of digital technology — and visual communication — to empower people to plan for a future of climate change.

I’ve only had time to scratch the surface of the new web site. But so far, I’m impressed. And I know that it will be helpful in my future reporting on climate change.

To offer just one example, the web site offers access to an online, interactive tool from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that allows users to select a county and get a quick snapshot of its demographics, infrastructure and environment within flood zones. The results include a floodplain map, and graphics showing the overall population in floodplains, as well as the population over 65 years of age and in poverty that live in these areas, along with a plethora of other useful statistics and information.

I’ll be poking around the new site in coming days, and I may come back with an update on what I find.

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Giant "Chicken From Hell" is New Dinosaur Species

The big, bad, beaked stuff of nightmares, new dinosaur Anzu wyliei is described as “hell’s chicken” by the researchers who found it. Credit: Mark A. Klingler, Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

Researchers announcing a newly described dinosaur called it the “chicken from hell,” “hell’s chicken” and “scary as well as absurd.”

More prosaically known as Anzu wyliei, the beaked dinosaur stood about ten feet tall and more than 11 feet long with a tall crest on its head and sharp claws. A. wyliei lived about 66 million years ago in what’s now North and South Dakota, possibly sharing the same habitat as the iconic Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops species. Researchers announced the new species this week.

Despite its vicious-looking claws, A. wyliei likely ate vegetation, small animals and possibly the eggs of other species. It lived on a floodplain and, while flightless, had a bird-like appearance with slender legs and a toothless jaw. Although no fossilized evidence of feathers were found, based on its relationship with other feathered species, researchers believe the animal had feathers on its tail and arms.

Illustration courtesy of Bob Walters.

Researchers estimate Anzu wyliei weighed perhaps 450-650 pounds, making it among the largest known oviraptorosaurs.

Oviraptorosaurs are feathered dinosaurs that belonged to the larger maniraptor group, from which modern birds evolved.

Aside from getting to put the phrase “chicken from hell” in a press release, researchers who described the new dinosaur today in the open-access journal PLoS One have good reason to be excited about the find. Their analysis is based on partial remains of three separate individuals found in the Hell’s Creek formation; together, the fossils form an almost complete A. wyliei skeleton. That’s important because the dinosaur belongs to the Caenagnathidae family, a mysterious offshoot of the oviraptorosauria subgroup previously known only from a handful of fragmentary bones.

Having a nearly-complete example of a Caenaghathid not only fills in a blank in the fossil record, it’s also rewriting the oviraptor family tree.

Already A. wyliei‘s remains have settled a debate about the relationship between different oviraptors species: “hell’s chicken” has shown North American oviraptors are much more closely related to each other than to similar species in Asia. At the same time, researchers believe an Asian oviraptor, the 26-foot-long Gigantoraptor, should be reclassified as a Caenaghathid based on similarities its shares with A. wyliei.

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Explore the Milky Way in Amazing 360-Degree Panorama

The Cat’s Paw Nebula. Credit: NASA/ESO/DSS2

Do you lack the time and funds for a fancy spring break getaway to some tropical clime? Well, NASA has the perfect intergalactic trip package for you. From the comforts of your desk chair, you can venture thousands upon thousands of light years into the Milky Way galaxy and return before your lunch break is over.

NASA’s Spitzer telescope spent the past decade snapping two million infrared photographs of our galaxy to stitch together a massive 360-degree panorama of the Milky Way. It’s the most detailed infrared panorama of our home galaxy ever made, and was derived from the GLIMPSE360 project.

Our galaxy is a flat, spiral disk about 100,000 light years in diameter. The GLIMPSE panorama only includes a small sliver of the sky — about 3 percent — but includes more than half of the stars in the Milky Way, which is due to our galaxy’s pancake shape.

When you take time to explore the panorama, you can find distant galaxies and areas of star formation. You’ll also notice that our galaxy is riddled with bubbles. These structures are cavities around massive stars, which blast wind and radiation into their surroundings. GLIMPSE also added navigation shortcuts so you can skip to popular destinations like Cat’s Paw Nebula, Canis Major and the galactic center (where a massive black hole resides).

However, the GLIMPSE data aren’t all for show. The data have helped astronomers create precise star maps of the Milky Way’s inner arms. The data will also guide NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope to areas of star formation, where it will make even more detailed observations. The GLIMPSE panorama and Spitzer telescope mission are described in more detail in the video below.

While your friends and coworkers may tout their newly bronzed skin, you can brag about your tromp through the dark, unexplored backcountry of our galaxy where some of the faintest stars exist. Subsequently, your friends and family may suggest you take an actual vacation.

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Darker Skin Evolved To Reduce Cancer Risk

A reconstruction of a female Homo erectus. Reconstruction by John Gurche; photographed by Tim Evanson

A long-discounted theory about the evolution of skin color may have had it right all along, new research suggests.

Darker skin gives individuals much greater protection from UV light-induced skin cancer. Pale-skinned people are roughly 1,000 times more likely than individuals with dark skin to suffer from the three most common skin cancers. But for years, researchers believed the lowered risk was an incidental benefit, not one derived through the pressure of natural selection.

Even Charles Darwin poo-poohed the notion that pigmentation could be an adaptive trait. A new study, however, finds evidence that skin cancer was in fact a driving evolutionary force for early hominids to have darker skin.

The findings were based studying people with albinism in equatorial Africa, which has the highest UV radiation exposure on the planet. The study, based on medical records, found that more than 80 percent of people with albinism in this region developed terminal skin cancer before the age of 30, or roughly at one’s reproductive height. Thus, researchers say, individuals with light skin were likely to die sooner— and produce fewer offspring — than those with darker skin.

Researchers involved in the study believe that the earliest humans had pale skin containing pheomelanin, as do our close relatives, the chimpanzees. As our ancestors lost their body hair, likely to withstand the hot temperatures in the African savannah, that pale skin would have put them at great risk for early-onset skin cancers.

But those individuals who evolved to produce eumelanin — brown-black pigmentation — would have had a definite advantage because eumelanin affords natural protection from DNA damage — and skin cancer — caused by UV radiation. Darker-skinned early humans would have been less likely to die from skin cancer at a young age, and therefore more likely to live to produce more offspring, who would inherit their adaptive dark skin.

The study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggests that dark skin arose between 1.2 and 1.8 million years ago in equatorial Africa — the same area where albinism so often leads to an early death from skin cancer today.

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