Weekly round up - August 31, 2007
What’s been on The Great Beyond this week and a few extras...
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Archive by date: August 2007
August 31, 2007
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Storms to get stronger - August 31, 2007
Another day, another ‘global warming will kill us all’ story. This one is from at team at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies who have worked out that a warmer atmosphere will mean storms are even stronger. Or, in AP’s words, we face “more severe thunderstorms with deadly lightning, damaging hail and the potential for tornadoes”. LiveScience says global warming will make “severe thunderstorms and tornadoes a more common feature of US weather”.
While it has already been shown that heavy rainstorms will be more common in a warmer climate a new climate model developed by NASA shows the strength of updrafts in these storms will also be stronger and more severe (press release). AP notes that on a normal sunny day updrafts are less than 1 mile per hour, in a severe storm they can top 20: the faster they are the worse the storm.
It’s not all doom and gloom though - the model also suggests while there will be stronger and more severe storms there will be fewer storms overall. As Wired notes: “for once, there’s a little good news along with the bad”.
The paper seems to have been published in Geophysical Research Letters (abstract) a couple of weeks ago, but only press released yesterday.
Image: Getty
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Lucy fossil controversy - August 31, 2007
Nearly a month after she was, in the words of Pravda, “spirited out of Ethiopia” fossil superstar Lucy has gone on display in a Houston museum. The Houston Chronicle has compiled a celebratory ‘day in the life’ of the three million year old hominid; other papers are more interested in the controversy her US visit has caused. When it was announced the fragile remains would be undertaking a six-year tour experts including palaeontologist Richard Leakey condemned the move (Washington Post). “Quite simply, the Smithsonian position is that the fossil Lucy, one of the most important specimens of its kind, is too fragile to go on public tour," a spokesman for the museum said at the time (AP).
The Arizona Republic had a word with one of the people who discovered Lucy in the first place. Donald Johanson, of Arizona State University, thinks the gruelling tour schedule could be detrimental to her health. “Lucy is one of a kind, fragile and invaluable to the science of paleoanthropology. There are always dangers when an irreplaceable object is travelled.” Reuters notes that the remains have only been briefly displayed in the country where they were found. The Ethiopian National Museum prefers to display a replica.
Image: Lucy fossil / Houston Museum of Natural Science
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Scientists sue over background checks - August 31, 2007
Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which spearheads NASA’s planetary research, are suing the space agency and their employer CalTech over security checks into their health, mental state and sexual histories. The Nation says the new security checks are “puzzling” because scientists at the lab have “little or no” involvement in secret research. As the LA Times reports, NASA labs have been told to issue new badges, requiring employees to authorise access to personal information. The Times also says NASA’s administrator Michael Griffin is not for turning: “We will miss those folks [who refuse checks] ...That is their choice.”
“This is something straight out of the 1950’s McCarthy era. The ‘suitability criteria’ are so broad that investigators could use them to get rid of anyone they want,” said Dennis Byrnes, Chief Engineer for Flight Dynamics at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena (press release).
JPL is run for NASA by Caltech and the New York Times says more than 5,000 employees at the lab are not government employees but work for the university or other contractors, although all are subject to the checks. AP says a request for an injunction blocking the checks will be heard in the California district court on 24 September and, rather terrifyingly, those who won’t agree to them will be “voluntarily terminated” on 27 October. NASA’s page on the hspd12 security checks says “successful intrusions” dropped 46% after introduction of the cards at the Department of Defense. Wired has a nice take on the issue.
August 30, 2007
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Global warming: belief but no understanding - August 30, 2007
For all the coverage given to global warming it is often assumed that a sizable section of the public doesn’t believe it is actually happening. So it is nice to see some actual research on the subject. It is even nicer to see that most people believe global warming is happening and carbon dioxide emissions are the cause.
In a new paper Matthew Nisbet and Teresa Myers review 20 years of public opinion polls on the subject (abstract). In Nisbet’s words (from his blog), “... although a strong majority of Americans say that they believe that global warming is real, that temperatures are rising, and that the release of carbon dioxide is a cause, the public remains relatively uncertain about whether the majority of scientists agree on the matter [his italics].” Which seems to mean that the average member of the public thinks that she knows what’s what, but isn’t sure that the scientists do.
Over on the Prometheus blog climate scientist Kevin Vranes from the University of Colorado in Boulder seems happy:
“The science community has been freaking out for years about trying to answer the ‘we’re screaming at them about this problem, why aren't they doing anything about it???’ question. The stock answer from climate scientists is either about skeptics sowing doubt, or the problem is too complicated, or something like that, but it usually comes down to, ‘the public just isn't convinced that it's a problem.’ Matt’s paper shows that clearly the public is aware of global warming and does think it is a problem.”
Unfortunately, commenting on Vranes’s post, Nisbet says: “A word of caution on the interpretation of our study: On global warming, to paraphrase Kevin, the public isn't there and that remains both a major communication problem and a major policy problem. ... On questions measuring actual knowledge about either the science or the policy involved, the public scores very low.”
It seems we’re not quite there yet.
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‘Drunk’ astronauts were sober, probably - August 30, 2007
How do you tell if someone is drunk? In America you might ask them to walk in a straight line or stand on one leg. In the UK you might ask them to blow into a breathalyser. If you work for NASA you produce a number of contradictory reports and leave everyone confused about what the truth actually is.
The space agency’s administrator Michael Griffin claimed yesterday his “guys” are in the clear over allegations they flew while inebriated. “I'm saying I think our guys are doing a heck of a job, and these allegations are untrue,” he said (LA Times). He also said claims of drunken astronauts were “urban legend” (NY Times). The Washington Post says Griffin will start an alcohol testing program for employees, required by law since 1991 but not implemented.
Last month it was reported that NASA had allowed astronauts to fly while drunk (by Nature, as well as others). A report published on 27 July stated: “Two specific instances were described where astronauts had been so intoxicated prior to flight that flight surgeons and/or fellow astronauts raised concerns to local on-scene leadership regarding flight safety. However, the individuals were still permitted to fly.” (report pdf)
So it was something of a surprise to see the latest NASA report, evaluating the earlier report, states: “I was unable to verify any case in which an astronaut spaceflight crewmember was impaired on launch day ...” Wine, beer and “a half-empty bottle of tequila” were all found in crew quarters though. (report pdf)
Clearly we now need a review of the evaluation of the report. Oh wait – there’s already one scheduled.
You can read all the reports, summaries, statements and other water-muddying documents from NASA on their website.
Image: the shuttle through mist / NASA
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Supersonic space rain - August 30, 2007
Supersonic rain has been spotted falling around an embryonic solar system. Scientists using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope detected five times the water in all Earth’s oceans raining down on a disk of material around a still-forming star (Reuters and Space.com). “Water ... exists mostly as ice in the dense clouds that form stars,” said researcher Dan Watson of the University of Rochester (press release). “Now we’ve seen that water, falling as ice from a young star system’s envelope to its disk, actually vaporizes on arrival. This water vapor will later freeze again into asteroids and comets.”
As Watson explained to Wired, the material reaches supersonic speeds before it crashes into the disk that will probably go on to form planets. The ice vaporizes on impact and vapour emits a spectrum of infrared light which can then be detected on Earth. “That light is what we measured. From the details of the measured spectrum we can tease out the physical details of this brand-new, pre-planetary disk.”
Unfortunately ‘supersonic’ in this context may not be as impressive as it sounds. Speed of sound is approximately proportional to density – as the local density is low, relative to air, the speed will be too.
As the researchers explain in this week’s issue of Nature (abstract) this was the only example of such emission in a sample of 30 ‘Class 0 protostars’ - the youngest type of young stellar objects. The embryonic star system is about 1,000 light years away in the Perseus constellation and is named NGC 1333-IRAS 4B.
Image: artist's concept of fledgling solar system / NASA/JPL-Caltech
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Plants can hear - August 30, 2007
Korean scientists think plant genes could be turned on by blasting fields with classical music. According to New Scientist (subscription required) actually playing Beethoven to rice plants in a lab had no effect but when sound was played to plants at specific frequencies two genes became more active. The ald gene became more active at 125 and 250 Hertz, and less active at 50 Hertz. In their paper in Molecular Breeding the researchers suggest that in transgenic plants the expression of any gene fused to ald could be regulated by sound.
Newspapers in the UK are having a lot of fun with the suggestions. Heir to the throne Prince Charles was ridiculed in the 1980s for saying “I just come and talk to the plants, really - very important to talk to them, they respond.” So the research is leading to a number of “Charles was right” stories (The Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail).
August 29, 2007
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Spiderman suit in ten years - August 29, 2007
In ten years we will all be able to don suits giving us Spiderman like abilities, according to The Times. Unfortunately the new research from Nicola Pugno which The Times and others are reporting only shows theoretically that it could be done and rounds up previous research. We still don’t actually have even a prototype suit so ten years seems pretty ambitious to me.
Pugno, from the Polytechnic of Turin in Italy, has published an article in the Journal of Physics suggesting carbon nanotubes could be used to develop microscopic Velcro that could lead to human sticky suits. “However now that we are this step closer, it may not be long before we are seeing people climbing up the Empire State Building with nothing but sticky shoes and gloves to support them,” he says in the press release (a comment picked up with enthusiasm by UK tabloids The Sun and the Mirror). As the BBC notes, “Professor Pugno also outlined three properties which a real Spider-man suit must demonstrate. Firstly, and most obviously, it must be able to demonstrate strong adhesive properties. Secondly, the suit must be able to detach easily from a surface after it has stuck. Thirdly, the suit must, to some degree, be able to clean itself.”
Commenting on the story to Wired Ronald Fearing, an electrical engineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley, said: “We already know that if you take the performance of the gecko and scale it up to a person, you'd be all set," he said. "We don't know all the details of how the gecko works, however.” Scientists have been working on similar projects for years of course, but Pugno has pulled the various strands together in one article.
Of course, once you’ve gained super hero powers, you still have to put up with the same social problems – as Philip Ball explains in a recent Nature Muse.
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Greenhouse gases and ozone holes - August 29, 2007
It’s another bad day for planet Earth. The hole in the ozone layer over the Antarctic opened early this year according to the UN’s World Meteorological Organization, although it may end up smaller than in previous years (Reuters leads on it being early, Bloomberg on it being small). This news broke as climate scientists in the United States blamed greenhouse gases for unusually high US temperatures in 2006. Previously El Nino had been suspected.
“Last year’s average temperature was the second highest since record-keeping began in 1895. The team found that it was very unlikely that the 2006 El Niño played any role ...” said researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (press release). Their findings are due to be published in the Geophysical Research Letters journal. Data from 10 previous El Ninos and 42 simulations from 18 climate models were scrutinised. El Nino appeared to actually cause a slight cooling across the United States. The work showed that last year’s temperatures matched the warming expected from greenhouse gases but were “completely inconsistent” with the pattern expected from El Nino, according to the press release.
Actually though, we already know greenhouse gases are the major cause of warming – the International Panel on Climate Change report from the start of this year stated the probability that "most of the warming" over the second half of the twentieth century was due to increases in greenhouse-gas emissions was higher than 90% (Nature, subscription required). What this research does is exonerate El Nino for 2006.
“What we found was a very strong footprint of the observed warming, consistent with the greenhouse gas effect,” one of the researchers told Reuters. AP quotes cartoon character Pogo: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
Image: NASA
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Science blogger sued - UPDATE - August 29, 2007
Last week we highlighted a legal action against science blogger PZ Myers. According to a post on Myers’s blog the $15 million action has been withdrawn by Stuart Pivar, who was claiming Myers libelled him in reviewing his alternative theory of evolution. “I can't say that I was ever really worried — the man had no case — but it's nice to see that silly potential time-suck gone,” said Myers. However Pivar’s lawyer is apparently threatening legal action against lawyer Peter Irons, who has been writing letters examining the case (one of which is at the bottom of this blog post on The Panda’s Thumb).
August 28, 2007
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Star Wars prop in space - August 28, 2007
According to a number of websites (collectSpace for example) NASA is preparing to launch a genuine Star Wars lightsaber™ into space on a future shuttle mission. A film prop used as a laser weapon in the film will be on board the October launch of Discovery. Whether or not this is appropriate is now a subject of some debate at self-professed geek home SlashDot.
We couldn’t find a press release for this so we’ve put a call in to NASA to find out if it is actually true. In the meantime, please remember that - as NASA has told us - real lightsabers can’t (for the forseeable future) be made.
UPDATE – 29/08/07
Florida Today has now moved on this story, quoting NASA spokesman James Hartsfield as saying: “It is not infrequent that we fly artifacts and other items for museums and other organizations.” Which raises two questions: what else have they flown and is a movie prop really an artefact? According to the Ottawa Citizen the last time a “piece of pop-culture” was flown was September 2006 when Monopoly pieces were sent into orbit.
CollectSpace now has a photo gallery of the ceremony that took place when the prop landed in Houston. Bigelow Aerospace previously offered to ‘fly your stuff’ into space but orders are no longer being taken unfortunately.
Image: NASA
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Stem cells fix rat hearts - August 28, 2007
A new experiment is being hailed as the “best evidence yet” that stem cells could be used to repair heart damage (Reuters). The Guardian thinks it could lead to “off-the-shelf heart repair therapy for heart attack patients”. Previous attempts to inject heart muscle from stem cells into damaged hearts have ended with the introduced cells dying. So researchers developed a ‘cocktail’ to allow new cells to survive in rats. “We used to just squirt them (the cells) in a saline solution and say, ‘See you boys,’ and hope for the best. That was pretty dismal,” said Chuck Murry, study author and researcher at the University of Washington (Toronto Star).
Efforts to use stem cells in heart repair have also been hampered by problems with getting stem cells to turn into just heart muscle cells – previously only 1% of stems cells would turn into cardiac muscle. Using two proteins to encourage growth and then purifying the cells Murry’s team managed to convert 90% of stem cells into heart muscle cells. “Past attempts at treating infarcted hearts with stem cells have shown promise, but they have really been hampered by these challenges. This method we developed goes a long way towards solving both of those problems,” he said (press release).
The research appears in Nature Biotechnology (abstract). The company that sponsored the research has put out their own press release and The Street says their shares were up 8% in Monday morning trading.
Image: Heart muscle graft (bottom) in a rat heart damaged by a heart attack, with human-derived cells incorporated with scar tissue (middle) and regular heart muscle cells (top) / Michael Laflamme/University of Washington
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China legislates for failure - August 28, 2007
In an effort to cut research fraud China is considering legislation permitting scientists to fail. According to state news agency Xinhua a proposed amendment to the Law on Science and Technology Progress would allow scientists to report experiments that fail without jeopardising future funding. “It's difficult to make achievements in independent innovation if the scientific research departments and scientists don't tolerate failures,” said Bai Chunli, vice-president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The amendment would state: “Scientists and technicians, who have initiated research with a high risk of failure will still have their expenses covered if they can provide evidence that they have tried their best when they failed to achieve their goals” (Xinhua). This story has already been picked up by Reuters, which notes that this month alone 13 academics have apparently been blacklisted for falsifying research data. AP notes that a dean at a top Chinese university was fired for fraud last year.
According to China Daily (which credits Xinhua as a source) researchers will also be able to own the intellectual property rights of government-sponsored work under the proposed legislation, unless the work is military or “concerning major social issues and public interest”.
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Fantasy journal league - August 28, 2007
Biologist Carl Bergstrom has constructed what is either the best or the most bizarre idea of the year so far (quite possibly both). The University of Washington academic wants to establish a ‘Fantasy Journals’ league in the same way that some people play fantasy football. “Scientists could draft [as in ‘enlist’, not ‘write’] papers for their own fantasy journal, and then compete to see whose journal was most successful. ... Our lab would have a blast playing – and if I challenged my graduate students to beat my picks, I can guarantee that they would read an increasing fraction of the literature in their efforts to put my in my place.” suggest Bergstrom and colleagues (pdf).
The idea is starting to permeate the blogosphere. Jake Young, a PhD student at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, thinks it is “genius. ... We should totally play this.” The Guardian says “It promises all the thrills and nail-biting suspense of fantasy football - with added equations.” Not everyone is impressed though, judging by some comments on the Marginal Revolution blog post about this.
Nature even gets a mention, with Bergstrom noting: “To hear my colleagues talk about the mistakes that Nature or PLoS made by rejecting their papers, my colleagues seem to hold similar beliefs – they seem to believe that they that they can outdo Philip Campbell or Catriona MacCallum (no offense to Philip or Catriona) or whoever is controlling the “roster” of papers appearing in Nature.” I guess that depends what criteria you use to judge your papers. Phil said: ‘I’d be delighted to be shown how we could do better, though people’s opinions of their own rejections isn’t necessarily where I’d start.’
Image: Corbis
August 24, 2007
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Weekly round up - August 24, 2007
Round up of what’s on The Great Beyond this week and a few extras...
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Changes in Uranus’s rings - August 24, 2007
We saw them when Voyager flew past in 1986, but pictures of Uranus’s rings are clearly pretty enough to have everyone salivating again. Also, the planet’s rings seem to have changed since then, as Scientific American notes. Every 42 years the rings align edge-on to Earth, allowing astronomers a glare-free view. Comparing new images from ground-based telescopes to images from the Voyager flyby researchers report in Science that “dust distribution within the system has changed significantly since the 1986 Voyager spacecraft encounter and occurs on much larger scales than has been seen in other planetary systems”.
As the BBC notes, this data and images from the Hubble Space Telescope which looked at Uranus earlier this month could even reveal new moons. “Two little satellites called Cordelia and Ophelia straddle the brightest ring, the epsilon ring, and keep it in place, but people have always assumed there must be a bunch more of these satellites that are confining the nine other narrow rings. This is the unique viewing geometry that only comes along once in 42 years, when we have a chance of imaging these tiny satellites, because normally they are lost in the glare of the rings.” said Mark Showalter from the Seti Institute in California in the press release.
Come December 7 though we do get another shot - the Uranian equinox, where “the rings are perfectly edge-on to the sun, and after that, there is a brief period again when we will view the dark side of the rings, before they become illuminated again for another 42 years,” notes study author, Heidi Hammel of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
The press release for this study is remarkably exhaustive. This is really all about the pretty pictures though – thoughtfully provided both by the press release and the Hubble Site.
Image: Keck II images of Uranus in 2004, 2006 and 2007 / Courtesy Imke de Pater, Heidi B. Hammel, W.M. Keck Observatory
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Plenty of nothing - August 24, 2007
A “giant hole” in the universe has been discovered by astronomers from Minnesota. Investigating an area of the sky known as the WMAP Cold Spot, Lawrence Rudnick and colleagues found a void empty of stars, gas and even dark matter (press release). As AP’s widely circulating report notes, the hole is big: an “expanse of nearly 6 billion trillion miles of emptiness” (AP, and the same version with a much better headline from the San Diego Union Tribune). "Not only has no one ever found a void this big, but we never even expected to find one this size," said Rudnick.
Astronomers have long known that there are big voids in the universe, and think they can explain them with their theories as to how large scale structures first formed. But those theories are hard put to describe a void quite this big. Either it’s a statistical fluke or something is wrong with our current understanding. "What we've found is not normal, based on either observational studies or on computer simulations of the large-scale evolution of the Universe," Williams said (Reuters and the press release).
Using data that imaged the entire sky visible to the Very Large Array radio telescope Rudnick found a drop in the number of galaxies in one region. The region was already thought to be a bit odd because of the way it stands out as a hole in a map of background radiation left over from the Big Bang. This new study shows that this "WMAP cold spot" is not just intrinsic to this background radiation. "Although our surprising results need independent confirmation, the slightly colder temperature of the CMB in this region appears to be caused by a huge hole devoid of nearly all matter roughly 6-10 billion light-years from Earth," Rudnick said in the press release.
Image: Cold spot in Cosmic Microwave Background (left) and reduction in emission from radio galaxies (right) / Rudnick et al., NRAO/AUI/NSF, NASA
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The Daily Telegraph ties this together with recent revisionist accounts of the Viking landers’ ability to detect organic molecules in the Martian soil. But as readers of our recent feature on this subject (subscription required, I'm afraid) will appreciate, this is a complex debate, and the amount of biomass suggested might well in fact have been picked up by Viking, had it been there. The best report on the new claim we’ve seen so far comes from Ker Than at Live Science, who points out that at least one microbiologist with an interest in life elsewhere, Norm Pace of the Univeristy of Colorado, thinks it “sounds bogus”.
Another life-on-Mars mini-flap - August 24, 2007
Life on Mars stories never fail to gather a following, and a presentation at the European Planetary Science Congress in Potsdam, Germany this week duly picked up some coverage (Reuters, London Daily Mail). Joop Houtkooper of the University of Giessen, Germany, and his colleague Dirk Schulze-Makuch from Washington State University, believe:
that the subfreezing, arid Martian surface could be home to organisms whose cells are filled with a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and water. Dr Houtkooper said, "The GEx experiment [on the 1976 Viking landers] measured unexplained rises in oxygen and carbon dioxide levels when incubating samples. If we assume these gases were produced during the breakdown of organic material together with hydrogen peroxide solution, we can calculate the masses needed to produce the volume of gas measured. From that, we can estimate the total biomass in the sample of Martian soil. (Press release)
The Daily Telegraph ties this together with recent revisionist accounts of the Viking landers’ ability to detect organic molecules in the Martian soil. But as readers of our recent feature on this subject (subscription required, I'm afraid) will appreciate, this is a complex debate, and the amount of biomass suggested might well in fact have been picked up by Viking, had it been there. The best report on the new claim we’ve seen so far comes from Ker Than at Live Science, who points out that at least one microbiologist with an interest in life elsewhere, Norm Pace of the Univeristy of Colorado, thinks it “sounds bogus”.
Image: composite image of Mars taken by Hubble Space Telescope / NASA
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Women prefer pink – author responds - August 24, 2007
Earlier this week we covered research reported as showing “Women prefer pink” and some of the criticism it received. Anya Hurlbert, a neuroscientist at Newcastle University and one of the authors behind the research, has been kind enough to send us a response to her critics.
Click through for the full (unedited) response.
August 23, 2007
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Virtual epidemics - August 23, 2007
An out-of-control computer game is providing insights into how virulent diseases spread in the real world. A disease designed to challenge experienced players in the online game World of Warcraft has instead devastated the game’s entire online world after spreading by means of teleportation. Now researchers think this virtual epidemic might help them model real world situations, with the game becoming in Time’s words “a pandemic lab” (press release). “Human behaviour has a big impact on disease spread. And virtual worlds offer an excellent platform for studying human behaviour,” paper author Nina Fefferman, from Tufts University School of Medicine, told the BBC. The new paper is published in Lancet Infectious Diseases.
In 2005 World of Warcraft’s designers created a ‘disease’ that certain characters became infected with. However the ability in the game to teleport your character meant the disease spread further and faster than expected. According to Reuters Fefferman’s first-hand experience of the online plague led her to identify a ‘stupid factor’: “Someone thinks, ‘I’ll just get close and get a quick look and it won't affect me’.”
Gaming sites seem pleased, although Gaming Today asks: “Are they just going to “borrow” Second Life for a while and see how people behave after their skin starts breaking out in boils?” The World of Warcraft members’ forum has a thread discussing this topic, although it seems to have rapidly degenerated into a minor slanging match.
Image: WoW during epidemic / Blizzard EntertainmentInc, 2007.
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Transgender study row resurfaces - August 23, 2007
An almighty row in the social sciences has surfaced in the pages of the New York Times. In 2003 psychologist J. Michael Bailey published a book about transgender women and triggered an argument that has since ranged from issues of academic freedom to alleged ethics violations to outright personal abuse. On his faculty website (he is a professor of psychology at Northwestern University) Bailey states: “The critics especially dislike my contention ... that transsexuals who are not homosexual are autogynephilic. … autogynephilia can be understood as sexual arousal at the idea of being a woman.”
“What happened to Bailey is important, because the harassment was so extraordinarily bad and because it could happen to any researcher in the field,” Alice Dreger, an ethics scholar told the NY Times. Dreger’s investigation of the case came down firmly on Bailey’s side – it is available as a PDF file and seems to be slated for publication in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior.
Critics disagree. Prominent among them is Lynn Conway, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan. Conway claims the book “contains page after page of defamatory caricatures of transsexual women”. Her investigation into the book is not complimentary.
Whatever the rights and wrongs in this case the extreme nature of the argument is shocking. The Times article details how one transgender advocate downloaded pictures of Bailey’s children and posted them on a website with sexually explicit captions.
August 22, 2007
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Moose to blame for climate change - August 22, 2007
A new climate change message is emanating from Norway – we have to kill the moose. Researchers in the country have worked out that the average moose produces 2,100 kgs of methane a year, equivalent in global warming terms to a 13,000 km car journey. English language versions of Aftenposten and Spiegel have the story, although the both (which I can read) credit VG (which I can’t). “Shoot a moose and save yourself a climate quota," moose researcher Reidar Andersen apparently told VG.
This is just a slightly different version of the old “cows are to blame for global warming” (see Nature from 2000). Of course it won’t stop certain people having a field day. Newsbusters, for example: “modern politics sure is entertaining sometimes, especially when one politically correct cause threatens another”. The source of this story can be found on research website Forskning, for those who can read Norwegian.
Those who believe the planet is capable of regulating its own climate may be relieved to note that a feedback mechanism to deal with this problem already seems to have kicked in. Michigan Tech in the US believes ‘Global Warming Threatens Moose, Wolves’.
UPDATE - 23/08/2007
The Times has now picked up on this, adding to our understanding by suggesting that climate change has altered moose eating habits and created “fatter moose that are more likely to break wind”. In a further strange development the paper’s leader article on the subject includes an imagined conversation between two moose named Gunnar and Henry.
Image: Getty
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Science blogger sued - August 22, 2007
PZ Myers, who is a professor at the University of Minnesota and whose Pharyngula is one of the most popular science blogs around, is being sued for libel to the tune of $15 million after criticizing a book postulating an alternative theory of evolution. Stuart Pivar, the author of Lifecode, thinks Myers’s less-than glowing review of his book amounts to libel: according to blogger Teresa Nielsen Hayden he seems to take particular exception to the term “crackpot”. Myers’s own blog says “On the advice of counsel, I'm not going to say a word, yet.”
A quick search suggests that Myers is not the only person using the “c” word about Pivar at the moment. Nielsen Hayden has a good, defiantly partisan run down of what’s actually going on while Scientific American has the following comment from Myers (presumably before his advice came in): “Nothing in the review was motivated by personal malice … I still stand by my review, and now I'm a bit disturbed that someone would think criticism of a scientific hypothesis must be defended by silencing its critics.” The book seems to have had no reviews on Amazon before this; as a result of the publicity it now has five very negative ones.
Of 90 blogs weighing in on this at the time of writing, only one seems to be backing Pivar. The Disgruntled Chemist blog labels the lawsuit (which is against SEED as well as Myers) is the “worst kind of bullying”. Andrea Bottaro on The Panda’s Thumb thinks it is “the latest in frivolous lawsuit madness”. Only ‘Demolition 65’ claims to be “absolutely shivering with glee” that Myers, a long-time thorn in the side of creationists, is suffering discomfort—and even that anonymous blogger doesn’t think the suit is a very good idea.
In other blog news: a creationist in Turkey has managed to block access to a sizable chunk of the blogosphere in that country.
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Climate report ‘unlawfully’ withheld - August 22, 2007
The Bush administration’s refusal to release climate change documents has been declared unlawful by a federal court. As AP and others note, District Court Judge Saundra Armstrong has set a 31 May 2008 deadline for the government to produce a projection of global warming’s effects on the US environment and economy. Although the government is required to produce such an assessment every four years the most recent one was issued by the Clinton administration in 2000. “The defendants have unlawfully withheld reports they are required to disseminate,” ruled Armstrong (judgement PDF).
“The reports are supposed to be the premiere summary on the science of global warming in this country and used by all federal agencies … The Bush administration essentially deep-sixed these reports,” said Kassie Siegel of conservation group the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the groups which took the case to court (ABC News).
As the San Francisco Chronicle points out: “The ruling was the second legal defeat for the administration on global warming this year. The Supreme Court ruled in April that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases emitted from vehicle tailpipes were pollutants subject to federal regulation -- rejecting the government's position that it lacked such authority -- and said the voluntary measures promoted by the Bush administration were an inadequate substitute for regulation.”
The Center for Biological Diversity has put out a press release and further details of the case.
Image: Getty
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How fast were dinosaurs? - August 22, 2007
Putting dinosaurs and David Beckham together seems to be a recipe for getting your research into the press. Scientists at the University of Manchester in the UK have worked out how fast various dinosaurs can run – interesting but perhaps not front page news. But put out a press release saying that you’ve proved T. Rex could catch and eat David Beckham and it’s another story (freesheet Metro, Reuters, Scotsman, Times, Fox sports).
The paper involved is in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Biomechanics expert Bill Sellers and palaeontologist Phil Manning crunched the numbers for dinosaur skeletal and muscular structure to work out top speeds for various dinosaurs. They checked their calculations by using their model to estimate the speeds of known beings (such as professional athletes and ostriches). According to their model T. rex ran at a maximum of 18mph. Which is actually pretty lumbering compared to the tiny Compsognathus, which they calculated could run at almost 40mph.
“Previous research has relied on data from extant bipedal models to provide clues as to how fast dinosaurs could run,” said Sellers (press release). “Such calculations can accurately predict the top speed of a six-tonne chicken but dinosaurs are not built like chickens and nor do they run like them.”
As noted in the Times, one of a select few papers not to put the David Beckham angle in their headline, ostriches have been clocked at faster speeds than predicted by the model. But Sellers says this just means some dinosaurs could probably run even faster than predicted.
Whether a T. Rex could actually catch Beckham after it outpaced him is another matter though – earlier this year John Hutchinson of Stanford University published a study showing the beast could only turn very slowly (picked up by Cosmos). Duck and weave David! Duck and weave!
Image: Alamy
August 21, 2007
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Stutter trial payout - August 21, 2007
Subjects in a now notorious US medical experiment have won nearly $1 million in damages. The state of Iowa in the US has agreed to pay $925,000 to settle claims that a 1939 experiment by the University of Iowa Speech Pathology Department left six children with lifelong speech problems (Attorney General’s press release, settlement document). The children were harassed and belittled to get them to stammer in what became known as the ‘Monster Study’ (as AP notes). The man in charge of the study, Wendell Johnson, believed non-stutterers would develop the condition if labelled as stutterers. Oddly, and for reasons neither I nor the Des Moines Register can determine, one of the plaintiffs is getting $25,000 while the other five split $900,000.
This all makes you think hard about the kinds of trials that get approval, and wonder how much things have changed, especially given that when details of the study emerged in 2001 two professors said they’d known about it for years, but nobody listened to them (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel). Even 'normal' clinical trials for drugs can come with ethical issues that you'd think could be easily avoided (see column in Nature News today about gene therapy).
Wendell Johnson died in 1965; his son has established a memorial page with a huge amount of information about his work. He has also blogged about the settlement, with a rather different take on it to the newspaper reports, and provided a pdf of a book on the matter.
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NASA wants sounds for space - August 21, 2007
On the 30th anniversary of the two Voyager space-probe launches NASA is asking for suggestions on what a modern ‘greetings from Earth’ should include (nod to NASA Watch for bringing this to our attention). The Voyagers contained ‘golden records’ of pictures and sounds from Earth and “greetings in 54 different human languages and greetings from humpback whales”. NASA’s Voyager website has a nice overview of the missions. Voyager also contains work by artist Jon Lomberg that could last for over a thousand million years (according to his website at least) and "may be the longest lived piece of human art ever made".
Barbara Kerley, in the Christian Science Monitor, thinks the record is already looking a bit out of date. "It does not include, for example, the Human Genome Project, completed in 2003 – a cooperative, international effort to discover, at least on the genetic level, who we are. There is also no mention of the Internet, which allows more than a billion people around the world to communicate in ways that we couldn't have imagined 30 years ago."
NASA Watch has been a bit annoyed that more isn’t being made of this anniversary: “Why NASA did not get the word out to the public and the media in advance is curious. Its not like the date of the 30th anniversary wasn't known - for the past 30 years."
Image: Voyager during testing / NASA
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Women prefer pink - August 21, 2007
Women prefer pink and evolution is to blame, according to a story making the rounds today. Given that it's summer and light-hearted news is in vogue, it's unsurprising that this story has splashed around the world, from Los Angeles (LA Times) to London (The Independent) to Beijing (Xinhuanet). “The explanation might date back to humans’ hunter-gatherer days, when women were the primary gatherers and would have benefited from an ability to home in on ripe, red fruits. Culture may exploit and compound this natural female preference,” according to Anya Hurlbert, a neuroscientist at Newcastle University (press release).
So let’s look at Hurlbert’s research (in Current Biology). About 200 people aged 20 to 26 were asked to pick which of two colours their favourite was for a number of pairs. She did not find anything to contradict a much-reported universal preference for blue. Here’s what she did find (from the paper again): “[W]hile both males and females share a natural preference for ‘bluish’ contrasts, the female preference for ‘reddish’ contrasts further shifts her peak towards the reddish region of the hue circle: girls’ preference for pink may have evolved on top of a natural, universal preference for blue.” So women don’t prefer pink, per se -- they seem to prefer slightly redder shades of blue than men.
So what causes this pinkish preference? It's hard to say. These differences are found in the early 20s when social conditioning towards colour stereotypes is already well established. Hurlbert also found that Chinese participants in the trial had a slightly stronger preference for red shades than the British, which she suggests may be because in China red is the colour of good luck. The researchers "speculate" about biological origins and evolutionary reasons for it -- which seems to have been translated as 'scientist find it's in the genes' by some of the press.
Which is not to say there is no genetic link: studies on children have been inconsistent thus far. In children, where social influences may not be so strong, some have found no evidence of colour stereotypes (Zentner in 2001) while others have found “sex identifications and toy preferences were highly consistent with adult colour stereotypes” (Picariello in 1990).
UPDATE - 22/08/07 (click through)
August 20, 2007
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Arctic ice at record low (again) - August 20, 2007
Arctic ice comes and goes every year but this year it seems to have been going rather more than usual. For the second time this month a key record has been broken. “Today is a historic day. This is the least sea ice we've ever seen in the satellite record, and we have another month left to go in the melt season this year,” Mark Serreze, senior research scientist at the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, said last week (AP). CanWest News says scientists in Japan have confirmed the US data and both papers have a worrying prediction from Serreze that a complete melt of the ice could occur as early as 2030.
Ice can be measured in terms of extent and in terms of overall area. The records for extent have now been broken, according to data from Serreze's centre, joining the records for area, which were broken at the start of the month. As the Cryosphere Today blog noted on 9 August: “Today the Northern Hemisphere sea ice area broke the record for the lowest ice area in observed history. The new record (3.98 million sq. km) came a full month before the historic summer minimum typically occurs.”
A good article in the Financial Times looks in detail at what the melting ice means in light of the current political scramble for control of the area (which we highlighted in Nature at the start of this month). Those wanting more context should look at Gabrielle Walker’s Nature feature on climate tipping points from last year.
Image: Full moon over Arctic ice. NOAA Climate Program Office, NABOS 2006 Expedition
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Psychologists condemn torture, kind of - August 20, 2007
Psychologists in America have confirmed what most of the world already knows – mock executions, water-boarding, sexual humiliation, rape, the use of dogs to threaten or intimidate, and physical assault are wrong. But the American Psychological Association has refused to ban its members from being involved in these activities.
The APA issued an “unequivocal condemnation” of torture at a convention this weekend but shied away from banning its members from working in prisons such as Guantanamo Bay where the Geneva Convention is not upheld. As the San Francisco Chronicle puts it succinctly in its headline: ‘Psychologists oppose torture yet vote to attend terror interrogations’. A faction of the association had been pushing for a full ban on members’ involvement in torture (the Chronicle did a good piece looking at the issue before the decision was taken).
Having psychologists at such sites helps guarantee the well-being of detainees, army colonel Larry James, chief military psychologist at Guantanamo Bay in 2003. “If we removed psychologists from these facilities, people are going to die,” he told the convention. Laurie Wagner, a psychologist from Dallas, disagrees: “If psychologists have to be there so detainees don't get killed, those conditions are so horrendous that the only moral and ethical thing is to leave.” (AP)
The association’s move has drawn mixed reactions with some papers highlighting the fact they have ruled out specific torture methods (Boston Globe headline) and others that they have “spurned” a full ban (Miami Herald headline). The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required) notes that critics have previously pointed out the APA rules are “much less stringent than the policies adopted by other professional groups, notably the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association”.
If you wish to make up your mind you can read the motion as it passed.
UPDATE - 21/07/07
Salon have done a good piece on this subject, noting that “Since doctors and psychiatrists have ruled themselves out as professional groups, that leaves the psychologists to do the work. And some of them worry that the APA's latest position will still allow the abuse of detainees psychologically, so long as the pain doesn't last too long.” Their list of related stories also nicely charts the issue’s development.
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Depression ‘is over-diagnosed’ - August 20, 2007
The threshold for a diagnosis of depression is too low, leading to thousands of people being diagnosed with the condition when they are merely unhappy, according to a leading expert. But the suggestion has already been criticised from some quarters, in part due to concerns that a higher threshold would lead to more suicides.
In a ‘head-to-head’ in the 18 August edition of medical journal the BMJ Gordon Parker, of the University of New South Wales in Australia, argues that “current criteria are medicalising sadness”. He points out some of his research showing of 242 teachers 79 per cent met criteria for some kind of depression over 15 years (Scotsman). The Guardian notes that sales of antidepressants have increased massively in recent years - between 1998 and 2003 sales in Japan rose fivefold.
In response Ian Hickie, of the University of Sydney, argues people with depression are still missing out on treatment. Hickie’s view is backed by mental health charity SANE, with Marjorie Wallace, its chief executive, saying “[I]t is better to risk over diagnosis than to leave depression untreated. One in ten people with severe depression may take their own life.” (BBC and The Independent).
Their articles have lead to a series of messages to the BMJ’s online letters system from doctors across the world (responses to Parker, responses to Hickie). As psychiatrist Keith Dudleston, who works for a Community Mental Health Team in Devon in the UK, points out: “The interested educated observer of this controversy will be surprised that despite fifty years of intensive research, and the publication of at least two well used diagnostic manuals, two senior academic psychiatrists appear unable to agree upon the criteria for the diagnosis of one of the most common psychiatric conditions.”
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Found: 5,000 year old chewing gum - August 20, 2007
Researchers have discovered that the unpleasant habit of spitting out chewing gum onto the floor dates back at least 5,000 years. Sarah Pickin, a student from the University of Derby in the UK discovered tooth marks in an ancient piece of tar from an archaeology dig in Finland (BBC). “I had heard of ancient chewing gum being found before on previous European digs so when I found it in the trench, it was the first thing that crossed my mind. However, it looks just like a dirty piece of modern chewing gum with no smell or taste and I was also worried it could have been a bit of fossilised poo, so I asked a few of the other students to make sure,” Pickin told The Scotsman, raising the worrying point that she must have tasted it.
“It is generally believed that Neolithic People found that by chewing this stuff if they had gum infections it helped to treat the condition. It’s particularly significant because well defined tooth imprints were found on the gum which Sarah discovered,” said Trevor Brown, the student’s tutor. Those wishing to make their own chewing gum can follow this helpful recipe from Sini Annala, an employee of the Kierikki Centre where the discovery was made, “The actual material is some kind of tar that was made by heating birch bark. After the tar was made, it was boiled, and when it cooled, it became solid. When it was heated again, it became softer, and it was used at least sometimes as some kind of chewing gum.” (Press release.)
This story has generated some interest in the UK – a country where discarded gum is such a problem one city is now threatening £75 spot fines to offenders (Lancashire Evening Post). Freesheet Metro notes that the gum will now be displayed in a museum, showing once again that today’s rubbish is tomorrow's archaeology.
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