Latest Blogs

Fracking Poses a Risk to Our Water Supply

Fri, 17 May 2013 16:01:58 GMT

by Richard Schiffman The recent boom in fracking has turned America into the Saudi Arabia of natural gas, almost overnight. Proponents say that this burgeoning industry has ensured U.S. energy independence for years to come, and created a more climate-friendly alternative to dirtier-burning fuels like coal and gas. It has arguably also hastened the demise of the coal industry, as power plants switch in large numbers to the cheaper gas, resulting in U.S. CO2 emissions sinking to their l

Requiem for the World's Greatest Planet Hunter

Fri, 17 May 2013 16:00:00 GMT

After more than four years in space, restlessly searching for planets orbiting other stars, NASA's Kepler space telescope may have met its demise. The Kepler project is typically described in terms of raw numbers. As of the last official announcement, it had found 2,740 likely new planets--including 1,200 Neptune-size planets, 350 Earth-size planets, and at least 4 planets that orbit within the "habitable zone" where liquid water can exist. All of those numbers are sure to increase, as mo

The Trouble With "Limitations" In Science

Thu, 16 May 2013 21:09:54 GMT

Is it always good thing to know your limitations? Over at Scientific American, Samuel McNerney writes about the dangers of learning about common human cognitive biases. The problem is that it's easy to find out about, say, confirmation bias, and think "Well, it affects other people, but now I know about it, I am immune to it" - and then proceed exactly as you did before, suffering the bias but now with misplaced confidence in your abilities. I fear that a similar thing is at work in sc

Why race as a biological construct matters

Thu, 16 May 2013 11:29:47 GMT

My own inclination has been to not get bogged down in the latest race and IQ controversy because I don't have that much time, and the core readership here is probably not going to get any new information from me, since this is not an area of hot novel research. But that doesn't mean the rest of the world isn't talking, and I think perhaps it might be useful for people if I stepped a bit into this discussion between Andrew Sullivan and Ta-Nehisi Coates specifically. My primary concern is that

A Tale of Two Cities

Thu, 16 May 2013 04:18:42 GMT

I launched the ImaGeo blog here at Discover back in February, and ever since I've been focusing on spectacular visuals related to the science of our planet. Starting Thursday, May 16, I'll be slowing down a bit on my posts as I head off to China and Cambodia for a few weeks. I plan on continuing to blog here at ImaGeo while I'm gone. Just not every day. I'm particularly interested in the phenomenon of megacities. Along those lines, check out the image above. It's a screenshot of a timelap

Angelina Jolie, Myriad Genetics, & patents on genes

Wed, 15 May 2013 17:11:24 GMT

Because of Angelina Jolie's revelation, the Myriad Genetics case is in the news again. If you don't know what I'm talking about, look it up. Because of the patent Myriad can charge thousands of dollars for a test which would otherwise be much cheaper (and putting it out of reach of many without health insurance). My question here is simple: if you are a geneticist do you think Myriad's position has any validity? The reason I ask is that I know many geneticists, and I know many geneticists read m

The Kings of Minos were not Pharaohs

Wed, 15 May 2013 08:51:38 GMT

A few years ago I predicted to some friends that ancient DNA would transform our understanding of the human past. The reason being that inferences of population movements via material remains were imprecise at best. We are beginning to see my prediction come to fruit (mind you, the prediction was not a bold or courageous one). A new short communication in Nature Communications, A European population in Minoan Bronze Age Crete, addresses an old and frankly somewhat outdated question: wh

Churchill and the Stigma of Depression

Wed, 15 May 2013 08:01:12 GMT

The BBC today has an interesting article by Mark Brown of British mental health magazine One in Four: Do famous role models help or hinder? The context is that in Britain, charities and other advocates for people with mental illness have become fond of pointing to famous people, past and present, who suffered from a psychiatric disorder. The hope is that highlighting these 'role models' will fight stigma and provide hope. Winston Churchill and Steven Fry are especially popular in t

Another Massive Flare Explodes from the Sun

Wed, 15 May 2013 06:59:43 GMT

The sun really seems to be ramping up its activity. At 9:45 EDT on Tuesday night, it unleashed its fourth flare in as many days. You can see it toward the left side of the sun in the image above from the Earth-orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft. The false coloring in this picture is due to the wavelengths of light that the instrument on SDO viewed the sun with. These wavelengths are particularly good at revealing flaring activity. Characterized as an X1.2 flare, it was not

New Solar Flare Packs the Power of Millions of H-Bombs

Tue, 14 May 2013 16:31:24 GMT

Last night the sun unleashed its latest tirade: the third flare in as many days, and the most powerful one in 2013 so far. Exploding from the Sun's surface with energy equivalent to millions of 100-megaton hydrogen bombs, the flare spewed intense radiation into space. It peaked last night at 9:11 p.m. EDT. It was not directed toward Earth, but NASA says solar material from all three of the recent flares will pass by the Spitzer Space Telescope and could give a "glancing blow" to the S

GATTACA: utopia or dystopia?

Tue, 14 May 2013 10:12:57 GMT

Kevin Mitchell of Wiring the Brain has a very long post up inveighing against the specter of eugenics. I don't have a great deal of time to engage Kevin right now.* But in addition to Kevin's post I highly recommend this episode of WBUR's On Point. It has Steve Hsu on, and he articulates many of the positions that I myself hold. Steve's work with BGI has triggered the latest discussion of eugenics thanks to Vice's sensational representation of the research project and its aims. But it's a useful

Your Biggest, Darkest Cosmic Questions Answered (Part 2)

Mon, 13 May 2013 21:11:19 GMT

Dark energy is the single most important element in the universe. It influenced how the cosmos was born, how it is evolving today, and how it all will end trillions of years in the future. Right now, this energy is causing the universe to expand faster and faster; in the far future, the expansion may become so rapid that space itself will be torn apart. And yet we know next to nothing about what dark energy is. We don’t even have a proper name for it—the very term “dark energy” is little more th

An Icy Critter Cocktail Helped Baleen Whales Evolve

Mon, 13 May 2013 17:24:03 GMT

One way to understand how the ecosystem of the Antarctic originated is to look at its very base: tiny organisms called dinoflagellates, the little creatures that attract bigger creatures, and thus in effect support all of life in the ocean. Dinoflagellates produce hard cysts that fossilize well, and researcher Sander Houben and his team recently published findings in Science indicating that, once Antarctic ice began to spread over what was formerly a lushly forested, warm sub-tropical continen

Earth Art: The Namib Desert

Mon, 13 May 2013 07:25:31 GMT

You have to wonder after looking at this image whether nature has an imagination. I know it doesn't, but still... You're looking at sand dunes in the Namib desert, as seen from space by Korea's Kompsat-2 satellite, along with an ephemeral, braided stream called the Tsauchab, which rises in the Kauklift Mountains. The waterway carries water only when rain falls in the mountains. In the bone dry Namib desert, those flows are pretty few and far in between. But over he course of 2 million

Happy Mother's Day!

Sun, 12 May 2013 16:28:28 GMT

Best wishes to all the mothers out there (including this one).

Visualizing the Connectome

Sun, 12 May 2013 09:49:11 GMT

Last year, I blogged about a new and very pretty way of displaying the data about the human 'connectome' - the wiring between different parts of the brain. But there are many beautiful ways of visualizing the brain's connections, as neuroscientists Daniel Margulies and colleagues of Leipzig discuss in a colourful paper showcasing these techniques. Here, for example, are two ways of showing the brain's white matter tracts, as studied with diffusion tensor imaging (DTI): Another s

Open thread, 5/12/2013

Sun, 12 May 2013 08:25:03 GMT

The usual. I haven't been able to blog much because of various other responsibilities, but I definitely do feel pent up posting energy. So when I come back I assume that I'll have a lot of stuff to say. Meanwhile I'm chortling a bit about this bizarre attack on my friend Steve Hsu. Here's the issue that I always have with this: Steve managed to get tenure as a theoretical physicist. When you're talking to someone who is an academic theoretical physicist it is generally optimal to not assume a

How the sauce is made

Sat, 11 May 2013 20:48:14 GMT

(via The Festival of Patience)

Is the pornographic singularity real?

Sat, 11 May 2013 19:55:46 GMT

The above figure displays results from males in the General Social Survey who answer yes to the proposition that they've watched a pornographic film over the past year. This fact was cited in my post Porn, rape, and a ‘natural experiment’, to disabuse people of the notion that porn consumption has increased radically the past generation. I was aware of this finding, and so generally am careful to focus on the quantity of porn consumed, rather than the social penetration of porn consumption.

Brown-Out in the South Pacific

Sat, 11 May 2013 18:37:42 GMT

What's up with that brown splotch sprawling across a broad swath of the South Pacific in the upper right corner of this satellite image? Nope, it's not some black hole that has just materialized in the middle of the ocean, threatening to suck New Guinea and Australia into its depths. Neither is a gargantuan oil spill, or a massive bubble of air pollution that's drifted in from China. What happened on May 10 northeast of Australia was completely natural and unthreatening: an annular ecl