Discover Magazine

Science Getaways: T- 4 months | Bad Astronomy

Wed, 16 May 2012 19:34:03 +0000

Science Getaways is a company my wife and I started so that science enthusiasts (and you better face it, since you’re reading this, that’s you) can go on a vacation that has extra science added. For me, science isn’t a career or a hobby — it’s a lifestyle. I can’t get enough, even on vacation, so we figured why not put together vacation deals that have bonus value-added science?

The first Getaway is September 16 – 20 of this year, and it’ll be at the C Lazy U ranch, an all-inclusive luxury ranch in the Rocky Mountains. We visited there last year and it’s incredibly beautiful. The views are spectacular, and you’re really out in the middle of nature there.

Which brings up a funny coincidence. This morning I was going through some photos I took, and stumbled on one I took last year when I was up in Rocky Mountain National Park filming a science documentary. When we finished shooting we packed up the gear and headed down the path to the van. As we made that long walk, I looked over to my right and was pretty surprised to see this:

North American Fish Populations Slowly Crawling Back From Disaster, NOAA Report Shows | 80beats

Wed, 16 May 2012 18:15:54 +0000

A snow crab

If you’ve ever read up on the environmental impact of your eating habits, you know that eating fish can be a dicey prospect. Having been overfished for decades, many wild fish populations are on the brink of disappearing.

A new report from NOAA shows that one attempt to deal with this problem of severely depleted fisheries, the Magnuson-Stevens Reauthorization Act of 2006, seems to be helping, at least a little bit. The act states that each year, NOAA must give status updates on all fish populations within 200 miles of the US Coast. If the fisheries are hurting, fishermen must stop catching those fish until their numbers recover. Over the last 11 years, 27 previously precarious fish populations have been announced recovered; this year, the six lucky winners were the haddock in the Gulf of Maine, the Chinook salmon along the coast of Northern California, the snow crab of the Bering Sea, the summer flounder on the mid-Atlantic coast, the coho salmon on the coast of Washington, and the widow rockfish in the Pacific.

Overall, NOAA takes these recoveries as a sign that the law is doing its job; according to a metric ...

As oxygen filled the world, life’s universal clock began to tick | Not Exactly Rocket Science

Wed, 16 May 2012 17:00:41 +0000

The Earth’s earliest days were largely free of oxygen. Then, around 2.5 billion years ago, primitive bacteria started to flood the atmosphere with this vital gas. They produced it in the process of harnessing the sun’s energy to make their own nutrients, just as plants do today. The building oxygen levels reddened the planet, as black iron minerals oxidised into rusty hues. They also killed off most of the world’s microbes, which were unable to cope with this new destructive gas. And in the survivors of this planetary upheaval, life’s first clock began to tick and tock.

Today, all life on Earth runs on internal clocks. These ‘circadian rhythms’ are the reason we feel sleepy at night, and why our hormones, temperature and hunger levels rise and fall with a 24-hour cycle. They’re molecular metronomes that keep the events inside our bodies ticking in time with the world around us.

Until now, it seemed that the major branches of the tree of life each had their own timekeeping systems, evolved independently of the others. But Akhilesh Reddy and John O’Neill from the University of Cambridge have disproved that ...

Freedom From Fungus: Why Don’t Humans Have Chestnut-Style Blights and White Nose-Style Syndromes? | The Crux

Wed, 16 May 2012 16:59:07 +0000

Sarah Zhang is Discover’s web intern. See her blogging here and here, and follow her on Twitter at @sarahzhang.

Delegates to Indiana’s constitutional convention worked under this tree in 1816.
It later succumbed to Dutch elm disease.

Unless you have a weakened immune system or a stubborn case of athlete’s foot, it’s unlikely you spend much time worrying about fungi. And you shouldn’t—fungal diseases are not generally a big problem for a healthy person; common ones like athlete’s foot are annoying but not serious. In terms of infections, it’s bacteria, parasites, and viruses that kill us.

But the rest of nature tells a different story. According to a recent review of fungal diseases in Nature, fungi are responsible for 72% of the local extinctions of animals and 64% among plants. White nose syndrome in bats and Dutch elm disease are two high-profile examples of extremely deadly fungal diseases gaining wider ranges through global trade. While each fungus itself is unique, many fungal pathogens share several special abilities that make them especially lethal.

Unlike viruses and most bacteria, fungi can survive—and survive for years—in dry or frigid environments outside of ...

Prairie Light: Alberta Aurora | Bad Astronomy

Wed, 16 May 2012 16:57:18 +0000

Every now and again my work piles up and I can feel that edge of panic start to set in.

Then I saw a video and my brain let out a nice long sigh (brains are remarkable that way): Alberta Aurora – Prairie Light, a lovely time lapse that has better-than-usual resolution and color, taken as the April 23/24 solar storm swept over the Earth.

What you see in an aurora depends in part on the angle of the Earth’s magnetic field relative to the air; the geomagnetic field guides particles from the Sun’s outbursts into our atmosphere. If you are seeing this from far enough away, you get those sheets and ribbons, the interaction seen from the side. But at 1:50 into the video the perspective changes. The camera is underneath the point where the particles are streaming in, so you’re looking up, right into the barrel of the magnetic field. It’s a remarkable change in view that must be awesome to see in person.

I’ve never seen a full-on aurora, but some day I will. I hope it’s as pretty as this one was.

My new story on psychology’s problem with replications | Not Exactly Rocket Science

Wed, 16 May 2012 16:23:33 +0000

I have a new feature out in Nature looking at two big problems within the field of psychology. First, the field is almost entirely dominated by positive results, while negative ones languish unpublished in personal file drawers. Second, there are few incentives to replicate old results and negative replication attempts face a lengthy gauntlet of obstacles. In the story, I look at why these problems exist and why some psychologists are starting to take them very seriously.

The piece has its origins in an incident that regular readers will already know. In January, Stephane Doyen and colleagues had unsuccessfully tried to repeat a classic experiment where people walk more slowly down a corridor after being unconsciously primed with age-related words. I wrote about their research. Two months later, the man behind the original study – John Bargh of Yale University – wrote a scathing attack on Doyen’s team, me, and the journal that published the study. I responded.

The ensuing discussion opened my eyes to an undercurrent of unrest. Many psychologists came out of the woodwork to mention experiments that were hard to replicate, common practices that they ...

Trapped in Amber, the Oldest Evidence of Pollination | 80beats

Wed, 16 May 2012 14:54:49 +0000

Peering inside an ancient piece of amber, scientists have uncovered the oldest direct evidence of pollination: insects covered in pollen grains, likely from a gingko tree, from between 105 and 110 million years ago. These insects—a new genus of thrips, insects that still scuttle around today—had likely gathered pollen for food, trailing it from plant to plant along the way. To get an even closer look at the specimens (without cracking open the amber), the researchers took the lump to the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility. There, they used synchrotron X-ray tomography to generate a detailed 3-D image of the bugs, revealing tiny, specialized hairs they used to collect pollen grains (which are shown here in yellow).

Flowering plants first evolved about 130 million years ago, making them relative evolutionary newcomers; dinosaurs had already been around for 100 million years by then. Since early on, these plants have been aided in reproduction by insects that spread their pollen from one flower to the next, and in turn helped the insects by providing sustenance. “The co-evolution of flowering plants and insects, thanks to pollination, is a great evolutionary success story,” ...

To Disinfect Water Cheaply, Just Add Sunlight (and Salt or Lime Juice) | 80beats

Wed, 16 May 2012 14:41:09 +0000

The cheapest and easiest way to disinfect water? Sunlight. Just leave a clear glass or plastic bottle out in the sun for six hours. SODIS, or solar water disinfection, is an age-old method touted by the World Health Organization for areas where access to clean water is limited. UV rays in the sunlight tear apart the microbes to make water safe. Drink up!

SODIS is quite effective, but scientists have found two hacks that make the technique even better. One problem is that the water may be cloudy from sediment, which can be fixed with a dash of salt. NPR’s Salt blog explains:

Pierce and his colleagues discovered that by adding a little table salt to this murky water, they could get the particles of clay to stick together and settle to the bottom, making the water clear enough to purify using the solar disinfection method. They also found that the addition of salt works best for certain kinds of clay soils, namely bentonite, and not so well with others. But when they added a little bentonite along with salt to water that contained other types of clay soils, it worked just as well.

Pierce says the method works because bentonite clays have ...

The long reach of the Centaur’s dark heart | Bad Astronomy

Wed, 16 May 2012 13:21:28 +0000

Every now again I get surprised by a photo, showing me something I didn’t know about. And I love it even more when that surprise is from an object I thought I knew!

So check out this incredible image of the nearby galaxy Centaurus A, a nearby galaxy harboring a whole slew of surprises:

[Click to galactinate, or get the 4000 x 4000 pixel version, or, if you're feeling frisky, cram this onto your hard drive: an image that's 8500 x 8400 pixels and 29 Mb in size! And trust me: you want to.]

Isn’t that stunning? This picture was taken by the MPG/ESO 2.2 meter telescope in Chile, and once you get over its beauty you’ll realize this galaxy is, frankly, seriously messed up.

Cen A is about 12 million light years away and has roughly the same mass as our Milky Way, containing a few hundred billion stars. The underlying glow of those stars is what makes that round background fuzz in the image, and takes on the familiar elliptical shape of many such galaxies. [Note: All the individual stars you see here are in our on galaxy, since we're inside ...

Genes are overrated, genetics is underrated | Gene Expression

Wed, 16 May 2012 07:53:24 +0000

A few days ago Nathaniel Comfort pointed me to this post, Genetic determinism round-up. If you are curious go read Comfort’s whole post. I honestly didn’t enjoy it very much, I think I got what he was saying, but there were all sorts of circumlocutions around the overall message. But I agree one one thing in particular: an emphasis on concrete and specific genes for traits is a motif in science journalism that can be very frustrating, and often misleading. Nevertheless, that’s not the only story. I believe our current culture greatly underestimates the power of genetics in shaping broader social patterns.

How can these be reconciled? Do not genes and genetics go together? The resolution is a simple one: when you speak of 1,000 genes, you speak of no genes. You can’t list 1,000 genes in prose, even if you know them. But using standard quantitative and behavior genetic means one can apportion variation in the population of a trait to variation in genes. 1,000 genes added together can be of great effect. The newest findings in genomics are reinforcing assertions of non-trivial heritability of many complex traits, though rendering problematic attributing that heritability to a specific set ...

Abraham’s genetic threads | Gene Expression

Wed, 16 May 2012 06:46:08 +0000

Every few days my Google Alerts have been dropping in my inbox reviews of Harry Osters’ Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People. The latest, is in the The Tablet, A Case for Genetic Jewishness:

For a Jewish genetics researcher, being told in print that ‘Hitler would certainly have been very pleased’ by your work can’t be pleasant. But that’s what happened in 2010 to Harry Ostrer, a geneticist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, when he and his colleagues published a study showing that Jews in three different geographical areas had certain collections of genes that made them more biologically similar to one another than they were to non-Jews in the same regions. The work also showed that Jews around the world could trace their ancestry to a group of people who lived in the Middle East 2,000 years ago; that meant, however, that certain genetic signatures could be used to identify Jews, indicating that Jews share a common biological identity beyond their religious affiliation—which is what inspired the Hitler crack.

I don’t plan on reading Legacy because I already read the paper which it is based on, Abraham’s Children in the Genome Era: Major Jewish Diaspora ...

It doesn’t always get “better” | Gene Expression

Wed, 16 May 2012 05:28:15 +0000

The History News Network has a post up, Now It’s Obama Who’s Our First Gay President!, which hammers home points which I’ve been making implicitly and explicitly about historical processes, especially in the United States:

Today, I know no historian who has studied the matter and thinks Buchanan was heterosexual. Fifteen years ago, historian John Howard, author of Men Like That, a pioneering study of queer culture in Mississippi, shared with me the key documents, including Buchanan’s May 13, 1844, letter to a Mrs. Roosevelt. Describing his deteriorating social life after his great love, William Rufus King, senator from Alabama, had moved to Paris to become our ambassador to France, Buchanan wrote

…

This ideology of progress amounts to a chronological form of ethnocentrism. Thus chronological ethnocentrism is the belief that we now live in a better society, compared to past societies. Of course, ethnocentrism is the anthropological term for the attitude that our society is better than any other society now existing, and theirs are OK to the degree that they are like ours.

The specific aspect of James Buchanan’s sexuality is not particularly interesting to me. Rather, the bigger picture is that the social milieu of the 1850s is ...

Sleeper viruses explain why HIV evolves more slowly between people than within them | Not Exactly Rocket Science

Tue, 15 May 2012 23:00:50 +0000

HIV – the virus behind AIDS – is the most diverse of all viruses. Once it infects someone new, it mutates so rapidly that it can spawn a million genetically different strains in just a few months. This evolutionary onslaught overwhelms the host’s immune system, and creates big problems for any scientist trying to create a cure or a vaccine. By evolving so quickly, HIV turns itself into a million moving targets.

But when HIV jumps from one individual to another, something odd happens. The virus still mutates at a breakneck speed, but it does so 2 to 6 times more slowly than within any single person. Unexpectedly, the virus seems to evolve faster in a single host, than in a population.

There are three possible explanations for this puzzling trend, but Katrina Lythgoe and Christophe Fraser from Imperial College London think that only one is correct. They think that the ancestral strain – the one that kicked off someone’s infection – is more likely to spread to other people than its millions of descendants.

The progeny of the ancestral virus quickly evolve to avoid their host’s immune system and ...

NCBI ROFL: The flaming gypsy skirt injury. | Discoblog

Tue, 15 May 2012 23:00:28 +0000

“On review of admissions over a 12-month period, we noted a significant number of women presenting with gypsy skirt burns. We describe all six cases to highlight the unique distribution of the wounds and the circumstances in which the accidents occurred. Four skirts were ignited by open fire heaters: two skirts ignited whilst the women were standing nearby, distracted with a telephone conversation; one brushed over the flame as she was walking past the heater; other whilst dancing in the lounge. One skirt was ignited by decorative candles placed on the floor during a social gathering. Another skirt was set alight by cigarette ember, whilst smoking in the toilet. Percentage surface area burned, estimated according to the rule of nines, showed that gypsy skirt burns were significant ranging from 7 to 14% total body surface area (TBSA) and averaging 9% TBSA. Two patients required allogenic split-skin grafts. Common sense care with proximity to naked flame is all that is needed to prevent this injury.”

Photo: flickr/Mara ~earth light~

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Seriously guys, you really shouldn’t mock burns and burn prevention.
Discoblog:

Tapeworms in the brain: Fearfully common | The Loom

Tue, 15 May 2012 21:29:03 +0000

We’ve all heard about tapeworms getting into the intestines. That’s bad enough. But sometimes they can also end up in the brain. In my column in the latest issue of Discover, I write about neurocysticercosis, which is shockingly common in some parts of the world, causing an estimated five million cases of epilepsy. Yet neurocysticercosis experts consider the disease as a fairly easy one to wipe out. We have the tools to do it, but not the will. Check it out.

Come For the Beautiful “Glass Gem” Corn; Stay for a Dose of Genetics | 80beats

Tue, 15 May 2012 17:57:51 +0000

No, this isn’t Photoshop or a gemstone-studded trinket—just an ear of corn. Seedsman Greg Schoen of the Seeds Trust got this “Glass Gems” corn from his “corn-teacher,” a part-Cherokee man in his 80s. He planted the seeds, had a gorgeous harvest last fall, and posted the posts on Seeds Trust’s Facebook page in October. Then last week, the photos of the gem-like corn got picked up on the internet and went viral. Good luck trying to get your hands on any seeds now…

But kernel color is a fascinating—dare we say, colorful—topic in the annals of genetics research. For one, why are there so many vibrant colors in a single ear of corn? You don’t usually see flowers of different colors on a single tree. Each kernel is actually a different corn plant (or the seed of one) with a unique mix of genes inherited from its parents. That’s why counting up kernels of different colors in the more familiar purple and yellow corn cobs is a common way of teaching how pigment genes are inherited in Mendelian genetics.

Kernel color has also been used to unravel an ...

Dogs Catch Yawns From Their Owners. Does That Mean They Empathize with Us? | 80beats

Tue, 15 May 2012 17:45:45 +0000

One sleepy person can start a bout of contagious yawning that quickly spreads through a room. But a new study suggests the effect may not be limited to the room’s human inhabitants: Dogs can “catch” yawns from people, the study found—especially their owners, hinting that pooches may empathize with familiar people.

When listening to recordings of people yawning, 12 of the 29 dogs in the study yawned themselves. It made a big difference, however, whom they heard: The dogs yawned more than four times as much when they heard their owner yawn as when they heard as a stranger.

Earlier work has suggested a link between contagious yawning and empathy. Humans and chimps both yawn more when friends and acquaintances yawn than when strangers yawn, and people who don’t have much insight into what others are feeling—such as very young children and people with autism—don’t seem to catch contagious yawns. This is some of the strongest evident yet that dogs—humans’ constant companions for 15,000 years—may be able to empathize with us. But a yawn alone can’t tell us what’s going on in a dog’s brain, or its heart of hearts. A similar ...

Big Picture Science: Antivaxxers (and updates) | Bad Astronomy

Tue, 15 May 2012 17:15:01 +0000

I do a roughly monthly segment with astronomer Seth Shostak on Big Picture Science, a radio show/podcast done by The SETI Institute. This month, Seth and I talked about the American Airlines dustup when they were planning to run an interview with reality-impaired antivaxxer Meryl Dorey. This story is a great victory for reality, and I’ve already written about the back story.

Never forget: this antivax issue is more than important: it is literally life and death. Because of lowering vaccine rates, pertussis outbreaks are so prevalent health officials in the state of Washington have declared it to be an epidemic. The governor has had to dip into emergency funds to the tune of $90,000 to finance an information campaign to get the word out.

But the money is secondary to the idea that babies and people with immune deficiencies are at risk of dying from a disease that is essentially totally preventable if everyone got their vaccinations and boosters.

I cannot state that any more simply. The antivax crowd says vaccines cause autism, vaccines cause neurological problems, vaccines hurt your immune ...

What’s in Spam with Bacon? Tasty, Tasty Chemistry | 80beats

Tue, 15 May 2012 16:26:24 +0000

You’d be surprised what’s in your lunch. When you look closer at what makes your American cheese melt well and your hotdog so delicious, you might cringe for a few minutes, but hopefully you also get curious about what other characteristics we like in our food and how food manufacturers have, for better or for worse, given our taste buds what they want.

Over at Wired, they’ve dissected Spam with Bacon, and what they find runs the gammut from “Hey, it’s cool that science can do that!” to “Maybe canned meat was a really bad idea.”

This description of bacon captures the balance nicely:

“The cured belly of a swine carcass,” says the USDA. “Mmmm, bacon,” says most of America. Large-scale curing is usually done by injecting a brine solution into the belly of a butchered swine. The brine contains sodium erythorbate, an antioxidant that’s chemically similar to vitamin C. But it’s not here to prevent scurvy; instead it boosts the conversion of the sodium nitrite in bacon into nitric oxide, which minimizes the production of carcinogens when the pork belly is fried up. The brining increases the meat’s weight by 12 percent, but a ...

Is High-Risk Science Nuts or Brilliant? Event Tomorrow at the NY Academy of Sciences | 80beats

Tue, 15 May 2012 15:05:00 +0000

Just so it’s on your radar, New Yorkers: You won’t want to miss tomorrow night’s exciting discussion at the New York Academy of Sciences of how cutting-edge science and innovation are stimulated and sustained:

Moderated by Corey Powell, Editor-in-Chief of Discover Magazine, the panel will feature Jon Gertner, author of the recent bestselling book The Idea Factory; renowned theoretical physicist Brian Greene, PhD; technology investment expert Shelley Harrison, PhD; and MacArthur Genius Award-winning nanoscientist Michal Lipson, PhD.

Despite popular depictions on televisions and in film, scientific discoveries don’t always come as “Eureka!” moments after years of careful study and pursuit. A fair portion of scientific discoveries are the result of “that’s so crazy it just might work” thinking, or even, “this might fail, but we have to try it” ideas.

High-risk, high-reward science is defined by unique ideas and unconventional approaches that have the potential to create new models or fields within science and engineering or to radically change our understanding of a current concept. Such high-risk ideas may seem obvious in hindsight, but at the time they are unorthodox, impossible, or simply crazy. Yet there are organizations and individuals who make it their mission to identify and invest ...