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We're going to see a black hole!!!

"A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent, unless found guilty. A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe. It is guilty, until found effective." -Edward Teller The idea of black holes has gone from a curious thought experiment to a theoretical likelihood to a near-certainty -- with thousands of known candidates -- in a very short time. Image credit: NASA/Dana Berry, SkyWorks Digital. But never before have we been able to image a black hole directly; all we have are artists' renditions of what they might look like. And for the first time ever…

Japan quake, tsunami, nuke news 12: Engineers discover giant trench filled with radioactive water; Plutonium in nearby soil?

The most interesting and important current news, interesting if confirmed, is that plutonium has been discovered in soil near Fukushima. With all this talk about radiation, it is easy to forget that some of these elements are extremely poisonous in their own right. Plutonium is a very nasty poison. I've not seen the news reports or any details yet ... as of this writing, this is just reasonably reliable rumor. I'm off the intertubes for the rest of the day, but I'll update tomorrow on this topic. The cooling systems are still not operational and a huge amount of radioactive water has been…

Relativity and Baseball

It's baseball playoff time, so sport shows are full of one of the great mysteries of the season, exemplified by this .gif (from SBNation): Raul Ibanez hitting a game-winning home run. GIF from SBNation. No, not "Raul Ibanez, really?" but "How can he make the ball go that far?" After all, even very good outfielders are lucky to reach home plate with a throw from the warning track. Not even the hardest-throwing pitcher could stand at home plate and throw the ball into the second deck of a baseball stadium. Yet it's not uncommon for the ball to end up there after being hit by a bat. So, how…

Interstellar Laser Communications

In the comments to yesterday's grumpy post about the Fermi paradox, makeinu raises the idea that advanced aliens would be using more targeted communications than we do: On the point about electromagnetic communications: even we are now using lasers to target communications with space, because it’s simply more efficient and reliable. It’s also basically impossible to intercept, since you literally have to interrupt the beam to do so. This is true, to a point, but when you're talking about interstellar distances, it's not quite true that you have to interrupt the beam to detect communications…

How Do You Trap an Ion, Anyway?

One of the many physics stories I haven't had time to blog about recently is the demonstration of relativistic time effects using atomic clocks. I did mention a DAMOP talk about the experiment, but the actual paper was published in Science (and is freely available from the NIST Time and Frequency Division (PDF file), because you can't copyright work done at government labs) a month and a half ago, and generated a bit of buzz at the time. Given the delay between publication of the article and me blogging about it, I feel obliged to provide a little more detail than you'll get from the news…

I get email

There is a shifting pattern of spam email that I get. A while back, it was practically non-stop gay porn; I commented on this a while back, and laughed it off, which apparently annoyed the people who'd been sending it to me. I think they expected me to be stressed and conflicted and angry at getting photographs of muscular young men with large penises, but really…it doesn't bother me at all. So lately the supply of hunky naked men posing in my in-box has all but dried up. Instead, my previous criticisms have prompted a flood of commercial spam from middle eastern sites, and the malicious…

If These Lice Could Talk

Contempt is never wise in biology. The creature that you look down on as lowly, degenerate, or disgusting may actually turn out to be sophisticated, successful, and--in some cases--waiting to tell you a lot about yourself. That's certainly the case for lice. The human body louse, Pediculus humanus, has two ways of making a living--either dwelling on the scalp, feeding on blood, or snuggling into our clothes and come out once or twice a day to graze on our bodies. For lice, we humans are the world. They cannot live for more than a few hours away from our bodies.Only by crawling from one host…

Epistemic Shadows: Can sunlight explain a photographic mystery?

Preface | Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | (Sidebar 1) | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6 Pt. 7 | (Sidebar 2a) | (Sidebar 2b) | Pt. 8 | Pt. 9 | Conclusion Morris believes that shadows are the key. Yes, I'm back onto the actual path of Morris's investigation, where he's been pursuing the question 'which of Fenton's Crimean pictures came first?' and I've been pursuing his pursuit. He thinks that by measuring the angle of shadows from the cannonballs he can determine what time of day each picture was taken and, thus, get them in the correct order. A shadow is the back third of a three-part connection: the light…

Watch HIV Cell-to-Cell Transfer, Live!

It's amazing what the kids are up to these days. This one comes live from Mount Sinai (my present educational residence). Hubner et al., publishing in Science, use an infectious, fluorescent strain of HIV to watch the virus move from one cell to another. Their results are fascinating and may help us develop better ways to treat the disease. (Full disclaimer: This research was performed in the Chen lab at Mount Sinai where my roommate presently works.) It's funny how my biases work. I mean, I am not a microbiologist, but here is the bias that I had about how infections like HIV work: I…

Architectures of Flexible Control: Incongruence and Change Detection

Among nature's most impressive feats of engineering is the remarkably flexible and self-optimizing quality of human cognition. People seem to dynamically determine whether speed or accuracy is of utmost importance in a certain task, or whether they should continue with a current approach or begin anew with another, or whether they should rely on logic or intuition to solve a certain problem. A topic of intense research in cognitive neuroscience is how cognition can be made so flexible. One possibility proposed by by Brown, Reynolds & Braver is that cognitive control is multi-faceted, in…

Applications of Evolution 2 - Bayer Withdraws Cipro

This post was originally written on 9 September 2005, and was posted over at the old place. It's relevant to a post that will be appearing shortly, so I'm moving it over here for convenience. I haven't edited the original in any way. From a story in today's WaPo, I learned that Bayer has withdrawn it's poultry anitbiotic Baytril from the market. This marks the end of a five-year battle with the FDA over the drug. The FDA first proposed withdrawing Baytril in October of 2000, due to concerns regarding the development of antibiotic resistance. From a 2001 FDA Consumer Magazine article:…

Adult neuronal and oligodendrocyte stem cell identified

This is huge. Jackson et al. have identified that the adult stem cell in the human brain for both neurons and oligodendrocytes are the PDGFR-alpha expressing cells and that PDGF-AA causes proliferation of these cells and a shift towards the oligodendrocyte lineage. A little background. There is this place in the brain called the subventricular zone (SVZ) which is shockingly enough just below the lateral ventricles. This area contains rapidly dividing cells that during development grow outward to populate the cortices. These cells first form radial glia, then most of the glutamatergic…

Darwin and the African apes

In any book about evolutionary anthropology it is almost obligatory to cite Charles Darwin as the person who suspected that our species was most closely related to chimpanzees and gorillas, thus anticipating our modern understanding. In his famous 1871 book The Descent of Man Darwin wrote; In each great region of the world the living mammals are closely related to the extinct species of the same region. It is therefore probable that Africa was formerly inhabited by extinct apes closely allied to the gorilla and chimpanzee; and as these two species are now man's nearest allies, it is somewhat…

Ancient Armored Whales

The skull of Basilosaurus, from the 1907 Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution. In 1900 the famous bone sharp Barnum Brown discovered the skeleton of a huge carnivorous dinosaur in Wyoming, and near its bones were a few fossilized bony plates. When H.F. Osborn described this creature as Dynamosaurus imperiosus he used this association to hypothesize that this predator was covered in armor, but as it turned out "Dynamosaurus" was really a representative of another new dinosaur Osborn named Tyrannosaurus rex. Osborn's famous tyrant showed no sign of being covered with armor, and the…

Sivatherium: A giraffe with a trunk?

A giraffe, photographed at the Bronx zoo. For me, no visit to the zoo is complete without stopping by to see the giraffes. They are among the most common of zoo animals, certainly, but I still find them fascinating. If giraffes did not actually exist and someone drew an illustration of one as a speculative zoology project the picture would likely be written off as absurd, yet the living animal is more charming than preposterous. As with many extant large mammals, though, the giraffe is only a vestige of a once more diverse group. Its closest living relative is the okapi, a short-necked and…

Who knew? Tightening up requirements for waivers for school vaccine requirements increases vaccine uptake! (Part two)

Well, it's finally done. The grants that have been taking up so much of my time are finally with the grants office and, hopefully, won't have too many errors flagged as they go through the validation process. So it's time to get back into that blogging thing again, even though I'm admittedly tired. So I'll start out slow. No Orac-ian epics today, just another rather satisfying bit of news mirroring a previous post that I did last week about how making it more difficult to obtain personal belief exemptions to school vaccine requirements works. In states where PBEs are difficult to obtain or…

Kristjan Wager returns to discuss the Danish autism studies

Excellent. Having had to work on a talk last night, I didn't have any time to write anything substantive. Horrified at the thought of this blog going silent on a weekday (going silent on the weekend doesn't concern me much, given that my traffic almost always falls by around 50% regardless of whether I post on the weekend or not, barring any unexpected links from bigger blogs), I thought about doing what PZ did yesterday and recycling one of my more memorable posts from the old blog. Unfortunately, I couldn't come up with topic as likely to draw as much interest as PZ's, and I wasn't sure if…

Waterfall: A Bewitching Metaphor

As a writer, I love to use metaphors to explain what I see. Sometimes, it is much easier to describe how something is like another thing than it is to describe the thing itself. The metaphor adds a subjective layer of context to a thing, making the unfamiliar familiar. Language is, in some part, all subjective layers of context: a thing is a thing; we label and describe it for our convenience. We come to agreements about our language, about our use of labels, to the point where a thing and its label are indistinguishable. The word "water" is indistinguishable from water itself, as it is…

How Columbus was not a seer

A week ago I pointed out that in some visualizations of world wide population variation South Asians & mestizos seem to overlap which each other to a great extent. The reason for this is that both populations can be modeled as admixtures between two separate, but related, populations. Mestizos are the products of pairings between Europeans and indigenous America populations, while South Asians seem to be a stabilized hybrid population which emerged from the fusion of a West Eurasian (closely related to European) and East Eurasian (distantly related to East Asians) populations. The East…

Creationists on race

I almost agree with some pieces of what these guys at onehumanrace.com say. Except for the fact that they are insane. What is the only answer to racism? Before we can solve the problem of racism, we must first ask the question: "Where did the different 'races' come from?" Explore this site for the answer, plus fascinating scientific research demonstrating that there really are no "white" or "black" people. Take it piece by piece. There is no one answer to racism, so the opening question is misleading; but otherwise, the next assertion that it would be useful to know about the origins of…

Nifty Fifty Podcast: Dr. Tristan Hübsch On The Theory Of Everything

This Nifty Fifty Podcast features, Dr. Tristan Hübsch, Physicist and Mathematician from Howard University,  speaking to Immanuel Christian School about the “Theory of Everything” and how he got interested in Physics from a very early age. Read the full blog here.

Tangled Bank Episode LII

The latest edition of the Tangled Bank is coming straight to you from Coruscant…and the opening text is almost as long as the latest from Lucas, although fortunately it doesn't say anything about the trade federation and boring treaties.

Clock Quotes

Children will watch anything, and when a broadcaster uses crime and violence and other shoddy devices to monopolize a child's attention, it's worse than taking candy from a baby. It is taking precious time from the process of growing up. - Newton N. Minow

Family Life Blog Carnival Available

tags: blog carnival, family life The first anniversary edition of the Carnival of Family Life is now available for your reading enjoyment. They have 61 linked stories covering topics from family stories to finances, from great outdoor ideas to humor.

Sunday Night Movie: Cataglyphis

From David Attenborough's The Trials of Life (1990): If you're interested in learning more about navigation in Cataglyphis, look for papers coming from the lab of Rüdiger Wehner.  His group has produced a stream of really top-notch research.

Behaviorial pharmacology, behind the scenes

I was unaware the DrugMonkey and PhysioProf were on the payroll of The Onion. I'm not a behaviorial pharmacologist but I know quite a few and it didn't keep me from howling out loud at yet another gem from one of my favorite satirical pubs.

The Great Divide

The Continental Divide runs north-south from Alaska to northwestern South America. It separates waters flowing into the Pacific Ocean from those flowing into the Atlantic or Gulf of Mexico. We stopped in New Mexico to document traversing this natural boundary...

Evolution: The Story of Life by Douglas Palmer

A very cooly and heavily illustrated chapter from the book Evolution: The Story of Life by Douglas Palmer is available for free download from the National Center for Science Education . CLICK HERE for the download. Visit the NCSE web site here.

Richard Sears: Planning for the end of oil

As the world's attention focuses on the perils of oil exploration, we present Richard Sears' talk from early February 2010. Sears, an expert in developing new energy resources, talks about our inevitable and necessary move away from oil. Toward ... what?

Mt. Saint Helens Anniversary

Happy 28th anniversary of the 1980 Mt. Saint Helens eruption. The volcano had a catastrophic collapse of one side of the edifice that triggered the climatic eruption. Enjoy this clip from the CBS News from 3 days after the eruption.  

Comments of the Week #129: From the impossible physics of warp drive to photonic time

“Put two ships in the open sea, without wind or tide, and, at last, they will come together. Throw two planets into space, and they will fall one on the other. Place two enemies in the midst of a crowd, and they will inevitably meet; it is a fatality, a question of time; that is all.” -Jules Verne As the final three months of the year begin, it’s again time to look back on the past week here at Starts With A Bang! Lots of exciting stories were met with a number of interesting and provocative comments, which is what I always like to see. Here's what we covered, in case you missed anything:…

Mercury in vaccines as a cause of autism and ASD: A failed hypothesis

Unfortunately, as we have been dreading for the last four months or so since her relapse was diagnosed, my mother-in-law passed away from breast cancer in hospice. She died peacefully, with my wife and the rest of her family at her side. As you might expect, I do not much feel like blogging. Because I foresaw this day coming, however, I did set up a series of "Best of" reposts to autopost for you while I am in mourning. Some I have even updated and/or spiffed up with actual editing. If you've been reading less than a year or two, they're new to you. If not, I hope you enjoy them again. I don'…

Antrozoins: pallid bats, Van Gelder's bat, Rhogeessa... Baeodon!! (vesper bats part XI)

Vesper bats. Well done with sticking with it all so far - I have lots of non-bat stuff I want to cover, but (for reasons soon to be explained) I need to get this series finished. With this article - part XI in the series (XI) - we are not at the end. But we are at the beginning of the end. Look at the cladogram below to see where we are, and follow the links below if you want to know what happened before. We arrive now at Antrozoini... The Pallid bat or Desert bat Antrozous pallidus of western North America and Cuba is a large (wingspan 37-41 cm; mass 20-35 g), fairly scary-looking, big-…

Comments of the Week #35: A 2-week spectacular!

"It's a tad easier to be proud when you come in first than it is when you finish further back. But there's no reason to hide when you don't do as well as you'd hoped. You can't run away from your problems." -My Little Pony It's been two weeks since our last edition of Comments of the Week here on our Starts With A Bang forum, and -- to my great pleasure -- that hasn't meant a thing for the flow of great comments here! There's plenty to catch up on if you missed anything, as the last two weeks have seen some amazing posts, including: Why is the Universe's energy disappearing? (for Ask Ethan…

Comments of the Week #140: from becoming an astronaut to a perfect Universe

"You're not looking for perfection in your partner. Perfection is all about the ego. With soulmate love, you know that true love is what happens when disappointment sets in - and you're willing to deal maturely with these disappointments." -Karen Salmansohn It's been a great week full of great stories from the Universe here at Starts With A Bang! The topic for the next podcast has been chosen and you should get to see it all next week: on whether our Universe is the inside of a black hole or not! (It's a fun one; you won't want to miss it!) Most of us were clouded out of the Geminids, but…

Comments of the Week #111: from all of your atoms to Newton's failure

“Love doesn't make the world go 'round. Love is what makes the ride worthwhile.” -Franklin P. Jones It's been such a busy time here at Starts With A Bang that we're a day late bringing you last week's recap! And we've got to get rocking on it, because there's so much coming up to consider as well! First off, the Patreon campaign is even closer to our next goal, with a total of 128 active patrons. We did a Podcast for Science By Number talking about dark matter/dark energy and inflation and expansion: and we had a fantastic, busy week on top of that, including: How many atoms do you share…

Comments of the Week #105: from the movie 'Gravity' to the most astounding fact

“I guess I have a short attention span! I'm interested in new worlds, new universes, new challenges. I always said the only reason to make a film is not for the result but for what you learn for the next one.” -Alfonso Cuarón April has gotten off to a great start here at Starts With A Bang, with some amazing stories and some unique features you won't find anywhere else! Here's what the past week had in store: Does the climax of the movie 'Gravity' violate simple physics? (for Ask Ethan), LIGO's director explains what it's like to find a gravitational wave, What do star trails look like from…

The Whale and the Antibody

Evolutionary biologists face a challenge that's a lot like a challenge of studying ancient human history: to retrieve vanished connections. The people who live in remote Polynesia presumably didn't sprout from the island soil like trees--they must have come from somewhere. Tracing their connection to ancestors elsewhere hasn't been easy, in part because the islands are surrounded by hundreds of miles of open ocean. It hasn't been impossible though: studies on their culture, language, and DNA all suggest that the Polynesians originally embarked from southeast Asia. We may never be able to…

The Friday Fermentable

Welcome to the inaugural edition of The Friday Fermentable, the end-of-week fun feature of Terra Sigillata. As I was on vacation and sick last week, I did not accomplish my goals of wine and beer tasting to share with you specific recommendations this week. So, let us take this week to explain our philosophy: The mission statement for The Friday Fermentable is: 1. To celebrate the convergence of agriculture, biology, botany, chemistry, biochemistry, microbiology, neuroscience, pharmaceutics, and the pharmacology of natural products and herbal medicines in the production of historically-…

Muslim fundamentalists, then and now

It was in the 7th century of the Christian Era many of the events which shaped the course of Islamic sectarianism occurred. The major one you are aware of is the Shia-Sunni split; the reality of the origins of this schism and the way in which in manifests today is more complex than the cartoon cut-out you are normally presented, but I want to focus on a group which is outside of the Shia-Sunni dichotomy, the Ibadi. The Ibadi are descended from one of the assorted Kharijite sects. The Kharijites were extremists in the early history of Islam, they rejected Ali because he offered to parlay…

Medicine, Brain and Technology Weekly Channel Highlights

In this post: the large version of the Medicine & Health, Brain & Behavior and Technology channel photos, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week. Brain & Behavior. From Flickr, by jamesfischer Technology. From Flickr, by jurvetson Medicine & Health. From Flickr, by Pathfinder Linden Reader comments of the week: In dopes, Steinn Sigurðsson of Dynamics for Cats considers the case for allowing performance enhancing drugs in athletic arenas. While there are certainly risks involved, he believes, particularly for long-term health and with new and untested…

BLASTing through the flu: activity 5, how similar is similar?

No more delays! BLAST away! Time to blast. Let's see what it means for sequences to be similar.  First, we'll plan our experiment.  When I think about digital biology experiments, I organize the steps in the following way:             A.  Defining the question B.  Making the data sets            C.  Analyzing the data sets D.  Interpreting the results I'm going intersperse my results with a few instructions so you can repeat the things that I've done below.  I've some people writing that only experts should be analyzing data.  But  I disagree with those who say that sequence…

Mendel's Garden #8: Harvest Edition

Welcome to the October 15, 2006 edition of Mendel's Garden. Join me as we walk through the fields and admire the harvest. Evolutionary genetics As we stroll into the evolutionary biology plot, we notice a shape in the ground that looks suspiciously like a footprint. Who walked this path before? Where did they come from? Today, we have some interesting tools for learning about ancient peoples and satisfying our curiosity about the paths they trod. Or do we? Inspector RPM, from Evolgen, turns his magnifying glass on those methods and asks if they really tell us what we want to know.…

Sequencing the campus at the Johns Hopkins University

A few years ago, the General Biology students at the Johns Hopkins University began to interrogate the unseen world. During this semester-long project, they study the ecosystems of the Homewood campus, and engage in novel research by exploring the microbial ecosystems in different sections of the campus. Biology lab students gather environmental samples from different campus ecosystems, isolate DNA, amplify 16s ribosomal DNA by PCR, and check their PCR results by gel electrophoresis. DNA samples are next sent to the university's Genetic Resources Core Facility , where scientific staff, in…

Pandemic virus as property

This site has a Creative Commons license on it. Essentially this means anyone can copy, distribute or transmit my blog posts for whatever purpose they want -- even commercial purposes. The only restriction is that this unrestrictive license travels with the post. If you use something from us you must permit anyone else to take the same post from your site without asking permission; and to attribute it to us at Effect Measure (i.e., give us credit, ideally including a link back to this blog). We think this is a good model for influenza viruses, too. Because without it we are headed for…

China shares its bird flu questions

We've written here about China's failure to share viral isolates, but we hope we've also made clear that many Chinese scientists have been forthcoming in sharing much other scientific information with colleagues in other countries about their experience with bird flu. A good example of interesting and valuable information has just appeared (published Ahead of Print in CDC's journal Emerging Infectious Diseases). The paper has details on six H5N1 cases that occurred in China between October 2005 and October 2006. The cases were all in urban areas and had no known exposure to sick poultry or…

Sad days at NIEHS

I will admit to having a soft spot in my heart for one of the NIH institutes, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. NIEHS is on a separate campus in Research Triangle Park, NC, away from the main NIH campus in Bethesda, MD. It is separated in other ways, too, having a decidedly more public health focus than the other institutes. Its mission, like other NIH institutes, is to ferret out the basic causes of illness, in NIEHS's case, environmentally caused or influenced illness. Its interest in cancer caused by industrial chemicals, asthma from air pollution, reproductive and…

Boo hoo

We have made Ken Ham very sad. Yay, bonus! "We are disappointed with the zoo's decision and its impact on the families and visitors to the region who would have enjoyed taking advantage of this opportunity to make this a truly memorable Christmas," said Answers in Genesis and Creation Museum founder and president Ken Ham. "Both the Creation Museum and the Cincinnati Zoo have put together spectacular Christmas displays, and we were excited to partner with them to promote these events in a combination package that would have been of great value to the community." "My family and I have been…

Study: Trees save 850 lives every year, prevent thousands of health complications (seriously!)

Next time you pass a tree, you might want to give it a second thought. Maybe even a hug. One day, that tree might just help save your life. Let me explain. In a new study published in the Environmental Pollution journal, researchers found that the positive impact that trees have on air quality translates to the prevention of more than 850 deaths each year as well as 670,000 incidences of acute respiratory symptoms. In 2010 alone, the study found that trees and forests in the contiguous United States removed 17.4 million metric tons of air pollution, which had an effect on human health valued…

Well, if CERA says There Will Be Oil, We Can Just Stop Worrying, Right?

Daniel Yergin in the Wall Street Journal: Since the beginning of the 21st century, a fear has come to pervade the prospects for oil, fueling anxieties about the stability of global energy supplies. It has been stoked by rising prices and growing demand, especially as the people of China and other emerging economies have taken to the road. This specter goes by the name of "peak oil." Its advocates argue that the world is fast approaching (or has already reached) a point of maximum oil output. They warn that "an unprecedented crisis is just over the horizon." The result, it is said, will be "…