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Comments of the Week #179: From mirrorless telescopes to the physics ideas that must die

“It’s easier to hold onto a bad idea if you never share it, and it’s harder to defend one if you let it out.” -Victor LaValle After catching up with a big double-dose of our comments last week, Starts With A Bang! is here again with the latest! For those of you looking forward to my newest book, Treknology, it drops just one week from today! I will have special instructions on next week's comments of the week for anyone who wants me to personally ship them an autographed copy, so look for it if you want one! With that said, let's take a look back at our past week, and all the stories we've…

Comments of the Week #156: from fermions and bosons to saving particle physics

“There is a fine line between censorship and good taste and moral responsibility.” -Stephen Spielberg Another week full of amazing science stories has gone by here at Starts With A Bang, and there are some fun and fantastic announcements! We welcomed a new contributor, Jess Shanahan, to our ranks; I found out that Forbes has made me their official Star Trek: Discovery reviewer when that new series premieres; I'm in the process of selecting the final, officially licensed images for my new book, Treknology (and pre-order today!); and from this coming Thursday through Sunday, I'll be the Science…

Comments of the Week #148: From the Dipole Repeller to the limits of Science

“We have finally established the contours that define the supercluster of galaxies we can call home … This is not unlike finding out for the first time that your hometown is actually part of much larger country that borders other nations.” -Brent Tully It's been another remarkable week here at Starts With A Bang! Full of science, stories and a slew of information you won't find anywhere else, we've hit on a number of fantastic ones for your perusal. The news you haven't heard? My upcoming book, on the real-life science behind the technologies envisioned by Star Trek, now has a listing on the…

Japan quake, tsunami, nuke news 13: When in doubt, throw a towel on it.

As I tune in to NHK live TV, and see the piece on using Twitter to aid in disaster relief being shown for the 20th time over the last 48 hours, I wonder about what appears to be a sudden and dramatic drop in the level of coverage of the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster. Over the last several days, the IAEA has stopped bothering to note that cooling systems are still not working and have shifted their attention to monitoring the rising radiation levels outside the plant on both land and sea. Meanwhile, TEPCO engineers are speaking of covering the reactor plant with a big blanket of…

Comments of Two Weeks #103: From the Universe as a hologram to dark matter in galaxies

“Public discourse has been polluted now for decades by corporate-funded disinformation - not just with climate change but with a host of health, environmental and societal threats. The implications for the planet are grim.” -Michael E. Mann What a couple of weeks it's been, both at Starts With A Bang and beyond, as I had a trip to MidSouthCon spin my head around last weekend. And even though we were a little short on articles and on time, you certainly let me (and each other) have it with your comments, both last week and this past one. If you missed anything, we hit on: Could our Universe…

Polling creation/evolution

Attention conservation notice: 3000 words about how smart people who ought to know better are reading way too much into a poll. Last May, NCSE reported on a poll on evolution conducted by Virginia Commonwealth University. The results were, to my eye, in line with most of the other polling out there, so I never wrote about it here, other than a passing mention in a post about my WaPo review of Elaine Howard Ecklund's Science vs. Religion. Anyway, a month and a half later, Jerry Coyne and Jason Rosenhouse have discovered the poll, and each has found different questions in the poll that they…

Comments of the Week #84: From the very, very end to Mars' lost atmosphere

“It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are... than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.” -Henry David Thoreau Every week at Starts With A Bang is special, but we made an amazing move, over to Forbes, which is the new home of our blog! Starting on November 2nd, we made our move, and as the month unfolds, we'll be bringing all-new content over there, to be republished (ad-free) on Medium the next week. Here's the good stuff, just in case you missed anything: The very, very end of the Universe (for Ask Ethan), I'm going to…

Comments of the Week #44: From the Universe's center to where you are

"You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge." -Eckhart Tolle We're really hitting our stride for 2015 here at Starts With A Bang, and I'm so pleased you shared this past week with me. If you missed anything, here's what we've been through: Does the Universe have a center? (for Ask Ethan), Fall into a bigger galaxy (for our Weekend Diversion), Genesis episode 5, our galaxy's gravity (for Mini-Movie Monday), Everything you ever wanted to know about nothing, (from Sabine Hossenfelder) When Einstein…

Blowing smoke over secondhand smoke

"What do you think about second hand smoke?" he asked me. I sensed ulterior motives behind the question, but I wasn't sure. I suspected that he was just looking for an argument. "It's bad," I joked. "Some have told me that the studies don't show any health problems from second hand smoke," he replied. "I'm sure 'some' have," I retorted somewhat sarcastically. "No, really, is there any evidence," he replied. "I'm open-minded about this topic." Somehow I doubted this, but I figured, what the heck, and did a little reviewing. It makes for some interesting reading. The question of whether second…

Neandertal!

You don't have to tell me, I know I'm late to the party: the news about the draft Neandertal genome sequence was announced last week, and here I am getting around to it just now. In my defense, I did hastily rewrite one of my presentation to include a long section on the new genome information, so at least I was talking about it to a few people. Besides, there is coverage from a genuine expert on Neandertals, John Hawks, and of course Carl Zimmer wrote an excellent summary. All I'm going to do now is fuss over a few things on the edge that interested me. This was an impressive technical feat…

Skin color is not race

One of the peculiarities of American discussion about race is that skin color is assumed to be synonymous with racial distinctions. That is, skin color is not just a trait, but it is the trait which defines between population differences. There's a reason for this, the skin is the largest organ and it is very salient. Populations with little phylogenetic relationship to each other, from India to the Pacific to Southeast Asia have been referred to as "black" by lighter-skinned populations. No population is referred to by their neighbors as those "straight hairs," to my knowledge. But another…

New Research on Tree Rings as Indicators of Past Climate

A new study has recently been published that looks at the ecology of bristlecone pine growth at Sheep Mountain, and the tree ring signal those trees produce, at high altitudes in the Southwestern US. This is important because tree rings are an often used proxyindicator for reconstructing past climates. Those who keep track of the paleoclimate research will recall, for example, that tree rings were one of the proxyindicators used by Michael Mann and his team in constructing the famous "Hockey Stick" graph showing a dramatic increase in the Earth's temperature since the onset of industrial…

Comments of the Week #167: From failed stars succeeding to migrating the Earth

“Sometimes the silences, the gaps, tell us more than anything else.” -Peter Ackroyd Did you know that there's even more going on than before here at Starts With A Bang!? Yes, we have our articles at Forbes; yes, we have our Podcasts on Soundcloud; yes, we have our first book out and our second available for preorder. But we also have had a recent appearance on Portland's NBC affiliate to talk about the eclipse, I've also been doing podcasts to promote Treknology and will be recording another interview this afternoon, and I've been researching and speaking with scientists and engineers…

Comments of the Week #162: from singularity evaporation to the loss of Earth's helium

“The ability to listen and learn is key to mastering the art of communication. If you don't use your verbal skills and networking, it will disappear rapidly.” -Rick Pitino It’s been a week full of amazing and controversial stories about the Universe here at Starts With A Bang! Did you catch the fantastic live event on Wednesday at Peddler Brewing Company in Seattle: Astronomy on Tap, starring me and the incredible Sarah Tuttle? If not, you can catch it now! If you're in a multimedia mood, you're in luck, because the newest (and twentieth!) Starts With A Bang podcast is now live: on the Fate…

Legal analysis of the ICR's recent lawsuit

It's long and fairly detailed, but this synopsis by a lawyer will give you the gist. This lawsuit is gloriously insane. From top to bottom, this is exactly the kind of lawsuit you would expect from the kind of minds who think the world is 6,000 years old.

Two interesting NASA items

From NASAwatch: SOFIA taken from Ames and moved to Dryden Research Facility at Edwards Science Mission Directorate turmoil - who is leaving next? These are not unrelated. I do wish certain people in Very Senior Positions would do their job like mature professionals and not like petulant high schoolers with a grudge.

Surtur smiles.

You are not superstitious, are you? Eyjafjallajökull - from the air is it clear that there are three craters in the caldera. click to enlarge The mind does some great interpolative associative processing ;-) Image is radar, from an Icelandic coastguard plane. The craters are 200-500m across. For now.

How fast do you have to run if you're being chased by a velociraptor?

Brian Switek, from Laelaps, could probably tell you. And, if you vote for him in the 3rd Annual College Blogger Scholarship competition, he just might. He'll tell you why should you vote for him, too, and I agree. And below the fold, is an inspirational cartoon. From xkcd.

New Blog Alert

From Paul Myers comes a link to a new blog by University of Chicago physicist Sean Carroll. From his academic webpage, it's obvious that he is interested in the intersection of religion and science and I hope he writes on that subject extensively on his blog. Welcome to the blogosphere, Sean.

Flibbertigibbet Dembski

Now he's moving again, from the prestigious Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville to the eminent Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. If you ask me, they've both got "theological" and "seminary" in their name, so who cares? He's moved from one dunghill to another.

Odd

Which is the odd one out? (from the Graun). [Update: and the answer is, the one on the far left, because it isn't odd; as most people answered, with varying degrees of formality.] [Update, from the comments, CR offers us a rather easier "spot the odd one out":]

Athabasca Valles Distributary Channels

This observation shows small, branching channels that are part of the larger Athabasca Valles channel system. These side channels are "distributaries" because they bifurcate from the main channel, which is located to the northwest of this image. The distributaries flowed from north to south when they were active. more

Ant News Roundup

Asphinctopone differens Bolton & Fisher 2008 A new species from the Central African Republic Bolton & Fisher Revise Asphinctopone (Zootaxa) Shattuck Revises the Indo-Pacific Prionopelta All imported Fire Ants in the U.S. are descended from 9-20 initial foundress queens [summary in ScienceDaily] ZooKeys: A new open-access journal for biodiversity & taxonomy

A Skeptic's Theme Song!

Bob Carroll of The Skeptic's Dictionary, has produced a theme song for skeptics. Well, OK. He stole the music from Leonard Cohen. "The Tower of Song" becomes "The Tower of Woo." Actually, I think he's drawing on Bob Dylan at bit, too. From the Infidels album, which would be appropriate.

Testing, testing

Strangely, I just got two requests for participation in discussions: one from an Intelligent Design creationist apologist, Jason Rennie, and another to join in a debate this weekend from Dinesh D'Souza. I just thought I'd test whether these guys actually pay attention to what I write by putting the answer here. NO.

Today is the day - Waterloo!

Today is the day when it will all come crashing down around us evil Darwinists. Expelled has been, uh, expelled from whence it came. Yes, the prophet Benjamin will speak and the scales will be lifted from the eyes of the public. Verily I say unto thee, repent now.

Dammit! It is OUR job to frame!

There is something bitterly ironic about a muppet like Dembski complaining about the Nisbet & Mooney piece on "framing science." His complaint is, after all, coming from a man who accepts money from a group who coin glib phrases like "teach the controversy" and talk about "a new science for a new century". Sheech!

Friday Nudibranchs

From up in Juneau, Alaska, my pal Nick Bonzey at the US Forest Service thought I'd appreciate a good dose of nudibranchs, claiming 'these guys are MUCH cuter than your average sea cucumber.' Admittedly, with photos like these from National Geographic's David Doubilet, Nick might just be onto something...

Ike in Perspective

Here is a photo from the space station, showing some really big thunderheads: It is an inset from a high-resolution photo of Ike, courtesy of NASA: href="http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/272686main_ISS017E015708_hi.jpg"> The photo posted on the NASA site is 2098x3072 pixels.  Click (twice) on the image to get the full effect.  More href="http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/multimedia/hurr_ike091008.html">here.

TGIF: Nautilus clip from "Ocean Deep"

Clips from the BBC series Planet Earth Ocean Deep episode have found their way to YouTube. The clip embedded above starts in a deep (guessing 750m) gorgonian field on a Northeast Pacific seamount, and moves to follow a foraging nautilus that migrated into a shallow water reef by night, from ~400m depth.

Are you all listening?

Franken is broadcasting from the UMM campus right now, if you're interested. If you've finished listening to the Al Franken show — Live! From Morris! — now is the time to switch to Science Friday, where you'll be able to hear Richard Dawkins talk about The God Delusion.

Update on TheScian SF Book

As you may know, we are publishing a Science fiction anthology with the stories from the yearly SF contest. In latest news on that, Proof copy has arrived from both CreateSpace and Lulu. I like the CreateSpace copy better because the dimensions look right. Lulu has done good job as well.

Killer Texting

Source. Lily Goldsmith from Valencia CC. My posting, "Texting As Killer, As Savior" generated strong interest and I wanted to share some more compelling graphic designs from Dr. Robin Landa's Wiley Student Advertising Design Challenge, "Texting and Driving Don't Mix." Which one do you think conveys the message most clearly?

Genome Sequencing

The Scientist has a good review of genome sequencing (coming from a more biomedical perspective). I tend to present genomics from an evolutionary angle (rather than functional). This is a good read if you're not too familiar with the field, and all you know about genomics is what I've told you.

In Situ Blogging

At the end of May, I will be out to sea! But alas never fear, because my dedication to the DSN reader is great! I will be blogging from sea about my daily exploits and pictures from the cruise. Stay tuned for the dates and link to the MBARI website.

Shuffling the deck

The dynamic duo of Shelly from Retrospectacle and Steve from Omni Brain have now teamed up to bring you Of Two Minds. Also, Josh Donlan has started his stint as a contributor to Shifting Baselines, so there may be more about Pleistocene re-wilding on Sb in the near future.

Kasatochi from space

NASA posted a nice image of the ash plume from the current eruption at Kasatochi (Alaska) showing the brown/grey ash mixing with white clouds over the Pacific. Not much else to report on the eruption other than that AVO reported that seismicity remained low from August 10-12.

Tiny pterosaurs and pac-man frogs from hell

It was Beelzebufo that finally made up my mind. Long-time readers will have noticed that I generally fail to discuss the exciting stuff that's being announced in the news, even when it's very much relevant to the Tet Zoo remit. Indeed some of you have even commented upon this fact. What's my excuse for this? Well there are a few actually... -- For starters, once I've decided to blog about something - say, initial bipedalism or European pumas or liolaemine lizards - I need to stick with it and get it out of the way. Because I have a long list of subjects that I plan to blog about, I am not…

Gibbons, take 8

I have to confess to being tired of answering William Gibbons' occasional replies. It's to be expected that someone with a "PhD in creation science apologetics" (which is roughly the same as having a PhD in defending astrology) would have mastered the "Gish Gallop", but Mr. Gibbons, it appears, simply has not a shred of intellectual honesty or concern for accuracy. Rather than offering a line by line response, let me point ouf the evidence on which I rest that conclusion. To begin with, let's look at his disturbing habit of appropriating the work of others and pretending they are his own. In…

The revenge of the return of the resurrection of the "autism as mitochondrial disorder" notion

If you need some woo, and you need it fast, who ya gonna call? HuffPo! Yes, as I've pointed out since its very inception, if there's one thing The Huffington Post is good at doing, it's butchering medical science and serving up regular heapin' helpings of the purest woo. Be it the anti-vaccine pseudoscience that has dominated its pages from the very beginning (including posts by our old friend Dr. Jay Gordon), the quantum woo favored by Deepak Chopra, or the rank quackery that's been showing up on HuffPo's pages more and more frequently over the last two years or so, there's no "respectable"…

Ancient toothed whales had baleen

"It is little wonder, then, why this great creature failed to continue its lineage: with no ears, it could not sustain a top hat upon its head, and thereby expired from lack of common dignity." A cartoon featuring Koch's "Hydrarchos," cobbled together from several Basilosaurus skeletons. [Update: I've been told that this cartoon is from Married to the Sea, whereas I had assumed that it was so old that it was public domain (I just had it sitting around in my pictures file and I don't remember where it came from). I'll err on the side of caution: Married to the Sea.] Yesterday was the…

Comments of the Week #180: From the planets Kepler missed to the NASA photos that changed the world

“We do not realize what we have on Earth until we leave it.” -Jim Lovell Well, the Scienceblogs comments are still on the fritz, requiring me to manually un-spam them one-at-a-time, but Starts With A Bang! is still going strong with some fabulous stories based on the best knowledge we have! This next week is poised to be a doozy of a fantastic one, as Treknology is out at last (Amazon is having a sale on it today, and my copies arrive on Wednesday), so next weekend I'll have special instructions for you on how to order autographed copies from me. Also, check out Starts With A Bang on Forbes…

Comments of the Week #164: From black holes to moons with moons of their own

“There are two types of people who will tell you that you cannot make a difference in this world: those who are afraid to try and those who are afraid you will succeed.” -Ray Goforth We've really investigated some amazing scientific stories this week here at Starts With A Bang! There's always so much to consider, think about and enjoy, and I'm already looking ahead to what's on the plate for this week: a new podcast to put together, progress on designing and constructing our timeline-of-the-Universe poster, and putting the final touches on my upcoming book, Treknology! In fact, I had an…

Radiation from CT scans: Balancing risks and benefits

NOTE: Orac is on semi-vacation this week, trying very hard to recharge his Tarial cells. Actually, although he is at home, he is spending much of his time in his Sanctum Sanctorum (i.e., his home office) working on an R01 for the February submission cycle. Given that the week between Christmas and New Years Day tends to be pretty boring, both from a blogging and blog traffic standpoint, he's scaling back the new, original stuff and mixing in some "best of" reruns, as well as some more recent stuff that appeared in a different form elsewhere, modified a bit to be more appropriate to this blog…

It couldn't happen to a sleazier guy

When Ray Comfort published his own version of Darwin's Origin, he had to come up with some original content for the introduction. He couldn't. Instead, he stole the first three pages outright from an essay by University of Tennessee professor Stan Guffey — those are the only reasonable pages in his 50 page contribution — and the rest is a mish-mash of standard creationist arguments that you can find on the internet. It's actually kind of impressive that he reached so low on the stupid scale with this one; there isn't one creative thought in the whole sloppy, plagiarized piece of work. Now the…

The Genetic Map of Europe

The figure above comes from the an article in The New York Times, The Genetic Map of Europe, which draws from a new paper, Correlation between Genetic and Geographic Structure in Europe. The authors sampled 2,500 Europeans across 300,000 points of genetic variation, then extracted out the components of that variation, and plotted the individual data points along the two largest independent dimensions. You note that various samples tend to cluster geographically with each other; i.e., Finns tend to cluster with other Finns, Italians with Italians. This makes sense since Europe hasn't been a…

Ancient DNA in Xinjiang

Via Dienekes, Ancient mtDNA from Sampula population in Xinjiang: The archaeological site fo Sampula cemetery was located about 14âkm to the southwest of the Luo County in Xinjiang Khotan, China, belonging to the ancient Yutian kingdom. 14C analysis showed that this cemetery was used from 217 B.C. to 283 A. D. Ancient DNA was analysed by 364âbp of the mitochondrial DNA hypervariable region 1 (mtDNA HVR-1), and by six restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) sites of mtDNA coding region. We successfully extracted and sequenced intact stretches of maternally inherited mtDNA from 13 out of…

This is democracy: stupid humans

Study: Geography Greek to young Americans: ...33 percent could not point out Louisiana on a U.S. map.... ...showed that 88 percent of those questioned could not find Afghanistan on a map of Asia.... ..."half or fewer of young men and women 18-24 can identify the states of New York or Ohio on a map [50 percent and 43 percent, respectively],".... But I'm sure many could pinpoint Britney Spears' butt crack. The reality is that most humans are not interested in "world affairs" (aside from The World Cup). Not only is their interest lacking, they don't possess that much native intelligence. We…

Genetic conundrum

Obviously a sex-linked trait. All males seem to exhibit the trait but none of the females. It can't just be the lack of something on the X, otherwise some of the females would have exhibited this trait as well. No, perhaps a mutant on the Y which acts in a trans & "dominant" acting manner to repress or abolish something on other chromosomes? Note: All the males exhibit the phenotype, but none of the females do. If you accept it is a sex-linked trait which manifests because the males don't have a compensatory copy of the allele inherited from the mother, then all their mothers had to…

Links 3/4/11

It's supposed to be warm tomorrow! Let's celebrate with some links. Science: When Iron and Bacteria tragically collide: From the Middle Ages to the University of Chicago Systematically Biased Beliefs About Political Influence: The Working Paper (I would love to see some neurosciency type blog about this) Today is a day to be annoyed with Nature (Publishing Group that is) #NatureFail Other: There Goes the Neighborhood Letter from a Teacher in Defense of Small Class Sizes $1.2 Trillion: The Real U.S. National Security Budget No One Wants You to Know About (I don't agree with including the…