A Texas state judge shocked the world last week by declaring the death penalty in that state unconstitutional. Now he explains that ruling:

A Houston judge who declared the death penalty unconstitutional Thursday clarified his ruling in an impromptu hearing Friday, saying he ruled the procedures surrounding the process in Texas are illegal.

During Friday's hearing, prosecutors filed motions asking state District Judge Kevin Fine to reconsider his ruling and also to proceed with April's death penalty trial of John Edward Green Jr. Fine maintained at the hearing that he believes innocent people have been executed.

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The incredible thing is that even after scandal after scandal, Blackwater (now Xe) is still being considered for and given huge contracts by the government. Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan is trying to prevent that from happening again in Afghanistan:

A senior Senate Democrat said Thursday the Pentagon should consider barring Blackwater, now called Xe Services, from a new $1 billion deal to train Afghan police because of "serious questions" about the contractor's conduct.

The comments by Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin suggests thinning patience in Congress for the Pentagon's heavy reliance on contractors on the battlefield.

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Chicago Tribune recently banned (sensibly, it seems) the use of 119 cliched words or phrases in Tribune story. NPR blogger Ian Chillag, who apparently either did not get or badly misread the memo, promptly set about using all 119 in a single sentence . Jump the break ('read more") to revel in the whole thing:

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Daniel Sarewitz, professor of science policy at Arizona State University, has an important op-ed at Slate today explaining why if we continue to frame the climate change debate in terms of science, we may never achieve meaningful policy action. Drawing on the conclusions of much of the scholarship in the area of science studies, Sarewitz writes:

When people hold strongly conflicting values, interests, and beliefs, there is not much that science can do to compel action. Indeed, more research and more facts often make a conflict worse by providing support to competing sides in the debate, and by distracting decision-makers and the public from the underlying, political disagreement. In such cases each side will claim to have the scientific high ground.

Writing in the New York Times last week, Al Gore made exactly this point about climate change by noting that "the science has become clearer and clearer." Yes, there is a robust scientific consensus that human activity is causing the atmosphere to warm up. But so what? Decision-makers need to know how climate change will affect specific political jurisdictions, and, more importantly, what types of interventions will make a difference, over what time scales, at what costs, and to whose benefit--and whose detriment.

Sarewitz's op-ed resonates with my own views on the issue shared earlier this week at Dot Earth and in a news report at the NYTimes.com. Until we propose policies that reflect the values and input of a range of political voices and until we communicate about the national and local benefits of those policies, we may never overcome political paralysis. Moreover, the more that scientists and environmental advocates become distracted by the climate skeptic movement, responding to every new attack with a combo of war rhetoric and technical defenses of the science, the deeper the divide on climate change is likely to grow.

Sarewitz's full article is a must-read, but here's how he ends:

Politics isn't about maximizing rationality, it's about finding compromises that enough people can live with to allow society to take steps in the right direction. Contrary to all our modern instincts, then, political progress on climate change requires not more scientific input into politics, but less. Value disputes that are hidden behind the scientific claims and counterclaims need to be flushed out and brought into the sunlight of democratic deliberation. Until that happens, the political system will remain in gridlock, and everyone will be convinced that they are on the side of truth.

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There are 15 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:

Extreme Female Promiscuity in a Non-Social Invertebrate Species:

While males usually benefit from as many matings as possible, females often evolve various methods of resistance to matings. The prevalent explanation for this is that the cost of additional matings exceeds the benefits of receiving sperm from a large number of males. Here we demonstrate, however, a strongly deviating pattern of polyandry. We analysed paternity in the marine snail Littorina saxatilis by genotyping large clutches (53-79) of offspring from four females sampled in their natural habitats. We found evidence of extreme promiscuity with 15-23 males having sired the offspring of each female within the same mating period. Such a high level of promiscuity has previously only been observed in a few species of social insects. We argue that genetic bet-hedging (as has been suggested earlier) is unlikely to explain such extreme polyandry. Instead we propose that these high levels are examples of convenience polyandry: females accept high numbers of matings if costs of refusing males are higher than costs of accepting superfluous matings.

Record Dynamics in Ants:

The success of social animals (including ourselves) can be attributed to efficiencies that arise from a division of labour. Many animal societies have a communal nest which certain individuals must leave to perform external tasks, for example foraging or patrolling. Staying at home to care for young or leaving to find food is one of the most fundamental divisions of labour. It is also often a choice between safety and danger. Here we explore the regulation of departures from ant nests. We consider the extreme situation in which no one returns and show experimentally that exiting decisions seem to be governed by fluctuating record signals and ant-ant interactions. A record signal is a new 'high water mark' in the history of a system. An ant exiting the nest only when the record signal reaches a level it has never perceived before could be a very effective mechanism to postpone, until the last possible moment, a potentially fatal decision. We also show that record dynamics may be involved in first exits by individually tagged ants even when their nest mates are allowed to re-enter the nest. So record dynamics may play a role in allocating individuals to tasks, both in emergencies and in everyday life. The dynamics of several complex but purely physical systems are also based on record signals but this is the first time they have been experimentally shown in a biological system.

Are Maternal Antibodies Really That Important? Patterns in the Immunologic Development of Altricial Passerine House Sparrows (Passer domesticus):

Maternal antibodies are believed to play an integral role in protecting immunologically immature wild-passerines from environmental antigens. This study comprehensively examines the early development of the adaptive immune system in an altricial-developing wild passerine species, the house sparrow (Passer domestics), by characterizing the half-life of maternal antibodies in nestling plasma, the onset of de novo synthesis of endogenous antibodies by nestlings, and the timing of immunological independence, where nestlings rely entirely on their own antibodies for immunologic protection. In an aviary study we vaccinated females against a novel antigen that these birds would not otherwise encounter in their natural environment, and measured both antigen-specific and total antibody concentration in the plasma of females, yolks, and nestlings. We traced the transfer of maternal antibodies from females to nestlings through the yolk and measured catabolisation of maternal antigen-specific antibodies in nestlings during early development. By utilizing measurements of non-specific and specific antibody levels in nestling plasma we were able to calculate the half-life of maternal antibodies in nestling plasma and the time point at which nestling were capable of synthesizing antibodies themselves. Based on the short half-life of maternal antibodies, the rapid production of endogenous antibodies by nestlings and the relatively low transfer of maternal antibodies to nestlings, our findings suggest that altricial-developing sparrows achieve immunologic independence much earlier than precocial birds. To our knowledge, this is the first in depth analyses performed on the adaptive immune system of a wild-passerine species. Our results suggest that maternal antibodies may not confer the immunologic protection or immune priming previously proposed in other passerine studies. Further research needs to be conducted on other altricial passerines to determine if the results of our study are a species-specific phenomenon or if they apply to all altricial-developing birds.

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tags: Department of Motor Vehicles, DMV, driver's license, prank, funny, humor, offbeat, odd, streaming video

The Department of Motor Vehicles has sure changed since when I lived the US. For example, I once had a cast on my foot and was told to wait to renew my driver's license until after the cast had been removed. When I see what these two guys managed to do, I admit I feel somewhat put out because after all, DMV wasn't photographing my foot!

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The latest study on flu vaccine effectiveness in children has been well discussed in the MSM and the flu blogs, so I'll point you to those excellent pieces (Branswell, crof, Mike Coston at Avian Flu Diary) and just add some things not covered elsewhere. The full text of the article is available for free at JAMA and it's a pretty good read, so if you want to see for yourself what is involved I urge you to read it, too. First, let me back up a bit and connect this to the controversy about observational and randomized clinical trials we've been discussing here of late (before my grant writing interfered, anyway).

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tags: cycles, Invasion of the Teddy Bears, music, animation, Cyriak, offbeat, odd, streaming video

Here's a truly peculiar video for you to watch featuring infinite teddy bears invading a beach. Music and animations by Cyriak, who has quite a following, apparently.

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"He loves nature in spite of what it did to him."

- Forrest Tucker

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compare and contrast

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Well, that didn't take long.

Remember when the grande dame of the anti-vaccine movement, Barbara Loe Fisher, decided that she would try to harass, intimidate, and silence Paul Offit through the filing of a frivolous libel suit against Dr. Offit, Amy Wallace (the journalist who interviewed Offit for an excellent article last year), and Condé Nast, the publisher of WIRED, which ran the article? Well, the judge has ruled, and that ruling is...dismissed!

The text of the ruling can be found here.

There are some awesomely awesome passages in this ruling, which is a slapdown that, while not as epic as, for instance, the slapdown that Judge John E. Jones III delivered to creationists in Kitzmiller v. Dover, is nonetheless very satisfying to read--with one exception. The judge in this case makes some truly annoying statements like:

Moreover, in the context of the Wired article, the statement "she lies" lacks the provably false content that is required to support a defamation action.=

So far, so good. Then, not so good:

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Reviewed by other ScienceBloggers:

Prehistoric DNA reveals the story of a Pleistocene survivor, the muskox

Ancient DNA Isolated from Fossil Eggshells May Provide Clues to Eggstinction of Giant Birds

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This is part three of a multi-part presentation of a sample chapter from a forthcoming book, The Madam Curie Complex. Part One can be found here. Part Two can be found here.

Recently I was approached with an offer to share with my readers a sample chapter from a forthcoming book called The Madam Curie Complex: The Hidden History of Women in Science. A caveat: I have not read the whole book, and offering the sample chapter here for you to read does not constitute an endorsement by me of the book. But I was sufficiently intrigued by the sample chapter I read to think it was worth sharing with you, to let you read if you want. You can make up your own minds and decide if you want to purchase the book, which is on offer at the Feminist Press site for a reasonable price. About the book:

This March, The Feminist Press will release The Madam Curie Complex: The Hidden History of Women in Science by historian Julie Des Jardins. The book tells the stories of women scientists, from Marie Curie to Maria Mayer, who took enormous chances and made great discoveries in spite of, and at times because of, the resistance they faced in a male-dominated field. Des Jardins compares their stories with prominent male counterparts in an exploration of whether, and how, women research, collaborate, and come to different conclusions about the natural world.

The chapter I have been given to share with you is chapter 7, The Lady Trimates and Feminist Science?: Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas. It came to me in a pdf version and a lot of formatting has been lost in moving it to this blog, but I hope you will still enjoy be able to enjoy reading it. I hope locating the footnotes will not be too hard. I've broken the chapter into sections for a series of posts, and the reference footnotes for each section will be at the end of each post.

On to the second section of the chapter...

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Several items in the general category of charitable activity:

• Kate is running the Con or Bust auction again this year, with proceeds going to support people of color interested in attending SFF cons, principally Wiscon. Bidding is open through Saturday at 11:59pm ET, and items up for bid include many things that may be of interest to readers of this blog, including a certain book, plus a bunch of other stuff I will put below the fold.
• I got email from the Nobel Prize committee the other day. Well, OK, the webmaster for Nobelprize.org. They have an "Ask a Nobel laureate" feature going on their YouTube channel, and the current laureate taking questions is Albert Fert, one of the Physics laureates from 2007. You can record a question for him through March 19, and they'll record and post his answers after that.
• The favorite educational charity of ScienceBlogs, DonorsChoose is in another of these online contests to win money from major corporations, in this case the Pepsi Refresh Project. If they get enough votes, they can siphon off a tiny fraction of a percent of the money Pepsi earns selling junk to kids, and put it toward classroom and library supplies for schools. If this sounds good to you, go over there and vote.

And there's your charity shilling for the moment. I'll put a list of the Con or Bust items Kate thought might especially appeal to ScienceBlogs readers below the fold:

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This is part two of a multi-part presentation of a sample chapter from a forthcoming book, The Madam Curie Complex. Part One can be found here. Part Three can be found here.

Recently I was approached with an offer to share with my readers a sample chapter from a forthcoming book called The Madam Curie Complex: The Hidden History of Women in Science. A caveat: I have not read the whole book, and offering the sample chapter here for you to read does not constitute an endorsement by me of the book. But I was sufficiently intrigued by the sample chapter I read to think it was worth sharing with you, to let you read if you want. You can make up your own minds and decide if you want to purchase the book, which is on offer at the Feminist Press site for a reasonable price. About the book:

This March, The Feminist Press will release The Madam Curie Complex: The Hidden History of Women in Science by historian Julie Des Jardins. The book tells the stories of women scientists, from Marie Curie to Maria Mayer, who took enormous chances and made great discoveries in spite of, and at times because of, the resistance they faced in a male-dominated field. Des Jardins compares their stories with prominent male counterparts in an exploration of whether, and how, women research, collaborate, and come to different conclusions about the natural world.

The chapter I have been given to share with you is chapter 7, The Lady Trimates and Feminist Science?: Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas. It came to me in a pdf version and a lot of formatting has been lost in moving it to this blog, but I hope you will still enjoy be able to enjoy reading it. I hope locating the footnotes will not be too hard. I've broken the chapter into sections for a series of posts, and the reference footnotes for each section will be at the end of each post.

On to the second section of the chapter...

Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Collective Imagination

Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Collective Imagination

Oklahomas Christian Medical and Dental Association is such a massive joke.

They brought in Donald Ewert, a clueless dork, to talk about the 'Evolution of the Immune System' Creationism.

Brought in Mr. NOMNOMNOMNOM to talk about the science/religion/ethics behind stem cell research SCIENTISTS KILLING BABBIES!

And yesterday they brought in Ellen Myers to talk about: "Did the Nazis have it correct? Part II: Euthanasia and Doctor Assisted Suicide; Will We Repeat the Past."

I had no idea who this woman was. A casual Google search turned up juicy morsels like this:

She has published papers in the Creation Research Society Quarterly and at the International Conference for Creationism. She grew up in Nazi Germany, is multi-lingual, and has a Masters degree in History.

... The following 45 minutes were quite possibly the weirdest, most irritating 45 minutes I have experienced in a very long time (hey, its been a while since Caseytits was in town).

Part of it is that Im not used to crazy old people. I dont mean crazy as in 'kooky fun!' I mean crazy in a 'tea-bagger experiencing rapid cognitive decline' way. My grandmothers were strong independent women up till the end, and very respectful of my religious/political decisions, so it took me a minute to get used to an 80 year old woman, lecturing at a medical institution, saying things like "OBAMA SAID THE US IS NO LONGER A CHRISTIAN NATION! DID YOU HEAR THAT??? GERMANY WAS A GOOD CHRISTIAN NATION UNTIL NAZIS!"

It was kinda like a 45-minute version of this.

*blink*

The one bloggable thing I got out of this event was an observation*. A difference between Radical Christian ethics and my ethics.

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A bad day for your ego is a great day for your soul. -Jillian Michaels

But however you use a treadmill, there's one extremely simple thing you can do to dramatically intensify your workout: incline it!

If you're an outdoor walker/runner, this is the equivalent of going uphill instead of over level ground. There are many physiological differences in walking along an incline versus on level ground, but what does physics have to say about it?

Normally, if you're on level ground (or a level treadmill), you stay at the same level in the Earth's gravitational field.

But if you walk uphill (or on an inclined treadmill), you not only need to move forward at whatever pace you were moving at, you also need to climb -- a little with every step -- out of the Earth's gravitational field!

The Earth's gravitational field is no slouch, either. I'm an 80 kg individual, and for me to raise my elevation by just 5.3 meters (about 17 feet) costs me 4,200 Joules of energy, also known as one food calorie.

Now, if I actually exercise, I burn significantly more than one calorie by raising myself those 5.3 meters. Why? The two most significant reasons are as follows:

1. I am not a perfect engine. This means, in order for me to do 4,200 Joules of physical work, I need to burn about three times as much in food energy in order to get that much useful energy out. Alas, our bodies are inefficient in that manner.
2. When you exercise and then stop, your body doesn't know that it's okay for your heart to slow down for quite some time. So spending an hour walking uphill will elevate my metabolic rate for a lot longer than an hour!

Let's make a helpful table. We'll just look at the total distance you travel (e.g., if you walk at three miles-per-hour for one hour, you go three miles), put in the incline, and see how much extra physical work you need to do!

This is all for a person with a mass of 80 kg (about 176 pounds). Isn't that a spectacular difference? In other words, if you make a long-term change from walking on a flat ground (or treadmill) to walking up inclined ground (or an inclined treadmill), you burn extra energy with every step you take!

And what's with the Jillian Michaels quote? Well, I'm no longer the fittest guy on scienceblogs; say hello to Travis and Peter over at Obesity Panacea, our newest ScienceBlog! But whatever you're doing, don't forget to take the time to get out there and do something active; you'll feel better and you'll be healthier. And who doesn't want a higher quality of life?

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In the Feb 26 issue of Science, the Chief Patent Counsel for GlaxoSmithKline has written a "Policy Forum" article outlining the reasons that the pharmaceutical industry needs longer and stronger patent protection on its new drugs (to fend off those nasty generics). I was kind of shocked to see such a propaganda piece in Science, but I suppose it is all part of looking at both (all) sides of an issue. Big pharma has been telling us how tough they've got it for years, and the argument that they must charge very high prices to pay for all that R&D is so old that you can probably find it carved on stone in subterranean caverns beneath New Jersey (where many big pharma companies live). Unfortunately, many of the arguments are hollow as well - since it has been pointed out many times that over 75% (a conservative estimate) of new drugs come directly out of academic research and then get their souls licensed to big pharma. Anyway, I'm working on a letter to the editor (which only has a slight chance of getting into Science in any form anyway). Here's a first draft, which, I'm afraid, is most likely a bit too terse for Science as yet:

Dear Editors,

Regarding Sherry Knowles Policy Forum article in the 26 Feb 2010 issue of Science, it is difficult to feel much fiscal compassion for an industry that has long held the record for highest profit margins in the world. The GSK Chief Patent Counsel's suggestion for giving branded pharmaceuticals an even longer protection period from generics also elicits little sympathy for an industry that has forced the creation of literally scores of non-governmental agencies who fight daily for universal access to life saving medicines that are kept from people who need them simply because of patent restrictions and cost. It is true that new drugs cost a lot of money to develop, although nowhere near as much as the pharmaceutical industry claims (a discrepancy that has been pointed out for years by people like Marcia Angell, former Editor-in-Chief of the New England Journal of Medicine). Is it wise, however, to give even more control over branded drug distribution to an industry that is steadily conglomerating into a small number of giant profit making machines? Are a few multi-billionaire CEOs, with an eye primarily on the bottom line, the best arbiters of what drugs the world may be allowed to have access to? I'd like to see a Policy Forum discussing how to decentralize the pharmaceutical industry: how to sever the currently requisite licensing-to-big-pharma model and create a large number of small-profit-margin ventures, working closely in league with academic labs, developing and manufacturing new, critically needed drugs, and getting them to needed populations at 3% over cost. Big pharma can stay around too: there's plenty of market for more Rogaine and Viagra spin-offs.

Sincerely yours,

Livid in Louisiana

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I've been meaning to pick up on a comment made by a reader over at writedit's epic thread on NIH paylines, scores and whatall. (If you want to swap war stories and score/IC payline grumbling, that is the hot place in town.) The guy was ticked off about a recent review he received and had a question:

I am an establishe investigator. I subnitted a competing renewal ... I got a score of 40 (37 percentile). I was very shocked and dissapointed to find out that my application had a preliminary score of 2.7 (which would have been fundable) but it seems one negative reviewer carried the day, and convinced others to pull down the score. I have not yet seen the comments, but if the comments have factual errors, especially from the negative errors, can I appeal the review and request a re-review?

Recently, as luck would have it, a loyal reader of the blog submitted the following scores, received on the review of her R01 grant proposal. Under the new scoring procedures in place since last June, these are scores which each reviewer suggests for criteria of Significance, Investigator, Innovation, Approach and Environment. I may have slightly re-ordered specific scores for concealment purposes but this is essentially the flavor.

rev#1: 2,1,1,1,1

rev#2: 2,2,3,3,1

rev#3: 3,2,5,4,2

It really is always Reviewer #3, isn't it?

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After a long confinement in a cramped metal tube, the guards stewardesses have finally released me in Melbourne. I'm going to have to figure out what I'm doing next — I think the University of Melbourne Secular Society is going to wrangle me out to a wildlife sanctuary, but I haven't connected up with them just yet. I'm just sort of savoring the sense of freedom right now, and making fiendish plans.

But the important news is that I've survived, mostly. You might want to stay upwind of me, but otherwise I'm feeling pretty good right now.

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Writer Amy Wallace just tweeted and posted to her blog the fabulous news that a pending libel case against her and physician Paul Offit has been dismissed.

Amy Wallace was the author of the centerpiece article in a Wired magazine feature on how antivaccination activists create fear and confusion by distorting and misrepresenting facts about vaccines. This article "An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All," was discussed in detail here back in October.

Two days before Christmas one of those individuals, Barbara Loe Fisher (also Arthur), filed a $1 million claim that Dr. Offit had libeled her in Wallace's article by saying, "She lies," in reference to Ms. Fisher. Condé Nast, the publisher of Wired, was also named in the suit.

Orac at Respectful Insolence wrote a very detailed post a week later explaining how Loe Fisher and other anti-science activists use the threat of legal action to suppress criticism since they can't rely on the science.

While dismissed, this legal action has certainly created financial and emotional distress for Ms. Wallace who, unlike Dr. Offit, had no experience in dealing with the level of hostility that can be dished out by the antivaccination movement. As a freelance writer, Ms. Wallace probably also lacks the financial backstop that Dr. Offit has. In effect, I am concerned that a writer like Ms. Wallace, who wrote one of the best articles in recent memory on the antivaccinationist movement, will never take another assignment on such an issue because it is just not worth the aggravation. Even prior to the suit, Wallace noted that she had never before received such hateful letters and e-mails on any other topic in her 25 years of writing professionally. Much of the opposing correspondence made lewd sexual comments about Ms. Wallace rather than engage in a debate about the content of her article.

If my prediction is true, Orac is correct: the simple threat of legal action can be used to suppress criticism of anti-science and pseudoscience nonsense that threatens society (unlike taking a heavy metal-laden supplement product that harms only the user, withholding vaccines from children compromises herd immunity in society.)

On the other hand, this episode may embolden Ms. Wallace and encourage other writers to speak more extensively on the house of cards that lies behind antivaccinationists faulty assumptions on causality and search for true causes of autistic spectrum disorders.

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Of all the mass extinctions that have occurred during earth's history, among the most hotly debated is the one which wiped out mammoths, saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths, and the other peculiar members of the Pleistocene megafauna around 12,000 years ago. It was not the most severe mass extinction, not by a long shot, but unlike the end-Cretaceous catastrophe 65 million years ago there is no single "smoking gun" that can account for the pattern of extinction. Instead the Pleistocene mass extinction remains a very mysterious event, but by looking at the natural history of one of the event's survivors scientists have been able to get a better idea about how one of the suspected extinction triggers affected prehistoric mammals.

Today's populations of muskox (Ovibos moschatus) are remnants of the Pleistocene herds which were once spread all around the Arctic Circle. The shaggy bovids are survivors of the events which wiped out so many other large mammals, but this does not mean that they were immune to ecological changes that may have played a pivotal role in the extinction. As illustrated by a new paper in the journal PNAS, the changing climate had a major influence on muskox populations, and by looking at what happened to them it may be possible to understand the fate of some of their extinct contemporaries.

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A few months ago, attorney Ames Grawert and I wrote about a defamation case filed by noted anti-vaccine crank Barbara Loe Fisher against respected journalist Amy Wallace, vaccine expert Dr. Paul Offit, and Conde Nast. The suit arose from a statement by Offit in an excellent article by Wallace. At one point in the lengthy article, Offit is quoted as saying, regarding Loe Fisher, "She lies."

Loe Fisher launched the defamation suit based on these two words, claiming they made her appear "odious, infamous, and ridiculous." Anyone who has read Loe Fisher's writing at her National Vaccine Information Center knows that she needs no help in this regard.

But the judge who drew the case didn't comment on Loe Fisher's idiocy, just her error in thinking that the law protects her from heated criticism. The case was dismissed today. In his ruling, US District Judge Claude Hilton stated that since it is nearly impossible to prove or disprove the statement "she lies", something statute requires, and that since hyperbole uttered in heated debates is clearly protected free speech, the case cannot proceed.

Thank the US Constitution and our long history of protection of free speech for our ability to duke it out verbally without fear of an avalanche of frivolous lawsuits. Scientific fact is not a matter of law, and science cannot proceed in an atmosphere of fear of open debate.

Shame on you Barbara (of course, there will always be an England).

(h/t CS)

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Upchucky award runner-up and Disco. 'Tute staffer Casey Luskin is upset. Last fall, we were on a panel together, and I mocked his defense of the neo-creationist "orchard model" described in Explore Evolution as claiming that life "poofed" into existence. In the course of one of Casey's regularly scheduled bouts of logorrhea, he decides to respond to this claim:

I presented some of this information discussed below at the St. Thomas conference last fall, and NCSE staff member Josh Rosenau repeatedly alleged that I was making a “poof” hypothesis for the origin of monkeys.

No. That is not what I was arguing at all.

The NCSE made a specific argument for common descent based upon the “continuity” and “consistency” between biogeography and evolution. The evidence presented below refutes their assertion.

This argument is no “poof” hypothesis for the origin of monkeys. In fact, if the only alternative to common descent is, in the words of Josh Rosenau, the “poof” hypothesis, then that says more about common descent being an unscientific hypothesis than anything else.

Fortunately for Mr. Rosenau and the NCSE, there are alternatives to common descent apart from the “poof” hypothesis. Common descent is testable, and in my view it fails the test presented below. Explore Evolution presents a scientifically testable alternative to common descent, the orchard model. The NCSE dismisses it as a “creationist” argument, but as will be seen below, only the hardened Darwinian faithful will buy such quips, dismissals, and refusals to seriously engage this argument.

Second, and more significantly, the "orchard" is a "poof" model. Casey's specific argument (to the extent he has one) is that South American monkeys are not actually descended by common ancestry from the same genealogy as other primates. In short, that they were poofed into existence, fully formed, in South America, while quite similar species existed in Africa, evolving in the manner revealed by fossils, molecules, and anatomy.

The same pattern of fossils, molecules, and anatomy says that South American monkeys are related to the rest of the primates. It's true that we don't have a complete understanding of how they got from Africa to South America, but (contrary to what Casey suggests) rafting across the southern Atlantic at the time in question really isn't that problematic. Mangroves form giant interlinked root structures, and big storms drive massive chunks of forest away. A single pregnant monkey on such a raft is all that's required for successful colonization. And monkeys are social, so you probably wouldn't have just one in a tree. And the raft itself would be full of food (vegetation, insects, fruit), and hollow branches to take shelter in.

No, it's not a high-probability event. Most such rafts would sink mid-ocean. But it only takes one to succeed. South America drifted for millions of years in what George Gaylord Simpson calls "splendid isolation," with a fascinating fauna. That isolation seems to have left the fauna at a competitive disadvantage when exposed to the fauna of North America after the Isthmus of Panama closed, and it is likely that African monkeys would have had a similar competitive advantage upon arrival 50 million years ago.

At the time in question, the Atlantic was narrower than it is now, and sea levels lower than they are today, further narrowing the ocean. Then as now, a current ran from equatorial Africa to equatorial South America, which would push material from Africa to South America.

I understand that Casey finds this scenario unlikely, but it has the advantage of not needlessly calling for monkeys to have been poofed into South America in the process of planting a new tree of life in Oligocene South America. For an orchard model to be realistic, there has to be some mechanism in place that could explain multiple origins of life at the necessary point in time and capable of generating the sorts of life we actually see. Scientists do consider whether unicellular life has multiple origins over 3.5 billion years ago, trying to sort out the ways in which interchange of genetic material in that early period might have interwoven the early shoots of those many trees into a single tree, a process called anastomosis. Calling for the simultaneous origins of unicellular life early in earth's history is not unreasonable, as conditions must have existed at the time which were capable of giving rise to life at least once. The notion of a multicellular organism appearing fully formed in the midst of an existing fauna defies belief.

As to Casey's rejection of the "creationist" label for his favored "orchard" model, I refer him to the work of Kurt Wise, a young earth creationist who introduced the "orchard" to the world in 1990, at the Second International Conference on Creationism. In the figure below, from his 1990 paper "Baraminology: A Young-Earth Creation Biosystematic Method," Wise illustrates his preferred "orchard model." In the text, he explains:

Some modern creationists are suggesting a metaphor of their own — a metaphor which is planted between the Evolutionary Tree and the Creationist Lawn. The new metaphor may be described as the "Neo-creationist Orchard" (see figure 1C). In this metaphor, life is specially created (as fruit trees are specially planted) and polyphyletic (i.e. each tree has a separate trunk and root system). There are also discontinuities between the major groups (trees are spaced so that branches do not overlap and could not and never did anastomose) and there are constraints to change (a given tree is limited to a particular size and branching style according to its type). In these ways, the Neo-creationist Orchard is similar to the Creationist Lawn. They differ, though, in that the Neo-creationist Orchard allows change, including speciation, within each created group (each tree branches off of the main stem). Permitting this type of change (variously called by creationists 'diversification', 'variation', 'horizontal evolution', and 'microevolution') in different amounts in different groups allows the creation model to accommodate microevolutionary evidences (e.g. changing allelic rations, genetic recombination, speciation, etc.).

That's "poof." It's the orchard. The illustration is nearly identical to that used in Explore Evolution to illustrate the "orchard". Search the evolutionary literature all you like, you will not find any papers advocating such a model, in which platyrrhine monkeys (among others) are magically poofed into existence in South America. For Casey to suggest that his beloved "orchard model" is anything but "poof," he needs to do offer an explanation for platyrrhine monkeys.

Alas, rather than offering to explain his orchard model, Casey closes by assuring us "The next three installments [of his blog series] will explain how the sea monkey hypothesis refutes the NCSE’s biogeography objections to Explore Evolution." In other words, rather than defending his own ideas, he'll spend the time attacking other people. I don't think much of the strategy, but maybe Casey will take the advice of his fellow creationists instead. So here's Kurt Wise from Hitt's article:

"My idea is not to attack evolution," he said. "My goal is to develop a theory that explains the data of the universe better than conventional theory but is consistent with Scripture." His major beef with other creationists, he explained, is that they only take pleasure in picking at the weaknesses of evolution. "It's a small person who is focused on attacking a theory. By the time I finished at Harvard, I realized I could destroy macroevolutionary theory at will." …

"I don't want to challenge evolution," he said, his voice echoing in the dark stone chamber. "I intend to replace it."

we do not favor mandating the teaching of intelligent design — as is so often misreported — but rather that we think when evolution is taught teachers should present both the evidence the supports Darwinian evolution as well as some of the evidence that challenges it.

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---

Two new papers out today - the first ever studies to employ whole-genome sequencing for disease gene discovery - neatly illustrate both the promise and the challenges lying ahead both for clinical and personal genomics.

The first paper presents the final - and successful - outcome of geneticist James Lupski's attempt to track down the genetic basis of his own disease. Lupski suffers from a syndrome called Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT) disease, a neurological condition which results in muscle weakness and wasting. The paper describes the process of sifting through the thousands of potentially functional variants to eventually pin down the mutations responsible, which turn out to be in a gene that has been previously associated with CMT.

This study is a clear illustration of the power of whole-genome sequencing to cast light on a long-standing personal mystery (Lupski has been searching for his disease mutation for decades). However, Lupski was fortunate that his mutation fell within a gene that had already been demonstrated to be linked to CMT; as the second study shows, researchers hunting for entirely novel disease-causing genes face a more serious challenge.

The second paper describes a similar attempt to nail down the gene responsible for a severe disease, this time using whole genome sequencing performed by Complete Genomics on four members of a family: two siblings affected by a disease called postaxial acrofacial dysostosis (Miller syndrome), and their two unaffected parents.

Here the outcome is less unambiguously cheerful: this paper illustrates that even with complete genomes it can still be hard to pick apart the genetic origins of disease. 

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That mansplainer thread just won't quit - it is the gift that keeps on giving. Well, if you can call continuing recitations of the endless ways women are constantly mansplained by the d00dly mainsplainers of the world a "gift". Along with the mansplainer d00ds who show up to mansplain how mansplaining does not exist, should not be called mansplaining if it does exist, is a benign and non-sexist practice if it does exist, and anyway, I THOUGHT THIS WAS SCIENCEBLOGS WHAT ABOUT THE SCIENCE DEAR GOD WILL NO ONE THINK OF THE POOR SCIENCE????

Which brings us to Ace's most excellent and apropos comment:

Is there another word like manventing for conjuring elaborate situations in your head that explain away any situations that contradict your "facts"? Ex: I was mansplained to that the reason one of my homework questions was wrong was not because I had simply lost track of a wayward negative sign, but because women cannot understand physics with their poor tiny non-spatial brains. Yet when I pointed out that that I had scored roughly 20% higher in physics on our (non-curved) graduation exams than he, he manvented the "fact" that the government adjusts womens' scores in math and science to make them feel better. Or something. Because I didn't actually write a perfect exam, I just scored higher than the rest of the inferior females.

You cannot make this shit up. Oh wait, you can. If you are a manventer.

Ladies of the mansplainer thread, I am happy that you have found community, and a word for that which has so plagued your existence. Naming experience is so very important - once we can give a name to what is happening to us, it has a little less power over us, at least a little less power to make us feel so crazy about it. There's a whole category on this blog called "naming experience" to reflect that importance. I'm just sorry that there are so many of you, and that your unhappy mansplaining experiences are so varied and many.

Here's hoping all your mansplainers, with their manvented facts, develop a long-lasting case of laryngitis. I'm talking years-long. May you enjoy the sweet sounds of mansplaining silence, at least for awhile in this month celebrating women's history.

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This is part one of a multi-part presentation of a sample chapter from a forthcoming book, The Madam Curie Complex. Part Two can be found here. Part Three can be found here.

This is something a little different for TSZ. Recently I was approached with an offer to share with my readers a sample chapter from a forthcoming book called The Madam Curie Complex: The Hidden History of Women in Science. A caveat: I have not read the whole book, and offering the sample chapter here for you to read does not constitute an endorsement by me of the book. But I was sufficiently intrigued by the sample chapter I read to think it was worth sharing with you, to let you read if you want. You can make up your own minds and decide if you want to purchase the book, which is on offer at the Feminist Press site for a reasonable price. About the book:

This March, The Feminist Press will release The Madam Curie Complex: The Hidden History of Women in Science by historian Julie Des Jardins. The book tells the stories of women scientists, from Marie Curie to Maria Mayer, who took enormous chances and made great discoveries in spite of, and at times because of, the resistance they faced in a male-dominated field. Des Jardins compares their stories with prominent male counterparts in an exploration of whether, and how, women research, collaborate, and come to different conclusions about the natural world.

The chapter I have been given to share with you is chapter 7, The Lady Trimates and Feminist Science?: Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas. It came to me in a pdf version and a lot of formatting has been lost in moving it to this blog, but I hope you will still enjoy be able to enjoy reading it. I hope locating the footnotes will not be too hard. I've broken the chapter into sections for a series of posts, and the reference footnotes for each section will be at the end of each post.

The chapter opens with two quotes:

We think of science as manipulation, experiment, and quantification done by men dressed in white coats, twirling buttons and watching dials in laboratories. When we read about a woman who gives funny names to chimpanzees and then follows them into the bush, meticulously recording their every grunt and groom, we are reluctant to admit such activity into the big leagues. We may admire Goodall's courage, fortitude, and patience but wonder if she represents forefront science or a dying gasp from the old world of romantic exploration. . . . The conventional stereotype is so wrong. . . . Jane Goodall's work with chimpanzees represents one of the Western world's great scientific achievements. --Stephen Jay Gould, Introduction to the revised edition of In the Shadow of Man¹

Often I think of science in technological terms--of the cold machinery, the devices, and accelerators, the weapons that science makes possible--all the things that modern science creates and utilizes. However, one day, I thought of science and appreciated its intent to look more closely into the beauty and mystery of nature. I had a glimpse of science in a different light, and at that moment the image of the woman in my dream came to mind. In one view of science the image exists of the male scientist exerting power and control over passive female nature. In this view the practice of science is seen as a violation of the natural world. However, my dream image raised the possibility of an alternative view. I began to consider another generative impulse of pure science--one born of curiosity and the love of nature. Then the woman becomes an intriguing symbol of a new way for me to think about the practice of science and its nature. She embodies the sense of science as the desire to understand nature, pursued in a rational and imaginative way. . . . Science is then not about the power of (male) intellect over passive (female) embodied nature. Rather science is a marriage, the relationship between human intellect and the intelligibility of a dynamic nature--nature which is both mysterious and knowable and in whose knowing we learn something about ourselves. --Mary Palevsky, Atomic Fragments, April 1997²

1. Jane Goodall, In the Shadow of Man (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), 5.
2. Mary Palevsky, Atomic Fragments: A Daughter's Questions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 238.

On to the chapter...

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One of the truisms in data curation is "well, of course we don't let sensitive data out into the wild woolly world." We hold sensitive data internally. If we must let it out, we anonymize it; sometimes we anonymize it just on general principles. We're not as dumb as the Google engineers, after all.

Only it turns out that data anonymization can be frighteningly easy to reverse-engineer. We've had some high-profile examples, such as the AOL search-data fiasco and the ongoing brouhaha over Netflix data. Paul Ohm's working paper on the topic is a great way to get up to speed.

We librarians are fairly dogmatic about this sort of thing, owing to our professional-ethics commitment to your freedom to read. We wipe your checkout record clean after you turn your items back in. We do keep passive-voice usage records on our materials: "this book has been checked out X times since Y date." But that's it. (And no, we don't keep track of when you visit the library, so it's not possible to connect a formerly checked-out book with you based on the date of checkout.)

This long-standing design decision is being challenged on social-media grounds; it's hard to build Web 2.0-ish applications around your library behavior if we don't keep records of your library behavior! I used to be on the Web 2.0 side of this particular controversy, but as I've been reading about reidentification, my mind has changed. Information about which local public library one goes to isn't precisely "zip code," but it's awfully, awfully close.

Anyway, the application to human-subjects data of all stripes is, I hope, obvious. It's not as simple as anonymizing data; even aggregating it and only permitting queries may not solve the problem. Certain data breakdowns (e.g. from survey data) may be problematic.

Taking heed of the problem is the first step to solving it—but only the first. The sooner we have data-release guidelines that take reidentification into account, the happier I will feel about open data in the social sciences and medicine.

Incidentally, are you as sanguine about governments providing "linked data" as you were? Because I'm not.

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One of Massachusetts Republican Senator Scott Brown's campaign gimmicks was to drive everywhere in a pickup truck, thereby 'proving' that he's a regular guy (never mind that he's very wealthy). One wonders what would have happened to Scott's image had the Coakley campaign stumbled across this little sartorial tidbit (by way of Rumproast; italics mine):

Arianna told me that he showed up for his first real date with her mother, Gail Huff, a TV newscaster to whom he has been married for more than 23 years, in pink leather shorts. It's family lore.

The pinkish color drained from his face when I asked him about it during a conversation in his campaign office just before we took off in the truck. He clarified that the shorts weren't something that he went out and purchased -- it wasn't like that at all. "I did the couture shows, and instead of paying in cash, they paid in clothes," he said. "And one of the things I had to wear were leather shorts. And these happened to be pink."

As he told the story, he seemed, almost in spite of himself, to get into it. "If I wore these now," he said, "I'd get shot. But it was the '80s. Pastels were in. It was all pastel-y."

I remember the '80s, and, even when I possibly could have had the physique to pull it off, I would never had been caught in pink, pastel-y leather shorts. I certainly never would have worn them on a date (presumably in public). Even if I wanted to ensure that my date would never want to see me again, I still wouldn't have worn pink leather shorts.

I'm guessing Brown probably wishes he hadn't done that. Seriously though, this does demonstrate just how stupid politics by archetype is.

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Pi day is March 14th - get it? (3.14) I am a big fan of Pi. Here is my first post to celebrate the awesomeness of Pi (I know this is early, but I was too excited to wait).

How can you determine Pi?

Oh sure, tons of high schools do the classic experiment. Measure the circumference and diameter of as many round things as possible. Plot diameter vs. circumference. The slope will be Pi. Really, this is a great lab to do for all sorts of ages. The key thing is that students can see what Pi really means. I am not going to talk about this lab, I am going to do some thing cooler.

What if I had a 1 meter by 1 meter square taped out in the grass near the physics building and shot ping pong balls off the roof at this square? Ping pong balls are very difficult to aim, so you could easily imagine that they would fall in a random pattern in the square. I don't really want to set this up, so I am going to do it with a program instead. Here is a program that will generate random points in a 1 x 1 square.

This is what the output would look like:

Now, here is the key. What if I calculate the distance of each of these point from the origin? This would simply be:

Doing this, I can separate all the points into those that are more than 1 unit away from the origin and those that are less than 1 unit away. In this plot, (of 1000 points) the red dots are more than one unit away and the blue are 1 unit or less.

Note that this plot does not have exactly the same horizontal and vertical scale - no idea why it came out like that. However, this is enough dots that maybe you can see a pattern. The blue dots are filling up 1/4^th of a circle. The full area of this circle would be:

Since I am a physicist, I have trouble leaving the area as unitless. What if I look at the ratio of blue dots to total dots? This should be the same as the ratio of the area of the quarter circle to the whole square, or:

Doing this for my last random number run, I get pi = 3.04. What happens as I increase the number of random dots? This a plot of the estimation of Pi for numbers of dots starting at 1000 up to 100,000 dots. I did this 5 times because each time is different.

So, you can see that as the number of random points increases, the estimated value of Pi is a little less spread out and closer to 3.14-something.

P.S. Thanks to Dave for this idea. You know who you are.

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tags: evolution, evolutionary biology, ancient DNA, aDNA, molecular biology, molecular ecology, archaeology, paleontology, fossil eggshell, extinct birds, giant moa, Dinornis robustus, elephant birds, Aepyornis maximus, Mullerornis, Thunderbirds, Genyornis, bpr3.org/?p=52,peer-reviewed research, peer-reviewed paper, journal club

To conduct my avian research, I've isolated and sequenced DNA from a variety of specimens, such as blood, muscle, skin and a variety of internal organs, dry toepads from long-dead birds in museum collections, feathers, the delicate membranes that line the inside of eggs, and even occasionally from bone. But I was surprised to learn that avian DNA can also be extracted directly from fossilized eggshells -- eggshells that completely lack eggshell membranes.

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Orac knows all. Orac sees all. Orac discovers all.

Anti-vaccine loons, know this and tremble, as Teresa Conrick over at J.B. Handley's--excuse me, Jenny McCarthy's--home for happy anti-vaccine propagandists has:

While googling to find the Tribune article, I instead found Orac's site. Who is Orac? Well, suffice to say that he has some mysterious desire to want autism to be only a genetic disorder. He gets upset if you discuss vaccines or the environment as causative factors. The usual suspects of the neurodiverse world and the assorted anonymous Wackosphere characters were hanging out at his site with their typical sarcasm and "blood-thirsty" DAN! comments. Orac though was beyond his usual histrionic self as his comments were pointed at the exact wording of the lawsuit. He actually had the lawsuit in a pdf file for the taking on his site! Now how, within hours of the Trib posting and to be exact, the Trib article by Patricia Callahan was posted online at 5:19 p.m. CST, March 4, 2010 and Orac had his pdf and blog up at March 5, 2010 3:00 AM. Appears to be quite bizarre and a bit suspicious?

What makes this even more concerning is that Dr. Usman herself had not received the lawsuit, all 46 pages to be exact, yet anyone could obtain it from Orac. The question remains how did Orac get it and who gave it to him?

You know, it's really damned inconsiderate to refer to a post and not to link to it. I don't do that even to the loons at Age of Autism, but they do it to me all the time. In any case, Teresa is referring to this post by me from last week. Of course, if AoA knew anything about Orac, they would know that he is the most powerful computer in the Federation. The reason is that Orac is able to communicate with any computer in the galaxy. Couple that with Orac's insatiable thirst for knowledge, and it's child's play for him to discover the Tribune article and the PDF of the actual lawsuit.

Or maybe Orac has spies everywhere, yes, even within the anti-vaccine movement itself. Muhahahahahahahahahaha!

What the real case is, I'm sorry, but I won't be saying. It's too much fun to let Teresa and her commenters keep guessing and, as a result, fearing the omniscience of Orac.

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tags: PalmenGarten, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, flower porn, nature, environment, image of the day

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Now this is how it's done. The Bollywood horse slide.

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While doing some poking around online, I came across a website called Project Rho, which tries to provide some science background for science fiction writers who want some degree of technical accuracy in their imaginative work. Generally it looks like they're on the right track.

In their section on stealth in space, they explain with the weary air of repetition that there's no such thing. The flare of a rocket is bright enough to be seen from basically anywhere, and the thermal signature of even a spacecraft with rockets off is visible from clear across the solar system. The first I can believe (though of course it's worth checking), but the second sounds fishy. But so do lots of true things. Why not run the numbers ourselves? Before we do, let's see what they say:

"Well FINE!!", you say, "I'll turn off the engines and run silent like a submarine in a World War II movie. I'll be invisible." Unfortunately that won't work either. The life support for your crew emits enough heat to be detected at an exceedingly long range. The 285 Kelvin habitat module will stand out like a search-light against the three Kelvin background of outer space.

They go on later in the article:

The maximum range a ship running silent with engines shut down can be detected with current technology is:

Rd = 13.4 * sqrt(A) * T^2
where:
Rd = detection range (km)
A = spacecraft projected area (m^2)
T = surface temperature (Kelvin, room temperature is about 285-290 K)

If the ship is a convex shape, its projected area will be roughly one quarter of its surface area.

Example: A Russian Oscar submarine is a cylinder 154 meters long and has a beam of 18 meters, which would be a good ballpark estimate of the size of an interplanetary warship. If it was nose on to you the surface area would be 250 square meters. If it was broadside the surface area would be approximately 2770. So on average the projected area would be 1510 square meters ([250 + 2770] / 2).

If the Oscar's crew was shivering at the freezing point, the maximum detection range of the frigid submarine would be 13.4 * sqrt(1510) * 273^2 = 38,800,000 kilometers, about one hundred times the distance between the Earth and the Moon, or about 129 light-seconds. If the crew had a more comfortable room temperature, the Oscar could be seen from even farther away.

The equation given isn't derived. We have no idea where they're getting that 13.4 proportionality constant. Dimensionally it's correct, and it's pretty easy to derive the equation up to that constant which will depend on the sensitivity of the detector. That equation modulo some uncertainty with respect to that constant is accurate as far as it goes given a spacecraft of hull temperature T and cross-sectional area A.

I would take you through the steps of the derivation, but it would be pointless because the assumption that the hull temperature has anything to do with the interior temperature is simply flat wrong. We can prove this with a potato.

Switch your oven to the "Bake" setting at a temperature of 350 F. After preheating, put in the potato. The interior of the oven, and eventually the potato, are maintained at a constant temperature of 350 degrees. How hot is the exterior surface of the oven? Depends on how well insulated your oven is, but I can guarantee it's a lot less than 350 degrees.

The key is the understanding the relationship between heat and energy. Put hot coffee in a thermos - the hot coffee is hot because it contains thermal energy. If the energy can't leave, the coffee will stay hot because the energy stays inside the thermos. The outside of the thermos stays at the temperature of the surroundings. Now neither the thermos nor the oven is a perfect insulator. Some energy leaks out of the oven's interior, cooling it down. The oven thus has to pump energy into the heating elements to make up for this loss. Equilibrium is reached when the rate of energy being put into the oven equals the rate of loss through the insulation.

For a spacecraft in a vacuum, the pretty much the only way to lose energy from the interior is by radiant heat. The higher the temperature of the outside, the higher the rate of energy loss via radiation. But the temperature itself is irrelevant, since just like the oven and the thermos it's not necessarily related to the actual temperature inside the cabin at all. It is always and everywhere a function of the total power passing through the hull. If the temperature inside the cabin is constant, the power leaving the hull by radiation is exactly equal to the power being generated inside the hull.

So how far away can we detect a given amount of emitted power? According to Wikipedia, a telescope of 24" aperture can detect stars of magnitude 22 after a half-hour exposure. I think this is a pretty good realistic limit for detection with reasonable equipment in a reasonable time frame. Now we need to compare this magnitude to something of known power output. How about the Sun? The sun has magnitude -26.73 as seen from the Earth's surface (smaller magnitude is brighter), for a difference in magnitude of 48.73. The exponent used for magnitude is 2.512, so the difference in power per unit area of telescope is 2.512^48.73 = 3.1 x 10¹⁹. Since the Sun radiates about 1000 watts per square meter at the distance of the earth, the smallest radiant power we can reasonably detect in our telescope is about 3.123.1 x 10^-17 watts per square meter.

Our hypothetical spacecraft is radiating that power into space, evenly distributed over the surface of a sphere of radius r, where r is the distance to the detector. When that power-per-area is the same as the limit of our telescopic capability, that gives us the maximum detection range. Mathematically,

Where rho is the sensitivity of our detector. Solve for r:

So what's the power? Well, each human on board is going to produce about 100 W just from basic bodily metabolism. Computers, life support, sanitation, and all the rest will contribute more. We might assume 10,000 watts total for a futuristic ship that's specifically designed to emit as little power as possible. It might well be significantly lower. Plugging in, I ger r = 5.98 x 10⁹ meters. This is pretty far, but it's only around 4% of the distance from the earth to the sun. Practically nothing in terms of solar system distances. Even a ship dumping a megawatt of power should only be visible from a third of the earth-sun distance.

The reason for this divergence in our estimate versus the Project Rho estimate is that it takes a huge amount of energy to maintain a hull exterior at cabin temperatures. But insulation means that's not necessary, all that's necessary is that the power out equals the power generated in the interior.

Or at least this is my impression. I could be wrong. Thoughts?

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Well, you could be dead, I suppose. But the American Family Association says that you can X-out your gayosity by starting a relationship with Jesus Christ. They don't specify the nature of the new relationship you'd be having.

Anyway, Joe My God suggests that you Freep this poll.

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The other day I told you about a doctor promoting a dietary supplement for the treatment of HIV, despite the lack of any significant data to support his claims. If there's anything medical bloggers have found over the years is that woo rarely walks alone.

In my post I expressed some incredulity at the fact that Kaiser promotes himself as an internist and HIV expert despite any of the usual formal education required for these designations. Examination of his website reveals that he is also an expert in "longevity", cancer, chronic fatigue, autoimmune disease, and intestinal parasites. Fascinating.

According to Kaiser's website:

Integrative Health Consulting believes that a comprehensive healing program of aggressive natural therapies, combined with standard medical treatment and mind-body healing techniques, is vital to the successful treatment of most serious medical conditions.

Every day I hear from patients and friends with serious diseases who are trying to sort through the piles (pun intended) of unsolicited advice about their serious diseases. When I see bullshit like this, all I can think of is my friends who might read this and be taken in. The statement that "Integrative Health Counseling believes that..." is wonderfully useless. What the company does or does not believe about its offerings is not a good gauge of their utility. What are "aggressive natural therapies" and what data supports their use? As with most questionable medical practices, their program just happens to be good for everything. That's terribly convenient.

Comprehensive Healing Programs consist of recommendations from each of the following seven categories:

1) Diet
2) Vitamins & Nutritional Supplements
3) Herbs & Acupuncture
4) Individualized Exercises Programs
5) Stress Reduction/Positive Attitude
6) Hormone Balancing
7) Medical Therapy

The use of a combination of recommendations from the above categories imparts a far better success rate than the use of one category alone (i.e. medical therapy). When an approach such as this is taken to the treatment of chronic conditions such as cancer, hepatitis, autoimmune disorders, and chronic fatigue syndrome a high success rate is achieved.

Really? How do you know that? So, you're claiming that by combining medical therapy with a bunch of unproven and disproved modalities, you fix people with serious diseases.

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The animal on the right is no ordinary chicken. Its right half looks like a hen but its left half (with a larger wattle, bigger breast, whiter colour and leg spur) is that of a cockerel. The bird is a 'gynandromorph', a rare sexual chimera. Thanks to three of these oddities, Debiao Zhao and Derek McBride from the University of Edinburgh have discovered a truly amazing secret about these most familiar of birds - every single cell in a chicken's body is either male or female. Each one has its own sexual identity. It seems that becoming male or female is a very different process for birds than it is for mammals.

In mammals, it's a question of testicles, ovaries and the hormones they produce. Embryos live in sexual limbo until the sex organs (gonads) start to develop. This all depends on a sexual dictator called SRY, a gene found on the Y chromosome. If it's present, the indifferent gonads go down a male route; if not, they take a female one. The sex organs then secrete a flush of hormones that trigger changes in the rest of the body. The sex chromosomes are only relevant in the cells of the gonads.

But the gynandomorphs show that something very different happens in birds. Birds have Z and W chromosomes; males are ZZ and females are ZW. Zhao and McBride used glow-in-the-dark molecules that stick to the two chromosomes to show that the gynandromorphs do indeed have a mix of ZZ and ZW cells. However, they aren't split neatly down the middle. Their entire bodies are suffused with a mix of both types, although the male half has more ZZ cells and the female half has more ZW ones.

Even though the three chickens were both male and female, one of them only had a testicle on one side, the second only had an ovary on one side, and the third had a strange hybrid organ that was part testis and part ovary. These malformed organs pumped the same soup of hormones throughout the birds' bodies but, clearly, each side responded differently.

Zhao and McBride started to suspect that each cell has its very own sexual identity, and that this individuality exists from the chicken's first days of embryonic life. They proved that by transplanting cells from embryonic sex organs from one animal to another. All the transplants produced a glowing green protein so Zhao and McBride could track their whereabouts, and those of their daughters.

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If you go to your physician's office and inquire about your weight status, he or she will measure your height and weight to derive your BMI (weight in kg divided by height in m squared). Then they will compare your BMI to that of established criteria to decide whether you are underweight (<18.5 kg/m2), normal weight (18.5-24.9 kg/m2), overweight (25-29.9 kg/m2), or obese (>30 kg/m2) . Often times, this measure alone determines whether or not you receive lifestyle treatment. But how useful is this measure anyways? What does it tell you about your health? And finally, how helpful is it to measure when assessing the effect of a lifestyle (diet/exercise) intervention?

For quite some time I have been meaning to discuss some of the issues of solely relying on BMI as a measure of obesity and health, and a nice nudge from our friend ERV was just the motivation  I needed to finally get to work.

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It is a common argument by those who are opposed to evolution's implication for religious belief to label Darwin as a social Darwinist and a racist. Adrian Desmond and James Moore's book Darwin's Sacred Cause has gone a long way towards dispelling any claims that Darwin sought to justify black inferiority (in fact, as they show, countering such arguments was an important part of Darwin's work). However, the claim that Darwin inspired social Darwinism is a persistent argument and those that proffer it will stoop to any level in order to discredit him. As I pointed out in my series Deconstructing Social Darwinism, the political theory is incredibly inconsistent but the central tenets were formed by Herbert Spencer, not Darwin. Darwin himself largely eschewed politics and economics and felt that Spencer had misconstrued his ideas for his own political ends. However, despite how frequently this fact has been presented the erroneous argument continues to appear over and over again.

Religious fundamentalists such as Jonathan Wells or Harun Yahya (whose book blaming Darwin for Hitler, Stalin, Mao, hemorrhoids, long lines at Starbucks and other terrible evils can be seen in the image above) are well known for this line of thought. However, the latest attempt to label Darwin with this brush is Richard Weikart, an historian at California State University, Stanislaus in his article Was Darwin or Spencer the father of laissez-faire social Darwinism? in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.

Weikart's argument is very poorly constructed, as you would expect of someone who works for the Intelligent Design think tank The Discovery Institute and who wrote a book blaming Darwin for Hitler's ideas on eugenics and genocide (a book so powerfully argued that it took a single blog post to refute it). Rather than point out the poor scholarship in his own article I thought it would be more illuminating to look at a case study that offers a novel way of determining whose ideas were interpreted as social Darwinian and whose were viewed as neutral science. I recently discovered such a case study in the form of a PhD dissertation by an historian of Middle Eastern science Marwa Elshakry.

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"The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery." ~~Mark van Doren

The chemical structures danced across the page as I sat trying to figure out what reaction came next. It was the beginning of organic chemistry as an undergraduate and people had warned me that o-chem would be a bit of a monster. Over that previous summer I had heard countless horror stories about how hard organic chemistry can be. As a biology/ pre-med major I had no other choice but to endure this course. Yet by the second month of class I enthusiastically soaked up the varied drawings, rapidly mastered the new reactions and loved the challenge mainly because my professor had made the subject come alive to me and invested countless hours into his students.

During one of our first lessons he explained his office hours: he had none. Not meaning that we could never ask him any questions, but if the door was open and he was in there we could stop in and ask questions to our heart's content. Many an hour he spent in his office fielding the hundreds of questions that his students threw at him. I believe it was both his willingness to invest in us as students as well as his ability to ignite an excitement for chemistry that changed my path from bio-pre med. By second semester I was a Chemistry major and had discovered a few teaching skills of my own as well as a heart for eduction. I feel quite fortunate that I was surrounded by great teachers in college, many of them influenced much of the path I find myself on today. Truly: "A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops. " ~~Henry Adams.

Meet Nifty Fifty speaker Dr. Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa, Brain Surgeon and Researcher at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. His shares a little bit of his inspirational story of how he went from migrant worker to neurosurgeon in the video below. His story is one of perseverance and dedication for a better way of life as well as the magnitude of influence a few dedicated math and science teachers at San Joaquin Delta College (a community college) had on his life. He credits his success to their investment into him as a student, " "Honestly, there is no question, I would not be where I am today without San Joaquin Delta College." Read more about him on our Nifty Fifty website .

The 'Nifty Fifty' are a group of noted professionals who will fan out across the Washington, DC area next October to speak about their work and careers at various middle and high schools. Are you a Festival Partner Organization? Then nominate a 'Nifty Fifty' speaker! Find out more about how to nominate a speaker here.

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In response to my post on the effects of mood on cognition, which also referenced the possibilities of self-medicating ourselves into the ideal mood, Andrew Sullivan offered up the following anecdote:

I was talking with a fine artist the other day and he was telling me how blocked he was on a piece, and how he then smoked some pot and everything came together.

It unleashed what he wanted to express, by suppressing the analytic portion of his mind that was inhibiting him. I know this is the bleeding obvious to anyone who has a brain and an ounce of human experience but it is a truth we are somehow circumscribed from uttering in public.

There's a reason why jazz would be impossible without weed.

A new paper published in Psychiatry Research sheds some light on this phenomenon, or why smoking weed seems to unleash a stream of loose associations. The study looked at a phenomenon called semantic priming, in which the activation of one word allows us to react more quickly to related words. For instance, the word "dog" might lead to decreased reaction times for "wolf," "pet" and "Lassie," but won't alter how quickly we react to "chair".

Interestingly, marijuana seems to induce a state of hyper-priming, in which the reach of semantic priming extends outwards to distantly related concepts. As a result, we hear "dog" and think of nouns that, in more sober circumstances, would seem to have nothing in common.

Here's Vaughan Bell, lucid as always:

The effect [hyper-priming] has been reported, albeit inconsistently, in people with schizophrenia and some have suggested it might explain why affected people can sometimes make false or unlikely connections or have disjointed thoughts.

As cannabis has been linked to a slight increased risk for psychosis, and certainly causes smokers to have freewheeling thoughts, the researchers decided to test whether stoned participants would show the 'hyper-priming' effect.

Volunteers who were under the influence of cannabis showed a definite 'hyper-priming' tendency where distant concepts were reacted to more quickly. Interestingly, they also showed some of this tendency when straight and sober .

Obviously, you don't want too much hyper-priming, or else everything seems connected; the web of associations becomes a source of delusions. But for many creative tasks it's important to cultivate an expansive associative net, or what psychologists refer to as a "flat associative hierarchy".

Interestingly, there's some speculative evidence that such distant intellectual connections are most likely to be generated in the right hemisphere. There is, for instance, that research on moments of insight that I've written about before. But there's also some interesting data from patients with selective hemispheric damage. When people suffer an injury to their left hemisphere, the side-effects are obvious: they typically lose the ability to speak in coherent sentences, or suffer other dramatic language deficits. They neglect relevant details, miss appointments and struggle to get dressed. People with right hemisphere damage, in contrast, tend to experience much more subtle symptoms, such as an inability to "get" a joke or perceive sarcasm or enjoy a poem. All of these skills require a coarse-grained kind of cognition, an ability to look past the details and see the remote associations.

And this returns us to madness. Several studies have found that people with extremely mild forms of schizophrenia - they're often referred to as "schizotypal"-- perform above average when solving various lab tasks used to measure creativity. What explains this anomaly? Interestingly, schizotypal subjects also have markedly enhanced right hemisphere function, and are more likely to rely on this hemisphere during normal cognitive processing.

Last speculative point: marijuana also enhances brain activity (at least as measured indirectly by cerebral blood flow) in the right hemisphere. The drug, in other words, doesn't just suppress our focus or obliterate our ability to pay attention. Instead, it seems to change the very nature of what we pay attention to, flattening out our hierarchy of associations.

If you're interested in an overview of our distinct hemispheric talents - a fascinating subject that has been obscured by too much bad pop science - I'd recommend this book.

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How embarrassing should it be for this country that Iran -- Iran, for god's sake -- puts its officials on trial for torture and we don't?

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A couple of years ago, I was poking around in a European art museum and came across an exhibit of exquisitely beautiful Eastern Orthodox religious paintings, "icons." Beyond being visually striking -- they have an austere, hieratic, distant quality -- they are also, I realized at the time, in a way, scientific.

Alright, I know, that's a wild statement. But hear me out.

A religious icon is more than a painting. It has a semiotic value that's highly codified, a language and practical purpose of its own that sets it apart from all the other representational art preceding our modern era of abstraction. This is partly because it's such an ancient form of art, one dating back to a time when making images at all was a relatively rare gesture. It's also because it's a devotional form, a way of representing something believed to transcendent and beyond human understanding. This last point is what interests me.

An icon is somewhat fraught: it's not entirely intended to be an object of its own. Rather, its purpose is to be a likeness, a tangible object that stands for an idea by signifying or representing it. In Christian theology, to worship an icon itself (remember the golden calf?) is blasphemous, and yet religious icon paintings date back to the 3rd century and are a major part of both Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Catholicism. This is because of a subtle semantic distinction: while worshiping an idol is frowned upon, worshiping via an idol is different.

St. Basil the Great, an influential 4th century Christian theologian and monastic, explained this concept by noting that "the honor shown the image passes over to the archetype," that is to say the entity or object which it represents. He also illustrated further, "If I point to a statue of Caesar and ask you 'Who is that?', your answer would properly be, 'It is Caesar.' When you say such you do not mean that the stone itself is Caesar, but rather, the name and honor you ascribe to the statue passes over to the original, the archetype, Caesar himself." In a sense, an icon of Caesar, or Jesus, is a two-dimensional window into the sublime, a conduit by which we can make tangible and understood something which is by definition transcendent and beyond the limited scope of human understanding.

Now let's look to the definition of the word "diagram:" according to Wikipedia, a diagram "is a two-dimensional geometric symbolic representation of information according to some visualization technique." Often, a scientific diagram -- or a mathematical equation, for that matter -- is not only a two-dimensional representation of something three-dimensional, but a representation of something that is without form. A relationship, a quality. That is to say, by definition something that's transcendent, or beyond the limits of ordinary experience.

I think it's safe to say that in the case of mathematics, or scientific diagrams, we also pass "the honor to the archetype." We work with diagrams and symbols because they are the only way for us to bat around massive, immaterial concepts with any dexterity, and the final results of our work -- which often appear as strings of numbers, symbols, and lines on paper -- can have implications which are massive, far-reaching, and, while I hesitate to use the word "spiritual" for obvious reasons, certainly philosophical.

Edward Tufte, the statistician and recent presidential appointee put this point quite elegantly in a 2004 interview with the Technical Communication Quarterly :

The commonality between science and art is in trying to see profoundly--to develop strategies of seeing and showing. This seeing is not about "Aren't these pictures of molecules beautiful?" Rather, the point is to recognize the tightness between seeing and thinking on an intellectual level not just a metaphorical level. That tightness is expressed in the very physiology of the eye: the retina is made from brain cells; the brain begins at the back of the eye. Seeing turns into thinking right there.

Both Orthodox icons and the symbolic language of scientific diagrams are placeholders, totems; their reality exists independently of their representation of it. Again, the same could be said about mathematics, a set of symbols which articulate a far more profound, invisible presence. As Tufte writes, these things turn seeing into thinking.The distinction, really, between these religious icons and their secular, scientific equivalents is that they operate from different ideological bases: one is based on faith, and the other on knowledge. But the notion that these labors of mankind reach their apogee in what in the end are merely symbols, indicators, and arrows which point toward the actual, ineffable, unrepresentable reality of existence is an important thing which unifies spiritual "irrational" religious and "rational" scientific thought.

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The New York Times has an article about lots of former Scientologists, including some very high ranking members, leaving the church and making accusations of abuse and corruption all the way to the top:

Raised as Scientologists, Christie King Collbran and her husband, Chris, were recruited as teenagers to work for the elite corps of staff members who keep the Church of Scientology running, known as the Sea Organization, or Sea Org.

They signed a contract for a billion years -- in keeping with the church's belief that Scientologists are immortal. They worked seven days a week, often on little sleep, for sporadic paychecks of $50 a week, at most.

But after 13 years and growing disillusionment, the Collbrans decided to leave the Sea Org, setting off on a Kafkaesque journey that they said required them to sign false confessions about their personal lives and their work, pay the church thousands of dollars it said they owed for courses and counseling, and accept the consequences as their parents, siblings and friends who are church members cut off all communication with them.

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ALZHEIMER'S Disease is the most common form of dementia, affecting an estimated 30 million people worldwide. The cause of the condition is unknown, but the prime suspect is amyloid-beta (Aβ), a 42-amino acid peptide which accumulates within neurons to form insoluble structures called senile plaques that are thought to be toxic. Aβ is synthesized in all neurons; it is associated with the cell membrane, and is thought to be involved in cell-to-cell signalling, but its exact role has eluded researchers.

A new study published in the open access journal PLoS One now shows that Aβ is a potent antibiotic that can prevent the growth of a number of disease-causing microbes. The study provides the first evidence of a normal role for Aβ, and also raises the intriguing possibility that Alzheimer's Disease occurs as a result of the immune system's response to infection. The findings could make researchers re-think Alzheimer's, and have implications for how the condition is treated.  

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I hate press secretaries, especially White House press secretaries. Their job is to look into the camera, or speak to the reporter, and with an absolutely straight face repeat something they know is a lie -- and that they know you know is a lie. Press secretaries are disgusting people.

But Dana Perino, the last of several people to hold that position in the Bush administration, seems to want to separate herself even from that vile pack and distinguish herself as a particularly ridiculous specimen by continuing to tell ridiculous lies even when she's not getting paid to do it anymore. Here's what she said on Fox News this weekend:

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A reader sent me a press release sent out by a Republican candidate for Congress from Ohio named Paul Schiffer that is chock full of demagoguery on the entirely fake issue of "czars" in the White House.

Paul Schiffer, Republican Candidate for Congress in Ohio's 16th Congressional District, has written legislation to outlaw Barack Obama's dozens of 'CZARS' in the White House. Schiffer promises to introduce this legislation in Congress after election to Congress. Schiffer explained:

"I believe 'Czars' are un-American. It started out as almost an inside-the-Beltway joke under Republican Administrations -- calling a Presidential adviser a 'Czar.' But the idea of Presidential 'Czars' has become a worrying trend. If we continue on this path, Presidential over-use of White House 'Czars' threatens to weaken America's democratic system."

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