This is not a reference to the recent three decades of rapidly increasing global temperatures, rather it is a reference to an aniversary of the first appearance of the term "global warming" in the peer reviewed literature. The paper was by Wally Broeker and titled "Are we on the brink of a pronounced global warming?"

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I have a very weak constitution. It doesn't take much time on a moving vehicle of any type to make be barf, and I've hurled all over gorgeous coastal areas in tourist destinations around the world. There was that one time in Italy, snapping photos of the incredible shoreline caves (now dubbed barf grottos), that one time scuba diving in Belize (after I had made it to the surface, thankfully), and in lobby trashcans of various finally stationary destinations (the video is of me, my sister, and my fiancé inadvisedly spinning around while at an archeological site in Greece earlier this summer, where I was lucky enough to avoid any emesis). While I am particularly susceptible to motion sickness, almost everyone with inner ear function will experience it at some point given the right tilting, oscillating, and generally vestibularly-disturbing circumstances. What is going on in our guts and brains when we're in a moving vehicle that makes us throw up? Why can't we just deal with motion better? As it negatively affects so many, this nauseating (did you know: the word nausea itself comes from the Greek word for boat!) inconvenience associated with technologically-assisted travel by sea, land, air, or IMAX screens has been the focus of intense and sometimes wacky research for more than 100 years. Although a great deal of mechanistic evidence for how motion sickness happens has been described, the theories of why it happens are still controversial and fascinating. Experiences with motion sickness have been described since at least the time of Hippocrates, and until the late 1800's, the causes of motion sickness were attributed to "blood and guts theories", the symptoms thought to be the result of decreased cerebral blood flow or disturbance of digestive flow caused by the shaking of the viscera. When Victorian physicians started realizing that people who didn't have inner ear function never got motion sickness, the theories of what causes motion sickness completely changed. Instead of focusing on the humours, physicians thought that motion sickness was caused by vestibular overstimulation--when our balance-sensing systems are overloaded by rolling motion, our body freaks out and starts barfing. The vestibular system of the inner ear is fascinatingly complex, made out of a series of tubes full of fluid sloshing around inside your head, activating nerves that tell your brain where you are and where you're going as the fluid tips and turns. Connections between the vestibular system and our muscles and eyes help to keep us standing upright and to make sure that we can see stable images even as we move our heads. While the Victorian observations made it very clear that the vestibular system is involved in causing motion sickness, it eventually was realized that overstimulation alone wasn't enough to explain the phenomenon. Overstimulating your vestibular system while jumping or dancing will almost never cause motion sickness, and drivers or pilots rarely experience motion sickness even while their passengers are vomiting, so control of your own motion is somehow important too, affecting how the signals of motion are being interpreted by your brain. Moreover, as basically anyone who's seen Cloverfield can attest, it's possible to feel motion sickness without moving at all, simply watching simulations of motion in movies or video games is enough to make many people sick. Motion sickness is now understood as not just something that happens when your inner ear is overwhelmed, but arises when your brain is confused about what your eyes are seeing and what your vestibular system is feeling. When your body is moving but you can't see or control why you're moving, or when you see motion that doesn't correspond to what your body is feeling at the movies, the mismatch of the neural signals activates the vomiting center of the brain. Many of these neural pathways and brain structures were identified through a series of horrific experiments on dogs in the 1940's and 1950's involving destroying different parts of the brain and seeing whether the mutilated dog would throw up after being spun around on a swing. In the 1980's and 90's slightly more humane experiments on human undergraduates standing and vomiting on wobbling platforms added more data on the simply anatomical picture from the dog studies, providing mathematical models of the neural pathways involved in motion sickness, details on the types of motion that make it better or worst (0.2 Hz is the optimal barf frequency), how strobe lights or keeping absolutely still while in a moving vehicle can make symptoms better (some people think that this is why antihistamines like dramamine can help with symptoms of motion sickness), how ginger can make you feel less nauseous, and even connections between migraine and motion sickness susceptibility. These studies offer suggestions for dealing with motion sickness through engineering or pharmaceutical interventions, but none really address why we suffer from motion sickness. Is there a reason that our brains can't process these contradictory eye/ear signals? Does motion sickness somehow actually make us stronger, or at least better able to survive to the next generation; is there a positive evolutionary selection for feeling sick? The fact that many mammals, like those poor postwar experimental dogs, and even fish being transported on trucks experience motion sickness points to a kind of evolutionary stability that many scientists have seen as evidence that there has to be an evolutionary explanation for motion sickness. Starting in the 1970's and continuing today, several evolutionary theories seeking to explain why we suffer from motion sickness have been published and debated, offering several scenarios for how such neural pathways could be selected for. What kind of selective pressure would be so strong as to keep tricking our brain into barfing in harmless situations? One interesting idea is the toxin theory--during the billions of years of animal evolution, the kinds of motion that cause motion sickness are pretty rare relative to other things that could cause mixed sensory signals getting to your brain, like, for example, hallucinogenic neurotoxins. When your eyes and your ears are saying different things, your brain doesn't realize that this is the result of external motion, but thinks that you're hallucinating and forces you to throw up to expel the offending toxin. If you actually are hallucinating, barfing seems like a great response, and a great way to keep on living to produce more offspring. Contrasting hypotheses point out that this theory can't really explain the fact that babies and toddlers--who are at relatively high risk for ingesting and being killed by toxins--don't get motion sickness when being carried around. A much simpler and much more recently published theory is the negative reinforcement model, which posits that motion sickness, instead of being a protective mechanism against toxins, is like pain--an unpleasant response to something that is bad for us and causes us to avoid the triggering behavior in the future. According to this theory, motion sickness teaches us to avoid the out-of-control motion that could injure us or leave us more vulnerable to predation. Certainly, spinning around all the time can make you fall down and a much easier target for saber-toothed tigers. In my cushy tiger-free life, motion sickness has provided the negative reinforcement to avoid spinning amusement park rides and sailboats (although not quite enough to stop getting in cars or planes when the destination seems worth it). These theories can perhaps help satisfy our feelings of being betrayed by our own bodies, and can point to other toxin-sensing or negative-reinforcement neural networks involved, perhaps expanding our how understanding, but I'm always a little skeptical of this type of evolutionary argument. Even though my fiancé comes from a seafaring family, I don't think my motion sickness susceptibility is going to necessarily hurt my chances of reproducing. Although soldiers and sailors do have much higher stakes for being incapacitated by motion sickness, motion sickness became a fixed trait in animals way before the existence of humvees or aircraft carriers. Does there really have to be a positive evolutionary selection for motion sickness in order for it to exist? What if motion sickness is a completely arbitrary consequence of how our brainstems evolved, as some evolutionary biologists are beginning to think is the case for courting displays and secondary sex characteristics (check out Carl Zimmer's awesome post about arbitrary sexual selection and evolution over at The Loom: "Darwin, Sex, and Dada")? What if as our brain develops in early childhood and we become more coordinated, the pathways that turn out to activate motion sickness in the wrong contexts get laid down too? What if there's no negative selection against motion sickness, or no positive selection for the systems that could stop it? Imagine there is some very costly way for our brains to be able to deal with conflicting sensory input, to avoid motion sickness, but having evolved without boats and cars and airplanes we didn't have the selective pressure for such a mechanism to be worth the cost. Next time I'm feeling seasick, as I try desperately to look to the horizon, clutching my ginger pills, all of these contradictory just-so stories will swirl in my head (just like my vestibular fluid), making me if not comforted that there could be an evolutionary reason for my discomfort, at least distracted from the worst of the queasiness. Read the comments on this post... Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Inside the Outbreaks on the ScienceBlogs Book Club

The anopheles mosquito, Anopheles gambiae, is the primary vector for human malaria. Mosquitoes in general, the A. gambiae included, find their prey by tracking body odor exuded from the breath and skin. Apparently, the composition of body odor determines A. gambiae's preference for one individual over another. It has been known for some time now that A. gambiae preferentially seek out and draw blood from pregnant women (Linsay et al 2000; Ansell et al 2002; Himeidan, Elbashir and Adam 2004), preferring pregnant over none pregnant women at about a 2:1 ratio. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post... Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Inside the Outbreaks on the ScienceBlogs Book Club

The NC Science Festival will bring together more than 100 science-related events Sept. 11-26. Through science talks, hands-on activities, tours, performances and exhibits, North Carolina's science community will be on display to engage and inspire a new generation of scientists. How will we engage our state in science? By showing citizens of our state science that is... Diverse. Life is your lab...from age two to 122! Events on our festival schedule reflect the interests of all ages. Kids will get hands-on learning experiences, and adults will dive deep into current science topics with experts. From nature hikes to story hours to the science behind auto racing - there will be something for everyone! Local. Science is happening everywhere in North Carolina - all the time! Much of the Festival schedule is comprised of science events that happen regularly throughout the state. Hometown breweries, municipal parks and local libraries have all added homegrown North Carolina science events to the festival schedule. Practical. We're focusing on the topics North Carolinians are curious about - renewable energy, health and wellness and our changing coastline are just a few. Science in North Carolina goes beyond laboratories and into topics that directly affect our state and its citizens. Our focus on science won't end in September. Response to the North Carolina Science Festival has been so positive that we're planning to make the Festival an annual event!
Want to learn more about the NC Science Festival? Visit our website at <www.ncsciencefestival.org> or follow us on Twitter (@ncscifest). ~~Denise Young
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"I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night." -Galileo There should be a big vote going on today about the future of spaceflight in America. Obama has outlined his new space policy, and has called for the commercial sector to step up and get involved in spaceflight, particularly in low-orbit, satellite, and space launch technologies. This is going to be a hard sell to a lot of politicians, of course, who will stand to lose many government jobs as programs like Constellation and the Space Shuttle go away. But the payoff is potentially huge, as private industry looks very eager to take over these tasks. (Check out the commercial spaceflight federation; there's plenty of interest and capability here.) This transition, mind you, has happened before. In the early days, NASA was pretty much entirely a military extension of the government. The first pictures of the Earth from space were from White Sands Missile Base in New Mexico in the 1940s, taken from aboard V-2 rockets. The US satellites and launch vehicles that made NASA famous were old military projects, starting with Explorer I, which predates even the formation of NASA! Although NASA was declared to be a civilian organization, the military involvement has remained huge. Of the 12 people who've walked on the Moon, 11 of them are former military. (Jack Schmitt, the last man to set foot on the Moon, was the only civilian.) But times have changed. A few years ago, the Ansari X-Prize was awarded to SpaceShipOne, a venture from private industry that launched a human safely up into space. And the era of Commercial Spaceflight had begun. The X-Prize was named after Anoushah Ansari, the first female private space explorer, and the first astronaut of Iranian descent. Why do I bring this up? Because it isn't just the spacecraft, the payloads, and the launches that are going to be private in the future. The astronauts are going to be private, too! That's right, private astronauts. So who are these private astronauts going to be? And what types of missions and duties are they going to perform? Well, if you search for commercial astronaut on google, the first non-Wikipedia site you get is astronauts4hire.org, founded in April of this year. There's an interview with their President up at NewScientist, which I encourage you to read to get some basic answers to such questions as: Are commercial space flights really such a big deal for science? Being an astronaut is one of the pinnacles of human achievement today, but will it become a lot more like a regular job in future? What kind of science does sub-orbital flight allow you to do? What's the idea behind Astronauts4Hire? But I have a special treat for you. These are the first 17 aspiring commercial astronauts. And they have agreed to answer your questions, Starts With A Bang readers! So here's the deal. Ask them! (That's what the comments here are for!) Ask the big questions that you want a commercial astronaut to answer. They can be easy, hard, political, scientific, personal... whatever you want. If you see a question you like, second (or third, etc.) it. And at the start of next week, I'll select and send the five best questions based on your suggestions and recommendations to them! And I'll post the (unedited) answers here as soon as I get them. So here's your big chance. Ask a commercial astronaut anything! What do you want to know? Read the comments on this post... Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Inside the Outbreaks on the ScienceBlogs Book Club

The Lord of the Rings trilogy came on TV again recently. My wife and I can't help but to watch this even though we have it on DVD. Anyway, I was thinking about the part where Gondor sends a signal to Rohan asking them for military aid. Since this was before the invention of email, they had to do it with a signal fire. Hopefully this clip won't be a spoiler for you, but this is from the movie. Actually, all of the clips available have embedding disabled. So this is just a picture of that clip. If you want to see it, go to the youtube version. One other spoiler: Sauron is really Frodo's father. Ooops. I really shouldn't have let that one out. How fast does this signal travel? There are three angles to this question. Symbolically, what is this speed? What is my estimate of the speed from the video clip? What would be the speed if someone really set this up - you never know, you might need to do this in the event of a zombie attack. Symbolically I was going to call this "theoretical" speed, but that might be confusing. Instead, I am just going to set up the problem without putting any numbers in. Let me start with a picture. Also, let me assume that the signal fires are all equally spaced. The distance between signal fires doesn't matter so much as how many signal stations are there. If I use the variables form above, then the number of stations will be: What about the time? There are two times. First, how long does it take for people at a station to react to the previous signal fire? I will call this tr (reaction time). The other important time - how long does it take to light the signal fire? I will call this tl. To calculate the speed of the signal, I need the total distance and the total time. This gives: Now, substituting for the total time and the total distance, I get (in terms of n): This solution tells me what I need to know. The average distance, the time to light the fire and the reaction time. Note, there is already an assumption. The first assumption is that there are enough signal waypoints that the ends don't matter. Actually, I guess even if there is only one fire, it still takes time to light and for the receiver to react. Ok, then that is not an assumption. From the movie Can I get an estimate of these three parameters from that movie clip? Oh, yes I can. Will it be realistic? Who knows. Here is the stuff I found. When Pippin lights the first signal, it takes about 12 seconds from the time he puts the fire on it until it is mostly lit. After the first signal is on fire, Gandalf sees the next signal only 6 seconds later. WHAT? The guys (or gals) at the next station must have just been sitting there staring and waiting for a signal. Oh, it was probably like 40 years since the last time it was used. I guess you can do stuff like that if you don't have youtube. But wait, the more I think about this, the more upset I get. I am ok with invisible rings, flying dragons, glowing swords and stuff. However, it is beyond the bounds of reason to expect me to believe that some guys are sitting way on the other mountain with a hair-triggered lighting mechanism. Six seconds. Seriously. The next time to light is 12 seconds. That is reaction plus light time. The next one is at night and has a total time of about 6 seconds. At night! Don't these guys even sleep? 3 seconds for the next one. Come on man. In this last one, Aragon notices the signal in under 2 seconds. Luck or skill? A couple of other things I noticed. The first fire had a roof over it - very sensible. The other fires seemed to be open to the air (and rain). Also, it seems like all of the fires are on tops of mountains. At least they didn't show any on flat ground. One other thing, the signal started during daytime, went through the night and ended at day time. I am not sure how far apart these two locations are (Rohan and Gondor), but I doubt this signal went faster than the rotation of Middle Earth. How fast does Middle Earth rotate anyway? Well, it seems there are a couple of possibilities here. The signal speed is fast, but the distance is very far. So far that it takes a long time to get there (more than 1 night). The signal speed is uber fast and Rohan is on the other Side of Middle Earth. The signal passes through the shadow side of Middle Earth, but takes less than one night to get there. The night is really short on Middle Earth Didn't Gandalf and Pippin ride from Rohan to Gondor without stopping? It couldn't be THAT far even on a super-horse. If the horse went about an average speed of 15 mph for 30 hours straight (just my first guess) that would be 450 miles. Back to my estimations. So far, from the movie I have that the total time for one signal seems to be on the order of 10 seconds. What about the distance? My first guess is on the order of 50 miles. I just guessed that. Complete guess. Well, in the movie, all the signal fires are on mountains. There aren't too many mountains in this part of Louisiana (there aren't really any rocks even). So, here is a google map of some peaks near Vail, Co (the first thing I could think of).
View Larger Map From this map, the nearby peaks are only about a couple of miles away. Ok, now I am looking at Pikes Peak. Still, the nearby stuff seems on the order of 5 miles away. Ok, I am going with 5 miles. Putting this in, I have a signal speed of: Wow. If I use that speed and assume that it takes 12 hours (because it goes through the night) then Rohan would be 216,000 miles away. Note: the circumference of Earth (not Middle Earth) is around 24,000 miles. Ok, maybe that part of the movie is wrong. What if it is 500 miles away? How long would the signal take? There would be about 100 signal stations (at 5 miles apart) and each one would have around a 10 second turn around time. This would be 1,000 seconds or around 15 minutes. A more realistic estimate What if I forget about the movie? How fast could I send a signal from say New York to Raleigh, NC - about 450 miles? Clearly, I need to estimate some stuff. Distance I think this is the toughest to estimate. How far away can I put a fire and still have someone see it? Obviously, terrain matters. In flat parts of the Earth, you might be hard pressed to see 5 miles. But, I think I could make a fire on a mountain top that could be seen perhaps 20 miles away. Really, the question is: how far away could you see a fire? To test this, I took some pictures of a candle flame. Yes, I did. Here is the flame (about 1 cm tall) from about 4 meters away. Here it is about 15 meters away (I zoomed in the image after I took the picture - so I did not use any optical zoom.) And now at 30 meters. I can't really see this at 30 meters in the picture - but with the naked eye, I could kind of pick it out. So, that is one candle at 30 meters away. Let me assume that has a light power output of Po. This would give an intensity of light at that distance of: I am calling this Id. The d stands for detect - thus the lowest intensity that I can detect. Now suppose I ramp this flame up to a big bonfire. If it is about 2 meters tall (and wide), and if I assume the power output it proportional to the surface area, then this bonfire would have an area of about: I assume if it has 40,000 times the area, it will have 40,000 times the power output of the candle. So, how far away could someone be and have the same intensity (assuming the light is even radiated in all directions). So, that seems that I could see this about 19 km or about 11 miles away. That seems pretty far, but ..... maybe I should use something a little closer for the average distance. 13 km seems like a good average. Note: I know you can see light pretty far away. For example, take a light house. If you are out at sea, these suckers can be seen at least 10 miles out (if the tower is tall enough). Also, the Sun. It is really far away, but I can see that (Double Note: don't look at the Sun, you could hurt your eyes.) Time What about the reaction time. I guess this could be really short, but I am imagining a station with 2 people in it. If you only had one person, the reaction time could be much longer. With 2 people, they could take turns sleeping and they could help each other do chores (also, they would have someone to play checkers with). Reasonably, I think a reaction time of 10 minutes on average seems like a good guess. If I were sitting around for years waiting for a signal, I would probably just keep checking it every once in a while and not just stare at it. Oh, and what if there were clouds or rain? It could feasibly be the case where someone doesn't notice the fire for around an hour. Lighting time. Technically, this could be quite short (or the order of a minute). However, things could happen to make this much larger. Suppose it rained or some lighting error occurred. Maybe the chemical that was put on the fire "wore out" or something. It could take 30 minutes or more to get this sucker going. With this in mind, I am going to use a lighting time of 5 minutes on average. This will give a signal speed of: note: I fixed the above equation. It was missing a ) - thanks to riri. So, back to the New York to Raleigh thing. How long would this take? To send a signal 450 miles, it would take 14 hours. I like that answer. But, here is the problem. How many signal stations would you need? Over 50 stations. That is 50 stations that need to have people and supplies. Maybe in the grand scheme of things, that isn't too bad. Final Note: What about the book? I found my Return of the King book and looked it up. It seems that Pippin doesn't like the Beacon of Gondor. Instead, he notices it as he and Gandalf ride to Gondor. The only details I found was that they could see the lights traveling as they rode. Read the comments on this post... Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Inside the Outbreaks on the ScienceBlogs Book Club

A couple of days ago, I expressed my amusement at an e-mail sent to me by someone named "Carol." The amusement came primarily from the subject matter in the e-mail, which described something called a "biophoton ionizer," whatever that is. Knowing, as I do, how prevalent water woo is (after all, what is homeopathy but the grand daddy of all water woo?), I was naturally curious about what the heck a "biophoton ionizer" is. After all, what's the difference between a regular photon and a "biophoton"? What is the characteristic of the photon that makes it "bio," if you know what I mean. I was sure that there was some absolutely fantastic woo to be found, so much so that I decided that it was time for a new installment of Your Friday Dose of Woo, even after its relatively long hiatus. Besides, not much was going on at the anti-vaccine front, so much so that Age of Autism had been very quiet over the previous several days. Indeed, the merry band of anti-vaccinationists over at AoA have been so quiet lately that it's eerie. Besides, we're entering the dog days of summer. Where I am, at least, it's hot, humid, and things are relatively slow. A break is clearly called for, and there's nothing that provides an amusing break from the boredom of one's daily existence than a bit of woo. So I mosied on over to the first site that I found that dealt with biophoton ionizers and checked it out. I was not disappointed. First, let's check out Photonic Water Systems. I love this part in particular, which happens to be right on the front page of the website: After hundreds of years spent studying the nature of matter, physicists can now demonstrate that everything in our world is made of molecules that are made of atoms that are made of subatomic bits of energy endlessly vibrating at different frequencies. These units of energy carry information. That information interacts with the information of our cells in either beneficial or damaging ways. We now know that the photonic energy carried by Nature's original, living water is far more important than the particulates it may contain. In fact, revitalizing water to its creative state not only inactivates harmful pathogens and chemicals, it does so by removing the memory they leave behind. Photon energy is light energy, and when the frequency of light is present, life is enhanced and optimized. We are re-entering the era of light because we're now able to detect, understand and photograph what has been there for us all along. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post... Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Inside the Outbreaks on the ScienceBlogs Book Club

Younger offspring: Mom? I have a question. Dr. Free-Ride: OK. Younger offspring: If I got up really early -- Dr. Free-Ride: I hope you won't.
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Welcome to another article on the Matamata Chelus fimbriatus. Yay! In the previous episode we looked briefly at the Matamata's long, thick neck and on a few aspects of Matamata evolution (a brief introduction to what the Matamata is, and where it lives, can be found here) [in the composite image shown above, the skull and neck is from digimorph while the photo of the live animal is from wikipedia]. This time, we're going to look at the anatomy of the skull and hyoid skeleton (do stick with me here, it's well worth it). I made the point previously that, despite being comparatively well-known as turtles (and animals) go, I just wasn't able to find a good, illustrated description of the neck because such a thing doesn't exist (though Hoffstetter & Gasc (1969) did at least figure the neck vertebrae). In contrast, the skull has been well described... and it's surreal. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post... Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Inside the Outbreaks on the ScienceBlogs Book Club

Here at Thoughtful Animal headquarters, we are conducting series of seven-question interviews with people who are doing or have done animal research of all kinds - biomedical, behavioral, cognitive, and so forth. Interested in how animal research is conducted, or why animal research is important? Think you might want to do some animal research of your own someday? This is the interview series for you. Dr. Zen Faulkes (website, twitter) is Associate Professor of Biology at the University of Texas-Pan American, where he studies the evolution of behavior and nervous systems, particularly the origin of new behaviors. He is currently working mostly with decapod crustaceans, with a particular emphasis on the unusual crayfish Marmorkrebs. In addition, he writes the blog NeuroDojo, the Better Posters blog, and organizes Markmokrebs.org, where there is also an award-winning blog. I realize I haven't yet written about any of his research, technically, but I did write about a paper on spatial learning in octopuses that he contributed to as an undergraduate research assistant. Figure 1: Doctor Zen in front of one of his better posters.
Jump behind the fold for the interview, and enjoy!
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Earlier this year, I received a charming email from a pair of Helsinki-based artists and designers who work under the name of OK DO. OK DO is a socially-minded design think tank and online publication; they dug Universe and wanted to know if I'd contribute to a new publication and exhibition project they were working on. The project, Science Poems, was perfectly up my alley: a variety of articles and work loosely structured around the "poetry and multi-sensorial aesthetics of natural sciences rather than their functionality and logic." For the occasion, I wrote a short piece about the aesthetics of Science Fiction: The Science Poem Manifesto. Banged out in a lucid forty-five minutes, it was my most effortless piece of writing in recent memory, presumably because the themes had been banging around in my head, unexpressed, for a decade.
As Stanislaw Lem wrote, science fiction "comes from a whorehouse but...wants to break into the palace where the most sublime thoughts of human history are stored." Within the shadowy, grimacing frame of its own poetics, it does. Because the sublime thoughts of human history have always been projected outwards, to the vastness outside of our minds. Science fiction is a movement outwards, not inwards: "up, up, and away." Science fiction knows, like the science poets do, that the sky begins at our feet. The science poets look at our sky and they see three moons, or a ringed planet in sultry sunset; they hear a voice whispering across the void, hear the malice in its tone, but still find how to forgive it. Science poets see a tentacle and know its embrace. Science fiction is the grief of tomorrow and the horror of today. Science poetry makes no illusions. The finished Science Poems book is an honest-to-goodness marvel, marrying interviews with chemists, astronomers, curators, and fashion designers with short fiction, photography, and aesthetic references to everything from John Cage to electromagnetism. It features discussions with Marc-Olivier Wahler, curator of Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Cosmic Wonder, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, and Paola Antonelli, senior curator of Art and Design at the Museum of Modern Art. I am proud to have been involved. Read the entire Science Poem Manifesto here. As far as I know, the Science Poems book itself is only available for sale online via Napa Books in Helsinki. If you live in Europe, a list of available booksellers can be found here. Also, a lot of the content -- all exceptional -- is available for free online. Lastly, as note to our continental readership: OK DO will be having a book party for Science Poems next Thursday, August 5th at Berlin's Do You Read Me?! bookshop. [Reposted from SPACE CANON] Read the comments on this post... Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Inside the Outbreaks on the ScienceBlogs Book Club

In the early 15th century, Imperial Chinese mariners under the eunuch admiral Zheng He made great voyages of discovery in enormous ships. Then the Hongxi Emperor decided that what they had found on far shores was underwhelming, the whole fleet was scuppered and the Chinese paid no further attention to seafaring. In 2007 I discussed a silly story about alleged descendants of Zheng He's non-eunuch crew in Kenya who had suddenly remembered their Chinese heritage, which was convenient since the Chinese were interested in local mining rights. Now the Guardian has news about the Kenya - Zheng He - China connection, relayed to me by Aard's Chinese reporter who happens to share my bed and board. A well-funded group of Chinese maritime archaeologists plans to spend three years searching for the wreck of one of Zheng He's ships off the Kenyan coast. According to the newspaper, the impetus of the project is "Kenyan lore" about a shipwreck taking place in the 1400s. If so, then I am very sorry for my Chinese colleagues. They have a "likely shipwreck site", but no actual shipwreck yet. I hope the project does find a 15th century Chinese shipwreck. But if they do, then this will in no way validate the suddenly remembered folklore. It's a ridiculous product of current Afro-Chinese economic relations, and I'm sure no well-educated Kenyan or Chinese archaeologist believes one word of it. [More about china, kenya, africa, history, archaeology; kina, afrika, kenya, historia, arkeologi.] Read the comments on this post... Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Inside the Outbreaks on the ScienceBlogs Book Club

This APS rocks!
Here's the press release from PAMnet:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

APS ONLINE JOURNALS AVAILABLE FREE IN U.S. PUBLIC LIBRARIES

Ridge, NY, 28 July 2010: The American Physical Society (APS) announces a new public access initiative that will give readers and researchers in public libraries in the United States full use of all online APS journals, from the most recent articles back to the first issue in 1893, a collection including over 400,000 scientific research papers. APS will provide this access at no cost to participating public libraries, as a contribution to public engagement with the ongoing development of scientific understanding.

APS Publisher Joseph Serene observed that "public libraries have long played a central role in our country's intellectual life, and we hope that through this initiative they will become an important avenue for the general public to reach our research journals, which until now have been available only through the subscriptions at research institutions that currently cover the significant costs of peer review and online
publication."

Librarians can obtain access by accepting a simple online site license and providing valid IP addresses of public-use computers in their libraries (http://librarians.aps.org/account/public_access_new). The license requires that public library users must be in the library when they read the APS journals or download articles. Initially the program will be offered to U.S. public libraries, but it may include additional countries in the future.

"The Public Library program is entirely consistent with the APS objective to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics," said Gene Sprouse, APS Editor in Chief. "Our goal is to provide access to everyone who wants and needs our journals and this shift in policy represents the first of several steps the APS is taking towards that goal."

--Contact: Amy Halsted, Special Assistant to the Editor in Chief, halsted@aps.org, 631-591-4232
--About the APS: The American Physical Society is the world's largest professional body of physicists, representing close to 48,000 physicists in academia and industry worldwide. It has offices in Ridge, NY; Washington, DC; and College Park, MD. For more information:
www.aps.org.
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Yesterday, I described the relationship between low-income and poor performance in English and math in Massachusetts (see the post for methodological details). Well, I've saved the worst for last--science education: Just to remind everyone, the horizontal axis is the percentage of children in a school who qualify for free lunch, and the vertical axis is the percentage of children who, according to their MCAS scores, are either classified as "Need Improvement" or "Warning/Failing" in science. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post... Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Inside the Outbreaks on the ScienceBlogs Book Club

(This is an edited excerpt from an op-ed piece I just wrote for Xconomy, posted here as I think it provides some nuance on my views on regulation of genetic testing that was lacking from my post last week.

Some context for new readers: a Congressional investigation into the direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing industry last week left a sour taste in the mouths of many observers of the embryonic industry; it was a vicious, one-sided affair, starring a biased report on a "sting" operation performed by the US Government Accountability Office. Along with other recent moves by the FDA, it potentially sets the scene for draconian regulation to be laid down on the industry. Here I argue that other, more careful approaches are the best way forward.
For more discussion from multiple viewpoints on the regulatory battle ahead, check out the posts by my co-authors on Genomes Unzipped and the ensuing comments threads: Caroline Wright argues that genetic data provides educational opportunities that should not be legislated away, and Jeff Barrett and Kate Morley argue that different standards should be applied to medical and non-medical tests.)

The costs of regulation
It would be all too easy to use the false claims and unethical behaviour depicted in the GAO report to justify a whole-sale FDA crackdown on the direct-to-consumer genetic testing industry, and that was certainly the flavour of the Congress proceedings. However, such a move would be short-sighted, and would ultimately harm consumers more than it protected them.

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Something told the wild geese It was time to go, Though the fields lay golden Something whispered, "snow."
Leaves were green and stirring, Berries, luster-glossed, But beneath warm feathers Something cautioned, "frost."
All the sagging orchards Steamed with amber spice, But each wild breast stiffened At remembered ice.
Something told the wild geese It was time to fly, Summer sun was on their wings, Winter in their cry. - Rachel Field I'm trying to get back to normal - even though things aren't quite normal here. In the last three weeks my blogging home has melted down twice and my physical home is up for grabs and I admit, I'm a bit discombobulated. But I'm also laying down the question of whether we should move, and putting it in Eric's hands. My husband both loathes moving more than I do and also worries about money more than I do - so in the end, I think this is going to come down to Eric's gut feeling - does he fear and loathe moving less than he fears and loathes financial instability? Honestly, this is a question only he can answer. For myself, I've actually sort of settled down on the subject and come to the conclusion that we can both make a go of it here and also make a good go of it there. That is, both options are ok with me - if I'm dissatisfied with the community here, I can work harder at it, and see if I can get more cool people out this way. We can rent out the in-law apartment to make the house more affordable. And while I worry about the tax burden and the costs, I've been poor enough in my life that we'd have to just be a lot more unstable for me to freak out. I'm content to make it work here, and I also think there are virtues to trying to make it work there - and I'll do either one. What *I* don't deal well with is uncertainty - but this isn't my decision in some way - I could push Eric one way or another, but I don't want to live with him when pushed ;-), so honestly, it is in my husband's hands. So I'm starting to focus back on my daily life - and there's certainly plenty to do there. Bazillions of herbs to harvest and dry. Plenty of vegetables, gardens to weed, quarts of peach salsa to can. The shelves are filling up and I have to clean and reorganize the kitchen - and that kind fo work will matter whether we stay or go. And like the wild geese in my oldest, Eli's favorite poem, I can feel the tang of winter coming. When you live on a farm, and when you eat with the seasons, winter is always coming in a way - I order my Thanksgiving turkey in February, order the seeds potatoes for my Chanukah latkes just a month or so after we finish eating them, thin our autumn's apples in June, plant the beets and kale we'll eat in December in July. Round and round and round we go, and we we stop we always know. It isn't like things really stop in winter - there's plenty to do in the quiet times. But at some point the last of the brussels sprouts and winter greens will be done, the hens will take their annual sabbatical from laying, and the food we have will be the food we eat, with light and judicious purchasing from things far away. Because we want to keep this light and judicious, we are always looking at the abundant plenty now with ideas of how we can put more summer into our pantry for the short, cold days ahead. There is a moment in summer, usually about halfway through - about now, really, when I begin to feel that tang of winter. It isn't caused by anything in particular - it is hot and humid right now, no change in the weather to shift my worldview. I've been canning and preserving since June, so the pickles and jams aren't the reason. The hay has been cut for a while now, and the animal's winter feed has been on our mind since June too. No, it is something intangible, faint, hard to identify, but real. Something is telling me to move my always-thinking-forward cyclical life into higher gear - perhaps an instinct, perhaps a habit born from a life of back to school planning - who knows. But it is time - not to go, but to recognize that steaming amber spice is a transient, passing thing, to be loved, held onto, preserved. I don't have to do this, of course - I can buy my thanksgiving turkey at a store, buy apples weekly at the same place. I don't have to change my diet from season to season - although the tastes and nutritional value and price will change, I could just keep on eating and doing the same things day after day. I don't want to, though. Besides the fact that my body craves what is coming, and gets frustrated with the good-looking, empty tasting aseasonal alternatives, those choices come with costs I don't want to bear. Every time I spend a dollar on food, I vote for what kind of food system I'm going to have - and I want to vote for what I want to see more of. My neighbors with farms can't provide me with strawberries and tomatoes in February - so if I'm going to vote for them, I'm going to eat those things sparingly - or not at all. At the same time, the lush abundance of summer in the Northeast is so overwhelming that without a serious commitment, food would go to waste, which seems to me a loss and a sorrow, when I know I will want it so badly in the cold. I can't eat every zucchini, eat every berry on the bush - we give it away, we share with friends and neighbors and the food pantry, and still, there is more. This plenty, glorious organic excess, produced in tandem with nature would be lost in part if I didn't put some of it away for winter. And it simply isn't that hard to do - the returns are so vast, the meals that I've done the primary labor for in summer, the short winter evenings that can be made longer by a dinner half ready, and fresh from last summer's heat, are worth it. This is what human beings have done for almost all the time in human history that we have abided in cold climates. I don't have any idea how much that history is bred into my bones - all I know is that like the squirrel who gathers more acorns and the bear that grows fat with berries, I can feel the whisper of frost. And there's something energizing and invigorating about that call, that sense of instinct taking over. I'm not really sure where I will winter - what nest I will crawl into, what fire I will sit before. But I know enough about my cold and pleasant place to know that every taste of the abundance of summer will be welcome, every bit of heat in a jar will be beloved when the cold seeps in the cracks and the quiet time begins. Summer sun is on my back, but winter is in my dreams - and hands. Sharon Read the comments on this post... Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Inside the Outbreaks on the ScienceBlogs Book Club

Funny how everything old is new again, isn't it? Yes, if there's one thing I've learned over nearly six years of blogging, it's that, sooner or later, everything is recycled, and I do mean everything. At least, that was the thought going through my mind when I came across PZ's discussion of a clueless wonder who appears to be advocating a science section in that cesspit of anti-vaccine quackery and quantum woo, The Huffington Post, whose proclivities for pseudoscience have led its activities to be characterized as a war on medical science. It's actually more than just a war on medical science, though. It's a war on all science, as posts by Deepak Chopra and a recent pro-"intelligent design" creationism post claiming that Darwin led inexorably to Hitler's genocide demonstrated. If there were any conclusive evidence that HuffPo is all about all kinds of pseudoscience, I was hard-pressed to think of what it could be. It's déjà vu all over again, as the saying goes, given that a proposal that HuffPo develop a science section was floated to the science blogosphere nearly two and a half years ago, to the hysterical guffaws of the assembled bloggerati, guffaws that turned to gasps of dismay when science bloggers realized that this was actually a serious proposal. Fortunately, the proposal appeared to have gone nowhere, although unfortunately not entirely so given how much HuffPo seems to have expanded its medical writings into realms of quackery hitherto unplumbed outside of NaturalNews.com, Mercola.com, and Whale.to. So here we are, nearly two and a half years after the previous time that someone advocated a science section for HuffPo, to the ridicule of serious science and medical bloggers everywhere, and the same idea rises from the grave again, like one of those zombies in The Return of the Living Dead who claw their way out of the ground as the rain picks up the 245-Trioxin in the crematorium smoke and saturates the graveyard with it. This time around, the person advocating the formation of a science section at HuffPo is someone named J.L. Vernon, who wrote a post entitled Ongoing debate about the establishment of a "Science" section on the Huffington Post "News" website. He starts out with what sounds like an admirable set of goals: Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post... Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Inside the Outbreaks on the ScienceBlogs Book Club

Another book with my name on it has just appeared. Again it's a kid's book: Dorling Kindersley's Know It All (Baines 2010) - a fantastically well illustrated, fact-packed encylopedia of everything science (and the successor to the highly successful 2009 Ask Me Anything). It's a multi-authored book (authors: Simone Bos, Julie Ferris, Ian Graham, Susan Kennedy, Darren Naish, Jim Pipe, Carole Stott and John Woodward). My section - titled 'Dinosaurs' - isn't just on dinosaurs; it also includes spreads on Palaeozoic tetrapods, ichthyosaurs, pterosaurs, Pleistocene mammals, and hominids. Does it really tell the Tet Zoo reader anything they don't already know? No, of course not. But it's still worth talking about, as I find it interesting that I'm increasingly able to get 'new' ideas on prehistoric tetrapods into popular books, and hence into 'mainstream' culture... Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post... Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Inside the Outbreaks on the ScienceBlogs Book Club

In the wake of last week's defeat of cap and trade, the predictable narrative offered by bloggers and commentators has been to blame the failure on industry, skeptics, and Republicans. It's also the explanation likely echoing in the minds of many scientists and environmental advocates. But it's important to take a step back from the easy emotional reaction and take a look at the complexity of factors that shape societal gridlock on this issue. As I remarked to Andrew Revkin at Dot Earth earlier this month: If we were able to statistically model societal inaction on climate change, what proportion of the variance would be accounted for by the disinformation efforts of skeptics and false balance by journalists? Perhaps 10%. Maybe 15%? [Commentators] unfortunately tend to exaggerate the influence of climate skeptics while overlooking the many other factors that contribute to societal gridlock... At the Breakthrough blog, as Devon Swezey, Yael Borofsky, and Jesse Jenkins detail, Republicans opposed the bill but so did many Democrats giving Harry Reid only 30-40 votes in favor. And while the Chamber of Commerce opposed the bill, major industry members including Shell, BP, and Alcoa helped craft the legislation and actively lobbied for passage. The public opinion and media environment also contributed to the legislative defeat, but this factor is far more complex than narrowly blaming the work of skeptics, conservative media, or claims about "false balance" in coverage. As I described in a panel presentation earlier this year at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, legislation on climate change--which necessitates a non-incremental, systemic change in policy--should be compared to other similar policy debates such as welfare or immigration reform where wider public opinion and the level of news attention has played a decisive role. As the recent Six Americas of Global Warming report shows, the U.S. public has yet to come to the type of widespread consensus and opinion-intensity on the issue that creates the incentive for the White House, Democratic members of Congress, and moderates among Republicans to take the political risks to pass legislation. To get to that point, we need to rethink the focus and nature of policy action and how we communicate about the issue. Following Copenhagen and now with the failure of cap and trade, a window has opened for discussion of alternative policy directions. New voices, seats at the table, and fresh ideas are needed on the most effective approaches to curbing greenhouse gas emissions, policy proposals that are also capable of gaining bi-partisan support in Congress. In an interview with Ezra Klein at the Washington Post, Michael Shellenberger offers this perspective: I think that some time needs to pass for Democrats and liberals and greens to assess what happened and start coming to terms with the political, economic and technological realities that are the driving force behind the serial political failures of cap-and-trade. Our view is you need a price on carbon, but that it's going to start very low. No one will impose or sustain a high price on carbon as long as the gap between fossil fuels and clean energy remains so wide. So we need to be moving to a framework where at the center is technological innovation to close the gap between fossil fuels and clean energy. That might need to be funded with a small tax on carbon. But the center is the technological innovation. In conjunction with our policy approach to the problem, we also need to rethink how we communicate about the relevance of climate change and importantly the benefits that would accrue from proposed action. Environmental groups spent record amounts of resources on advertising and lobbying in support of cap and trade. From this effort, what lessons were learned? What appears to have been successful? What strategies can be ruled out as dead ends? As the NY Times' Tom Friedman concluded in his column yesterday: The Senate's failure to act is a result of many factors, but one is that the climate-energy policy debate got disconnected from average people. We need less talk about "climate" and more about how conservation saves money, renewable energy creates jobs, restoring the gulf's marshes sustains fishermen and preserving the rainforest helps poor people. Said Glenn Prickett, vice president at the Nature Conservancy: "We have to take climate change out of the atmosphere, bring it down to earth and show how it matters in people's everyday lives." UPDATE: Eric Pooley has an excellent analysis arguing similar points in an article today at Yale Environment 360. See also: Audio and Highlights of the Harvard Kennedy School Panel w/ Andrew Revkin on Climate Change, Skeptics, and the Media Study: Re-Framing Climate Change as a Public Health Issue Slate: More Science Won't Solve Climate Change Gridlock At Slate, A Need for Diplomacy in the Climate Wars Read the comments on this post... Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Inside the Outbreaks on the ScienceBlogs Book Club

"Don't blame yourself. The apocalypse wasn't your fault. Actually, it was just as much your fault as it was anyone else's. Come to think of it, if you're an American, it was probably about 80-90 percent more your fault than the average human. But don't let that get you down. It wasn't exclusively your fault. Unless you're the president. Then it might be your fault. But you'll have plenty of interns to tell you that it wasn't, so you'll be fine." -Meghann Marco Nothing gets a scientist in the press quite like telling everyone that we're all gonna die. Remember when there was talk of creating black holes that destroy the world at the LHC? Remember the hype that the world's going to end on December 21st, 2012? Remember the supposed end-of-civilization-as-we-know it from Y2K? (Actually, younger readers may not!) As you may have guessed, none of these things either has destroyed the world or is likely going to. These stories are always out there, and they're almost always full of gross misinformation. One of the public services that science (and scientists) often perform is getting the correct information out there, out of the hopes that this will allay the hysteria and the wasted resources that these scares cause. But what do you do when it's one of your own who causes scares like this? I'm looking squarely at you, asteroid- and comet-hunters. Remember, a few years ago, there was speculation that there was a 1 in 37 chance that the large asteroid, Apophis, would hit the Earth with devastating results? Of course, now that we've taken better data, that chance is now down to less than 1 in 100,000. And this seems to be a recurring theme in popular media; I recall watching the worst episode ever of History Channel's "The Universe" on comets and asteroids destroying the Earth. To what should be no surprise, a new asteroid, relatively large in size, with poor data mapping its trajectory, is in the news. I've gotten to read headlines like: Asteroid Could Threaten the Earth in 2182, Giant Asteroid Headed Towards Earth; Could Level London, and Will an Asteroid Kill Us All in 2182? The reports are that there's a 1-in-1,000 chance that we're going to get hit. And I get it. I get why this is so scary. After all, a giant asteroid impact is what wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. If that happened to Earth today, just as surely, we'd all be goners. Here's my problem with this type of reporting, both by journalists and by scientists. Remember the story of The Boy Who Cried Wolf? It only works if the boy cries wolf when there's actually a wolf! Despite what's being reported, the odds are almost certainly much, much safer than "one-in-a-thousand." But you'd never know that from reading the news. Take Apophis, for example. The odds were reported at 1-in-37 because the data was poor at that point, the asteroid's trajectory was very uncertain, and solid conclusions couldn't be drawn. It wasn't until better data was taken and its trajectory was better determined that we could come up with a realistic estimate. And we did, and it was more like 1-in-250,000. But this means Apophis never had a 1-in-37 chance of hitting us, we just didn't have enough data to know better. Does this latest story feel like déjà vu? It should. When you tell stories like this, giving 1-in-1000 odds of our destruction I don't believe you. I've seen the pattern of bad reporting, and I assume -- correctly -- that you give "scary" odds because your data isn't good enough to make a realistic prediction. (Guess what? The data for this new asteroid, 1999 RQ36, isn't very good yet.) And you do it, alarming the public, every couple of years. And when more data comes in, we find out -- every time so far -- that the object is actually going to miss the Earth entirely by many thousands (or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands) of kilometers. So STOP. We've got lots of asteroids, and we need to learn to track them, because when a potentially devastating one actually does wind up on a collision course with Earth, we'd like to be ready. And even though "extinction" events (like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs) only happen once every hundred million years or so, smaller, substantial impacts that cause significant damage happen thousands of times more frequently. But by causing unfounded hysteria like this, based on inconclusive data, you make all of us look bad. Worst of all, you add to this awful misconception that science doesn't know what it's talking about most of the time. And that's not true. Science knows what it's talking about. But loudmouth scientists (and science journalists) who cry "wolf!" (or "Asteroid!") harm us all, and I'm speaking out against it. We're not all going to die, not from this asteroid, not anytime soon. And your great-great-grandkids probably won't either; give us a few more years to better track this asteroid and we'll have an accurate, meaningful estimate of the odds for you then. But until then, please don't lose any sleep over it. Read the comments on this post... Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Inside the Outbreaks on the ScienceBlogs Book Club