maternal dolphins

This is an awesome story.

Two pygmy sperm whales were trapped on along a beach in New Zealand (a sandbar along the beach confused them). The beach has a friendly dolphin that often shows up to play with swimmers and boaters. A local conservation official had been trying to push the whales out to sea, and was having little luck, when he saw the dolphin approach the whales. They made noises to each other, and then the dolphin guided the whales to a small break in the sandbar and out to sea.

Before this, scientists were unaware that dolphins and whales could communicate with each other. I suspect this incident is going to ignite some new research.

But it goes along with other stories of dolphins who have "saved" other animals, such as protecting seals from sharks, and helping stranded swimmers. Dolphins apparently have a human-like ability to recognize distress in other animals and feel the need to help, which is pretty cool.

total eclipse of the moon

There's going to be a full lunar eclipse Wednesday night, around 9:00 pm here in Chicago. The total eclipse will last from 9-9:50, with partials before and after.

This is still plenty early enough, so get outside and check it out. Lunar eclipses are really beautiful.

i'm in on the cover-up

If you're not an astronomy geek like me, you are probably completely unaware that an asteroid called TU24 passed near the Earth last night. When I say "near" I'm not talking about "you live in the same town as me, so you live near me" kind of near. I mean, "you live on the same planet as me, so you live near me" kind of near. This asteroid is passing Earth at a distance of 300,000 miles - 40 times the diameter of the Earth, outside the orbit of the moon. In the relativistic distance of interstellar space, this is near. But practically, in a way it can affect Earth, it's plenty far away. The reason you haven't heard about this on TV or in the news is that it's so far away as to be uninteresting to anyone but astronomers - you can't see it with a backyard telescope, it won't affect us in anyway. It's a non-story to regular people.

However, if you love the intertubes like I do, you might have discovered the conspiriacy theorists! One hilarious one is tu24.org, where they claim that the asteroid, despite being 400 yards across, somehow will be able to have an effect on Earth, even from 300,000 miles away. The stuff they are saying makes little sense, like disturbances in the Earth's magnetic field (due to the fact that the Earth holds a positive charge!), plasma discharges, etc. It doesn't make a lot of sense, because it is science filtered through junior high science fiction.

I read some of the forums on tu24.org today, for a giggle, and really, it made me a little sad. People who don't know any better were afraid that all the power was going to go out, or a volcano was going to spontaneously erupt, or their dog was going to suddenly freak out, due to a chunk of metal in outer space. Some of these people are writing sentences like they are playing Mad Libs using only science words. And many of these people really believe that the government, NASA, and the media were conspiring to keep all this information hidden from everyone in the world. "Why isn't the media talking about this???" Um, because it's a non-event?

It hits home how important EDUCATION is. And it scares me, because these people vote.

nightmares

There are multiple ways in which the world as we know it could end. Global climate change may cause the world we know it to end with a whimper. But two of the ways in which the world as we know it could end with a bang have been in the news recently.

Explosion of a Supervolcano:

There are several "supervolcano" explosions in Earth's history. One of the most recent was the explosion of Toba about 75,000 years ago (which may have almost led to the extinction of the early humans):

The eruption lasted perhaps two weeks, but the ensuing "volcanic winter" resulted in a decrease in average global temperatures by 3 to 3.5 degrees Celsius for several years. Greenland ice cores record a pulse of starkly reduced levels of organic carbon sequestration. Very few plants or animals in southeast Asia would have survived, and it is possible that the eruption caused a planet-wide die-off. There is some evidence, based on mitochondrial DNA, that the human race may have passed through a genetic bottleneck within this timeframe, reducing genetic diversity below what would be expected from the age of the species. According to the Toba catastrophe theory proposed by Stanley H. Ambrose of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1998, human populations may have been reduced to only a few tens of thousands of individuals by the Toba eruption.

This explosion was 28 times larger than the largest volcanic eruption in historic times, at Mount Tambora in 1815, which emitted the equivalent of around 100 cubic kilometres of dense rock and created the "Year Without a Summer" as far away as North America.

What many people don't know is that we have a Supervolcano right here in our own backyard.

The turmoil beneath Yellowstone's "supervolcano" is raising the land as much as 2.8 inches per year, new ground measurements show. But the inflating land is not about to erupt, assured geologists, despite the caldera's ancient history of massive explosions.

The "supervolcano" is really a caldera, a basin-shaped volcanic feature formed in the wake of a large eruption. Spanning roughly 925 square miles in the northwest corner of Wyoming, the Yellowstone Caldera is thought to erupt every few hundred thousand years, but its exact origins remain a mystery.

Asteroid Impact:

Movies have shown us lots about the possibiities of an asteroid impact. Most of us have heard that the K-T boundary shows evidence that an asteriod or comet struck the earth and led to the extinction of the dinosaurs (70% of the species) 65 million years ago.

Its not something that we think about regularly. But there are around 150 known Earth-orbit crossing asteroids. Because asteroids are made of dark rock and do not reflect (like icy comets do), asteroids are almost impossible to see. So we really have no idea how many asteroids are out there around us.

With enough warning, and if the object was in a middling range, theoritically we could blow up an asteroid before it struck us. At the very least, we'd have time to do all the things we'd always wished we'd done before we all die.

But, thanks to the fact that Congress won't give NASA any money, and yet Bush wants us back on the moon by 2020, funds are being diverted from looking for Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) into getting us ready to go back to the moon.

Thankfully, at least for now, NASA is still able to track large objects that could cause planet-wide devasastion, but which don't come nearby more than every few hundred years. There are untold thousands of objects out there less than a half mile across that we currently don't have the money to find, let alone track, that would cause regional devasastion on impact.

Who wants to take bets on whether climate change, the supervolcano, or an asteroid gets us first?

waste not, want not

It seems like "global warming" is the phrase on the air lately. I keep getting involved in discussions on various blogs and message boards about it.

The thing that keeps driving me batty is that so many people talk about cliamte change as if it's EITHER natural cycles, OR it's man-made change. Like the two things can't both be happening. Of course they're both happening. Our interdependent global climate system is so complex, that trying to identify what affects what, and how everything is related, is enough to make your eyes bleed. It's not just one thing, or even two or three things. There's dozens of things, all "chicken-and-the-egg" with each other.

Some things we as humans have done wouldn't be too bad, except that the problems are being exacerbated by changes in the natural cycles. If people are using their land to its fullest extent during a "good" period, and then the natural cycle changes even a little, suddenly that land can no longer support the number of people it once did. In desperation, people being misusing resources or running out of things, and if the natural cycle gets better, they might make it okay, but if the natural cycle goes in a worse way, they may be doomed.

The way to survive is to 1) identify what kinds of changes are happening, and identify how they are affecting us. And 2) to look at our resources, and figure out how we can get the most out of them. Are we cutting forests at a sustainable rate, or are we destroying them? Are we using more oil than we need to? Are we fishing to extinction, or are we fishing at a rate and in a way that allows the fish to sustain?

We've become used to using the land and throwing it away. The cycle of the Earth in which man has risen has been a good one, but looking at the history of the Earth, we're likely just in a short warm period between ice ages. This warming is probably only temporary (maybe a few thousand years more at most) before we dip back toward an ice age.

We've been able to waste our resources because we're in a good climate cycle, and previously we've mostly not had too many people (population grows almost exponentially). But if we start to dip into a bad cycle, or our population continues to grow rapidly (or likely both), our current ways of using will no longer work. We won't be able to keep wasting the way we have. We need to recognize that and be ready.

a rant

The next person who says to me, "This weather is crazy. Must be global warming!" is getting a punch in the mouth.

One weird weather pattern does not equal global warming. The number of different factors that lead to localized or global climate change are numerous and complex, and have to be tracked over many years, decades or centuries.

The thing that makes me the angriest about this whole climate change debate is that so many people see it as an "either/or." Either humans are entirely to blame and have screwed up the earth, or it's just natural cycles that repeat in Earth's history, and we don't need to change what we're doing.

It's much, much more complicated than that.

I'm currently reading "Collapse" by Jared Diamond. He does a great job of laying out how past civilizations have collapsed due to a combination of natural climate fluxuation and the civilization's own effect on their environment.

Let's say we have an area of land that is 50 square miles. A third of the area is fertile soil and pasture land in a flood plain. Another third is uphill of the floodplain, but still good soil and lots of timber. The other third is rocky and mountainous, with a lot of trees. The weather is mild and temperate, and there's a decent amount of rainfall. In an ideal climate condition and with efficient farming, the floodplain can support 200 people per square mile, with farming and cattle, etc. A small band of settlers (say 100 people) moves into the area, and they set up farms in the floodplain. The farming is good, game is abundent in the forests uphill, and so the population grows rapidly. Say maybe 200 years go by, and the population has grown dramatically, to the point that the floodplain is getting near the amount of people it can support. There have been a few years of drought here and there, but they were able to get through it, building irrigation ditches and with hunting. They've been cutting down the trees uphill for building, for firewood, for heating iron, etc.

As time goes on, maybe another 150 years, the population continues to grow, exceeding what the floodplain can support. They expand to the hills, cutting down or burning the remaining trees to create land for farming, or letting cattle and sheep eat vegetation, and the mountain trees are still being cut down for timber and firewood faster than they can regrow in the poor soil and higher elevation. What begins happening as the vegetation is removed is that the topsoil on the hills starts washing or blowing away, making the hills less suitable for growing. The irrigation ditches are diverting water from the river. But the population is still growing, so the farms expand up the hillsides and mountain sides to higher elevations where things don't grow as well, because the growing population needs to be fed. It's been over 200 years since a major drought, and the population has more than doubled since that time, and this society is at a cultural highpoint. A dry, cold winter occurs. The growing season is shorter, and there is little rain. The farms in the higher elevations can't produce much food with the limited rainfall and the shorter summer and the lack of good topsoil. This change in weather patterns occurs periodically for the next 20 years - several bad years followed by several good ones. Its similar to the pattern that occured 200 years ago, but this time there are many, many more people to feed, and the land is much less able to support them - almost no trees, large soil erosion, and the river level has dropped dramatically due to the irrigation runoff and limited rain. Fights begin over resources, the limited water and timber and food. Other civilizations have grown up around this one, and they are all in similar situations - there is nowhere to go. Starvation is rampant, and birth rates decline rapidly, as well as many deaths from warfare among the civilization and their neighbors. The civilization collapses.

What I've just described is a basic version of what happened to the Maya in southern Mexico. They moved into a perfect area, grew to over-utilize it during a period of favorable climate, and damaged the area in such a way that during a less favorable climate, the land could no longer support them. The evidence there shows that a few small periods of drought and less favorable weather occured about every 200 years, with bad and good years alternating within a decade or so. The Maya got through the first couple of these 200 year cycles, but another hit right after their civilization reached its peak, and the various Mayan civilizations collapsed during the drought years of the next cycle, unable to support themselves.

On a larger scale, this is what is happening to the Earth as a whole. We are already seeing signs of collapse in areas like Haiti and Rwanda. The societal tensions that already existed in Rwanda were pushed to the breaking point by resources, especially water, disappearing in a fragile environement where weather changes (either natural or due to changes in other parts of the globe) made the land even less suitable.

We as humans are making changes that, during this period of ideal climate, don't seem to be causing much harm. But when the natural cycle makes another change, and it will, those changes we've made, the overutilization that we've done, will mean that the Earth cannot continue to support us as it has. The 1400s-1800s were a Little Ice Age, with a large overall temperature drop in Europe and North America. The Norse colony in Greenland had existed for 450 years during the favorable climate, but as soon as the Little Ice Age started, the damage they had done to the fragile climate (over-cutting trees, loss of topsoil, over harvesting of vegetation and wild animals) led to their rapid demise. The local Inuit, who made different choices, survived in the same area during the Little Ice Age, where the Norse died out.

All evidence shows that we are only in a break between Ice Ages right now. We as a planet survived the Little Ice Age the first time around, but with our hugely increased population and the environmental damage we've done, will we survive the next one? What will we have to sacrifice to make it?

Galaxtasarus

Watch out, little stars! The Galaxtasarus is gonna get you!



This image is from the Hubble Telescope, of a star-forming region in the nearby dwarf galaxy, the Small Magellanic Cloud.

the horrors of sunshine

So, i went over the weekend to see Sunshine, having only a vague concept of what it was about (Danny Boyle? Cillian Murphy? I'm in!). Ok, seriously, such a weird and sad movie should not have a word that is so cheerful for a title. It's a hard movie to explain, especially since it is of the action/mystery genre, and I don't want to give anything away. If you're familiar with Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later" or "Trainspotting," you'll probably like this movie, especially if you also enjoy sci-fi. I do wish they'd explained a little more of the "science" they were using - it seemed like about 10-15 minutes of exposition was cut to get the film well below 2 hours, and there was some information I could have used, or at least would have liked. And then, the ending sort of freaked me out. I thought one thing was going on, turns out it was something else. But the something else is actually really freakin' cool. Am I being vague? Very well, I'm being vague.

where man has never gone before

On the internet with time to kill? Check out Galaxy Zoo.

Long-range, high-powered telescopes are taking hundreds of images a day of distant galaxies and other objects, many, many more than can be analyzed by the staff available. History has shown that the human eye is much better at classifying these objects than computers (which throws out anomalies, which are the most interesting of all).

This site allows regular joes to view and classify images from the hundreds of thousands currently being cataloged. You go through a tutorial and then take a test. Once you pass the test, you can begin classifying. Your classifications are compared with others to create a consensus. You can see pictures from the universe that almost no one has ever seen.

Seriously, it is addictive. Discovered via Bad Astronomy.

ETA: Why am I addicted? 'Cause you get to see stuff like this! Look at the tail! Galaxies are MERGING! It's Science in action!


I'm just not sure what's happening here...

why evolution matters

During last week's Republican Presidential debate, the candidates were asked about their belief in evolution. Several, most notably Mike Huckabee and John McCain, believe in creationism over evolution. That man was created by God and put on Earth.

What I found most interesting, though, was Huckabee's comment, quoted at the end of the CNN article:

"It's interesting that that question would even be asked of somebody running for president," Huckabee said. "I'm not planning on writing the curriculum for an eighth-grade science book. I'm asking for the opportunity to be president of the United States."

It disturbs me that he's unable to see the link between understanding and respecting science, and being President. The debate between science and faith, science and religious morals, continues to become more entrenched as scientific discoveries grow.

A Presidential candidate's belief in creationism over evolution is a signpost for their beliefs on other things that are at odds between science and faith, such as stem cell research and cloning, abortion, global warming and climate change, and a host of other issues, not to mention things like school prayer.

A mind that is so entrenched in faith, that it can't rationally examine or accept scientific evidence to the contrary, has no place in the most important position in America. The Presidency requires extreme mental flexibility, and an ability to examine a wide range issues using logic and reason and a respect for evidence, not using emotion or faith.

ok, seriously...

science freakin' amazes me.

Jamestown Skeleton Still a Mystery

"In the tooth test, the National Environment Research Council Isotope Geosciences Laboratory of the British Geological Survey studied strontium and oxygen isotopes in tooth enamel. The isotope ratios, compared with ratio of isotopes in drinking water, can determine where a person lived during childhood, when the teeth are formed."

this super awesome photo of Saturn, backlight by the sun, recently came in from the Cassini probe. the image is incredible. they found some new rings, and possibly more moons.

i want to be a scientist.

it's the catholic cavalry, come to save us!

Science is astounding us again, and the Church is doing what it can to stop it.

Stem Cell Method Leaves Embryos Viable

Hooray! A major advancement in science that might keep the Christian Right happy. Win-win, right?

“The new technique takes just a single cell from an early-stage embryo and uses it to seed a line of stem cells. The rest of the embryo retains the potential to develop into a healthy human.

Scientists at Advanced Cell devised a clever means of piggybacking on existing fertility treatments to avoid the creation, manipulation or destruction of embryos specifically for the production of stem cells.

The fertility procedure, known as preimplantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD, is used when parents want to avoid having a child with a lethal or severely debilitating birth defect. About 1,000 such procedures are performed each year in the United States.

The new stem cell production method takes a cell extracted during PGD and allows it to divide. One of the two resulting cells is genetically tested as in normal PGD; the other is cultured to encourage the development of stem cells.”

Oh, but wait… Here come the Catholics to save the day.

"’It is widely believed that one cell of a very early embryo may separate and become a new embryo, an identical twin," said Richard Doerflinger of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.”

I’ve got a few questions for you, Richard Doerflinger. As a bishop, how do you counsel your parishioners who are suffering from cancer, strokes, Parkinson’s disease, paralysis? Do you tell them this is all part of God’s Plan, and that we can’t understand why He does what He does? Do you tell them to pray to God for help?

I bet you don’t tell them that science is finding way to help them. Science that was developed through the free will you believe that God gave to man.

When they come to you in their anguish, do you tell them you’re using your influence to block the possible development of a cure? That you believe it is better for them, here and now, to suffer, than to allow the loss of one cell that might possibly, under the perfect conditions, one day become a human? That you and your God revere life so much that you would prefer your followers live in pain, than risk the life of a cell that wouldn’t even exist at all without the science you decry?

good ol' NASA

NASA always knows how to make me feel better.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2006-04-27-comet_x.htm

Chunks of a comet currently splitting into pieces in the night sky will not strike the Earth next month, nor will it spawn killer tsunamis and mass extinctions, NASA officials said Thursday.

more fun with science

Primate Dads Show Pregnancy Weight Gain

geeking out on science

Comet Dust Has Hints of Organic Matter

Global Warming Feeds Speedy Evolution