"Balancing" climate education in South Dakota and elsewhere [The Island of Doubt]
Leslie Kaufman in the New York Times presents a disturbing tale of attempts by creationists to up their chances of slipping religion into science classrooms by piggy-backing it onto "balanced" instruction of climatology.
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Increasing signs of activity at Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland [Eruptions]
Eyjafjallajökull, an ice-capped volcano in Iceland that last erupted in 1823.
We talked a few weeks ago of signs that there were increasing signs that an eruption could occur on Iceland - increased seismicity on the Reykjanes Ridge suggested that magma might be on the move. Now, we have two pieces of evidence that we might see activity at Eyjafjallajökull, on the southern side of the island nation.
First off, there is a focus of seismicity under the area of Eyjafjallajökull, with an especially large bump in the last 2 days. Both the number and magnitude of the seismicity has been marching upwards, with the latest earthquakes reaching around M3, almost directly underneath the buried (by ice) crater of the volcano. This would suggest that something is up under the ice cap - either magma is moving in the system or the hydrothermal system is experiencing some large fluid flow event. I can't really figure out the depths of these earthquakes based on the Icelandic Met Office page, so any help with that would be greatly appreciated. UPDATE: The depths can be found by clicking <a href="">the tab above the map marked "table". (Thanks to Bernd for that info.)
Secondly, from what I can gather from a Google Translation of an Icelandic article, there is also signs of inflation at Eyjafjallajökull. The article seems to suggest that the volcano has seen ~40 mm of movement/inflation to the south based on GPS measurements and that the focus of seismicity (when the article was written) was ~10 km below the surface of the volcano. (And any of you Icelandic readers, I'd love to get a better translation!) This would also suggest that magma might be entering the upper echelons of Eyjafjallajökull's magmatic system. UPDATE: It appears that the Icelandic Met Office doesn't think this is leading to an eruption (Thanks to Orri with help on the translation).
Taken together, it looks like Eyjafjallajökull is a prime candidate for the next eruption on Iceland. Eyjafjallajökull (also known as merely Eyjafjöll) is one of a series of volcano systems on the south side of Iceland, near Katla. Amongst the Icelandic volcanoes, it has been relatively quiet, with the last known eruption occurring from 1821 until 1823, with evidence for eruptions in 1612 and 550 AD. The last two eruptions have been VEI 2, with explosive characteristics - and with a volcano under a glacier, we always have the threat of jökulhlaup - glacial outburst flows triggered by the volcanic eruption. And unlike many Icelandic volcanoes, the last eruption of Eyjafjallajökull was produced silicic to intermediate tephra rather than basalt. The larger volcanoes on Iceland such as Eyjafjallajökull, Katla and Krafla have all produced rhyolite eruptions in the dominantly basaltic land - and the rhyolite magma that was hit while drilling last year shows that you can get very silicic magmas even in a hot spot/mid-ocean ridge setting.
{Hat tip to Dr. Boris Behncke and Mattias Larsson for info in this post.}
Beer makes humans more attractive to malarial mosquitoes [Not Exactly Rocket Science]
We've all heard about "beer goggles", the mythical, invisible eyewear that makes everyone else seem incredibly attractive after a few pints too many. If only beer had the reverse effect, making the drinker seem irresistibly attractive. Well, the good news is that beer does actually do this. The bad news is that the ones who are attracted are malarial mosquitoes.
Anopheles gambiae (the mosquito that transmits malaria) tracks its victims by their smells. By wafting the aromas of humans over thousands of mosquitoes, Thierry Lefevre found that they find the body odour of beer drinkers to be quite tantalising. The smell of tee-total water drinkers just can't compare. The somewhat quirky conclusion from the study, albeit one with public health implications, is that drinking beer could increase the risk of contracting malaria.
Lefevre recruited 43 men from Burkina Faso and sent them individually into one of two sealed, outdoors tents. One tent was kept unoccupied. In the second, the volunteer had to drink either a litre of water (just shy of two pints) or a litre of dolo (a local 3% beer and the country's most popular alcoholic drink). A fan pumped air from the tents, body odour and all, into the two forks of a Y-shaped apparatus. Both branches met in a third arm, which ended in a cup full of mosquitoes. The insects had to decide which branch of the Y to fly down and two pieces of gauze trapped them in their chosen path (and saved the volunteers from an infectious bite).
Lefevre showed that the smell of a beer drinker, 15 minutes after chugging his litre, increased the proportion of mosquitoes inclined to fly into the tubes, and the proportion (65%) who headed down the beer-scented fork. The smell of water-drinkers had no effect, nor did the smell of the occupied tent before its inhabitant started drinking.
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Nature Network Has A Brand New Look [The Primate Diaries]
Think you know Nature Network? Wait till you see what they're up to now. The members of my former parish have now unveiled their long awaited MT4 platform and you can re-experience all of their wonderful science blogginess updated afresh for your viewing pleasure.
The administrators announced the news yesterday at Schemes and Memes:
Nature Network turned three last month. During our early years, we've enjoyed thousands of illuminating, entertaining and sometimes controversial posts from our diverse pool of bloggers. Now, exciting new changes are afoot.
From tomorrow, Nature Network's blogs will have a high-profile new home on the Nature.com Blogs site, where they'll feature alongside Nature Publishing Group's highly regarded blogs, such as The Great Beyond, Nautilus and The Sceptical Chymist. In other words, all the blogs hosted by Nature will be brought together in one scintillating web site.
Links to new blog posts, recent comments and popular posts will still appear on Nature Network's blogs page as ever, but the real meat - the words, pictures, videos, maps, thoughts and theories of our bloggers - will now appear at blogs.nature.com.
Cllimategate and what it means for science [Tomorrow's Table]
John Broder writes today in the New York Times that the uproar over the unauthorized release of hundreds of emails and recent revelations about a mistake in the IPCC report threatens to undermine decades of work and has badly damaged public trust in the scientific enterprise.
Broder's interviews with scientists reveal two thoughtful but seemingly opposing viewpoints:
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Why Lindsey Graham Frames Cap and Trade As "Dead" [Framing Science]
Graham, Kerry, Lieberman, and Gore all share the same goal but are moving to differentiate themselves as a way to claim credit for climate action and to appeal to different audience segments.
At The NYTimes.com, Greewire's Darren Samuelsohn examines Senator Lindsey Graham's strategy to define cap and trade legislation as "dead." The Senator's declaration has been most notably quoted in a January article at the New York Times and in an article Saturday at the Washington Post, with his remarks much discussed and debated among other members of Congress, by advocates, in the blogosphere, across various talk media outlets, and even as Samuelsohn reports, by foreign governments.
Here's what Graham tells Samuelsohn is behind his strategy:
Bigger picture, Graham explained his reason for declaring "cap-and-trade is dead" is more about framing the debate for public consumption than anything else.
"This started with the planet is heating up and Iowa is going to become beachfront property," he said. "Now people go around not saying that much. I think they've oversold the consequences to climate change, to global warming. And the momentum around this large cap-and-trade bill to save the planet has been replaced by a business model: How do we create jobs and stay ahead of the Chinese and clean up the air? Once you start changing your perspective from 'Iowa is going to be beachfront property' to 'How do you create jobs and clean up the air?' you have a completely different focus."
He added, "We're going to fundamentally change how we price carbon looking at the economy differently than we have in the past. And the goal of this bill is not only to clean up the air but to create energy independence and jobs. The goal of cap and trade was to solve the Al Gore problem. I'm trying to solve the Lindsey Graham problem."
After interviewing Graham yesterday, Samuelsohn called me this morning, asking what I thought the motives behind this strategy might be and the possible impacts. Here's what I said:
Matt Nisbet, a professor of communications at American University, sees an opportunity for better public debate in the wake of Graham's comments declaring the end to the broad cap-and-trade approach.
"I think what's happening politically is we're moving from a very narrow limited focus on just one option," he said.
In the past, the longtime focus among politicians and reporters was on cap and trade alone, squeezing out other options like a carbon tax or a cap-and-dividend approach.
"Most of the discussion is not on substance, but rather political viability and the game or jockeying in order to win support," Nisbet said.
Nisbet said the single-tracked focus has soured the public's understanding of the legislative debate and all of its complexities. "What you have is a picture for the public of a lot of ideological crossfire from the left and right over a policy that very few members of the public understands, or even cares to understand," he said.
Looking forward, opponents will slap the "cap and tax" title on the bill no matter what sponsors say.
But he predicted that Graham's message about energy independence and jobs may be the right strategy, especially as he speaks to a different constituent group of independents and Southern voters, compared with some of the movement's traditional leaders.
"Even though they might share the same goals, Lindsey Graham, Al Gore and John Kerry, they're also trying to differentiate among themselves and claim credit for achieving those goals," Nisbet said.
For more on communication strategy related to climate change, see this video clip from American University's Forum on "The Climate Change Generation: Youth, Media, and Politics in an Unsustainable World."
Why Is Liberia Being Robbed? [The Primate Diaries]
Yesterday the BBC aired an investigative report documenting how American "vultures," such as New York-based Eric Hermann at hedge fund FH International, bought up debt from Liberia for pennies on the dollar and are now forcing Liberia's impoverished government to pay in full. This is at the same time that Western governments have been erasing this odious debt from years past.
The effect of Hermann's financial maneuvers earns few applause in Liberia. In that African democracy, diplomat Winston Tubman tells us what he would say to vulture fund operators, "'Do you know you are causing babies to die all over Liberia?'"
That's strong language, but in Liberia, we see the effects of the threat of losing over million from this desperately poor nation's budget. In the village of Demeh, I meet Howa Murvee. During Liberia's recent civil war, her grandfather was beaten to death in front of her. Every home in the village was destroyed. Now, with money from selling donuts at a rural bus stop, she has raised the 0 need for materials to rebuild her mud-and-thatch home.
[Watch the report below]
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The bacterial zoo in your bowel [Not Exactly Rocket Science]
You are outnumbered by a factor of 10 to one, by forces you cannot see. Your body has around ten trillion cells, but it's also home to a hundred trillion bacteria. For every gene in your genome, there are 100 bacterial ones. Most of these are found the dark, dank environment of your bowel but their incredible diversity is being brought to the surface. Say hello to the gut metagenome.
Together with a team of international scientists, Junjie Qin and Ruiqiang Li from BGI-Shenzen had the unenviable task of studying the bacteria from the faeces of 124 Europeans. They used a formidable and audacious technique called metagenomics, which analyses all the genetic material in a sample, without bothering to culture the individual species first. It's a shoot-first-ask-questions-later method that captures all the data and lets other programmes sort out the mess.
Stool samples from 33 people have already been analysed in this way, but Qin and Li managed to sequence almost 200 times as much DNA. Brace yourself for some big numbers. Their project uncovered just under 3.3 million bacterial genes, more than 150 times as many as reside in the entire human genome. By their estimate, your bowel and mine harbour at least 160 bacterial species each and we share many of our tenants (I say bacteria, but around 1% of the genes came from archaea, a superficially similar group but one that's actually as different from bacteria as bacteria are from us).
The quest to understand gut microbes may seem like an arcane niche of science, but it's actually very important for public health. We rely on these microscopic passengers more than we realise. They harvest energy from our food, provide us with nutrients that would otherwise be denied to us, prevent the growth of harmful bacteria, and more. In many ways, they're like a forgotten organ. They can also go rogue, changing their community in ways that are linked to obesity or bowel diseases. Indeed, Qin and Li showed that the gut microbiome of a health person looks very different to that of someone with a bowel condition like Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis.
All in all, over 1,000 species make their living in the human bowel but a common cadre of 57 are shared by the vast majority of us. Even for this common set, each individual species could be thousands of times more common in your gut compared to mine. With such variation, it's no wonder that earlier smaller studies concluded that people have very different gut lodgers.
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Will you solve the Rubik’s cube at the USA Science and Engineering Festival? [USA Science and Engineering Festival: The Blog]
You CAN do the Rubik's cube Tournament is taking place at the USA Science and Engineering Festival.Have you signed up yet?
43 quintillion different combinations...
I don't believe I have actually ever solved a Rubik's cube, so after finding out that we are going to have a Rubik's cube competition at the USA Science and Engineering Festival I went out and bought one...for research purposes of course. After all, I am a scientist and my curiosity got the better of me as this website claims that I CAN learn how to solve a Rubik's cube. Working with a '7 steps solution guide of on how to solve the cube ' so far it seems that the key to solving a Rubik's cube is part muscle memory and part pattern recognition. I have only been able to solve one side so far...but I'll keep the blog posted periodically on my progress. Sign up a K-12 student here for the competition. There is plenty of time to learn how to solve the cube! Check out some back ground info on Rubik's cubes below.
In the process of learning how to solve a Rubik's cube I discovered the sport of ''speedcubing". World Record holders can solve the puzzle in less than 10 seconds! That is pretty amazing! Better get back to practicing.