NASA - NASA'S Spitzer Sees Milky Way's Blooming Countryside

June 10, 2013, 3:03 am

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PASADENA, Calif. -- New views from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope show blooming stars in our Milky Way galaxy's more barren territories, far from its crowded core. The images are part of the Galactic Legacy Infrared Mid-Plane Survey Extraordinaire (Glimpse 360) project, which is mapping the celestial topography of our galaxy. The map and a full, 360-degree view of the Milky Way plane will be available later this year. Anyone with a computer may view the Glimpse images and help catalog features. We live in a spiral collection of stars that is mostly flat, like a vinyl record, but it has a slight warp. Our solar system is located about two-thirds of the way out from the Milky Way's center, in the Orion Spur, an offshoot of the Perseus spiral arm. Spitzer's infrared observations are allowing researchers to map the shape of the galaxy and its warp with the most precision yet. While Spitzer and other telescopes have created mosaics of the galaxy's plane looking in the direction of its center before, the region behind us, with its sparse stars and dark skies, is less charted. "We sometimes call this flyover country," said Barbara Whitney, an astronomer from the University of Wisconsin at Madison who uses Spitzer to study young stars. "We are finding all sorts of new star formation in the lesser-known areas at the outer edges of the galaxy."

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Could A Volcano Power America?

June 10, 2013, 3:03 am

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An ambitious experiment is underway to harness the heat of a volcano in central Oregon. The process is green, efficient... and causes earthquakes. In October, at the Deschutes National Forest in central Oregon, a team of scientists and engineers began pumping 11 million gallons of water underground, right near the caldera of the famed Newberry Volcano. The Northwest weather was a cool 50 degrees most days, about the same temperature as the water the engineers drove, up to 375 gallons a minute, 10,000 feet into the ground. There, deep in the earth’s crust, the temperature reaches more than 600 degrees. That’s what the engineers were pumping for: If everything goes according to plan, a company called AltaRock Energy will suck the super-heated water from underground and use it to spin turbines and juice the area with renewable power. Over the next two months, the engineers would keep pumping the water, as the weather started to turn. Snow gathered itself up tree trunks and the engineers' equipment, eventually forcing them to lower ground. All the while, the team listened for rumblings from deep underground. The water pushed against fractures deep in the earth at 2,400 pounds per square inch, more pressure than an alligator's bite, expanding natural cracks in the rock until a network of watery tunnels formed below ground. Not long after starting, the team picked up the first earthquake, then, over the course of their experiment, picked up 219 more.

Do It: 20 Years of Famous Artists’ Irreverent Instructions for Art Anyone ...

June 10, 2013, 3:03 am

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“Art is something that you encounter and you know it’s in a different kind of space from the rest of your life, but is directly connected to it.”One afternoon in 1993, legendary art critic, curator, and interviewer extraordinaire Hans Ulrich Obrist — mind of great wisdom on matters as diverse as the relationship between patterns and chance and the trouble with “curation” itself — sat down in Paris’s Café Select with fellow co-conspirers Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier, and the do it project was born: A series of instructional procedures by some of the greatest figures in contemporary art, designed for anyone to follow as a sort of DIY toolkit for creating boundary-expanding art. Over the twenty years that followed, manifestations of the project popped up in exhibitions around the world, from the most underground galleries to the most prestigious museums.Twenty years later, Obrist is releasing Do It: The Compendium (public library) — a wide-ranging medley of artist instructions spanning performance art, sculpture, urban intervention, philosophical reflection, and even recipes from, contributors like Lawrence Weiner, Louise Bourgeois, Ai Weiwei, Douglas Coupland, David Lynch, and Sol LeWitt. The project, above all, explores art as unbridling of author and authority, art as internationalism, art as a homage and a middle finger to Art. It lives somewhere between Yoko Ono’s instructions for art and life, John Cage’s interpretable notations, and Philip Glass’s notion of authorship as transformation.

Why I Moved My Blog From Wired

June 10, 2013, 3:03 am

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Apologia: This is a bit inside-baseball, but as quite a few people have asked me what’s the full skinny on why I moved my blog from WIRED, I thought it best to leave a post particularly about that. No dirt here, in case you’re wondering; if you were looking for a whack at WIRED, adjust your expectations.The reasons, more innocent, boil down to two: Changes in my own work priorities; and changes in the media and blogging ecosystem.The prime reason I’m moving is so I can focus more steadily for a time on finishing my book, which I’ve mentioned often here, tentatively titled The Orchid and the Dandelion (Crown). I know some people manage it, but I’ve found it hard to reconcile the demands of blogging at a venue like Wired and of writing a serious book that requires deep immersion: a matter of not just the time each venture requires, but of what you might call the focal length of one’s mental lens. A venue like Wired requires, methinks, either an unrelenting focus on a particular beat or fairly steady and regular surveys of many fields; I can’t seem to mesh either with the sort of time and focus needed for a book. The move also frees me to experiment a bit more at the blog. I hope to see what sort of more Tumblr-like approach I can take at Neuron Culture now that it’s in a self-hosted venue.

Supercontinent: how the world is moving together

June 10, 2013, 3:03 am

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Our planet used to be made up of one huge land mass. And it will be again (in a few million years), with Australia heading for Asia and North Africa on a collision course with EuropeThis year is the 50th anniversary of one of 20th-century science's most important discoveries – the revelation that the land below us is on the move; that the continents we live on are creeping across the globe.In September 1963, two Cambridge geophysicists – Fred Vine and Drummond Mathews – interpreted a zebra-like magnetic striping of the Pacific ocean floor as the result of a conveyor belt of new crust spreading out of submarine volcanic ridges. That idea of oceans spreading quickly became a central plank in the theory of a mobile Earth. Plate tectonics revealed to scientists that the static geography depicted in every world map is a mere planetary snapshot – the latest freeze-frame in a drama that has played out on the surface of Earth for billions of years.Many times in Earth's past the continents have been dispersed across the globe, kept apart by spreading oceans. But eventually oceans begin to close, and far-flung lands are drawn inexorably together. They fuse in crunching collisions, welding themselves into single vast terrains: supercontinents.

Best Summer Books: SA‘s Picks and Yours | Observations, Scientific American ...

June 10, 2013, 3:03 am

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All year long Scientific American editors, bloggers and contributors mull over and write about recently published science books worth reading. These works cover everything from ancient quantum computing to surviving a mass extinction. The “Recommended” page in our magazine offers monthly reviews; we have a “Books” section on our Web site that features our eBooks and our imprint with Farrar, Strauss & Giroux; and many of our bloggers focus on fiction and non-fiction (for instance, Literally Psyched) or even write them (see Becky Crew’s Zombie Tits, Astronaut Fish and Other Weird Animals (University of South Wales Press, 2013), Scott Barry Kaufman’s Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined (Basic Books, 2013), Maria Konnikova’s Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes (Viking, 2013) and Katherine Harmon Courage’s upcoming Octopus! The Most Mysterious Creature in the Sea (Current Hardcover, 2013). When summertime arrives, it often affords sweet time to dive more deeply into one’s stacks of books. Below is a list of many of our writers’ top selections for this summer, all of which have been published between January 1, 2013, and August 1, 2013.The list is incomplete and subjective, of course. Which notable 2013 science titles have we left out or overlooked? Please let us know by leaving a comment below or by tweeting your suggested titles at @sciam with the hashtag #sabooks.

Starwatch: Scorpius

June 10, 2013, 3:03 am

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The approaching solstice ensures that our June nights are brief and awash with twilight, particularly over northern Britain. Our latitudes also mean that Scorpius, one of the most interesting constellations in the entire sky, remains partly hidden as it slides westwards across the S horizon.The chart above, some 35° wide, looks S at 01:00 BST at present and shows the whole of Scorpius as it appears from 40° N, roughly the latitude of Madrid. As we travel northwards, though, the horizon climbs higher and the southern parts of the scorpion, its tail and Stinger, dip lower in the sky and eventually disappear from view. Dashed lines indicate the horizon for London and Edinburgh.The leading star of Scorpius, the red supergiant Antares, shines near mag 1.0 from about 550 light years (ly). Its distinctive hue helps it to stand out when it is so low in our twilit sky and comes from its relatively cool surface near 3,100C as compared with our Sun's 5,500C. It is 60,000 times more luminous and perhaps 800 times wider than our Sun so that, if the two exchanged places, it would engulf both the Earth and Mars.Like many red supergiants, Antares pulsates a little in size, but its brightness variations are less spectacular than those of the hot blue star Delta to its west. Also called Dschubba, Delta has been ejecting swathes of gaseous material since 2000 and varying erratically between mag 2.3 and 1.6, a factor of two.

ResearchGate to nowhere?

June 10, 2013, 3:03 am

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I’m a little baffled by the recent $35M funding round, which included Bill Gates, for social network for scientists ResearchGate. And of course the media baiting quote from RG that it wants to win a Nobel Prize for its efforts.One look at the traffic stats tells you all you need to know as a potential investor. The graph below is from Alexa, which is known to undercount traffic, but it can be used to reliably compare competitors relative to each other. The redline is Academia.edu and the blue is ResearchGate over the past six months. Alexa ranks RG at the 5,433 most visited site, with Academia.edu at 2,686 most visited.While RG claims to have 2.9M users, only a very tiny fraction of those are actives. Other traffic analytics stats confirm these numbers. My guess is roughly

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Saudi prince launches libel action against Forbes magazine over Rich List

June 10, 2013, 3:03 am

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Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who owns London's Savoy hotel, claims US publication undervalued his wealth by $9.6bnSaudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal is suing Forbes magazine for underestimating his wealth. Photograph: Yasser Al-Zayyat/AFPSaudi Arabia's Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, one of the world's wealthiest businessmen who owns assets including London's Savoy hotel, has launched a libel action against the business magazine Forbes over claims it underestimated his fortune by $9.6bn.Alwaleed, who is often described as the most influential businessman in the Middle East, vowed to sever ties with Forbes in March when its coveted annual Rich List valued him at $20bn – placing him as the 26th most wealthy billionaire on the planet.The prince insisted he was worth closer to $30bn and accused the respected US magazine of being "demonstrably biased" against Saudi Arabian firms.Now Alwaleed has taken his complaints about the magazine to the high court in London, filing a defamation claim against the Forbes publisher, its editor Randall Lane and two of its journalists, according to court documents seen by the Guardian.Through his Saudi-based investment vehicle, Kingdom Holding, Alwaleed owns large stakes in Apple, Twitter and Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation and has built a formidable property portfolio, including the Savoy Hotel in London and the Plaza in New York.

One Photographer's Experience Documenting Mentally Ill Inmates | Art Beat: ...

June 10, 2013, 3:03 am

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An inmate on max assault status and 23-hour lock down talks to himself in his cell. Max assault status is issued to inmates who have attacked officers or treatment staff. The inmates have been known to throw a mixture of feces and urine, spit, hit, kick, punch or cut. Photos by Jenn Ackerman.What happens to someone suffering from mental illness after they commit a crime? Are they treated for their illness during their incarceration? Is their treatment sufficient or will they be sent back to the streets without the necessary help to prevent future damage? With the mass shootings in Newtown, Conn., Aurora, Colo., and countless others before, the treatment of mental illness has become a highly debated national issue. The conversation has largely been about prevention, treating the mentally ill before they commit a crime. But what happens after the crime is committed? What is the prison system like for the mentally ill and the people responsible for managing them?Minneapolis photographer Jenn Ackerman set out to find out the answers to these questions. For her project Trapped, she spent months in the Correctional Psychiatric Treatment Unit (CPTU) of the Kentucky State Reformatory to learn about the experiences of the mentally ill confined in the prison system.

Happy Father’s Day to all Superdads | Illusion Chasers, Scientific American ...

June 10, 2013, 3:03 am

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Photographer Giulia Pex has come up with the coolest Father Day’s present ever. Her series “Dad, you are my favourite superhero” mixes drawing, illustration and photography to showcase her dad’s alter egos as the Man of Steel or the Dark Knight.The surprisingly effective and deceptively simple comic-book style portraits convey both affection and spur-of-the-moment spontaneity. With the possible exception of dad’s characterization as Spiderman’s nemesis, supervillain Dr. Octopus, that is.

The spy who came in for your soul

June 10, 2013, 3:03 am

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A shop assistant uses the eftpos system at a store in Sydney December 11, 2012.  REUTERS/Tim WimborneLeaks to the press, like hillside rain tugged seaward by gravity, gather momentum only if the flow is steadily replenished.After a major leak to the Guardian‘s Glenn Greenwald resulted in a scoop Wednesday about the National Security Administration’s harvesting of phone records, reporters instantly mined their back pages for leads and rang up their sources to amplify and extend his story, and went looking for leakers of their own. In other words, the press pack prayed for rain.But before that scoop had run its course, Greenwald (and Ewen MacAskill) went to press with another revelation about the NSA’s Prism program, which collects email, chat, VOIP conversations, file transfers, photos, videos and more from Web users. A similar Washington Post piece by Barton Gellman and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras beat the Guardian duo by a few minutes, a downpour in a very short time. The Guardian-Post overlap was so pronounced that it’s likely the two publications were nurtured by the same source, identified in the Post as “a career intelligence officer.”Friday afternoon, Greenwald and MacAskill dropped another bombshell about Obama’s cyberattack plans in the Guardian. These aren’t leaks. This is a flood.

The real NSA scandal? The horrible slides.

June 10, 2013, 3:03 am

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The Yale political scientist and data visualization guru Edward Tufte went off on the NSA for its horrific PowerPoint graphics Thursday night:Dreadful spy-PRISM deck sets new record for most header logos per slide: 13 washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special… #powerpoint #ppt twitter.com/EdwardTufte/st…List of spy-PRISM collected information includes nearly everything, except PPT decks. No useful information at all? twitter.com/EdwardTufte/st…PRISM “providers”: classic PPT statistical graphic: 13 logos, 10 numbers, 9 bubbles, 1 giant green arrow. #powerpoint twitter.com/EdwardTufte/st…

To Light a Fire

June 10, 2013, 3:03 am

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At one magical instant  the page of a book – that string of confused, alien ciphers–shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader.- Alberto ManguelEverywhere I go in the world, I see young and old,rich and poor, reading books.Whether readers are engaged in the sacred or the secular,they are, for a time, transported to  another world. We are familiar with words describing images, but not sofamiliar with images describing words and theimpact reading has on our lives.Garrett Stewart’s book, The Look of Reading:Book, Painting, Text, explores the relationship ofreading and art.He points out that a wide array of artists from Rembrandt to  Picasso and Cassattand dozens more,over the past 500 yearshave painted people reading and the “look of reading” on the subjects’ faces.A great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty. - Pablo NerudaBooks are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home. - Anna QuindlenThere is no frigate like a bookTo take us lands away,Nor any coursers like a pageOf prancing poetry.This traverse may the poorest takeWithout oppress of toll;How frugal is the chariotThat bears a human soul!- Emily Dickinson

This chart explains why cities are at the center of innovation

June 10, 2013, 3:03 am

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It’s obvious from human history that people have long found unique value in living and working in cities, even if for reasons they couldn’t quite articulate. Put people together, and opportunities and ideas and wealth seem to grow at a more powerful rate than a simple sum of all our numbers. This has been intuitively true for centuries of city-dwellers.There have been plenty of theories. Adam Smith famously figured that people become more productive when we’re able to specialize, each of us honing a separate area of expertise. And when lots of us elbow into cities, we’re able to specialize in ways that we can’t when a rural farmer must also double as his own butcher, accountant and milkmaid. Other economists have suggested that cities become great agglomerators of industry when factories cluster together around economies of scale and communal access to transportation.“We think there’s an underlying completely different way of thinking here, which is very different from the economist’s way of thinking,” says Pan, a doctoral candidate in computational social science in the MIT Media Laboratory’s Human Dynamics Lab. Previous work by researchers at the Santa Fe Institute has proven the math behind the power of cities: As they grow in population, all kinds of positive outcomes like patents and GDP and innovation (and negative ones like STDs and crime) grow at an exponential factor of 1.1 to 1.3.

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The secret history of psychedelic psychiatry

June 10, 2013, 3:03 am

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On August 15th, 1951, an outbreak of hallucinations, panic attacks and psychotic episodes swept through the town of Pont-Saint-Esprit in southern France, hospitalizing dozens of its inhabitants and leaving five people dead. Doctors concluded that the incident occurred because bread in one of the town’s bakeries had been contaminated with ergot, a toxic fungus that grows on rye. But according to investigative journalist Hank Albarelli, the CIA had actually dosed the bread with d-lysergic acid diethylamide-25 (LSD), an extremely potent hallucinogenic drug derived from ergot, as part of a mind control research project.Although we may never learn the truth behind the events at Pont-Saint-Esprit, it is now well known that the United States Army experimented with LSD on willing and unwilling military personnel and civilians. Less well known is the work of a group of psychiatrists working in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, who pioneered the use of LSD as a treatment for alcoholism, and claimed that it produced unprecedented rates of recovery. Their findings were soon brushed under the carpet, however, and research into the potential therapeutic effects of psychedelics was abruptly halted in the late 1960s, leaving a promising avenue of research unexplored for some 40 years.The secret history of psychedelic psychiatry began in the early 1950s, about 10 years after Albert Hofmann discovered the hallucinogenic properties of LSD, and lasted until 1970. It was uncovered by medical historian Erika Dyck, who examined the archives from Canadian mental health researchers and conducted interviews with some of the psychiatrists, patients and nurses involved in the early LSD trials. Dyck’s work shows early LSD experimentation in a new light, as a fruitful branch of mainstream psychiatric research: it redefined alcoholism as a disease that could be cured and played a role in the psychopharmacological revolution which radically transformed psychiatry. But, despite some encouraging results, it was cut short prematurely.

Psychedelic Academe

June 10, 2013, 3:03 am

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You don't have to spend much time at the six-day second international Psychedelic Science conference in downtown Oakland to learn that not all its 1,900 attendees are academic scientists, and that few are strangers to the power of mind-bending drugs.On my first day, boarding the conference's sunset cruise of San Francisco Bay, I meet Chad, a middle-aged man dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, who says his trips with magic mushrooms have reawakened him to the beauty of existence. "I am here out of curiosity," he explains, adding that he has a desire to understand what he has experienced. "It is just really nice to know they are breaking through some of the barriers with formal research. God knows there is a lot of informal research."As the sun sets behind the Golden Gate Bridge, I meet Seabrook. Wearing rings in both ears and a flower badge pinned to his cap, he says he has never had a bad trip in more than 20 LSD experiences. "The main thing I love about this is it is a reunion—I have so many old friends here it is like a family," he says.At least half the attendees on the cruise disembark early in San Francisco to join a celebration of Bicycle Day, commemorating the day in April 1943 that the Swiss chemist Albert Hofman sampled the lysergic acid diethylamide compound that he'd discovered and then rode his bike home.

Friday Weird Science: There once was a moth that lived on a sloth…

June 10, 2013, 3:03 am

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There once was a moth That lived on a sloth All snuggled in tight in its hair But it's small fry eat crap So to avoid a food trap Moths have to lay all their eggs...down there.Waage and Montgomery. "Cryptoses choloepi: A Coprophagous Moth That Lives on a Sloth" Science, 1976.Ah. Coprophagy. It may sound like a weird fetish, but in fact the consumption of crap (and I don't mean fast food) can provide a lot of nutrition. Many species, like sloths, for example, eat a lot of plant matter. Plants are pretty tough to digest, and some of the nutrition is just going to go right through you. Some animals, like rabbits, reduce, reuse, and recycle, by eating their own poop. But sloths have different priorities.Sloths are slow. When they are hanging almost motionless in the trees, camouflaged by the algae that live in their fur to blend in with the leaves, they are relatively safe from predators. There is little movement to detect, and then of course, if you're going to eat it, you often have to go out on a limb, so to speak. And who can blame them? Aren't we all a little vulnerable when dropping some kids off at the pool? But sloths are more than a little vulnerable. They climb down from the trees to the ground to do the business. They hang on to a lower branch, dig a hole with their hind feet, poop delicately in their homemade latrine, and then cover it up with leaves, to hide the smell from potential predators.

Ancient Martians May Have Been Hydrogen Powered : DNews

June 10, 2013, 3:03 am

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While it’s hard to imagine much life surviving on the arid surface of Mars, there’s still some hope of finding Martian life in underground habitats. But for any life forms to survive, they’d need some kind of energy source, like the way we breathe oxygen. One interesting possibility is that Mars life may be hydrogen powered.A group of researchers led by Lisa Mayhew, of CU Boulder, has identified a particular chemical reaction that may take place between iron-containing minerals and water, which produces hydrogen gas. So much hydrogen gas, in fact, that it could potentially support life in underground habitats — either here on our own planet, or in similar ecological niches on Mars.Specifically, this chemical reaction is known to occur between seawater and igneous rocks under the ocean floor. Near hydrothermal vents, at high temperatures, the rocks release iron ions into the water that react with the surrounding water to produce iron oxides and hydrogen gas.While this hydrogen (dissolved in the water) is produced in regions too hot for life to flourish (over 200°C), it seeps out from the rocks into cooler regions where some microbes are already known to be sustained by it. Mayhew and her colleagues have found the first evidence that this reaction can work perfectly well at lower temperatures too. She explains, ”Water-rock reactions that produce hydrogen gas are thought to have been one of the earliest sources of energy for life on Earth.”

Crap.

June 10, 2013, 3:03 am

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Jun 09 2013 Commenting RulesThe Desert Tortoises With Boltcutters Civility Pledge [Introductions]: Meet the other commenters The [Lounge]: a safe space; friendly chat; moderated The [Thunderdome]: no-holds-barred unmoderated chaos Chris Clarke is a science and natural history writer, editor, and environmental protection activist in Joshua Tree, California. • Coyote Crossing • my writing at KCET • Desert Biodiversity • Facebook • Twitter • Google Plus • Walking With Zeke • Walking With Zeke (iBookstore)I reserve the right to publicly post, with full identifying information about the source, any email sent to me that contains threats of violence.