Welcome to Science Saturday, where you can join the Overnight News Digest crew in celebrating this week's news in science, space, and the environment. As usual, we begin the festivities with a slide show of this week's news in science, courtesy of the New York Times.
The Milky Way’s Missing Arms and New Bacteria
Also pictured, a possible landing spot for the next Mars Rover, the nucleus of a mouse cell during division, brown dwarfs, rapidly uplifted rocks in Bolivia, and a polar bear in Iceland.
More on these and other science stories after the jump. Also this week, a special reader feature in the comments--stay tuned!
Slideshow
On the Northern Martian Plains
The first week on Mars for the Phoenix Martian Lander.
Mining Sulfur
Mining sulfur from a volcano in Indonesia.
Astronomy/Space
Space.com: Black Holes Key to Spiral Arm Hugs
ST. LOUIS — As if in a cosmic hug, the spiral arms of some galaxies wrap around themselves more tightly than others. The key to the bear hug: Galaxies holding heftier black holes at their centers also have more tightly wound spiral arms, an astronomer announced today.
The finding gives astronomers a way to weigh so-called supermassive black holes, which can have masses of millions to billions that of the sun, and are thought to reside at the centers of galaxies.
"This is a really easy way to determine the masses of these super-massive black holes at the centers of galaxies that are very far away," said researcher Marc Seigar, an astrophysicist at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. "This gives us a way to measure the size of these black holes out to larger distances than ever before, up to 8 billion light-years away."
Space.com: New Images: Milky Way Loses Two Arms
ST. LOUIS — For decades, astronomers have pictured our galaxy as sporting four major, spiral arms, however new images effectively sever two appendages, revealing the Milky Way has just two major arms.
"We're not proposing that they change the positions of the arms," said Robert Benjamin of the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater. "What we're proposing is a change in the emphasis of the arms." Benjamin will present his team's results today here at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS).
Space.com: New Mini-Planet Is Lightweight Champ
ST. LOUIS — There's a new extrasolar planet on the block: a mini-orb likely covered with a deep ocean. And it takes the record for the lowest mass exoplanet to orbit a normal star, astrophysicists announced today.
The li'l planet — weighing in at three times Earth's mass — grabs the lightweight title from a five Earth-mass planet just announced in April.
Space.com: Martian Soil Sample Clogs Phoenix Probe's Oven
The lander's robotic arm released a handful of clumpy Martian soil onto a screened opening of the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA) on Friday, but the instrument did not confirm that any of the sample passed through the screen.
Images taken on Friday show soil resting on the screen over an open sample-delivery door of TEGA, which is designed to heat up soil samples and analyze the vapors they give off to determine the soil's composition.
The researchers have not yet determined why none of the sample appears to have gotten past the screen, but they have begun proposing possibilities.
Houston Chronicle: Japanese space lab doubles in size
The shuttle Discovery's astronauts linked two Japanese modules aboard the international space station Friday, making the largest science lab aboard the orbital outpost even bigger.
The operation using the station's robot arm mated two of the three segments that will eventually make up a $2.3 billion Japanese Kibo lab complex. A third segment, an open platform for external science experiments, is scheduled to launch aboard a shuttle mission next year.
Friday's assembly activities gave Kibo a two-story appearance, a first-floor module to house astronauts while they carry out physics, biology and medical experiments, plus an "attic."
Houston Chronicle: Astronauts successfully test Japanese lab's robotic arm
Astronauts debuted the international space station's newest piece of equipment Saturday during a successful but very limited test.
Space shuttle Discovery crew members Akihiko Hoshide and Karen Nyberg moved two of the six joints on the Japanese Kibo lab's robotic arm for the first time, maneuvering them very slightly with a series of commands.
"The very first maneuver was completed successfully," Hoshide told Japanese flight controllers near Tokyo.
Space.com: Astronauts Fix Space Station Toilet
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) appeared to solve the orbiting lab's toilet troubles Wednesday as they prepared to open a new Japanese laboratory for business.
Space station flight engineer Oleg Kononenko replaced a failed pump in the station's Russian-built commode in a fix that restored the space toilet's ability to collect liquid waste.
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Three initial tests of the system appeared to be successful, with Russian engineers giving the station crew the go ahead to use the repaired toilet for now and report on its status.
Houston Chronicle: Launch pad damaged in shuttle's liftoff, NASA says
The Kennedy Space Center launch pad used by the shuttle Discovery was significantly damaged as the ship and its seven astronauts lifted off on Saturday, the space agency said on Monday.
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The damage stretches along one of the two "flame trenches" that directs exhaust away from the structure as the shuttle's three rocket engines and two solid rocket boosters ignite.
The force of the liftoff blew flame-proof brick and concrete at least several hundred feet away from the trench on the north side, said NASA's LeRoy Cain, who chairs the shuttle mission management team.
NASA has created "an investigative board to assess the cause of the damage and prepare repair options."
AP via Houston Chronicle: NASA says European ship would ease station trips
NASA encouraged Europe on Thursday to develop its own manned spaceship, which would give the world — and particularly the U.S. — another way to reach the international space station.
Europe became "a full-fledged space power," NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said when flight controllers at a European Space Agency center guided an unmanned cargo ship to the international space station in April, successfully delivering food, water and clothes.
"It would be a small step" to develop that technology into "an independent European human spaceflight capability," Griffin said.
Biodiversity
N.Y. Times Dot Earth Blog: Stars and State Department Fight Wildlife Trade
Thursday was World Environment Day, and the green messages were flowing all around, including one from Alain Robert, a French stuntman and activist who scaled the jungle-gym like exterior of The New York Times headquarters to hang a banner about the human cost of global warming.
Over at another tall gray building, the United Nations, a campaign was unveiled involving the State Department, a couple of celebrities, and a coalition of countries and groups seeking to curb the trade in illegally-harvested wildlife and related products.
The centerpiece is a series of short video advertisements, featuring Harrison Ford, discouraging people from buying pets, curios, medicines or other goods that are part of this $10-billion-a-year illicit trade. (Bo Derek, a State Department envoy on the issue, is the other celebrity.)
N.Y. Times Dot Earth Blog: Polar Bear Shot in Iceland; Icy Spring May Have Led It There
A polar bear that showed up in Iceland, presumably after drifting on ice flowing south from Greenland this spring, was shot and killed by a team led by police officers on the ground that it posed a threat to people. This has happened before, the last time in 1993, according to Icelandic and British news reports, which said there were records of polar bears in the country back to the year 890.
AP via the N.Y. Times: 7 Condors Poisoned by Lead; One Dies
Seven endangered California condors, about 20 percent of the population in Southern California, have been found to have lead poisoning.
The birds started turning up sick about a month ago during random trappings at Bitter Creek National Wildlife Refuge in the San Joaquin Valley.
One of the birds died during treatment at the Los Angeles Zoo, and six others are still being treated there.
Climate/Environment
See Science Policy.
Psychology/Behavior
N.Y. Times: Cellphone Tracking Study Shows We’re Creatures of Habit
New research that makes creative use of sensitive location-tracking data from 100,000 cellphones in Europe suggests that most people can be found in one of just a few locations at any time, and that they do not generally go far from home.
"Individuals display significant regularity, because they return to a few highly frequented locations, such as home or work," the researchers found.
That might seem like science and mountains of data being marshaled to prove the obvious. But the researchers say their work, which also shows that people exhibit similar patterns whether they travel long distances or short ones, could open new frontiers in fields like disease tracking and urban planning.
N.Y. Times: Expense-Account Science
In an experiment reported in Science, researchers at the University of Cambridge and U.C.L.A. manipulated the diet of subjects and found that people with low levels of serotonin become less likely to make a deal when playing the "Ultimatum Game." In this game, one person proposes a way to divide a sum of money between two players. If the second player agrees to the division, they get the money; if not, neither gets anything. Normally, if the first player proposes keeping the lion’s share for himself, the second player will accept the deal about about half the time — he may resent the inequity, but he realizes that getting a small share is better than nothing.
But in this experiment the players rejected that deal 80 percent of the time when their serotonin levels were low, and it wasn’t because they were cranky or depressed, the researchers report. They conclude that lower levels of serotonin "can selectively alter reactions to unfairness," and note that in the experiment this condition "increased retaliation to perceived unfairness without affecting mood, fairness judgments, basic reward processing or response inhibition."
Physics
N.Y. Times: Dark, Perhaps Forever
A decade ago, astronomers discovered that what is true for your car keys is not true for the galaxies. Having been impelled apart by the force of the Big Bang, the galaxies, in defiance of cosmic gravity, are picking up speed on a dash toward eternity. If they were keys, they would be shooting for the ceiling.
"That is how shocking this was," Dr. Livio said.
It is still shocking. Although cosmologists have adopted a cute name, dark energy, for whatever is driving this apparently antigravitational behavior on the part of the universe, nobody claims to understand why it is happening, or its implications for the future of the universe and of the life within it, despite thousands of learned papers, scores of conferences and millions of dollars’ worth of telescope time. It has led some cosmologists to the verge of abandoning their fondest dream: a theory that can account for the universe and everything about it in a single breath.
Eastern Ontario Now: Corrected: Blackberry Co Founder Donates To Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics
Waterloo-The Co-CEO of the Research In Motion company, who manufactures the Blackberry personal electronic e-mail device, donated a generous additional $50 million dollars to Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.
Mike Lazaridis stepped up to the plate and announced his increased, personal donation to the Perimeter Institute, located in Waterloo Ontario.
The total philanthropy now equals $150 million dollars the RIM executive has given to the independent institute.
I attended the inaugural public lecture at the Perimeter Institute back in 2003 or 2004, so I have a personal connection to this story.
Science Policy
N.Y. Times: More Talking Than Listening in the Senate Debate About Climate Change
About a day into the debate over legislation to combat global warming but before Republicans brought the discourse to a stop on Wednesday by insisting that the clerk read every word of the 492-page bill, Senator James M. Inhofe decided to get a few things off his chest.
Mr. Inhofe, who believes that fears of catastrophic climate change are hugely overblown, has insisted that there is no need to get into a scientific argument because there are enough other reasons to oppose the Senate bill, which would cap the production of heat-trapping gases and force polluters to buy permits to emit carbon dioxide.
Still, for a guy who said he did not want to talk about science, Mr. Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, was the only senator to utter the phrase "anthropogenic gases." He also wanted to talk about the recent cold winter in his home state and mention a few small points of disagreement with Al Gore and Mr. Gore’s co-recipients of the Nobel Prize, the roughly 2,000 scientists who are part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sponsored by the United Nations.
Houston Chronicle SciGuy Blog: Have we missed our opportunity to act on global warming?
The answer might be yes, and it has nothing to do with the Earth passing a climate tipping point.
As I walked from my office to the parking garage last night I thought about $138 oil and its implications for global warming. On one hand, it's good. Great, actually. Higher prices for gasoline have already forced Americans to cut back their gasoline consumption, and many are trading pick-up trucks for hybrids. That's all good from a greenhouse-gas point of view.
At the same time, however, skyrocketing energy prices will probably have disastrous effects, at least in the near term, on efforts to pass meaningful climate reform. There are lots of reasons why the Lieberman-Warner climate bill failed in the Senate, but not the least of them is angst over energy costs.
N.Y. Times Dot Earth Blog: Investigators: NASA Officials ‘Mischaracterized’ and Limited Flow of Findings on Climate
Two years after James E. Hansen, the leading climate scientist at NASA, and other agency employees described a pattern of distortion and suppression of climate science by political appointees, the agency’s inspector general has concluded that such activities occurred and were "inconsistent" with the law that established the space program 50 years ago.
In a 48-page report issued on Monday as a result of a request in 2006 by 14 senators, the internal investigative office said the activities appeared limited to the headquarters press office. No evidence was found showing that officials higher at NASA or in the Bush administration were involved in interfering with the release of climate information, the report said. It also credited Michael Griffin, the agency administrator, for swiftly ordering a review and policy changes when the pattern came to light after articles in The New York Times early in 2006.
But the report, signed by Kevin H. Winters, assistant inspector general for investigations, criticized what it said was a sustained pattern of activities, largely supervised by senior political appointees, that included muting or withholding news releases on global warming and, at least in Dr. Hansen’s case, limiting a scientist’s interactions with reporters for fear that he might stray into discussing policies at odds with those of the White House.
Science Education
N.Y. Times: The Cons of Creationism
The Texas State Board of Education is again considering a science curriculum that teaches the "strengths and weaknesses" of evolution, setting an example that several other states are likely to follow. This is code for teaching creationism.
It has the advantage of sounding more balanced than teaching "intelligent design," which the courts have consistently banned from science classrooms. It has the disadvantage of being nonsense.
Science is Cool
Houston Chronicle: 50 years of space exploration recalled
Beamed back to Earth from afar, the early images of space exploration were often grainy, usually black-and-white, and sometimes accompanied by static and intermittent sound that provided viewers with glimpses of life aboard a rocket ship.
"A lot of it existed on proprietary (film) formats that belonged to NASA," said Bill Howard, Discovery Channel's executive producer of When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions.
The network has restored 50 years' worth of space mission film for use in a high-definition, six-hour series that marks NASA's golden anniversary, airing in two-hour blocks on three Sundays this month. Each hour-long episode is filled with historic moments plus official and candid footage of the space program's most accomplished names.
The first episode is entitled Ordinary Supermen, which is about the Mercury Seven astronauts and will air this Sunday at 8 PM EDT. The other episode titles are Friends and Rivals, Landing the Eagle, The Explorers, The Shuttle, and Home in Space.
N.Y. Times: An Overflowing Five-Day Banquet of Science and Its Meanings
That was the World Science Festival in New York City this past weekend: 46 shows, debates, demonstrations and parties spread over five days and 22 sites between Harlem and Greenwich Village, organized by Dr. Greene, the Columbia physicist and author, and his wife, Ms. Day, a former ABC-TV producer. Jugglers and philosophers, magicians and biologists, musicians and dancers — a feast one couldn’t hope to sample fairly.
Of course, I cannot fault Dr. Greene and Ms. Day for doing such a good job that I wanted to see much more than space and time permitted. In fact, you cannot help loving them. They are the first couple of New York science. And by their boldness and energy, they seem to have created a new cultural institution.
More from the World Science Festival, courtesy of Ray Kurzweil, via the N.Y. Times: The Future Is Now? Pretty Soon, at Least
Do you have trouble sticking to a diet? Have patience. Within 10 years, Dr. Kurzweil explained, there will be a drug that lets you eat whatever you want without gaining weight.
Worried about greenhouse gas emissions? Have faith. Solar power may look terribly uneconomical at the moment, but with the exponential progress being made in nanoengineering, Dr. Kurzweil calculates that it’ll be cost-competitive with fossil fuels in just five years, and that within 20 years all our energy will come from clean sources.
Are you depressed by the prospect of dying? Well, if you can hang on another 15 years, your life expectancy will keep rising every year faster than you’re aging. And then, before the century is even half over, you can be around for the Singularity, that revolutionary transition when humans and/or machines start evolving into immortal beings with ever-improving software.