The London Science Blogging Conference now has a Facebook page for discussions. Perhaps they will also have a FriendFeed room, like the BioBarCamp folks did - it was fascinating following the meeting from afar there these two days.

In the meantime, we had a secret meeting about, well, providing some neat surprises for you for the ScienceOnline'09 meeting (a.k.a., the Third Science Blogging Conference), bigger and better than ever - the website and wiki will be up in about ten days or so, watch this space for updates....

tags: West 66th street/Lincoln Center Subway Art, Artemis, Acrobats, Divas and Dancers, subway art, NYC through my eye, photography, NYC

Glass mosaic murals depicting scenes of theater, dance, and orchestra-related subjects are scattered throughout this station.

Some of you might know that starting tomorrow, a dozen or so of the ScienceBlog peeps are meeting in NYC. Unfortunately, I cannot tell you who they are (only they are allowed to reveal themselves), but most of them have told you they will be in NYC already, so you probably know who is here for the get-together, with perhaps one or two exceptions. Anyway, this year, I have a digital camera, so I am seeking requests from you -- what sorts of pictures would you be interested to see? Which ScienceBlogger would you like me to photograph wearing a lampshade? Would you like to see the Seed Offices? Would you like to see how many ScienceBloggers managed to cram themselves into the elevator that we ride up to the Seed offices? Or would you like a census to see which ScienceBloggers are among the "cool kids" who use macs instead of those oogly PCs? I already know that Professor Steve Steve will be here, because he will accompany me to London, so I can take pics of all cooperative ScienceBloggers with Steve Steve -- that almost goes without saying, I suppose.

Behold, the cutest burrito in Niskayuna:

8 lbs, 2 oz, 20 inches long. Do your own metric conversions.

The obligatory mother-and-child picture is below the fold:

Hello Pharyngulites, Danio here in my second official stint as 'guest blogger'. Like MAJeff, I'm very honored that PZ tagged me for the task, and I hope not to disappoint.

A bit about me: I am a postdoctoral fellow at PZ's alma mater, the University of Oregon, working on zebrafish (Danio rerio) as a model organism for studying hereditary deaf-blindness. I also have a broad interest in science education and science literacy, especially at the elementary and secondary school level, so I do a fair number of tours and demos for different student groups. I don't have as much time for more formal pedagogic endeavors as I'd like, but I have taught courses in Human Reproduction and Development in the past, and I have a special interest in the intersection of science and public policy in this area.

Why just "Danio", you might ask? My identity is not a secret, per se. People in my field who are reading this can probably figure out who I am, and that's totally ok. My choice to post under a pseudonym on Scienceblogs is out of consideration for my kids, who aren't old enough to make an informed decision on whether or not they want to be publicly associated with an unapologetically godless Mama, and for my husband, who, as a healthcare provider, has to kiss a lot more ass than I ever do, and thus could also suffer by association.

I'm glad to be here and looking forward to posting somewhat regularly. In keeping with the theme that MAJeff has started us off with, here's another question to mull over:

In reflecting upon PZ's current journey to the Galapagos, what site of significance in the history of scientific discovery would you like to visit, and why?
(If that doesn't do it for you, feel free to use this as an open thread).

Thanks to those who offered suggestions about what books to pick up. I didn't choose any of the suggested titles (sorry!) but I was able to find cheap used copies of some that I've been meaning to pick up for quite some time;

Elephants: A Short Account of Their Natural History, Evolution, and Influence on Mankind

Dynamics of Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Giants

Fundamentalism and American Culture

Reinventing Darwin

Life's Splendid Drama

The Metaphysics of Apes

Hunter and Hunted: Relationships between Carnivores and People

Your Inner Fish

The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perspectives on the Unification of Biology

Adam's Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins

God--or Gorilla: Images of Evolution in the Jazz Age

Why Elephants Have Big Ears

Again, many thanks to everyone who has used this blog as a springboard to purchase books and other items from amazon.com. It's a little thing, but it is definitely helping my self-education. What I read ultimately fuels what I write, and as I devour the new arrivals I hope to incorporate what I learn into my work here and elsewhere. (I've got to get cracking on my own book before the summer is over!) Now the only question is "Where am I going to put them all?"

[And if you want to do me one more favor you can make my Overlords happy by filling out a reader survey about ScienceBlogs. It only takes a few minutes and you get the chance to win some cool stuff, so give it a look if you have a couple of moments to spare.]

I love reading lists of fragrance chemicals. The assignment of pleasant, qualitative fragrance descriptions to chemicals with hard-nosed, rigorous functional group names always makes me giggle a little. Acetophenone, for instance, smells of orange blossoms. Today, I came across one that has both in the name: dewy propionate:

OK, let's say it all together.

Minnesota is the state.
Minneapolis is a city in Minnesota.
Saint Paul is the Capitol of Minnesota.
The Republican National Convention will be in Saint Paul. Saint Paul Minnesota. Not Minneapolis.

Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who is from a suburb of Saint Paul and who represents the sixth district to the US Congress in Minnesota (which is over on the other side of Minneapolis ... so she drives through both cities to visit her home town) should really know this.

But she does not.

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann has joined CBS anchor Katie Couric with mixing up the location of where the Republicans will be holding their national convention next month.

KARE

Here is the funny part: This is the smartest thing Bachmann has said since being elected.

Over at Science in the open, the the ScienceOpener (Cameron Neylon) is attending BioBarCamp. Now, IANAB (that stands for "I am not a stamp collector" :) ) but there are a ton of cool talks at BioBarCamp: many on open science / social media / science 2.0 etc (for which biologists are kicking everyone's rear at.) Here is the schedule on google docs. Because I'm supposed to be working on a talk for an upcoming review, I need something to listen to and watch out of the corner of my eye, as I work on the review. And ScienceOpener provides: A lifefeed of the event.

Which is cool, because now I can hear awesome interesting ideas, while trying to work on my presentation (with less awesome ideas, BTW.) And I even get to see familiar faces (well...familiar people lounging while listening):


How cool is that. Science, it is a changing, my little pea sized mind thinks :)

The state of the seedlings in my raised beds, nearly three weeks after the seeds were sown:

This is the funniest thing I have read since PZ got thrown out of EXPELLED. This cant freaking be real.

A woman by the name of 'Bernann McKinney' just made news by having her dead pit bull, Booger, cloned by a S. Korean company, RNL Bio.

Shortly after 'Bernann' rescued Booger off the streets, 'Bernann' was attacked by another dog, and Booger came to her rescue. She feels like shes alive because of Booger. I know the loyalty pits show their owners-- I feel her pain. But since she rescued Booger, 'Bernann' of all people should know what great dogs you can find on the street and in shelters! Shit, you can get a fixed pup with all their shots from the OKC shelter for $20. I cant even understand why people pay $$$ to breeders, much less $50,000 to clone a lost pet. And she got a bargain-- you and I would have to pay $150K to do the same thing. Its a waste of money, its a waste of life, its stupid.

That part of this story is not funny.

The rest of the story is funny.

A pocket-size lensless microscope that uses on-chip optofluidic microscopy (OFM).

The sample is dragged in front of the detector and an image is extrapolated. Now imagine if every cell phone had one of these?

Ref:
Xiquan Cui, Lap Man Lee, Xin Heng, Weiwei Zhong, Paul W. Sternberg, Demetri Psaltis, and Changhuei Yang
Lensless high-resolution on-chip optofluidic microscopes for Caenorhabditis elegans and cell imaging
PNAS (08) 105:10670-10675

Update: someone just informed me of this interview of Changhuei Yang on NPR, click here to listen.

MAJeff here, and I'll be one of your guestbloggers for the next several days. I'd first like to thank PZ for asking me to do this. I was more than a little surprised to get an email the other day inviting me, and I hope I can keep up the quality people have come to expect from the place.

I'm not sure of everything I'll be posting about yet. But, I'll probably be doing some of what I do when I teach, and that is asking questions. Y'all are a chatty bunch, so I probably won't need to do much asking. Sometimes, though, I just like to get to know folks better, to move beyond argument and talk. As a sociologist, I study people. I don't always understand them, but I do find them fascinating. Opportunities to get to know what drives folks are never to be turned down.

So, here goes: What is it about science that so enthuses all of you?

My brief answer--it's not Boobies; not that there's anything wrong with that, w00t--is below the fold....

This remarkable orb spider web is courtesy of reader Matt:

This individual was in my garden, and the colors of the web caught my eye. I don't think I've ever noted something like this before, and was quite surprised it showed on the photo. The outer edge of the nickel sized web pattern is iridescent blue, the inside fades into a purplish-magenta. No colors are visible when shaded.

How did the spider make a color gradient in its web? I'm really not sure. Although spiderweb can refract or diffract light quite spectacularly, the result is not as organized as this - it's more of a rainbow effect (see here)

Matt wonders if it could be an example of chromoskedasic color - color created by the differential scattering of light from particles in a colorless material. This is similar to the process behind a clear blue sky (or a vibrant red sunset): selective scattering of light from molecules (or dust) in the air contributes to the brilliance of the color. Chromoskedasic painting or print development, pioneered by Dominic Lam, is a technique in which emulsions of silver particles of various sizes are used to create the illusion of colored pigments on black and white photo paper. Lam's collaborator Bryant Rossiter coined the term "chromoskedasic" in 1989 (Lam and Rossiter, Scientific American, 1991). If differently sized particles are at work, then I guess the different regions of the web must be made from chemically distinct types of silk!

So is this refraction, chromoskedasic color, or something else entirely? Any optics types want to weigh in on what's happening here? And has anyone else seen this phenomenon before?

larger image

Once again, we open the floor to the lyrical expression of a few readers who have been inspired by the recent effusion of musical and poetical outbursts here. Fortunately for all, there is no gong hanging on the wall behind you, the judges…although some of these have been pretty good.

First up is a little poem written during the Dover trial by a very famous evolutionary biologist who has asked me to keep it anonymous. No confidence in the meter, huh? Or perhaps fear that declaring such talent will lead to the literary set distracting from the real work of biology?

I think that I shall never see
A theory dumber than ID:
It says that God can make a tree,
A beaver or a honeybee-
That God can simply get a whim
To make the small E. coli swim.
He waves His hand through Heaven's air
And lo! Flagella everywhere!
But sometimes even God falls down
And makes a poor, pathetic clown:
Yes, poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make Behe.

The second submission is by a well-known atheist who does out herself.

Super Geek
by Greta Christina
(to the tune of "Super Freak" by Rick James)

She's a very geeky girl
The kind you cheat off of in math class
And she will never let her teachers down
Once she takes her SAT's

She likes the boys in the chess club
She says that Spassky is her favorite
When she makes a move, it's rook takes bishop, check-mate
She's very hard to beat

The girl is pretty bright now
(The girl's a Super Geek)
The kind of girl you read about
(In Omni Magazine)
The girl is pretty brainy
(The girl's a Super Geek)
I'd really like to test her
(Every time we meet)
She's alright, she's alright, she's alright with me, yeah
She's a Super Geek, Super Geek, she's super-geeky

She's a very special girl
From her glasses to her Oxfords
And she will help me study AP math and physics
And AP bio, too

"Live long and prosper"'s what she says
"Back in the chem lab I'll be waiting"
When I get there, she's got Number Two pencils
It's such a geeky scene

The girl is pretty bright now
(The girl's a Super Geek)
The kind of girl you read about
(In Omni Magazine)
The girl is pretty brainy
(The girl's a Super Geek)
I'd really like to test her
(Every time we meet)
She's alright, she's alright, she's alright with me, yeah
She's a Super Geek, Super Geek, she's super-geeky

Judges?

As for me, it's time for me to flee the country. Ta-ta, until I next find a wireless connection somewhere in South America!

It's not just McCain who does not understand the Internet, it's his operatives as well:

Spread John McCain's official talking points around the Web -- and you could win valuable prizes!

That, in essence, is the McCain campaign's pitch to supporters to join its new online effort, one that combines the features of "AstroTurf" campaigning with the sort of customer-loyalty programs offered by airlines, hotel chains, restaurants and the occasional daily newspaper.

On McCain's Web site, visitors are invited to "Spread the Word" about the presumptive Republican nominee by sending campaign-supplied comments to blogs and Web sites under the visitor's screen name. The site offers sample comments ("John McCain has a comprehensive economic plan . . .") and a list of dozens of suggested destinations, conveniently broken down into "conservative," "liberal," "moderate" and "other" categories. Just cut and paste. ......

It's not working, as even rightwing bloggers are, well, bloggers, and understand how the online culture really works.

Jeff Jarvis - The myth of the creative class:

Internet curmudgeons argue that Google et al are bringing society to ruin precisely because they rob the creative class of its financial support and exclusivity: its pedestal. But internet triumphalists, like me, argue that the internet opens up creativity past one-size-fits-all mass measurements and priestly definitions and lets us not only find what we like but find people who like what we do. The internet kills the mass, once and for all. With it comes the death of mass economics and mass media, but I don't lament that, not for a moment.

The curmudgeons also argue that this level playing field is flooded with crap: a loss of taste and discrimination. I'll argue just the opposite: Only the playing field is flat and to stand out one must now do so on merit - as defined by the public rather than the priests - which will be rewarded with links and attention. This is our link economy, our culture of links. It is a meritocracy, only now there are many definitions of merit and each must be earned.

--------------snip-------------

I've long disagreed with those who say that copyright kills creativity, for I do believe that there is no scarcity of inspiration. But I now understand their position better. I also have learned that when creations are restricted it is the creator who suffers more because his creation won't find its full and true public, its spark finds no kindling, and the fire dies. The creative class, copyright, mass media, and curmudgeonly critics stop what should be a continuing process of creation; like reverse alchemists, they turn abundance into scarcity, gold into lead.

You can see it better, as well as add more hits (wiki-style) here. And internet memes are questionnaires that people tag each other to do. These are fads or hits, not memes.

The use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs, or roadside bombs) has led to an increase in the numbers of troops sustaining traumatic brain injury during military service in Afghanistan and Iraq. Such injuries are caused by the high pressure shock waves generated by the explosions, which cause rapid head movements, such that the brain is sheared and torn as it comes into contact with the inside of the skull.

Whereas conventional traumatic brain injuries caused by penetrative head wounds are easily diagnosed, those who sustain this kind of closed head injury often exhibit no external wounds. As a result, this type of TBI is often difficult to detect, and so may go undiagnosed for long periods of time. The incidence of TBI among U.S. troops is believed to be much higher than official figures would suggest, and it is now estimated that up to 15% of troops returning from the theater of war have been affected by it.

Although the brain damage caused by the shockwaves from IEDs cannot be picked up by conventional magnetic resonance imaging, recent research shows that it can be identified using a relatively new neuroimaging technique called diffusion tensor imaging. However, even in those troops suspected of sustaining a closed head injury, it may be some time before a brain scan can be performed.

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania have now developed a device which may be used to aid in the diagnosis of TBI. Developed by Shu Yang and her colleagues, the device was presented at the 26th Annual National Neurotrama Symposium in Orlando, Florida, last month. It consists of a sticker containing 6 micrometre-thick layers of a crystalline material which can be worn by troops on their uniforms or helmets.

The photonic crystals in the sticker have a specific three-dimensional structure which refracts light to produce colour of a given wavelength. Shockwaves from the blasts generated by IEDs alter the structure of the crystals, causing a visible change in their colour. Because blasts of different intensities produce different changes in the structure of the crystals, the stickers can reveal the force of a blast.

Such a device therefore help doctors to make a decision about whether or not treatment for a brain injury might be required. However, the exact relationship between colour change and blast intensity has yet to be determined, so the sticker still cannot be used to quantify the extent of brain damage sustained in a blast. It may therefore take years for such a device to be put into practical use on the battlefield.

Related:

• Uncle Prozac wants you
• Military over-reach and mental health
• Traumatic brain injury on the front line
• Exposure to sarin may have caused brain damage in U.S. troops

the simplest solution to the current US financial problems is a short period of modest wage inflation

"Did you know," my friend whispered, "that the Humane Society funds terrorists?"

I was stunned. What? That's crazy! I've adopted pets from there. No way! How could those be the same people??

My friend and I were suffering from "brand confusion." In business, this happens when different companies use similar names for their products in order to confuse the marketplace. In the animal rights movement, brand confusion is used to misdirect the funds that would otherwise help groups who do genuine humanitarian work.

As I learned in "The Animal Research War" by P. Micheal Conn and James Parker [published by Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN-13:978-0-230-60014-0], there is an animal rights group that goes by the name of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). But this is not the group that runs animal shelters. The HSUS takes the money that well-meaning people think they're giving to shelters and uses it to fund propaganda campaigns.

Continuing with asking for your help in fixing my Blogroll:

Every couple of days or so, I will post here a list of blogs that start with a particular letter, and you add in the comments if you know of something that is missing from that list.

See so far:
Numbers and Symbols
A

Today brought to you by letter B. This is what is on the Blogroll right now. Check also the Housekeeeping posts for other B blogs I have discovered in the meantime. Check links. Tell me what to delete, what to add:

Olympic Games: Researchers Explore What Makes Better Athletes, The Physiology Of Performance, And More:

The world-record pace for the marathon continues to improve for both men and women. For men, the record pace for the marathon is now about as fast as the record pace for the 10,000-meter run just after World War II. Today, champion athletes are running more than four times farther at speeds of well under five minutes per mile.

Neurobiologists Discover Individuals Who 'Hear' Movement:

Individuals with synesthesia perceive the world in a different way from the rest of us. Because their senses are cross-activated, some synesthetes perceive numbers or letters as having colors or days of the week as possessing personalities, even as they function normally in the world.

Humans' Response To Risk Can Be Unnecessarily Dangerous:

The traffic light ahead of you is turning yellow. Do you gun the engine and speed through the intersection, trusting that others will wait for their green, or do you slow down and wait your turn?

Perfectly Proportioned Legs Keep Water Striders Striding:

The amazing water strider -- known for its ability to walk on water -- came within just a hair of sinking into evolutionary oblivion. Scientists in France and the United Kingdom are reporting that the insect's long, flexible legs have an optimal length that keeps it afloat.

Entomologists Use 'Love Potion' To Detect Hidden Cerambycid Beetles:

Cerambycid beetles, also known as long-horned beetles, can cause severe damage to standing trees, logs and lumber. How then might they be promptly detected and their numbers swiftly controlled?

Gene For Sexual Switching In Melons Provides Clues To Evolution Of Sex:

A newly discovered function for a hormone in melons suggests it plays a role in how sexual systems evolve in plants. The study, conducted by French and American scientists, appeared recently in the journal Science.

Nine To Twenty Individual Fire Ant Queens Started U.S. Fire Ant Population:

The current U.S. population of red imported fire ants--which infest millions of acres across the southern states--can be traced back to nine to 20 queens in Mobile, Ala.

For The Birds Or For Me? Why Do Conservationists Really Help Wildlife?:

Volunteers who take part in conservation efforts may do it more for themselves than the wildlife they are trying to protect, a University of Alberta case study shows.

SpaceX has explanation for Falcon 1 stage separation failure in 3rd launch failure
With mo' better video.
Should be easy to fix.

First, from the Seed Overlords:

You may have noticed some pretty yellow banner ads around the site this week. They're advertising a huge reader survey that we're conducting right now. Anyone (excepting Seed employees) who fills it out can enter to win an iPod and MacBook Air.

The survey takes about 10 minutes to complete. Here's the survey page:

http://www.erdossurvey.com/sb/survey/

Then, following the lead of Ed, Bora, DrugMonkey, and Alice, I'd like to invite the readers of this blog, from regular commenters to committed lurkers, to check in.

Tell us who you are, what brings you here, and what brings you back. What do you like reading about here? What topics would you like to see more of?

I'm looking forward to hearing from you!

tags: American Avocet, Recurvirostra americana, birds, nature, Image of the Day

So, after almost a week of intense media scrutiny and finger-pointing at USAMRIID scientist Bruce Ivins as the perpetrator of the 2001 anthrax attacks, the FBI has now released its documents pertaining to the case, and declares that Ivins was indeed their man. However, a lot of unanswered questions remain--about the investigation itself, the whole mess surrounding the anthrax attacks and what they meant to the "war on terror," and the science itself that linked the attack strain to Ivins' lab. A few of the remaining issues are discussed below...

Common spelling mistakes should be accepted into everyday use, not corrected, a lecturer has said.

Ken Smith of Bucks New University says the most common mistakes should be accepted as "variant spellings".

He lists the 10 most commonly misspelt words, which include "arguement" for "argument" and "twelth" for "twelfth".

Mr Smith says his proposal, outlined in an article in the Times Higher Education Supplement, follows years of correcting the same mistakes.

Mr Smith, a criminology lecturer, said: "Instead of complaining about the state of the education system as we correct the same mistakes year after year, I've got a better idea.

"University teachers should simply accept as variant spellings those words our students most commonly misspell. BBC

Hat tip Virgil Samms

I second the motion.

Here's a few blog carnivals for you to read;

Tangled Bank, issue 111 -- eleventy-one! I think that's good luck in Hobbiton, right? Anyway, this blog carnival focuses on science, nature and medicine.

Carnival of the Vanities, 7 August 2008 issue. This is the original blog carnival, the first one in the whole wide world, and it links to the best writing in the blogosphere, regardless of topic.

Rants, the 6 August 2008 issue. You know you want to read it, yes you do!

...to ask über-quack Hulda Clark, the woman who disagrees with Dr. Simoncini in that she thinks that all cancer is caused by an intestinal fluke and that she can cure it by "zapping" it with a chintzy device she calls a "Zapper" that looks a lot like a Scientology E-meter, any question you want. She's going to be broadcasting her quackery all over the intertubes tonight on Patrick Timpone's One Radio Network at 7 PM CDT:

Thursday, August 7, 7-8 PM Talk to the Legendary Dr. Hulda Clark

Dr. Clark has a clinic in Mexico and claims a high success rate with Cancer patients and uses the word "Cure" openly widely in her work and many books. Her latest is "The Cure and prevention of all Cancers." We'll talk about zappers, parasites, cleansing, diet and what are the causes and cures she claims her experience and research are clearly showing. Please tell everyone you care about and also forward this, of course, to anyone you know who is dealing with cancer.

Consider it done, Mr. Timpone. I've just forwarded it to all my readers. It would be interesting to see if any skeptical questions could make it through at 888.663.6386. I'm sure she'd be happy to explain the scientific evidence backing up her claim that all cancer is caused by an intestinal fluke and why that evidence is nowhere to be found in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.

reasons for tenure #24952

ORNL fires Distinguished Scientist,
UT picks up slack

A'ight, DrugNut is asleep so I can sneak into his MT account and address a little issue that has been raveling my seams. Seems some SuperTurboBloggerz2.0 has been doing a little hating on sock puppets. Technically, I'm not actually a puppet but some of my best friends are and I'm happy to speak up for my oppressed and downtrodden woolen and cotton brethren.

The Word of SockMonkey Now, it's bad enough when demented tinfoil hat wackaloon blogoMcCarthy's see sock puppets under every bed. But we're talking a serious and well respected blogger here who wants sock puppets moved to the back of the bus.

The interviewer has no idea how big of an offense sockpuppetry is

Clif at Sadly No mocks some blogger who thinks that because the draft report Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States used a photoshopped picture of flood to illustrate a flood, rather than a picture of a real flood, this casts doubt on the science. Following the links I get to Anthony Watts who reckons that it was photoshopped "for better impact" -- I guess he thinks beautiful clean fake water has a better impact than the disgusting brown water you get in a real flood. Frpm Watts I find, surprise surprise, that this story originated at Climate "mountains out of molehills" Audit. Also hyperventilating is Roger Pielke Jr, who finds that this picture is the most serious example of sloppiness in the report.

Large letters at the bottom of the page spell out "First Draft - July 2008 Do not cite or quote". Do these people not understand what drafts are for?

Apparently artist Jan Vormann has been going around villages near Rome and patching ancient masonry with Lego. I'm not really sure what more to say about this, except that it seems perfectly reasonable to me.

This is how to do it: the Big Think project wants you to look over their inspirational science profiles and vote for one — and as a reward, they'll donate $1 to DonorsChoose, to fund educational projects. This is a win:win situation. For a couple of clicks, you get to be entertained for a few minutes, and you get to gouge a dollar out of Pfizer, and you get to help out school teachers. How can you not do it?

Apparently, they need 8000 more clicks to meet their quota and limit for the month. I bet we can do that in a day.

(By the way, I voted for Pardis Sabeti.)

From NASA:

Fractures, or "tiger stripes," where icy jets erupt on Saturn's moon Enceladus will be the target of a close flyby by the Cassini spacecraft on Monday, Aug. 11.

Cassini will zoom past the tiny moon a mere 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the surface. Just after closest approach, all of the spacecraft's cameras -- covering infrared wavelengths, where temperatures are mapped, as well as visible light and ultraviolet -- will focus on the fissures running along the moon's south pole. That is where the jets of icy water vapor emanate and erupt hundreds of miles into space. Those jets have fascinated scientists since their discovery in 2005.

"Our main goal is to get the most detailed images and remote sensing data ever of the geologically active features on Enceladus," said Paul Helfenstein, a Cassini imaging team associate at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. "From this data we may learn more about how eruptions, tectonics, and seismic activity alter the moon's surface. We will get an unprecedented high-resolution view of the active area immediately following the closest approach."

Seeing inside one of the fissures in high resolution may provide more information on the terrain and depth of the fissures, as well as the size and composition of the ice grains inside. Refined temperature data could help scientists determine if water, in vapor or liquid form, lies close to the surface and better refine their theories on what powers the jets.

Imaging sequences will capture stereo views of the north polar terrain, and high resolution images of the south polar region will begin shortly after closest approach to Enceladus. The image resolution will be as fine as 7 meters per pixel (23 feet) and will cover known active spots on three of the prominent "tiger stripe" fractures.

Read the rest here.

I usually don't stray into strictly political issues, but today's action by the Mayor of Detroit has me fuming. I've been avoiding blogging on this topic, but Kwame Kilpatrick always has a new criminal exploit fueled by his overwhelming arrogance. His latest idiocy will land him in jail for the night. Here's the basic story.

Kilpatrick is a bright and imposing young man (elected at 31) who had an unlimited political future. Detroit has a long history of producing brilliant African American political leaders, and Kilpatrick comes out of this tradition. His mother is Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick is chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, and his father was also deeply involved in local politics. He is a law school graduate, a former college athlete, and a former state representative. His youth and charisma have allowed him to communicate to both young and old citizens of Detroit and his constituents have been reluctant to turn against him. The mayor is deeply involved in a scandal that has resulted in felony charges and left the already struggling city effectively leaderless. By all accounts Kilpatrick is a very smart guy; how did he get himself into this mess?

Leave it to those wacky Korean cloners. In December, scientists from Gyeongsang National University gave us fluorescent kitties. Now, we have cute little puppies!

These aren't the first cloned pets on the market, we have stores that sell glowing fish. But these clones have a bit higher price tag. For $50,000 Bernann McKinney got 5 new "Boogers" from RNL Bio; "Booger McKinney," "Booger Lee," "Booger Ra," "Booger Hong and "Booger Park." That's $10,000 a Booger!

Still, who can resist these cute little boogers? I have a picture of the puppies below the fold and as you can see, they're adorable!

Dear ScienceWoman,
I am starting a career as a teacher and would very much like to enroll in a masters specializing in teaching high school science. I am wondering if you could help direct me to some grants or incentives that are geared towards encouraging women to pursue graduate teaching degrees in these areas. Any help you could give me would be much appreciated. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Future Teacher
P.S. I'd also like to stay in Texas if possible.

Dear Future,
That's fabulous that you want to be a high school science teacher. We need lots more enthusiastic and knowledgable science teachers. College instructors around the world are thanking you right now. But, as much as I wish I could help you, I don't know of any programs or grants geared towards women. One thing you might look into are programs funded by NSF's GK12 program. They are at universities nationwide. Usually, though, they are for students pursuing a graduate degree in a science field who also have an interest in teaching. I'm not sure they apply in your case, where it sounds like you are looking for an MAT program. Maybe our readers know of something that could help you out?
Good luck,
SW
P.S. Future Teacher and all ScienceWomen readers who care about science education should take just a minute or two to head over to the BigThink website. BigThink and Pfizer have a deal where for every person who clicks on the "Vote for this video profile" button on this page (http://www.bigthink.com/thinksciencenow/), Pfizer will give $1 to DonorsChoose, up to $10,000. Unfortunately, they've only raised about $1,900 so far. We can help send more money to K-12 science classrooms simply by clicking "vote for this video profile." Thanks for your help.

Whenever you're trying to talk about science to a broader audience, one of the major challenges is cutting out the jargon. Sometimes, though, the real difficulty is not so much in translating the jargon, as identifying it in the first place. This problem his highlighted by BAllenJ's comment on my last post:

...when you write these geology posts that the non-geologist can enjoy, could you please use the age instead of the geological name, or even better...along with? I need a secret decoder ring (OK, answers.com) to decode stuff like "During the Cretaceous and early Cenozoic..."

He's absolutely right, of course. I've discussed in previous posts the whys and wherefores of the geological timescale - how it attempts to divide geological history up into distinct chunks, each with its own unique tectonic, climatic and biological character. For geologists, it's a useful shorthand, because we're familiar with the geological timescale and know more or less where all of the different periods slot in*. I suspect that talking about named periods rather than absolute age ranges also helps geologists to handle the disconnect between the lengths of time we're discussing when talking about Earth history (tens, hundreds, and even thousands of millions of years), and the lengths of time that our little primate brains can actually get our heads around (ranging from a handful of years down to seconds, depending on how cynical you're feeling). Regardless, we're so used to bandying about 'Cretaceous' and 'Cenozoic' that we forget that they can be, to the layman, words just as impenetrable as 'diagenesis' or 'turbidite' (or, indeed, 'allochthonous').

I'm not unaware of this problem, of course, and at a number of places in that post I did provide numerical ages as well as period names. But I didn't everywhere, partly because I simply forgot to, but also because it's sometimes difficult to do so without destroying the flow of the text. Also, I'm not entirely convinced that simply inserting the numbers always helps people to really get to grips with where (or when) the hell I'm talking about. Perhaps it would just be easier to show visually when I'm talking about:

This is actually an idea I've been toying with for some time, but just hadn't got around to implementing: place this compressed timescale at the bottom of the post, with the red bar showing the time period I'm talking about, and every time I mention a geological period name, internally link down to it. I've just given 'Tectonics shown to drive changes in biodiversity' this treatment. Take a look, and let me know whether you think this is a useful addition, or whether I should just stick to adding more numbers. I am a little worried that the text is a little too small, or the logarithmic-esque timescale required to fit everything on nicely might be a little bit confusing. But it's fun to play...

*Of course, even we geologists usually have some shaky areas; as Christie has commented in the past, coming to South Africa gives you a whole new perspective on a period of Earth history which was previously generically filed away under 'really old stuff', or 'that time before multicellular life kicked off'.

How do we devise a global plan for energy transition? Rather than a whole plan, let's start with the crucial first step:

We need an immediate moratorium on the construction of new traditional coal plants. That is a higher priority than a cap & trade bill, although such a bill is also a high priority. If the West cannot stop building such coal plants and quickly show the world that multiple alternatives -- particularly efficiency and renewables -- are practical and affordable, then how will we be able to convince the developing world, especially China and India, to stop building such coal plants within the decade?

So that means the first major climate policy we should adopt is not a cap & trade, but

Requiring all new coal power plants to meet an "emission performance" standard that limits CO2 emissions to levels achievable with CCS systems.

A climate policy that does not start by achieving at least the first goal, a moratorium on coal without CCS, must be labeled a failure. By that measure, the cap and trade system currently being employed by the Europeans looks to be a failure. Even with a serious price for carbon dioxide of $40 a ton, Italy, Germany, the Czech Republic, and even Great Britain are pursuing new traditional coal plants, as the New York Times reported in May.

This why James Hansen recently reported finding a "sobering degree of self-deception" in Germany, UK, Japan in a recent trip, and reiterated his statement that the "Phase-out of coal emissions is the sine qua non for climate stabilization" and "Countries cannot be allowed to "buy out" of coal phase-out via supposed reforestation or reduction of non-CO2 forcings."

The good news is that a combination of energy efficiency, wind power, solar baseload, solar PV, cogeneration, and other alternatives can avoid the need to ever build another traditional coal plant in the industrialized world. The bad news is that the industrialized world has not taken the necessary steps to begin to clean energy transition in a serious fashion.

Again, until the rich countries show the rest of the world you can maintain economic development without building traditional coal plants, nothing else we do will really matter.

Fed up of trying to decide who to believe in the endless blog wars over climate science? Well, don't despair and don't rely on third parties you may know little about, instead educate yourself!

ps -eo user,pcpu,pid,cmd | sort -r -k2 | head -6

From friend-of-The-World's-Fair WJG comes a link to The Grass Seed, a graphic story/comic strip by Claudia Davila at Ballyhoo Stories.

In this post: the large version of the Politics and Medicine & Health channel photos, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week.

I was going to write something about the latest analysis of NIH funding in Science, but DrugMonkey did the work for me so go read his post. The bottom line is that NIH funding goes through boom-bust cycles that cause instability throughout the biomedical fields. In boom times the biomedical research fields recruit lots of grad students and postdocs (many of these recruits being foreign), after all the PIs need the work force and they now have funds to pay them. Then when these junior scientists go looking for their own lab and their first R01, the lack of funds forces many out of academia. To prevent this scenario from happening the NIH would need a 6% annual increase, which in all practical terms is impossible. Michael S. Teitelbaum calls this a "positive-feedback loop", but I tend to think of it as a pyramid scheme. And recently the NIH has been getting a whole lot less then a 6% increase - it's been flat. You can imagine the consequences.

Yet another piece of evidence for the futility of abstinence education. Masters et al., publishing in the journal Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, show that an adolescent's attitude about sex is a much stronger indicator that they will actually have it than their attitudes about abstinence.

The study followed around 300 teenagers from Seattle over a year after interviewing them about their attitudes about sex and abstinence and their intentions to have sex or abstain. They wanted to know how their initial attitudes and intentions about sex and abstinence interacted over time.

As you've probably heard, the US customs service has, recently, asserted the right to confiscate any and all computers and/or digital storage carried by anyone crossing the US border. They further assert the right to demand all passwords, encryption keys, etc., from the owners. They even further assert the right to keep or make copies of any data that they find, and to share it without limit with anyone they choose.

I don't think I really need to stress how insane this is. Back when I worked for IBM, I frequently travelled to Canada, because I worked with development labs in Toronto and Ottawa. When I did that, I carried a computer full of stuff that IBM considered to be highly confidential and highly sensitive. (I've even still got a wall-plaque from IBM thanking for me work on a project, where I'm not allowed to ever tell anyone what I did to earn it!) What this policy says is that the border service would have the right to turn that information over to anyone they wanted, without informing me or IBM that they had done so. Further, some of the information on that laptop was encrypted, and I did not have the key. They were encrypted with a system that would only allow them to be opened if the computer could contact a particular IBM server from inside the IBM firewall. So not only could the border service have confiscated the computer and passed on confidential or private information - but they could have arrested me for refusing to decrypt the information on the computer - even though I couldn't decrypt it.

This isn't new news. They've been doing this for a while, and we know they've been doing it - they've made absolutely no attempt to hide it.

The reason that I'm writing about it now is because I just read something on Salon about how an allegedly knowledgeable and tech-savvy person recommends coping with this, and I can't possible disagree more strongly. On the Salon Machinist blog, Denise Caruso wrote:

Swire notes that agents at the border are going further than just taking image copies of people's hard drives. They're actually demanding passwords and encryption keys so they can examine the contents.

Of course, they promise to destroy the copies and the keys as soon as they're done -- as long as they don't find anything illegal, like a downloaded song you didn't pay for -- so no security worries there, right? There's no such thing as a crooked customs or Border Patrol agent.

This gives government agents access to information they would never get by opening up your suitcase. In addition to e-mail, spreadsheets, documents and personal financial information like credit card receipts and photos, nowadays they can also listen to your stored Skype calls and voice mails.

Not to mention that just having encrypted data on your hard drive causes suspicion, or at least throws down the gauntlet. If you were looking for illegal stuff and you ran into a file that looked like this,

qANQR1DBwU4D/TlT68XXuiUQCADfj2o4b4aFYBcWumA7hR1Wvz9rbv2BR6WbEUsy
ZBIEFtjyqCd96qF38sp9IQiJIKlNaZfx2GLRWikPZwchUXxB+AA5+lqsG/ELBvRa
c9XefaYpbbAZ6z6LkOQ+eE0XASe7aEEPfdxvZZT37dVyiyxuBBRYNLN8Bphdr2zv z/9Ak4
/OLnLiJRk05/2UNE5Z0a+3lcvITMmfGajvRhkXqocavPOKiin3hv7+Vx88

wouldn't you immediately need to know what it said? It could be a conspiracy! It could be a list of child pornographers! It could be a copyrighted magazine article! It could be a bootleg Led Zepplin video!

Urgh.

So I figure the best solution is to encode your files rather than encrypt them, so that you could hide your stuff in plain sight. If agents don't know something is encrypted and it looks innocuous, they won't compel you to give them the key. "Here's your laptop, ma'am. Sorry for the inconvenience."

That's the wrong answer. The solution isn't to try to hide the fact that you're taking your own/your employer's privace seriously. The answer is to make encryption so absolutely routine that (A) finding encrypted files on a computer is so common and routine that it can't be used as a distinguishing characteristic to allow them to justify confiscating your computer, and (B) to make it so incredibly painful and laborious for them to get any data off of a computer that they give up.

The first part of instructions for how to do this are below.

I was on the Brian Lehrer show (no relation) this morning talking about insight, firefighters and the right hemisphere. Give it a listen. And I'm curious how readers engineer their own insights. Warm showers? Long walks? Richard Feynman preferred strip clubs, a cognitive strategy I have yet to test.