New blurry Hubble images of Pluto nonetheless show that its surface is wildly dynamic, moving scientists to sound like they’re using hyperbole:

“[With Pluto] you are looking at the surface in the Solar System that has the biggest changes of anything we’ve ever seen.”

That’s not even hyperbole. Whatever the nature of these extensive, rapid surface changes, they dwarf anything visible on the other solar system bodies.

Marc Buie said the exact mechanism was a mystery … “It’s close to springtime on Pluto. In the fall, it will be so much further away from the Sun, and so much colder. Things that boiled up in the spring will condense.”

“We think that these things are driven by seasonal processes on Pluto,” said Dr Buie, “But it’s a little bit of a surprise that you would see this big of a change this fast because the seasons take 248 of our years to progress.”

Space probe flyby in 2015!

sweet pic from the Hubble

Robert Anton Wilson riffs on accelerating weirdness.

We just joined Facebook, a handy way to follow this blog if you are a Facebook user or Facebook curious. Thank you.

He’ll be amazed to read this science article that attributes the creation of the “holographic universe” theory to these dudes in 1990s. That’s funny to me because Bohm published a vigorous scientific case for the holographic universe, the book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, in 1980.

Basically, the 1990s dudes published their work in a peer-reviewed journal, as an offshoot of well-accepted black hole work. So they get official credit. Meanwhile, although Bohm was a giant among quantum mechanics, Wholeness and the Implicate Order was a “popular” book and so doesn’t count, if you can call a book with tons of equations in it “popular.”
Seems like you would give the guy a mention is all.

Happens a lot where the heretical theories become accepted just a few years later, with the heretic not allowed a shred of acknowledgment - certainly not from the scientific press, who really are just mouthpieces for the establishment.

When Bohm said it, it was heretical and involved some “challenges to prevailing views”. Now that we know he was right about the whole holographic universe thing, maybe those challenges should get a second look too.

Must read.

The shrimp pond preparation begins with urea, superphosphate, and diesel, then progresses to the use of piscicides (fish-killing chemicals like chlorine and rotenone), pesticides and antibiotics (including some that are banned in the U.S.), and ends by treating the shrimp with sodium tripolyphosphate (a suspected neurotoxicant), Borax, and occasionally caustic soda.

But they’re so tasty…

The first vertebrates to walk the Earth emerged from the sea almost 20 million years earlier than previously thought, say scientists who have discovered footprints from an eight-foot-long prehistoric creature.

Is 20 million years a lot?

Abuse of the Journal/Peer Review system?? What??!?

Bayblab has more.
Good thing this is only confined to stem cell journals and not, say, cosmology or astronomy journals grumble grumble

The question is, since the system of doing science is broken, what are scientists going to do to fix it?

New research has officially “over turned” the “Primordial Soup” theory of the origin of life. It had an 80-year run where it was the dominant paradigm.

But the geochemical energy of hydrothermal vents is the new hotness:

“Textbooks have it that life arose from organic soup and that the first cells grew by fermenting these organics to generate energy in the form of ATP. We provide a new perspective on why that old and familiar view won’t work at all,” said team leader Dr Nick lane from University College London. … “It is time to cast off the shackles of fermentation in some primordial soup as ‘life without oxygen’ — an idea that dates back to a time before anybody in biology had any understanding of how ATP is made.”

Someone be sure and tell Tommy Gold, whose eye has been on deep sea vents for some time, in relation to the origin of life. Gold’s “Deep Hot Biosphere” theory (presented in a book of that title based on this paper) argues that life teems at the vents because it is upwelling from deeper inside the planet. Life’s true origin is in the geological depths, by Gold’s reckoning. And Gold is no slouch.

So, glad to see we’re getting down to the nitty-gritty, and this “primordial soup” nonsense doesn’t have to get in the way any more.

Still panspermia to contend with too, re: origin of life. Remember, even if panspermia champion Fred Hoyle was wrong about why the primordial soup idea was incorrect - it turns out it is incorrect anyway. So seems to me that Hoyle’s modern-day panspermia work should be given a second look. Because he wasn’t just criticizing the primordial soup theory, he was also advancing a positive case for panspermia, before it was cool as it were.

[The biographical side note I would offer is that Gold and Hoyle were close associates and shared a similar cognitive style - in that each found it fruitful to simply invert the common idea and see where it leads you. Don’t be too surprised if they turn out to have been right about everything.]

Great.

Despite ractopamine’s dangers and the falsified approval documents, the FDA approved ractopamine the following year for cattle–and last year for turkeys.

And you wondered why you had to learn geometry. …Uh, nsfw I guess.

Bonobo group eats dead infant, causes media kerfuffle:

Though uncommon, the behaviour may not be aberrant, says the scientist who witnessed it.

But it does further challenge a widely perceived notion that bonobos are an especially “peaceful” ape species.

Poppycock. We’re with this guy:

However, says Dr Fowler: “I am not sure there are wider implications from a scientific point of view.”

“I don’t see that occasionally consuming dead infants, however distasteful it might seem to us, is a sign of pathology or aberration per se.”

“I don’t think it necessarily says anything about ‘empathy’ or ‘morality’,” he adds.

“It had been suggested in the past that bonobos might feel more sympathy for victims, which is why they didn’t hunt monkeys, for example.

Metaphor

“But we now know they do hunt monkeys. So I think eating an already dead baby says little about bonobos in that respect.

“Bonobos are often used in a symbolic way, held up as the sexy, peaceful ‘Hippy Chimps’.

“The fact that they eat monkeys and consume their own dead offspring may not accord with this view, but I personally don’t see this as a problem.”

“The idea of the ‘Hippy Chimp’ is more a metaphor than a scientific argument,” he continues.

“I think the major implication is that we don’t need to see it as an aberration among other apes.

…i.e., no one should be getting the vapors about this.

As a result of the study, coauthor Tim Spector said, the study “shows fairly conclusively that the idea of a G-spot is subjective.” It didn’t take long, however, for this news to reach the French, who aren’t about to start taking sex advice from across the channel. A group of  gynecologists there convened their own conference in Paris to denounce this assault on female pleasure.

The rest.

Trying to iron out all the ways animals sense the earth’s magnetic field, researchers have managed to overturn a “widely held view” about the functioning of certain photoreceptor molecules:

…states Dr. Reppert, “the finding provides the first genetic evidence that a vertebrate-like (photoreceptor molecule) can function as a magnetoreceptor.”

An interesting feature of the team’s work disproved a widely held view about how these proteins can chemically sense a magnetic field.

In your face!!

“These findings suggest that there is an unknown photochemical mechanism that the (photoreceptor molecules) use instead,” says Dr. Gegear, lead author on the paper, “one that we are hotly pursuing.”

Mission: tag and bag all unknown photochemical mechanisms.

Holy crap - they’ve reconstructed the colors of the feathers running down a dinosaur’s back:

Using a powerful electron microscope to look inside the feathers, researchers were able to see microscopic structures called melanosomes, which, in life, contain the pigment melanin.

…
“There’s a very clear rim of feathers running down the top of its head like a Mohican, all the way along its back,” Professor Benton described.

Bands of dark and light along the tail can be seen in the fossils. This close examination has shown that the dinosaur’s “Mohican” was russet or ginger-coloured, and that these bands were in fact ginger and white stripes.

“This is the first time anyone has ever had evidence of original colour of feathers in dinosaurs,” said Professor Benton.

…

“This discovery suggests that with more work we may be able to accurately reconstruct colour patterns in some dinosaur species, and begin to understand how those colour patterns may have functioned for camouflage or display.”

This is something like a holy dinosaur grail being discovered.

The Drake Equation’s variables continue their maddening variability:

Frank Drake, who conducted the first organized search for alien radio signals in 1960, said that the Earth – which used to pump out a loud tangle of radio waves, television signals and other radiation – has been steadily getting quieter as its communications technology improves.

Drake cited the switch from analogue to digital television – which uses a far weaker signal – and the fact that much more communications traffic is now relayed by satellites and fiber optic cables, limiting its leakage into outer space.

“Very soon we will become very undetectable,” he said. If similar changes are taking place in other technologically advanced societies, then the search for them “will be much more difficult than we imagined.”

Didn’t think of that in 1960.

Also, just let me say that the absence of Fred Hoyle’s name in this panspermia-heavy article is deplorable.

For decades, scientists have scanned the heavens in search of extraterrestrial life. Perhaps they should have looked closer to home. Variant life forms – most likely tiny microbes – could still be hanging around “right under or noses – or even in our noses,” Paul Davies, an award-winning Arizona State University physicist, told a group of scientists Tuesday.

“How do we know all life on earth descended from a single origin?” he said, speaking at London’s Royal Society, which serves as Britain’s academy of sciences. “We’ve just scratched the surface of the microbial world.”

Here we’ve got Paul fucking Davies saying what Fred Hoyle got ridiculed for saying 30 years ago. At least give the guy a mention. The fact that Hoyle was wrong about chemical evolution doesn’t make him wrong about evolution from space. At least, when Paul Davies says there’s alien microbes in your nose, it sounds great. But Fred Hoyle, not so much.

Source of much amusement here at Gonzo HQ.

New study: feathers evolved in tree dwellers for swooping down. Like duh, right?

Some are still convinced that feathers evolved on ground-dwellers for flying up, but those people are stupid. The main reason is that it’s easy to fall down, and so one might expect evolution to hit upon ways of slowing descent, that could then be extrapolated to gliding, then flying.

The other way round, you have to think of evolution looking for a way to go up, and so you’d get … climbing.

Scientists have discovered that 100 years of studies based on incorrect assumptions will have to be rewritten:

A new study by scientists from Oregon State University and the Environmental Protection Agency showed — much to the surprise of the researchers — that soil clings tenaciously to the first precipitation after a dry summer, and holds it so tightly that it almost never mixes with other water.

The finding is so significant, researchers said, that they aren’t even sure yet what it may mean. But it could affect our understanding of how pollutants move through soils, how nutrients get transported from soils to streams, how streams function and even how vegetation might respond to climate change.

…”We used to believe that when new precipitation entered the soil, it mixed well with other water and eventually moved to streams. We just found out that isn’t true.”"This could have enormous implications for our understanding of watershed function,” he said. “It challenges about 100 years of conventional thinking.”

One might have thought that something as close to home as soil hydrology would be well understood by now. Findings like this illustrate that many scientific surprises lie in store, even in very well-established fields.

The conventional thinking about conventional thinking should be that one might fruitfully expect it to be wrong. Scientists such as Fred Hoyle and Tommy Gold made that their bread and butter, and while it often embroiled them in controversy, their greatest contributions were arguably made by rejecting the criteria of conservatism and standing the conventional theories on their heads. It’s not a surefire method - but as in the case of soil hydrology, it sure helps to consider that the conventional assumptions might be only, you know, assumptions.

I’ve read so much debunking of the idea that meteorites are rubble-piles, instead of solid rocks, that I am generally skeptical of theories that rely on the rubble-pile concept, like this so-called solution to the meteorite color mystery:

The Earth “changes the colour” of asteroids by shaking them up as they pass, according to scientists.

Researchers report that this solves the mystery of why the meteorites that land on the Earth often do not match the colour of asteroids in space.

…

Dr Clark Chapman, an astronomer from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, in the US explained that these asteroids were “not monolithic, solid bodies”, and were more like “rubble piles”.

So on the surfaces of these rubble piles, rocks are shaken and turned over, to reveal a fresh, unweathered surface underneath.

I’m not sure asteroids must have a rubble pile structure to match the data - could it be that they’re solid bodies, but covered with loose debris and dust, as explained in Tom Van Flandern’s NEAR Challenge below, which he won?

The exploded planet hypothesis (as described in Dark Matter, Missing Planets and New Comets) implies that all asteroids and comets are formed as debris clouds during the explosion of planet or moon-sized bodies at astronomically recent epochs. Only those asteroids involved in collisions will have their orbiting debris removed, forming families (in the case of long-ago collisions) or jet streams (in the case of recent collisions). For most “loner” asteroids and comets, the original debris clouds around the primary nucleus should still be intact. The debris would consist of material of all sizes from dust to near-primary-nucleus size. Normal evolution of such debris clouds under tidal forces would tend to concentrate much of the debris into the orbital plane, and to collect some of that planar debris in an equatorial ring at the synchronous satellite orbit location (typically 1-2 radii above the asteroid surface). Debris inside the synchronous orbit should be cleared out by tidal forces and mostly found now lying on the surface of the primary asteroid.

Besides, I thought this rubble-pile idea was put to bed already - hasn’t every actual observation of both asteroids and comets turned up solid bodies, as below? Just sayin - I know the theory is that they’re rubble piles, but the observations actually support solid bodies at least as well:

Swift’s Take on Deep Impact http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/swift_take_deep_impact.html?672005

Summary - (Jul 6, 2005) Scientists monitoring NASA’s Swift satellite had a good view of Deep Impact’s collision with Comet Tempel 1. … One of its most important observations from the impact is a quick rise in ultraviolet light. This means that the impactor struck a hard surface, as opposed to something soft and snowy.

…The Deep Impact team also mentioned “layers”, with the higher material rough and the lower portions of the surface smooth. This suggests a geologically evolved object rather than a primitive one.

Facebook page for our fiction project, “Novelty Theater”:

 http://www.facebook.com/pages/Novelty-Theater-by-Allen-and-Jim-Richardson/264250088092

Become a fan if you … are one. Warning: adult situations.

The unfortunately named Professor Nutt, fired from the UK govt for his sensible drug policy positions, has formed an independent drug advisory panel, that in his words will try and “take over” from the official panel. Plainly put, he’s here to kick ass and eat caviar and he’s all out of caviar.

More here on the Nutt controversy.

More independent science please!

It’s about fucking time. $30 million to study potential health effects beats a poke in the eye:

…the drug agency asked an independent panel of scientific advisers to review its draft report, and the panel gave it a scathing review. It accused the F.D.A. of ignoring important evidence and giving consumers a false sense of security about the chemical. The drug agency promised to reconsider BPA, and the announcement on Friday fulfilled that pledge.

Amazing the effect an independent scientific panel can have. Now if they could only start listening to independent scientists about genetically modified food…

Tests on stingrays reveal they are smart as shit, with tool use (manipulating water flow as tool) and other cognitive abilities.

It reveals that the fish, once thought a “simple reflex animal”, has cognitive abilities to rival birds, reptiles and mammals, scientists say.

… In the past, scientists have assumed that such cartilaginous fish have limited cognitive abilities, in part because they have been difficult to study, says Dr Michael Kuba from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel who undertook the latest study.

You got that? Because (in part) they were difficult to study, scientists assumed they had limited cognitive abilities. Absent any data whatsoever, the default scientific belief is that a given animal has limited cognitive abilities.

That illustrates nicely how anthropomorphism is underrated. Because the default belief of anthropomorphism is that well, any given animal is probably a lot like us. And time and time again, as in this case, it’s the anthropomorphic position that is correct, or at least, not surprised.

Terence McKenna on Novelty Theory part 1

Enjoy this scintillating analysis of what would happen in a Hulk vs Juggernaut fisticuffs. Geektacular.

Then, thrill to this episode of the animated Hulk series. Clip 1 . Clip 2. It’s got it all. Themes of science run amok pervade the Hulk mythos. Plus, see if you don’t get misty-eyed when Rick Jones and Betty Ross are forced to break the Hulk’s heart in order to save his life.

This is why we will win this struggle.