A plug for The Intersection of science and policy (via communication)

Lots to show and tell about space this week, this is only the beginning.

A blog I read pretty regularly is Chris Mooney's and Sheril Kirshenbaum's The Intersection. I had to re-post this video - it is a freakin' AWESOME marriage of pop culture/entertainment and science!

"The LHC is super duper fly."

For the rest of Mooney's post, which details a radio interview you may have heard on NPR's Living Earth, click here. May I also suggest you check out their new book (I haven't read it yet, but it's on my list!), Unscientific America:

"Viva Pluto!"

"Stop Planetary Discrimination!"

"Pluto Was Framed!"

"Dear Earth: You Suck. Love, Pluto."

"Pluto is still a planet. Bitches."

So read a small sampling of the defiant T-shirt and bumper sticker slogans that emerged in late 2006 after the International Astronomical Union (IAU), meeting in Prague, opted to poke the public with a sharp stick. The union's general assembly voted to excommunicate the ninth planet from the solar system, thus abruptly stripping Pluto of a status as much cultural, historic, and even mythological as scientific.

In the astronomers' defense, it had become increasingly difficult to justify calling Pluto a planet without doing the same for several other more recently discovered heavenly objects--one of which, the distant freezing rock now known as Eris (formerly "Xena"), turns out to be larger. But that didn't mean the experts had to fire Pluto from its previous place in the firmament. In defining the word "planet," they were arguably not so much engaged in science as a semantic exercise, meaning that instead of ruling Pluto out, they could just as easily have ruled a few new planets in, as a group of scientists, historians, and journalists had in fact proposed. But the IAU rejected that compromise for a variety of technical reasons: Pluto is much smaller than the other eight planets; it orbits the sun in a far more elliptical manner; its gravitational pull is not strong enough to have "cleared the neighborhood around its orbit" of other significant objects and debris…

People were aghast. Not only did they recoil at having to unlearn what they had learned as children, and perhaps the chief thing they remembered about astronomy. On some fundamental level their sense of fair play had been violated, and their love of the underdog provoked. Why suddenly kick Pluto out of the planet fraternity after letting it stay in for nearly a century, ever since its 1930 discovery? "No do-overs," wrote one cartoonist.

Soon websites started sprouting up encouraging people to vote on Pluto's status and override the experts. A Facebook group entitled "When I was your age, Pluto was a planet" drew a million and a half members. New Mexico, the state where Pluto's discoverer, Clyde Tombaugh, had built an astronomy program, took particular offense. Its House of Representatives voted unanimously to preserve Pluto's planethood and named March 13, 2007, "Pluto Planet Day." Surveying it all, the American Dialect Society selected "plutoed" as its 2006 word of the year--as in, "you plutoed me." The society offered this definition: "to demote or devalue someone or something, as happened to the former planet Pluto when the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union decided Pluto no longer met its definition of a planet."

Even many scientists were upset. "I'm embarrassed for astronomy," remarked Alan Stern, the chief scientist on NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto and beyond... (keep reading this excerpt)

Space week

A. Earthrise 1968 by William Anders/NASA (Video of the Earth rising and setting was captured in HD by the Japanese space agency and released last year. You can view it and other images, as well as geek out on how they caught the events on camera, here.)

I can't help but be curious, awestruck and inspired when I look up into a clear night sky. Unfortunately, I find I must go further and further now to see a starry sky.

The 40th anniversary of the first humans landing on the moon is as good as any moment to pause and reflect on how much we know, and how much we don't.

B. Dr. Sylvia Earle's TED Prize wish to protect our ocean (February 2009). This grandma kicks some serious science butt.

Here's to those who devoted their lives to exploring the great unknown, in space and right here on our own tiny planet. And here's to hoping that once again our nation's science coffers will be expanded as they were under Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy.

UPDATED 7/26/2009 - Here is a roundup of Space Week posts following this one:

• The Intersection of science and policy via communication
• Space baubles
• Middle of the week space shenanigans
• The power of wonder

Does this fragrance make me look fat?

Of all the five senses — sight, touch, hearing, taste and smell — the latter is the one that has always held the most intrigue for me. Actually, let's be honest, I am captivated by smell and our ability (or inability comparatively speaking) to detect a scent and apply meaning to it whether consciously or subconsciously. We have a lot to be thankful for the role our sense of smell plays in our lives.

A. The secret to womanhood is — mmm, bacon...

First and foremost, in my humble opinion, taste and scent are intricately tied to one another — food would not be nearly as appealing and enjoyable without it. In fact according to one scientist-turned-CEO cited in a recent New York Times article, as much as 80% of what we perceive as taste might really be smell. Any sommelier or wine coinnesseur worth her/his salt, for instance, will tell you breathing in the bouquet and/or exhaling on the finish is so important to properly appreciating a fine wine. I swear to you it is true, based on first hand experience with this flavor-enhancing behavior almost every night. My most memorable and poignant example of this was in Portugal during the Euro 2004; I tasted the smell of olives in a vinho tinto we enjoyed late one night upon returning to our country pousada from a day spent driving through the vast stretches of olive trees during the drive to and from Aveiro.

Next, of all the five senses, smell is the one most closely linked with memory. Have you ever been somewhere else, when a wayward smell immediately transports you back in time to corn dog day in your elementary school cafeteria, summer camp after a light shower, or the weekly visit to a beloved elderly family member in assisted living, etc.? A few years back there was an interesting study published in the British Royal Society biology letters, which noted the roles memory and smell play in elephants' ability to keep tabs on family members near and far. I can imagine how liberating this might be if I had a similar ability to keep tabs on Big and Little CL at the neighborhood park around 11am every Sunday.

Many animals of course use their sense of smell to guide them, sometimes over considerable distances, to a member of the opposite sex ripe for mating. And this brings me to smell as a vehicle for bodily communication, or smell's sensual and sexual sides. I recently brought your attention to one study that suggests women are more capable than men of sniffing out biologically relevant information from sweat. As gross as that may at first sound, odor and the ability to detect it play a crucial role in mate selection, and thus reproduction; this is a biological function of hormone and pheromone production seen in many (most?) animals.

Think about it, body odor is either a turn-off or a turn-on, and a strong one at that. Humans are the only species of which I'm aware that intentionally apply scents in order to be more sexually attractive — dogs do not roll in deer feces to attract other dogs. The company who can develop and bottle human pheromones will make a killing (ever see that X-File gender bender episode?), and those Axe commercials would have you believe that company already has. Is it any wonder perfume is a multi-billion dollar business? And that doesn't include aromatherapy or the myriad other personal care product companies that spend fortunes on developing or acquiring fragrances for their lotions, shampoos, lip glosses, etc.

With all of this in mind, I am pretty sure I'm advertising to Mr. CL that I'm open for business when I wear perfume (personal favorites are Lauren and No. 5, oldies but goodies). Having children has altered the frequency with which I apply fragrance; I don't spritz and dab as regularly as I used to because a mother's scent is very important in the early bonding with baby (and vice versa). My childhood memories of my own mother are tied to Jungle Gardenia, and I can't help but think of her when I smell the real flower.

So, what does your scent say about you —
Can you bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan? I won't hate you because you're Beautiful, smart and a good cook.
Do you have a Passion for Poison?
What's your Pleasure, or has it been an Eternity?

Diatomaceous update

Speaking of diatoms, a colleague just forwarded this to me - what a totally chunky bit of reporting!

Through the eye of a needle, a world writ small. In this award-winning image, wildlife photgrapher Peter Parks depicts a single drop of seawater collected at the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and magnified 20 times to reveal its living contents.

 

Go check the rest of it out for yourself at the San Diego Union-Tribune. (Photo courtesy of Nikon Small World and Imagemarinequest.com)

Diatoms are cool and hot, trust me on this

Has this ever happened to you, when you know what you are talking about but unfortunately [dumb ass!] cannot articulate at the time? It happened to me yesterday in a staff meeting, no less. As I lay in bed drifting off to sleep last night, the relevant info - dimethyl sulfide, of course! - that had been locked away in storage in the nether regions of my brain hit me like a bolt of lightening.

My organization has a journal club - once a month, we devote a part of our regular staff meeting to covering oceans-relevant studies and news from pre-assigned journals. I think it's a brilliant idea - from what I understand, it's a tradition borrowed from medical school (but I haven't verified this) - and makes staying on top of a number of journals much easier than any one person could do on her/his own.

While summarizing the microbial oceanography content from the May 14 Nature Insight, I included the what-I-thought-to-be-common-knowledge remark that "diatoms, as you know, are responsible for cloud production."

"Um, no we don't know" was the immediate response.

My colleagues were eager for an explanation, and the intricacies of phytoplanktonic life were momentarily eluding me. All I could say was, "I don't recall the precise biological and chemical processes, but, trust me, diatoms are linked to cloud formation and the regulation of temperature. I'll get back to you on this."

Here is the plain-speak answer I should have been able to articulate:

A. The picture that would have been worth 1,000 words. (courtesy of Oceanworld)

Phytoplankton such as diatoms emit dimethyl sulfide or DMS, a component in the "smell of the sea." Some of this gas ends up in the atmosphere, where it oxidizes and forms particles around which water can condense and form cloud droplets. The reflectivity of clouds (or their albedo) is influenced by the number of these condensation particles. According to my now totally outdated Environmental Science textbook (I see it's currently in its tenth edition), as the ocean warms more DMS is produced. Clouds block sunlight, so more DMS means more potential clouds to block sunlight. This, in turn, would result in a cooling effect, however, less solar energy means less active phytoplankton, which means less DMS and thus less cloud condensation particles. Hot, cold, hot, and so on...

In other words, what we have is a nice little feedback mechanism that is thought to help regulate temperature and keep it within a suitable range for life. Under normal conditions and all other things being equal, which of course we know they are not. (For more on diatoms and the regulation of planetary temperature, see Science Progress.)

Tall, dark and smelly

From ScienceDaily (Apr. 7, 2009):

It may be wise to trust the female nose when it comes to body odor. According to new research from the Monell Center, it is more difficult to mask underarm odor when women are doing the smelling.

The female nose, it always knows! The article continues:

"It is quite difficult to block a woman's awareness of body odor. In contrast, it seems rather easy to do so in men," said study lead author... 

and

The researchers speculate that females are more attuned to biologically relevant information in sweat that may guide women when choosing a mate...

"Taken together, our studies indicate that human sweat conveys information that is of particular importance to females. This may explain why it is so difficult to block women's perception of sweat odors."

So, ladies, what biologically relevant info are you sniffing out?