The Oyster’s Garter

Sounds like a headline from The Onion doesn’t it? It’s actually the headline from Space.com. Seems the British papers saw the NASA photo of the Mars terrain at right (taken by the Spirit Rover) and decided the circled image was a sitting Martian. No amount of logic will dissuade such folks, but I’ll quote Benjamin Radford’s marvelously succinct explanation for how they know it’s just a bit of landscape:

 In fact, it will actually be pretty easy to determine whether or not the image is of alien life. In later photographs of the area, either the same shape will be there or it won’t. If it is, it’s a rock (unless, of course, little Martian men can hold the same pose for weeks or months at a time).

Even better, the rock formation is very close to the camera, so it’s quite small, just a few inches tall.

Not now that I know how to generate electricity from rain drops. Well, not me. But us. People. French people.  Fine, a French scientist named Jean-Jacques Chaillout. Seems he’s figured out how to harness rain to generate electricity. The key is piezoelectric materials, which are usually crystal formations that generate electricity in response to mechanical energy (i.e. movement). But  Chaillout and his colleagues at CEA/Leti-Minatec in Grenoble have struck on a special polymer that lets them harness the energy generated.  A single drizzly drop could be worth 1 microwatt of energy, and one hard downpour drop could generate 12 milliwatts, 12,000 times as much.

This sort of technology could help provide renewable electricity to places  with too much cloud cover to make practical use of solar power, but there’s a ways to go before it’s really practical. Chaillout estimates that in rainy parts of France the technology will generate 1 Watt-hour per year per square meter. Considering we typically measure electricity usage in kilowatt-hours, that’s really not much. But imagine the eventual electrical potential of Providence!

Mercury in seafood is nothing new. But when the NY Times tested sushi-grade tuna, there was so much mercury in some pieces that the EPA could yank it from the market. The doctor quoted in the article recommended no more than one meal every three weeks - not too different than eating fish caught in New York Harbor. Deep Sea News has more detail, and blogfish has the tuna industry response.

Poor tuna. Between overfishing, mercury, and habitat destruction, can things get worse? Oh, yes - Kate Wing reports that Atlantic bluefin tuna can’t even make it in a Mamet play.

Most academic science is funded by the government, so the results essentially belong to the people. But the data that is paid for by these grants rarely appears outside of expensive, subscription-only journals. The Public Library of Science (PLoS), a free online scientific journal, is a great approach to making science results available to the public. And, very soon, Google will be another!

Wired Magazine reports that Google’s next huge world-changing project will be a home for terabytes of scientific data. Wired says:

The storage will be free to scientists and access to the data will be free for all. The project, known as Palimpsest and first previewed to the scientific community at the Science Foo camp at the Googleplex last August, missed its original launch date this week, but will debut soon…

The storage would fill a major need for scientists who want to openly share their data, and would allow citizen scientists access to an unprecedented amount of data to explore. For example, two planned datasets are all 120 terabytes of Hubble Space Telescope data and the images from the Archimedes Palimpsest, the 10th century manuscript that inspired the Google dataset storage project.

Wowzers. For ocean scientists, I envision having real-time and archival monitoring data at our fingertips. Imagine having all the long-term data sets (like CALCOFI or the Scripps pier series) in one place. Or imagine people putting all kinds of photo transects up there. Want to virtually dive on a wall in the Galapagos? Here’s 1 m square photos along a 100 m transect - analyze as you will.

Of course, the tricky part will be coaxing scientists into actually putting their hard-earned data up for all to see. But I think once the momentum gets going, it will be too powerful a tool to resist.

Every girl loves heart-shaped jewelery. That’s why this is one of my favorite necklaces. The double-takes are amazing - “is…is…that…a HEART?” If you’d rather have something fuzzy, here’s a glittery, anatomically-correct knit heart. For the more mad-scientist-inclined, you can dream of having a real beating heart in a jar.

Fuzzy heart via Chaos Theory

Insects are among the most abundant lifeforms on earth, so it’s not very surprising that their parasites are equally abundant. And those parasites take many, many forms - most awesomely disgusting and terrifying.

First in today’s parasite buffet, courtesy of my most excellent friend Sam, is a tasty red berry! Oh, wait, that’s actually an ant. A newly discovered nematode alters the color of its host-ant’s abdomen, making it look like a ripe, delicious berry. As if that isn’t enough, the nematode also makes the ant wave its tasty abdomen in the air (normally a defense posture) and makes the ant taste better by suppressing the ant’s defensive chemicals. Birds eat the ant and poop out the parasite, the ants collect the bird poop & feed it to their larvae, and the cycle begins anew.

Next is Cordyceps, a fungus that can control bugs’ brains. Insects infected with Cordyceps have an uncontrollable urge to climb high up a plant and clamp their jaws tight. The fungus then eats their brain and sporulates out of their head. You really MUST watch this video for the time-lapse zombie-fungus-brain-eating sequences.

Finally, please enjoy hipsters driven mad by the natural world. Cracked.com features The 5 Most Horrifying Insects in the World. It’s the most hysterical (insane, not funny) article I think I’ve ever read - the entire piece reads like one primal scream. I don’t know why they’re so frightening - after all, they left out the bat-eating Amazonian Giant Centipede (video, with Davd Attenborough to soothe you).

Don’t worry. At least it’s not like you’ve got any mind-controlling parasites.

Photo from Neurophilosphy, some links from Metafilter.

[Update: For more on abortion as a human right, see Are Women Human?" on Pandagon.]

Today is the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. NARAL is celebrating with Blog for Choice Day. Since I believe that having a choice about whether to be pregnant is a critical human right, here’s my contribution.

One of the hoary old tactics of anti-choice activists is to equate abortion with murder. They claim that killing a fertilized egg, no matter how old, is the same as killing a toddler or an adult. So the argument over abortion has been about when life begins - is it Sperm Magic (the moment an egg is fertilized) or is it “quickening” (when movement can be felt) or is it birth itself?

Since nobody can objectively determine the beginning of life, there can be no compromise. That is, IF anti-choice activists really, truly think abortion is murder. But they don’t.

This truly fantastic chart from Alas, a Blog opened my eyes. It lists actual policies proposed by anti-choicers, and whether it is consistent with abortion=murder…or whether it is consistent with punishing women who have sex.

The ORV Alguita (previously) has set off on a new journey to the North Pacific Gyre to examine marine debris. You can follow along with their adventures at their blog. If you’re a teacher or a student, they have a special school-related blog where the crew will answer questions.

The Alguita is run by Algalita Marine Research Foundation, who are the go-to people on trash in the North Pacific Gyre. They brought the gyre to national attention, and pretty much every single paper on the trash gyre in the scientific literature is associated with them, since nobody else is doing any research yet. (though NOAA has made motions.) The lack of multiple data sources is somewhat disturbing for such a big, high-profile issue.

I would really like to see a big oceanographic vessel make a trip out to the gyre. The Algalita folks do fantastic work, but their vessel is much, much smaller than the usual research size. This means that they can’t use large, heavy sampling equipment or operate in marginal conditions. For a size comparison, here’s the Alguita’s A-frame (those slanty white bars in the background), which is used to deploy & retrieve equipment. Here’s a photo of yours truly (in the baseball hat) operating the A-frame on the Sproul, SIO’s smallest ship.

Furthermore, none of the Alguita’s crew are trained oceanographers. There’s a lot of specialized knowledge out there about how to sample the big-ass ocean. (I don’t have it, being a coastal ecology type, but there’s a ludicrous amount to know.) A trained crew can sample around the clock, continuously, for the entire voyage. A small ship just doesn’t have that ability. The tradeoff, of course, is that even the smallest SIO ship costs $12,000 per DAY at sea.

Despite my nitpicking, I’m glad the Alguita is out there, and I am quite curious to see what they bring back. For any San Diego or SoCal readers, one of the Alguita’s crew, Marcus Eriksen, will be reporting on their findings at SIO on April 16th. I’m sure there will be PLENTY of plastic to go around.

When Miriam and I moved in 2006, we used over 100 cardboard boxes and some ungodly quantity of packing materials and duck tape (You know - it’s for ducks). In fact, combined with the fuel emissions produced by the truck hauling our belongings cross-country and the jet flight to San Diego, moving may have been the most environmentally harmful thing I’ve ever done.

Well, they can’t reduce the carbon emissions from jet fuel (yet), but the fellows at Earth Friendly Moving can at least save us the boxes problem. They make plastic moving boxes out materials they take out of the landfill, and they rent them out to customers for a buck a week a box, plus delivery fee. They also make a packing material composed mostly out of recycled paper pulp, and they drop off and pick up the boxes in their bio-diesel trucks. They even stack the boxes for delivery on a pallet made of recycled used diapers (They call it the Poopy Pallet. Yay Poop Power!). The founders, Spencer Brown and Brian Anton, claim that for ever 100 boxes they make, 256 pounds of landfill is removed, and it saves three trees.

The price is pretty reasonable, too. The cheapest deal I found with a quick Froogle search lead me to a supplier charging $1.58 per large box. On our last move we used over 100 boxes, but let’s call it 100 for the roundness of the number (nice, round zeros, like donuts, ahhhh…). So, at the high end delivery fee, we’re paying $2 a box, but we can feel good about ourselves. At the low end we’re paying $1.20 a box, so we get to feel good about ourselves AND save money. As good old Hannibal Smith said, I love it when a plan comes together.

(Thanks for the tip, Anna!)

Because it’s Friday, and the long weekend is coming up, and the writer’s strike is delaying the next season of 24, take five minutes for this bit of video, sent to me by a friend of mine.  You will laugh, because you know it’s true.