Link Banana

Brandon Keim is justifiably angry that the American Department of Health and Human recently declared a state of anthrax emergency for no discernible reason but the immunity it offers to vaccine manufacturers.

Emergency exemption from legal liability is granted to vaccine manufacturers by the Public Readiness and Preparedness Act, passed in 2005 to protect against paralyzing lawsuits during outbreaks of anthrax, avian influenza or other potentially pandemic diseases.

The Wired Science blog has a cool compilation of the relevant Digg bait.

Two interesting tidbits:

• Primordial Mars was like primordial Earth.
• The European Space Agency offers some beautiful photos the Echus Chasm. The chasm was made by liquid water at some point in the past. (via Wired Science)

Perhaps in part to validate their story predicting this occurance, Wired Science says that though China’s making a valient effort, air quality in Beijing isn’t really better. (Though, as anyone who’s been in a big city could have told you, rain and wind do a good deal to improve visibility.)

…of the heart. But aside from my irrationational affinity for cheesy 80s songs, there was a solar eclipse today. And not a mini one. Wired Science pulls some great photos of it.

A picture of the International Space Station transiting the sun. It’s like a mini solar eclipse.

(via Wired Science)

Scientists figured out why the Northern Lights flitter around:

The satellites confirmed that the storm was caused by a phenomenon called magnetic reconnection in which solar energy stretches the Earth’s magnetic field lines until they reach their limits and snap back into equilibrium. Like an earthquake in the sky, this releases enormous amounts of energy, and charged particles go flying into the atmosphere.

At least one scientist doubts China’s ability to keep Beijing’s air quality within acceptable limits for Olympic competition:

China’s basic air problem is that the city experiences roughly weekly meteorological cycles in which stagnant, polluted air coming from the provinces south of Beijing is flushed out by cold fronts from Mongolia. When the weather doesn’t cooperate, there is little that the authorities can do, Rahn said.

“I’m glad I’m not an Olympic organizer responsible for canceling these events,” Rahn said. “It is a borderline situation and unpredictable until the 11th hour. “

Scientists think they may have found the ideal reservoir for all CO₂ America needs to remove from the atmosphere.

The answer, say Columbia researchers, lies in huge reservoirs of basalt off the coast of the Pacific northwest. That basalt is buried underneath hundreds of feet of sediment, and that in turn lies thousands of feet below the ocean’s surface.

The basalt, located on the San Juan de Fuca tectonic plate, could store about 150 years’ worth of the United States’ yearly load of 1.7 gigatons of emissions.

It’s also worth noting, as this story does, that there are more than a few people who think the whole idea of carbon sequestration is a waste of time and resources.

This is rather old, but it was news to me: when taught to use currency, monkeys pay for sex.

(via Wired Science)

Announced with less than a tenth the fanfare of the ice on Mars, scientists now believe there is water on the moon. Add this to the near-invisible announcement of water in Mercury’s atmosphere, and it’s beginning to look like water’s far more prevalent in the solar system than we’d thought.

Fascinating:

Using MRI scans of gay and straight men and women, the researchers found that people who liked women — heterosexual men and homosexual women — had larger right brain hemispheres, while people who liked men — heterosexual women and homosexual men — had symmetrical brains. As seen in the image, MRI and PET scans showed a similar pattern in two specific regions of the brain, the right and left amygdalas, which are thought to control fight-or-flight reactions.

Sometimes interesting things come consecutively from an interesting site with an unlikely theme. This is one of those times.

• Israeli scientist grew a tree from a 2000 year old seed. Alexis Madrigal wonders if such a tree could be a “native plant” or if it’s actually a seed without a country. (Yes, I do think it’s rather fitting that Israeli scientist conjured the thought of someone “without a country.”)
• Also, a solar-thermal demo plant has been completed in Israel. I’m a little surprised. I thought such things would forever exist only in memory.

Are we obligated to protect any life forms we find on Mars? One thought:

All of a sudden, it’s a judgement call. And that really hadn’t occurred to me until I heard Randolph talk of protecting extraterrestrial life — and though his arguments invoke religious parables, it doesn’t really require religious beliefs. He strikes the same vein as Methodist environmentalist Bill McKibben, who’s found a secular audience among more old-fashioned progressives.

“Fundamentally, the question is what it means to be a space-traveling species, and what counts as being an ethical space traveler. What sort of obligations if any do we owe to any extraterrestrial life that we encounter, whether it’s intelligent or not?” he asked.

Some astronomers say that we should only look for extraterrestial life that has a reasonable probablitiy of finding us.

Though I have no idea where this falls is proportion to America’s total consumption, it’s interesting to see that wind dominates among currently planned methods of power generation.

I’ve probably noted my fascination with synesthesia — associating numbers with colors, smells with shapes, etc — before, but this stuff is interesting:

Where does synesthesia come from? Maybe synesthetes are just lying. Perhaps they’re under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs — many research subjects are college kids, after all — or happened as children to play with colored alphabet blocks. Or maybe they’re simply good with metaphors.

To Ramachandran, the latter answer gets at the truth — but he stressed that what appears as metaphor is a literal sensory experience for synesthetes. That may explain, he said, why synesthesia is eight times more common among poets, artists and novelists than the general population.

The essence of art is, arguably, metaphor, and its practitioners are especially prolific — and metaphor is just a convenient shorthand for the connection of unlinked cognitive phenomena. That’s exactly what appears to happen in the minds of synesthetes. Far-flung parts of their brain have unusually high levels of cross-wiring.

It’s worth reading the rest of the post, if only for the heartening “we’re all synesthetes” argument at the end.

Wired Science has an approachable look at this report which measured the per-capita emissions of the 100 largest US metro areas. There’s not much terribly surprising — density is good, public transportation is good, coal is bad, mild weather is good — but the map’s still interesting to see.

That is: the next pollutant we’re to get collectively scared about. From Wired Science:

“The natural nitrogen cycle has been very heavily influenced by human activity over the last century perhaps even more so than the carbon cycle,” said University of East Anglia biogeochemist Peter Liss, a co-author on the second paper.

The problem isn’t strictly nitrogen, which comprises more than three-quarters of the air we breathe, but so-called reactive nitrogen. These are analogous to better-known free oxygen radicals: an altered electron configuration makes them especially unstable, and more likely to wreak environmental havoc.

In 1860, humanity produced 15 metric tons of reactive nitrogen. By 1995, that number stood at 156 tons, and swelled to 185 tons by 2005. Those numbers are small in comparison to global CO2 emissions — 27 billion tons annually — but the impacts are magnified by what James Galloway, a University of Virginia biogeochemist and co-author of the review, calls the nitrogen cascade.

The Economist addressed the same topic. I’m sure 100 other publications have or will soon.

Wired Science found a recent Pew survey on climate change both weird and confounding:

Over the last year and a half, the number of Americans who believe the Earth is warming has dropped. The decline is especially precipitous among Republicans: in January 2007, 62 percent accepted global warming, compared to just 49 percent now.

Seeing as how 2007 was the second-warmest year on record, and the popular press finally took climate change seriously, I’m not sure how attitudes shifted in this manner. That’s the troubling part.

The confounding part: among college-educated poll respondents, 19 percent of Republicans believe that human activities are causing global warming, compared to 75 percent of Democrats. But take that college education away and Republican believers rise to 31 percent while Democrats drop to 52 percent.