December 17, 2007 1:00

Cosmic Firehose

Composite image of a cosmic jet spewing from one galaxy and caroming off another/X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/D.Evans et al.; Optical/UV: NASA/STScI; Radio: NSF/VLA/CfA/D.Evans et al., STFC/JBO/MERLIN

Artist's rendering of the same thing, so you can see what's going on/NASA/CXC/M. Weiss

The most up-to-date thinking about black holes is that giant ones, with as much mass as a million or more stars each, lurk at the cores of many galaxies. As gas tries to funnel into these powerful cosmic vacuum cleaners, it heats up and spews jets of matter out into space. When one of those jet is aimed straight at us, it's called a quasar. Fortunately, they're all much too far away to pose a danger to us.

In this distant system, called 3C321, the jet is aimed straight at a nearby galaxy, where it strikes a glancing blow and then sprays out into intergalactic space. The false-color image at the top is a composite of measurements made by optical (orange), radio (blue), X-ray (purple) and ultraviolet (orange) detectors on several ground- and space-based telescopes, including the Hubble, Chandra, VLA and MERLIN.

The smaller galaxy is rotating around the larger (unofficially named the "death star galaxy") —right into the path of the jet. If something like that were happening to the Milky Way, we wouldn't be around to talk about it.

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December 14, 2007 3:27

More Blogs by Scientists

Overlooked in my first post, added thanks to reader reminders

Bad Astronomy

Real Climate

More to come, I'm sure

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December 14, 2007 9:57

Why I Hate Scientist-Bloggers

OK, I don't really hate them. But it used to be that science journalists stood between scientists and the public. The scientists did research, then we asked questions and translated their dry jargon and complicated ideas into scintillating prose. Sure, there were a few scientists, like Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould and Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who wrote engagingly about the mysteries of the natural world, but they were relatively few.

Now look what's happened. Go to the Science Blogs website and you'll find dozens of actual scientists, commenting in real time on every aspect of science you can imagine. It wouldn't be so bad if they were inarticulate—but most of them aren't! They're eloquent, funny, sarcastic and really smart (the last kind of goes without saying). No sooner does a paper appear in a major (or even a minor journal) than they jump in with knowledgeable reaction.

The truth is that science journalists have always relied on actual scientists to help us understand the implications of some new discovery. Some of us are pretty savvy about some areas of science, but still, we need to get expert perspective. Scientist-bloggers help us do that, only more efficiently. And because there are so many of them, with many more scientists commenting on their posts, the wisdom of crowds distills the essence of the arguments very quickly.

Just to prove I don't really hate them, here are some—but only some! anyone I've left out, don't take it personally!—of my favorite blogs by scientists: Pharyngula, Aetiology, Cosmic Variance, The Intersection (a joint effort with at least one actual scientist blogging), Respectful Insolence.

There are plenty more—go explore. As long, that is, as you return here afterward.

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December 12, 2007 7:03

Carrying a Baby is Hard Enough as it Is

Artist's rendering of a pregnant Australopithecene, circa 2 million years B.P. /John Gurche

Paleoanthropologists agree that the change from walking on all fours to bipedalism was what started our distant ancestors on the evolutionary trail away from the apes and toward humanity. But because upright-walking puts strain on the lower back, an apelike spine with the vertebrae in a pretty straight line, couldn't handle the pounding. By two million years ago, the ancestor known as Australopithecus (Lucy is the best-known representative) had evolved a load-handling forward curve to that part of the spinal column.

But because pregnancy causes a major weight distribution in women—and presumably because, lacking birth control, Lucy and her compatriots were probably pregnant much of the time—female Ausralopithecenes developed a curve that stretched across more vertebrae than males, according to a study in the current Nature by scientists from the University of Texas at Austin and at Harvard. Male and female chimps don't have any differences in spinal curvature. Modern human females, like Lucy, do.

Luckily for them.

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December 11, 2007 8:29

Girls Rule

Back in 2005, Harvard president Lawrence Summers made some less than enthusiastic remarks about women in science. Now he's ex-president, and while some blamed the political-correctness police for his downfall, last week's results in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology suggest it was the actual-correctness police who made the call. The top three winners of the contest, aimed at high-school students nationwide, were...girls.

Janelle Schlossberger and Amanda Marinoff, both 17, of Long Island's Plainview-Old Bethpage John F. Kennedy High School split the $100,000 top prize in the team competition, and Isha Himani Jain, of Freedom High School in Bethlehem, Pa., gets to keep another $100,000 for winning the individual contest. Here's one of many news stories about them.

And my apologies to all three for being late to post on this.

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December 10, 2007 2:08

Let's Have a Presidential Debate on Science

Last summer I blogged about a meeting of high-level journalists and scientists to address the question of why Americans are so uninterested in science—even though it has a huge impact on their lives. One idea was to try and get the Presidential candidates to focus on science policy in a slightly more nuanced way than simply declaring themselves for or against evolution, stem cell research or global warming.

Now that idea is gaining some traction, as you'll see on the science-policy blog The Intersection. Lawrence Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University and a participant in the conference, recently published this
Wall Street Journal Op-Ed (subscription) calling for a debate that focuses seriously on science policy. There's also a brand-new group on Facebook

Will it happen? I sure hope so. Given that science is the basis for understanding human disease, the future of our environment and economic competitiveness, among other hugely important issues, it's pretty absurd that the candidates aren't even talking about it. Maybe if we all close our eyes and wish really hard, they will. But putting public pressure on them is probably an even better plan.

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