Medical officials are saying that there have been 37 cases of pertussis — whooping cough — reported in my hometown of Boulder so far this year.

We’re not even 100 days into 2012 yet. [Note: Washington State is in the midst of an actual epidemic of pertussis.]

How serious is this? 30 of those Boulder cases are in children under the age of 18… and it almost took the life of six week old Natalie Schultz. The local news reported on this:

[You may need to refresh this page to see the video.]

This outbreak might shock you, especially considering Boulder is one of the most educated cities in the United States. But in fact, I’ve been wondering if and when something like this might happen here. Denial of the benefits of vaccination is strong in educated areas, like Boulder or Marin county, California — being educated doesn’t mean you get things right, and in fact can make people believe in their own knowledge even more strongly. They go online and find antivax literature which magnifies their own beliefs.

Also, these tend to be more left-leaning areas, and the antivax movement does better there. The result? A little baby, not even two months old, is recovering from a nearly-fatal event that was totally preventable if enough people were vaccinated. Herd immunity would have prevented this whole thing. Natalie is too young to get a pertussis vaccine herself, so babies like her rely on adults — us — to be immunized against these diseases.

Adults should have a pertussis booster every ten years. I got my TDaP booster a couple of years ago. Just two months earlier, unbeknownst to me at the time, a little girl in Belgium named Lore Darch died from pertussis at the age of 83 days. Her father, Danny, wrote a diary for her as a memorial. Read it if you can. I did, and my heart aches so hard it’s a physical pain.

Like David and Toni McCaffery — who lost their daughter Dana to pertussis — Danny and his wife Katrien have become vocal advocates for vaccination.

If you haven’t had your booster, you should talk to your board-certified doctor and see if you need one as well.

As Danica, Natalie’s mother put it:

"I almost lost my daughter at almost six weeks old… that could have been prevented if everyone was vaccinated."

She’s right. Antivaxxers are wrong. DON’T believe them about vaccine ingredients. DON’T believe them when they say they just want to educate people. DON’T believe them when they say vaccines cause autism. DON’T believe them when they say vaccines don’t work.

Vaccinations save lives. It’s that simple. Go talk to your doctor. NOW.

My thanks to The Vaccine Times on Twitter for alerting me to this.

Every week (or so) I do an interactive live video chat on Google+ where people can ask me questions about space and astronomy. I call it Q&BA, and it’s always fun to hear what questions are on people’s minds.

I recently got a great question: "What do you think of the concept of a space habitat? Is it possible to replicate Earth’s environment in space?" I really leaned into this one — I’ve spent some time thinking about it — so here’s my answer:

That last minute or so is important to me. One of the reasons I do any of this — write, speak publicly, and share my joy of science — is to help increase public perception of science and space, and hopefully to help inspire people to be excited about space travel the way others inspired me when I was younger. I imagine this will be a recurring theme in future Q&BAs.

I have an archive of Q&BA links and videos. Take a look and see if there are other ones that tickle your imagination.

There are times — rare, but they happen — when I have a difficult time describing the enormity of something. Something so big, so overwhelming, that words simply cannot suffice.

The basic story is: Using the VISTA telescope in Chile and the UKIRT telescope in Hawaii, astronomers have made an incredibly detailed map of the sky in infrared. This map will help understand our own galaxy, more distant galaxies, quasars, nebulae, and much more.

But what do I mean by "incredibly detailed"?

This is where words get hard. So hang on tight; let me show you instead.

Here’s a section of the survey they made, showing the star-forming region G305, an enormous cloud of gas about 12,000 light years away which is busily birthing tens of thousands of stars:

[Click to enstellarnate.]

Pretty, isn’t it? There are about 10,000 stars in this image, and you can see the gas and dust that’s forming new stars even as you look.

But it’s the scale of this image that’s so amazing. It’s only a tiny, tiny part of this new survey. How tiny? Well, it came from this image (the area of the first image is outlined in the white square):

Again, click to embiggen — it’ll blow your socks off. But we’re not done! That image is a subsection of this one:

… which itself is a subsection of this image:

Sure, I’ll admit that last one doesn’t look like much, squished down into a width of a few hundred pixels here for the blog. So go ahead, click on it. I dare you. If you do, you’ll get a roughly 20,000 x 2000 pixel picture of the sky, a mosaic made from thousands of individual images… and even that is grossly reduced from the original survey.

How big is the raw data from the survey? Why, it only has 150 billion pixels aiieeee aiieeeeee AIIEEEEE!!!

And this would be where I find myself lacking in adjectives. Titanic? Massive? Ginormous? These all fail utterly when trying to describe a one hundred fifty thousand megapixel picture of the sky.

Yegads.

And again, why worry over words when I can show you? The astronomers involved helpfully made the original data — all 150 billion pixels of it — into a pan-and-zoomable image where you can zoom in, and in, and in. It’s hypnotizing, like watching "Inception", but made of stars.

And made of stars it is: there are over a billion stars in the original image! A billion. With a B. It’s one of the most comprehensive surveys of the sky ever made, and yet it still only scratches the surface. This survey only covers the part of the sky where the Milky Way galaxy itself is thickest — in the bottom image above you can see the edge-on disk of our galaxy plainly stretching across the entire shot — and that’s only a fraction of the entire sky.

Think on this: there are a billion stars in that image alone, but that’s less than 1% of the total number of stars in our galaxy! As deep and broad as this amazing picture is, it’s a tiny slice of our local Universe.

And once again, we’ve reached the point where I’m out of words. Our puny brains, evolved to count the number of our fingers and toes, to grasp only what’s within reach, to picture only what we can immediately see — balk at these images.

But… we took them. Human beings looked up and wondered, looked around and observed, looked out and discovered. In our quest to seek ever more knowledge, we built the tools needed to make these pictures: the telescopes, the detectors, the computers. And all along, the power behind that magnificent work was our squishy pink brains.

A billion stars in one shot, thanks to a fleshy mass of collected neurons weighing a kilogram or so. The Universe is amazing, but so are we.

Images credit: Mike Read (WFAU), UKIDSS/GPS and VVV

My old friend and colleague Neil Tyson has long been an advocate for exploration, for basic investment in science, and for pushing the boundaries of what we know and can do. In early March, he got a chance to make his stand official: he testified before the Senate.

Here’s what he said:

Not bad, not bad at all. His passion for this is clear, and his thinking true. There is a lot of room for the devil in the details — he and I agree that doubling NASA’s budget would be A Good Thing, but there would have to be a requisite increase in oversight, and many more administrative details. But that’s not the point when you’re talking to Congress about inspiration: you’re there to inspire. He’s trying to make a much larger point and not get bogged down in details.

And his main point, I think, rings true. After all, "How much would you pay for the Universe?"

On Twitter recently, I saw the following tweet:

[That tweet was from Minute Physics, a great channel on YouTube which does very short, informative, and fun animated physics videos.]

Intrigued, I clicked the link and watched this video. I describe it below. [You may have to refresh the page to get the video to load; if you see a blank spot beneath this then refresh.]

Amazing, right?

Not really. It’s totally bogus! And I’m happy to explain how.

Spinning the truth

Here’s the deal. The trick plays on the idea that people think water will drain (or flush in a toilet) one way north of the equator, and the other way south. Most people know hurricanes rotate one way (counterclockwise) in the north and the other (clockwise) in the south, so there’s some basis for this. The reason cyclones spin opposite ways in opposite hemispheres is due to the Coriolis effect, which I’ve explained in detail both on this blog and on my old website.

Read those explanations first if you’d like, but you don’t need to understand the Coriolis effect in detail here. All you need to know is that over the size of a water basin, the Coriolis force has no effect. I mean it: none. Any random eddy or movement of water in the basin is hugely more important than the teeny tiny effect of the rotating Earth on the basin.

Brain drain

So how does this work then?

Watch the guy working the ruse carefully. First he goes through a show of finding north, and locating the position of the Equator. This is all simply for show. As you’ll see in a second, this exact trick will work anywhere, not just on the Equator. I could do it in Boulder, at a latitude of 40° north!

He goes first to a basin on the Equator. It’s already filled, and the video jumped right before that, so I don’t know if he filled it right before draining it, or if it was sitting there for a while already filled. My guess is it had the water sitting for awhile — you’ll see why in a second. When he pulls out the plug the water drains straight down. OK.

He then grabs the basin and bucket and moves a few meters south. Watch very carefully what happens then: he pours the water from a bucket, making sure the water is flowing in to the left of the drain hole:

I’ve noted with an arrow where the plug is, and where he’s pouring the bucket.

When he does this, it sets up a natural clockwise spin to the water overall; it hits the back of the basin and will flow to the right from there. At least some of the people around him don’t notice this, though, since you can hear them talking excitedly about it.

Now watch again starting at 1:40 when he moves the basin to the north of the Equator. It’s hard to see, but you do very certainly see him pouring the water to the right of the drain hole:

See? That naturally sets up a counterclockwise rotation to the water! It has nothing to do with where the basin is; if he swapped the two locations but still poured to either side of the drain hole, the water would do exactly the same thing!

As for the water in the basin on the Equator, that’s why I think it was sitting for awhile first: he probably filled it carefully so there was no circular motion of the water. That way, when it drains, it drains straight down.

Flushed away

One thing I want to point out here: that guy knows exactly what he’s doing. He has to, to make it work. So at the very least, this is a trick. If he’s asking for money, though, and not explaining it, then in my opinion it’s just plain old fraud. Of course it’s not like he’s the first guy to take advantage of tourists! Caveat emptor, of course. But then, caveat venditor, too. Because there are folks like me who are fond of lux et veritas^*.

My point is simply this: it’s easy to fool people, and it’s really easy to fool them if they already have some vague knowledge of how things are "supposed" to be. By coincidence, my friend James Randi wrote about this very topic for Wired magazine recently. It’s worth a read.

I’ll note — speaking of separating people from their money — that I have a whole chapter in my book Bad Astronomy debunking exactly this type of thing, though the person in the example I used had a slightly different technique.

But the bottom line is this: for hurricanes and shooting cannon and launching missiles, yeah, the Coriolis effect is important. For draining sinks and flushing toilets, though, it’s all a matter of spin.

Tip o’ the cyclone to Minute Physics.

^* I’ll note, in the interest of full disclosure, that several people in the comments to the video debunk the method very well. however, I did not look at the comments before watching the video. In fact, the moment he picked up the basin the first time, my immediate thought was "He’s going to pour the water to the side of the drain!" So I didn’t cheat here. And hey! Would I lie to you?

The Tennessee legislature — apparently jealous that the people running Louisiana are hogging all the laughing stock — is possibly about to pass an antiscience bill designed specifically to make it easier for teachers to allow creationism in their classroom.

The bill passed the House last year, but then a similar bill was put on hold in the Senate. Unfortunately, it was put to the Senate floor earlier this week and passed. It will have to be reconciled with the House bill, but it’s expected to pass. It’ll have to then go to the Governor to sign it into law.

Basically, the bill will make sure teachers can discuss creationism in the classroom, as well as global warming denialism. The House version states,

This bill prohibits the state board of education and any public elementary or secondary school governing authority, director of schools, school system administrator, or principal or administrator from prohibiting any teacher in a public school system of this state from helping students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught, such as evolution and global warming.

That whole "strengths and weaknesses" is for all intent and purpose a lie; we’ve seen it many times before. Of course science has strengths and weaknesses, but what these people are looking to do is be able to say any kind of antiscience rhetoric in the classroom and not get called on it. What the bill should call for is legislators to be tested on the strengths and weaknesses of their creationist beliefs that clearly contradict what’s known about the real world. Or, better yet, how what they’re trying to do violates the Constitution of the United States.

I would pay good money to sit and listen to that.

I also wonder how the Tennessee lawmakers would feel if, say, teachers used this potential law to teach about Islam, or astrology, or Wiccan beliefs. That would be interesting indeed.

If you want more, Josh Rosenau has a great summary, as does Cara Santa Maria at the Huffington Post, and, of course, the NCSE. It’s not clear to me that the Governor will sign this bill; Josh’s post has more on that. But even if he doesn’t, all those creationist climate change deniers will simply try again in some different way.

If you live in Tennessee, you should let the Governor know how you feel, and right away. Otherwise…

Every day — every single day, it seems — I see a note on Twitter, or get email, or hear someone on TV asking why we bother spending so much money on NASA. Billions of dollars! We should be spending that money right here on Earth!

This argument is wrong in every conceivable way. Ignoring that we do spend that money here on Earth, ignoring that NASA’s budget is far less than 1% of the national budget, ignoring that the amount we spend on NASA in a year is less than we spend on air conditioning tents in Afghanistan, ignoring that we spend five times as much on tobacco in a year than we do on space exploration… this argument is still dead wrong.

Why?

Because when we invest in science, when we invest in space, when we invest in exploration, we always, always get far more back in return than we put in. And not just in dollars and cents.

See that picture above? It shows a new type of rocket engine design. Usually, fuel is pumped into a chamber where the chemicals ignite and are blown out the other end, creating thrust. The design pictured above does this in a new way: as the fuel is pumped into the chamber, it’s spun up, creating a vortex. This focuses the flow, keeping it closer to the center of the chamber. In this way, when the fuel ignite, it keeps the walls of the chamber cooler.

So what, right?

Here’s what: using this technology — developed for rockets for NASA, remember — engineers designed a way to pump water more quickly and efficiently for fire suppression. The result is nothing short of astonishing:

One series of tests using empty houses at Vandenberg Air Force Base compared [this new] system with a 20-gallon-per-minute, 1,400 pound-per-square-inch (psi) discharge capability (at the pump) versus a standard 100-gallon-per-minute, 125 psi standard hand line—the kind that typically takes a few firemen to control. The standard line extinguished a set fire in a living room in 1 minute and 45 seconds using 220 gallons of water. The [new] system extinguished an identical fire in 17.3 seconds using 13.6 gallons—with a hose requiring only one person to manage.

In other words, this new system put out a fire more quickly, using less water, and — critically — with fewer firefighters needed to operate the hose. This frees up needed firefighters to do other important tasks on the job, and therefore makes fighting fires faster and safer.

There is no way you could’ve predicted beforehand that investing in NASA would have led to the creation of this specific innovation in life-saving technology. But it’s a rock-solid guarantee that investing in science always leads to innovations that have far-ranging and critical benefits to our lives.

If for no other reason that’s why we need to invest in science: in NASA, in NSF, in NOAA, and all the other agencies that explore the world around us. It’s for our own good. And it always pays off.

[UPDATE: I should have noted that this technology was developed by Orbitec, a contractor with NASA and not NASA itself. The argument I make above still stands, though.]

Tip o’ the firefighter helmet to Michael Interbartolo.