Good news! It looks like a lot of the science stimulus funding will stay in the economic package!

Here’s the breakdown:

So the package means NASA and the NSF each get over a billion dollars in additional funding, though apparently the Department of Energy office of science did not get any additional funding, which is a bummer (DOE did get $1B for energy efficiency research). NASA gets $500M for Shuttle replacement work, which is very badly needed, and $300M to go toward science (yay!). NSF gets a cool billion for research, which means lots and lots of scientists will be able to further our knowledge and make the world a better place.

This bill will go up for vote on Monday. It may still get voted down, though I doubt it; lots of compromises were made (too many, perhaps), so IMO a filibuster is unlikely. With people hurting as much as they are right now, and a clear mandate for change that’s swept the nation, anyone who looks obstructionist at this point is risking political suicide.

We’ll see how this plays out on Monday.

Tip o’ the majority whip to ScienceDebate2008.

More bad news from the UK: Measles cases rose 36% in 2008 over the previous year, from 990 to 1348.

Health Protection Agency experts said most of the cases had been in children not fully vaccinated with combined MMR and so could have been prevented.

Immunisation expert Dr Mary Ramsay said the rise was “very worrying”, adding measles “should not be taken lightly”.

No, it shouldn’t, given that it can lead to pneumonia and encephalitis.

This news comes on the heels of an antivax diatribe by "journalist" Jeni Barnett on LBC radio in England. Science advocate Ben Goldacre, who writes Bad Science, takes her to task here and here.

Continuing on with irrationality: LBC lawyers told Ben to take down the clip of her irrational spewings. Of course, that’s their right; he posted all of it, so they have a copyright claim. However, doing something as dumb as that just means people will take all the more glee to get the word out there, as I’m doing now.

And, of course, it’s still all over the web. It’s on YouTube thanks to Rachel Dunlop, for example. A series of skeptics have posted transcripts of it, too, so you can read what Ms. Barnett said. You really have to read it for yourself to see the level of nonsense on display, like this:

I want to know from some kind of expert what measles is and what is in the vaccine, and why people have a reaction to it, and really my question is: what is wrong with childhood illnesses? Is it – to hark back to the first hour – because we don’t have parents at home looking after the children? What’s going on? Is there something wrong with having mumps…

So she doesn’t know what measles is, or what’s in the vaccine, or what’s wrong with childhood illnesses, or what’s the problem with mumps… but she goes on the radio railing against vaccination?

What mad world?

I’m sorry that antivax crackpots are not restricted to only the US. But if you run across one, send ‘em here, send ‘em to Orac (who has written about Ben’s post as well), send ‘em to Ben. We’ll win this yet.

Right now — literally, today — Congress is trying to figure out what to do with a nearly trillion-dollar economic stimulus package President Obama has submitted. There seems to be a lot of unclear calls to action online due to some severe cuts in the package, so I want to try to make this more clear.

First– the Republicans are saying this is a spending bill, not a stimulus package. That’s basically yet another conservative load of baloney: the spending is going toward stimulating the economy. The bill has short-term and long-term goals in it, so that we can get things rolling quickly, yet be able to sustain the events once the initial push is over. A stimulus needs inertia, or else it grinds to a halt.

Senate Democrats are working with moderate Republicans to compromise (from what I have read and seen about this current package, the conservative Republicans don’t appear willing to compromise, only to cut) — though the bill passed the House with not a single Republican voting for it; I wonder if Obama understands what that means to future packages he proposes.

One compromise that was reported by the AP — Talking Points Memo has the specifics — is an $88 billion dollar cut to the original package. These are substantial slashes to the budget, including $750M from NASA (a 50% reduction), $427M from NOAA (a 34% cut), $100M from the Department of Energy office of science (a 100% cut), and $1.4B from NSF, again, a 100% reduction. In other words, DOE science and the NSF are being zeroed out of this bill.

I want to be clear: these are not actually cuts to the budgets of these groups! The original package calls for increased spending on them, so what these cuts mean is that the agencies won’t get as much of an increase, or, in the case of the DOE OS and NSF, any increase at all.

Worst case scenario is that these programs get cut, and nothing really has changed; they still get the same money they did before this package was proposed. The problem is that with the economy the way it is, we do need to do something to make sure our country continues running. The money that goes to NASA, for example, is to the Exploration directorate, which includes going to the Moon and living in space. The money spent by Congress on these programs is invested, not wasted. And studies show that money spent on NASA is returned multiplied several times. In other words, we make money on NASA.

And the National Science Foundation sponsors a huge amount of basic scientific research across the board, from students up to full-time researchers. Investing that money is directly investing in the future of the United States. I wonder about the cognitive dissonance necessary to rail against foreign countries outpacing us, yet trying to cut science funding.

Bottom line: increased spending in these programs is a good thing. It helps people keep their jobs, it produces things we need, and in the long run makes money for the country. I’m calling my senators right now. How about you?

I like to think I’m something of a funny guy. I once won fourth place in a comedy contest in college, and the guy who won second place plagiarized Stephen Wright. So really I did pretty well. Don’t ask how many people competed.

Science is actually a pretty wealthy hunting ground for humor. The Big Bang Theory is still slaying me when I watch it, and sometimes they put in jokes you kinda have to be a scientist or a geek to get.

Brian Malow not only agrees with me (I assume) but he’s taken it a step farther: he’s a science-based stand-up comedian. He has (of course!) a video on YouTube.

Not too bad. The virus walking into a bar was pretty funny, and would’ve been even without the intro part. Now if he can just get regular people to understand why the spherical cow joke is so funny…

Tip o’ the funny bone to… my mom. Yes, my mom.

The record for the smallest planet orbiting a sun-like star has once again been broken. The newest planet to hold the record in its tiny hand is COROT-Exo-7b, which has only twice the diameter of the Earth!

COROT is a European satellite that stares at stars and looks for tiny drops in their brightness. There are many causes of such events, but one is from a planet passing in front of the star, making a mini-eclipse. This has a distinctive signature in the way the light of the star dims, so a planetary transit can be distinguished from other sources.

We know so much about the way stars behave now that by looking at how much the star dims, we can get a decent handle on the size of the planet (a big planet blocks more light, and a smaller one makes a smaller dip). In this case, the planet has a diameter of about 25,000 kilometers or so. That’s far smaller than the usual "hot Jupiters" detected, which are more than 100,000 km across. Like them, however, it’s very close to its parent star: it only takes about 20 hours to make an orbit! Even Mercury takes 88 days to round the Sun, so this new dinky ball must be practically touching the surface of its sun. Even though the star is a K0 type (slightly cooler than the Sun), the surface temperature of the planet must be well over 1000 C. Just so’s you know, this system is over 450 light years away from us.

The big questions is, what’s the mass of this planet? These observations cannot determine that; they only get its size. To find its mass, astronomers will have to take spectra of the star and look for a shift in the wavelengths from the Doppler shift as the planet tugs the star. I have not read the journal paper for this discovery — it’s not published yet — but it seems to me that kind of observation may still be beyond our current technology. The planet may not have enough mass to pull on the star hard enough for us to detect it.

Until we know that, we can’t say much about this little guy. Is it solid metal, or rock? What characteristics does it have? We simply don’t know. I’ll add that a lot of news stories — even the press release itself — are saying this is a planet that has a surface we could walk on. That’s baloney, no matter what. First of all, walking on a surface glowing red hot may be your idea of a fun perambulation, but it ain’t mine! Second, if the planet is rocky, the surface may very well be molten. Third, planets have surprised us before. While I doubt this is a gaseous body, we simply don’t know enough about it to say much about it past its size and temperature. In other words, saying anything more is pure speculation, and should be regarded as such.

Still, a planet this size strongly implies it’s rocky, like Earth, as opposed to a gas giant like Jupiter. We are very, very close to detecting an Earth-sized planet orbiting another star, maybe even one in an Earth-like orbit. I wouldn’t be surprised if we find one in the next year or two… but even then, we won’t know much about it besides its size and temperature. But that’s certainly enough to make for some exciting news!

Image credit: CNES

Just a quick note: Darlene from Science Cheerleader was part of the Hive Overmind team at Pasadena making sure the panel ran smoothly. She’s posted some fun pictures on her site.

Keep your eye on her. We’ve been talking, and she has some good ideas about making science more accessible to the public, and we need a lot more of that.

Centaurus A is a nearby galaxy — at 13 million light years distant, only a handful of big galaxies are closer to us. And it’s weird: it’s an elliptical galaxy eating a spiral! They’re in the last stages of merging into one bigger and messier galaxy. Dust from the spiral forms a huge ring around the center of the galaxy, with the gas and dust from both galaxies being dumped into the core.

But at that core is a supermassive black hole, gobbling down the matter as fast as it can… and even that’s not fast enough. The material piles up around the black hole, forming a superheated disk which helps channel all the vast forces in play around it. The end result is two corridors, twin tunnels leading up and away from the poles of the disk. Material heated to millions of degrees blasts through these paths, creating beams of matter and energy screaming out from the black hole.

And we have a front row seat.

Centaurs A, erupting. Click for a much larger, cooler version. Credit: ESO/WFI (Optical); MPIfR/ESO/APEX/A.Weiss et al. (Submillimetre); NASA/CXC/CfA/R.Kraft et al. (X-ray)

This new look at Cen A is a combination of three different telescopes in three different wavelength regimes: visible light from a 2.2 meter telescope in Chile, X-ray from the orbiting Chandra Observatory, and sub-millimeter emission (basically high-energy radio; if it were on your radio dial it would be off the scale to the right) taken by APEX, a 12 meter telescope located in the high desert in Chile.

The composite image is false color. The visible light (shown in more or less true color) is from stars and gas in the galaxy (and foreground stars in our own galaxy). The blue is from from Chandra, showing high energy X-rays. See how the jets are blue near the center? When they erupt from near the black hole they have tremendous energy and glow in X-rays. Measurements of how the gas is behaving indicate that the gas is moving outwards from the core at half the speed of light.

Holy Haleakala.

The new bit is the orange, which is from the submillimeter emission. That comes from cooler, less violent regions. That includes the ends of the jets, and the ring of dust circling the colliding galaxies. The jets slow as they ram gas outside the galaxy, and eventually puff up and stop. As they do, they emit much longer wavelengths in the radio and submillimeter region, where the new APEX instrument is sensitive — and this is the first time this part of the jets has been seen in this wavelength. Interestingly, the rammed gas at the tip of the bottom jet is glowing in X-rays, meaning a lot of activity is still going on there — you can see the arc of the shockwave. The density of gas in that area is much larger than "above" the galaxy, which is why you can see it better.

The ring of dust is interesting as well. It’s easy to see in visible light, too, as a dark band blocking light from stars closer to the galaxy’s center. All that gas disturbed by the collision is forming stars at a very high rate. Those stars pour out dust, which is warmed by the starlight. Warm dust emits lots of submillimeter light, making it obvious to APEX.

At the very heart of the galaxy, as material pours into the black hole, a fierce amount of energy is emitted. That can be seen as the starlike point right smack dab in the middle. We see it in all three wavelengths, which is why it looks so bright in this image.

Cen A is a funny study in contrasts. Galaxy collisions on this scale aren’t common, so it’s nice to have one so close; statistically that’s rare. The collision has made a complete mess of things, so it’s good we can see it from close by; we get more details that way. But it’s so messy it’s hard to say what’s going on exactly! We have a decent idea in general, but specifics can be hard to nail down. That’s why looking at it with many different telescopes helps so much. If we only had visible light telescopes, we’d miss the jets of matter. If we had only X-rays we wouldn’t see the stars and the dust ring. If we had only radio or submillimeter we’d miss the high-energy action going on.

Like in the blind men and the elephant parable, we need to take all the information we have and combine it to get, literally, a complete picture of the scene. With APEX added to our inventory, we’ve added new pieces to the puzzle, and that always makes it easier to solve.