A couple of weeks ago we heard news that the Tevatron at Fermilab, soon to be superseded by the LHC at CERN as the world’s cutting-edge high-energy particle accelerator, might not be completely out of surprises just yet. The D0 experiment released results that seemed to indicate an asymmetry between the properties of matter and antimatter, at a level just a smidgen above what you need to claim a statistically significant result. Blogs started chattering right away, of course, but this was big enough news to be splashed across the front page of the New York Times.

The measurement concerns the decay of B mesons — particles consisting of one bottom (b) quark and one lighter antiquark, or vice-versa. If the other quark is a down, the corresponding meson B_d is electrically neutral, as is its antiparticle. They can therefore practically indistinguishable, and can oscillate back and forth between each other. The one difference is that the meson and anti-meson decay a little bit differently; this has been studied in great detail at B-factories, with results that have been very useful in determining values of parameters in the Standard Model of Particle Physics.

The new D0 results use a different kind of particle — the B_s meson, in which a strange quark rather than a down quark is stuck to the bottom quark. They measured the relative rate of decay of the B_s and its antiparticle, and found a discrepancy that appears inconsistent — barely — with the Standard Model. In particular, they looked at decays that produced muons or anti-muons.

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A few days ago the following headline on the New York Times website caught my eye: Seeing What the Hubble Sees, in Imax and 3-D. There are two reasons this headline is worthy of note. First, it is amazing that an IMAX movie about the Hubble Space Telescope exists at all, and is worth mentioning on the front (web)page of the NYT. Hubble is a part of the popular imagination, and may be the object most closely tied with Science in the eyes of the general public (even more than the LHC). Furthermore, it is absolutely astounding that NASA launched hundreds of kilos of camera equipment and film into orbit, and spent valuable astronaut time (both on the ground and in space) to pull off the filming. I would claim one of the lasting legacies of the Apollo missions to the Moon are the photographs, and in particular Earthrise. That single photograph of our home as a small blue marble against the vastness of space put our planet into proper perspective for the very first time. NASA is well aware that part of its mission is to light up the public imagination, getting us to peer past our limited horizons, and out into the vast Universe beyond. This film is part of that tradition.

The second interesting aspect of the headline is that it’s nonsensical. Hubble has only one eye. It has one mirror. It can’t perceive depth, and therefore can’t see in 3-D. We see slightly different images in each of our eyes, and then a fairly impressive difference engine (called a “brain”) figures out the depth to everything we are looking at, and whether that rock is about to bonk us on the head and we need to duck NOW! 3D movies (such as Alice and Avatar) use circularly polarized light, and glasses with different filters in each lens, to produce the different images for each eye. (The light is circularly polarized so that, if you tilt your head, it all still works; the old linear polarization approach didn’t do this, and had a tendency to make one feel motion sick [at least, it did for me]).

In general astronomical sources are too far away for us to discern distance using parallax. That’s why the night sky looks “flat”, even though the planets and stars and galaxies are at a tremendous range of distances. If you wanted to be able to directly “see” the distance to the nearest star, in the same way that you ascertain the distance to an approaching lion, your eyes would need to be separated by roughly 10 billion km. (Eye separation = Distance*Angle. The human eye has an angular resolution of roughly 1 arcmin = 0.0003 radians, and the nearest star [Proxima Centauri] is 4 lightyears = 3.8e13 km.) The way we figure out distance in Hubble images is by using color information (and, in particular, the spectra) to discern recession velocity (redshift), and thereby distance (using Hubble’s law). This is not something we do with our eyes (although we do use color information to discern temperature; you’re unlikely to grab something that is so hot it’s glowing blue). Hubble sees a purely two-dimensional Universe. So “seeing what the Hubble sees …in 3-D” is a contradiction in terms. Was the headline carefully crafted to see if we were paying close attention?

Even enigmatic eclipsing binaries are thrilled to appear in Beetle Bailey. Sinatra would have killed to appear in Beetle Bailey, am I right?

We’ve been studied. Bora points to a new paper by Inna Kouper in the Journal of Science Communication. The title is “Science blogs and public engagement with science: Practices, challenges, and opportunities,” which pretty much explains what it’s about. The author picks out a collection of eleven blogs — Pure Pedantry, Synthesis, MicrobiologyBytes, Bioethics, Wired Science, DrugMonkey, Scientific Activist, Pharyngula, Panda’s Thumb, and our own humble offering — and analyzes posts and comments to judge how effective these sites are at promoting science communication.

The list of blogs chosen is — okay, I guess. I have no idea how it was constructed, and the paper doesn’t seem to provide much guidance. Bora has a critique of the methodology that wonders about that, and about exactly how objective the study is. It’s very hard to assign numbers to things like “ratio of informative posts vs. rants,” or “degree to which the cause of collegial communication was harmed by use of intemperate language.” The paper reads like someone read a bunch of blogs and typed up their personal impressions.

For the most part I don’t disagree too strongly with the impressions, with the obvious caveat that it’s almost completely useless to study “science blogs” as a group. People don’t read randomly chosen collections of blogs; they read very intentionally chosen subsets that appeal to their own interests, and different reading lists will lead to wildly divergent impressions about what blogs are really like.

More significantly, though, I can’t really agree with the moral that the author draws from these experiences. Here is the telling quote from the paper:

The blogs employ a variety of writing and authoring models, and no signs of emerging or stabilizing genre conventions could be observed. Even though all blogs mentioned science or a particular scientific discipline in their descriptions, they differed in their voice representations, points of view, and content orientation.

It’s hard to disagree with that, but I think it’s a good thing, and the author clearly does not. Blogs differ in many ways, and happily avoid the encroachment of stabilizing genre conventions. That’s one of the biggest benefits of opening up communication channels to a tremendous variety of content providers, rather than restricting things to just a few mainstream outlets; writers can have their voices, and readers can choose who to read, and everyone is happy.

It’s clear that a lot of people want blogs to be just like some pre-existing communication medium, just with comments and occasional expertise. And there are blogs like that, if that’s what you’re into. And there are blogs that aren’t, likewise. I hope it stays that way.

First a programming notice: turns out I will not be on the Colbert Report tonight. Never fear — I was just bumped back to next week, Wednesday March 10 (11:30 p.m., 10:30 Central). Business as usual in TV land, no big deal. I was hoping that I was nudged in favor of a newly medaled Olympic hero, or at least minor royalty, but it looks like tonight’s guest will be Garry Wills. He’s one of my favorite writers, but still. Obviously some Catholic favoritism going on here.

Small scheduling glitches aside, the Colbert Report and the Daily Show remain two of the best places to hear interviews with interesting academics on TV, especially with scientists. In USA Today, Dan Vergano writes about this curious state of affairs. Neil deGrasse Tyson brings up a good point, that Johnny Carson’s version of the Tonight Show used to feature interviews with heavyweights such as Carl Sagan and Margaret Mead. These days, not many non-satirical network news shows bring on scientists (or anthropologists, or for that matter philosophers or English professors) as a regular event.

When Conan O’Brian took over the Tonight Show, the Science and Entertainment Exchange received a request from the producers to suggest some entertaining (and hopefully enlightening) scientists they could consider bringing on as guests. I don’t know if they ever followed up on that idea, and now I guess we’ll never know. Hopefully the success of Stewart and Colbert will convince the networks that Americans don’t necessarily turn the channel when faced with people who think carefully about the universe.

It’s generally easy to write a damning book review. It’s much harder to write a positive and enthusiastic one. So how about a review that includes this paragraph?:

I put down Rebecca Skloot’s first book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” more than once. Ten times, probably. Once to poke the fire. Once to silence a pinging BlackBerry. And eight times to chase my wife and assorted visitors around the house, to tell them I was holding one of the most graceful and moving nonfiction books I’ve read in a very long time.

That’s Dwight Garner reviewing the book for the New York Times. What’s more, this is a nonfiction book revolving around science! Henrietta Lacks died at age 31 of cervical cancer. She was relatively poor, and completely unknown. No tombstone marks her grave. Without any sort of consent or awareness, some of her cells were “stolen” during her treatment. It turned out that the cells could be cultured, and they rapidly became a key tool in biomedicine. Salk used her cells to develop a vaccine for polio. The cells are ubiquitous, living on and thriving half a century after Henrietta Lacks’ death. Although this was all news to me, apparently any self-respecting biologist has heard of HeLa. Her full story has plenty of moral and philosophical implications, as well as basic science. Henrietta Lacks has had a profound, and completely unwitting, impact on our lives. Wired magazine has a chart:

Garner ends his review with:

This is the place in a review where critics tend to wedge in the sentence that says, in so many words, “This isn’t a perfect book.” And “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” surely isn’t. But there isn’t much about it I’d want to change. It has brains and pacing and nerve and heart, and it is uncommonly endearing. You might put it down only to wipe off the sweat.

I think he liked the book. Other reviews have been similarly enthusiastic (see Skloot’s blog for links). “Immortal Life” is definitely heading to my bedside table. But apparently one of my co-bloggers has recently published a book, and I should probably read that one first. If only I could find time.

Every scientist who writes a popular-level book harbors a secret (or maybe not-so-secret) ambition: to be invited on the Colbert Report. Not only because Stephen Colbert is a funny guy, and it’s a good way to sell books — although there is that. The truth is that Colbert (and the Daily Show) love talking to scientists. The sad part of that truth is that more people are exposed to real scientists doing cutting-edge research by watching Comedy Central than by watching, shall we say, certain channels you might have thought more appropriate venues for such conversations. But the happy part is that Colbert and Jon Stewart help bring some fun to science, and expose it to an audience it might not otherwise reach.

So, mark your calendars: I’m going to be on Colbert on Wednesday, March 3. (Scheduled to be, anyway — updates as events warrant.) I have a book to sell, not that I would have turned down the opportunity otherwise.

The precedents are pretty formidable — below the fold I’ve put some of Colbert’s recent interviews with some famous physics/astronomy types. Two things seem immediately obvious: (1) for scientists, these folks are very good at doing entertaining interviews, and (2) Stephen Colbert is an amazingly good interviewer, managing to mix topical jokes and his usual schtick with some really good questions, and more than a bit of real background knowledge. I think this is going to take some preparation.

Anyone want to venture some guesses as to what questions he might ask? Every little bit of anticipation helps.

(Note on above link to the Onion: “Punkin Chunkin,” “Manhunter,” and “Heavy Metal Taskforce” are all real Science Channel shows. “Extreme Gravity” is, as far as I can tell, not.)

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Over the last few months I have had the pleasure of discussing science and science journalism with Faye Flam, who covers science for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Faye reports on all kinds of science, and a number of other topics, as you can read about on her web site. But most recently she has put a great deal of work into covering climate change; even interviewing Michael Mann, who will be visiting us at Penn for a physics colloquium in just a couple of weeks. And she has found it enough of a challenge that she has chosen to write about it as a (first of several, I hope) guest post.

This is a hot topic, as we all know, and I’m hoping we get a thoughtful and respectful discussion in the comments. Nevertheless, this might be a good place to remind people that we’ll generally delete comments that are off topic or offensive.

Now, here’s Faye.

There must be some redeeming lesson to come from covering the so-called climate gate scandal that’s dragged on over the last two months. Member of the public actually care about science. They’re even passionate about it. But when that happens it’s not always pretty.

Never in my 14 years as a newspaper science writer have I found myself on the receiving end of such a powerful stream of hate mail – searing bombs of name-calling that get fired into my personal and work inboxes, as well as screaming, profanity-laced screeds landing in my voice mail. There’s much gloating about the downfall of newspapers and speculation that soon I’ll perish on the streets, begging for pennies.

I even got my first death threat following this story. It was the first of three stories I wrote on this topic for the Philadelphia Inquirer after a cache of e-mail messages were stolen from some prominent climate scientists and picked over by their worst enemies for signs of malfeasance.

Many member of the public are raging at me for failing to point out what they see as an inexcusable case of scientific fraud. For them, there’s no distinction between committing fraud and being wrong. That might worry some members of the scientific community.

I wasn’t ordered to write anything on this issue. During the same period I also wrote a nice story about the Hubble Telescope, and one about heroic cancer researchers. I could easily have skipped this whole mess and written other nice stories – on Kepler, or maybe LHC. People always like stories about planets and particles.

But instead, I returned from Thanksgiving vacation to write this quick overview, followed by the more offbeat Q and A story linked above.

Then, in a fit of masochism, I decided to profile one of the scientists involved – Michael Mann – because he works nearby at Penn State University. That gave the whole thing a local angle.

Mann’s work has been scrutinized for years, after a researcher in Canada pointed out a possible statistical flaw in some climate reconstructions done in the 1990s. That eventually led to an investigation by a National Academy panel. They concluded that Mann’s initial papers weren’t perfect but the general conclusions held up, and there was no evidence of fraud.

In other areas of science, the public can be more tolerant. Back in the 1990s, people were in some disagreement about the age of the universe. When new information came in, some were shown to be off be a few billions years, give or take, but they didn’t get carted off to Siberia.

Others had wrong ideas about the shape and fate of the universe, since nobody back then thought it was accelerating. That’s the beauty of science. It’s self-correcting – though sometimes the corrections can take a while.

The other lesson here is that many people don’t understand the role of uncertainty in science. There is uncertainty over the way water vapor changes the situation, for example, with most experts saying it will create a positive feedback but a few arguing for a negative one.

And still, some people write to inform me that the science is “settled.” These critics are not sure what’s settled but they’ve heard this and seem to think it’s important to repeat.

Others recognize the uncertainty in climate science and find it appalling. That’s particularly true of engineers, who seem pretty well-represented among self-proclaimed global warming skeptics. It’s a level of uncertainty that would never fly in modeling systems for chemical refineries, or so they tell me.

One MIT-trained engineer said his own calculations prove that the climate models can’t work because, in short: “junk in equals junk out”. It would make for a great story if a local guy who worked for a chemical refinery took down the whole climate science establishment on the back of an envelope. Unfortunately, I have to consider the possibility that he hasn’t.

The global warming skeptics also love to use the term “AGW theory”. This proved a great strategy for debating because the scientists don’t really refer to anthropogenic global warming as a theory, and many aren’t sure what AGW theory means. That gives the critics the freedom to say it means that only humans can influence the climate – and that the climate never changed at all before humans hit the scene. Then they can point to this untenable position and say, “ha ha – aren’t these scientists dumb!”

Coming from the more liberal side of things, a reader suggested that even if some fatal flaw crops up in both the climate models and the climate reconstructions, and the world does plunge into a protracted global cold spell, the scientists who had done the original work shouldn’t necessarily be thrown in prison or burned at the stake.

It might seem strange, even insane, for the public to base views of the carbon cycle and water vapor feedbacks on politics. Is it a problem of science illiteracy? I don’t think so. We could all be better educated about basic physics and chemistry and this debate would still play out the same way.

It all makes more sense, though, in light of the way differing political philosophies tolerate uncertainty – whether they’re considering government-funded scientists delivering uncertainty or the prospect of policy changes based on uncertain science. How much should we know before we start conserving energy? Classify CO2 as a pollutant? Submitting to international regulations? The best we can do as scientists and science writers is respect those political differences, state what’s known as clearly as possible, and be honest about what’s not known. People will still hate us, of course. There’s no way to escape that.

You might have heard the news out of last week’s American Astronomical Society meeting, that the Hubble Space Telescope had found evidence for the most distant galaxies yet discovered. Using the newly-installed Wide Field Camera 3, HST did a close-up examination of some likely candidates in the Ultra Deep Field, and found galaxies at redshifts of 7 or 8 (meaning the universe is now 8 or 9 times bigger than it was when the light was emitted). That corresponds to about 600 million years after the Big Bang, which pushes back the era of galaxy formation quite a bit.

But wait! Over at Science News, Ron Cowen points out that a team led by Rychard Bouwens and Garth Illingworth of UC Santa Cruz already has a paper on the arxiv that uses similar techniques to identify three galaxies with a redshift of 10, corresponding to only 450 million years after the Big Bang. And, as Cowen mentions in a blog post, the paper was available since last month.

Constraints on the First Galaxies: z~10 Galaxy Candidates from HST WFC3/IR
Authors: R.J. Bouwens, G.D. Illingworth, I. Labbe, P.A. Oesch, M. Carollo, M. Trenti, P.G. van Dokkum, M. Franx, M. Stiavelli, V. Gonzalez, D. Magee

Abstract: The first galaxies likely formed a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Until recently, it has not been possible to detect galaxies earlier than ~750 million years after the Big Bang. The new HST WFC3/IR camera changed this when the deepest-ever, near-IR image of the universe was obtained with the HUDF09 program. Here we use this image to identify three redshift z~10 galaxy candidates in the heart of the reionization epoch when the universe was just 500 million years old. These would be the highest redshift galaxies yet detected, higher than the recent detection of a GRB at z~8.2. The HUDF09 data previously revealed galaxies at z~7 and z~8… [snipped]

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At this very moment the nations of the world are meeting in Copenhagen to discuss the Earth’s climate. 192 countries are represented, and for the next two weeks they will try to come up with a strategy to deal with climate change. Obama will show up in 10 days, as will other heads-of-state. Unfortunately, much of the media coverage (at least in the US) includes discussion of what is being called “ClimateGate”. Someone hacked into the email system of the University of East Anglia, and stole hundreds of private emails from climate researchers around the world. Let us remember that Watergate had to do with an investigation of the burglars, while in this case there seems to be scant attention to the crime (i.e. stealing and publishing personal email), and much more attention to the “incendiary” emails themselves.

Scientists are people too. Amazingly enough, we get frustrated and annoyed. We have fights with colleagues. We let our emotions get in the way of dispassionate peer review. We send emails we probably shouldn’t. This should be no surprise to anyone. There are immense pressures on scientists working on “hot button” issues like climate change. They’re constantly being assaulted and questioned (mostly by people with no particular background or training). And, on occasion, individuals end up saying things and doing things they shouldn’t. Looking over the stolen emails, there are certainly some unfortunate revelations. But there is nothing even remotely indicating widespread fabrication of results. As far as I know, not a single scientific finding is now in doubt because of these emails. No papers will be withdrawn. Nature has a summary of the [lack of] content of the emails. A lot more detail can be found here. And the IPCC weighs in here.

I am not an expert on climate change. If the lives of our children and grandchildren depended on questions having to do with cosmology or general relativity, I would most certainly have a direct, informed opinion. And I would hope that my opinion, and those of my colleagues, would be solicited and respected, given that we’ve dedicated our lives to studying the relevant subject matter. Likewise, I respect the conclusions of my esteemed colleagues in the fields of climate research. And there is absolute and clear consensus on one fundamental point: the actions of human beings are altering our climate. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), composed of thousands of scientists from all over the world, made this startlingly clear. I highly encourage you to read the report (or at least the executive summary). As if that isn’t enough, the World Meteorological Organization just released a report indicating that the last decade was the warmest on record, and that the warming trend shows every sign of continuing.

Now, there are certainly researchers in the field that dissent. This is part of the nature of the scientific enterprise. We’re all trained to be skeptical and contrary. Be leery of received wisdom. Question everything, and try to build your own understanding from first principles. Along the way, on any topic whatsoever, you find some scientists that wander down some misbegotten path and get stuck. Sometimes the individual is Einstein, and they’re about to blow open entire fields. But the vast majority of the time, these radically contrary scientists are simply misguided and wrong. Which is okay. It’s part of the process. And it keeps everyone on their toes.

You can find scientists that believe the Universe is not expanding. They are wrong. You can find scientists that believe there is no evidence for evolution. They are wrong. And you can find scientists that believe there is no evidence for anthropogenic global warming. They are wrong.

This is not to say that there aren’t open questions or issues in these fields, nor that we understand everything perfectly. It’s simply a statement that the evidence is compelling and overwhelming, and the basic findings are no longer in doubt. Any future theories will incorporate and subsume what we already know. Just like General Relativity subsumed Newtonian gravity, without nullifying the inverse square law. Global warming is happening. We are (at least part of) the cause. Perhaps the details of what will happen in the next few decades are unclear. Perhaps the worst-case scenario won’t come to pass. It’s a very complicated, interconnected, non-linear system. All we know for sure is that human activities are introducing a new forcing term into our climate, and that this term is already having measurable effects. The Earth is really big. Go outside and look out across the mountains or the oceans or the sky. There’s a lot of room out there. It’s amazing that we can have a serious, global impact on this massive chunk of rock. For reference, I calculate that the entire biomass of humanity is 6.8 billion x 68 kg (150 lbs) = 5 x 10¹¹ kg. This is one hundred million millionth the mass of the Earth. And yet, we’re having an effect on the entire planet.

Since this issue has profound consequences for centuries to come, I would claim it is the responsibility of every citizen of the world to educate themselves on the topic. It seems to me that each of us has three straightforward choices:
1. go back to school, get a PhD in climate sciences, and form one’s own informed opinions about what’s going on.
2. trust the experts.
3. trust the fringe.

Note that the fringe consists almost entirely of non-experts. And believing the fringe requires you to be convinced there’s a vast scientific conspiracy, with the willing collusion of thousands of experts around the world. With no obvious motive or agenda. As a practicing scientist, I find it farcical that people imagine scientists capable of such a wide-ranging, organized conspiracy. We’re much too eager to prove each other wrong. And we’re much too stubborn and iconoclastic to just go along with the consensus, if we pick up any whiff of doubt. On the other hand, it is easy to see why some are interested in questioning global warming. It is indeed an inconvenient truth, after all.

We are altering our planet’s climate. This is not in doubt. How can anyone not be disturbed by the knowledge that we are fundamentally changing macroscopic properties of the Earth, our only home?

[NOTE: Sean just posted on the same topic. This just goes to show that even fellow bloggers have trouble coordinating. Much less thousands of scientists engaging in vast, motiveless conspiracies.]