Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.

Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge.

There’s water in them-thar hills! Or, maybe I should say asteroids! Yes, the clever folks down and over at the NASA Infared Telescope Facility have added another good find to their impressive list of findings.

So we’ve got water in asteroids.

Water on Mars.

Water on the Moon.

Maybe we can get around to making a couple of pure doses of homeopathic remedy. Maybe… monkshood – a poisonous plant that supposedly cures… Brontophobia, in homeopathy.

Like cures like – except that actonitine, the active poison in monkshood, causes respiratory paralysis, not fear and sweating. So even if we do manage to find enough water in the solar system to actually make an effective homeopathic dose, maybe that one isn’t such a good test to try.

A lot of you have been asking “When is the next meeting going to be?” and pointing out things like “Hey, weren’t the meetings going to be monthly?” Well SHAZAM – February 23rd – it’s a Tuesday. Historically, it’s also the day in 1870 that the state of Mississippi was re-admitted into the United States after the Civil War, but don’t ask me why I know that. I won’t be able to answer.

This may not bring us up to the hoped-for goal of an average of one meeting per month, but we’re getting closer (we’re right at .4). It’s my fault. Promise.

Well, it’s Monday, so you know what that means: A great big ole’ stack of links.

First up: Evolution in Medicine This is an interesting article that points to a real, non-manufactured debate in the vaccination world. At hand is the problem of making sure that your vaccinations select against more virulent strains of disease rather than the less virulent ones, allowing them to survive and integrate their less-virulent genes into the viral population.

This sort of thing takes place in nature, as well. There is the “trade off hypothesis,” for instance. If a virus (or other pathogen, but viruses serve as excellent examples) kills the host organism too quickly, there is a loss of survival fitness. Allowing the host to continue to linger ensures that the host (which is an entire ecosystem, as far as the pathogenic organism is concerned) stays around long enough to keep spawning more disease.

And if there are no other hosts for the pathogen, then being less virulent is a good thing from the viewpoint of the pathogen (and the host, for that matter). Of course, this is not a universal rule (so few things are!); if an organism is not really hampered by the death of the host, or if it is highly transmissible, then the cost of virulence is much lower.

Most things in evolution have this sort of trade-off; in The Greatest Show on Earth Richard Dawkins uses the example of the gazelle legs; longer legs make you faster, allowing greater survivability, up until a point where the legs become brittle and break too easily, making you an easy meal.

Ah, on to other pastures. If you happen to be one of those “experts” from Ghost Hunters, Ghost TV, Ghostvision, Paranormal Patrol, or whatever the hell is on the History channel at the moment; Ben Goldacre has found you a new job. You’d be working for the same people who make the head lice repellent badge, and have this to say about it:

1. How does it work?
Without a comprehensive understanding of technology e.g. that used in space travel, it is not really possible to provide a very satisfactory answer.

So if you’re a rocket scientist and school nurse dealing with head lice, you should write these guys a letter.

Not that it would be as relentless and classical as this gem from Mark Twain written to a patent-medicine salesman.

Twain was a great wit of his time. His writings on religion, the tragic medicine of his time, and (my personal favorite) Christian Science show a deep skepticism about human nature, education, and authority, while revealing a man who has a bit of faith in the abilities of reason, sees them as accessible to most people, even if they don’t, perhaps, use them.

Things have changed a lot since Twains’ day, but patent medicine salesmen are still out there and education is still in a laughable state. Take, for instance, the autism-vaccination link crowd. You might have heard about this recently – Andrew Wakefield was dishonest and unethical in his research that showed the only link between autism and vaccination.

Bad science AND unethical experimentation on children, combined with a heap of undeclared conflict of interests? It makes you wonder who the anti-vaxx crowd is screaming about when they say these things about actual doctors.

On to Convergent Evolution.

You may remember this one if you tuned in to Skeptics Guide this week. Apparently, researchers in China and Michigan mapped out the gene responsible for the super-sensitive inner-ear hairs that make echolocation possible. The Chinese team was studying bats, and the Michigan team was studying dolphins. Surprise, surprise, the exact same gene was altered in both animals, a gene that made these hairs super-short and sensitive. More research is underway to see if other animals who have crude sonar systems – shrews, oilbirds, and swiftlets to name a few.

Of course, these aren’t the only single-gene convergences in biological history. One of my favorites is the case of the Northern Short Tailed Shrew and the Beaded Lizard.

These two animals have mutated versions of the same ancestral gene to create the toxic protein they employ.
Now – Get your ass to Mars! There you’ll find the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. Now you’ve doubtlessly heard this week that Spirit isn’t doing too well. By that I mean that it’s stuck. Stuck in a hole. On Mars. But it’s still going! The team at the JPL/NASA is going to shut it down for a few months so that it can survive the insane Martian winter. While it will no longer be doing any roving, it is now an immobile laboratory – on another world. The lack of focus on moving it around means that the team can get down to some more science after the winter.

Some people are upset, but Spirit is doing pretty damn well. After all, it only had a ninety day mission. In human lifespan terms, this would be like getting upset that someone only survived to be 1400 years old. The folks at the Planetary Society have more to say on the subject, and don’t seem to be too excited about the fact that NASA, not the JPL, is calling the final shot on this one. Of course, Spirit is still valuable, and they’ll be kicking her around to try and get into a survivable position, so we’ll have to wait until next year to see what’s up. One thing a stationary Spirit might be able to model quite well is the wobble of the Martian orbit – a clue to the nature of the core of the planet.

Plus, let’s not forget that Opportunity is still kicking, heading to a relatively new crater (the youngest crater examined on Mars) and is within 100 meters of it.

If only all our NASA news could be so good. The new NASA budget, which actually seems to have been crafted with an eye to a lot of astronomical complaints, is run-down in a nice manner on Bad Astronomy. The bad news: It might not pass the Congress.

The topic of the evening was not, in fact, 2012 as I had planned. Instead, talks of climate change led the evening. We had an actual paleoclimatological lab monkey on hand, and went through the topic over and over, before going on to other topics, returning to climate change, and ordering drinks.

The award for insightful comment of the month goes to Dennis. I’m sorry that there isn’t actually any sort of reward for this, Dennis, but if there were….

First-time attendee Jennifer asked why so many of the skeptics meetings she’s attended were well-watered with alcohol. The question bounced off a few skulls for a moment, until Dennis got to the heart of it.

“I think intoxication is part of the human condition.”

That would certainly explain a lot. It reminds me of the words of Charles Allen Smart: “I don’t think that any of us can afford to look at nature and at the major facts of the human situation while dead sober.”

And that is why we have Skeptics in the Pub, in the Pub.

Well, on to the linkings. It was great to see all of you in the flesh, and we’ll be doing it again, very very soon.

The Golden Woos are out for last year. Ah, reminds me of good times; Bill Maher, Deepak Choprah, the list is like a… well, I’d say “shower of gold,” but I think that’s something else.

CSICOP has put up a great collection of Carl Sagan writings. Carl Sagan is pretty much the only argument you need when someone says that science lacks a sense of awe or wonder.

But should you need another example of someone with a serious sense of “holy shit the universe is awesome,” look no further than Phil Plait. In this article he’s staring at Mars. I have to say that this picture is mind-blowing in that we get to see an avalanche happen on another planet. Galileo would be proud.

Of course you could always get out there and do some superscience yourself. If the weather will just get a little bit colder, you could try some of these fun experiments. Free drink to anyone who finds out if boiling water freezes before room temperature water through an experiment. No fair just reading in on the internet.

Just make sure your experiment doesn’t wind up on this website. Or, if it does, make sure no one dies.

Readers in Louisiana may have to be doing all of their science education at home and online, if the school board reviews get set up in the way that the Louisiana Family Forum (friends of Focus on the Family) is hoping. Since Louisiana was the site of the Edwards v. Aguillard case that defined creation science as religious (necessitating the turn towards “Intelligent Design”) – you’d think they’d know better.

I suppose if you’re going to Louisiana (or to talk with Dr. James Dobson) you’ll want to bone up on your debate skills. Note: Does not improve all debate skills, only against creationist claims. Not guaranteed effective against James Dobson.

Of course, to see the “Creationist Claims” list in a mere eleven minutes, you’ll have to endure some bad animation, but…

My personal favorite rebuttal for Young Earth Creationists: is this one, albeit never as hilarious as this.

Of course at the time the Sumerians weren’t the only ones doing agriculture: The lichens were doing it too. I had never known that lichens were kind of like SCOBYs.

And courtesy of reader soberguy, comes a great YouTube video about homeopathy:

He’s also provided us with a good article from Discover Blogs on the evolution of prions. You can add this to evolution of computer code to show the robust nature of evolution through (any sort of) selection as a theoretical construct. Even some cosmologists refer to it now (though who knows, it could just be biology-envy on their part).

Oh well. Here’s your random link of the day. It’s the Shakespearean version of The Big Lebowski, and I want to see it performed, ever so badly.

Zounds, man. Look at these unworthiest hands; no gaudy gold profanes my little hand. I have no honour to contain the ring. I am a bachelor in a wilderness. Behold this place; are these the towers where one may glimpse Geoffrey, the married man? Is this a court where mistresses of common sense are hid? Not for me to hang my bugle in an invisible baldric, sir; I am loath to take a wife, or she to take me until men be made of some other mettle than earth. Hark, the seat of my commode be arisen!

There’s a few interesting anomalies about this event that are bound to refine astronomical information – Phil Plait, of course, has an excellent rundown in his informational and bombastic style, but if you’re willing to put up with me for a few paragraphs more…

First off; the star being pulled in is likely a White Dwarf (or a “degenerate dwarf” if you like the D&D style sound of that); these stars are hydrogen and helium poor, and rich in heavier metals that make the X-Ray emissions from this event distinctive.

Secondly, from the spectra of the infalling material, you can get an idea as to how fast the matter is falling in – giving you an idea of how large the black hole is. And this one is a strange size – not too big, not too small, a “middleweight” hole that had been suspected to exist, but never observed.

It will take the black hole about 100 years to eat this X-ray spewing dwarf, the core of which is made of a strange sort of matter – degenerate matter. This is a form of matter that can no longer be compressed, at this point quantum mechanics comes into play, and the matter is prevented from collapsing further because doing so would mean that elemental particles would have to occupy the same space.

That is a lot of pressure. And it is a real effect that exerts actual expansive force, holding up the core of the star against collapse. This pressure is called degeneracy pressure.

If one of the stars in a binary star system becomes a white dwarf, and the other star is close enough, the white dwarf will actually pull star matter from it’s partner onto the surface of the white dwarf. With the addition of this matter, the white dwarf will eventually become so massive that the pressure overcomes the degeneracy pressure.

Then the shit blows up and it’s called a Type Ia Supernova.

So what Chandra is observing is sort of the reverse phenomenon. I can’t imagine that things will blow up, but we’ve got another hundred years of watching to see what happens when that degenerate matter turns back to normal gas.

Now, I’m no astrophysicist (which is why I read Phil P’s blog in the first place) but it could be interesting to see – the degenerate matter will eventually become gaseous again as the white dwarf loses mass, which could…

…I dunno…

If you’re feeling somewhat important or egotistical today – enjoy!

I always like to look at it like this: No matter how badly you screw up, in the grand scheme of things….