• How the city hurts your brain
  Seed Editor-at-Large Jonah Lehrer explains how life in the big city can dull our minds and lower our self-control.
• Food Dance Gets New Life When Bees Get Cocaine
  Drugged-out bees may provide researchers with new insight into the treatment and prevention of drug use in humans.
• A very rough guide to the highlights of 2008
  A sometimes-educational and often-hilarious aggregation of neuroscience news and entertainment in 2008, including an article deemed "Most likely to hasten the coming robot war."
• The Nose Knows (Or Why Smoking Should Be Banned Everywhere)
  Research shows that long after cigarette smoke has dissipated, health risks still persist. The simple rule: if you can smell it, it's hurting you.
• Desktop atom smashers could replace LHC
  As the world tightens its belt in tough economic times, the future of expensive particle accelerators is anything but certain. A smaller, desktop-sized model could become a viable alternative.
  

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Seed kicks off the International Year of Astronomy with a slideshow of awe-inspiring astronomical snapshots of our universe.

The Pleiades star cluster, captured here in infrared by the Spitzer Space Telescope. Click on image to view slideshow. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/J. Stauffer (SSC/Caltech).

The International Year of Astronomy is a global celebration commemorating Galileo's first telescopic explorations of night sky and Kepler's publishing of Astronomia Nova. More than 135 countries will be participating in 2009, hosting events that seek to reconnect people around the world with the unique sense of discovery felt by Galileo and Kepler four centuries ago:

From Earth to the Universe
A slideshow of awe-inspiring astronomical snapshots. From Earth to the Universe is a collection of images curated by the American Astronomical Society set to display in public parks, airports, and art centers in over 30 countries throughout the year. View the slideshow to see Seed's favorites. Learn more.

The US celebration kicks off on January 6 during the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society at the Long Beach Convention Center in California. There will be a virtual ribbon-cutting ceremony that commences when light emitted 400 years ago from a distant star reaches Earth. The event, which is open to the public, will be broadcast live on the web.

In the UK, the Society for Popular Astronomy, Royal Astronomical Society and Science and Technology Facilities Council will be providing 1,000 secondary schools with free telescopes.

More information about International Year of Astronomy celebrations around the world can be found here.

The centuries of inquiry and knowledge that 2009's International Year of Astronomy celebrates were not inspired by concerns over the ratio of spiral-to-elliptical galaxies, the behavior of supermassive black holes, the composition of the interstellar medium, or other interests of many modern astronomers. The driving force behind the development of astronomy was the question of humanity's place in the universe, particularly whether or not other worlds exist outside our own, worlds like ours where sunlight-stirred wind, water, and earth somehow gave rise to flourishing life and intelligence.

It seems fitting, then, that this year &mdash the 400th anniversary of both Galileo Galilei's first use of a telescope and the publication of Johannes Kepler's Astronomia Nova &mdash the most anticipated astronomical event addresses precisely this question. The Kepler Mission, a space telescope named after the 17th-century pioneering astronomer and set to launch in March 2009, will likely bring us closer to knowing that answer than all other accumulated events thus far in human history.

Using a sophisticated photometer, Kepler will detect the shadows of planets as they travel across the faces of their home stars in their distant orbits. It may reveal and characterize hundreds of planetary systems, some of which could be like our own, complete with a "twin" of Earth. During its four-year mission in Earth-trailing orbit, the specially designed photometer will focus on and record data from a single swath of stars in our galaxy where stellar systems with habitable planets are likely to exist. The spacecraft will store the data and transmit to Earth about once a week. In years to come, the Kepler as well as other ambitious telescopes and observatories hold the promise of illuminating whether our situation here on Earth is an astounding rarity or an innumerably common occurrence.

Brad Pitt as Benjamin Button. Courtesy Paramount Pictures.

In David Fincher's film adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," opening Christmas day, the title character is born in the form of a baby with the developmental attributes of a blind, decrepit old man. He is able to leave his wheelchair and learns to walk only in his 70s, joins a tugboat crew on the high seas as a 60-year-old, and falls in love for the first time in his 50s. Then the effects of aging begin to take over. As a boy, he is beset by dementia. As an infant, he forgets how to speak and walk, until finally, he ends up back where he started, as Fitzgerald wrote, where "there were only the white, safe walls of his crib."

On the Blogs
ScienceBloggers discuss the latest developments in longevity research.

Benjamin Button, with its numerous funerals and fatalities, has a body count rivaling that of most Hollywood shoot-'em-ups. And while Button may be in the enviable position of growing younger and more dashing (he's played by Brad Pitt) as those around him age, he too is fated to expire. Ultimately, this is a movie about mortality — and is mainstream cinema's most recent attempt to grapple with our fear of death and our longstanding dream of turning the human body clock backwards.

But the concept of turning back or slowing the processes of aging no longer exists simply in the realm of fable, as when Fitzgerald penned his story in 1922. It is a substantive aim of contemporary science. Geneticists, gerontologists, and biologists are further along than ever before in identifying the processes of aging — by examining certain genes tied to longevity, for example. But finding a so-called cure is still in the realm of fantasy.

One of the most controversial and ambitious scientists in the field of aging research is the British-based former computer scientist Aubrey de Grey, whose theories are similar to a Benjamin Button-style switcheroo of senescence. He is the cofounder and chairman of the Methuselah Foundation, which works to defeat age-related disease and extend the healthy human life span.

De Grey views the human body as a machine that can be sustained indefinitely through molecular overhauling and maintenance and claims to have identified "seven deadly things" that cause aging — from cellular atrophy to mitochondrial mutations — that are also reversable. As if contemplating a car's tune-up, de Grey imagines people submitting to periodic stem cell implants that would refurbish older cells and gene therapies that would restore mutated mitochondrial DNA — which is linked to dementia and diabetes — back to their original sequence. Through these rejuvenating processes, de Grey believes we have the potential to extend our life spans to 1,000 years. "And I think it's not nearly as hard as we believe," he says.

He cites progress, for example, in the creation of induced pluripotent stem cells by a team of scientists at Kyoto University in 2006, which would allow for normal adult cells to yield stem cells that can be used for repairing the body. "It completely sidesteps the immune problem," says de Grey. "Now we could take cells from a prospective patient and subject them to this procedure, and bingo, we've got stem cells that we can nudge in whatever direction we need."

Critics say that most of de Grey's theories are contingent upon discoveries that have yet to come to fruition, and de Grey himself concedes that he has no solution to crosslinking — the process by which sugar-protein bonds join and diminish the elasticity and mobility of proteins — which has been implicated in thickened arteries, cataracts, and congestive heart failure, among other age-related problems.

The Hindu Kush-Himalayan region showing major river basins. Courtesy ICIMOD.

The developing world is undergoing a rapid metamorphosis. Gaia Vince is on a 21st century odyssey to document the increasing influence of science in global challenges like urbanization and economic growth and issues surrounding biofuels, biodiversity, agriculture, and growing a knowledge economy.

Swerving past stray cows, improbably laden motorbikes, and boys out goat walking, the taxi ride through central Kathmandu was not for someone who had so recently finished their breakfast. The driver, obviously heeding an appointment more urgent than mine, and with an expression of committed intent, horn-blasted his way through clouds of fumes and dust to the outskirts of the city. I clung to the back of his seat and re-swallowed my breakfast.

The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) is a few miles from downtown Kathmandu and a world away from its chaotic fracas. The villa-style building in a valley of rice paddies exudes a calm that belies the often antagonistic relations of its member countries. ICIMOD is an initiative of the United Nations Environment Programme and the eight nations of the Hindu-Kush: Nepal, Bhutan, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Burma, and Bangladesh.

More than 1.3 billion people and their economies depend on ten large rivers  — including the Indus, Ganges, Irrawaddy, Yellow, Mekong, and Brahmaputra — that originate in the Himalayas. As climate change forces the mountain glaciers into retreat and effects frequency of precipitation, the rivers, and those living along them are vulnerable to reduced water flow. The impact could be felt far away from these mountain regions. Businesses in this  — one of the more water-poor regions of the world  — are actually exporting "virtual water" in the form of thirsty crops like cotton to places like Britain, which receives plentiful rainfall. "If you walk into any shop in the West, you'll find that most T-shirts are made in China. Rice will come from India or Bangladesh," ICIMOD specialist Mats Eriksson explains.

The 150-strong ICIMOD workforce is on the frontline between researchers and policymakers, tasked with treading the path between unwelcome climate-model predictions and their implications for the region's water, energy, and agriculture management. But solving upstream-downstream conflict between countries is daunting, particularly given the problem of inadequate data on river volume and flow.

Another issue for ICIMOD is glacial outburst floods. As glaciers melt they form vast lakes that are hemmed in by the moraine of loose rocks and debris left by the retreating glacier. Warming from climate change is increasing the number and size of these lakes and when these moraines give way, the resultant outburst washes away entire towns. "Almost the only monitoring we have on these lakes comes from remote satellites, and it contains very little information," says Andreas Schild, the Swiss-born director of ICIMOD. "We need in-situ measurements using a common methodology, and that has to be done by the region's governments."

Calorie Restriction
In October 2006, Jonah Lehrer noted that the low-calorie link to longevity had received a spree of publicity in the popular press. Although a restricted diet has been shown to increase the lifespan of rodents and primates, Jonah points out that severe dieting has a major evolutionary drawback: your body won't have enough energy for sex. Furthermore, given many Americans' habits today, dieting may be culturally unrealistic: "since 40 percent of Americans are currently obese, mass starvation probably isn't a viable public health plan," he writes. About a year later, Mark Hoofnagle wrote about a study in PLoS suggesting that it's not just how little you eat that makes you live longer, but how little protein you eat.

Resveratrol.

Resveratrol
In November 2006, a Nature report found that resveratrol, a compound in red wine, can increase the lifespan of yeast, worms, flies, and mice by up to 20%. Shelley Batts explained the findings.

The results were so tantalizing, noted Abel Pharmboy, that the senior author of the paper, David Sinclair, raised $82 million in venture capital funding to continue the research.

This August, however, Jake Young reviewed the resveratrol research and brought up some lingering questions about the drug's biological mechanism. "While we are beginning to understand the molecular biology of aging, we should remember that mice are not humans," he wrote. "There are good reasons to be skeptical that inhibiting pro-aging pathways in humans will have the same effect that it has in lower organisms."

Sex Differences
Last year, Afarensis explained that studying the tooth size of hoofed animals can help us understand why women live longer than men.

Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure
By Paul A. Offit (Columbia University Press)
In a perfect world, the public's knowledge would mirror the scientific consensus. In Autism's False Prophets, vaccine expert Offit dissects how shady lawyers, suspect science, self-interested politicians, and equivocating journalists have derailed this hope, convincing millions that vaccines cause autism even as the scientific community has proven the theory false. More than a book about a disease, it is an ode to uncorrupted science and a cautionary tale that data alone is never enough. Buy

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
By Mary Roach (W.W. Norton)
There are many humorous science books. There are not many hilarious science books. With Bonk, a review of science's study of sexual behavior, Mary Roach has written a volume so viscerally funny, it's easy to overlook how obsessively she researched her subject. But Roach's tales of a day with pig inseminators, a hands-on experience with penile implants, and a romp under an ultrasound machine serve as not-so-subtle reminders of her commitment to writing the first-ever comprehensive book on sex research. Buy

Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It
By Elizabeth Royte (Bloomsbury)
Convenient, trendy, and calorie-free, bottled water is ubiquitous, global consumption having doubled in the past decade alone. Yet, according to Royte, packaged H2O has entered our lives without due consideration. From inside the water labs of Nestlé to a small Maine town engulfed in water-rights disputes to places experiencing early "bottle backlash," Royte narrates a meticulously researched yet lively account sure to earn this issue its overdue attention. Buy

Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain
By Kirsten Menger-Anderson (Algonquin Books)
After a routine bleeding goes terribly awry, Dr. Olaf van Schuler flees Europe for New Amsterdam and becomes the first in a long line of eccentric physicians: practitioners of phrenology and psychosurgery, believers in animal magnetism and spontaneous combustion. Menger-Anderson's fictional take on the harsh realities of old-world medical science is at once grotesque and utterly compelling, as are her madcap characters, who desire so earnestly to find a cure — whatever the cost. Buy

The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment
By Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich (Island Press)
In 2005 Paul Ehrlich, along with Donald Kennedy, editor-in-chief of Science, proposed that the nations of the world launch a Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior, a project intended to emphasize that changing our behavior, our "individual motives and values," is as pivotal for long-term sustainability as tallying carbon levels and degrees of temperature rise. Ehrlich and Kennedy noted a striking disconnect between the scientific recommendations most of us can dutifully recite — arrest population growth, curb greenhouse-gas emissions, limit consumption — and the measures that we are willing to adopt in our day-to-day lives (and that our politicians are willing to endorse, perhaps especially in an election year). How, they asked, might human cultures evolve to permit the kinds of behavioral changes that bootstrap a sustainable and equitable global society? Read the full review. Buy

Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet
By Oliver Morton (Harper Collins)
Oliver Morton's Eating the Sun is a poetic account of photosynthesis. Weaving the biomechanics of sun-to-sugar into a natural history of the planet, he provides context for the current climate crisis, then considers plant-inspired alternative energies, including hydrogen-producing algae and large-scale biomass developments in the tropics. Within photosynthesis Morton finds inspiration for both an ode to nature and reason for optimism about the technologies designed to mimic it. Buy

The Endless City
Edited by Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic (Phaidon)
Today, for the first time in history, more than half the world's population lives in urban areas — a figure likely to reach 75 percent by 2050. The product of the "Urban Age" conferences, this 500-pager takes as its focal point six major world cities — New York, London, Shanghai, Johannesburg, Mexico City, and Berlin. Hundreds of color photographs, maps, designs, and statistics provide a visually arresting and comprehensive survey of the key factors in creating — and sustaining — a thriving modern metropolis. Buy

The Hot Topic: What We Can Do About Global Warming
By Gabrielle Walker and Sir David King (Harcourt)
In The Hot Topic, former science advisor to the British government Sir David King teams up with veteran science writer Gabrielle Walker to offer perhaps the most thoughtful and scientifically rigorous work to date on how we got the Earth into this fix, and how we can help get it out. Allying with neither the do-nothing denialists, the geo-engineering technophiles, nor the orthodox environmentalists, King and Walker build a nuanced case for, above all, science-based judiciousness. Buy

Next 9 Picks

• The Return of Amateur Science
  Mark Frauenfelder, of bOINGbOING and Make fame, believes that the internet has facilitated an age of science-as-hobby, capable of laying the foundations for an amateur's scientific revolution.
• Picturing Moore's Law
  These simple diagrams illustrate the evolution of the computer chip from Fairchild's integrated circuit to the exponentially more powerful Intel chips found in modern day computers. While Moore's law is a well-understood phenomenon, who knew it could be presented so beautifully?
• Shade coffee benefits more than birds
  Do you feel guilty knocking back a cup of Chock Full o'Nuts or Folgers? If you do, new research reveals that you can reduce that guilt by switching to shade grown coffee whose ecological benefits include ensuring bio-diversity through helping rare tree species pollinate.
• Inventor's 2020 vision: to help 1bn of the world's poorest see better
  In a "tremendous glimpse of the obvious" this inventor found that using water's naturally lens-like properties he could provide adjustable eye care to the masses.
• Holiday Medical Myths: Zapped!
  The beauty of science is that not only can it expand our collective knowledge, but that it can also be put to use in ending the campaigns of disinformation that, for example, want you to think that the holiday season is accompanied by a surge of suicides. Though December and January may be a downer for some, it seems that not everybody is as suicidal as our culture would lead us to believe.
  

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The Anatomy of a Hit Song
It's not the hook or the lyrics; it's got to do with other peoples' opinions.

Professor Yuval Shavitt, of Tel Aviv University's School of Electric Engineering, is melding math and sociology to describe mass behavior on the Internet. He is the principal investigator of DIMES, a project that hopes to map the structure and topology of the Internet, begun four years ago. And for the past year, he has used data-mining tools to collect and interpret massive amounts of data from file-sharing networks. By applying a decades-old sociological theory that describes the spread of information in social networks to the online world, he has been able to develop a predictive algorithm that identifies musicians who will ascend from local popularity to national stardom.

Click to enlarge

Shavitt and a team of graduate students developed their algorithm first by collecting half a billion search-query strings from Gnutella, a peer-to-peer file-sharing network. Non-music-related searches and searches for already-popular musicians are eliminated, and the remaining queries are tagged and sorted by the specific city or region from which the queries originated, using IP addresses. These searches are dubbed "geo-aware query strings."

The geographic location of an emerging artist is the key to predicting their success, explains Shavitt. "If an artist has the potential to be successful, people will first start noticing them in the small geographical area where they live and perform." In fact, a potential pop star will typically enjoy thousands of downloads a day on a local level, while remaining relatively unheard of on a national level. A large divergence between local and global popularity, called the Kullback-Leiber divergence, is a strong indicator of star potential. The algorithm measures the K-L divergence to produce a short list of potentials, of which 15 to 30 percent will go on to reach national popularity within weeks.

According to Shavitt's paper on the subject, "Spotting Out Emerging Artists Using Geo-Aware Analysis of P2P Query String," presented at the International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining last August in Las Vegas, his predictive algorithm is based on the groundbreaking sociological theories of Mark Granovetter, who first described in the 1970s how micro-level interactions between individuals affect macro-level phenomena. From Granovetter's work emerged the small-world model, which is able to predict a product's success based on its adoption by a small network of people — assuming that the "main driver behind a product's growth is communication between individuals."

The use of geo-aware peer-to-peer query strings presents a potentially major shift in music hit-prediction software, most of which — like Hit Song Science — collects data on the sound of a song, then compares the melody, tempo, and lyrics for example of a potential hit to a database of established hits. "Our algorithm never hears the actual song; it is based on the Internet mirroring of the social word of mouth of people spreading their interest in the song," says Shavitt. "It will be interesting to compare the success rates of both approaches."

But Shavitt's algorithm may have wider implications. He and his team of researches have been contemplating using the algorithm to predict the success potential of a homegrown politician, for example. Text encryption would be needed to data-mine searches on politicians, as their Internet presence is best measured in their popularity as discussion topics in forums and chat rooms. It's much trickier to data-mine text, as compared with numbers — and to determine if what's being written about public figures online is positive — "but it's certainly doable," says Shavitt. With the growing sophistication and popularity of online social networking sites and file-sharing services, Shavitt demonstrates how math can describe and harness mass behavior in online environments. The applications of which could be endless.

Seed's Endorsement of Barack Obama
"Science is a way of governing, not just something to be governed."

President-elect Barack Obama officially named his White House science and technology advisors on Saturday during a radio address that was also posted on YouTube. Naming a science team at this point in the transition period is a marked difference in strategy compared with that of George W. Bush, who waited 8 months after being elected before naming his science advisor. Obama stressed the importance of pushing forward alternative energy and genetic research, as well creating an environment that encourages the life-changing scientific breakthroughs that shape our lives. "Our leading minds are hard at work chasing the next big idea," Obama said. "The truth is that promoting science isn't just about providing resources — it's about protecting free and open inquiry. It's about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it's inconvenient — especially when it's inconvenient." It's the competent team of scientists below who will have the president's ear on some of the most critical issues of our time.

John Holdren
Director, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
Co-chair, President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology
John Holdren is a Harvard University professor of environmental science and public policy sciences as well as professor of environmental policy at the Kennedy School of Government's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He is also director of the Woods Hole Research Center, an ecological think tank in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Holdren headed the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, an international group of eminent, Nobel-winning scientists in 1995, and he won a MacArthur Foundation genius award in 1981 for his arms control work. After receiving a PhD in physics from Stanford University in 1970, Holdren taught at UC Berkeley, focusing on global environmental change, energy technologies and policies, nuclear proliferation, and science policy. Holdren previously served as Bill Clinton's science and technology advisor. Obama described his appointee as "one of the most passionate and persistent voices of our time about the growing threat of climate change."
More info: www.ostp.gov

Courtesy Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center

Harold Varmus
Co-chair, President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology
"What I'm focused on is the fact that we have some serious problems, and we have a new president who is going to ask scientists to help solve them," said Nobel-prize laureate Harold Varmus, upon the announcement of his appointment to co-chair. Varmus is the current president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, a leading institute in cancer research and therapy. The politically active genetics researcher served as director of the National Institutes of Health from 1993 to 1999, where he spearheaded NIH-wide lectures and symposia to bring scientists together and doubled the agency's budget during his tenure. Varmus has been an advocate for the importance of basic research and freedom of scientific inquiry, as well as a predominant driving force of the open-access movement, which over the last decade has reshaped scientific publishing. He cofounded the Public Library of Science, a non-profit publisher of peer-reviewed scholarly journals committed to freely accessible scientific literature. Read more about Harold Varmus's open access contributions in Seed's Revolutionary Minds series.
More info: www.ostp.gov/cs/pcast

Courtesy Jane Lubchenco

Jane Lubchenco
Administrator, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Jane Lubchenco is currently a professor of Marine Biology and Zoology at Oregon State University. Lubchenco received her PhD from Harvard University in 1975 and has since served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the International Council for Science, and the Ecological Society of America. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Royal Society, and the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World. Lubchenco is a recipient of the MacArthur and the Pew Fellowships, eight honorary degrees, and various other awards including the Heinz Award in the Environment, the Nierenberg Prize for Science in the Public Interest, and the AAAS Award for Public Understanding of Science and Technology. In 2004, she became the first scientist ever to receive the Environmental Law Institute Award. As the Administrator of NOAA, Lubchenco will have considerable influence on climate research during Obama's presidency. She has criticized Bush's environmental policies, telling the Associated Press that his administration "has not been respectful of the science."
More info: www.noaa.gov

Courtesy Harvard Medical School

Eric Lander
Co-chair, President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology
Biologist Eric Lander, a renowned leader of the Human Genome Project, has been named to Obama's team of science and technology advisors. "I can't think of a time when the problems and challenges facing the country--environment and energy, healthcare, education--had more to do with science and technology than they do today," Lander said in response to the announcement. In addition to his post as a professor of biology at MIT and professor of systems biology at Harvard Medical School, Lander is the founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, which works to leverage the information encoded within the human genome — including genes, regulatory controls and cellular circuitry — to better understand basic issues in medicine and to find cures for disease. Obama said that he viewed Lander as "a powerful voice in my administration as we seek to find the causes and cures of our most devastating diseases." Read more about the significance Eric Lander's human genome work in Seed's Revolutionary Minds series.
More info: www.ostp.gov/cs/pcast

• The Union of Evolution and Design
  Too often the dichotomy of man and environment becomes so skewed we fail to see ourselves in it, but as this author states "just as technologies should maximize ecosystem services, they should also maximize human capabilities," and it is this that will be the challenge of great design seeking to address the environmental crisis into the future.
• You Never Know What You'll Find in a Book
  When was the last time you sold a book at a yard sale or to a second-hand bookstore? Did you leave anything in it by accident, and if you did what story will that item tell upon rediscovery?
• Martial law of the jungle
  The question of "eco-interventions", or using military force to ensure the protection of bio-diversity, raises a number of hotbed issues that call into question who is more important, man or animal?
• The 6 Coolest Things You Can Do With Your Dead Body
  If you are feeling particularly generous this holiday season, why not consider donating your body to science?
• Breast cancer gene-free baby due
  In a bold move by the medical community, and one slightly reminiscent of Gattaca, a child in England has had the gene known to increase the risk of breast cancer removed prior to birth.
  

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• Wind of change
  Due to the explosion of discussion surrounding alternative energy, terms are being bandied about without the appropriate expertise. But, this Economist article provides a solid recap of the wind energy industry.
• Can Science Help Solve the Economic Crsis?
  The Edge's brilliant, but oftentimes dense, email arrives every week, and is only sometimes read, but this week's issue seeks to break down the role science can play in solving the economic crisis and is an absolute must-read.
• Intelligent soldiers most likely to die in battle
  Admittedly, the data is from pre-World War II, but the results remain insightful today.
• Flawed Science Advice for Obama?
  Given the rather perilous state of science policy today, is it really the best course of action to invite a stubborn, and at times fraudulent, science adviser into the White House to guide us out of this mess?
• Hysteria in Four Acts
  Not surprisingly, a society's evolution is reflected best in its mental health disorders such as "hysteria," wherein our culture's obsession with mental health become manifested. (via a&l daily)
  

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Plated brewer's yeast in suspension. Photograph courtesy of Caylan Larson.

• FLO1 Is a Variable Green Beard Gene that Drives Biofilm-like Cooperation in Budding Yeast
  Cell 14 November 2008

What does it mean for an organism the width of a human hair to be domesticated? To find out, Kevin Verstrepen, a biologist from Harvard University, went straight to many peoples' dream destination: the brewery. Here, Saccharomyces cerevisiae &mdash the tame, simple, go-to laboratory model for nearly all plants and animals &mdash lives a double life as the best-fermenting yeast in the world.

After talking with brewers, Verstrepen found that wild yeast behavior differed significantly from the yeast used by experimental biologists: "What I learned is that brewer's yeast stick together at the end of fermentation," Verstrepen says. "They start adhering to each other, clumping together, forming what we call flocs of cells. Lab yeast cells don't do that."

To find out why, Verstrepen and his team took the wild yeast back to the lab. There they discovered that the yeast were clumping together to protect themselves from stress. Toward the end of fermentation, the yeast produce enough alcohol to harm themselves. By clumping together, using a special adhesion protein, they create a nearly impenetrable barrier for alcohol and other toxins, with the yeast on the outside altruistically taking the brunt of the blow. "Outer cells protect the inner cells. Basically the chemicals cannot penetrate these flocs," says Verstrepen.

This kind of collaboration is a deceptively sticky problem in evolutionary biology. Darwin struggled with it &mdash and never resolved it. In any collaboration, every participant makes an investment and reaps the benefits. But how is this system protected from cheaters who bilk the rewards without contributing themselves?

Enter the so-called green-beard solution, first hypothesized by W.D. Hamilton. The theory goes that in order to join a mutually beneficial collaboration, one would need a signifier called a "green-beard gene." In yeast this appears to be FLO1. Yeast that do not produce this adhesion protein cannot enter the floc.

Green-beard genes were thought to be nonexistent or extremely rare in nature, with only a few fuzzy examples thus far. The existence of a green-beard gene in yeast makes this model organism far more social &mdash and complicated &mdash than ever imagined. To date it provides the cleanest example of a green-beard gene in nature.

Do laboratory yeast ever encounter stress? "They don't encounter as much stress as these feral strains, because actually, we treat our laboratory yeast very well," says Verstrepen. Essentially, laboratories provide a toxin-free, risk-free environment, and the result has been domestication. "S. cerevisiae don't behave like they would in the wild anymore. They behave like we would want them to behave in a test tube. We basically stopped evolution."

• First cases of touch-emotion synaesthesia discovered
  Just when we got our heads wrapped around synaesthetes, like Rain Man, here come the tactile-emotion synaesthetes, who might experience denim as depression, corduroy as confusion, and sand as heavenly.
• Big Picture: The year 2008 in photographs
  The Boston Globe's supersized photo gallery launches a three-part, year-end series today, covering everything from the cosmos to international conflict. Topping the list, a jaw-dropper of lightning bolts in a dust cloud appearing to rise out of Chile's Chaiten volcano.
• Hackers 'aid' Amazon logging scam
  Hi-tech criminals have penetrated a computer system that monitors logging in Brazil in order to issue fake permits to loggers; an estimated 1.7m cubic metres of timber have been logged illegally as a result.
• The Periodic Table of Awesoments
  Awesominers — those who study awesome things — have identified 118 fundamental "awesoments" that compose all good things. In their spin on the periodic table, the fundamental relationships between Doritos, black holes, and robots has finally been revealed. (via kottke)
• New genes suggest obesity is in your head, not your gut
  Results from a recent obesity study of over 90,000 people indicate that many of the genes known to affect body mass influence brain function rather than metabolic processes.
  

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An aerial shot of Antarctica's Weddell Sea, taken in 1989 from the window a B-105 helicopter. The iceberg depicted is one of several that Dr. Karen St. Germain and her colleagues landed on in order to collect ice samples. Image courtesy Dr. Karen St. Germain.

March 2009 will mark the end of the fourth ever International Polar Year (IPY), a scientific program that intensively studies the poles. In order to have full and equal coverage of both the Arctic and the Antarctic, a polar year actually spans two annual cycles. In the era of global warming and melting icecaps, polar research reaches beyond the scientific community, agitating politicians, celebrities, artists, musicians and implicating any person, really, who has experienced the weather.

It was in this context that new media artist Andrea Polli found herself part of the International Polar Year Celebration on Monday evening at the CUNY Graduate Center's Segal Theater, as part of the Graduate Center's Science & the Arts series. Polli shared the stage with Dr. Karen St. Germain, algorithm chief at National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) and music experimentalist Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky, who recently traveled to Antarctica to compose a 70-minute acoustic portrait of its rapidly changing environment.

Sonification is the process of translating numerical data into sound. Polli, who sonically interpreted climatic data from Antarctica's McMurdo Station, played her eerie soundscapes Monday night while the crowd got settled, saturating them with gusts and drops, sloshes and whirs representing sound filtered by data of ice movement, temperature changes, glacial snow levels, and other Arctic processes. Polli wrote a computer program that directly correlates changes in the data to changes in the timbre, as well as the pitch and loudness, of the sounds.

Polli, who was sporting a fanny pack Monday night and seemed like she'd be more comfortable outdoors, originally traveled to Antarctica to study instruments that remotely record data, like thermometer and anemometers, but found that there were many more humans measuring data conditions on the ground than instruments. She picked up the term "ground truth," which refers to the data collected by people on location, as opposed to what is gathered remotely.

In her documentary short film about her experiences, Ground Truth, which screened while ambient sounds played in the background, Polli interviews scientists about why they are willing to go to remote, uncomfortable, and hazardous locations. Many respond that no matter how sophisticated and reliable instruments get, a human element will always be necessary to relate image data to the real characteristics and materials on the ground.

Since her first trip to Antarctica in the late 80s, Dr. Karen St. Germain has spent decades "ground truthing" at the poles. Monday night during a half-hour presentation on her career, she cheerily noted that field work is not glamorous, describing how she watched ice grow, lived in a tent, and survived on Cheetos, and how her instruments often failed her: "Even if you checked that it worked before you left, once you're in the field, it's likely going to break." St. Germain also described her current work, developing sensors for the first NPOESS satellite, which will make measurements and observations of the oceans, land cover, snow and ice cover, and the atmosphere of the entire planet.

St. Germain showed a series of animations illustrating fluctuating sea-ice levels, and when the levels suddenly and radically shrunk, the audience gasped; it would have been an ideal moment for a Deep Impact style tidal wave to hit New York. Several times, St. Germain noted that the decrease was due in part to cyclical variations, but emphasized that in the past few years the loss of sea ice has increased dramatically. When an audience member asked about the reliability of data via high-tech imaging versus from the ground, St. Germain took a tone similar to the scientists in Polli's video: "All data are wrong," she laughed. "Hopefully they are wrong in different ways."

The Numbers Game: The Commonsense Guide to Understanding Numbers in the News, in Politics, and in Life
By Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot (Gotham)
Drawing on examples from popular news outlets, Blastland and Dilnot's short, punchy book carefully unravels the ways in which statistics are distorted and misrepresented — often unintentionally — in media coverage of important and controversial issues. The book is a necessary companion for anyone looking to make sense of the percentages, probabilities, averages, and large dollar amounts making headlines on any given day. As the authors explain, "if we are the least bit serious about any of these issues, we should attempt to get the numbers straight." Buy

On the Surface of Things: Images of the Extraordinary in Science
By Felice Frankel and George M. Whitesides (Harvard University Press)
In the ten years since Frankel and Whitesides created a stunning new way to envision science, Frankel's images have appeared in over 300 journals. In this reissue, the authors include several new images and fresh digital scans of the old. Yet, they write, the spirit of the original remains. "We chose the subject — surfaces, and the light that illuminates them — because they are important in the two great technologies — information and biology — that are now remaking the world." Buy

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
By Dan Ariely (Harper)
Any economic model based on perfect human rationality is undoubtedly flawed. But that doesn't mean people behave unpredictably. In this exuberant book, behavioral economist Dan Ariely contends that our irrational behavior is wholly consistent, and that we can learn to capitalize on it. Ariely backs up each claim with examples from his own inventive research — subjects include unwitting MIT students and unsuspecting trick-or-treaters — forming an argument as charmingly anecdotal as it is convincing. Buy

Tomorrow's Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food
By Pamela C. Ronald and Raoul W. Adamchak (Oxford University Press)
Genetically-engineered versus organically-grown. It's a choice often framed as being between science and nature, but it's a false one, says this wife-husband team. In a literal marriage of two entrenched camps, Ronald, a plant genomics researcher at UC Davis, and Adamchak, an organic gardener, shed light on the unfounded fears of gene modification and the merits a more-holistic approach to agriculture. Recipes include "Sticky Rice with GE Papaya" and "Isolation of DNA from Organically- Grown Strawberries." Buy

The Stuff of Life: A Graphic Guide to Genetics and DNA
By Mark Schultz, Illustrated by Zander Cannon and Kevin Cannon (Hill and Wang)
With the graphic novel gaining status as a form of serious storytelling, The Stuff of Life makes a case for the graphic-novel textbook. A sentient alien sea sponge professor makes the case for sexual reproduction (and thus genetic diversity) to the leader of its species, and in the process, explains the basics of molecular biology, Mendelian inheritance, and evolution. The illustrations are simultaneously cute and explanatory, and the text's oversimplifications and techno-utopianism are justified for a cartoon treatment of one of most complex stories in science. Check out a Stuff of Life animated lesson here. Buy

The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strageness of Insect Societies
By Bert Hölldobler and E.O. Wilson (W.W. Norton)
In this sequel to their 1990 Pulitzer-winning The Ants, the authors focus on new research demonstrating that in social insects (bees, termites, wasps, and ants), natural selection works not on individual members but on the colony as a unit. These "superorganisms," according to Hölldobler and Wilson, occupy a distinct — and overlooked — biological niche halfway between an organism and entire species. Sure to rekindle the group-selection debate, this magnum opus on six-legged societies offers a provocative twist to the evolution of complex behavior. Buy

The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature
By Daniel J. Levitin (Dutton)
Following up on his bestselling This is Your Brain on Music, musician and cognitive scientist Levitin argues that we evolved to produce and consume music for six reasons: friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, and love. Drawing on personal anecdotes, conversations with greats such as Sting and Joni Mitchell, and his own knowledge of evolutionary history, Levitin creates a rich account of how music has allowed humans to thrive even when faced with war, loss, and dwindling romance. Buy

Back

Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique
By Michael S. Gazzaniga (Ecco)
We take for granted the uniqueness of the homo sapien. In Human, neuroscientist Gazzaniga both complicates and clarifies this view, examining topics from empathy to transhumanism through the lens of human distinctiveness. Using primate research as a foil for the newest advances in human cognitive neurosciences, such as work identifying six commonalities between human and chimp art, he makes an eloquent case both for the sophistication of our nearest relatives and for the biological singularity of humanity. Buy

Icarus at the Edge of Time
By Brian Greene (Knopf Publishing Group)
Time's strangeness, with its brutal indifference, lies at the center of Brian Greene's Icarus at the Edge of Time, in this, his first book for children. It is a moving and successful fiction, but as important, Greene offers a solution to one of the perennial questions of his trade: What attracts a popular audience to science in general, and in particular to the difficult abstractions of modern physics? Read the full review. Buy

In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
By Michael Pollan (Penguin Press)
Pollan's last book, Omnivore's Dilemma, sparked a nationwide conversation about the environmental and ethical consequences of what Americans eat. Here, he returns with a surprisingly simple prescription: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Charting the rise of so-called "nutritionism" — a reductionist ideology, not a science — he reveals how Americans have gotten fatter and unhealthier despite being the most food-obsessed culture in the world. After digesting this compact manifesto, you may never want to read the Nutrition "Facts" again. Buy

The Invention of Air: A Study of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America
By Steven Johnson (Riverhead Books)
Natural philosopher Joseph Priestley's insatiable curiosity led to his discovery of oxygen, as well as to his flight from Britain after a mob burned down his house and his Unitarian church. Johnson takes frequent side trips into how scientific insight changed the politics and religion of Priestley's day and meditates on why science, faith, and politics should not be considered in isolation from one another. Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams were all huge fans of Priestley's relentless enthusiasm and his reasoned approach to religion — begging the question of whether politicians today could find scientists, and science, so compelling. Buy

Jetpack Dreams: One Man's Up and Down (But Mostly Down) Search for the Greatest Invention That Never Was
By Mac Montandon (Da Capo Press)
From Bell Labs to Boba Fett, the jetpack has long been a holy grail of geekdom. Journalist Mac Montandon chases down this futuristic flying machine and introduces us to the motley crew of garage-based tinkerers devoted to keeping the dream aloft. While scientific reality may write the jetpack's obituary, Montandon delivers a fine ode to what makes a lot of us fall in love with science in the first place: a future where the impossible is possible. Buy

The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces
By Frank Wilczek (Basic Books)
The Lightness of Being is a detailed account of the physics governing our universe, from minuscule quarks to massive dark matter. Wilczek delves into the origin of mass, the nature of gravity, and the potential for a unification of forces. With a command of both concept and language that few can rival, he weaves witty commentary into eloquent explanations. Heavy on physics but light on math, this book offers an accessible though sophisticated look at the central ideas of modern physics. Buy

The Living Cosmos: Our Search for Life in the Universe
By Chris Impey (Random House)
Existential musings never go out of style: What are we? What is our origin and our fate? Are we alone? These questions are timeless, but with the advent of astrobiology — the study of life in the universe — we have begun to better understand ourselves empirically within a cosmic context. The Living Cosmos delivers a thorough introduction to this exciting field, masterfully surveying the foundations of our knowledge and the limits of our imaginations. Buy

The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom
By Simon Winchester (Harper)
Until recent decades Westerners were blissfully unaware that China, not Europe, was the civilization behind scores of history's great inventions, from gunpowder to mechanical printing and the magnetic compass. It was in the 1950s that perceptions began changing, largely due to the work of one distinctive figure: Joseph Needham, an English biologist, diplomat, explorer, libertine, and, not least, historian of science. Now he is the focus of Simon Winchester's revealing biography. Read the full review.
Buy

Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life
By Carl Zimmer (Pantheon)
For a single-celled organism, Escherichia coli lives a surprisingly complex life. In Microcosm, Carl Zimmer delves into the microbe's unique universe, highlighting the species' role in groundbreaking experiments that laid the foundations of modern biology. From the discovery of bacterial sex to genetic engineering, E. coli has provided answers that have reshaped our very definitions of life. Zimmer succeeds in engendering a healthy respect for the bug that lives inside us all. Buy

Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them
By David Anderegg (Tarcher)
Are you a nerd? According to David Anderegg, we should all be so lucky. Deftly weaving sociological research with anecdotes from his own practice as a child psychologist, Anderegg documents the charming innocence, unselfconsciousness, and passionate interests of the much-maligned "nerd." The book provides an enlightening and highly entertaining look at a world that both shuns nerds and desperately needs more of them. Buy

Next 7 Picks

Illustration of a cholera cell by Marina Tsaplina.

Modern epidemiology, or how we track the health of populations, is founded on the work of John Snow, who in 1854 connected contaminated drinking water in London's Soho district to an outbreak of cholera. Without looking at a single bacterium, Snow managed statistically and cartographically to trace an outbreak back to its source, and in so doing set the groundwork for a shift within the scientific community from the concept of "miasma" to modern-day germ theory. Now a new generation of scientists is using Snow's founding principles, with the help of satellites and computers, not only to understand why diseases strike but also to predict when they will.

In a study published in a recent issue of PNAS, Rita Colwell, of the University of Maryland's Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, and her team unveiled a predictive model of cholera. It signals a change in the way disease prevention is understood, shifting from a transmission-based model, in which it is necessary to observe the disease in order to stop future cases, to a model that assumes disease emergence is reliant on predictable variables in the environment.

Flu-gle
ScienceBloggers discuss the implications of Google Flu Trends.

Unlike Snow, whose cholera investigation was based largely on proximity data, Colwell bases her work on the known biology of cholera and its hosts. The disease's most common host is the copepod species of zooplankton, and so conditions linked to copepod multiplication, most notably the relative presence of chlorophyll in the water, are also favorable to cholera outbreaks. Today cholera is common to the developing world, where citizens utilize untreated water for a variety of purposes, including for drinking. Using remote sensing, or networks of satellite data to determine environmental and geographic factors, the team identified a number of environmental factors to predict likely cholera outbreaks in the developing world.

The predictive capacity of Colwell's model over time was striking, and its power is further reinforced by a painstakingly controlled three-year study in which her team showed that filtering local water with the cloth of a sari drastically reduced cholera incidence. Even more impressive, those who continued to filter their water have begun to demonstrate a protective effect &mdash other people who live near them get cholera less often. The work has combined the predictive and the prescriptive: It demonstrates not only how to predict an outbreak but also how to use that information to develop interventions. "It presents a way of guiding the effective and efficient use of limited resources in these areas," says Colwell. "You can distribute filters, or make public postings letting people know that incidence could go up."

• Scientists Warn Large Earth Collider May Destroy Earth
  The Onion points out the need for even larger scale science experiments to finally get the job done and really destroy the planet.
• Richard Dawkins and Derren Brown talk about "psychics"
  Forever on his quest to break the hearts of children and worshippers of magic worldwide, Richard Dawkins explains the science behind so-called psychics.
• Things that go bump in the night
  You might think you wouldn't mind a case of "sexsomnia" until your partner describes your loving touches as if "the skin is being ripped away from her body".
• Skeletal Remains
  Surely any number of kids were lulled into science worship with their first trip to a Natural History Museum and that first tremulous sighting of a T. Rex skeleton, but as this article points out, these bones are meant for more than child's play. (via 3QuarksDaily)
• Defeating Bedlam
  This week Olivia Judson, instead of tackling the complexities of scientific theory, attempts to reign in the entropic disarray of scientific information on the web by offering helpful organizational advice.

Got something for Seed's Daily Zeitgeist? Email the Zeitgeister.

Adnan Oktar (aka Harun Yahya), left, with the author, right, and a translator. Image courtesy of the author.

On the Blogs
ScienceBlogger PZ Myers recently commented on the apparent compromising of a news site that published an unfavorable article on Harun Yahya.

Not In Kansas Anymore
If you think the creationists are bad in the US, check out Turkey.

Having written about American creationism in the past, I received an email several months ago inviting me to interview Harun Yahya in Istanbul. Harun Yahya is a pen name for Adnan Oktar, the leader of a small but well-financed religious community that's based there. After years of refusing to grant interviews, Oktar has begun welcoming Western journalists to meet with him. The BBC, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and many others have taken him up on his offer. In mid-October, I made the journey.

To many scientists, Oktar and his books are a running joke. His 17-inch tall, 850-page book called The Atlas of Creation, which began appearing in mailboxes of scientists across Europe and the United States two years ago, aims to debunk Darwinian evolution with brilliant color, sensational photo-collages, and Qur'anic exegesis. It presents hundreds of fossils, pictured alongside modern flora and fauna, as evidence that all species were created separately by God millions of years ago and have undergone no modification at all. The Atlas goes on to blame Darwinist theories for a whole roster of worldly ills, including fascism, terrorism, and even the Columbine shooting.

Adnan Oktar pairs out-of-context quotes with Photoshopped images to support many of his arguments against evolution. (Click to see entire page.) Image from The Atlas of Creation courtesy of harunyahya.com.

The Atlas's claims about genetics, zoology, and paleontology are full of error. Like many creationists, Yahya mistakes ongoing debates about the mechanics of evolution as evidence that the theory as a whole is in crisis. He grossly exaggerates the age of fossils of modern animals, labeling a snow leopard skull as 80 million years old, while the oldest remains known to scientists are far more recent. One blogger even discovered that some of the creatures pictured in the Atlas are photos of realistic fishing lures, with their hooks still visible. Yahya has arranged to have RichardDawkins.net banned in Turkey — along with dozens of other sites — for publishing this fact.

The night of the interview, a man named Emre Calikoglu picked me up at my hotel near the Hagia Sophia. Calikogulu manages international distribution for Harun Yahya media, and he is part of Oktar's inner circle of about 350 — many of whom are among Turkey's wealthy elite — who refer to each other as, simply, "friends" or "brothers." When he arrived driving a new Volkswagen sedan, Calikoglu was talking on an iPhone as ambient electronic music played quietly on the stereo. We drove through the city and over the enormous suspension bridge that spans the Bosphorus to Istanbul's Asian side. Our destination was an elegant house behind a gate on a quiet street, owned by another Oktar "friend."

When we arrived, lights and cameras were already set up to record the interview for the Harun Yahya websites. I was asked to take off my shoes at the doorstep. Oktar, who arrived a few minutes after us, was the only one in the room wearing shoes. They were black leather, worn with black slacks and a blazer over a black Versace t-shirt. His presence was impressive, and he didn't linger for small talk, either before or after the interview.

A collage connecting Darwin to Hitler from Harun Yahya's The Atlas of Creation, top; Adnan Oktar, bottom. Images courtesy harunyahya.com

Harun Yahya's books are just as polished as he is. They often come printed in full color on glossy paper, full of photographs and graphics. In one of his several books condemning violence, Only Love Can Defeat Terrorism, an ornamental gold border frames every page. The text is punctuated by Photoshop collages, including one of children frolicking in a grassy garden amidst Roman temples and another of dolphins jumping from a pool in the floor of a baroque palace.

Oktar oversees the design of all Harun Yahya products, assisted by 20 to 30 aides. According to Calikoglu, it is Oktar himself who insists on the extravagant and expensive look. "In the initial stages we were unable to understand the necessity of it," Calikoglu told me, but they were convinced when the approach caught on. Global Publishing, which produces and distributes Harun Yahya media, claims to churn out 18 million books per year, produces documentary films based on them, and maintains dozens of websites. According to Hakan Korkmaz, director of sales in Turkey for Global Publishing, over a million Harun Yahya books have been sold in the country in the last four years. And Korkmaz's office, located in a building on the northwest end of Istanbul, houses a call center with a staff of 30.

In Islamic bookstores from Istanbul to Chicago, I've seen rows of Harun Yahya books prominently on display. Booksellers tell me that they are popular among customers, and it's no wonder. Yaha books are relatively inexpensive — perhaps sold below production cost — and their colorful, textured covers outshine all the other pious volumes on the shelves. At a store in Turkey, a boy who had just bought some Yahya books told me that he didn't read them himself, but he planned to resell them for a higher price.