Credit: Associated Press Photo

Being a science journalist does occasionally have its perks, like being allowed on site for a NASA shuttle launch.

With five minutes and counting to liftoff on Saturday evening, I left the news office at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) and hurried down to the grassy lawn next to NASA’s famous countdown clock to watch Discovery blast into space. According to a NASA VIP guest list, watching somewhere on KSC with me that night was the Deputy Prime Minister of Sweden, Maud Olofsson—no doubt in attendance to witness the ascent of his fellow countryman and astronaut, Christer Fuglesang—and Joey Fatone, a former member of the band N Sync.

It was my first time seeing a NASA shuttle launch, and even though I had watched video of past night launches so I’d have an idea of what I was in store for, it didn’t quite prepare me for what I actually saw.

Discovery’s launch dazzled. One minute the evening was dark, and Discovery was still on its pad, illuminated by bright ground lights like the star of some Broadway show. The next moment, flames were erupting from the shuttle’s twin boosters and Discovery was wreathed in thick, curling smoke. A heartbeat later, I heard the dull roar of the shuttle’s engines and then Discovery was off the ground. The shuttle shot spaceward, arcing like a flare and leaving behind it a cloudy trail that darkened and expanded before dissolving away. Discovery floated higher and higher until it was just a pinprick in the night sky, and then it was gone.

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Later that night, NASA held a news conference to discuss Discovery’s successful liftoff. NASA chief Michael Griffin was one of the panelists. Earlier in the week, an article in the Times questioned the purpose of the International Space Station (ISS), where Discovery was heading:

“Once again, the shuttle Discovery is about to blast into space. And once again, it will dock with the International Space Station, and astronauts will continue the process of building the half-completed orbiting laboratory in a mission full of daunting challenges.

“But the majesty of the first nighttime liftoff in more than four years, now scheduled for Thursday just before 9:36 p.m. Eastern time, will not dispel a question that has long been the subject of sharp debate among experts: What is the space station for?”

During the postlaunch news conference, a reporter asked Griffin to describe how the ISS fit into the big picture of space exploration. His reply to the reporter could easily have been interpreted as an answer to the Times article as well.

“The questions about the space station were very appropriate. I asked many of them myself early in my career when the United States lacked plans for going beyond the space station,” he began.

Paraphrasing a quote by Navy Admiral Harold Gehman Jr., the chief of the NASA Accident Investigation team that investigated the Columbia tragedy in 2003, Griffin said: “‘For the foreseeable future, space travel is going to be expensive, difficult and dangerous, but for the United States it is strategic. It is part of what makes us a great nation.’ I believe that.”

The ISS is not a goal in itself, he continued, but a stepping stone in the United State’s larger ambition of returning to the Moon, and going beyond, to Mars.

“On the space station, we will learn how to live and work and space. We will learn how to make hardware survive and function for three years, that we’re going to need if we’re going to go to Mars. The space station is on the footpath toward becoming a spacefaring nation,” he said. “Similarly, if we’re going to go to Mars, if we’re going to go beyond, we have to learn how to live on other planetary surfaces and use what we find there, to bend to nature to our will, just like the pilgrims did when they came to what is now New England.

“The pilgrims, if you might recall, half of them starved the first winter. There was a reason their celebration was called ‘Thanksgiving.’ They were only a few thousand miles from home, and they were people who farmed for a living, and yet when they came to a new arena, they didn’t know how to farm, they didn’t know what food would grow and what food wouldn’t, they didn’t know what food they could eat.

“We’re going to have to learn how to live and survive in other places. The Moon is a stepping stone on that path. When you bring it all together, the space station, the moon, looking forward past that to Mars, these are the steps that we have to take if we want to become a spacefaring nation. I think that we should want that. I want that. I want that for the American people, for my grandchildren, for my great grandchildren.

“NASA is the arm of the federal government that takes on this task. We do it as well as we can,” he said. Bringing it back to the night’s launch, Griffin added “Sometimes we stumble. Today we didn’t stumble.”

I wrote about a paper appearing in Science today that compares public acceptance of evolution in the United States versus other countries. As part of the study, the researchers reviewed surveys in which adults were given 10 True or False statements (listed below) to test their understanding of basic concepts from genetics.

Each correct answer was worth one point. The median score for American adults was 4. How do you fare? (**answers at bottom of post)

1. Ordinary tomatoes do not have genes, whereas genetically modified tomatoes do.

2. Genetically modified animals are always larger than ordinary animals.

3. Cloning is a form of reproduction in which offspring result from the union of sperm and egg.

4. Today it is not possible to transfer genes from humans to animals.

5. If someone eats a genetically modified fruit, there is a risk that a person’s genes might be modified too.

6. All plants and animals have DNA.

7. Today it is not possible to transfer genes from animals to plants.

8. Humans have somewhat less than half of the DNA in common with chimpanzees.

9.. It is possible to extract stem cells from human embryos without destroying the embryos.

10. All humans share exactly the same DNA.

**Use your mouse to highlight below to see the answers:

All statements are false except number 6.

It looks like the mysterious Morgellons Disease is finally being taken seriously by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Just to recap, sufferers of Morgellons report sensations of insect-like object scuttling beneath their skins and fibrous filaments oozing out of open wounds. A lot of doctors dismissed it as being all in the patients’ heads, however, and said it was most likely a common psychological disorder called “delusions of parasitosis.” But the reports kept coming in, and the Morgellons Research Foundation, a non-profit organization that raises public awareness about the disease, say they have recorded over 2,000 cases.

Now, after a year or more of pressure from alleged sufferers of the disease, the CDC is launching a study of Morgellons in South Texas, where more than 100 people are reported to have it. The CDC study will aim to determine whether Morgellons is a real disease or just a shared psychosis.

“Either way, it’s a public health threat,” CDC spokesman Dan Rutz told the Charlotte Observer.

Two weeks after British doctors warned that keeping cellphones and other metallic objects in your pocket can increase the amount of internal damage incurred if lightning strikes, a Colorado teenager was burned after he was struck by lightning while listening to music on his iPod.

Seventeen-year-old Jason Bunch was mowing his lawn and listening to Metallica when he was struck down by a bolt of lightning. Bunch managed to somehow get back inside the house, take off his shoes and burned T-shirt, and get into bed, where he awoke later to discover that he had vomited and that his ears were bleeding.

According to the Denver Post, the first thing that Bunch did upon waking was call his mom.

“Mom, I think I got hit by lightening,” he said.

Later, at the hospital, the teen called a friend to say that he wouldn’t be able to make it to bowling after all, and also a girl that he was to have a date with.

“I did not stand you up. I was struck by lightening,” he told her.

The insides of Bunch’s ears were burned and he lost some hearing, and he had burn marks in the outline of his earphones from his ears, down his right side to his hips where his iPod was.

British doctors recently warned in the British Medical Journal that carrying around metallic objects could increase the amount of internal damage sustained during lightning strikes by redirecting the normal flow of current over the body inward.

However, many lightning experts were skeptical, and one told LiveScience that the mechanism the doctors described didn’t seem plausible.

Bunch didn’t suffer serious internal damage, but he and his mother think the iPod acted as a lightning antenna. Gregory Stewart of the Lightning Reference Center told the Denver Post that it was probably just a freak accident though.

“There is no scientific evidence to show that lightning is ‘attracted’ to items like an iPod,” Stewart said. “However, if someone wearing earbuds is struck, current may travel along the wires into the ears.”

A letter that Charles Darwin wrote to a clergyman patiently explaining how his theory of natural selection works will be sold next month in a Sotheby’s auction.

The letter is dated October 15, 1860, a year after “The Origin of Species” was published, and was written in response to a letter by Rev William Denton, a Victorian clergyman who expressed doubts about Darwin’s theory.

“I am very far from being surprised at anyone not accepting my conclusions on the origin of species,” Darwin wrote.

Darwin explains in six pages how evolution by natural selection works and gaves exampes of natural variation and artificial selection in horses, pigs and cats.

“Those naturalists who go a little way with me, the more they reflect on the subject the further they go,” he adds.

“It’s a very charming letter,” Southeby manuscript specialist Gabriel Heaton told National News. “He doesn’t talk down to Denton, who clearly knows far, far less about the subject matter than he does - it seems that William Denton has probably misread the book but Darwin is very, very generous to him.

“The fact he wrote a long and detailed letter in itself is very generous. They probably didn’t know each other.”

According to New Scientist, the letter is expected to fetch between £20,000 to £30,000, or about U.S. $36,500 to $55,000.

I had a story on SPACE.com yesterday about a very cool discovery: a one-thousand year old petroglyph, or rock carving, that was found in Arizona and which might depict the supernova of 1006, or SN 1006. The carving is presumed to have been made an ancient group of Native Americans called the Hohokam.

The researcher who made the discovery argues that symbols of a scorpion and stars on the petroglyph match the relative positions of SN 1006 to the constellation Scorpius when the star first exploded.

Well, after I wrote the article, a lot of thoughtful readers wrote in with a very good question: Scorpius is an ancient Greek invention, so what are the chances that Native Americans living more than an ocean away looked up at the night sky and also saw in the stars the outline of a scorpion?

As one reader succinctly put it:

“There are three possible solutions to this: Either the Hohokam people had the same name for the constellation as the Greeks, there was significant contact between North America and Europe prior to this date, or the petroglyph is a fake and does not date to that period.”

So which is it? Is the petroglyph an example of a cosmic coincidence, a hoax or startling evidence that the ancient Greeks and Native Americans had contact with each other?

I passed the question along to John Barentine, the astronomer who made the discovery. Barentine’s reply below:

“Your readers are right, this announcement very well should be greeted with some skepticism. The identification of what I refer to as a scorpion petroglyph with the classical constellation of Scorpius is, naturally, tentative. I make my case for these glyphs representing the 1006 supernova event largely on the arrangement of the scorpion and the bright star being very similar to the arrangement of these figures in the sky on the night the supernova appeared. Historical research (e.g. that of Richard Hinckley Allen in “Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning”, Dover Publications, 1963) suggests that in virtually every world culture where scorpions are indigenous creatures, the stars of the modern constellation Scorpius were identified with scorpions and their mythology. In fact, I believe Allen refers to this constellation and Taurus as among the “oldest” constellations in terms of their appearance in history.

“That said, of course there is the probability that the appearance of these symbols in proximity to one another is coincidental. Given that the people who created the drawing left no written record of their history, it’s impossible to verify this claim independently. However, we are pursuing the avenue of attempting to date the petroglyph via chemical means. A date roughly corresponding to the early 11th century would, I think, support my claim. Also, there is as much circumstantial evidence for my claim as there is for the famous Crab Nebula pictograph in Chaco Canyon, NM, with which many archaeologists do not agree. So my announcement today is a suggestion, first and foremost, worth further investigation.”

April isn’t turning out to be a very good month for creationists. No less than three big science stories have appeared in the last two weeks that both strengthen the case for evolution and discredit long held creationists’ arguments.

Here they are in order:

Tiktaalik:

Scientists announced in the journal Nature last week the discovery of fossils from a curious 375-million-year-old creature displaying an odd combination of both fish and land animals traits.

Dubbed “Tiktaalik,” the creature was immediately hailed by scientists as being a major find, one as critical for understanding how fish became four-limbed animals as Archaeopteryx was to understanding the transition of dinosaurs to birds.

The very next day, Robert Crowther, director of communications at the Discovery Institute, posted a statement on the institute website in a rushed attempt at damage control. Crowther wrote:

“These fish are not necessarily intermediates…Tiktaalik roseae is one of a set of lobe-finned fishes that include very curious mosaics…They are not intermediates in the sense that have half-fish/half-tetrapod characteristics. Rather, they have a combination of tetrapod-like features and fish-like features. Paleontologists refer to such organisms as mosaics rather than intermediates.”

In his blog Pharyngula, PZ Meyers, a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, points out why this argument is flawed:

“But that kind of mosaicism is what you’d expect, and what we should see in a transitional form! Every element of the organism shouldn’t be changing in a slow and steady lockstep, but instead should shift haltingly…Sometimes major shifts in the environment might oppose some kind of concordance, and plasticity means a change in one structure might impose related changes in associated structures, but it’s silly to assume everything morphs uniformly from one generation to the next.”

The rest of Meyer’s post deserves reading as well, as he points out other examples of Crowther’s sloppy thinking

Not so Irreducibly Complex:

In Science last week, Joseph Thornton of the University of Oregon and colleagues published results from a computer simulation demonstrating for the first time how natural selection can create a complex molecular system out of individual parts—something that ID proponent Michael Behe said couldn’t be done.

Behe believes that such systems are “irreducibly complex,” which is just a fancy new name for the very old argument that some systems in nature are made up of parts that are too well matched and work together too perfectly to be the work of evolution; instead, the argument goes, such systems must be the products of an intelligent designer who sounds suspiciously like God.

Thornton’s experiment shows this argument is rubbish. His team’s experiment showed how a protein receptor that is activated by the hormone aldosterone could develop long before the hormone actually evolved.

The model showed an ancestral receptor developing which responded to a hormone which was more ancient than, but whose structure was similar to, aldosterone. Therefore, when aldosterone did evolve, a receptor that was “preadapted” for it already existed.

“The stepwise process we were able to reconstruct is entirely consistent with Darwinian evolution,” Thorton said. “So-called irreducible complexity was just a reflection of a limited ability to see how evolution works.”

Of course, when queried by the New York Times, Behe dismissed the results, calling them “piddling.”

Behe’s reason? That a two-component molecular system was too simple to be considered irreducibly complex. To fit his definition, such a system would need to have “at least three pieces and perform some specific function.”

But if we look at Behe’s definition of irreducible complexity as described in his book, “Darwin’s Black Box,” it reads only:

“By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.”

Nowhere does it specify the need for a three-part system, nor is there any explanation of why a two-part system wouldn’t work.

The Discovery Institute also issued a press release commenting on Thornton’s work and later more press releases defending irreducible complexity. Instead of a lengthy analysis, I refer any interested readers to Carl Zimmer’s post on the Loom, where he dissects their arguments in detail.

Our Ancient Ancestry:

The last study I’ll mention came out today and it’s the one I find the most interesting.

In this week’s issue of Nature, scientists report the discovery of a new cache of fossils belonging to Australopithecus anamensis, the earliest known member of Australopithecus, the genus that gave rise to Homo and our own species.

Au. Anamensis was known before from fossils unearthed in Kenya in 1994, but the remarkable thing about this latest discovery is that it was found in the Middle Awash valley of Ethiopia.

Middle Awash is a place to refute and infuriate any creationists. In layers of stacked sediments measuring more than a mile thick, scientists have in recent years uncovered the remains of nearly 250 hominid specimens, representing eight different species from all three of the major genera in human evolution since our split with the ancestor we shared with chimpanzees 6 to 8 million years ago.

The unique positioning of the new Au. anamensis bones–they’re sandwiched between fossils of the older Ar. ramidus and the geologically younger Au. afarensis–allowed scientists to conclude for the first time that this species first appeared about 4.2 million years ago.

Importantly, the anatomical features of the Au. anamensis fossils are intermediate between those of the other two species, which is what would be expected if the three species were evolutionarily linked. The new bones also display the trend towards bigger teeth and thicker enamel that is characteristic of early hominid evolution.

So far, the Discovery Institute hasn’t issued a press release on this one yet, but it’s still early.

Anyone under the impression that it’s just the United States that is irrational about evolution need only to read this article to be convinced otherwise.

From the second graph:

“McGill University [in Canada] says the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council made a ‘factual error’ when it denied Professor Brian Alters a $40,000 grant on the grounds that he’d failed to provide the panel with ample evidence that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is correct.”

and further down…

“In its decision to deny the grant, the SSHRC panel said Alters had not supplied ‘adequate justification for the assumption in the proposal that the theory of evolution, and not intelligent design theory, was correct.’”

The professor in question was one of six key witnesses in the Dover trial called in to testify against intelligent design last year.

Here’s the last graph:

“The members of the SSHRC committee that rejected Alters’s application were: chairperson Susan Bennett of the department of English literature at the University of Calgary; Lawrence Felt of the department of sociology at Memorial University of Newfoundland; University of Ottawa history professor Ruby Heap; Gilbert Larochelle from the department of human sciences at the Universite du Quebec a Chicoutimi; and Ruth Rose from the department of economics at the Universite du Quebec a Montreal.”

Thanks for this, Heather.

In a letter to his friend and confidant Asa Gray in 1860, Charles Darwin famously wrote:

“I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.”

The creature Darwin was referring to is a parasitic wasp that paralyzes its prey (a living caterpillar or other insect) and then lays its eggs inside their stilled bodies so hatching larvae will have fresh meat to feed on.

For Darwin, Nature’s rampant cruelty and blindness to suffering were strikes against the possibility of creation by a God of infinite love. And he was right in thinking so, says Robert Newman, an intelligent design proponent whose book, “What’s Darwin got to do with it?,” is promoted on the website of the Discovery Institute, the Christian think-tank that masterminds the ID movement.

Instead, Newman thinks there is another explanation: angels, specifically “bad angels,” aka demons.

In an article entitled “Rumors of Angels: Using ID to Detect Malevolent Spiritual Agents,” published on the website of the Interdisciplinary Biblical Research Institute and uncovered by Nick Matzke over at The Panda’s Thumb, Newman writes:

“Between the actions of an infinite, eternal, omniscient being and those of us lowly humans, could we find evidence for the actions of intermediate beings such as angels? The works of good angels might easily be mistaken for those of God, except that the quality might not be up to the divine standard. And design that appears to us to be malevolent might be the work of sinful beings above our level–bad angels, demons, or Satan.”

Of course, humans might be mistaken in considering Ichneumonidae to be malevolent, Newman writes, because “After all, many of the insects that are killed by the Ichneumonidae are pests to human farmers.”

Newman believes that if scientists weren’t so quick to dismiss the existence of angels, then they would have explanations for otherwise puzzling (at least from a biblical viewpoint) natural phenomena. In addition to explaining the behavior of parasitic wasp, bad angels might also be responsible for diseases such as AIDS and Ebola.

If scientists were to look closely, they might also find examples of the handiwork of “good angels.”

One such example, Newman says, is the famous panda’s thumb. In addition to their five fingers, pandas have an opposable “thumb” that they use to grasp and manipulate bamboo. But unlike the specialized thumbs of humans, a panda’s thumb is made by enlarging a few bones that form the wrist in other species and rerouting some muscles.

This, as the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould pointed out, is not good design, but it would be expected of evolution by natural selection, a process that can’t create from scratch but that must work with the resources that are available.

But again, Newman has an alternative explanation. Assuming that the panda’s thumb is bad design (something that he isn’t fully convinced of), “may it not be the work of genetic manipulation by angels, who are constrained by history to work with what is available in the ancestral panda lineage, unlike an omniscient, omnipotent God making a new design from scratch?”

Newman’s article is worth a read if you’re curious to see how ID proponents twist facts to justify their erroneous conclusions. In the section about AIDS, for example, Newman gives a fairly accurate description of how the HIV virus infects its host cell (by converting its RNA to DNA and then inserting into the genome of its human host cell) and spreads and points out how AIDS has killed tens of millions of people, but his only link to angels (or demons in this case) is this line: “Fiendishly clever, don’t you think?” He then does a similar thing with Ebola.

The article would have made a good ID parody or April Fools joke, which is what I initially thought it was, except that Newman is serious.

The article is long (almost 5,000 words), but once I started reading, I couldn’t stop. It’s like watching a conman in action or reading the hallucinogenic ravings of a schizophrenic. You’re disgusted and repelled, but fascinated at the same time.

I just received a note that Randy Olson’s film, Flock of Dodos, will make its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival here in New York. For people who aren’t familiar with this film, it’s a humorous documentary that skewers both intelligent design proponents and scientists who support evolution alike—the first group for pedaling creationism as science and the latter for not doing enough to make evolution accessible to the public and for not standing up to the ID movement when it was just getting started. I interviewed Olson a few weeks back and got his thoughts on the whole thing.

From the trailer and the positive reviews it’s garnered so far, it looks to be a great film. For anyone in the city who’s interested, here’s the screening schedule:

Sunday, April 30, AV7-3, 8:30 pm—AMC Village VII, 66 Third Ave (at 11th St)
Monday, May 1, A34-09, 3:00 pm—AMC 34th St, 312 W. 34th St
Friday, May 5, A68-1, 6:00 pm—AMC 68th St, 1998 Broadway (at 68th St)
Sunday, May 7, AV7-1, 4:00 pm—AMC Village VII, 66 Third Ave (at 11th St)