Don't Mess with Texas

How many spiders live in a spider web big enough to "encase several mature oak trees and thick enough in places to block out the sun"?

Lots.

Call the UFOlogists!

Some Italian geoscientists think they have discovered the spot in Siberia where the so-called "Tunguska event" occurred - the 1908 explosion, probably caused by a meteorite, which devastated a huge area and lit up the sky as far away as London. It's also a favorite incident for UFO conspiracy theorists.

Anyhow, the scientists have discovered a lake that might actually be an asteroid impact crater:

A University of Bologna team says a lake near the epicentre of the blast may be occupying a crater hollowed out by a chunk of rock that hit the ground. Lake Cheko - though shallow - fits the proportions of a small, bowl-shaped impact crater, say the Italy-based scientists. Their investigation of the lake bottom's geology reveals a funnel-like shape not seen in neighbouring lakes.

But don't close the books on the conspiracies:

A geophysics survey of the lake bed has turned up an unusual feature about 10m down which could either be compacted lake sediments or a buried fragment of space rock.

Or the mothership!

What About the Mint-Wafer Walls?

Best blog line of the day:

After all, when the construction crew has built a foundation of tissue paper in a pool of quicksand, by the time you get around to criticizing the roofers for using graham crackers for shingles, you're about out of outrage.

This comes from firebrand biology blogger PZ Myers, over at Pharyngula, where he's eviscerating another anti-evolution book.

Warm, Warmer, Warmest

From the New Scientist, a special report on global warming.

A firm and ever-growing body of evidence points to a clear picture: the world is warming, this warming is due to human activity increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and if emissions continue unabated the warming will too, with increasingly serious consequences.

Yes, there are still big uncertainties in some predictions, but these swing both ways. For example, the response of clouds could slow the warming or speed it up. With so much at stake, it is right that climate science is subjected to the most intense scrutiny. What does not help is for the real issues to be muddied by discredited arguments or wild theories.

So for those who are not sure what to believe, here is our round-up of the 26 most common climate myths and misconceptions.

I've only read a few of the articles, but what I've seen has been very, very good, like this riposte to the "It's too cold where I live - warming will be great" line that gets trotted out here in Minnesota:

As global temperature climbs to 3°C above present levels - which is likely to happen before the end of this century if greenhouse emissions continue unabated - the consequences will become increasingly severe. More than a third of species face extinction. Agricultural yields will start to fall in many parts of the world. Millions of people will be at risk from coastal flooding. Heatwaves, droughts, floods and wildfires will take an ever greater toll.

There are two factors should borne in mind when thinking about the impacts. Firstly, even countries that escape the worst of the direct effects will feel the economic effects of what happens elsewhere. There may be social and political problems too, as migration increases and water becomes increasingly scarce in some regions.

Secondly, there are time lags between rises in CO2 and their impact on climate... The IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] predicts a minimum temperature rise by 2100 of 1.8°C... - more than enough to inundate many major cities around the world, including New York, London and Sydney.

So, yeah, while we might be able to start making (more) mediocre wine here, that's a bad tradeoff for seeing New York go under water, not to mention the low-lying cities in Asia that house millions of our fellow humans.

Eleventy Reasons to Abhor Religion

As we come up on Memorial Day, that ancient religious festival, it's worth reading PZ Myers' eleven reasons to hate religion, such as

I. Literalism. We in the evo-creo wars know this one well. If the Bible says it, it must be literally true. There was a world-wide flood, there was an ark, the earth is 6000 years old, etc. One antiquated hodge-podge of a book becomes the arbiter of truth, with the added benefit that its clutter and inconsistency and diversity of authorship means you can justify anything with the right random quote.

II. Authoritarianism. Once you've abandoned individual thought to the dictates of a book, you're accustomed to surrendering intellectual autonomy…so you pass responsibility on to others. Religious history is a parade of petty tyrannies, where religious authorities, from your local parish priest to the pope and Pat Robertson, get to tell you what is right. Unfortunately, their credentials as authorities on righteousness always seem to rest on assertions about the words of prior religious authorities.

Read them all! The comments are good too!

Slow & Steady Wins the Feast

The 111th Boston Marathon was run on Monday, in rather dismal conditions. A few days before, anthropologist Daniel Lieberman delivered an interesting talk on why it is that humans, alone among terrestrial animals, and certainly alone among mammals, can and do run so far. His talk is summarized at Physorg.com. A few snippets:

Lieberman said the appearance about 2 million years ago of physical adaptations that have no impact on walking but that make humans better endurance runners provide evidence that early scavengers became running hunters.

Specifically, we developed long, springy tendons in our legs and feet that function like large elastics, storing energy and releasing it with each running stride, reducing the amount of energy it takes to take another step. There are also several adaptations to help keep our bodies stable as we run, such as the way we counterbalance each step with an arm swing, our large butt muscles that hold our upper bodies upright, and an elastic ligament in our neck to help keep our head steady...

Humans, he said, have several adaptations that help us dump the enormous amounts of heat generated by running. These adaptations include our hairlessness, our ability to sweat, and the fact that we breathe through our mouths when we run, which not only allows us to take bigger breaths, but also helps dump heat. "We can run in conditions that no other animal can run in," Lieberman said.

All together, Lieberman said, these adaptations allowed us to relentlessly pursue game in the hottest part of the day when most animals rest. Lieberman said humans likely practiced persistence hunting, chasing a game animal during the heat of the day, making it run faster than it could maintain, tracking and flushing it if it tried to rest, and repeating the process until the animal literally overheated and collapsed.

And then, hey, no need to cook Mr. Antelope! He's half cooked already.

The talk on the whole a fascinating look at how anthropology can help make sense not only of human origins and capacities, but some of the wacky shit we do - like run 26.2 miles in a rainstorm.

(The summary also quotes a silly thing Lieberman said: "Humans are terrible athletes in terms of power and speed, but we’re phenomenal at slow and steady. We’re the tortoises of the animal kingdom." I guess that's why he's an anthropologist and not a biologist.)

Prehist-Roary

From the National Science Foundation:
Scientists have confirmed the existence of protein in soft tissue recovered from the fossil bones of a 68 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex (T. rex) and a half-million-year-old mastodon.
The article prattles on about this being an aid to studying evolution and to helping understand diseases, but all I can think is that we're just two giant test tubes and a smart but eeeeevil scientist away from one of a great steel-cage match. "Sunday, Sunday, Sunday! Out of the mists of time come two beasts in a fight to the death!"

Cellular Memory

Forget flash drives; we're on the verge of hemoglobin drives:

Researchers have created an ultra-dense memory device the size of a white blood cell that has enough capacity to store the Declaration of Independence and still have space left over. The accomplishment represents an important step toward the creation of molecular computers that are much smaller and could be more powerful than today's silicon-based computers.

Imagine being able to send a few terabytes of data swimming in your veins. What a great way to back up iTunes. But does this mean our kids' teachers are going to have to worry about blood doping as a means to cheat on the SAT, not the football field?

Sweet

According to the guys over at the Freakonomics blog, expensive oil (and gas) may make Americans skinnier not because it'll encourage more walking and cycling, but because it'll increase the cost of corn as ethanol makers buy it up. Food manufacturers will stop buying expensive corn and corn products like high-fructose corn syrup and start using other, usually better-for-you sweeteners like cane sugar. I dunno if it will happen, but I like the chain of events.

Of course, then the ethanol craze will cause its own environmental disasters.

Sojourning on Mars

Can robots feel lonely? A few years ago, the Sojourner robot roved around Mars for a few months, after being released by the Opportunity lander. From the New Scientist:

Unlike Spirit and Opportunity, Sojourner could not directly communicate with Earth and had to rely on the lander to transmit messages about its health and travels. So when contact with the lander, which was designed to last one month, was lost after three months, ground controllers were not sure what became of Sojourner.

Now, it seems the rover kept moving, apparently trying to reach its companion. "The rover was programmed so that if it didn't get commands from the lander, it would assume it somehow got out of radio contact behind a ridge or rock," [NASA geologist Tim] Parker told New Scientist. "So it would drive to the lander as best it could and keep trying to re-establish contact", circling it as it got close, he says.

When it was last seen, the rover was 13 metres away from the Pathfinder lander. Now, it appears to be about 6 metres away, according to the new MRO images. "I think the simplest explanation is it started to drive back, got about half way, and stopped for whatever reason – it may have thought it got there," says Parker. "The other possibility is it drove around and around for who knows how long and simply failed at that location."

Even on a day when I find out that my mom had to put one of my childhood pets to sleep, this story of a lonely robot on Mars strikes me as ineffably sad.

Gimme a "T"

Apart from weekends in which Brett Favre's Packers embarrass the Bears *cough Rex Grossman cough* in Chicago , the first weekend of the playoffs is my favorite of the year. All those wildcard games are good for the soul.

With four matchups in the offing, I was impressed by this post at the Cognitive Daily about how testosterone levels may account for virtually all of the home-field advantage typically enjoyed by sports teams. The study on which the post is based uses English Premier League players, whom we know are all crumpet-eating pansies, but still - when playing at home against a rival, the players were absolutely juiced on testosterone.