After this, Mars will get fainter

Outer planets normally move toward the east in front of the backdrop stars of the Zodiac, but sometimes they move west (retrograde). Mars retrograde motion ends on June 30, 2016. It started on April 17. On May 22 – about halfway between those dates – Mars reached opposition, the day upon which Earth flew between Mars and the sun for the first time in about two years, and Mars appeared opposite the sun in our sky.

Photo top of post: Tom Wildoner, at LeisurelyScientist.com

Opposition marks the middle of the best time of year to see an outer planet. The beginning and end of retrograde mark the beginning and end of that best observing period. So the best time to see Mars in this two-year period is ending.

Mars has been bright and red and awesome in our night sky. But, as the days and weeks continue to pass, we’ll see Mars fade in brightness, as Earth flies ahead of it in our smaller, faster orbit around the sun.

By luck, Mars has been in a triangle on our sky’s dome with two other bright objects: the planet Saturn and the red star Antares. Keep your focus on the “fixed” star Antares to note the movements of Mars and Saturn in the months ahead.

If you live in the city, you might notice this triangle of objects in your sky. All 3 are bright and shine in most urban skies.

If you live in a rural location, you can see more. You’ll find the graceful tail of Scorpius, the Scorpion, behind the 2 bright planets, Saturn and Mars, and the bright star Antares. Antares is said to be the Scorpion’s Heart.

If you could see all the solar system planets from the sun, you’d see them all, always, going eastward in front of the backdrop stars. However, as viewed from the moving platform of Earth, planets that lie outside of Earth’s orbit (Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune) appear to go retrograde for a few to several months of the year.

A retrograde takes place whenever the planet Earth in its smaller orbit swings in between the sun and a superior planet – a planet that orbits the sun outside Earth’s orbit. From Earth’s perspective, that planet appears to be drifting in retrograde (backwards) relative to the backdrop stars.

Why does it happen? The planet is still moving toward the east, after all. Retrograde motion is an illusion, much as that you see from a moving car on a highway, passing a slower car. The car being passed appears to be going backwards relative to the more distant landscape. The diagram below uses race cars to illustrate.

A schematic of how retrograde motion works when Earth (T) passes an outer planet (P) as they both orbit the sun (S). The changing viewing angle from Earth makes the projection of the planet against the celestial sphere (A) move backwards (A2-A4) as we pass the slower planet. Image via Wikipedia user Rursus

The video below (no audio) shows Mars’ retrograde motion in front of the background stars for the year 2016, courtesy of Professor Richard Pogge, The Ohio State University, Department of Astronomy. Practiced stargazers will probably recognize the zodiacal constellations Libra and Scorpius.

And here’s one more video. It’s from the beautiful website shadowandsubstance.com, which is created by Larry Koehn. It shows 2016’s oppositions of both Mars and Saturn, in front of the constellations Libra and Scorpius. Notice Mars appearing larger around its May 22 opposition! And notice that, although Larry doesn’t provide a red line tracing Saturn’s retrograde path, Saturn moves retrograde for a time around its June 3, 2016 opposition.

So here we are on June 30, 2016, and Mars is pausing momentarily in front of the stars as seen from our earthly perspective. After today, Mars resumes its eastward course through the constellations of the Zodiac, until Mars’ next retrograde starts on June 26, 2018 and then ends on August 27, 2018. Midway through the 2018 retrograde, Mars will at opposition on July 27, 2018. That 2018 opposition will mark the middle of the best time to see Mars next.

By the way, the Mars’ retrograde in 2018 will be somewhat shorter than the retrograde of 2016 because Mars will come closer to Earth in 2018 than it did in 2016. That means Mars will be brighter in our sky! In fact, the months around July, 2018 will be an even better time to view Mars than these recent months.

And if you saw Mars at its brightest (late May and early June, 2016), you know how awesome that is!

We list the retrograde dates for the superior planets below. Note that the farther the planet is from the sun, the longer the retrograde. In their order going outward from the sun, the superior planets are Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. We include the dwarf planet Pluto for you Pluto lovers!

Retrograde dates for superior planets in 2016:

Mars
Retrograde begins: April 17, 2016
Retrograde ends: June 30, 2016

Jupiter
Retrograde begins: January 8, 2016
Retrograde ends: May 9, 2016

Saturn
Retrograde begins: March 25, 2016
Retrograde ends: August 13, 2016

Uranus
Retrograde begins: July 29, 2016
Retrograde ends: December 29, 2016

Neptune
Retrograde starts: June 13, 2016
Retrograde ends: November 20, 2016

Pluto
Retrograde begins: April 18, 2016
Retrograde ends: September 25, 2016

Mars and Saturn aren’t the only planets in the evening sky. Look westward at nightfall for the dazzling planet Jupiter, the brightest starlike object up each evening, and for the star Regulus, brightest star in the constellation Leo the Lion.

Bottom line: Mars retrograde (westward) movement in front of backdrop stars started on April 17, 2016, and ends on June 30, 2016. What does it mean? Only that the best time in 2 years to observe Mars is now drawing to a close.

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/296826l

Outer planets normally move toward the east in front of the backdrop stars of the Zodiac, but sometimes they move west (retrograde). Mars retrograde motion ends on June 30, 2016. It started on April 17. On May 22 – about halfway between those dates – Mars reached opposition, the day upon which Earth flew between Mars and the sun for the first time in about two years, and Mars appeared opposite the sun in our sky.

Photo top of post: Tom Wildoner, at LeisurelyScientist.com

Opposition marks the middle of the best time of year to see an outer planet. The beginning and end of retrograde mark the beginning and end of that best observing period. So the best time to see Mars in this two-year period is ending.

Mars has been bright and red and awesome in our night sky. But, as the days and weeks continue to pass, we’ll see Mars fade in brightness, as Earth flies ahead of it in our smaller, faster orbit around the sun.

By luck, Mars has been in a triangle on our sky’s dome with two other bright objects: the planet Saturn and the red star Antares. Keep your focus on the “fixed” star Antares to note the movements of Mars and Saturn in the months ahead.

If you live in the city, you might notice this triangle of objects in your sky. All 3 are bright and shine in most urban skies.

If you live in a rural location, you can see more. You’ll find the graceful tail of Scorpius, the Scorpion, behind the 2 bright planets, Saturn and Mars, and the bright star Antares. Antares is said to be the Scorpion’s Heart.

If you could see all the solar system planets from the sun, you’d see them all, always, going eastward in front of the backdrop stars. However, as viewed from the moving platform of Earth, planets that lie outside of Earth’s orbit (Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune) appear to go retrograde for a few to several months of the year.

A retrograde takes place whenever the planet Earth in its smaller orbit swings in between the sun and a superior planet – a planet that orbits the sun outside Earth’s orbit. From Earth’s perspective, that planet appears to be drifting in retrograde (backwards) relative to the backdrop stars.

Why does it happen? The planet is still moving toward the east, after all. Retrograde motion is an illusion, much as that you see from a moving car on a highway, passing a slower car. The car being passed appears to be going backwards relative to the more distant landscape. The diagram below uses race cars to illustrate.

A schematic of how retrograde motion works when Earth (T) passes an outer planet (P) as they both orbit the sun (S). The changing viewing angle from Earth makes the projection of the planet against the celestial sphere (A) move backwards (A2-A4) as we pass the slower planet. Image via Wikipedia user Rursus

The video below (no audio) shows Mars’ retrograde motion in front of the background stars for the year 2016, courtesy of Professor Richard Pogge, The Ohio State University, Department of Astronomy. Practiced stargazers will probably recognize the zodiacal constellations Libra and Scorpius.

And here’s one more video. It’s from the beautiful website shadowandsubstance.com, which is created by Larry Koehn. It shows 2016’s oppositions of both Mars and Saturn, in front of the constellations Libra and Scorpius. Notice Mars appearing larger around its May 22 opposition! And notice that, although Larry doesn’t provide a red line tracing Saturn’s retrograde path, Saturn moves retrograde for a time around its June 3, 2016 opposition.

So here we are on June 30, 2016, and Mars is pausing momentarily in front of the stars as seen from our earthly perspective. After today, Mars resumes its eastward course through the constellations of the Zodiac, until Mars’ next retrograde starts on June 26, 2018 and then ends on August 27, 2018. Midway through the 2018 retrograde, Mars will at opposition on July 27, 2018. That 2018 opposition will mark the middle of the best time to see Mars next.

By the way, the Mars’ retrograde in 2018 will be somewhat shorter than the retrograde of 2016 because Mars will come closer to Earth in 2018 than it did in 2016. That means Mars will be brighter in our sky! In fact, the months around July, 2018 will be an even better time to view Mars than these recent months.

And if you saw Mars at its brightest (late May and early June, 2016), you know how awesome that is!

We list the retrograde dates for the superior planets below. Note that the farther the planet is from the sun, the longer the retrograde. In their order going outward from the sun, the superior planets are Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. We include the dwarf planet Pluto for you Pluto lovers!

Retrograde dates for superior planets in 2016:

Mars
Retrograde begins: April 17, 2016
Retrograde ends: June 30, 2016

Jupiter
Retrograde begins: January 8, 2016
Retrograde ends: May 9, 2016

Saturn
Retrograde begins: March 25, 2016
Retrograde ends: August 13, 2016

Uranus
Retrograde begins: July 29, 2016
Retrograde ends: December 29, 2016

Neptune
Retrograde starts: June 13, 2016
Retrograde ends: November 20, 2016

Pluto
Retrograde begins: April 18, 2016
Retrograde ends: September 25, 2016

Mars and Saturn aren’t the only planets in the evening sky. Look westward at nightfall for the dazzling planet Jupiter, the brightest starlike object up each evening, and for the star Regulus, brightest star in the constellation Leo the Lion.

Bottom line: Mars retrograde (westward) movement in front of backdrop stars started on April 17, 2016, and ends on June 30, 2016. What does it mean? Only that the best time in 2 years to observe Mars is now drawing to a close.

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/296826l

Surprise! Some mantas are homebodies

Lead study author Josh Stewart follows a giant oceanic manta ray – with remoras, aka suckerfish, on its back – at Bahia de Banderas off mainland Pacific Mexico. Image via Scripps Oceanography/ Octavio Aburto/ PBS

The graceful glides and flapping fins of enormous manta rays suggest oceanic journeys, and indeed mantas have long been thought to migrate long distances. Even this summer’s kiddie blockbuster – Finding Dory – features animated manta rays, moving far and fast in a great migration. But new research indicates that manta rays in the Indo-Pacific, at least, don’t wander far from their territories. These findings were published in the August, 2016 issue of the journal Biological Conservation.

Manta rays (Manta birostris) can reach a “wingspan” of 23 feet (7 meters). They can weigh nearly 3,000 pounds (1,350 kg) and have a lifespan of about 40 years. They’re found in the open ocean, particularly near seamounts and offshore islands. Manta rays are filter feeders, much as some whales are; they take in large volumes of sea water to strain out and consume zooplankton, tiny animals found near the ocean surface, for example, tiny crustaceans and free-floating larval forms of larger marine animals.

The Indo-Pacific region. Image via Eric Gaba via Wikimedia commons.

Joshua Stewart, a researcher at the Scripps Gulf of California Marine Program, led the team that studied manta rays at four different locations in the Indo-Pacific. These locations were separated by 373 to 8,078 miles (600 to 13,000 km).

At each location, the team tagged manta rays to follow their movements over a six-month period. Would mantas at one study location appear at the others? It seems the answer is … only sometimes.

Tagging an Oceanic Manta from Josh Stewart on Vimeo.

Stewart and his team discovered that the manta rays were not highly migratory. He said, in a statement:

These animals are showing a remarkable degree of ‘residency behavior’ compared to the migrations we were expecting. While mantas do make the occasional long-distance movement, it appears that the norm is to stay put.

And not just for a single year, or a single generation. The team also collected muscle tissue samples from some mantas at each location, in order to analyze them genetically and for stable isotope ratios. Genetic studies were used to better understand the relationship between mantas at each site. Stable isotope analysis of muscle tissue was used to determine the mantas’ feeding locations, since each regional food chain hold a unique signature of certain elements. Stewart said:

We found that these patterns of ‘residency’ [tending to stay in one location] remain true on multi-year and generational time scales, with both genetic and isotopic separation between populations.

He said the lack of a wanderlust among Indo-Pacific manta rays suggests that any one population of them is highly susceptible to fisheries and other human impacts. On the other hand, he said, local populations are more easily protected.

A giant manta ray at Revillagigedo Archipelago, about 300 miles off Baja California, Mexico. Image credit: Scripps Oceanography/ Octavio Aburto.

Manta rays are in decline across the globe due to overfishing. They’re targeted for their gill plates that are used in traditional Chinese medicine, and are caught in fisheries bycatch. Study co-author Calvin Beale of the Misool Manta Project, said:

The research we’ve conducted has shown that perhaps the most effective management strategies for oceanic manta rays will come from the local and national level.

In Indonesia, for instance, manta rays spend most of their lives in Indonesian waters, and are protected under the laws of that country. Beale said:

If more countries follow suit and protect their local manta populations, the outlook for the species may improve from the current downward trajectory.

In another study of manta rays, Stewart and his team tagged six mantas at the Revillagigedo Archipelago in Mexico. There, they discovered that diving depths of the tagged mantas varied by season, presumably in pursuit of their main prey, plankton. Stewart commented:

This additional study helps explain why the mantas may remain resident, unlike most other large marine animals. Rather than move horizontally over long distances to track specific prey items, it seems that oceanic mantas are quite flexible in their foraging behavior, perhaps allowing them stay put rather than migrate.

Bottom line: New research indicates that manta rays in the Indo-Pacific are not long-distance migrators, as previously thought, but mostly stay close to their home water.

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/295KOQs

Lead study author Josh Stewart follows a giant oceanic manta ray – with remoras, aka suckerfish, on its back – at Bahia de Banderas off mainland Pacific Mexico. Image via Scripps Oceanography/ Octavio Aburto/ PBS

The graceful glides and flapping fins of enormous manta rays suggest oceanic journeys, and indeed mantas have long been thought to migrate long distances. Even this summer’s kiddie blockbuster – Finding Dory – features animated manta rays, moving far and fast in a great migration. But new research indicates that manta rays in the Indo-Pacific, at least, don’t wander far from their territories. These findings were published in the August, 2016 issue of the journal Biological Conservation.

Manta rays (Manta birostris) can reach a “wingspan” of 23 feet (7 meters). They can weigh nearly 3,000 pounds (1,350 kg) and have a lifespan of about 40 years. They’re found in the open ocean, particularly near seamounts and offshore islands. Manta rays are filter feeders, much as some whales are; they take in large volumes of sea water to strain out and consume zooplankton, tiny animals found near the ocean surface, for example, tiny crustaceans and free-floating larval forms of larger marine animals.

The Indo-Pacific region. Image via Eric Gaba via Wikimedia commons.

Joshua Stewart, a researcher at the Scripps Gulf of California Marine Program, led the team that studied manta rays at four different locations in the Indo-Pacific. These locations were separated by 373 to 8,078 miles (600 to 13,000 km).

At each location, the team tagged manta rays to follow their movements over a six-month period. Would mantas at one study location appear at the others? It seems the answer is … only sometimes.

Tagging an Oceanic Manta from Josh Stewart on Vimeo.

Stewart and his team discovered that the manta rays were not highly migratory. He said, in a statement:

These animals are showing a remarkable degree of ‘residency behavior’ compared to the migrations we were expecting. While mantas do make the occasional long-distance movement, it appears that the norm is to stay put.

And not just for a single year, or a single generation. The team also collected muscle tissue samples from some mantas at each location, in order to analyze them genetically and for stable isotope ratios. Genetic studies were used to better understand the relationship between mantas at each site. Stable isotope analysis of muscle tissue was used to determine the mantas’ feeding locations, since each regional food chain hold a unique signature of certain elements. Stewart said:

We found that these patterns of ‘residency’ [tending to stay in one location] remain true on multi-year and generational time scales, with both genetic and isotopic separation between populations.

He said the lack of a wanderlust among Indo-Pacific manta rays suggests that any one population of them is highly susceptible to fisheries and other human impacts. On the other hand, he said, local populations are more easily protected.

A giant manta ray at Revillagigedo Archipelago, about 300 miles off Baja California, Mexico. Image credit: Scripps Oceanography/ Octavio Aburto.

Manta rays are in decline across the globe due to overfishing. They’re targeted for their gill plates that are used in traditional Chinese medicine, and are caught in fisheries bycatch. Study co-author Calvin Beale of the Misool Manta Project, said:

The research we’ve conducted has shown that perhaps the most effective management strategies for oceanic manta rays will come from the local and national level.

In Indonesia, for instance, manta rays spend most of their lives in Indonesian waters, and are protected under the laws of that country. Beale said:

If more countries follow suit and protect their local manta populations, the outlook for the species may improve from the current downward trajectory.

In another study of manta rays, Stewart and his team tagged six mantas at the Revillagigedo Archipelago in Mexico. There, they discovered that diving depths of the tagged mantas varied by season, presumably in pursuit of their main prey, plankton. Stewart commented:

This additional study helps explain why the mantas may remain resident, unlike most other large marine animals. Rather than move horizontally over long distances to track specific prey items, it seems that oceanic mantas are quite flexible in their foraging behavior, perhaps allowing them stay put rather than migrate.

Bottom line: New research indicates that manta rays in the Indo-Pacific are not long-distance migrators, as previously thought, but mostly stay close to their home water.

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/295KOQs

Is there a disease that makes us love cats?

Click here if video does not appear on screen.

Documented human cases of a disease called toxoplasmosis go back as far as ancient Egypt. The condition is caused by a parasite that can only reproduce in the intestines of cats. Today about one-third of the world’s population is infected with toxoplamosis, but most people who have it will never know it.

Emory evolutionary biologist Jaap de Roode, whose research focuses on the co-evolution of parasites and their hosts, worked with animators and writers at TED-ED to create the video lesson, above. Watch it to get a brief overview of what is known about toxoplasmosis, and some of the big questions that remain.

Related:
Monarch butterflies use drugs

from eScienceCommons http://ift.tt/29cUSHe

Click here if video does not appear on screen.

Documented human cases of a disease called toxoplasmosis go back as far as ancient Egypt. The condition is caused by a parasite that can only reproduce in the intestines of cats. Today about one-third of the world’s population is infected with toxoplamosis, but most people who have it will never know it.

Emory evolutionary biologist Jaap de Roode, whose research focuses on the co-evolution of parasites and their hosts, worked with animators and writers at TED-ED to create the video lesson, above. Watch it to get a brief overview of what is known about toxoplasmosis, and some of the big questions that remain.

Related:
Monarch butterflies use drugs

from eScienceCommons http://ift.tt/29cUSHe

Instagram Culture and the Democratization of Pretension [Uncertain Principles]

When I was going through the huge collection of photos I have from the Forum in Rome, I kept running across pictures containing two young Asian women (neither of them Kate). This isn’t because I was stalking them, but because they were everywhere, stopping for long periods in front of virtually every significant ruin and striking exaggerated poses for each other to take photos of. I had to carefully frame a few of my own photos to avoid them, but I did also take a few that deliberately included their posing, because it was so amusingly over the top.

Tourists taking photos of each other in the Forum.

I thought of this (and went to the trouble of cropping down one of those shots for the image above) because The Conversation ran a more-erudite-than-average “kids these days” piece with the dramatic headline “What’s lost when we photograph life instead of experiencing it?” While this drops a few references to modern neuroscience to claim that constant distraction is reshaping our brains for the worse, the central complaint is a fuzzier one: that the sort of self-presentation involved in taking and sharing photos at famous sites is Bad.

In pursuit of digital affirmation, even ordinary experiences become fodder for photographs.

Instead of staying present – being (and really observing) where we are – our impulse is to capitalize on all lived experiences as an opportunity to represent and express ourselves visually. Part of what’s troubling about this kind of tenacious documentation is the thin line between representation or expression and – as with the “Snap Pack” – the marketing or commodification of everyday life.

Personal photo collections, publicized through applications like Instagram and Facebook, risk primarily becoming a tool for self-promotion. The ability to constantly measure public feedback for each posted photograph enables, and may encourage, users to tweak visual representations of their own lives in an effort to simply maximize a positive response.

Now, obviously, as somebody who took 1600 photos on a one-week trip to Rome, and posted a whole bunch of them on the Internet, I’m obviously going to bristle at this a bit. I don’t have a very concrete idea of what “staying present – being (and really observing) where we are” is supposed to mean, but it’s not at all clear to me that my photographic activity is impairing that. On the contrary, I would be somewhat inclined to argue that taking all those pictures enhances the experience, at least for me (the effect might be less positive for Kate, having to wait while I futz around with photography…). Finding the right angle, lighting, and framing to get an image that captures a particular moment– or even just lends itself to a flippant photo caption— requires a level of closer observation than I might otherwise give some of these sites.

And, yes, when I select a subset of those photos to present on the Internet, that’s an act of carefully curated self-presentation, both through the images I choose and the words I use to describe them. I picked the photos in Monday’s blog post and the jokes in that album of art pictures as a way of putting forward a certain image of myself to the Internet– what I find aesthetically interesting, what I like in art and history, what I find funny. Which is hopefully appealing to a particular subset of people who will read and link and leave appreciative comments, and generally think well of me.

I absolutely agree that self-presentation is a big piece of what’s going on, here, but I would also argue that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Nor is there anything particularly new about it– the genre of self-presentation through carefully curated travel narrative goes back well before the invention of cameras, let alone smart phones. The idea of going to famous places and presenting a particular image of yourself by exhaustively documenting your reaction to them was already firmly established 150 years ago when Mark Twain got a really good book out of spoofing it.

You could argue, of course, that The Innocents Abroad is also a carefully curated work of self-presentation on Twain’s part, and I’ll happily agree with that. For that matter, writing a blog post about how selfie-snapping tourists are Doing It Wrong is also engaging in the same sort of activity.

A better counter might be to note that my blogging-and-photo-captioning is not remotely in Twain’s league (another point I won’t contest at all), and I think this hits closer to the heart of the matter. That is, I think the core complaint of the “photo-sharing is Bad” crowd is not so much about the fact that people are engaged in self-presentation through image curation– that’s an activity we’re all engaged in, all the time. I think the fundamental complaint driving these thinkpieces is that it’s being done by the wrong people.

That is, when somebody with intellectual heft does it– a Mark Twain, or a Robert Hughes, or even a Ph.D. candidate at a major university– silently contemplates a cultural object without electronic aids, and shares it later in a more traditional channel, then it’s important and worthwhile. A random tourist snapping selfies, though, is crass and shallow and insufficiently engaged with Experiencing the Moment. The problem with cameraphone technology and photo-sharing apps isn’t that they created self-promoting self-presentation– ostentatious intellectuals have been carefully curating their images by publicly sharing their cultural experiences for centuries. The problem with technology is that it’s democratized that process, making it trivially easy for any yob with an iPhone to seek affirmation from their friends by presenting themselves as the sort of person who visits Important Cultural Sites.

I’m obviously choosing to frame this in the most unflattering way possible– that curation activity again– but these kinds of pieces push a lot of my buttons. To start with, there’s the Luddite element of pretending that online life is less “real” than unplugged activities, which always gets my back up. More than that, though, at their heart, these essays seem to me to flow from a deep vein of elitism that runs through not just academia but the segment of modern society that self-presents as intellectual– people who read and re-share the nebulous collection of smart-people magazines and websites that run pieces decrying the pernicious effect of Internet technologies on modern life.

Now, I’m not denying at all that the people who rail against selfie-snapping find some ineffable benefit in slow and silent contemplation, that would be lost to electronic intermediaries. I can’t quite fathom what that is, but I take them at their word on that, and believe that it’s true to the sort of people they choose to be.

What I object to is the presumption that this ineffable benefit is something universal, and those who aren’t seeking it out are Doing something Wrong. Because this is ultimately a question of personal aesthetics, and those are highly variable. If some other subset of the population finds that their experience of culture is enhanced by taking selfies and sharing them with friends via social media, well, that’s just fine, because they’re not the same kind of people. It’s just as viable and valid a set of personal preferences, and so long as it doesn’t intrude on the ability of others to enjoy the same culture in their own way (I’ve had a few close calls with selfie sticks wielded by inattentive tourists), it’s every bit as deserving of respect.

The critical stance of the standard cell-phones-ruin-everything essay, though, is based on the idea that people who use their phones to do the same thing that travelogue writers have been doing for centuries are Wrong because they’re not approaching and experiencing culture in the same manner as an ostentatious intellectual. It’s an attempt to elevate the aesthetic preferences of academics to a human universal, and denigrate the preferences of wide ranges of other people as lesser. It’s an attitude toward the public at large that I find condescending, bordering on contemptuous, and its prevalence in academia is a constant low-level irritant.

(I should note that this, too, is not especially new. Twain’s book devotes no small amount of space to lampooning and lamenting the crass and shallow among his fellow travelers. I’m inclined to think it’s gotten a bit worse of late, thanks to a variety of network effects that are well discussed elsewhere, but I could easily be wrong about that.)

Now, am I going to make a big pitch for the underappreciated aesthetics of a well-chosen Instagram selfie? No, not really. It’s not my thing– of the 1600-odd photos of Rome on my camera and smartphone, the number with me in them probably doesn’t crack double digits, and several of those are group photos with my friends from college who I only see once or twice a year.

At the same time, though, if that’s what floats your boat, go nuts. I mean, I’d prefer it if people could keep their selfie sticks the hell out of my photo frames, and well clear of my head, but the quality of an aesthetic experience is ultimately a very subjective thing, and if having a duckface selfie in front of the Arch of Septimus Severus enhances your experience of the Forum, more power to you. Be who you are, where you are, share it with your friends, and don’t waste time worrying about people who self-present as grumpy academics.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/294wd5e

When I was going through the huge collection of photos I have from the Forum in Rome, I kept running across pictures containing two young Asian women (neither of them Kate). This isn’t because I was stalking them, but because they were everywhere, stopping for long periods in front of virtually every significant ruin and striking exaggerated poses for each other to take photos of. I had to carefully frame a few of my own photos to avoid them, but I did also take a few that deliberately included their posing, because it was so amusingly over the top.

Tourists taking photos of each other in the Forum.

I thought of this (and went to the trouble of cropping down one of those shots for the image above) because The Conversation ran a more-erudite-than-average “kids these days” piece with the dramatic headline “What’s lost when we photograph life instead of experiencing it?” While this drops a few references to modern neuroscience to claim that constant distraction is reshaping our brains for the worse, the central complaint is a fuzzier one: that the sort of self-presentation involved in taking and sharing photos at famous sites is Bad.

In pursuit of digital affirmation, even ordinary experiences become fodder for photographs.

Instead of staying present – being (and really observing) where we are – our impulse is to capitalize on all lived experiences as an opportunity to represent and express ourselves visually. Part of what’s troubling about this kind of tenacious documentation is the thin line between representation or expression and – as with the “Snap Pack” – the marketing or commodification of everyday life.

Personal photo collections, publicized through applications like Instagram and Facebook, risk primarily becoming a tool for self-promotion. The ability to constantly measure public feedback for each posted photograph enables, and may encourage, users to tweak visual representations of their own lives in an effort to simply maximize a positive response.

Now, obviously, as somebody who took 1600 photos on a one-week trip to Rome, and posted a whole bunch of them on the Internet, I’m obviously going to bristle at this a bit. I don’t have a very concrete idea of what “staying present – being (and really observing) where we are” is supposed to mean, but it’s not at all clear to me that my photographic activity is impairing that. On the contrary, I would be somewhat inclined to argue that taking all those pictures enhances the experience, at least for me (the effect might be less positive for Kate, having to wait while I futz around with photography…). Finding the right angle, lighting, and framing to get an image that captures a particular moment– or even just lends itself to a flippant photo caption— requires a level of closer observation than I might otherwise give some of these sites.

And, yes, when I select a subset of those photos to present on the Internet, that’s an act of carefully curated self-presentation, both through the images I choose and the words I use to describe them. I picked the photos in Monday’s blog post and the jokes in that album of art pictures as a way of putting forward a certain image of myself to the Internet– what I find aesthetically interesting, what I like in art and history, what I find funny. Which is hopefully appealing to a particular subset of people who will read and link and leave appreciative comments, and generally think well of me.

I absolutely agree that self-presentation is a big piece of what’s going on, here, but I would also argue that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Nor is there anything particularly new about it– the genre of self-presentation through carefully curated travel narrative goes back well before the invention of cameras, let alone smart phones. The idea of going to famous places and presenting a particular image of yourself by exhaustively documenting your reaction to them was already firmly established 150 years ago when Mark Twain got a really good book out of spoofing it.

You could argue, of course, that The Innocents Abroad is also a carefully curated work of self-presentation on Twain’s part, and I’ll happily agree with that. For that matter, writing a blog post about how selfie-snapping tourists are Doing It Wrong is also engaging in the same sort of activity.

A better counter might be to note that my blogging-and-photo-captioning is not remotely in Twain’s league (another point I won’t contest at all), and I think this hits closer to the heart of the matter. That is, I think the core complaint of the “photo-sharing is Bad” crowd is not so much about the fact that people are engaged in self-presentation through image curation– that’s an activity we’re all engaged in, all the time. I think the fundamental complaint driving these thinkpieces is that it’s being done by the wrong people.

That is, when somebody with intellectual heft does it– a Mark Twain, or a Robert Hughes, or even a Ph.D. candidate at a major university– silently contemplates a cultural object without electronic aids, and shares it later in a more traditional channel, then it’s important and worthwhile. A random tourist snapping selfies, though, is crass and shallow and insufficiently engaged with Experiencing the Moment. The problem with cameraphone technology and photo-sharing apps isn’t that they created self-promoting self-presentation– ostentatious intellectuals have been carefully curating their images by publicly sharing their cultural experiences for centuries. The problem with technology is that it’s democratized that process, making it trivially easy for any yob with an iPhone to seek affirmation from their friends by presenting themselves as the sort of person who visits Important Cultural Sites.

I’m obviously choosing to frame this in the most unflattering way possible– that curation activity again– but these kinds of pieces push a lot of my buttons. To start with, there’s the Luddite element of pretending that online life is less “real” than unplugged activities, which always gets my back up. More than that, though, at their heart, these essays seem to me to flow from a deep vein of elitism that runs through not just academia but the segment of modern society that self-presents as intellectual– people who read and re-share the nebulous collection of smart-people magazines and websites that run pieces decrying the pernicious effect of Internet technologies on modern life.

Now, I’m not denying at all that the people who rail against selfie-snapping find some ineffable benefit in slow and silent contemplation, that would be lost to electronic intermediaries. I can’t quite fathom what that is, but I take them at their word on that, and believe that it’s true to the sort of people they choose to be.

What I object to is the presumption that this ineffable benefit is something universal, and those who aren’t seeking it out are Doing something Wrong. Because this is ultimately a question of personal aesthetics, and those are highly variable. If some other subset of the population finds that their experience of culture is enhanced by taking selfies and sharing them with friends via social media, well, that’s just fine, because they’re not the same kind of people. It’s just as viable and valid a set of personal preferences, and so long as it doesn’t intrude on the ability of others to enjoy the same culture in their own way (I’ve had a few close calls with selfie sticks wielded by inattentive tourists), it’s every bit as deserving of respect.

The critical stance of the standard cell-phones-ruin-everything essay, though, is based on the idea that people who use their phones to do the same thing that travelogue writers have been doing for centuries are Wrong because they’re not approaching and experiencing culture in the same manner as an ostentatious intellectual. It’s an attempt to elevate the aesthetic preferences of academics to a human universal, and denigrate the preferences of wide ranges of other people as lesser. It’s an attitude toward the public at large that I find condescending, bordering on contemptuous, and its prevalence in academia is a constant low-level irritant.

(I should note that this, too, is not especially new. Twain’s book devotes no small amount of space to lampooning and lamenting the crass and shallow among his fellow travelers. I’m inclined to think it’s gotten a bit worse of late, thanks to a variety of network effects that are well discussed elsewhere, but I could easily be wrong about that.)

Now, am I going to make a big pitch for the underappreciated aesthetics of a well-chosen Instagram selfie? No, not really. It’s not my thing– of the 1600-odd photos of Rome on my camera and smartphone, the number with me in them probably doesn’t crack double digits, and several of those are group photos with my friends from college who I only see once or twice a year.

At the same time, though, if that’s what floats your boat, go nuts. I mean, I’d prefer it if people could keep their selfie sticks the hell out of my photo frames, and well clear of my head, but the quality of an aesthetic experience is ultimately a very subjective thing, and if having a duckface selfie in front of the Arch of Septimus Severus enhances your experience of the Forum, more power to you. Be who you are, where you are, share it with your friends, and don’t waste time worrying about people who self-present as grumpy academics.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/294wd5e

Asteroid Day 2016 is June 30

Image via Debbie Lewis

The second annual Asteroid Day happens on June 30, 2016. Asteroid Day is a global awareness campaign to help people learn about asteroids and what we can do to protect our planet from asteroid impacts. You can join the Asteroid Day discussion on Twitter and Facebook.

Asteroid Day 2016 will also include hundreds of events – films, concerts, interactive workshops and panels with engineers, scientists and astronauts.

Here’s the premise of Asteroid Day, in the words of co-founder Dr. Brian May, astrophysicist, guitarist and songwriter for the band Queen:

Our goal is to dedicate one day each year to learn about asteroids, the origins of our universe, and to support the resources necessary to see, track and deflect dangerous asteroids from Earth’s orbital path. Asteroids are a natural disaster we know how to prevent.

Brian May

Asteroid Day is held on the anniversary of the largest asteroid impact in Earth’s recent history – an event known as the Siberia Tunguska explosion. On June 30, 1908, a small asteroid exploded over Tunguska, Siberia. It released the equivalent of 100 tons of TNT, devastating an area of about 800 square miles – the size of a major metropolitan city.

We are excited to share our brand new #AsteroidDay video series "Scientists Rock" with you: https://t.co/tRhqXxxYeq http://pic.twitter.com/FZZNqrYknG

— Asteroid Day (@AsteroidDay) June 27, 2016

The European Space Agency (ESA) is an Asteroid Day partner. ESA asteroid specialists will be participating at events in Barcelona, Munich and Heidelberg. Ian Carnelli, project manager for ESA’s proposed Asteroid Impact Mission, spoke from the ESTEC technical centre at Noordwijk, the Netherlands:

ESA has been studying the role of space missions to address the asteroid hazard over the last 15 years.

Today we have the technology to change the path of an asteroid, but we need to test our technology in space and learn if our models are correct by measuring all the relevant parameters.

Asteroid Day media partner, Discovery Science will dedicate the entire day on June 30 to asteroid programming.

An object entered the atmosphere over the Urals early in the morning of February 15, 2013. The fireball exploded above Chelyabinsk city, and the resulting overpressure caused damage to buildings and injuries to some 1,500 people. This photo was taken by Alex Alishevskikh from about a minute after noticing the blast. Photo via Alex Alishevskikh/Flickr

Bottom line: Asteroid Day is a global awareness campaign to help people learn about asteroids and what we can do to protect our planet from asteroid impacts. The second annual Asteroid Day happens on June 30, 2016.

To learn more and participate, visit Asteroid Day’s website

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/295zG1U

Image via Debbie Lewis

The second annual Asteroid Day happens on June 30, 2016. Asteroid Day is a global awareness campaign to help people learn about asteroids and what we can do to protect our planet from asteroid impacts. You can join the Asteroid Day discussion on Twitter and Facebook.

Asteroid Day 2016 will also include hundreds of events – films, concerts, interactive workshops and panels with engineers, scientists and astronauts.

Here’s the premise of Asteroid Day, in the words of co-founder Dr. Brian May, astrophysicist, guitarist and songwriter for the band Queen:

Our goal is to dedicate one day each year to learn about asteroids, the origins of our universe, and to support the resources necessary to see, track and deflect dangerous asteroids from Earth’s orbital path. Asteroids are a natural disaster we know how to prevent.

Brian May

Asteroid Day is held on the anniversary of the largest asteroid impact in Earth’s recent history – an event known as the Siberia Tunguska explosion. On June 30, 1908, a small asteroid exploded over Tunguska, Siberia. It released the equivalent of 100 tons of TNT, devastating an area of about 800 square miles – the size of a major metropolitan city.

We are excited to share our brand new #AsteroidDay video series "Scientists Rock" with you: https://t.co/tRhqXxxYeq http://pic.twitter.com/FZZNqrYknG

— Asteroid Day (@AsteroidDay) June 27, 2016

The European Space Agency (ESA) is an Asteroid Day partner. ESA asteroid specialists will be participating at events in Barcelona, Munich and Heidelberg. Ian Carnelli, project manager for ESA’s proposed Asteroid Impact Mission, spoke from the ESTEC technical centre at Noordwijk, the Netherlands:

ESA has been studying the role of space missions to address the asteroid hazard over the last 15 years.

Today we have the technology to change the path of an asteroid, but we need to test our technology in space and learn if our models are correct by measuring all the relevant parameters.

Asteroid Day media partner, Discovery Science will dedicate the entire day on June 30 to asteroid programming.

An object entered the atmosphere over the Urals early in the morning of February 15, 2013. The fireball exploded above Chelyabinsk city, and the resulting overpressure caused damage to buildings and injuries to some 1,500 people. This photo was taken by Alex Alishevskikh from about a minute after noticing the blast. Photo via Alex Alishevskikh/Flickr

Bottom line: Asteroid Day is a global awareness campaign to help people learn about asteroids and what we can do to protect our planet from asteroid impacts. The second annual Asteroid Day happens on June 30, 2016.

To learn more and participate, visit Asteroid Day’s website

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/295zG1U

Mastering Marinade Science

Put common kitchen ingredients to the test to better understand how marinades work. With a bit of science, a family classic could get a flavor-enhancing makeover this summer! (Or, kids might come up with an awesome new family favorite!)

Kitchen Science

Summer holidays and family get-togethers often go hand in hand with recipes that involve a marinade. Does your family have a favorite BBQ recipe or a marinade used year after year for certain grilled meets or vegetables?

Foods cooked outdoors on a grill are often marinated first—soaked in a mixture before being cooked. During this soaking process, the marinade sticks to the food (or adsorbs). (Note: Adsorption is when something adheres to something else; absorption is when something soaks into something else.) The more the marinade adsorbs, the more flavor your food picks up. Marinades also can have the effect of helping to tenderize the food. You want a marinade that has sticking power. You want a marinade that adsorbs effectively. But what is the key to the process?

Vinegar, sugar, salt... many marinade recipes include similar ingredients. Which ingredients are key to making a good marinade? Are there certain ingredients in a marinade recipe that help the marinade stick to the food? Can science help you figure out which ingredients you need to create a marinade with super sticking power?

A Kitchen Test

The Flavor That Food! Exploring the Science of Marinades food science project guides students in a marinade test. Using tofu (less expensive than many meats), food coloring (so you can see and evaluate the amount of adsorption), and sugar, vinegar, and salt, kids put marinade ingredients to the test. Which ones will stick best to the foods and why?

This science experiment involves making a set of standards against which students will compare their marinated foods, so there is plenty of fun (and colorful) preparation and testing to do in exploring which ingredients will result in blocks of tofu with the most marinade. (Students will be able to tell because the tofu blocks that hold the most marinade will be the ones with the most intense color!) If your kids are curious about how much a marinade adsorbs versus being absorbed, try cutting open some of the tofu samples after they have soaked. What can you tell from looking at the inside?

With the basic setup in place, students can extend the kitchen science activity to test other ingredients (like lemon juice, lime juice, soy sauce, hot sauce, worcestershire sauce, oils, or sugar sweeteners) or store-bought marinades. Exploring the variable of "time" is also a good extension for this kitchen science activity. How long should a food marinate for the best adsorption? Is there a maximum time? Students can test with the tofu to see if length of time in the marinade makes a difference, but be aware that other food types have different recommendations for how long they should be soaked in a marinade.

By the end of this kitchen science exploration, students may be able to update a family marinade favorite to make it even tastier!

Fun (and Colorful!) Family Science

For a family-friendly version of the Flavor that Food! experiment, see Saucy Science: Exploring the Science of Marinades at Scientific American.

from Science Buddies Blog http://ift.tt/299bgI5

Put common kitchen ingredients to the test to better understand how marinades work. With a bit of science, a family classic could get a flavor-enhancing makeover this summer! (Or, kids might come up with an awesome new family favorite!)

Kitchen Science

Summer holidays and family get-togethers often go hand in hand with recipes that involve a marinade. Does your family have a favorite BBQ recipe or a marinade used year after year for certain grilled meets or vegetables?

Foods cooked outdoors on a grill are often marinated first—soaked in a mixture before being cooked. During this soaking process, the marinade sticks to the food (or adsorbs). (Note: Adsorption is when something adheres to something else; absorption is when something soaks into something else.) The more the marinade adsorbs, the more flavor your food picks up. Marinades also can have the effect of helping to tenderize the food. You want a marinade that has sticking power. You want a marinade that adsorbs effectively. But what is the key to the process?

Vinegar, sugar, salt... many marinade recipes include similar ingredients. Which ingredients are key to making a good marinade? Are there certain ingredients in a marinade recipe that help the marinade stick to the food? Can science help you figure out which ingredients you need to create a marinade with super sticking power?

A Kitchen Test

The Flavor That Food! Exploring the Science of Marinades food science project guides students in a marinade test. Using tofu (less expensive than many meats), food coloring (so you can see and evaluate the amount of adsorption), and sugar, vinegar, and salt, kids put marinade ingredients to the test. Which ones will stick best to the foods and why?

This science experiment involves making a set of standards against which students will compare their marinated foods, so there is plenty of fun (and colorful) preparation and testing to do in exploring which ingredients will result in blocks of tofu with the most marinade. (Students will be able to tell because the tofu blocks that hold the most marinade will be the ones with the most intense color!) If your kids are curious about how much a marinade adsorbs versus being absorbed, try cutting open some of the tofu samples after they have soaked. What can you tell from looking at the inside?

With the basic setup in place, students can extend the kitchen science activity to test other ingredients (like lemon juice, lime juice, soy sauce, hot sauce, worcestershire sauce, oils, or sugar sweeteners) or store-bought marinades. Exploring the variable of "time" is also a good extension for this kitchen science activity. How long should a food marinate for the best adsorption? Is there a maximum time? Students can test with the tofu to see if length of time in the marinade makes a difference, but be aware that other food types have different recommendations for how long they should be soaked in a marinade.

By the end of this kitchen science exploration, students may be able to update a family marinade favorite to make it even tastier!

Fun (and Colorful!) Family Science

For a family-friendly version of the Flavor that Food! experiment, see Saucy Science: Exploring the Science of Marinades at Scientific American.

from Science Buddies Blog http://ift.tt/299bgI5

How Does Helium Get Underground In The First Place? (Synopsis) [Starts With A Bang]

“I have this one little saying, when things get too heavy just call me helium, the lightest known gas to man.” –Jimi Hendrix

The second lightest and second most abundant element in the Universe, helium, is incredibly rare on Earth. Practically none of the helium that Earth was formed with still exists, since was too easy for it to escape from our tenuously held atmosphere, unlike the gas giant worlds. But deep underground, in the heavy-element-rich interiors of the Earth, new helium is continuously produced.

Scientists studying the ash from a recent eruption of Ol Doinyo Lengai volcano in Tanzania. Public domain photo.

The heaviest unstable elements, like thorium, uranium and radium, are particles that undergo alpha decay on timescales of hundreds of millions to billions of years. They give rise to massive pockets of helium, enabling us to extract it for scientific, medical and more frivolous purposes. But if we waste this cheap, abundant and easy-to-obtain material now, humanity doesn’t have hundreds of millions of years to wait for it to replenish itself.

Helium balloons, where the vast majority of the helium inside will escape the Earth. Image credit: public domain photo from Pixabay user HilkeFromm.

Go get the full story on our helium’s origin — and fragility — over on Forbes today!

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/292weUh

“I have this one little saying, when things get too heavy just call me helium, the lightest known gas to man.” –Jimi Hendrix

The second lightest and second most abundant element in the Universe, helium, is incredibly rare on Earth. Practically none of the helium that Earth was formed with still exists, since was too easy for it to escape from our tenuously held atmosphere, unlike the gas giant worlds. But deep underground, in the heavy-element-rich interiors of the Earth, new helium is continuously produced.

Scientists studying the ash from a recent eruption of Ol Doinyo Lengai volcano in Tanzania. Public domain photo.

The heaviest unstable elements, like thorium, uranium and radium, are particles that undergo alpha decay on timescales of hundreds of millions to billions of years. They give rise to massive pockets of helium, enabling us to extract it for scientific, medical and more frivolous purposes. But if we waste this cheap, abundant and easy-to-obtain material now, humanity doesn’t have hundreds of millions of years to wait for it to replenish itself.

Helium balloons, where the vast majority of the helium inside will escape the Earth. Image credit: public domain photo from Pixabay user HilkeFromm.

Go get the full story on our helium’s origin — and fragility — over on Forbes today!

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/292weUh