Left Side of the Aisle #75 - Part 7

And Another Thing: Some cool archaeology bits

Finally for this week, a few rather cool archaeological bits.

For almost three decades, Colin Steer, of Plymouth, Devonshire, UK, wondered what caused the living room floor beneath his sofa to dip. After he retired, he decided to find out. So he started digging - and discovered that the indentation in the floor was covering a well. A well 30 inches wide and 33 feet deep that dates back to the 16th century.

The well may be connected to something called Drake’s leat, a watercourse built in the 16th century by Sir Francis Drake to carry water from Dartmoor to Plymouth. Steer is trying to find someone to date the well more exactly. In the meantime, he's got a cool feature for his house.

Speaking of old English stuff, one of the enduring mysteries of British history has been the burial place of King Richard III. It's known he was killed during the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, the last major battle of the War of the Roses. After the battle, Richard's body was stripped naked and paraded through the streets of Leicester to prove he was dead.

Researchers believe Richard was then buried in a nearby Franciscan friary. But that friary was demolished during Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, leaving the exact location of the friary unknown.

Now, researchers have found the friary under a city parking lot in Leicester. They have found medieval window tracery, glazed floor tile fragments, part of what may be the cloisters, and a section of wall.

And just over a week ago they announced they have found human remains, with "strong circumstantial evidence" suggesting it's the body of Richard III. If it turns out to be so, another history mystery has been solved.

Finally, researchers have used new techniques to examine 4,000 year old obsidian tools found in Syria near its borders with Turkey and Iraq to reveal trade and trade routes of four millennia ago.

Obsidian is naturally occurring volcanic glass. It's smooth, hard, and far sharper than a surgical scalpel when fractured. It was highly desired as a material for making stone tools. In fact, obsidian blades are still used today in some specialized medical procedures.

Using the most recent techniques that use the fact that each volcanic source has a distinctive chemical signature, the researchers determined that most of the obsidian at the site and other nearby ones came from volcanoes some 200 kilometers (125 miles) away in what is now eastern Turkey. That wasn't a surprise, as models of ancient trade routes predicted as much. However, the team also discovered a set of obsidian artefacts originating from a volcano in what is now central Turkey, three times further away, indicating trade in obsidian was - and thus the associated trade routes were - more widespread than previously thought.

What's amazing here is that the ability to read that volcanic signature is so exact that not only did the team identify the particular volcano where the obsidian in the artefacts originated, they were able to pinpoint the exact flank of the particular volcano where it was collected and to determine that it was gathered from two different spots on its slope. That is just incredible.

Sources:
http://www.care2.com/causes/5-reasons-archaeology.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/9506985/Well-well-well-couple-find-medieval-shaft-beneath-sofa.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2196353/Archaeologists-digging-council-car-park-Leicester-confirm-friary-King-Richard-III-believed-buried-in.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120904135334.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Bosworth_Field
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-19561018

Left Side of the Aisle #75 - Part 6

And Another Thing: Good news on solar and wind energy

Some good news on the energy front: A solar industry group announced earlier this month that the US is on track to install as much photovoltaic solar power this year as we did in the previous ten.

The report, by GTM Research and the Solar Energy Industries Association, found that US solar installations more than doubled in the second quarter of 2012 as compared to last year, adding 742 megawatts of capacity. This growth was driven largely by new utility-scale solar generation projects, including two large projects that benefitted from DOE loan guarantees. The US now has enough installed solar capacity to power one million homes.

And it's not just solar: The wind industry has also seen tremendous growth in recent years. Not long ago, the estimates were that the US would reach 40 gigawatts of wind power by 2030. Wind power now, already, has 50 gigawatts of generation capacity installed: Twenty-five percent more eighteen years earlier.

The Department of Energy estimates that wind could provide 20% of US electricity by 2030, roughly double all our nuclear power plants.

That boom is due in part to the Federal Production Tax Credit. But unless Congress acts, the tax credit will expire at the end of this year. It will be interesting to see how that plays out; it'll be a good metric for judging just how concerned our supposed liberals are with the environment, renewable energy, and climate change and just how concerned the right wing is with actually aiding business.

Sources:
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2012/09/11/media-missing-the-big-picture-on-solar/189835

Left Side of the Aisle #75 - Part 5

And Another Thing: Voyager 1 and 2 nearing true interstellar space

A few weeks ago marked a couple of significant anniversaries in space exploration: the 35th anniversaries of the launches of the Voyager spacecrafts way back in 1977.

August 20 was the anniversary of the launch of Voyager 2. September 5 was the anniversary of the launch of Voyager 1.

That's not a mistake; Voyager 2 was launched first. The reason for the numbering was that because of the different paths the two spacecraft were to take, Voyager 1 was going to pass Voyager 2 and reach the initial goal, which was to do flybys of Jupiter and Saturn, first. They carried out that mission using computers with just 8000 words of memory and 8-track tapes.

They sent back data on Jupiter's big red spot and Saturn's rings. They discovered erupting volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io; saw hints of an ocean below the icy surface of Europa, and found signs of methane rain on the Saturn moon Titan. Voyager 2 went on to fly by Uranus and Neptune. It is still the only spacecraft to have done so.

And then they just kept on going - and kept on sending back data. Voyager 1 is now about 11 billion miles from the Sun. That is about four times further from the Sun than Neptune, far beyond the solar system, twice as far as the Kuiper Belt. Voyager 2 is not all that far behind: about 9 billion miles from the Sun.

And now they are about to make space history yet again: They are about to become the first human-made objects ever to enter actual interstellar space.

The heliosphere is a giant bubble of charged particles the Sun blows around itself and which actually serves to help shield the solar system from the most intense cosmic rays. The heliosheath, where the Voyagers are now, is the outermost layer of the heliosphere. It marks the boundary between the region of space affected by the Sun and true interstellar space. The heliosphere is thought to extend to somewhere between 11 and 14 billion miles from the Sun - which means Voyager 1 is pushing against the edge. It could cross over literally any day.

Still, bear in mind that the limit to the heliosphere still could be something like 3 billion miles further out. Even though Voyager 1 travels a million miles a day, three billion miles is still 3,000 days, or a little over eight years. But when you've been waiting for something for 35 years, that doesn't seem all that long.

The Voyagers have enough electrical power to last until 2020, with conservation efforts after that keeping at least some instruments going another five years. When the last instruments are shut down around 2025, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 will have been sending back data for 48 years.

After that, they will take up positions of honor, orbiting the center of our galaxy essentially forever.

Sources:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/09/04/165269/voyager-1-set-to-burst-solar-system.html
http://www.universetoday.com/44572/neptunes-distance-from-the-sun/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_belt
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/

Left Side of the Aisle #68 - Part 5

And Another Thing: Curiosity lands on Mars

Curiosity, the largest and most advanced spacecraft ever sent to another planet, made its extraordinary, multi-step, landing on Mars Sunday night (or Monday morning, if you prefer). Everything worked just as intended.

Curiosity now begins its two year mission focused on the question of if there ever was - or, quite improbable as it may be, is - life on Mars.

It joins a colleague on a distant part of the Martian surface, the rover Opportunity - which is now in the eighth year what was originally scheduled as a 90-day mission. If we have the same kind of luck with Curiosity as we've had with Opportunity, by the time of a hoped-for human landing on Mars in the 2030s, Curiosity may still be running.

Just two quick things I want to mention: One is that when you see the video, as I'm sure you have, of the excitement in the control room when touchdown was confirmed, you should remember that a lot of those people worked for literally 10 years for that moment.

And two, I have to show you this. I think it's one of the most extraordinary space photos ever. It was taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. We have two satellites orbiting Mars. One of them was used to relay signals from Curiosity back to Earth so we knew what was going on. The other, the Reconnaissance Orbiter, took this shot. Note the white box toward the left end of the picture. In that box you can see Curiosity descending on its parachute, part of the process of its landing.

Seriously, majorly, cool.


Sources:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0806-mars-curiosity-rover-landing-20120806,0,2608752.story

Left Side of the Aisle #68

Left Side of the Aisle
for August 9 - 15, 2010

This week:

Sikh temple massacre and the "lone wacko" nonsense
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Latest-News-Wires/2012/0806/Sikh-temple-shooter-identified-as-Wade-Michael-Page-white-supremacist-video
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-temple-shooting-gun-violence-obama-20120807,0,2176449.story
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/sikh-temple-shooting-wisconsin-mass-killing-7-years-article-1.1129793
http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/killings-mark-4th-mass-murder-in-state-since-2004-4k6cgse-165072026.html
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-08-07/business/sns-rt-us-usa-wisconsin-shooting-weaponbre876068-20120806_1_sikh-temple-attack-gun-laws-handgun
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/05/wisconsin-shooting-sikh-temple_n_1744256.html
http://www.npr.org/2012/07/27/157469718/new-republic-nra-members-support-gun-control
http://hotair.com/archives/2012/07/30/pew-poll-little-support-for-new-gun-control-regulations-after-aurora-shooting/
http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/the-truth-about-gun-politics-many-americans-support-restrictions-20120720
http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/david/pat-robertson-suggests-atheists-blame-sikh-t
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/06/pat-robertson-says-those-_n_1749532.html

67th anniversary of bombing of Hiroshima
http://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2012/08/06/hiroshima-marks-67th-anniversary-of-a-bomb-attack
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/08/hiroshima_64_years_ago.html
http://www.fas.org/programs/ssp/nukes/nuclearweapons/nukestatus.html
http://www.doug-long.com/summary.htm

Outrage of the Week: blocking relief for homeowners
http://blog.usw.org/2012/08/06/f-the-bureaucracy-the-white-house-can-help-homeowners-right-now/
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/07/why-firing-ed-demarco-is-no-solution-to-fhfa-refusal-to-engage-in-principal-modifications.html#xyIvFz4WfX0tyG7Z.99
http://news.firedoglake.com/2012/08/01/why-ed-demarco-wont-be-fired/
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/31/fire-ed-demarco/
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/01/more-demarco/
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2012/08/06/tim-geithner%E2%80%99s-principal-hypocrisy/

Clarabell Award: commenters on story about racial slur
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/31/motel-6-racial-slur_n_1720762.html

And Another Thing: Curiosity lands on Mars
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0806-mars-curiosity-rover-landing-20120806,0,2608752.story

Death of Mary Tamm, Romana #1
http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Romana
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-18995370

I am curious - Mars

The Mars rover Curiosity has safely landed on Mars.

The 2000-pound (910kg) vehicle, the size of a small car, now begins what is planned as a two-year mission focused on the question of if there ever was or could at some time be life on Mars.

It joins Opportunity, now in the ninth year of a mission that was planned to last for 90 days.

And the geek smiles.

Footnote: What with all this, it's probably appropriate that there have been a spate of new reports about Roswell 1947.

Left Side of the Aisle #45 - Part 6

And Another Thing: Seeds of past lives

Look at this picture.

It's a plant. Its scientific name is Silene Stenophylla. It's a live plant, fertile, with lacy white flowers and viable seeds. It was grown from seeds from immature fruit found in a squirrel's burrow containing various fruit and seeds. What makes this burrow and these particular seeds and this particular plant special is that burrow had been frozen in the Siberian permafrost for over 30,000 years.

This is the oldest plant ever to be regenerated by more than an order of magnitude: The previous oldest seeds to produce a viable plant were - by comparison in this context - "only" 2000 years old. These seeds are 15 times older.

This is not only major cool, no pun intended, it shows that ancient life forms, ancient DNA, can survive intact in the ice for thousands, even tens of thousands, of years - shades of the X-Files - which in turn opens up the possibility of resurrecting other life forms.

The fact that these seeds were found in the same strata as bones of large mammals, not only including such as bison, horse, and deer, but also mammoth and wooly rhinoceros, has got some people dreaming of the possibility of resurrecting - that is, having actual, live, walking around, eating, drinking - wooly mammoths.

That's not possible now - the necessary cloning technology is still iffy and we lack the intact DNA - so no, there's no Jurassic Park on the horizon, even the dim horizon, even if you ignore the slight time differential between mammoths and dinosaurs of about, oh, 60 million years. But is it in the foreseeable future to have a live mammoth walking around? Depending on the breaks - and finding a big enough sample of intact DNA may be the biggest hurdle - but depending on the breaks? Yes, it is possible. And that - again no pun intended - is really cool.

Oh, and one other quick thing, another anniversary which I missed: Monday, February 20, was the 50th anniversary of the day John Glenn took off to become the first American to orbit the Earth.

It's sometimes hard to think that only 7-1/2 years later, July 20, 1969, the first human walked on the Moon.

Sources:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j6vshXWgZSUj3pLD2sLNWJlHSFnQ?docId=CNG.8e6d7b5da9fa2c8e49617bdada3627df.251
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/02/21/russians-resurrect-30000-year-old-frozen-flower/
http://www.foxnews.com/topics/science/national-academy-of-sciences.htm#r_src=ramp
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jJp_vTdRhyEZc6s084rTPSA4z5AA

The Geekian Chronicles

Hey! Wow! We've found water on Mars!

Um, wait, haven't we known that for some time?

Well, yes - for one thing, it's been known for some time that the Martian polar ice caps are water ice (a lot of it) and there's ample evidence that at some point in the past Mars was much warmer and wetter than it is now (the Mars rovers showed that) and there very likely were large seas. More recently, upon examination some features of the planet's landscape can best be explained by flows of water in the "recent" past - "recent" in quotes because what was meant was geologically recent, which could be 100,000 years ago or more. (Hey, when you're used to talking in terms of tens of millions or even billions of years, 100,000 years just ain't that long.)

So what's so cool about this latest news? Because a)we're not talking about ice, we're talking about liquid water and b)we're not talking about 100,000 years ago, we're talking about now. We're talking about seasonal flows of liquid water on Mars, now.

To be more precise, not exactly water but salty mud. The atmospheric pressure on Mars is so low that any water that actually was free on the surface would boil away to vapor vary quickly, so this is likely water mixed with soil - that is, mud. And it's likely salty because the freezing point of salty water is below that of fresh water and Mars is so cold that the difference matters.

Scientists, of course, are not claiming this is absolute, rock-solid proof - only that present-day seasonal flows of salty mud are the best explanation anyone has come up with of the observations. But that doesn't change two facts: One, this is about the strongest evidence to date that liquid water is to be found on present-day Mars and two, that first fact increases the chances that there may be something alive there. It would be unlikely in the extreme to be anything more than microbes - but it would be life on another planet.

And that is just damn cool.

I love science.

Just to take a short break

A new species of butterfly has been found flying around Northern Ireland.

One reason to note July 21

So at 5:57 AM Eastern Time on Thursday, July 21, just one day after the 42nd anniversary of the first Moon landing, the space shuttle Atlantis landed at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, bringing an end to the space shuttle program. Without it, the US will have no way of its own to send astronauts into space for at least several years.

It seems particularly correct to note this event about now because just a few days ago I was at a political gathering - maybe some of you were at similar ones; it was one of those MoveOn.org-type events supposedly about "getting input" but really more a way to expand their mailing list - but anyway, I was there and at the meeting the participants were asked to cite a moment they felt proud of their country or community.

For my part, I said I preferred to think of it in terms of hopeful rather than proud and I cited the example of a state legislator in Massachusetts who changed his mind about supporting an amendment to the state constitution designed to overturn the state Supreme Judicial Court decision allowing for same sex marriage on the grounds that in the year since, "nothing happened." Except for those directly affected, i.e., those who could now marry, life went on as before and all the social stresses and upheavals that had been predicted never materialized - in which case, he said, he could find no reason for the amendment. That, I said, made me hopeful because it was a demonstration of the fact that people can change for the better.

The point of raising this here, though, is that another man there spoke of the Moon landing and how he later saw a space suit of the type the astronauts used with a section cut out so you could see the multiple layers that made up the suit, each with its own purpose, each designed by a team to work with the rest. He said he was impressed with the teamwork that took and asked something to the effect of “Why can’t we still do that? Why can't we still cooperate as a nation on a big project like that?”

I didn’t say say this at the time because it wasn't relevant to the meeting, but I thought to myself "NASA still does that - all the time."

We have become rather blase about space travel; it no longer gets the headlines, no longer generates the excitement, it once did. And our whole attitude about NASA and the end of the shuttle program is frankly confused or at least a real mixed bag.

But even without the star-quality treatment space stuff got in the past, NASA has continued to do some really cool, high-level-of-cooperation-required stuff.

- In February 2001, NASA landed a spaceprobe on an asteroid. Yes, landed.
- In 2005, a NASA probe blew away a section of a comet so we could get a better sense of how and of what they - and other things in the Solar System - are constructed.
- In March of this year, another NASA probe went back to same comet to see how it had changed over the intervening years as a result of the 2005 impact.
- In fact, that probe, called Stardust-NEXT, had been launched in 1999 and by January 2006 had flown through the coma of a comet, collected samples, and flown back past Earth, dropping off a payload of those samples as it went by. It was then sent back out to that second encounter with a different comet.
- Just four days ago, a robot spacecraft went into orbit around an asteroid 117 million miles from Earth.
- And NASA is now planning a mission to fly to an asteroid, take samples from it, and bring them back to Earth.
- Two months ago, a NASA Earth-orbiting satellite confirmed a far-reaching prediction of general relativity, that of "frame-dragging," where a spinning body (such as the Earth) actually warps spacetime by "dragging" spacetime around with it.
- Go back in time: Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, launched in 1977, are now 9 billion miles and 34 years from Earth and they are still producing new data and new discoveries. Just last month, NASA reported that data from the Voyagers shows that the heliosheath, the area where the effect of the solar wind (the stream of particles emitted by the Sun) is being attenuated by interactions with interstellar space, is full of a "froth" of bubbles of magnetic energy - a very unexpected discovery, which is the best kind.

The Hubble Space Telescope, source of all those cool images (and just yesterday, discoverer of a fourth moon around Pluto) - that's NASA. The Chandra X-Ray Observatory - that's NASA. The International Space Station (the ISS) - our part of that, that's NASA.

And tomorrow, NASA is scheduled to announce the landing site for the next Mars rover.

Ah yes, the Mars rovers. On January 4, 2004, the rover named Spirit landed on Mars. It was supposed to operate for 90 days and to travel for up to a kilometer. It ran for more than six years and went nearly 8km; that is, 25 times longer and eight times further than it was originally designed to. In fact, it would have gone longer and further but over a year ago, one of its wheels broke through what looked like a firm crust and the rover got trapped in loose sand. Unable to recharge its solar cells, it fell silent. On May 25, NASA made a final and unsuccessful attempt to contact Spirit.

But that's not really the end of the story, because a few weeks after Spirit landed, its twin rover Opportunity landed on another area of Mars. Now, more than seven years and 30km later, Opportunity is still going strong.

All of this I find exciting and wondrous - because it seems to me that space exploration is one of the purest expressions of what it is to be most human, what is (if you'll pardon the bad grammar) most unique about us: The desire to know. The desire to learn, to understand; the need to have our curiosity satisfied.

And that more than anything is what space exploration is about: knowing, learning, understanding. Knowing what we didn't know before, learning what we hadn't learned before, understanding what we didn't understand before, about time, about space, about how things came to be as they are, about how they will be in the future.

Yes, there have been technological benefits, lots of them - not the least of which is that NASA's need to miniaturize components to save space and weight (and therefore fuel) was a driving force behind the development of integrated circuits. But even without those benefits, the sheer - and I use the word deliberately - glory of knowledge, of learning, would have made it all worthwhile.

But now the space shuttle program, the headliner of US space exploration for the past good number of years, is over. Shut down. Shuttered. For the next several years, the US is going to have to depend on Russian spacecrafts to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS.

Why is this happening? Because Barack Obama wants to impose his vision of space exploration on NASA.

His vision is one in which the space shuttle does not fit, a vision that wants to turn over the sort of missions the shuttles ran to private, profit-driven, corporations. So again, as has happened so many times before, the government (i.e., the public) pays for the research, pays for the development, pays the costs of ironing out all of the inevitable but unexpected kinks, does all the dirty work, and then turns over the whole thing to the same prophets of profit that brag about their derring-do and entrepreneurship and would have us bow down before The Market (pbui).

Now, let's be both clear and fair: Barack Obama is hardly the first president to do this, to want to see his personal vision of space exploration become that of the nation. Indeed, JFK's call to go to the Moon was just that. And Obama does not want to end the space program, he just wants it to focus on what he thinks it should.

But what angers me is that there is no indication that he, anymore than the others before him, went to NASA and talked to the astrophysicists, talked to the astronautical engineers, talked to the astronauts, talked to the people who know what the hell they are talking about, and asked them what they thought was most important, what they thought would be most productive. No, he just wanted his vision, the Big Dream, the Big Picture of "manned" landings on asteroids and then on Mars.

The vision of humans landing on Mars is not, standing alone, objectionable and indeed I have argued that human space flight should remain part of the space program because the idea of people actually going and seeing - even if it is only a select few who are able to physically do that - has a grandeur of its own. But as it stands now, it is a vision that substitutes grandeur for actual learning while making a greater place for the whims of private profit.

And that is why the end of the space shuttle program makes me sad and the day is worth noting.

Geekzilla returns

My dog can read minds!

Um, yeah, sure, whatever....

No, really!

Right. Look, just stay calm. Everything will be okay. Okay? Just stay calm.

Well, okay, my dog can't actually read minds, but it can sense emotions. According to a study of domestic dogs and wolves led by Monique Udell of the University of Florida and published in the journal Learning & Behavior, canines

may be born with the inherent ability to perceive and react to human emotion.

Wolves and dogs were given the option to beg for food from either someone who was paying attention to them or someone who ignored them, with the first more likely to give them food. While the dogs, with long experience of contact with humans, were better at telling the difference, even the wolves showed some ability to judge human attentiveness.

So all of you out there who have been insisting that your dog can sense your mood? You may well be right.

I was a Teenage Geekenstein

The chances of eventually having somewhere else to go to really get away from it all have gone up.

According to an extrapolation of early results from NASA's Kepler telescope, which is designed to search for extrasolar planets, there are at least 50 billion planets in the Milky Way.

At least 500 million of those planets are in the not-too-hot, not-too-cold zone where life could exist.

True, no extraterrestrial life has been found despite some teasers over the years. But then add in other discoveries, such the recent one of a bacterium in California’s Mono Lake that uses arsenic instead of phosphorus in its DNA and the examination of a meteorite that revealed amino acids where there shouldn't have been any (leading chief researcher Dr. Daniel Glavin to say it suggests "there is more than one way to make amino acids in space"). In light of those and other discoveries, 500 million seems, well, let's just say to my mind it's rather too large a number to think that life screwed up every one of those chances.

Attack of the 50-foot geek

Salud! Skoal! Here's to ya!

The earliest known winery has been uncovered in a cave in the mountains of Armenia.

A vat to press the grapes, fermentation jars and even a cup and drinking bowl dating to about 6,000 years ago were discovered in the cave complex by an international team of researchers.

While older evidence of wine drinking has been found, this is the earliest example of complete wine production, according to Gregory Areshian of the University of California, Los Angeles, co-director of the excavation. ...

According to the archeologists, inside the cave was a shallow basin about 3-feet across that was positioned to drain into a deep vat. ...

They also found grape seeds, remains of pressed grapes and dozens of dried vines. The seeds were from the same type of grapes — Vitis vinifera vinifera — still used to make wine.

This site is in the same area where the oldest known leather shoe, dated to some 5,500 years ago, was found. Maybe now we know why whoever lost the shoe did. (Yes, I know, not really. Geez.)

The Unigeek and the Wasp

This is sort of a geek post but sort of a what, a political one I guess, too. A segue, so to speak.

Back at the beginning of November, I wrote about an article describing a psychological study that supposedly demonstrated that right-wingers are "happier" than left-wingers.

One of the standard, almost cliché, tenets of the happiness patrol is that religious faith is a key to happiness, demonstrated by the fact that people who attend church regularly report being happy more than those who don't.

However, a new study published in the December issue of the American Sociological Review challenges the assumptions inherent in that finding: that religious belief is measurable by church attendance and through that, that it is the belief itself that is the source of happiness.

In fact, sociologist Chaeyoon Lim of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-author Robert Putnam of Harvard found no connection between church attendance and self-reported happiness. The difference, they found, was in the social connections people established in the congregation.

Ac­cord­ing to the stu­dy, 33 per­cent of peo­ple who at­tend re­li­gious ser­vic­es eve­ry week and have three to five close friends in their con­grega­t­ion re­port that they are “ex­tremely sat­is­fied” with their lives. “Ex­tremely sat­is­fied” is de­fined as a 10 on a scale rang­ing from 1 to 10.

In com­par­i­son, only 19 per­cent of peo­ple who at­tend ser­vic­es week­ly, but who have no close friends in their con­grega­t­ion call them­selves ex­tremely sat­is­fied. On the oth­er hand, 23 per­cent of peo­ple who at­tend ser­vic­es only sev­er­al times a year, but who have three to five close friends in their con­grega­t­ion are ex­tremely sat­is­fied with their lives, the re­search­ers re­ported. Fi­nal­ly, 19 per­cent of peo­ple who nev­er at­tend ser­vic­es say they’re ex­tremely sat­is­fied with their lives.

“To me, the ev­i­dence sub­stanti­ates that it is not really go­ing to church and lis­ten­ing to ser­mons or pray­ing that makes peo­ple hap­pi­er, but mak­ing church-based friends and build­ing in­ti­mate so­cial net­works there,” Lim said.

That is, the people who have friends in the congregation and thus feel they are part of a community are the ones who are the happiest. It is the community, not the religion, that matters.

I posted something about the value of community it was not quite two years ago now. I argued that "community" was a concept in which the right does not believe but that it's value was such that that our relentless cry, relentless as the right always is about their latest slogan, should be "Justice. Compassion. Community." Nice to have the value of that notion given some confirmation.

The Geektor's Daughter

Now don't anybody try to tell me that this is not major cool:

A previously unknown kind of human—the Denisovans—likely roamed Asia for thousands of years, probably interbreeding occasionally with humans like you and me, according to a new genetic study. ...

This "new twist" in human evolution adds substantial new evidence that different types of humans—so-called modern humans and Neanderthals, modern humans and Denisovans, and perhaps even Denisovans and Neanderthals—mated and bore offspring, experts say. ...

Taken together with a May DNA study that found Neanderthals also interbred with modern human ancestors, the Denisovan finding suggests there was much more interbreeding among different human types than previously thought, Stanford University geneticist Brenna Henn said.

That is not a position that has had a lot of support lately, although it has continuously percolated through discussions of human evolution. What makes this new DNA study, using material taken from a fossil bone of the finger of a young girl who died about 40,000 years ago, extra intriguing is that

living Pacific islanders in Papua New Guinea may be distant descendants of these prehistoric pairings.

Which, if true, would mean that prehistoric interbreeding not only occurred, it was common enough to leave present-day traces.

And Jean Auel smiles.

The Poison Geek

He's fearless. She's totally without fear. They showed no fear. Yes, they are fearless.

She is fearless.

Um, actually, yeah, she is. Literally.

A woman with a rare genetic disorder, Urbach-Wiethe disease, isn't frightened by anything – haunted houses, spiders, snakes, movie monsters, death threats, being attacked or robbed, the Live Science website reports.

Researchers at the University of Iowa have done their best to scare the 44-year-old woman, identified only as "SM" for confidentiality reasons.

And they failed.

SM has a damaged amygdala, an almond-shaped portion of the brain strongly linked to feelings of fear in animals - and, SM's case indicates, in humans as well.

"On no occasion did SM exhibit fear, and she never endorsed feeling more than minimal levels of fear," the experts wrote.

They indicated that, over a three-month period of investigation "and a life history replete with traumatic events, SM repeatedly demonstrated an absence of overt fear manifestations."

Which, as they note, has clear drawbacks:

"She is aware that she does not have appropriate or normal responses to situations that would normally induce fear," University of Iowa researcher Daniel Tranel said.

A lack of response that could easily lead her into danger by being unaware of - or, more accurately, unresponsive to - conditions and situations that others would recognize as potentially threatening.

But here's Einstein's "difficulty - opportunity" thing again: Justin Feinstein, one of the researchers, has worked with veterans who suffer from PTSD. He described them as having lives "marred by fear," sometimes so great they can't even leave their homes. SM can help us to better understand how fear functions in the brain and thereby to develop better treatments.

The Geektaran Stratagem

Enough of space stuff. Some down-to-Earth geeky things. Start with some good news - or at least may become good news.

On the heels of World AIDS Day comes a stunning medical breakthrough: Doctors believe an HIV-positive man who underwent a stem cell transplant has been cured as a result of the procedure.

Timothy Ray Brown, also known as the "Berlin Patient," received the transplant in 2007 as part of a lengthy treatment course for leukemia.

His doctors recently published a report in the journal Blood affirming that the results of extensive testing "strongly suggest that cure of HIV infection has been achieved."

Brown's case paves a path for constructing a permanent cure for HIV through genetically-engineered stem cells.

This, as should be obvious from that last sentence, is not a cure. But if confirmed it is indeed a breakthrough. With some 33 million people worldwide who are HIV-positive and live with the day-to-day potential of developing full-blown AIDS, the potential this presents for improving life is major.

Geek of the Ood

More evidence that we very well may not be alone.

From nearby there is this:

Scientists have found at least one dormant "cryovolcano" - an ice volcano, one that spews near-liquid ice rather than molten rock - on the surface of Saturn's moon Titan.

Why is that particularly exciting for exobiologists? Because it increases the chance of finding some sort of life there. For one thing, the fact that there could have been liquid water carried to the surface makes it possible for chemical reactions to occur that could form amino acids within days, much sooner than the "cryolava" could freeze. Second, it has been speculated for some time that Titan might have a liquid ocean under its frozen surface. If so, it becomes possible that life developed there and a cryovolcano would carry it to the surface where its frozen remains might later be detectable.

None of that, of course, means that there ever was, is, or ever will be life on Titan. But it does increase the possibility.

Meanwhile, from far away there is this:

[R]ed dwarfs are much more common than previously thought—so much so that any estimate of the total number of stars existing must be tripled, some astronomers have announced.

The findings could boost the chances of life existing in the relatively nearby universe, as red dwarfs are considered good candidates for hosting planets with potentially complex life.

Because red dwarfs are rather dim, astronomers hadn’t been able to detect them in most galaxies other than our own before now, the researchers explained.

Using the instruments at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, the investigators found that red dwarfs are far more plentiful in nearby galaxies than they are in our own Milky Way - about 20 times as many, in fact.

In addition to boosting the total number of stars in the universe, the discovery also increases the number of planets orbiting those stars, which in turn elevates the number of planets that might harbor life, [Pieter] van Dokkum [of Yale, who lead the research,] said. ...

“There are possibly trillions of Earths orbiting these stars,” van Dokkum said, adding that the red dwarfs they discovered, which are typically more than 10 billion years old, have been around long enough for complex life to evolve. “It’s one reason why people are interested in this type of star.”

We, obviously, have never found life anywhere other than Earth. But the chances of something alive being out there, whether simple or complex, seem to improve every time we turn around.

The Geeks of Pompeii

You want a head-scratcher a little closer to home? Try this:

The Geminid meteor shower, which peaks [in early mid-December], is the most intense meteor shower of the year. It lasts for days, is rich in fireballs, and can be seen from almost any point on Earth.

And astronomers can't figure out why.

Most meteor showers come from comets, which spew ample meteoroids for a night of 'shooting stars.' The Geminids are different. The parent is not a comet but a weird rocky object named 3200 Phaethon that sheds very little dusty debris—not nearly enough to explain the Geminids.

The debris stream that produces the Geminids is massive compared to the others through which the Earth passes, but compared to typical comets, 3200 Phaethon, classified as an asteroid, "is more of a 98-lb weakling."

One possible explanation is that when 3200 Phaethon passes inside the orbit of Mercury, which it does every 1.4 years, the Sun boils off debris that becomes part of the Geminid stream. One problem: When researchers observed 3200 Phaethon pass just 13 million miles (21 million km) from the Sun's surface - that's just a little more than one-third the distance from the Sun to Mercury, in other words, damn close - the amount of debris boiled off amounted to only 0.01% of the mass of the Geminid stream, which is not enough to keep the stream from dissipating over time.

Perhaps the rock comet was more active in the past?

"We just don't know," says [NASA astronomer Bill] Cooke. "Every new thing we learn about the Geminids seems to deepen the mystery."

And no matter what the deniers and dodos may say, scientists love a good mystery.

Partners in Geek

Galaxy-sized space bubbles aren't the only thing that has astronomers and astrophysicists scratching their heads of late. It seems that prevailing scientific models of how galaxies formed just might be wrong.

Astrophysicist Danilo Marchesini of Tufts University and his team have reported finding "a relatively large number of very massive, highly luminous galaxies that existed almost 12 billion years ago when the universe was still very young, about 1.5 billion years old." The problem is, by most recent models galaxies that massive - about five to ten times as massive as the Milky Way - should not have been able to form that quickly.

These estimates [of when the galaxies were formed] might be somewhat off, but it’s not clear whether any such error could be large enough to explain the findings, the researchers said. ...

“It is clear that our understanding of how massive galaxies form is still far from satisfactory,” said Marchesini.

But as Albert Einstein famously said, "In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity" and the very fact of this unexpected result can lead to a better understanding of how galaxies form and evolve.

This is why I love astronomy and astrophysics. We know so much and at the same time know so little. We just keep finding new stuff out there.