Myopic Astronomer's Kaleidoscope

By DENNIS OVERBYE


Was it something we said?

A star has been spotted flying out of the Milky Way. And it apparently won't be back.

Astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics recently clocked the star's velocity at 1.5 million miles an hour, twice as much as it needs to escape the galaxy's gravitational field, making this the first galactic runaway to be discovered....
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Astronomers say they have discovered an object that appears to be an invisible galaxy made almost entirely of dark matter. The team, led by Cardiff University, claimed it is the first to be detected.

A dark galaxy is an area in the Universe containing a large amount of mass that rotates like a galaxy, but contains no stars. It was found 50 million light years away using radio telescopes in Cheshire and Puerto Rico.

The unknown material that is thought to hold these dark galaxies together is known as 'dark matter', but scientists still know very little about what that is....
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By KENNETH CHANG (NY Times)

Only about one-eighth of the physics professors at Harvard are women, a statistic that might seem to support the recent assertion by its president, Dr. Lawrence H. Summers, that fewer women than men are willing to make the necessary sacrifices. He also suggested that a difference in 'intrinsic aptitude' between the sexes might help explain the disparity.

A report released Friday by the American Institute of Physics offers a contradictory conclusion: after they earn a bachelor's degree in physics, American women are just as successful as men at wending their way up the academic ladder.......
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Instead, the sex disparity arises earlier in the pipeline, between high school and college. Nearly half of students taking high school physics are girls, but fewer than a quarter of the bachelor's degrees in physics go to women.

"That's where the drop-off point in physics is," Dr. Ivie said. "That's where they need to look." Dr. Ivie said the situation appeared to be different in at least some other sciences, like chemistry, where women earn a larger percentage of doctoral degrees but leave academia at a higher rate than men........
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By Steve Connor, Science Editor in Washington
19 February 2005

Scientists have found the first unequivocal link between man-made greenhouse gases and a dramatic heating of the Earth's oceans. The researchers - many funded by the US government - have seen what they describe as a 'stunning' correlation between a rise in ocean temperature over the past 40 years and pollution of the atmosphere.

The study destroys a central argument of global warming sceptics within the Bush administration - that climate change could be a natural phenomenon. It should convince George Bush to drop his objections to the Kyoto treaty on climate change, the scientists say.

Tim Barnett, a marine physicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego and a leading member of the team, said: 'We've got a serious problem. The debate is no longer: 'Is there a global warming signal?' The debate now is what are we going to do about it?......
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By Paul Rincon

An art expert says Hubble telescope images are a modern proxy for romantic 19th Century landscape paintings - carefully balancing art and reality. Hubble's raw images are carefully processed to produce the stunning colour representations that appear on the front pages of newspapers.

Elizabeth Kessler says the scientists who do this often make choices that suggest geological features on Earth. She presented her ideas at a major science conference in Washington DC....
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02.18.05

Scientists have detected a flash of light from across the Galaxy so powerful that it bounced off the Moon and lit up the Earth's upper atmosphere. The flash was brighter than anything ever detected from beyond our Solar System and lasted over a tenth of a second. NASA and European satellites and many radio telescopes detected the flash and its aftermath on December 27, 2004. Two science teams report about this event at a special press event today at NASA headquarters. A multitude of papers are planned for publication....
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Environmentalists say 15 tigers counted there last May have disappeared......

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By Hamish McRae

After seven years, huge international debate and the freezing out of George Bush's United States from the international community, the Kyoto Protocol is formally ratified today. The agreement, which seeks to limit the world's carbon emissions, was signed by 84 countries in Japan's former capital city in 1997. It bound the industrialised countries to cut emissions by 5 per cent from their 1990 level by 2012.

The treaty has been hailed as the key step forward in confronting the environmental challenges posed by climate change. But it remains controversial: is it a great leap forward in international co-operation or another example of empty political posturing? Or maybe, just maybe, something of both?..................
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Penn State's Alex Wolszczan, the discoverer in 1992 of the first planets ever found outside our solar system, has discovered with Caltech's Maciej Konacki the smallest planet yet detected, in that same far-away planetary system. Immersed in an extended cloud of ionized gas, the new planet orbits a rapidly spinning neutron star called a pulsar. The discovery, to be announced during a press conference in Aspen, Colorado, on 7 February, yields an astonishingly complete description of the pulsar planetary system and confirms that it is remarkably like a half-size version of our own solar system--even though the star these planets orbit is quite different from our Sun.....
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By JULIA REED

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FRENCH WOMEN DON'T GET FAT
By Mireille Guiliano.
263 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $22.
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When I was 15, I studied in France, at the University of Strasbourg, for six weeks. On weekdays, my fellow American students and I ate lunch in the school cafeteria and discovered the wonders of braised rabbit and coq au vin, followed always by an apricot tart or napoleon (my first ever!) at the nearby patisserie. On weekends we toured the country by train, fortified by bread and (real!) cheese, along with copious amounts of cheap red wine. Already weight-obsessed, I was sure I'd put on at least 10 pounds. But when I stepped off the plane, the jaws of my waiting parents and my best friend literally dropped. It turns out I'd lost 10 pounds -- I'm not sure I've looked as good since.

Mireille Guiliano had quite a different teenage experience abroad. As an 18-year-old from a small town in eastern France, she spent a year as an exchange student in the well-to-do Boston suburb of Weston, Mass., where she discovered the distinctly American joys of bagels, brownies and chocolate chip cookies and gained 20 pounds. When her own parents met her ocean liner in Le Havre, they were as stunned as mine were, but for a different reason -- her father told her she looked like a sack of potatoes. ''I could not have imagined anything more hurtful,'' she writes. ''And to this day the sting has not been topped.''

Never fear -- Guiliano's story has a happy ending. After a few miserable months during which she gains more weight, cries herself to sleep and hurries past mirrors clothed in shapeless flannel shifts, her mother brings in the family doctor, a k a ''Dr. Miracle.'' He detoxes her with leek broth for a weekend, teaches her to become a master of both her ''willpower'' and her ''pleasures,'' and supplies her with recipes, including one for apple tart without the dough. She learns to love walking, finds her ''equilibrium'' and goes on to become C.E.O. of Clicquot Inc. and a director of Champagne Veuve Clicquot. Most remarkably, despite the fact that she dines out 300 times a year and enjoys two- and three-course meals for lunch and dinner every day -- always accompanied by a glass of Champagne -- she has remained thin.....
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By KATIE HAFNER

FIRST, a confession. Since starting to write this article two hours ago, I have left my chair only once. But I have not been entirely present, either. Each time I have encountered a thorny sentence construction or a tough transition, I have heard the siren call of distraction.

Shouldn't I fiddle with my Netflix queue, perhaps, or click on the weekend weather forecast? And there must be a friend having a birthday who would love to receive an e-card right now. I have checked two e-mail accounts at least a dozen times each, and read eight messages. Only two were relevant to my task, but I responded right away to all of them. My sole act of self-discipline: both instant messaging accounts are turned off. For now.

This sorry litany is made only slightly less depressing when I remind myself that I have plenty of company. Humans specialize in distraction, especially when the task at hand requires intellectual heavy lifting. All the usual 'Is it lunchtime yet?' inner voices, and external interruptions like incoming phone calls, are alive and well.

But in the era of e-mail, instant messaging, Googling, e-commerce and iTunes, potential distractions while seated at a computer are not only ever-present but very enticing. Distracting oneself used to consist of sharpening a half-dozen pencils or lighting a cigarette. Today, there is a universe of diversions to buy, hear, watch and forward, which makes focusing on a task all the more challenging......
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By Richard Black
BBC environment correspondent, in Exeter


The risks from global warming are more serious than previously thought, a major climate conference has concluded. In its final report, the committee which organised the UK Met Office meeting said the impacts of climate change were already being felt.

The communiqu� held back from declaring precisely what was meant by a 'dangerous' level of warming. But, 'it has given us a clearer picture of what is expected,' said Environment Secretary Margaret Beckett.

The conference in Exeter, in southwest England, was called 'Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change'. It was announced by Prime Minister Tony Blair, and was intended to give a scientific context to Britain's efforts to make the climate issue a central feature of its Group of Eight (G8) and EU Presidencies this year.

Although the committee refrained from defining 'dangerous', it did emphasise the scale and nature of the warming threat it said was already apparent. 'The impacts of climate change are already being observed,' the communiqu� said. I think we have to keep temperatures below [2C], otherwise we risk really major changes Dr Bill Hare, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research 'Ecosystems are already showing the effects of climate change. Changes to polar ice and glaciers and rainfall regimes have already occurred'......
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Jared Diamond's compelling study, Collapse, asks why throughout history, whole societies suddenly disappear - and what it means for us today

Robin McKie
Sunday January 16, 2005

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive
by Jared Diamond
Allen Lane �20, pp576

In a remote corner of south west Greenland, a group of abandoned buildings stands at the head of a long, mountain-rimmed fjord. Many are made of deftly hewn stone; there are remains of barns, stores and a boathouse, and at its heart, the township's church still stands with intact doorways, niches and gables. Only its turf roof is missing.

This is Hvalsey, a Viking stronghold where, according to anthropologist Jared Diamond, medieval Scandinavian settlers 'wrote in Latin and Old Norse, wielded iron tools, herded farm animals, followed the latest European fashions in clothing - and finally vanished'.

Thus, those lovingly turned stones guard a grim secret, the fate of thousands of warrior-colonists who had made Greenland their home for almost 500 years but who were last heard of in 1410, when Thomas Olafsson, a ship's captain, brought news to Norway that a Greenlander called Kolgrim had just been burnt at the stake for witchcraft. After that, silence. The colony was forgotten until missionaries stumbled on Hvalsey's ruins in 1723.

The Black Death, attacks by pirates and even an invasion by the Skraelings - the Inuit - have since been blamed for the colony's destruction while more recent suggestions have centred on climatic fluctuations. 'It got too cold and they died,' as archaeologist Thomas McGovern succinctly put it. But the true cause, says Diamond, was far more complex and, ultimately, far more revealing than any single, convenient explanation. Yes, climatic deterioration probably helped destroy Norse Greenland. But the Vikings also damned themselves. 'The Inuit survived,' he points out. 'The Vikings' disappearance was not inevitable.......
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By NICHOLAS WADE

Published: February 1, 2005

Linguists studying a signing system that spontaneously developed in an isolated Bedouin village say they have captured a new language being generated from scratch. They believe its features may reflect the innate neural circuitry that governs the brain's faculty for language.

The language, known as Al Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, is used in a village of some 3,500 people in the Negev desert of Israel. They are descendants of a single founder, who arrived 200 years ago from Egypt and married a local woman. Two of the couple's five sons were deaf, as are about 150 members of the community today.....
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By LORRAINE KREAHLING

At a tattoo and piercing parlor on St. Mark's Place in Manhattan recently, Young-Cho, an experienced tattoo artist, applied a small winged horse to Mara Fallon's shoulder.

He dipped his buzzing instrument into a small plastic cup of blue ink and then appeared to draw with the electric needle on Ms. Fallon's shoulder. 'It feels like when you pull hairs out when you rip off a Band-Aid,' she said.................
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Tattoos and body piercings have become so common that they hardly attract notice. One recent study of 7,960 college students in Texas found that one in five had at least one tattoo or piercing of a body part other than the earlobe.

But health officials say they are increasingly worried about the health risks posed by such body modification practices, including physical disfigurement and bacterial and viral infections, and not only from needles that draw blood in potentially unsanitary conditions...
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February 1, 2005

By CORNELIA DEAN

A few years ago, I told Donald Kennedy, editor of the journal Science, that I wanted to write an essay for his publication. It would say, 'Anyone who thinks that sexism is no longer a problem in science has never been the first woman science editor of The New York Times.'

I never wrote the essay. But the continuing furor over Dr. Lawrence H. Summers's remarks on women and science reminds me why I thought of it.

For those who missed it, Dr. Summers, the president of Harvard, told a conference last month on women and science that people worried about the relative dearth of women in the upper ranks of science should consider the possibility that women simply cannot hack it, that their genes or the wiring of their brains somehow leave them less fit than men for math, and therefore for science.

Dr. Summers has since said clearly that he does not believe that girls are intellectually less able than boys. But maybe his original suggestion was right. If we ever figure out exactly what goes on inside the brain, or how our genes shape our abilities, we may find out that men and women do indeed differ in fundamental ways.

But there are other possibilities we should consider first. One of them is the damage done by the idea that there is something wrong about a girl or woman who is really good at math.

I first encountered this thinking as a seventh grader who was scarred for life when my class in an experimental state school for brainiacs was given a mathematics aptitude test. The results were posted and everyone found out I had scored several years ahead of the next brightest kid. A girl really good in math! What a freak! I resolved then and there on a career in journalism.....
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Evolution Takes a Back Seat in U.S. Classes

By CORNELIA DEAN

Dr. John Frandsen, a retired zoologist, was at a dinner for teachers in Birmingham, Ala., recently when he met a young woman who had just begun work as a biology teacher in a small school district in the state. Their conversation turned to evolution.

'She confided that she simply ignored evolution because she knew she'd get in trouble with the principal if word got about that she was teaching it,' he recalled. 'She told me other teachers were doing the same thing.'

Though the teaching of evolution makes the news when officials propose, as they did in Georgia, that evolution disclaimers be affixed to science textbooks, or that creationism be taught along with evolution in biology classes, stories like the one Dr. Frandsen tells are more common.

In districts around the country, even when evolution is in the curriculum it may not be in the classroom, according to researchers who follow the issue. Teaching guides and textbooks may meet the approval of biologists, but superintendents or principals discourage teachers from discussing it. Or teachers themselves avoid the topic, fearing protests from fundamentalists in their communities...
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