Sequence MY Genome. Now.

Its almost certainly a coincidence, given the authors' affiliations, but I did a double take when seeing this article published.

Snow Falling on Mars

I'd love to be able to write something cogent about the happenings on Capital Hill. But I'm just plain too frustrated. I'm frustrated that the vote today came down to petty politics of the worst sort. And I'm even more frustrated that NOBODY on the Hill has bothered to tell me just how the current plan is supposed to work, or what these so-called "alternatives" that have captured the minds of the Republican party are. If there's one thing that pisses me off more than anything as a voter, its that the politicos don't have the backbone to explain to me, uncertainties, warts, and all, what's doing on.

But I can't write that post. Because I'm angry. So instead, I've been watching clouds move on mars, and thinking of snow falling on another planet. Its a nice reminder of what we, as a people, can do. And that there are some really beautiful things out there.



Thanks, Tyler, for the link.

Life Before Roe

As a developmental biologist (albeit one working strictly with invertebrates), I spend a lot of time looking at developing embryos and trying to figure out, at both a philosophical and biological level, when the little egg in my microscope stops being an egg and starts being a little sea urchin/sea star/tunicate/worm/whatever. The consequences of these musings have relevance for debates about abortions in humans and that age-old question of when life begins. Someday I'll say something more about this. But what I rarely consider is the other half of the equation, namely what is it like for the parents who have to choose whether or not to allow an embryo to make that murky transition between ball of cells and a human life.

An essay today in the New York Times addresses that question, in not so many words, far better than I could have. I encourage you to have a look.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Images are an essential part of the scientific process. More so than words, and even when heavily doctored or taken selectively from dishes of otherwise abnormal samples (I mean, come on, WE know what they should look like), pictures form the foundation of monographs in natural history. Nowhere has this been more true than in marine biology and microbiology, where samples are often delicate and hard to ship to museums inland or, in the case of tiny things, can only be viewed by professional scientists with expensive microscopes and a lot of training in how to use them.

In the olde days, the obtainment of such images relied on the skills of technicians and researchers able to draw what they saw and transform those drawings into formats that could be printed for distribution in journals. Though cases of manipulation are known, for example Haeckel's drawings of early embryos, these hand-drawn images were remarkably good, and it's taken us decades (or centuries in some cases) to perfect cameras capable of recording what these early researchers saw in their scopes. Curating my image database recently, I came across a few of my old favorites that are worth showing here, both because they are beautiful and because they are an excellent reminder that some skills in science just aren't as common as they used to be.

Leeuwenhoek's first images of cells in slivers of cork bark were among the most transformative images in all of science, and remain among my favorites due both to the impact they had on how we think about biological organization (imagine biology class without cells) and because no matter how many times I've tried to recreate this image in lab, I can't get anything close to this good. My microscope costs $250,000. He made his microscope by hand.


Other favorites of mine, for reasons that will become apparent shortly, come from Mortensen's monographs on sea urchin larvae. Whenever I find a larvae I can't identify, or a feature that seems odd, I can almost without fail find out what I need to from his papers from the early 1900s. This one is his drawing of a several-week-old larvae from the sea urchin Tripneustes esculentus. I wish I could remember the website I finked this from. My apologies to you, webmeister, where ever you are.

And perhaps my favorite of all of the images from scientific days of yore are Haeckel's beautiful drawings of jellyfish, beautiful creatures and the inspiration for one of the best art-meets-science exhibits I have ever seen at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. This particular copy of Haeckle's image comes from Florian Raible at EMBL.

If you've been a reader of this blog for a while, you will no doubt have been impressed by the volume of lawyerly knowledge contributed by the other authors. I have no such knowledge. But I do have pretty pictures and proof, I hope, that there are indeed beautiful things in the intersticies of life.


A gaggle of larvae from the urchin Lytechinus variegatus viewed under polarized light to make the skeletons glow. No other manipulation of the image was performed.


A three day old pluteus larvae from Sphaerechinus granularis.


And a freaky-weird (but pretty) hybrid larvae resulting from crossing Sphaerechinus granularis and Paracentrotus lividus. Hopefully that's still legal to do by the time this goes live.

Whenever I find things tedious, frustrating, or just dump in my work, I look at these images and remember that tiny living things are really cool.

Sexual Selection is Fun

I'm not a usual promoter of cute online toys, and I've grown increasingly distrustful of online networking sites like Facebook that, as Andy pointed out, seemed designed to infantilze otherwise productive members of society. But this one's different, because it's educational. It's also pretty funny.

Courtesy of Ralph Haygood, I bring you Evarium on Facebook.

Evarium is a sexual selection simulator, bringing to to view one of the more interesting, and misunderstood, of the mechanisms originally proposed by Darwin for explaining the incredible diversity of life we see all around us, and a pretty good demonstration of the fact that God need not have an inordinate fondness for pretty colored, drag-prone Quetzals, so long as somewhere there is a female Quetzal that finds those feathers just irresistible.

Though we think about adaptation as a product of post-Darwinian thought, the idea of adaptation long pre-dates Darwin, as evidenced by the writings of thinkers like Aristotle, William Paley, Darwin's own grandfather Erasmus Darwin , and Empedocles, my favorite and most forgotten (and most spectacularly wrong) evolutionary theorist.

All of these thinkers pointed out that, when you look at the world around us, organisms seem to be remarkably well suited to the tasks they do in life. But there are some obvious, and often beautiful, exceptions to this rule, such as the tail feathers of the peacock or the elaborate antlers of some deer, that seem so over the top that you have to wonder why peacocks aren't all eaten on the spot by hungry lions (or whatever). I can tell you from personal experience that they are not hard to catch, are terrible fliers, and are very, very tasty in a stew (thank you, Chinese field assistants for that culinary adventure).

The answer, while it may seem obvious to us now, was one of Darwin's great coups: Only in the very long-run is the survival of a trait a function of the survival of a species. As long as your pretty feathers on average net you more offspring (your sexy factor minus your eaten-by-lion factor) than the other birds in the single's bar (called a "lek" by biologists), your species is going to see a lot more long tails in the future.

What wasn't appreciated even by Darwin, who considered sexual selection to be an important, but still relatively minor contributor to organismal diversity, is just how much organismal change can be driven by sexual selection alone. Ralph's simulator makes this clear in a way that is easy to understand, fun to play with, and a lot more attractive on your profile page than that stupid aquarium. I encourage you all to take a look (and while you're at it, take a gander at the Random Questions section of the Evarium page).





I should also note that every time you add this, just a little more money from the free market goes to science, a field that just keeps losing in the oh-so-important battle in our government to make cooler ways of blowing people up.

The 4 Steps of Irresponsible Science Reporting

It's easy to forget during an election year, but mass media doesn't limit its oversimplifications and distortions to political news. Media outlets are just as good at improperly framing science news as they are at skewing political news. Today's top science story provides a great example of their ability to confuse.

Step 1: Something Science-y Happens.
The first step in distorting science news is to report on something that is interesting to people who have even a passing curiosity regarding the world around them. Such an event happened on Wednesday morning.

At 2:12 am EDT on Wednesday, the effects of a star explosion arrived at our planet. The visible effects of the explosion could be seen by the naked eye for about a minute. This celestial event was made all the more exceptional due to the astonishing distance between the Earth and the star: More than 7 billion light years — about halfway across the universe.

Normally, naked eye visibility is limited to about 1500-2000 stars. The most distant object or structure generally visible to the naked eye is the Triangulum Galaxy, about 3 million light years away (1/2500^th of the distance to Wednesday's explosion). Being able to see something more than 7 billion light years away? That's cool. Let's write a story.

Step 2: A Story is Written.
Never-happened-before astronomy stories make for good sound bite-length stories, so it's unsurprising that major news websites all featured this story during the week. The NY Times pointed out in its story that this explosion was a gamma ray burst, which "might mark the implosion of a massive star into a black hole, or the collision of a pair of dense neutron stars." CNN.com left the gamma ray details of its story, noting that the story involved an "aging star."

Step 3: A Thoughtless Reader Poll is Created.
It's someone's job at CNN.com to create reader polls on the basis of the stories of the day. As minor political controversies of this election season have illustrated, the raison d'être of CNN.com's online reader polls appears to be to inflame reader opinion and heighten their interest in the news — even if that means leading them astray.

Before looking at the CNN.com poll below, let's remember what this story is about. According to the NY Times, we're talking about "the implosion of a massive star into a black hole, or the collision of a pair of dense neutron stars." With that in mind, here's the CNN.com Quickvote reader poll:Of course, it's all but a truism that our planet's eventual fate is to be consumed by our dying star. 900 million years from now, our sun's hydrogen will be on its way to depletion. The resulting expansion of our star into a red giant will make our planet inhospitable. Billions of years later, the sun will expand enough to consume the Earth — but we certainly won't be around to complain.

Current supernovae models indicate that our sun is nowhere near massive enough to explode in a supernova. Even less likely is that our star could experience the kind of core collapse supernova that may be the cause of the massive gamma ray burst in the article.

Step 4: Poll Participants Leave More Misinformed Than They Came.
As of this morning, 72% of Quickvote respondents think it's possible that our star will explode and vaporize our planet.
Of course, some of the "yes" folks are those who know something about our star's life cycle and our planet's eventual demise. However, others of these folks are just babes in the woods, alarmed that our star might explode at any moment — just like that star in the article!

An appropriate follow-on to this poll would be a story like What Is Our Government Doing to Prevent the Sun From Exploding? They could even accept responses from readers. I might propose a system of gigantic belts that would prevent the Sun from expanding. No, wait! How about a giant fire extinguisher so we could partially hose down the Sun, should it get too hot?!

(If you like curmudgeon-y blog posts complaining about CNN.com's absurd astronomy coverage, you might enjoy this old Sauntering post, where we look at the some of the ridiculous images that CNN.com pairs with any story about a potential meteor/asteroid/comet impact.)

The Best Invertebrate Biology Project Ever.

I study sea urchins. This is not the most exciting model system, I admit. But every once in a while someone working with urchins really does something to push back the frontiers of science. I present to you, dear readers, the best of urchin biology.

Things we don't know about climate change.

(Editor's Note: Garfield's post below is part of Sauntering's participation in Blog Action Day, where 15,000 blogs have agreed to address climate change on October 15, 2007.)

With the award of the Nobel Prize to Al Gore and the IPCC, global climate change has officially hit the big time. It's been trendy for a long time, but awarding the Peace Prize signifies an important recognition on the part of the international community: Global climate change isn't just an effect on the planet, its an effect on how human beings interact with one another.

The reason that global climate change will have such an impact on human interactions isn't because its going to get warmer. Warmer conditions would certainly mean trouble for some, the Maldives most notably, but probably a boon for others as warmer climates mean longer growing seasons and a lower dependence on heating oils. Some win, some lose. Nothing new about that.

What's makes climate change a problem is that so many of the consequences are just so uncertain, and human beings have never dealt well with uncertainties. Here are the facts as we know them.

1) We are dumping more carbon dioxide into the air than the earth has seen since the Bartonian, when sea levels were 100 feet taller and the planet was filled with crazy looking mammals (the later is probably unrelated).

2) The mean global temperature is increasing. We moved up 0.6 degrees Celsius in the last century, and, on average, its just going to keep getting hotter.

3) The world is a terribly complicated place, and we have just about no idea what these changes will mean for our planet. But whatever these changes are, we'd better get used to them, because even if we were all to give up driving right now, there's a general consensus that it will take decades for our planet to process the current glut of gasses in the air.

This uncertainty, I think, is the real problem we're facing. If we knew it was going to get warmer by .06 degrees every decade from here on out, we could plan. As the oceans rise, people would move away from the coast. Farms would move ever northward (or southward if you live down there), and there would be massive-scale efforts to secure the residents of every major city an air conditioner to ward off the rash of heat-related deaths we've seen the past few summers. Or at least this is how it would go in rich countries. Poor countries would be sort of screwed, but I digress. That's someone else’s problem and we have a solution - fences to keep out the flood of migrants...and you'd better believe there would be a flood of migrants as crops to the south begin to fail.

The problem is that we don't know that this is going to happen, at least not everywhere. One of the most surprising findings from both models and actual observations is that some areas may actually get cooler. The gulf stream, that magical river of water that keeps merry old England from feeling the wrath of old man winter like Siberia (which lies on the same latitude) has a real chance of going away if the Artic ice melts, which would pretty much put an end holidays at the beach for most of Western Europe. In the Antarctic, paradoxically, there appear to be areas that are getting cooler, the result, ironically, of the gigantic lack of an important greenhouse gas called "Ozone" right above Antarctica.

The uncertainties seep even into things we feel pretty sure of. One thing that seems certain is that levels of C02 are rising. But it isn't happening as fast as we might expect. The reason is that oceans and plants turn out to be remarkably good at sequestering carbon, at least for now. But they aren't doing it for free. Oceans are able to absorb carbon dioxide through a reaction involving the Carbonate buffer, but at the cost of making the oceans more acidic. This, in turn, is known to affect the ability of organisms to use calcium for building shells and skeletons, leaving us with a lot of sad barnacles, sea urchins, corals, foraminiferans, and coccolithophorids. Never heard of these last two? That's too bad, for you see it is they are producing a fair amount of the oxygen you breath every day. Kind of complex, isn't it? And this is for a system we know a lot about. What don't we know? Pretty much all the rest.

Sadly, we aren't likely to get a better handle on these changes before its too late. Outside of military efforts, less is being spent on scientific research in this country than last year....or the year before...or the year before..... Changes are coming. We'd better start getting used to living with uncertainty.

Science does it again!

Every once in a while we stumble across a paper that brings the office to a standstill for a while, a paper the epitomizes what good science is all about.

This week's wonder comes to us from Japan, no stranger to unusual technological achievements.

Yes, we can now continue to eat species long after we've eaten them down from a stable, reproductively viable population size.

Science brings you Inter-species Sperm Transfer.


Awesome.

What Passes for Truth is Stranger than Fiction

For some folks, Wikipedia (the online resource deceiving college students everywhere) leaves something to be desired. The creators of Conservapedia created their site as "a much-needed alternative to Wikipedia, which is increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American."

This is not a parody site. Parody is entirely unnecessary. I submit for your approval the Conservapedia's entry for "unicorn."

As an aid to future historians, looking to understand the odd things that "conservative" came to represent during the 00's, here's "unicorn" as it stood on the morning of 2/24/07:


"Great Job on the Unicorn page!" Conservapedia contributor PhilipB writes to Rich P, the primary author of this scholarly contribution. Great job indeed.

Hat tip to Sadly, No!

Male & Female & Somewhere In Between

Today, Sauntering Resident Scientist Garfield reports from the field about males, females, and the space between the two:

Unless you have been living in a cave, you’ve almost certainly been involved in a water-cooler discussion this past month about the Indian runner, Santhi Soundarajan, who was stripped of her silver medal in the Asian Games after failing a gender test.

I was told about this story during the Department Christmas Party about 45 minutes after I decided that the free bar was not receiving enough attention from the invertebrate zoology wing and that I was the only one capable of remedying this situation. For those dissatisfied with my treatment of this issue in the next few paragraphs, I refer you to the preceding sentence.

My first thoughts upon hearing this story were:

1. How hard can it be to determine gender? Did this really require a team of specialists?
2. What in the world did they mean when they said she had “abnormal chromosomes” and “more Y chromosomes than allowed?”

The plant people, who decidedly were making good use of the free bar, and I came up with the following observations which, fortunately for this blog, were recorded on a cocktail napkin because I thought it would make for an interesting letter to our irritatingly conservative student paper.

Topic One: Gender is a complicated issue.

Actually, complicated doesn’t cut it. Gender is a mind-boggling complex set of issues that are often related to, but can be analyzed quite independently of, what sorts of gametes you produce and your sexual orientation. The best treatment of this topic, from a biological perspective, that I am aware of is Joan Roughgarden’s Evolution’s Rainbow, which is nicely reviewed here.

In her book, Roughgarden, who in addition to being a transgendered individual is one of Biology’s great synthesizers of theoretical and empirical approaches to evolution and ecology, catalogs the vast array of gender roles that occur in natural populations. While gametes tend to come in two flavors (Big/Egg and Little/Sperm), individuals can change sex during the course of their lifetimes and, even in cases in which sex remains constant over time, can play many, many more roles in the production of offspring than the binary distinctions “male” and “female” can effectively capture. If I’m ever invited back to post again, I’ll rant about the many sad ways in which failing to understand that gender is anything but a binary classifier have ruined lives. In the mean time, I invite you to read about the Bonobos, our sex-crazed relatives whose embrace of complicated gender roles have lead to a vastly more peaceful existence than that experienced by rest of the Chimpanzee world, in which the usual mode of conflict resolution involves beating your neighbor to death if he looks askance at your favorite female. If I die and get to come back as anything interesting, I’m coming back as a Bonobo. No pun intended.

As fascinating and complicated as the topic of gender is, it is presumably not what the officials were concerned with when they decided that Soundarajan was too man to be woman. What they were concerned with is the observation that while gender and sexuality come in many flavors, a great deal of the variation between humans can be effectively captured by two labels, “male” and “female,” and that individuals to whom these labels apply tend to perform differently in sporting events.

The primary culprit for this dimorphism of concern to sports enthusiasts is Testosterone, that most wonderful of hormones that builds larger muscles and bones, produces less hair on your head and more everywhere else, poisons the minds of 15-24 year-old males the world over, and would presumably give an unfair advantage to any female athlete producing (or injecting) unnatural levels of this hormone. This brings us to topic two.

Topic Two: There’s more to a being a man than a Y chromosome.

From my perspective, the line “The official also said the test revealed more Y chromosomes than allowed” sums up the most interesting aspect of the case. If having a Y chromosome is the biological definition of male-ness, as it was for many years for the International Olympic Committee, how can one have more Y-chromosomes than allowed? Isn’t one enough? The process of sex determination is, like gender, a complicated thing. While the end result of the process is usually binary, there’s a lot of ways to get intermediate results.

Human embryos default female. That’s right, each XY male out there started out on the road to being female but was halted in the process by an influx of testosterone released when genes encoded by the SRY region of the Y chromosome cued your nascent gonads to start pumping the stuff out. Of course hormones other than testosterone play a causal role in the development of sexual traits. But baring the activity of testosterone, your developing body would default to produce the hormones that trigger cells to build female structures, not male.
At each step along this process of differentiation, processes can go awry, and cells can fail to respond appropriately to the hormones all around them, resulting in a developing embryo with sexual characteristics both male and female. At the department Christmas party, we came up with the following list of common ways of generating intersex individuals. I list them here with the caveat that none of us are human endocrinologists and that its not a complete list. Furthermore, it doesn’t acknowledge the fact that even when nothing “goes wrong” with the sex determination system, there’s more of a gradient between male and female structures than is generally acknowledged.

Androgen insensitivity: The Jamie Lee Curtis Syndrome
I don’t know if its true or not, but I grew up with the rumor that Jamie Lee Curtis is, in fact, biologically male, but has a mutation in the receptor for testosterone that made her developing body insensitive to the effects of testosterone and other androgens. I don’t know if this is true or not for Curtis, but the phenomenon is well documented and has effects ranging from male sterility to the production of females normal in almost every regard, but lacking a uterus and, obviously, the ability to bear children. If I had to guess, I’d put my money on some variation of this.

Klinefelter Syndrome
In something 1 in 500 male babies, an early nondisjunction event leads to cells containing XXY instead of the usual XY or XX. This is probably not viable contender here, because Kleinfelter’s individuals are pretty obviously male. But people keep asking me about this, so I put it in. Related is Turner Syndrome, in which females have only a single X chromosome (XO rather than XX or XY). While these individuals have reduced female sex characteristics, they are pretty clearly female, and are unlikely to be running track given the other symptoms that come along with having only a single sex chromosome.

Other types of chromosomal mosaicism
It does happen. Every so often you get individuals containing both XY and XX containing cells, but the relevance of this to the case in question is far from clear. In most cases, humans with unusual chromosome counts are fairly abnormal, and would probably not be winning silver medals in track events. Furthermore, humans, unlike butterflies, show secondary sexual characteristics as a result of hormonal influences. Even if some cells were XY, in a body with female gonads and sex hormones, they’d act female, and vice versa.

Swyer Sundrome
This label applies to a suit of genetic abnormalities, usually involving mutations to the SRY region of the Y-chromosome, and often resulting in an inability to synthesize testosterone, that affect the process of differentiation from female to male


What strikes me is that in each of the above cases, having a Y-chromosome in a woman has little effect on a woman’s physiology other than adversely affecting her ability to have children. That’s because in most cases, biological females with Y-chromosomes are either unable to produce or are unable to respond to male sex hormones, and as a result do not “enjoy” the athletic enhancements associated with having high levels of testosterone. For individuals with ambiguous genitalia, this may not apply. The effects of androgens may be in full effect. But in these cases, I’d argue it doesn’t matter as much to which gender individuals have been assigned or adopted. What matters is the extent to which androgens like testosterone have affected muscle production and physiology, and suggests to me that if the world’s sports authorities were really concerned with equity in sports, they’d do better paying attention to Chinese women swimmers with 5 o’clock shadows than bothering this poor woman.

Garfield really is a scientist and reports to you occasionally from the Biology Department of a fine research institution dedicated to the discovery and creation of sanctified knowledge.

Non-Newtonian Fluid Meets Spanish TV

Some TV hosts walk on water (+ corn starch) in a 4' deep tub of fluid where the viscosity changes with the strain applied against the surface. Stabbing the surface with force causes it to behave like a solid. More gentle treatment leads it to behave like a liquid.


Wikipedia: Non-Newtonian Fluid

Nukequake

Here's the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program page on the 4.2 earthquake caused by the apparent North Korean nuclear test.

2006 CEI "Energy" Commercial = 1964 LBJ "Daisy" Commercial

So a Big Oil astroturfing group has started a CO₂ is Great promotional campaign.

Colin (who has an absolutely amazing eye for cross-cultural similarity) notes that one of the commercials is just a rehashing of LBJ's famous "Daisy" commercial for the 1964 Presidential Election.



Unfortunately, though, it's the inverse of the "Daisy" commercial. Rather than spook us into action, the goal of the commercial is to lull you into complacency.

Einstein Would Be So Happy & Proud

Bush has decided to stop referring to current US military operations as the War on Tara, instead opting for the moniker World War III.

Oh, yeah. That's much better.

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

Albert Einstein, in a letter to President Harry S. Truman

Clinton Wanted a Definition of Is. Bush Wants a Definition of Wetland.

During his first campaign, President Bush's environmental platform included a policy of no net loss of wetlands, a policy he retreated from in his 2004 campaign.

On March 30, Interior Secretary Gail Norton announced a 715,300 acre increase in wetland areas since 1997. Unfortunately for Secretary Norton, the Fish and Wildlife Service announced the loss of 523,500 acres of natural wetlands during the same period ...at the same conference. (Awwwkwwward)

The difference between the two sets of numbers? Secretary Norton "admitted much of that gain has been in artificially created ponds, such as golf course water hazards and farm impoundments."

You Can ______ 20% of the People 20% of the Time

In the most recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, 47 percent of voters "strongly" disapproved of Bush's job performance, a deeply foreboding number for GOP'ers seeking election this fall. In this same poll, 20 percent of respondents said they "strongly approve" of the job President Bush is doing.

When I see the latter number, I find myself amazed at the resilience of these people. With all that President Bush has done for them, 20% still strongly approve of him.

What are some other things that roughly 20% of Americans believe in or practice?

22% of adults believe "human beings evolved from earlier species"
     (Harris, 7/6/05)

23% of surveyed Americans don't identify themselves as Christian
     (ARIS, 2001)

26% of "born again" people support marijuana reform & legalization
     (Zogby, 3/24/06)

22% think doctors should always try to save a patient's life
     (Pew, 1/5/06)

22% smoke
     (Harris, 3/9/06)

21% believe in reincarnation
     (Harris, 12/14/05)

21% believe immigation is a very big problem in their community
20% believe immigation is a moderately big problem " "
22% believe immigation is a small problem " "
     (Pew, 3/30/06)

28% strongly oppose gay marriage
     (Pew, 3/22/06)

How Do You Know When It's a Big Winter Storm?

...when it has an eye. Plus, until today, I'd never even heard of a snowstorm accompanied by thunder and lightning.



Don't worry, though. It's not all suffering. Maggie, Molly, and Mel like it just fine.

Bush v. Science, Round 37: George Carlton Deutsch III

After it became clear that he had been less than truthful on his résumé, George C. Deutsch III resigned his post at NASA yesterday, where he had taken it upon himself to see that NASA's online references to the "Big Bang" were amended to read the "Theory of the Big Bang."

His rationale for the change? "It is not NASA's place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator," moreover, he explained to one NASA employee that the Big Bang "not proven fact; it is opinion."

The 24-year old Mr. Deutsch's credentials for his post as a writer and editor in NASA's public affairs office in Washington? He worked the Bush/Cheney reelection war room in 2004 (It turns out he does not, in fact, have a Bachelor of Arts in journalism, Class of 2003, Texas A&M — hence the resignation.)

Of course, Mr. Deutsch's choice of preface for "Big Bang" is technically correct, but for profoundly incorrect reasons. I love the way Josh Marshall sums up the problem:

(The Big Bang is) not just some idea someone thought up which stands on an equal footing with any other idea anyone else could cook up. Among cosmologists today, it's the dominant theory about how the universe began. It is based on various theoretical work (which I won't try to understand or explain) and supported by a lot of astrophysical data.

The theory could turn out to be wrong. And it will almost certainly end up being revised in one or more ways. But it is not 'opinion'.

It's worth taking note of the word choice because it captures the mix of obscurantism and relativism which has characterized all the Bush administration's attitude about science and, really, pretty much all empirically based knowledge...

The rub here is the failure to see that knowledge which has been subjected to and survived – indeed been strengthened by – empirical and theoretical scrutiny stands on a higher footing than information that hasn't. This isn't pedantry. Nor is this some obscure alcove in the science curriculum.

This mindset – obscurantism and relativism duking it out to be of most use in the pursuit of power – suffuses the Bush administration: a lack of respect for facts and the set of tools we use to discern factual information from chatter and bombast.

Islam in Space

I love the internet.

The second of these questions occurred to me on the subway last night (I was listening to an excellent Hajj-related podcast from the BBC archive). Thanks to the indescribeable wonder that is the internet, I have at least one answer to my question.

The questions:

1. In the event of deep space travel, in which direction should a Muslim pray?
2. If the event of a Muslim living her entire life in outer space, is she required to perform the Hajj (traditional one-in-a-lifetime visit to Mecca & Medina)?
3. For a Muslim living in a distant solar system, how is Ramadan determined?

These are the questions. For the answers, I refer you to islamweb.net's Fatwa Center.