science

Electronic Arts' much-hyped evolutionary computer game, Spore, hit U.S. stores last weekend.

In the first 30 seconds of Spore, the game's creators answer the question of how life began: an asteroid crashes into a planet and cracks open to reveal a googly-eyed little microbe. The microbe is you. You guide your species through evolution, from a cell swimming in aqueous murk to a space-faring civilization. You design the creatures, and later the buildings and vehicles that they control. As you advance in the game, you can stretch and shape your creature's spine, and add arms, legs, spikes, and wings. Spore then animates your creation and gives it a gait, a voice, emotions, and enough cunning to attack rivals or ally with them. The game contains the entire history and future of a universe created by you, the player -- and because it lets you explore the cosmos forever, its limits are the player's own imagination.

With four days left before opening ceremonies, China's much-hyped weather modification program shows no sign of having improved the weather.

Judging by James Fallows's latest photos, Beijing's skies are the color of rice water, and they aren't trending in the direction of clarity. The public pronouncements of the weather-bureau spokesmen, once bold and Promethean, are now humbler: "The Beijing Olympic weather center will issue monitoring and weather warning and will update the weather information on a rolling basis," said Wang Jiangjie, who just last January boasted of having a team of weather modifiers to clean up the skies for the Games. Her colleagues allude vaguely to techniques that are supposedly still up the Chinese meteorological sleeve, but even they note that these techniques are "only on the stage of experimentation."

Jane Mayer's new book alleges the cooperation of the eminent psychologist Martin Seligman in government programs later involved in the torture of detainees.

In 2002, Seligman spent three hours at Naval Base San Diego, lecturing on torture and interrogation. But his lectures, he protests, were flipped on their head: he told the group of military men and women how to resist torture and interrogation by an unscrupulous foe. According to Mayer, the military used his insights to learn to induce in victims a condition of "learned helplessness" -- a type of forlorn passivity that Seligman first observed in randomly electrocuted dogs 40 years ago. He hasn't collaborated with that group since the lecture, he says, and he strongly condemns torture. "My career has been devoted to finding out how to overcome learned helplessness, not how to produce it."

Novelist Thomas M. Disch killed himself in his New York apartment on July 5.

Endzone, Disch's blog, was one of the Web's cheeriest and one of its darkest. It derived its cheer from a reckless, desperate wit, often expressed by ridiculing, lampooning, or harassing enemies and professional associates who had crossed him. The ancient blogger wisdom about counting to a thousand before posting a personal attack seemed not to have reached him, and the effect was amusing and bracing. When an editor at FSG rejected an introduction he had written to the poems of Allen Tate, Disch responded with a short verse-cycle, childish and pissy, denouncing the editor, quite unfairly, by name. (Disch could write well about other people's poetry, but he was an eccentric choice for a Tate introduction.)

A Nuclear Family Vacation is published by Bloomsbury.

The opening scene of the newest Indiana Jones film is set in Nevada in 1957, possibly during Operation Plumbbob, an actual nuclear-test series in which the U.S. measured the response of humans and physical structures to nuclear blasts. Satellite images give a hint of what's left: a pockmarked brown landscape of craters and broken buildings. There are smashed reinforced-concrete domes, shattered windows, as well as iron rails and bridges that the heat and explosion have twisted. It looks, I am told, like a place where Superman (or perhaps Uri Geller) had given himself over to a fit of rage.

The Department of Energy is preparing to submit an application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license to store radioactive waste in Yucca Mountain, Nevada, under a plan endorsed by John McCain.

The word "mountain" has lovely connotations: icy streams, conifer forests, unblemished views of a snowy sierra, yodeling competitions. (OK, so not they're not all lovely.) Alas for Yucca Mountain, these images of alpine sweetness do not apply to it at all. If Yucca Mountain had a name that conveyed just how baking-hot, barren, forlorn, and lifeless it is -- perhaps "Yucca Death Vault" would do it justice -- more people might see the logic in the government's plan, now nearly thirty years old, to use it to store the nation's radioactive garbage. The mountain is dry, geologically appropriate, and far enough from human settlements to keep it secure in case of accident or attack. Nevadans and anti-nuke activists object and say that the risk of leaks, of terrorist attacks, and of unforeseen catastrophes is too great to allow Yucca Mountain to accept the waste. But the waste has to go somewhere, and Yucca Mountain is the right spot.

New research into the ancient climate of the Sahara shows that the region went from lush and wet to dry and desolate within a few thousand years.

The classic evidence for a wet Sahara comes from the Tassili frescoes, a series of fifty Algerian cave paintings that depict humans living with crocodiles, buffalo, giraffes, and other animals that do not thrive in arid climates. Ten thousand years ago, it appears, our ancestors could have grown rice in the Sahara, or spent their weekends Jet-Skiing at their North African lake-houses. For millennia, they had no reason to fear their water running out, or their settlements' being reclaimed by desert sands, or of water running out. What the new reports about this bizarre climatological period don't much emphasize, though, is that the Sahara was wet during a period of comparative global heat, and that it became parched only as the planet chilled.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) announced a $1-million prize for whoever comes up with a commercially viable way to produce in vitro meat by 2012.

PETA's million-dollar prize is an occasion for irony -- delicious or repulsive, depending on one's perspective. About a decade ago, an urban legend claimed that the government had barred Kentucky Fried Chicken from calling its food "chicken," because it used genetically modified Frankenbirds, brainless and grown in jars, that bore no resemblance to chicken or poultry of any kind. That supposedly explained the rebranding of Kentucky Fried Chicken as "KFC" -- a government demand for truth in advertising. Needless to say, this idiotic myth contained not even a grain of truth. KFC continued to use real chickens, and to abuse them wantonly in the production process. PETA noticed and launched a campaign, "Kentucky Fried Cruelty," to draw attention to KFC's brutal methods. Now PETA's prize suggests the organization wishes the urban legend had been true from the start. One looks forward to clever PETA graphics featuring Colonel Sanders in a lab-coat, instead of bloodstained and sporting devil-horns.

George W. Bush sets new goals for U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions.

With a few choice puffs of presidential CO2 in the Rose Garden yesterday afternoon, President Bush extinguished any hopes that environmentalists may have had for a meaningful shift in his climate change policies. The president committed the United States to stopping the growth of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2025. A decade ago, the United States signed the Kyoto Protocol, agreeing to cut its greenhouse gas emissions to 7 percent below 1990 levels between 2008-2012. You don't need a Harvard MBA to recognize that, compared with the second goal, the first is a walk in the park. Our greenhouse-gas emissions in 2006, for example, were about 15 percent higher than in 1990.

The Journal of Ornithology published a paper that illuminates the "vagrant bird" effect -- what happens when migratory birds go off-course.

The splendid Effect Measure, a relentless tracker of avian influenza news, explains the paper's relevance to public health. If diseases are human-borne, we have to watch human movement patterns (spraying planes before they touch down in New Zealand, vaccinating pilgrims before they join the scrums in Mecca); if they are bird-borne, we have to figure out where these ailing avians are going, and why. The birds in question here are leaf-warblers and thrushes who start off in Siberia and head toward South Asia. Some end up confused and end up in Europe, instead, where they die. The paper suggests that a longtime hypothesis -- that birds end up in the wrong place because they get blown off-course -- isn't right. According to decades of reports by birdwatchers across Europe, the fat birds go off-course just as regularly as the skinny ones (who would presumably be more affected by winds). The paper says the lost birds have a genetically warped sense of direction: it tells them how far to go, but steers them wrong.

NASA's Cassini probe found pools of liquid water -- the key ingredient for the formation of life -- on Enceladus, a moon of Saturn.

Spewing out of Enceladus's south pole is a geyser, a fizzling spray of what looks like ice-crystals ejected from a big liquid reservoir. The presence of liquid water indicates a heat source (it's 330 degrees below zero on most of Enceladus's surface, so something must be heating the area), as well as the possibility that life exists in a form we might recognize. As far as scientists can tell, the water has been there for hundreds of millions of years, more than enough time to give the warm primordial slurry a chance to breed some microbes, and possibly more complex life. Is the geyser spraying freeze-dried fish into orbit around Enceladus?

A suit filed in District Court in Hawaii demands that the U.S. halt construction of the Large Hadron Collider (L.H.C.), the $8-billion particle accelerator on the Franco-Swiss border, on the grounds that it could cause the destruction of the earth, the solar system, or the universe.

The L.H.C. could reveal the nature of matter and confirm physicists' best guesses about the validity of string theory. These would be advances comparable to Einstein's or Newton's -- but they are possibilities only because we do not know what will happen when we switch the contraption on. Scientists protest that the probability of their experiments' causing the end of the universe is astronomically low, and they are telling the truth. But tinkering with the unknown is what experimental science is all about, and even the scientists must admit that there is a chance of doomsday (and, indeed, a chance of many other things) in any project like this.

An Oregon man (recognized as male, anyway, by the law, his friends, and his wife) is pregnant.

More arresting than Thomas Beatie's words, published in The Advocate this month, are the photos of his stubbly face and swollen belly, now in its second trimester. Transexualism is documented and usually accepted, more or less, in many cultures; consider the waria in Indonesia, the mustarjil in Iraq, the mahu in Tahiti, the katoy on Soi Cowboy. But cases like these will challenge even the sensibilities that have gotten used to the occasional mismatch between anatomy and gender. It's one thing for a man to wear a dress, and another for him to wear a maternity dress.

Everyday products, from baby-bottles to beer, contain particles manipulated by unregulated and potentially dangerous nanotechnology, according to a new report by Friends of the Earth.

The report, "Out of the Laboratory and On To Our Plates," identifies 104 products -- like Miller beer brands, Baby Dream's "Nano Silver" milk bottle, and Samsung refrigerators -- with particles artificially manipulated at the atomic level. Nanoparticles are more chemically reactive than their larger counterparts, can be more toxic to human cells, and can more easily invade our tissues and organs. The authors advocate a moratorium until governments test their safety -- and, perhaps more critically, require companies to label products that contain them. MORE

Arthur C. Clarke, the celebrated science fiction novelist, died earlier today.

Clarke was best known for anticipating the advent of telecommunication satellites and for writing 2001: A Space Odyssey, later adapted by Stanley Kubrick into one of the most innovative and well-regarded films of all time. But more than that, Clarke was a dissenter, a cosmopolitan visionary who saw conventional patriotism and religious belief as a dangerous plague; only by doing away with both, he ofted argued, could humanity reach its full potential.

On February 29, a leading South Korean research university announced it had suspended the author of two headline-generating papers for fabricating his data.

Tae Kook Kim's research, which appeared in Nature Chemical Biology and Science in 2005 and 2006, offered alluring possibilities for breakthroughs in fighting cancer and slowing (or even reversing) aging. His suspension for dishonesty follows several embarrassing retractions in other hyped research areas -- the most notable involving another South Korean scientist, Woo Suk Hwang, who falsely claimed to have created human stem-cells via cloning. (Ironically, newspapers reporting on Kim's ostensible accomplishments quoted Kim as saying he aspired to be "another Hwang Woo Suk.") MORE

In the current issue of Microbiologist, researchers report that tea could be an antidote to anthrax.

Anthrax, scourge of tabloid staffers, has infected exactly one person in the U.S. during the last five years -- a New York musician who contracted it from the raw African animal skins he used to make drums. Those of us who procure our hides from reputable sources face no danger. But if anthrax does break out, commonly consumed plants (slightly modified) do seem to be one of our best defenses. A few years ago, researchers rejiggered the genomes of tobacco cells to produce anthrax antigens, a first step toward making a safer vaccine. And now it appears that Earl Grey, in addition to his supposed aphrodisiac effects, could fight off the bacillus, without any modification at all. MORE

The Las Vegas police found ricin, a chemical weapons agent, in a Las Vegas hotel room rented by Roger Von Bergendorff, a 57-year-old computer graphics artist and pet enthusiast.

Extracting ricin -- so potent that a single drop could kill you and your whole family -- isn't difficult, which is why a man with obvious social handicaps and no relevant training apparently succeeded in producing enough to poison himself half to death. Governments have made breathless claims about Al Qaeda's desire to weaponize the chemical, and the dubious success of this poor man's homebrew will stoke the fears of the stokeable. MORE

A new study from the University of Hull says that SSRIs, the most commonly prescribed anti-depressants, do no better than sugar-pills at alleviating depression.

Don't hurl the Zoloft into the trash just yet. Though headlines trumpeted the paper as shocking news, in fact one of its authors published a study ten years ago showing the same results. The most interesting finding, in fact, is that for the seriously depressed, the drugs do have some effect. Moreover, critics have pointed to problems with the results of the study, which was really a "meta-study" that analyzed previous research, including unpublished work. Most notably, the studies it analyzed were often short (six weeks or less, which is about how long anti-depressants typically take to work). MORE

Princeton researchers published a paper describing a devastating attack on standard encryption -- including encryption used to secure government secrets.

Data remain safe, most of the time.  The attacker needs access to the computer minutes after the user has walked away, and if he arrives later the data stay locked.  If the user guards the computer jealously, by clutching it close to the chest, or, as Atlantic employees with company-issued laptops are required to do, entrusting it during nights and weekends to a Gurkha security team, then even the geeks of Princeton can't get in.

One line from John Markham's informative NYT article stood out.  "The team [...] did not know if such an attack capability would compromise government computer information, because details of how classified computer data is protected are not publicly available."  Many readers will take this statement as a sign of government computers' security.

Security experts would suggest the opposite conclusion: vulnerabilities reveal themselves only when many eyes are looking for them.  It took so long to find this one because thousands of computer scientists and engineers all over the world have over the years collaborated to make encryption stronger.  The government's methods, if they are different, will have had none of the same scrutiny.  And other than a squad of Gurkhas, scrutiny is the only security worth having.

Two political scientists claim that politics is genetically hardwired.

John Alford of Rice University announced he had analyzed 12,000 twins and found that identical twins were more likely to agree on politics than fraternal ones. A few days later, his colleague John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska gave a lecture on his research into predicting people's "political inclinations based on DNA."

These assertions of a "physiological difference" between conservatives and liberals may tempt us to revive the old, Manichean debate over nature, nurture, and the free will. But might we ask if political scientists have presumed to learn too much about society from brain scans and twin studies? These methodological tools are incalculably valuable for neuroscientists, but their usefulness in describing complex, behavioral phenomena is loosely correlative at best.  The miracle of genes is more in manufacturing proteins than in writing manifestoes.

The USDA recalled 143 million pounds of beef that had passed through a California plant -- more than all the recalled meat in the previous decade combined.

Workers at the Westland-Hallmark beef factory poked very sick cows, prodding them into the abattoirs with with the prongs of forklifts.  What makes a cow non-ambulatory?  Mad cow disease, for one thing.  The dreaded kuru relative attacks the central nervous system and leads to immobility and a terrible demise.

When the cows finally reached the killing floor, workers probably dispatched them with a captive bolt pistol -- which, as fans of Anton Chigurh will tell you, is an efficient but not entirely clean way to brain an animal.  Cortical tissue ends up smeared on the bolt, and can spread from one cow to the next, and perhaps into the meat itself.

We've been warned about the conditions of our slaughterhouses for years, and few of us have sought to protect ourselves, much less these poor diseased beasts.  This horror-show isn't our last warning, but it's not our first, either.  Get ready: after prions turn our brains into so much bubble wrap, the vegans will inherit the earth.

Will changes in sunspot activity wreak havoc on earth?

With the advent of Solar Cycle 24, many scientists expect a massive spike in solar activity that will have the potential to disrupt satellites, cell phones, and air traffic in 2012. 

But the real concern is Solar Cycle 25. Around 2022, a catastrophic drop in sun activity—the lowest in  centuries, according to NASA—may cause temperatures on earth to plunge, inaugurating an extended period of cold. In other words, a new ice age.

What seems to have escaped many reporters’ grasps—at Popular Mechanics, most recently—is that this dire scenario doesn’t square with the facts. The only evidence its proponents present is the seeming correlation between the “Little Ice Age” of the 17th and 18th centuries and a concurrent period of solar slump. But as everyone would do well to remember, climate is far more complicated than that.

As one of the most chaotic and multi-variable systems humans study, it is easy to see why debates over climate change often degenerate into battles over orthodoxy and political wrangling to fend off any one of many dire eschatologies. 

Eyes wide open, please

Sometime in 2027, you'll remember reading this post.  Maybe sooner.

Asteroid 2007 TU24 passed by the Earth harmlessly yesterday, a mere 334,000 miles from where you're sitting right now.  That's slightly farther away than the Moon, but closer than any known asteroid will come until 2027.  Had it hit, the 500-meter-across mass of iron could have caused a catastrophe -- probably not a Deep Impact-style planetary extinction, but something big. MORE