The Hames Webb Space Telescope Has Landed

Figuratvely speaking, that is. From Space.com:

After traveling almost a million miles, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope reached its final destination today (Jan. 24). The most powerful observatory ever to launch to space, the James Webb Space Telescope lifted off on Dec. 25, 2021 to explore the cosmos and our universe’s earliest milestones.

Since its successful takeoff, the $10 billion telescope has been busy deploying its various systems and structures and traveling over 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) to its new home: L2, the second sun-Earth Lagrange point, which it will orbit. Lagrange points are gravitationally stable points in space.

"Gravitationally stable" in this case means that the earth's gravity and the sun's gravity cncel each other out -- the telescope will stay put.

THe Webb teescope is designed to investigaete the first light in the unives=iverse. (It took a while aftetr the Big Bng for the first stars to form and start emitting light, so that's not quite the beginning -- but it's as close as we're likely to get.)

Here's more:

Via Joe.My>God., where there's lots more.

Meanwhile, In the Real World

Aside from the Keystone Kops dog-and-pony show that President Quid-Pro-Quo is offering as a "response" to the CoVID-19 pandemic, real researchers are getting real results:

Scientists have identified an antibody in a lab that they say can prevent the novel coronavirus from infecting cells. The team hopes the antibody could be used to create treatments for COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus. . . .

The team, whose research was published in the journal Nature Communications, have been exploring whether what are known as monoclonal antibodies could help patients with COVID-19. Currently there is no vaccine or specific treatment for the disease. Monoclonal antibodies are a type of protein created in a lab which can bind to a specific substance in the body. These types of antibodies mimic how the immune system responds to a threat, and are used to treat some forms of cancer.

An antibody named 47D11 was found to bind to the spike protein which the novel coronavirus, known as SARS-CoV-2, uses to enter the body, and block it in a way that neutralizes the pathogen.

This is prelimninary, but it builds on a model that's been successful in the past -- but, as the saying goes, the devil's in the details. If it works inside a human body, it may be the breakthrough we've been hoping for.

Read the whole thing.

Via Joe.My.God.

(Footnote: For those of you who are not science nerds, a virus is, in basic terms, a little packet of either DNA or RNA enclosed in a protein coat; some also have a fatty envelope over that. Those spikes/knobs you see in pictures of the coronavirus are proteins that it uses to penetrate the cell membrane of a host cell. Like any other organism, it wants to reproduce, but since it's lacking most of the metabolic processes that make that possible, it needs a host cell to provide those. Unfortunately, this relationship doesn't do the host cell any good.)

Science Note: "To Boldly Go. . . ."

This is one thing Trump couldn't shut down:

This composite image of Ultima Thule was taken on Dec. 1. Photo: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

On New Year's Day, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is expected to make history by conducting the most distant flyby ever, by zooming past an object a billion miles past Pluto. It's called "Ultima Thule," meaning "beyond the known world.

Why it matters: The spacecraft, which is the same one that sent back dazzling images of Pluto in 2015, is slated to be the first to explore an object in the Kuiper Belt -- a region of icy bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune that are thought to be leftovers from the solar system's early days.
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The goal of the mission is to learn more about the building blocks of planets. "In effect, Ultima should be a valuable window into the early stages of planet formation and what the solar system was like over 4.5 billion years ago," principal investigator Alan Stern wrote in a NASA blog post.

This is reallly exciting for us science geeks. This goes back to the first entry in "Earth: A Biography", which, as you'll no doubt recall, dealt with the origins of the universe and, finally, this planet we're sitting on.

There's a lot more at the link, and it's pretty interesting.

Via Joe.My.God.

Saturday Science: A Sidebar

This is actually relevant to my first post on "Earth: A Biography". From CNN (which for some reason has it in the "Health" section):

A spinning, solar-powered spacecraft as wide as a basketball court will arrive at Jupiter on July 4 to study the giant planet and to take the highest-resolution images of Jupiter in history.

NASA's robotic Juno probe is carrying seven science instruments designed to help scientists figure out how Jupiter formed and evolved. The planet is the most massive in our solar system -- a huge ball of gas 11 times wider than Earth. Researchers think it was the first planet to form and that it holds clues to how the solar system evolved.

"One of the primary goals of Juno is to learn the recipe for solar systems," Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator, said at a news conference on June 16. "How do you make the solar system? How do you make the planets in our solar system?"

Spacecraft have been to Jupiter before, but scientists still are puzzled. What's going on under Jupiter's dense clouds? Does it have a solid core? How much water is in its atmosphere? And how deep are those colorful bands and that mysterious giant red spot?

"Jupiter looks a lot like the sun," Bolton said. But it has much more than the sun, and that's really important.

"The stuff that Jupiter has more of is what we're all made out of," he said. "It's what the Earth is made out of. It's what life comes from."

A note: It seems that the Hadean eon of Earth's history might not have been as violent as previously reported: there is evidence that there were oceans as early as 4 billion years ago.

Now, back to Juno. From Nasa (via Joe.My.God.):

And this:

That one has 360° control (which means you can manipulate the image with your cursor).

(I know -- I get like a little kid with stuff like this. I should have been a scientist of some sort.)

Saturday Science: Tsunami! On Mars?

Martian coastline, after tsunami?

It looks as though that may very well have happened. Big ones:

Mars, despite its current rusted and parched appearance, was once a world where water flowed freely. Detailed observations of the red planet’s atmosphere and surface have led scientists to speculate that perhaps about 3.8 billion years ago, Mars had enough liquid water to form an ocean occupying almost half of its northern hemisphere.

However, scientists have not been able to find this primordial ocean’s coastline despite there being strong evidence that such large water bodies once existed on the fourth planet from the sun.

A new study has now revived the ancient ocean hypothesis. The study, published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, suggests the ocean’s shorelines were overrun and buried by two ancient mega tsunamis that occurred approximately 3.4 billion years ago.

It seems the first one, possibly caused by a meteor strike in the Martian ocean, was bad enough. Then the planet cooled down and the oceans froze, to the second one was an ice tsunami.

I don't even want to think about that. But, happily, someone did:

The scientists found evidence for another big meteorite impact, which triggered a second tsunami wave. In the millions of years between the two meteorite impacts and their associated mega-tsunamis, Mars went through frigid climate change, where water turned to ice, Fairén said: "The ocean level receded from its original shoreline to form a secondary shoreline, because the climate had become significantly colder."

The second tsunami formed rounded lobes of ice. "These lobes froze on the land as they reached their maximum extent and the ice never went back to the ocean - which implies the ocean was at least partially frozen at that time," he said. "Our paper provides very solid evidence for the existence of very cold oceans on early Mars. It is difficult to imagine Californian beaches on ancient Mars, but try to picture the Great Lakes on a particularly cold and long winter, and that could be a more accurate image of water forming seas and oceans on ancient Mars."

There's another possibility here that's intriguing: Where did life originate on Earth? The oceans. And brine, as in ocean, doesn't freeze as readily as fresh water.

These icy lobes retained their well-defined boundaries and their flow-related shapes, Fairén said, suggesting the frozen ancient ocean was briny. "Cold, salty waters may offer a refuge for life in extreme environments, as the salts could help keep the water liquid. ... If life existed on Mars, these icy tsunami lobes are very good candidates to search for biosignatures," he said.

That's one thing I love about science -- every answer generates more questions.

Saturday Science: Coywolf, Coydog, What?

Eastern coyote (Wikipedia Commons)

Interesting (well, for me, but I'm somewhat of a nature nerd) article on what has been called variously the "coywolf," "coydog," and "northeastern coyote," with an argument for naming it a new species:

Soon after, my colleague William Lynn (Marsh Institute, Clark University) and I published a meta-analysis in the scientific journal Canid Biology & Conservation that summarized recent studies on this creature and confirmed that what we call “coyotes” in northeastern North America formed from hybridization (the mating of two or more species) between coyotes and wolves in southern Ontario around the turn of the 20th century.

In the paper, we suggest that coywolf is the most accurate term for this animal and that they warrant new species status, Canis oriens, which literally means eastern canid in Latin. We based this on the fact that they are physically and genetically distinct from their parental species of mainly western coyotes (Canis latrans) and eastern wolves (Canis lycaon). They also have smaller amounts of gray wolf (Canis lupus) and domestic dog (Canis familiaris) genes.

Actually, the bulk of the article devoted to the statistical side (if I can call it that) of evolutionary biology and provides a good look at the way this sort of thing actually works.

Which some of us think is totally fascinating.

A Little Astrophysics to Wake Up To

Another fascinating insight from Stephen Hawking, on black holes and the information therein -- or not:

A long-standing conundrum related to black holes deals with something known as the “information paradox.” In a nutshell, the laws of quantum mechanics tell us that everything in the universe is encoded with information about its constituent particles’ quantum states. And, this information should never entirely disappear, not even if something gets sucked into a black hole. The fact that this information seems to get irretrievably lost when a black hole inevitably evaporates has frustrated physicists for nearly four decades.

During a lecture at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm on Tuesday, famed British physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking presented an idea about how this paradox can be solved. According to him, the quantum-mechanical information about particles falling into black holes doesn’t actually enter the black hole.

“The information is not stored in the interior of the black hole as one might expect, but in its boundary -- the event horizon,” Hawking said, adding that the information is encoded in two-dimensional holograms known as “super translations.”

The problem is that the information is not organized, so that, in practical terms, it is lost, even though it's not. (Don'cha love modern physics?)

I vaguely remember a science-fiction story from years ago in which someone was trapped in orbit around a black hole -- at the event horizon, more or less -- and someone else was trying to rescue them, but it's been a long time and I don't remember the details. The point of that little anecdote is that it may help visualize what Hawking is describing.

One thing that interested me is that I never knew that black holes evaporate, or that it's inevitable.

And Hawking notes that there are other ways out of a black hole short of dissolution. But you'll need to read the article.

They Came From Outer Space

Octopuses. At least, that's what some want to believe. PZ Myers takes exception to science reporting:

These reporters are embarrassing.

Not to freak you out or anything, but scientists have just revealed that octopuses are so weird they’re basically aliens.

The first full genome sequence shows of that octopuses (NOT octopi) are totally different from all other animals – and their genome shows a striking level of complexity with 33,000 protein-coding genes identified, more than in a human.

Bullshit.

The studies, of course, say just the opposite, but that hasn't stopped some people:

Proving that octopuses are creatures that arrived from another planet, possibly from another solar system, may not be revealed any time soon. However, their alien existence upon the Earth is expected to be the focus of significant research in the coming years. It is likely that they will be found to be born of the Earth, but the mysticism that they may be aliens makes the genome discovery quite intriguing.

This is what the abstract of the study says:

The core developmental and neuronal gene repertoire of the octopus is broadly similar to that found across invertebrate bilaterians.

Buy stock in tinfoil. It's a sure bet.

Science reporting in general is pretty abysmal. I don't know if it's just that the writers are generalists who find themselves out of their depth when covering specialist findings, or whether they're just so used to dumbing down that it's become a reflex. Years ago, I used to read NYT's science articles regularly, until I finally got fed up. And this was NYT.

Just in Case You Were Wondering

There's a new study -- from the description, it seems to be a literature review, actually -- that puts another nail in the coffin of "Children do best with a mother and father."

Scientists agree that children raised by same-sex couples are no worse off than children raised by parents of the opposite sex, according to a new study co-authored by a University of Oregon professor.

The new research, which looked at 19,000 studies and articles related to same-sex parenting from 1977 to 2013, was released last week, and comes as the U.S. Supreme Court is set to rule by the end of this month on whether same-sex marriage is legal.

“Consensus is overwhelming in terms of there being no difference in children who are raised by same-sex or different- sex parents,” University of Oregon sociology professor Ryan Light said on Tuesday.

I really had no idea there had been that many studies of same-sex parenting.

Note to TV talk show hosts: The next time Tony Perkins starts in on his "Social science has conclusively proven that children do best when raised by their married biological parents" bullshit, you have permission to laugh at him.

Remember Mark Regnerus?

And his "study" on people raised by gay parents? Except that almost none of them were:

In an upcoming article, a pair of sociologists are putting what they call the “final nail in the coffin” of the much-criticized study by University of Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus that purported to show that being raised by gay and lesbian parents harms children. The Regnerus study has become a favorite tool of Religious Right activists seeking to show that households led by same-sex couples are bad for children. At the same time, the study has come under scrutiny for the funding it received from anti-gay groups and for its lack of respondents who were actually raised in same-sex parent households.

Indiana University's Brian Powell and the University of Connecticut’s Simon Cheng didn’t just find methodological flaws in Regnerus’ research — they took the data he collected, cleaned it up, and redid the study, coming to a very different conclusion about families led by same-sex couples.

It seems that not only was the methodology flawed, but a significant portion of the data was suspect:

By eliminating suspect data — for example, a 25-year-old respondent who claimed to be 7’8” tall, 88 pounds, married 8 times and with 8 children, and another who reported having been arrested at age 1 — and correcting what they view as Regnerus’ methodological errors, Cheng and Powell found that Regnerus’ conclusions were so “fragile” that his data could just as easily show that children raised by gay and lesbian parents don’t face negative adult outcomes. . . .

Many people who he categorized as having been raised by a gay or lesbian parent had spent very little time with that parent or with his or her same-sex partner. Even Regnerus admitted that his data included only two people who said they had been raised for their entire childhoods by a same-sex couple.

There are also serious questions about the genesis and conduct of the study, as well as its publication -- why was it accepted for publication before the data analysis was complete? for example. (The article at the link strikes me as a little shrill, even verging on sensationalistic, but seems, ultimately, to be well-documented. A more concise and less slanted summary is at Wikipedia.)

Of course, this won't affect Anti-Gay, Inc.'s use of the study -- they'll just mutter something about "the gaystapo" and keep on citing it.

Saturday Science: On Einstein, Climate Change, and How It Works

Yeah, I know it's Monday, but I just ran across this at Mahablog, and you should read it. It's a wonderful segue from Einstein's General Theory of Relativity to climate change to how science works. Key idea:

In other words, in the world of science, nothing is ever settled. No scientific theory, even stuff that’s been accepted for generations and observed and tested to within an inch of its life, is ever placed beyond all doubt.

And the absolute worst sin, the thing that will get one booted out of the Science Club, is being thought of as too credulous. So no matter how many tons of empirical evidence one may collect to support one’s theories, lectures and published papers are always embroidered in language that gives the scientist an escape hatch if part of it is challenged by new data.

And from there she goes on to eviscerate climate change denialists and other anti-science buffoons.

Gets to the core of the issues and beautifully written. Read the whole thing.

Saturday Science: The Evolution of Morality

I go on quite a bit about how human beings, as social animals, are more or less hard-wired toward what we call "moral behavior." As I usually phrase it, "Why do people form societies?" The answer, of course, is "For mutual benefit." (Actually, my usual answer is "I don't think it's so that the greediest and most dishonest can take everything," but that's usually when I'm debating "libertarians.")

Well, this morning I ran across this post from Undercover Blue at Hullabaloo, referencing this article by Indre Viskontas on the work of psychologist Paul Bloom. The article is not easy to excerpt, but click through -- it's short, and it has videos and stuff. Essentially, it summarizes Bloom's work with infants and toddlers on how compassion and a sense of fairness seem to be on display early on, based on babies' choices of the good guys (those who help or share) over the bad guys (those who do neither) as preferences -- they opt for the good guys.

This echoes the behavior of other primates exhibited both in research settings and in the wild: most of our relatives travel in groups, and they help each other out. Primate societies are marked by cooperation among the members, which from an evolutionary standpoint (you knew this was coming) has proven to be an adaptive trait: cooperation among members of the group enhances the survival of the group and, by extension, that of the individuals who make up the group.

There's always self-interest, though. In the realm of small children, Bloom discovered that, while perfectly happy to distribute someone else's treats in equal shares, when it comes to the child's own treats, it's a very different story. As they grow, however, that changes, as witness Viskontas' first anecdote in the article on Bloom's work:

At the playground, I watch my 10-month-old son beeline to the center of the sandbox where there is a bright pink shovel. But before he gets there, a rambunctious 2-year-old snatches up the coveted toy first. As my son watches the shovel slip away, a wobbly 14-month-old comes over and offers him a half-chewed cookie.

There's an element of tribalism in this. As Bloom notes, as quoted by Undercover Blue:

"But this compassion and this helping, it all pertains to the baby's own group," says Bloom. They are less naturally generous with out-group members.

By our natures, we strongly value those around us over strangers. And to the extent that you and I don't, to the extent that you and I might recognize that somebody suffering, I don't know, from the Ebola virus in Africa, is a life just as valuable as those of our closest friends and family, that's an extraordinary cultural accomplishment. And it's something that's not in the genes. It's not what we're born with.

And there we have an added wrinkle: culture building on inheritance.

(I don't think I need to emphasize how this applies to, say, contemporary American politics: it's a matter of expanding your perception of "Us" as opposed to "Them," and the trend in American history has always been toward a larger "Us." There's always been an element in American society, and others as well, that fails to make the leap. These days, we call them "Republicans.")

National Graphic did a special with Richard Leakey on his discoveries at Turkana in Africa, of which this clip addresses the issue under discussion here:

Self-interest? Yes, but also, as Leakey puts it, "bonding, care, love, affection, protection" -- which all boils down to "compassion."

If you look at any religion -- and most people, for some reason, consider the teachings of their religion as the basis of morality, rather than its codification -- you'll find that underlying all the codes of behavior, tribal taboos, and "history" is one basic precept: we take care of each other. (Some evoutionary theorists have hypothesized that we're also hard-wired for belief. Be interesting to see how they test that one.)

And I can already hear the objections: how can genetics determine something as complex as our understanding of morality? Well, in addition to instilling a tendency toward cooperation and compassion, evolution also gave us brains. You do the math.

(I'm going to refrain from commenting on the somewhat rudimentary sense of morality evidenced by the spokespersons of the "religious" right, except to note that their concern is with tribal taboos, not any real values. Although I will admit that imagining their reaction to the idea that morality is hard-wired gives me a great sense of satisfaction.)

This one has a lot of ramifications. Use your imagination.

Saturday Science: The History of the Universe

From the description at YouTube:

Scientists at MIT have traced 13 billion years of galaxy evolution, from shortly after the Big Bang to the present day. Their simulation, named Illustris, captures both the massive scale of the Universe and the intriguing variety of galaxies -- something previous modelers have struggled to do. It produces a Universe that looks remarkably similar to what we see through our telescopes, giving us greater confidence in our understanding of the Universe, from the laws of physics to our theories about galaxy formation.

This is what it's describing:

It's fascinating, but the video moves a little too fast for me to follow very well. If you want more information, the research paper itself is here; it's behind a paywall, but you can read the Nature article about the project here. And via Towleroad, here's a rather more accessible discussion of the creation of the model at The Guardian.

It's like I've always said: The universe is a fascinating place.

If It's About Children

Maybe we should pay attention to what's happening with them. This, of course, stems from the time-honored battle cry of the anti-gay "Christian" right, "Save the Cheeeldren!!!" Well, aside from the travesty produced by Mark Regnerus on instructions from the Witherspoon Institute (and ultimately, it turns out, the Heritage Foundation), a number of sociologists and psychologists -- real ones -- have done studies about the effects on children of being raised in "non-traditional" families.

One of the first things I ran across this morning, which brought the whole issue to the fore, was this post at AmericaBlog, referencing a study from Britain (with, unfortunately, a broken link; if I find it, I'll link to it).

Whether the children lived with two biological parents, with a step-parent and biologic parent, or in a single parent family, made no difference: 64% said they were happy ‘sometimes or never’, and 36% said they were ‘happy all the time’.

Even when the researchers statistically removed the effects of other factors such as parental social class so that the effects of family type were isolated, the results showed no significant differences.

Jenny Chanfreau, Senior Researcher at NatCen, told the conference that, in contrast, relationships with parents and other children were strongly linked with how likely the seven-year-olds were to be happy. For instance, factors such as getting on well with siblings and not being bullied at school were associated with being happy all the time.

Ms Chanfreau said they found a similar result when analysing another set of survey data on 2,679 children aged 11 to 15 in the UK– this also showed no significant statistical difference in the level of wellbeing among children in the three types of family when the effects of family type were studied in isolation.

[She] told the conference: “We found that the family type had no significant effect on the happiness of the [two groups of children.]

“It’s the quality of the relationships in the home that matters–not the family composition.

Getting on well with siblings, having fun with the family at weekends, and having a parent who reported rarely or never shouting when the child was naughty, were all linked with a higher likelihood of being happy all the time among seven-year olds.

“Pupil relations at school are also important–being bullied at school . . . [was] strongly associated with lower happiness in the seven-year-olds, for instance.”

That called to mind a recent study from Australia that indicated that children of same-sex parents were happier and better adjusted than their peers from "traditional" families.

''Because of the situation that same-sex families find themselves in, they are generally more willing to communicate and approach the issues that any child may face at school, like teasing or bullying,'' Dr. Simon Crouch, the lead author of the Melbourne University study, said. ''This fosters openness and means children tend to be more resilient. That would be our hypothesis.''

It would seem that reality doesn't support Tony Perkins' often repeated assertion that "Social science has proven conclusively that children do best with their married biological parents." But then, we know Perkins will say whatever will bring in cash. (I actually remember seeing one study that stated that idea as part of the executive summary; it was a study comparing the children of married heterosexual couples with the children of unwed teenage mothers, and that statement wasn't even supported by the data. Draw your own conclusions.)

As to the kids and their reactions to their families -- well, someone decided to let them speak for themselves:

'Nuff said?

Saturday Science: "Long, Long Ago

in a galaxy far away. . . ."

Source: Hubblesite.org

How long? Maybe 12 billion years. Not long after the Big Bang. And how far away? I have no idea. But it's quite a distance. The image is from the Hubble Space Telescope, and uses gravity as a lense to magnify very faint, very distant galaxies.

"The Frontier Fields is an experiment; can we use Hubble's exquisite image quality and Einstein's theory of General Relativity to search for the first galaxies?" said Space Telescope Science Institute Director Matt Mountain. "With the other Great Observatories, we are undertaking an ambitious joint program to use galaxy clusters to explore the first billion years of the universe's history."

Simultaneous observations of this field are being done with NASA's two other Great Observatories, the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The assembly of all this multispectral information is expected to provide new insights into the origin and evolution of galaxies and their accompanying black holes.

Somehow, I find it hard to think of myself as the center of the universe.

Saturday Science: The Buddha is 200 Years Older Than We Thought

This is a fun story:

The two archaeologists had a hunch that the Buddha’s birthplace in southern Nepal held secrets that could transform how the world understood the emergence and spread of Buddhism.

Their pursuit would eventually see them excavate the sacred site of Lumbini as monks prayed nearby, leading to the stunning claim that the Buddha was born in the sixth century BC, two centuries earlier than thought.

The part I found particularly interesting is this:

Prior to this discovery, most scholars said that the Buddha — who renounced material wealth to embrace and preach a life of non-attachment — lived during the fourth century BC, founding a religion that now counts 500 million followers.

Buddhists in Nepal and Sri Lanka, however, have always believed that the sage was born around 623 BC, a date that now seems more accurate.

You can't discount oral traditions. Yes, they get altered over time, sometimes deliberately, but they are, after all, the original way we transmitted our history from one generation to the next.

A short intro to the project:

Tell Me Again

about how marriage between one man and one woman is the ideal. From a new study:

“LGBQ participants (lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer) are more generally positive about and happier with the quality of their relationship and the relationship which they have with their partner,” the study, which comes out today, finds.

“Heterosexual parents are the group least likely to be there for each other, to make ‘couple time’, to pursue shared interests, to say ‘I love you’ and to talk openly to one another.”

Oh, but wait, I forgot -- marriage is not about being happy together, it's about children.

Children who are raised in households with same-sex parents are more likely to lead healthier lives, according to preliminary findings of a new study. Australian researchers at the University of Melbourne found that children of gay parents not only are healthier overall, but also are more likely to get along with the rest of their family unit.

Conducted by Simon R. Crouch, Elizabeth Water, Ruth McNair, Jennifer Power and Elise Davis, the study looked at data on 500 Australian children below the age of 18. Among their findings, researchers concluded that factors such as self-esteem, emotional behavior and time spent with parents does not vary between children of same-sex and heterosexual couples. However, researchers did find a high level of health and family cohesion in children of gay and lesbian couples.

Saturday Science: About Those Extra Pounds

The earth may be heavier than we thought, because of dark matter. Maybe.

There may be a giant ring of dark matter invisibly encircling the Earth, increasing its mass and pulling much harder on orbiting satellites than anything invisible should pull, according to preliminary research from a scientist specializing the physics of GPS signaling and satellite engineering.

The dark-matter belt around the Earth could represent the beginning of a radically new understanding of how dark matter works and how it affects the human universe, or it could be something perfectly valid but less exciting despite having been written up by New Scientist and spreading to the rest of the geek universe on the basis of a single oral presentation of preliminary research at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in December.

This is all still very iffy -- dark matter as a concept is relatively new, and was actually invented to explain anomalies between the universe's actual rate of expansion against what our calculations show it should be.

Dark matter – invisible and so-far almost undetectable – was invented to try to explain why the universe does seem to be expanding from a single point as Big Bang theory predicts, but not nearly as fast as it should.

Galaxies, stars and other matter should only crawl away from each other at the speeds we see if there were a lot more gravity holding them back than there would be if the matter we could see were all the matter in the universe.

Making the math work – getting it to agree with what the universe had already decided to do – meant bumping up the guesstimated weight of the universe by 80 percent, with nothing to explain what all that mass actually was. Dark matter is widely accepted as real among physicists, but is still more a mystery filler substance than an actual, explainable phenomenon.

The actual numbers are, to a layman, miniscule, but to a physicist, they're significant. As for dark matter itself, it helps if you think of it as loose neutrinos and such that aren't coalescing into anything really detectable (except, as in this case, by inference).

So, if those holiday treats took up residence around your waistline, just blame it on dark matter.

I was going to post a picture to go with this, but the thing is, you can't see the stuff.

Hah! Found one, and another article on dark matter.

Saturday Science: Not Quite "Jurassic Park"

but a lot closer to home. This story's a couple of weeks old, but one of the nice things about science is that discoveries don't lose their interest or value after fifteen minutes. ("Benghazi!!1!") And whatever your personal reaction, you have to admit it's fascinating:

In a paper in the journal Nature, scientists reported that they had retrieved ancient human DNA from a fossil dating back about 400,000 years, shattering the previous record of 100,000 years.

The fossil, a thigh bone found in Spain, had previously seemed to many experts to belong to a forerunner of Neanderthals. But its DNA tells a very different story.

It most closely resembles DNA from an enigmatic lineage of humans known as Denisovans. Until now, Denisovans were known only from DNA retrieved from 80,000-year-old remains in Siberia, 4,000 miles east of where the new DNA was found.

The mismatch between the anatomical and genetic evidence surprised the scientists, who are now rethinking human evolution over the past few hundred thousand years.

I admit I don't know much about the Denisovans -- here's the Wikipedia entry, which seems to be solid, except of course, that, in light of this new discovery, anything it says about the geographic distribution is open to question.

Remember when the evolutionary tree read a lot more like Genesis? "And Homo erectus begat Homo neanderthalensis, and neanderthalensis begat. . . ." Well, as is usually the case with something that simplistic, it wasn't quite that clear-cut. (Which is probably why fundamentalists of any religion have so much trouble dealing with the real world.) Twenty years ago, the idea of interbreeding between subspecies wasn't usually on anyone's radar (at least, not paleoanthropologists), even though we know it happens -- one of my favorite orchids, Cattleya guatamalensis, is a natural hybrid between C. aurantiaca and C. skinneri. There's no reason people couldn't have done the same thing -- and probably would still be doing it, except we don't seem to have any subspecies left.

Saturday Science: Walking On the Stars

Well, OK, not exactly on the stars, but on a comet. OK, not exactly walking on it, but landing a rocket ship on it. That's what's going to happen next year, if all goes according to plan:

At precisely 10am GMT on 20 January next year, a tiny electronic chip inside Europe's Rosetta spacecraft will flicker into life. The robot probe will then be several hundred million miles from Earth, an orbit that will be bringing it closer and closer to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, a massive ball of ice, dust and organic materials that orbits the Sun every six and a half years.

Rosetta's electronic wakeup call will trigger circuits, heaters and instruments and bring the probe, which has been in hibernation for two and a half years, slowly back to life in preparation for its landing on the comet, one of the most spectacular feats of space exploration ever planned.

An artist's impression of Rosetta on the surface of its target comet. Photograph: J. Huart/Corbis

You may not think this is all that exciting, but it is:

Then, as the comet – which is about 2.5 miles wide – makes its closest approach to the Sun in August 2015, Rosetta will analyse the plumes of water vapour and gas and the geysers of organic material that will erupt into space as 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko heats up and sends out a great glowing tail of gas and filaments behind it.

"Rosetta is going to be the first spacecraft to track the life of a comet as it arcs towards the Sun," says Paolo Ferri, head of solar and planetary operations for the space agency. The resulting data and images promise to be dramatic, to say the least.

We stand to learn a hell of a lot about what the solar system was like on Day One. That's really exciting.