The Gulf oil spill story is back from the dead, and so is 70% of the spilled oil. Health effects of the oil spill. Human evolution: The database. Human future: Written in the stars. Human brain: Power corrupts, but why? Sex is brain food.
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REPORTS OF THE BP GULF OIL SPILL STORY'S DEATH HAVE BEEN GREATLY EXAGGERATED. This was the week that the media discovered — with much help from scientists — that the BP Gulf oil spill story hadn't gone away after all. That's because, contrary to earlier assertions, the oil hasn't gone away either. "Oh, snap! You mean 70% of oil is still THERE??" roared Dr Bik at Deep-Sea News.
Doc Bik was describing a new study from the University of Georgia that contradicted a sunny US government report earlier this month. In that report, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had averred that 75% of the oil had been "eliminated."
Turns out that was an obfuscatory miasma of Orwellian doublespeak. "Eliminated" did not mean the oil was gone. "Eliminated" meant the oil had been busted up enough, for example by dispersants, so it was no longer quite so obvious.
Also, those friendly microbes the Administration praised, the ones who were doing such a great job of scarfing down hydrocarbons, do their scarfing over a period of months, not days. Also, the microbes don't care for the taste of the most toxic components of oil and so leave them behind to continue being toxic.
At Wired Science, Brandon Keim reports on a just-published Science paper from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Among other matters, it explains that, under the special circumstances of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, oil doesn't necessarily float. But it doesn't go away, either. At Voltage Gate, one of the new Scientopia blogs, Jeremy notes that the oil was sinking deeper, which could introduce toxins into the food chain.
At the Columbia Journalism Review's Observatory blog, Curtis Brainerd sums up the week's revisionism. He includes a juicy description of efforts by reporters and a congressional investigator to pry actual data out of NOAA, data that would back up the agency's contention that three-quarters of the oil was gone.
When last heard from, NOAA was saying that the data might be forthcoming.
In two months.
I guess they are hoping that by October we will have forgotten all about it. Again.
OILY HEALTH MATTERS. Meantime, also this week, the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences announced a $10 million collaboration to study health effects of the Gulf oil spill. See the report by Rhiannon Smith at The Great Beyond.
The project is being given a head start by citizen participation in the form of a New Orleans-based environmental group. The Louisiana Bucket Brigade is carrying out a big oil-leak mapping project and hundreds of health surveys among Gulf residents. Elana Schor of Greenwire reports.
THE LSST SHALL BE FIRST AND WFIRST SHALL BE SECOND. The National Research Council's selection of top priorities for astronomy and astrophysics, a project it puts together every 10 years, was also released this week. The NRC says the report
prioritizes activities based on their ability to advance science in key areas, and for the first time also takes into account factors such as risks in technical readiness, schedule, and cost
Attempting to remedy complaints that previous surveys have underestimated costs severely, the survey committee hired a contractor to run the adding machine this time, according to Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, who summarized the report for ScienceInsider. See also 80Beats and SciAm's Observations, which pointed out that the recommendations were all for big projects, whether on Earth or in space.
The Large Scale Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) in Chile topped the list. Next came a space-based project, the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST). For the astrophysicists' assessments of heavenly priorities, see the roundup (with links) by Daniel Holz at the group blog Cosmic Variance; also, Steinn Sigurðsson liveblogged a summarizing webcast at Dynamics of Cats. If you are still starry-eyed, find the webcast, full-text report, photos, etc., etc., here. All free.
Those of us who grew up on Amazing's stories about life elsewhere in the Universe will be cheered by the news that also on the list is the New Worlds Technology Development Program. That's preparation for a space mission sometime after 2020 to look for habitable planets outside the Solar System. Habitable by Homo sap, presumably.
Further food for these fantasies is provided by the prolific Brandon Keim. He reports for Wired Science that farming could be possible on Mars.
THE COMPLEAT HUMAN EVOLUTION. Speaking of Homo sap, I missed this last week, but it's an item so admirable, not to mention potentially so useful for us, that I didn't want to let it go by again.
University of Wisconsin paleoanthropologist John Hawks, bless his heart, has been assembling a searchable bibliographic database of papers — and blog posts! — on human evolution. It includes links, for example to full texts at Google Scholar, and there's an RSS feed for new entries. Nearly 12K entries so far, whew. It's built on a database put together over 40 years by Milford Wolpoff and his students; Wolpoff is the very well-known paleoanthropologist at the University of Michigan.
As Hawks would be first to tell you, the database is not truly complete, for reasons he describes in his introductory post. But it seems to me to fit the American Heritage Dictionary's definitions of "compleat": "1. Of or characterized by a highly developed or wide-ranging skill or proficiency" and "2. Being an outstanding example of a kind; quintessential".
WONDERING WHERE YOUR FRONTAL CORTEX IS? Jonah Lehrer, late of ScienceBlogs, has settled his blog, The Frontal Cortex, at Wired Science. Among this week's posts are one on the psychology of power, excerpted from an article Lehrer did for The Wall Street Journal last weekend.
The bottom line is that psychologists have verified experimentally what Lord Acton observed in the 19th century: power corrupts.
On looking up that quote, I see Baron Acton added a comment I had never heard before: "Great men are almost always bad men." As Lehrer points out, though, they don't usually start out that way. Folks generally have to be likeable to get power in the first place.
Yet when they get it, Something Happens. The psychologists don't seem too sure what that Something is. One theory is that power robs people of the ability to empathize with others. That may be true, but why?
One of the scientists
compares the feeling of power to brain damage, noting that people with lots of authority tend to behave like neurological patients with a damaged orbito-frontal lobe, a brain area that's crucial for empathy and decision-making.
So what is he suggesting here? A chemical surge that remodels Dr Jekyll's brain into Mr Hyde's?
For more cheering brain news, turn to another of Lehrer's latest posts: "Sex Is Stressful, But Good For You." Sexual activity, it turns out, makes new neurons grow and new dendrites sprout. Sex, in short, is brain food.
My thought is that it's brain food with a second big plus: Sex burns calories instead of adding them.
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