Cats and earthquakes were popular subjects this year. (image courtesy of flickr user 37prime)

It’s that time of year when journalists and bloggers put together their reviews of the past 12 months. But the list below is unlike any other. You may have noticed that Surprising Science tends to cover science a bit differently than other blogs and publications do. Combine that with a diverse (and, of course, fabulous) readership, and you’ve got an interesting list of most-read stories for the year. (If you’re looking for a more traditional 2011 retrospective, we recommend the lists from Discover, Scientific American and Science.)

#10 Earthquake in Washington, D.C.: On August 23, the Smithsonian offices, along with a good portion of the Northeast, shook due to a magnitude 5.8 earthquake in Mineral, Virginia. In a weird coincidence, I had been researching earthquakes in unexpected places when the quake took place, and so people in my office jokingly blamed me for the incident.

#9 14 Fun Facts About Chickens: Following the earthquake and Hurricane Irene, we took a break from natural disasters with weird chicken facts. My favorite? That a female bird can eject the sperm of a rooster if she decides she doesn’t want his chicks.

#8 The Science Behind the Japanese Earthquake: On the morning of March 11, we woke up to news of a powerful earthquake off the coast of Japan. That shaking, however, would soon be overshadowed by the devastating tsunami and nuclear disaster that followed.

#7 Examining Telecommuting the Scientific Way: Unfortunately this post did not have the result I’d hoped, and I’m still not allowed to telecommute. (But if anyone has been successful in using these arguments, please let us know in the comments below.)

#6 The Secret Lives of Feral Cats: After a study in which scientists tracked feral kitties, we weighed in on the question of whether it was better to trap the cats, spay/neuter them and release them back into the wild or, as some advocate, euthanize any found. The blog came down on the side of catch and release, but we discovered many readers who have a serious hatred for these felines.

#5 The Curious World of Zombie Science: We examined an interesting trend in science, the study of human zombies, including computer models of the spread of the zombie disease, potential ways zombies could be created and how math could save you from a zombie attack.

#4 The Myth of the Frozen Jeans: Levi’s and the New York Times claimed that freezing your jeans would kill the germs that make them smell. Scientists who study bacteria disagree.

#3 Five Historic Female Mathematicians You Should Know: Our list, a companion to a top ten list of historic female scientists, included the creator of the world’s first computer program and a contemporary of Albert Einstein.

#2 Life Without Left Turns: A study that found that intersections constructed to eliminate dangerous left turns were more efficient than traditional intersections added to my convictions that getting rid of left turns would be a good thing. But not all my readers agreed.

And #1 The Glow-in-The-Dark Kitty: A story about Mayo Clinic researchers who created a fluorescing cat as part of their studies on feline HIV, which they hope would lead to insight on human HIV and AIDS, sparked a debate in the comments about the ethics of the research.

What do you hate most about mosquitoes? (photo courtesy of flickr user Aesum (Very Busy))

If there’s one downside to living in a city built on a swamp (not really—it just feels that way during D.C.’s muggy summers), it’s the mosquitoes. They hover just outside my front door, ready to take a bite from my face or, worse, follow me indoors where they can munch on me in my sleep. And then yesterday I read about how the West Nile Virus has been identified in samples of D.C. mosquitoes, which adds a layer of worry on top of the itching. After reading up on these pesky summer companions, I thought I’d share these 14 facts:

1 ) There are around 3,500 species of mosquitoes, but only a couple hundred feast on human blood.

2 ) If you’ve been bitten by a mosquito, it was a female. Male mosquitoes make do just fine with plants, but females need a blood meal before they can lay eggs.

3 ) The female’s saliva contains an anti-coagulant that lets her more easily suck up her meal. The saliva induces an allergic response from her victim’s immune system; that’s why your skin gets an itchy bump.

4 ) Females lay their eggs in shallow water or even damp soil that’s prone to flooding. Get rid of any standing water near your home to reduce the mosquito horde.

5 ) The best time to avoid mosquitoes is in the afternoon, when temperatures are hottest and the insects rest in cooler spots.

6 ) The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists only four chemicals as being effective for repelling mosquitoes: DEET, Picaridin, Oil of Lemon Eucalyptus (or its synthetic version, called PMD) and IR3535.

7 ) Mosquitoes are attracted to the carbon dioxide, lactic acid and octenol found in our breath and sweat, and they also sense the heat and humidity that surrounds our bodies. They may also have a preference for beer drinkers.

8 ) Some scientists think that eliminating mosquitoes wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Others aren’t so sure, though, and worry about the effects on the ecosystem of the loss of an insect that is eaten by spiders, salamanders, frogs, fish and other insects.

9 ) Malaria infects around 250 million people each year worldwide and kills about one million, mostly children in Africa. About a fifth of those deaths can be attributed to counterfeit anti-malarial drugs.

10 ) George and Martha Washington both suffered from malaria. George contracted the disease when he was a teenager. In the second year of his presidency, he experienced severe hearing loss due to quinine toxicity.

11 ) Insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) that hang over a bed have been shown to reduce malaria incidence among children and pregnant women by up to 50 percent. The nets last only a few years before they have to be replaced.

12 ) The last time there was an outbreak of yellow fever, another mosquito-borne illness, in the United States was in 1905 in New Orleans. At the time, the city was trying to prevent the disease by fumigating all the ships that entered the city. However, a smuggler’s ship full of bananas avoided the quarantine and by June cases began to emerge among Italian immigrants who unloaded banana boats.

13 ) Birds were originally blamed for the spread of the West Nile Virus across the United States. But a 2010 study says that it was the mosquitoes themselves, which can travel up to 2.5 miles per day, that were responsible for the spread of the disease from 2001 to 2004.

14 ) The emergence of a worldwide outbreak of the mosquito-borne disease chikungunya can be traced to a 2004 drought in Kenya. The disease hasn’t made it to the United States yet, but scientists think that could occur at any time.

Colin Firth, a king AND a scientist. © The Weinstein Company/courtesy Everett Collection

Ideas for scientific experiments come from all sorts of places (and fewer of them originate in the lab than you might think). A study on political orientation and brain structure, published in Current Biology, for example, got its start when the actor Colin Firth—credited as a co-author on the paper—was guest-editing a BBC Radio 4 program called “Today.” “This struck me as an opportunity to explore things which compel me…but about which I’m perhaps not sufficiently informed,” he told host Justin Webb. “I…decided to find out what was biologically wrong with people who don’t agree with me and see what scientists had to say about it.” Or to put it a bit more nicely, to see if the brains of people with different political leanings were truly different.

Ryota Kanai and Geraint Rees of University College London took that idea and ran with it. They performed MRI scans of 90 college students who had been asked about their political attitudes, and then looked at various structures in the brain. They found that a greater amount of gray matter in the anterior cingulate cortex was associated with liberalism and a greater amount in the amygdala was associated with conservatism. They confirmed the finding in a second set of 28 participants.

These findings are consistent with previous studies showing greater brain activity in the anterior cingulate cortex of liberals. One of the jobs of that area of the brain is to monitor uncertainty and conflicts. “Thus, it is conceivable that individuals with a larger ACC have a higher capacity to tolerate uncertainty and conflicts, allowing them to accept more liberal views,” the scientists write.

The amygdala, on the other hand, processes fear, and previous studies have shown that conservatives respond more aggressively in threatening situations. “Our findings are consistent with the proposal that political orientation is associated with psychological processes for managing fear and uncertainty,” the researchers write.

Still unknown, however, is which comes first, the brain structure or the beliefs. The researchers would have to expand their study to see if there are changes in brain structure before or after a person changes their political leanings.

Perhaps Firth could sign up as a volunteer.

Feral cats can roam over great distances, a new study finds (image courtesy of flickr user 37prime)

Do feral kitties live good lives? The Washington Post asked that question last week in a story that examined the practice of controlling feral cat populations by trapping cats, spaying or neutering them, and then releasing them back into their former home environments (it’s often called Trap-Neuter-Return or TNR).

The Humane Society of the United States, the ASPCA and other supporters say the nation’s estimated 50 million to 150 million feral felines often live healthy lives. They also say TNR has added benefits: After a cat colony is sterilized, nuisance behaviors such as fighting and yowling are reduced, and the feral population stabilizes. Feral cats can keep rats in check, too.

Skeptics, including People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and some veterinarians, argue the life of an alley cat is rarely pleasant. In many cases, they say it’s actually more humane to euthanize cats, rather than condemn them to a harsh life on the streets.

Some insight into the lives of both feral and owned kitties comes from a new study, published in the Journal of Wildlife Management, in which researchers set out to track free-roaming feral and owned cats by placing radio transmitters on 42 kitties in and around Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. Twenty-three of those transmitters also had tilt and vibration sensors that measured activity.

The scientists found that the feral cats had home ranges that stretched across large areas; one male kitty’s range covered 1,351 acres (2.1 square miles). They roamed over a wide variety of habitats, most often in urban areas and grasslands, including a restored prairie. In winter, they preferred urban spots, forests and farmland, all places that would provide greater shelter from bad weather and help them keep warm. Cats that had owners, meanwhile, tended to stick close to home, with their range sizes averaging a mere 4.9 acres.

Feral kitties were also more active than cats that had homes. Unowned cats spent 14 percent of their time in what the scientists classified as “high activity” (running or hunting, for example), compared with only 3 percent for kitties with owners. “The unowned cats have to find food to survive, and their activity is significantly greater than the owned cats throughout the day and through the year, especially in winter,” says study co-author Jeff Horn of the University of Illinois.

In addition, the feral cats’ daily activity patterns—sleeping during the day and being active at night, which likely reflects the behavior of their prey, small mammals, as well as lets them better avoid humans—was very different from kitties with homes. Those animals were most active in the morning and evening, when their owners were likely home and awake.

Only one owned kitty died during the study, compared with six feral cats. Two of the feral cats were killed by coyotes, and the researchers believe that at least some of the others were killed by other cats, as the owned kitty was. Cats that live outdoors, even just part of the time, are at risk of death from other cats as well as diseases such as rabies, feline leukemia and parasites, the researchers note.

And of course there’s the fact that cats, owned and unowned, kill wildlife. “Owned cats may have less impact on other wildlife than unowned cats because of their localized ranging behavior, or conversely, they may have a very high impact withing their smaller home ranges,” the scientists write. “Free-roaming cats do kill wildlife and pose a disease risk; cat owners should keep pets indoors.”

But there’s nothing in this study that convinces me that feral cats are living such harsh lives that death would be better, as PETA and other TNR skeptics have contended. Feral cats do have harder and shorter lives than our pets. They have to find their own food and water and shelter, and this isn’t easy. But that’s what any wild creature has to do, and to imply that their lives are worthless because they are hard is, frankly, ridiculous.

Blogger Sarah brought NASA-mission-themed cookies to the office last week (photo by Molly Roberts)

Just a little while ago the Space Shuttle Endeavour lifted off into space from the Kennedy Space Center on its last mission, the second-to-last mission for any Space Shuttle. Like many people I watched the liftoff (from my computer at home) and was a bit wistful to see space exploration as I have known it since my childhood nearing its end. But I have to say, when I think about the end of the Space Shuttle program, I’m really not that sorry to see it come to a close.

Oh, it’s not that I’m not a fan of space exploration (I even made NASA-space-mission-themed cookies last week for my office), but the Space Shuttle never lived up to its original concept, and it’s been sucking up a lot of money over the years, money that could have paid for even more discoveries than have already been made.

When the Space Shuttle was conceived in the 1960s, before we had even landed on the Moon, proponents were making claims that a reusable space vehicle, one that could land like an airplane, could be cheaper to operate on a per-launch basis and could launch as frequently as once a week. But the reality was far different.

The Space Shuttle is expensive: Putting people into the unnatural environment of Earth’s orbit is never going to be cheap, but the shuttle is particularly costly. One analysis of the program pegged the cost per mission at $1.3 billion (I’ve also seen estimates of $1.5 billion), enough to fund almost 3,000 research grants at the National Science Foundation or pay for a big chunk of a spacecraft like Cassini that will be producing data for decades. Another way to look at this is the cost per kilogram of getting something into space: The shuttle averages about $10,400 per kilogram of payload while the Russians pay only about $5,400 using their Soyuz spacecraft. We’re overpaying for the service when it’s delivered via shuttles.

The Space Shuttle launches infrequently: Those dreams of once-a-week launches were quickly dashed by reality. Once-a-week became twice-a-month became less than once-a-month. It took months to turn over a Space Shuttle for its next mission, and frequently launching people, science experiments and satellites into low-Earth orbit has been impossible.

The Space Shuttle is not reliable: Shuttle launch delays are frequent and costly (good luck to anyone planning to go to Florida to watch the last liftoff next month). But even worse is the rate of catastrophic failure, about 1 in 65. My memories of the program are not the trip to the Kennedy Space Center my family took when I was a kid; they are of the images on TV of the Challenger and Columbia disasters.  Space exploration is never going to be risk-free, and if we’re going to explore our solar system and beyond, bad things will happen—just as they did for early Earth-bound explorers. We still need to decide as a society whether or not this is worth the risk.

When I was making the cookies for work last week, I realized how little our greatest space science has depended on the shuttle. Out of the five missions, only Hubble had depended on the Space Shuttle program, and it didn’t have to—its replacement, the James Webb Space Telescope, won’t. And without the shuttle program draining NASA’s limited funds, perhaps even more and better science will happen in the coming years.

Replacing one-time-use rockets with a reusable spacecraft is still a good idea, but we’re just not technologically ready for this. Our imaginations are far bigger than our abilities. That might seem like a sad realization, but it’s not. All it means is that we will keep inventing and striving to reach our sci-fi dreams, and that journey is a truly fascinating one.

(Think I’m wrong? That’s what the comment section is for.)

A zombie walk in Chile in 2010 (courtesy of flickr user rodolpho.reis)

Zombies seem to be only growing in popularity, and I’m not talking about the biological kind. They’ve got their own television show, plenty of films, and even a musical. They invaded the world of Jane Austen, and there are zombie crawls around the world, in which people dress up like the living dead and shuffle across some urban area.

And then there’s the growing field of zombie science.

In 2009, University of Ottawa mathematician Robert J. Smith? (and, yes, he really does include a question mark at the end of his name) published a paper in a book about infectious disease modeling titled “When Zombies Attack! Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection” (pdf). It started as a class project, when some students suggested they model zombies in his disease modeling class. “I think they thought I’d shoot it down,” Smith told NPR, “but actually I said, go for it. That sounds really great. And it was just a fun way of really illustrating some of the process that you might have in modeling an infectious disease.” Using math, the group showed that only by quickly and aggressively attacking the zombie population could normal humans hope to prevent the complete collapse of society.

That paper sparked further research. The latest contribution, “Zombies in the City: a NetLogo Model” (pdf) will appear in the upcoming book Mathematical Modelling of Zombies. In this new study, an epidemiologist and a mathematician at Australian National University refine the initial model and incorporate the higher speed of humans and our capacity to increase our skills through experience. They conclude that only when human skill levels are very low do the zombies have a chance of winning, while only high human skill levels ensure a human victory. “For the in-between state of moderate skill a substantial proportion of humans tend to survive, albeit in packs that are being forever chased by zombies,” they write.

Then there’s the question of whether math is really the most important discipline for surviving a zombie attack.

But how might zombies come about? There are some interesting theories, such as one based on arsenic from Deborah Blum at Speakeasy Science. Or these five scientific reasons a zombie apocalypse could happen, including brain parasites, neurotoxins and nanobots.

A Harvard psychiatrist, Steven Schlozman, broke into the field of zombie research and then wrote The Zombie Autopsies: Secret Notebooks from the Apocalypse, which blames an airborne contagion for the zombie phenomenon. The book delves into the (fictional) research of Stanley Blum, zombie expert, who searched for a cure to the zombie epidemic with a team of researchers on a remote island. (They were unsuccessful and succumbed to the plague, but nicely left their research notes behind, complete with drawings.) It’s more than just fun fiction to Schlozman, though, who uses zombies to teach neuroscience. “If it works right, it makes students less risk-adverse, more willing to raise their hands and shout out ideas, because they’re talking about fictional characters,” he told Medscape.

For those interested in getting an overview of the science, a (spoof) lecture on the subject, Zombie Science 1Z, can now be seen at several British science and fringe festivals. Zombiologist Doctor Austin, ZITS MSz BSz DPep, lectures in three modules: the zombieism condition, the cause of zombieism, and the prevention and curing of zombieism. And for those of us who can’t attend in person, there’s a textbook and online exam.

And the Zombie Research Society keeps track of all this and more, and also promotes zombie scholarship and zombie awareness month. Their slogan: “What you don’t know can eat you.”

Biology teacher John Scopes went on trial for teaching evolution in 1925 (via Wikimedia commons)

In 1925, John Scopes, a high school biology teacher, was put on trial in Tennessee for having the audacity to teach evolution to his students. In the 21st century, teachers don’t have to worry about being arrested for teaching this fundamental topic in science, and the Supreme Court declared teaching creationism unconstitutional in 1987, but that hasn’t stopped state legislators around the country from trying to enact laws that encourage the teaching of alternative theories or protect teachers who do so. The latest attempt, in Tennessee, looks like it might actually become law. But here are five reasons why it shouldn’t:

1 ) Evolution is the basis for all biology. Without it, much of biology and modern medicine just doesn’t make sense. There’s general agreement that good science education is needed to produce a populace capable of handling our increasingly technological future. Evolution has to be part of that, but sadly, it rarely is. A recent poll of high school biology teachers found that only 28 percent consistently teach evolution.

2 ) Teaching unscientific “alternatives” only confuses students. “There is virtually no scientific controversy among the overwhelming majority of researchers on the core facts of…evolution,” Alan Leshner, executive publisher of Science, wrote recently to two Tennessee legislators. “Asserting that there are significant scientific controversies about the overall nature of [this concept] when there are none will only confuse students, not enlighten them.”

3 ) Science-based industries might conclude the state is anti-science. Florida is considering its own law to require “critical analysis” of evolution, which could open the door to unscientific theories being presented in the classroom. In response to the measure, the Florida Academy of Sciences issued a statement noting that the measure would “undermine the reputation of our state and adversely affect our economic future as we try to attract new high tech and biomedical jobs to Florida.”

4 ) Anti-evolution theories aren’t science and don’t belong in a science classroom. Whether you call it creationism, creation science or intelligent design, it isn’t science and shouldn’t be taught alongside scientific theories. I could see the story of creation being taught in a history class, while studying the creation mythologies of various world cultures, but anything else is promoting religion and is unconstitutional in a public school.

5 ) If it goes to court, the anti-evolution side will lose, potentially costing a school district or state a lot of money. Case in point: Dover, Pennsylvania. The Dover Area School District was sued by parents after it mandated the teaching of intelligent design. The district lost, spectacularly (pdf), and paid more than $1 million in legal fees. Defending the teaching of anti-evolution theories now could potentially cost millions more.

By the time information reaches you, it may be garbled, like when children play Telephone (image courtesy of flickr user Bindaas Madhavi)

How far away is the information from its original source? Remember the game Telephone from your childhood, where a message would pass from one kid to the next, only to come out all garbled at the end? The same thing is true with most bits of information. The further you get from the original source (like a medical study), the more likely it is that what you read or hear has been misinterpreted. And if you can’t determine what the original source was—as often happens when reading chain emails or random Web sites—it may be best to simply ignore it.

Who paid for the information? We should be skeptical about financial conflicts of interest when it comes to science and medicine. Several studies have found that funding from the pharmaceutical industry is associated with positive results, for example. But the funders of news and advice sites can also influence the information. The New York Times Magazine recently compared two sites with medical information—WebMD and MayoClinic.com—and concluded, “With the site’s (admitted) connections to pharmaceutical and other companies, WebMD has become permeated with pseudomedicine and subtle misinformation.”

Is there any hype? If someone is claiming that they’ve found, say, the cure for cancer or cloned a human being, be very, very skeptical. The word “breakthrough” is often a clue, as there are few true breakthroughs in science.

Does the source of information have an intentional bias? Conservapedia, for example, admits up front that they are written from a conservative viewpoint, and so it should be no surprise that they call climate change “mostly a natural phenomenon.”

Is it a minority point of view? I’m not saying that the majority is always right, but if someone makes a claim that goes against the majority of scientists or doctors, that claim deserves more skepticism and investigation.

Is the story almost too good to be true? Urban legends persist because they capture our imaginations and contain just enough (or possibly too many) details to sound true. And they often come to us directly from people we trust (who got them from people they trust, who got them from people they trust). Check out suspicious stories at Snopes.com or other sites that fact-check tales of alligators in the sewer system or chihuahuas that are really rats. Even if a story is true, remember that the plural of anecdote is not data. Some smokers live to be 100 years old, but it’s still the case that smoking kills.

Is the source of information a TV or movie star? For reasons I will never understand, some people take their medical advice from actors like Jenny McCarthy. Dateline even gave over an entire hour to the crazy cancer theories of Suzanne Somers. But a general rule should be that you shouldn’t trust information coming from someone who deals in fiction for their day job.

A note on Wikipedia: The problem with Wikipedia is that you can’t answer many of these questions when reading the crowd-sourced Web site. But while I would never take medical advice from here, I do often use it to find other trusted sources, thanks to the footnotes.

What sources do you trust most for your science and medical information?

And so, in honor of today, here’s my top ten list of the worst—and weirdest—love stories from the world of biology:

10. Giant pandas: They are solitary creatures, and female pandas ovulate for only two or three days a year, so hooking up might be a bit of a problem in the wild. Even in captivity, panda mating isn’t always successful, leading zoo keepers to try everything from behavioral training to panda porn. The National Zoo’s current couple, Tian Tian and Mei Xiang, were unsuccessful in their mating attempts yet again this year; zoo curators then artificially inseminated Mei Xiang—which is how we got Tai Shan in 2005.

A female praying mantis will sometimes bite the head off her mate (image courtesy of flickr user paparutzi)

9. Pseudobiceros hancockanus: These orange-and-purple marine flatworms are hermaphroditic, meaning they can act as either a female or a male. How do they sort it out? Through penis fencing (see here for video). They battle each other with their penises and the winner pierces the other to deliver its sperm. The loser has to spend a lot of its energy and resources caring for the developing eggs.

8. Short-beaked echidnas: These spiky Tasmanian animals hibernate in winter, but that doesn’t deter some males from sex. They’ll happily mate with hibernating females; sometimes the females wake up, only to go back into hibernation, while others just sleep right through it. Scientists think that by re-entering hibernation, which would delay the development of a fetus, the female gets a chance to mate with a better quality male and abandon her first pregnancy.

7. Porcupines: The weird thing about porcupine sex has nothing to do with the quills. Male North American porcupines that want to mate with a female will first perform an elaborate dance, and then if she’s receptive, the female will let him douse her with urine. Ew!

6. Muscovy ducks: Males have a ballistic, corkscrew-shaped penis that they can use to force themselves onto unwilling females. Females, though, can fight back, at least against unwanted pregnancy, by refusing to relax her corkscrew-shaped genital tract. As a result, although a third of matings are forced, only three percent of offspring are born from those matings.

5. Redback spiders: When mating, the male redback spider performs a somersault that places his abdomen right above the female’s mouth, thus setting himself up to be eaten when copulation is done. It’s a noble sacrifice in the name of his genes—cannibalized males copulate longer and fertilize more eggs than males that survive mating, and females are more likely to reject other males after they’ve eaten their first mate.

4. Praying mantises: Like the redback spider, the female praying mantis often eats her mate. But she doesn’t always wait until they’re finished to start her meal. Sometimes the female will bite off the male’s head while they are copulating.

3. Bean weevils: The male bean weevil’s penis is covered with long, sharp spikes that can inflict serious scarring on a female. To make matters worse (for the female, that is), the longer the spines, the more successful the male is at depositing his sperm and fathering her young.

2. Banana slugs: Like the marine flatworms, banana slugs are hermaphrodites. When they copulate, each slug inserts its penis into the other. When they’re done, though, one slug may chew the penis off the other, and sometimes you end up with two penis-less slugs. Scientists call it apophallation.

1. Harpactea sadistica: This spider from Israel performs something called “traumatic insemination,” which is also characteristic of several insect species. The male injects sperm into the female by piercing her abdomen with his penis. This can leave an open wound prone to infection. Bedbugs, which also practice this method of copulation, at least provide the female with a spermalege that helps to repair the damage.

Still from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Credit: Everett Collection

No one knows when, or even if, we will discover alien life in the universe or what it might look like. But that hasn’t stopped those who are looking from planning on that eventuality, as I discovered when reporting “Ready for Contact,” one of the stories in Smithsonian‘s new special issue, Mysteries of the Universe. These scientists have a plan, and it involves telling everyone about their research and any discovery. “I think there’s a big misconception in the public that somehow this is all a cloak-and-dagger operation, and it’s not,” Arizona State University astrobiologist Paul Davies told me. “People are quite open about what they are doing.”

But what will happen after such an announcement is a true mystery. How will the media react, and the public? Will there be mayhem, or will we just yawn? The recent discovery of bacteria that can apparently use arsenic in place of phosphorus, however, has provided an interesting glimpse of what a discovery of alien life portends.

Our story starts on November 29, when NASA announced a December 2 press conference “to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.” Almost immediately rumors began to swirl that NASA might have discovered extraterrestrial life itself. The frenzy reached such a point that I even received a press release from a betting web site about the odds they were giving on just what NASA’s finding might be. (They placed a 33 percent chance on the discovery of a life form on Mars and a 16 percent chance that NASA would announce that Area 51 had been used for alien studies.) Meanwhile, those of us with embargoed access to the Science study NASA was referring to just groaned—we knew the rumors were all wrong but couldn’t say a thing.

After all that, the actual announcement, though interesting, seemed somewhat of a letdown.

But things heated up again shortly thereafter as scientists and bloggers began criticizing the research. One microbiologist summarized the paper as “lots of flim-flam, but very little reliable information.” They questioned whether the paper was worthy of being published, especially in so prestigious a journal as Science, while others defended the peer review process. And the arguing continues.

If this had been a discovery of alien life, we could probably expect a similar progression of events, only everything would by hyped by a factor of a hundred, at least. Davies, who is associated with the SETI program, which searches for radio signals of alien life, told me, “if there’s a ghost of a chance that a particular radio source is going to turn out to be ET messaging us, the media will be all over it right away.” More rumors, more crazy press releases, maybe CNN reporters camped on the scientists’ doorsteps. Davies imagines there would be mayhem among the general public, too, with the observatory that made the discovery hounded by people, their computers besieged by hackers. “You could imagine police cordons and even riot police,” he said. Who knows how religious leaders would react? And the scientific community would pick apart any discovery, as they are now doing with the arsenic paper.

Scientists in a series of workshops in the early 1990s attempted to determine the social implications of a SETI discovery. “It depends” seems to be their ultimate answer. But people would likely fall into one of two camps, as they have done in the past and do now. The catastrophists predict that the discovery of alien life will result in the end of humanity as we know it, or at least the end of our current culture. But for the “millennial enthusiasts,” as the group named them, “the gloom of the doomsayers is more than offset by the rapture,” they wrote. They see revelations of how to cure cancer, solve the energy crisis or win world peace.

A lot of this would depend on the nature of any discovery, of course. Single-celled life on Mars certainly warrants a different reaction than a message from an intelligent extraterrestrial or a spaceship landing on the White House lawn. In any case, there would be some level of freaking out from the media and, possibly, the public, as the arsenic study has shown.

But for many of us, I think our response would be somewhere in the middle. The discovery of life outside of Earth, while interesting, would hardly negate the need to go to work and earn money, to visit with friends and family, to eat quality chocolate, to do all the things we do every day. That doesn’t mean that the search for extraterrestrial life isn’t important or won’t ever have some impact on the average person. But it won’t change us any more than we’re changing already.

REE are almost ubiquitous in  modern technology because they’re incredibly useful. They are the “vitamins of chemistry,” says Daniel Cordier, a mineral commodities specialist for rare earths at the U.S. Geological Survey. “They help everything perform better, and they have their own unique characteristics,” he says, “particularly in terms of magnetism, temperature resistance and resistance to corrosion.” Those characteristics have helped REE find homes in everything from flat-panel TVs and smart phones to anti-lock brakes and air bags in cars, from sunglasses and crystal to lasers and smart bombs.

The rare earths were common when Earth was accreting, and so they are more abundant in the inner parts of the planet. They concentrate on the surface only in places where mantle eruptions have worked their way up through the crust, mostly in igneous materials. But unlike more familiar metals, such as gold and copper, rare earths don’t clump in single-element chunks. Instead, the REE all wait together as hot rocks are crystallizing. “They tend to follow phosphate around and hang out until the very end,” says Cordier, “and then they’ll crystallize out.” Recoverable concentrations can be found in several minerals, such as bastnaesite and monazite. But refining these minerals into individual elements takes many days of heavy processing.

The Mountain Pass mine once dominated rare earth element production (via wikimedia commons)

The United States has one of the richest REE deposits in the world, at Mountain Pass in California, but as interest in rare earths declined in this country in the late 20th century, China’s interest was heating up. Chinese scientists had visited during the Nixon Administration and taken their knowledge home, applying it to their own rich deposits. By the end of the 20th century, they were able to undersell the competition and drive most of the rest of the world out of the business. “They now sit in the driver’s seat,” says Cordier.

Earlier this year, China blocked REE exports to Japan, renewing concerns about the Chinese monopoly and prompting new calls for developing rare earth production elsewhere. The Mountain Pass mine, which has been inactive for several years, is scheduled to start up again in 2011. A new report from the USGS documents REE deposits in 13 additional states, and India, Australia and Canada are planning to get into the rare earths business more heavily.

And anyone looking for new REE deposits could benefit from the years of Chinese work in this area. Most of the world’s heavy rare earths come from ionic adsorption clays in southeast China, Cordier says, and no one has really looked at this type of clay elsewhere in the world. “There’s a lot of opportunity for exploration,” he says.

Cats use inertia to bring milk to their mouths (photo courtesy of flickr user invisible monsters)

The 1940 documentary short “Quicker’n a Wink” fascinated people with its slow-motion imagery of things like the beating of a hummingbird’s wings; it won a 1941 Academy Award. One of the revelations from the movie was that a cat curls its tongue backwards into a “J” when it goes to take a drink of liquid, letting the top of its tongue touch the surface first.

But kitties aren’t using their tongues like ladles, scooping up water, says a new study published yesterday in Science. Cats simply have to brush their tongues along to the surface of the liquid and let the power of physics bring it into their mouths.

The scientists used high-speed imaging to watch cats—including one researcher’s own pet, Cutta Cutta—lapping up milk, sometimes spending hours just waiting for the cat to get thirsty. Each cat would dip its tongue towards the liquid, just brushing the surface, not piercing it. When it lifted its tongue, the liquid adhered to the tip of the tongue and was drawn upward in a column (as in the above photo), thinning as the cat drew its tongue into its mouth. Just before the column would break, the cat would close its mouth and trap the milk, storing it in cavities inside and swallowing after every three to 17 of these lapping cycles.

This small act seems to defy gravity, but in actuality the cats have figured out how to keep a delicate balance between inertia—the tendency of the liquid to keep moving in the same direction—and the gravitational forces pulling the milk back into the bowl. Domestic cats don’t bring up a lot of liquid in each lap, only about a tenth of a milliliter, but they do it quickly, at a rate of about four laps per second.

When the scientists watched high-speed and YouTube video of larger kitties, such as lions and tigers, they found that the bigger cats’ tongues worked the same way, but they lapped at a slower rate. The researchers were able to develop an equation that predicted lapping frequency based on animal mass.

“The amount of liquid available for the cat to capture each time it closes its mouth depends on the size and speed of the tongue. Our research…suggests that the cat chooses the speed in order to maximize the amount of liquid ingested per lap,” says study co-author Jeffrey Aristoff, a mathematician at Princeton University. “This suggests that cats are smarter than many people think, at least when it comes to hydrodynamics.”

How different are apples and oranges? (courtesy of flickr user kokopinto)

The phrase “comparing apples and oranges” is often invoked when a person compares two items that are thought to be so different as to make any comparison invalid. But are apples and oranges really that different? According to TimeTree.org, Malus x domestica (the apple) and Citrus sinensis (the navel orange) are separated by about 89.2 million years of evolution, but they are both fruit trees. Surely there are valid comparisons that can be made. So where are the differences, and is a comparison between them truly invalid, as the idiom says?

To make my comparisons, I will draw from my own experience and several online sources, including a dietician’s analysis of the juices of the two fruits and a published study: “Comparing apples and oranges: a randomised prospective study,” by James Barone, which appeared in the British Medical Journal in 2000. Here are just a few characteristics:

As we can see from this small list, it is quite easy to compare apples and oranges. And they are remarkably similar in many ways. Although they may look and feel very different, the two fruits have a similar size and weight, and their juices have a similar caloric content and levels of vitamin C. However, they differ widely in fiber content of the fruit and in the potassium and folate levels of their juices.

In an earlier study (“Apples and Oranges—A Comparison,” published in the Annals of Improbable Research in 1995), Scott Sandford produced a spectrograph from dried samples of a Granny Smith apple and a Sunkist navel orange. He concluded that not only was it easy to compare the two, but the two fruits were remarkably similar. “Thus, it would appear that the comparing apples and oranges defense should no longer be considered valid. This is a somewhat startling revelation,” Sanford wrote. “It can be anticipated to have a dramatic effect on the strategies used in arguments and discussions in the future.” Well, he didn’t get that right, but perhaps we should consider dropping the use of this idiom.

Is this your view of a scientist? (via wikimedia commons)

The scientists we feature in Smithsonian magazine are sometimes perplexed about why we’ve included details about their personal lives. It’s the science that matters, they say, so why would anyone care about their art collection or television-director father? Bob Hazen, the mineralogist at the heart of our October story on the origins of life, had a similar reaction when he found out that the writer, Helen Fields, had included details about his weekend home and collecting habits. The answer to his “why” is found in the issue’s editor’s note:

Fields says the stories she most likes to report are about how science actually gets done—“how it works and the people who do it. I think science often seems like these grand ideas are handed down from on high,” she says. “But they come from people with dogs and kids and interests.”

That isn’t a surprise to anyone who has a scientist for a friend or relative. If all there was to a person was their research, lunch conversations would get boring and repetitive pretty fast. But if you don’t know a scientist personally, it might be easy to buy into the stereotype of the man in the white lab coat holding a brightly colored, bubbling test tube or flask (which is nothing more than dry ice in colored water, but it makes for a nice TV image) spouting research findings in dry, jargon-filled language.

It doesn’t take much, though, to show that stereotype is just a stereotype. (Sure, some scientists wear lab coats, but those bubbly, bright liquids are a rare find in the real world of science.) For example, after a group of seventh graders visited Fermilab, their drawings of scientists changed from being mostly white men in lab coats and glasses to a diverse group of men and women wearing regular clothes. And the PBS science show NOVA has been running a web series, “The Secret Life of Scientists & Engineers,” in which you can learn about scientists’ hidden passions, like rock music and Native American dance.

Science can be so interesting/perplexing/thrilling/(insert your own adjective) that the people doing the research sometimes become nothing more than background noise in a complex world. But the researchers behind the science are important and interesting parts of the story, too. And learning more about them can help to demystify science and get more people interested in it. That’s something we all should want.

Portrait of Earth (Image created by Reto Stöckli, Nazmi El Saleous, and Marit Jentoft-Nilsen, NASA GSFC)

Hi. I’m Earth. While I’m pleased and flattered that you have chosen to honor me on every April 22 for the last 40 years, I am seriously concerned and, frankly, very angry that most of you seem to forget me for the rest of the year. I periodically try to remind you of my power—floods, hurricanes and tornadoes are among my favorite methods—but you may have noticed that I have ratcheted up my work, or at least concentrated it in places you are most likely to notice, in the past six months or so.

I began with the Snowpocalypse in Washington, D.C. back in December, briefly shutting down the government. That was just a small taste of my power. Next was the magnitude 7.0 earthquake in Haiti on January 12. I struck again with a true blizzard, Snowmageddon, on the Eastern coast of the United States in February, that time shutting down the nation’s capital for an entire week. Later that month, on February 27, was my magnitude 8.8 earthquake in Chile. In March, I flooded large portions of New England. But my pièce de résistance really has to be this month’s eruption of the Icelandic volcano that created a volcanic plume that shut down much of European air travel.

Now that I have your attention, I have a list of demands:

• Reduce your greenhouse gas emissions. I don’t care how, but this is really for your own benefit. I survive just fine no matter how hot I get, but you’re not going to like most of the results of climate change.
• Quit using my natural resources so quickly. Again, I make this demand to help you. At the rates you’re going, I could easily run out of things like fish, wood, oil and some metals soon. I’ll be sad to see them go, but you’re going to have bigger problems.
• It took a very long time for my mountains to grow. Stop cutting off their tops to get to the coal and minerals underneath. Mountains don’t grow back like hair does.
• I know that dams may seem an easy way to create energy, but they really mess me up. They fragment ecosystems, send species into extinction and may even trigger earthquakes. Look for other, more environmentally friendly ways to generate electricity.
• Quit dumping your stuff everywhere. Didn’t your parents teach you to keep your home clean?

As you no doubt know, I can be far more violent and destructive than I have been in the last few months, but these were just wake up calls. And you can go ahead and ignore me; I’ll survive. Really, from my point of view, what you’re doing is simply annoying. But your activities are hurting your own species in the long run. So even if you don’t care about me, you might want to think about yourselves.

Cheers,

Earth

(This post was included in Scientia Pro Publica 28, where you’ll find more great science writing.)