Smithsonian.com

If you don't want to show an misformed Moon on a Christmas card, a full moon is a safe option (courtesy of flickr user sally_monster)

You probably don’t pay too much attention to the imagery on the Christmas cards you receive or the paper wrapping your presents. You probably care more about the card’s message or the attractiveness of the gift wrap. And it’s probably just as well, since a new study in the journal Communicating Astronomy With the Public has found that depictions of the Moon on Christmas cards and gift wrap and in children’s Christmas books are often wrong.

Peter Barthel, an astronomer at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, was spurred to look into this issue after seeing a Unicef Christmas card in 2010 and a popular animated Advent e-calendar that year that both showed an unlikely Moon. The card depicted children decorating a Christmas tree beneath a waning crescent moon (one with its left-hand side lit) while the calendar scene showed people caroling, also under a waning Moon. The problem here is that the waning Moon doesn’t rise until 3 a.m. While it’s not impossible that these scenes could take place in the early morning hours, “it’s unlikely,” Barthel writes.

And so Barthel began to examine Christmas scenes on wrapping paper and cards and in books in both the Netherlands and the United States, two countries that have done much to shape our modern view of Santa Claus and Christmas. He found that 40 percent of the pictures in Dutch Christmas books and 65 percent of the Dutch gift wrap samples incorrectly showed the waning Moon. And this wasn’t a modern problem–six out of nine samples from a collection of older Dutch gift wrap also depicted, wrongly, the waning Moon.

American Christmas artists did better at showing a believable Moon in their images, but simply because they more often draw a full Moon in Christmas scenes. (The full Moon rises at sunset and shines over evening holiday scenes naturally.) That said, Barthel did find examples of incorrect waning Moon scenes. One booklet even showed a full Moon and a waning Moon in the same night.

Should we care? Barthel says yes:

The errors are innocent, somewhat comparable to incorrectly drawn rainbows, with the colour at the inside of the arc. Now watching beautiful phenomena like rainbows and moon crescents is one thing, but understanding them makes them all the lot more interesting. Moreover, understanding leads to knowledge which lasts.

And I don’t think it’s too much to ask for artists, especially ones drawing for children, to pay a little attention to accuracy in something like this. After all, if artists like Vincent Van Gogh and Edvard Munch could take the time to use real moons and stars in their paintings, surely modern artists could as well.

A lunar eclipse turns the moon reddish brown (credit: Sky & Telescope / Akira Fujii)

On the night of May 22, 1453, the people of Byzantium could see an eerie red shadow cross the Moon. It was a partial eclipse–the Earth had gotten in between the Sun and Moon–and the Byzantines took it as a bad omen. And perhaps they were right–the city of Constantinople fell before the month’s end.

A full lunar eclipse will take place this weekend, visible from Asia, Australia and western North America. But people today don’t view this astronomical event as a worrying sign. Instead, it’s time for science! And you can participate.

The Classroom Astronomer magazine has set up a website, measurethemoon.org, to coordinate observations of the position of the moon in the sky as it passes through our planet’s shadow. And if you’re in the right place, you can measure the distance from the Earth to the Moon.

There are two ways to do this. The first is called the Shadow Method, and it’s the way that the ancient Greeks first measured the distance between the Earth and Moon thousands of years ago. Amy Shira Teitel explains in Universe Today:

Start with the few knowns. We know, as did the Ancient Greeks, that the Moon travels around the Earth at a constant speed—about 29 days per revolution. The diameter of the Earth is also known to be about 12,875 kilometers, or 8,000 miles. By tracking the movement of the Earth’s shadow across the Moon, Greek astronomers found that the Earth’s shadow was roughly 2.5 times the apparent size of the Moon and lasted roughly three hours from the first to last signs of the shadow.

From these measurements, it was simple geometry that allowed Aristarchus (circa 270 B.C.) to determined that the Moon was around 60 Earth radii away (about 386,243 km or 240,000 miles). This is quite close to the currently accepted figure of 60.3 radii.

You can follow Aristarchus’ method in your own backyard if you have a clear view of a Lunar eclipse. Track the movement of the Earth’s shadow on the Moon by drawing the changes and time the eclipse. Use your measurements to determine the Moon’s distance.

The second method, the Lunar Parallax Method, was familiar to the ancient Greeks but they lacked the ability to communicate over the far distances that is necessary to carry this out. Telephones and the Internet make this easily possible now. Two observers at least 2,000 miles apart will have to snap a picture of the Moon at the exact same moment. Because the angle at which the Moon and the stars behind it will be different for each person, the images they snap will be slightly different, particularly the stars in the background. “What your images have given you is a triangle,” Teitel explains. “You know the base (the distance between you and your friend), and you can find the angle at the top (the point of the Moon in this triangle). Simple geometry will give you a value for the distance of the Moon.”

If the people behind measurethemoon.org get enough participants, they’ll be able to compare all the various calculations, determine which method is more accurate and figure out how close two people have to be to get an accurate calculation with the Lunar Parallax Method.

If you’re not up for calculations, there are a few other lunar eclipse science projects you might want to participate in:

• Roger Sinnott of Sky & Telescope is collecting telescopic timings of the the passage of Earth’s shadow across lunar craters (find instructions here) as part of a long-term project to track the unpredictability of the diameter of the shadow.
• John Westfall of the Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers is collecting timings of when the phases of the lunar eclipse begin and end, made with the unaided eye, to calibrate similar observations made in the past when mariners used the Moon to determine longitude.
• Richard Keen of the University of Chicago will collect reports of the Moon’s brightness from amateur astronomers for use in volcano-climate studies.

After reading all this and seeing the picture above, you may be wondering why the Moon in a lunar eclipse turns red, not black. “That red light on the Moon during a lunar eclipse comes from all the sunrises and sunsets around the Earth at the time,” says Robert Naeye, editor in chief of Sky & Telescope. “If you were an astronaut standing on the Moon and looking up, the whole picture would be clear. The Sun would be covered up by a dark Earth that was ringed all around with a thin, brilliant band of sunset- and sunrise-colored light, bright enough to dimly light the lunar landscape around you.”

If, like me, you’ll miss out on this chance to see a lunar eclipse, your next opportunity will come in April 2014.

Many of us long to leave the cubicle farm, even for a day or two each week (courtesy of flickr user ste3ve)

If you’re trying to convince your boss to let you telecommute, you quickly run into a data problem. That is, there isn’t a lot of it. Oh, there are plenty of studies, but many of them are theoretical or anecdotal. What’s really needed is an experiment, with large numbers and a control group, like what is done when researchers test new medicines.

Well, we’ve lucked out, as someone has actually run that experiment, as Slate noted this week. A group of researchers at Stanford University partnered with a large (>12,000 employees) travel agency in China that was founded by a former Stanford Ph.D. student. The company’s chairman was curious about whether instituting a telecommuting policy would work for his employees and what kind of effect it would have. So they used employees in the company’s call center–the people who handled phone inquiries and booked trips–to test the questions (the results haven’t been peer reviewed yet, but they can be seen in this presentation [PDF]).

A call went out for volunteers, and 508 of the 996 employees in the group spoke up. Of those, 255 qualified for the study; they had the right space at home and enough experience at the company to be trusted on their own. The company then held a lottery, and employees with even-number birthdays were allowed to telecommute four out of five shifts a week, and those with odd-number birthdays worked solely out of the office. Like a medical trial, this setup gave the researchers an experimental (telecommuting) group and a control (office) group, which could easily be compared.

What the researchers found should hearten those of us who’d like to telecommute, even once in a while. After a few weeks of the experiment, it was clear that the telecommuters were performing better than their counterparts in the office. They took more calls (it was quieter and there were fewer distractions at home) and worked more hours (they lost less time to late arrivals and sick breaks) and more days (fewer sick days). This translated into greater profits for the company because more calls equaled more sales. The telecommuters were also less likely to quit their jobs, which meant less turnover for the company.

The company considered the experiment so successful that they implemented a wider telecommuting policy. But Slate reports that not everyone in the experiment chose to continue telecommuting; they valued the daily interactions with their workmates more than they disliked their commutes or other downsides of going into the office every day.

Clearly telecommuting is not for everyone. Another factor to consider might be how much a person’s family life interferes with their job, and vice versa. A new study in the Journal of Business and Psychology, for example, found that people who experience a lot of conflict between their family and work priorities suffered more exhaustion when they telecommuted, whether they stuck to traditional work hours or had more flexible schedules. In other words, people who had problems separating the work and personal parts of their lives found it just increased their stress levels when they combined the two at home.

But perhaps I should point out that work-family conflicts aren’t a problem for me, so I’d be delighted to telecommute.

Ecologists warn that New England's maples could be at risk (courtesy of flickr user paul+photos=moody)

The blog io9 is running a series of Public Science Triumphs, explaining how publicly funded science makes the world a better place. “It’s tempting to offload the cost of science onto business, but there are some kinds of research that only government can make possible,” io9 editor Annalee Newitz wrote this weekend in the Washington Post. That research, often called “basic,” may seem useless to some but can lead to great payoffs in the future. Basic research provides the foundation for monumental discoveries, fosters the development of ground-breaking technologies and gives us the information we rely on when making important decisions, like when and where to build and how strong to make a structure.

An important, and often under-appreciated, source of that information comes from the world of ecology. Everything in the world is connected, but not in the new age way most people mean when they say that. It’s all connected through more mundane (though, frankly, more fascinating) ways, like carbon and nitrogen cycles, food webs, water and fire—the subjects of the science of ecology. And it’s this kind of information that will help a builder to know why a warehouse will flood even if constructed a fair distance from the river, explain how reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone led to an increase in beaver dams and guide management decisions, such as setting levels for sustainable fishing of salmon.

Ecology is not a glamorous science; no one will ever accuse an ecologist of being motivated by money. (The practical clothes and sensible sandals usually deter such accusations.) Field sites are basic, at best. Your average college dorm provides more space and better food. But an ecologist probably won’t mind because she’s happier out in the muck anyway.

Much ecological research provides a simple slice in time, perhaps a few years of data. But to truly understand how everything is working together, more data is needed. That’s where the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network comes in. These are sites all over the world (included 26 in the U.S. LTER Network, funded by the National Science Foundation) that have been collecting data on primary production (the energy created by plants), the distribution of organisms in the ecosystem, the decay of dead organisms, the movement of water and nutrients, and the patterns of disturbances—at some sites for more than 30 years. Put that data together and an ecologist will have a picture of how organisms and the world around them are working together, and affecting the human population, too.

At Harvard Forest, for example, LTER ecologists have documented the spread of the Asian long-horned beetle (ALB), which took up residence in Worcester, Massachusetts a decade ago. Scientists have been trying to keep the beetle confined to the city, but LTER scientists found that the insect has spread to the nearby forest, infesting nearly two-thirds of the maple trees in one area. “If the ALB continues to spread outside Worcester, the abundance of red maples could provide a pathway for its dispersal throughout New England and other parts of eastern North America,” says the study‘s co-author, David Orwig of Harvard University. And if the beetles spread and take out New England’s maples, they would also destroy the region’s maple industry and even, perhaps, a good portion of the autumn tourist trade. More than one million people come to the area each year, spending about $1 billion in their quest to see the red maples’ stunning foliage. Knowing the maples are at risk may lead to changes in how the infestation is being fought.

Ecology, and especially long-term ecological projects, are scientists’ “gifts to the future,” as one of my colleagues put it. There is no Nobel Prize for ecology, and groundbreaking research papers are rare. Ecologists are pursuing this science because they simply want to know. And the benefits for the rest of us can be monumental. By better understanding how an ecosystem works, we are able to make better decisions that can save money and prevent disasters. No company is ever going to pay for this–their shareholders would never stand for it–but I’m glad to see NSF and other government agencies step in.

A group of scientists and statisticians led by the University of California at Berkeley set out recently to conduct an independent assessment of climate data and determine once and for all whether the planet has warmed in the last century and by how much. The study was designed to address concerns brought up by prominent climate change skeptics, and it was funded by several groups known for climate skepticism. Last week, the group released its conclusions: Average land temperatures have risen by about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the 20th century. The result matched the previous research.

The skeptics were not happy and immediately claimed that the study was flawed.

Also in the news last week were the results of yet another study that found no link between cell phones and brain cancer. Researchers at the Institute of Cancer Epidemiology in Denmark looked at data from 350,000 cell phone users over an 18-year period and found they were no more likely to develop brain cancer than people who didn’t use the technology.

But those results still haven’t killed the calls for more monitoring of any potential link.

Study after study finds no link between autism and vaccines (and plenty of reason to worry about non-vaccinated children dying from preventable diseases such as measles). But a quarter of parents in a poll released last year said that they believed that “some vaccines cause autism in healthy children” and 11.5 percent had refused at least one vaccination for their child.

Polls say that Americans trust scientists more than, say, politicians, but that trust is on the decline. If we’re losing faith in science, we’ve gone down the wrong path. Science is no more than a process (as recent contributors to our “Why I Like Science” series have noted), and skepticism can be a good thing. But for many people that skepticism has grown to the point that they can no longer accept good evidence when they get it, with the result that “we’re now in an epidemic of fear like one I’ve never seen and hope never to see again,” says Michael Specter, author of Denialism, in his TEDTalk below.

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that you think I’m not talking about you. But here’s a quick question: Do you take vitamins? There’s a growing body of evidence that vitamins and dietary supplements are no more than a placebo at best and, in some cases, can actually increase the risk of disease or death. For example, a study earlier this month in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that consumption of supplements, such as iron and copper, was associated with an increased risk of death among older women. In a related commentary, several doctors note that the concept of dietary supplementation has shifted from preventing deficiency (there’s a good deal of evidence for harm if you’re low in, say, folic acid) to one of trying to promote wellness and prevent disease, and many studies are showing that more supplements do not equal better health.

But I bet you’ll still take your pills tomorrow morning. Just in case.

This path has the potential to lead to some pretty dark times, as Specter says:

When you start down the road where belief and magic replace evidence and science, you end up in a place you don’t want to be. You end up in Thabo Mbeki South Africa. He killed 400,000 of his people by insisting that beetroot garlic and lemon oil were much more effective than the antiretroviral drugs we know can slow the course of AIDS. Hundreds of thousands of needless deaths in a country that has been plagued worse than any other by this disease.

If you don’t think that can happen here, think again. We’re already not vaccinating children against preventable diseases, something that will surely lead (and probably already has led) to lives lost. We have big problems to address in the coming decades—even greater changes to temperature, weather and water as the planet warms; a growing population—and we need to start putting our trust back into science, into the process that has brought us to where we are today, with longer lives, cleaner water and skies, more efficient farming. Because you have to admit, this is a pretty great time to be alive and it’s science that got us here.