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  • The origin of fools

    AFP - Getty Images file
    Are chimps capable of intentional foolery?

    Humans aren't the only ones who have a knack for fooling others: Witness the deceitful cuckoos and the yellow-bellied lizards. But humans, and perhaps chimpanzees as well, are the animal kingdom's consummate foolers. In fact, scientists say our capacity for deception and deceit may well be related to the size of our brains - and reflect an essential characteristic of higher-order thought.

    Just in time for April Fools' Day, here's a look at the evolutionary roots of foolery, as well as the origins of the annual custom and history's best April Fools' jokes.

    A foolish mind
    The evolutionary advantages of camouflage and mimickry can be seen going back millions of years - ranging from insects that look like plant leaves to octopuses that can make like a plant and leave. But the animals that play tricks on others of their own species are few and far between, said University of Chicago primatologist Dario Maestripieri.

    "Some of the primates like to tease other individuals and make fun of them," he told me. "Possibly they're the only animals that do this - poke fun at others just for the fun of it. Young animals do it to adults. It's not really deceptive. It's more like teasing behavior."

    Chimps and other apes also seem to be adept at deceiving each other for societal advantage, Maestripieri said.

    "The deception, when it's intentional, is something that comes with other complex cognitive skills. It's what people call 'theory of mind,'" he said. "To be able to deceive someone else implies the ability to know that they think, they believe. That's something that only the higher primates have."

    For example, female chimps (and even rhesus monkeys) will sneak around to have sex with younger males when the senior, dominant male isn't looking. A lone chimp will fool the others in its troop to save a cache of food all for itself.

    Some research has linked the capacity for deception with brain size - and specifically the size of the neocortex, the area of the brain involved in higher-level thought.

    "It seems that primates that have a larger brain engage in deception more than others," Maestripieri said. "But I have to tell you this is controversial, because when you study deception, you're studying a series of anecdotes. What might look like [intentional] deception to one researcher wouldn't look like that to another."

    Richard Byrne, an evolutionary psychologist at St. Andrews University in Scotland, agrees that it's hard to judge whether primate deception qualifies as intentional foolery - let alone the kind of April Fools' prankishness so familiar to humans.

    "To find a prank funny, one needs to understand how the world looks through other people's eyes - so that you can fully appreciate how stupid they must be feeling by now!" he wrote in an e-mail. "Technically called 'theory of mind,' that's just what most primate deception lacks.

    "The interesting thing in my primate evidence is that, even so, primates do use deception a lot, to achieve their own ends, presumably without having any idea how their victims feel," he continued. "Instead, they learn the tactics by experience. They just find out what works and - since they learn very fast in social contexts - only need one hint and they have got the trick."

    Whether or not chimps have a theory of mind is a hot topic of debate among psychologists and biologists. In humans, theory of mind and its impairment have been linked to all sorts of phenomena ranging from altruism and religious experiences to autism and delusional beliefs.

    The bottom line is that humans are on a higher level when it comes to getting inside someone else's head - and then using a good prank to mess with it.

    A foolish day
    The evolutionary beginnings of institutionalized foolishness are lost in the mists of time, but some historians set the origin of April Fools' Day back in the 1500s. According to this version of the tale, medieval New Year's celebrations in France were traditionally held in late March, climaxing with a final round of parties on April 1. Around the time of the Gregorian calendar switch, King Charles moved the timing for the big New Year's bash to January. Some people, however, continued to celebrate in April (or were fooled into doing so) - thus leaving themselves open to ridicule as silly old fogies.

    There are lots of holes in this story, as The Straight Dope points out. In fact, the more you think about it, the more the story sounds like a centuries-old April Fools' hoax itself. A more sensible explanation would be that April Fools' Day was a carryover from the Romans' Hilaria Matris Deum festival, which was held on March 25, the time fixed in the ancient calendar as the spring equinox.

    In his masterwork, "The Golden Bough," anthropologist James George Frazer said "a universal license prevailed" during the Hilaria carnival:

    "Every man might say and do what he pleased. People went about the streets in disguise. No dignity was too high or too sacred for the humblest citizen to assume with impunity. In the reign of Commodus a band of conspirators thought to take advantage of the masquerade by dressing in the uniform of the Imperial Guard, and so, mingling with the crowd of merrymakers, to get within stabbing distance of the emperor. But the plot miscarried. ..."

    Licentiousness? Disguises? Harmless plots? Now that sounds like an April Fool's party! But seriously, there may have been an elemental linkage between spring's arrival and the inclination to let your hair down - and trip up someone else in the process. Some even see parallels between April Fool's Day and Holi, the Indian festival of colors that is traditionally held in March or April.

    For more April Fool's lore, check out this Snopes.com analysis - which backs away from judging the veracity of the various claims made for the origins of April Fool's Day.

    A foolish list
    It might seem like a fool's errand to rate the top 100 April Fool's Day hoaxes of all time, but that's exactly what the Museum of Hoaxes has done. The BBC's report on the 1957 Swiss spaghetti harvest leads the list - and Snopes.com seems to concur with that opinion, calling it "arguably the best media-generated April fools' joke."

    Decades before The Onion made fake news into a franchise, the BBC's "Panorama" program staged an elaborate TV report about happy Swiss farmers plucking strands of spaghetti from trees, thanks to science's triumph over the dreaded spaghetti weevil.

    Other entries with a scientific bent include claims that the Alabama state legislature had set the value of pi at exactly 3, to conform with the Bible ... that a critter called the hotheaded naked ice borer was preying on penguins from below ... and that a 1976 planetary alignment would make earthlings feel lighter.

    Such intricate hoaxes make the run-of-the-mill April Fools' jokes listed by the BBC's h2g2 Web site and the April Fool Zone seem positively pedestrian in comparison. Last year, msnbc.com users told us about their own favorite office tricks, and "Consumer Man" Herb Weisbaum contributed his own list of work-related hoaxes. But let the prankster beware: A recent survey indicated that most marketing executives frowned upon April Fools' jokes, and only a slim majority of ad execs thought pranks were appropriate.

    Just be glad you weren't taken in by one of the 10 worst April Fools' jokes of all time. The list, assembled by the Museum of Hoaxes, runs the gamut from fake disaster reports to the unfunny fakery perpetrated by Saddam Hussein.

    In 1999, I fell victim to a fake April Fool's report about Yugoslav hackers, put over on me (and other journalists) by Art Bell's "Coast to Coast AM" radio talk show. Ever since then, I've been leery about anything with an April 1 time stamp. But in honor of the day, I'll give a little more latitude for frivolity in the comment section below.

    For an extra helping of April foolery, check out this roundup of scientific spoofs from 2004.

    Update for 1:15 p.m. April 1: I delved further into the evolutionary roots of deception and foolery with St. Andrews' Richard Byrne as well as Maureen O'Sullivan, a psychology professor at the University of San Francisco.

    First, the follow-up with Byrne, conducted via e-mail. We started out with the idea of "theory of mind," which humans are thought to possess and chimps may or may not have. To refresh your memory, theory of mind refers to the idea that you have an understanding of another entity's mental state - which means you can appreciate the power you have over them when you fool them:

    Q: I had thought your view was that at least some of the great apes (e.g., chimpanzees) did possess a theory of mind. And I've heard from other quarters that some of the deception methods used by chimps appear to anticipate how the deceived chimp might react under certain conditions.

    Byrne: "Both true, in the sense that I am sure chimpanzees do things, including deception, that require them to understand in some way what others are thinking or aware of. And all other great apes come to that. However, most of the primate deception I analysed didn't reach these heady heights, and could have been learnt without any such understanding, including most of the chimpanzee cases.

    "I do think, however, that these great apes (all the time) and we humans (most of the time) can manage to take account of others' thoughts, knowledge and feelings without actually working it out in a logical, probably conscious way. If we are pushed, someone might ask 'Why did you do that?' and we can come up with these logical answers, 'Because I thought she knew he loved her...,' but I'm not convinced that we go through those steps all the time in everyday life, and I'm not sure that non-linguistic animals like chimpanzees have any equivalent.

    "So, to me, theory of mind is two things: the fast, efficient, primitive way of solving theory-of-mind problems in everyday life and the lab, which chimpanzees share, and the slow, logical, probably conscious, 'mentalizing' that depends on language."

    Q: Does this imply that there is something qualitatively different about the way the human mind works vis-a-vis the use of deception (admittedly, as entertainment or practice as well as a survival skill)?

    Byrne: "Yes, it certainly would. Whether that difference is the critical one for finding pranks funny, I just don't know. It might be, if the mentalizing about other's embarrassment or discomfort is what makes us laugh, or it might be that chimpanzees just aren't motivated to persecute others subtly, they might just prefer to beat 'em up!"

    Then I spoke with O'Sullivan, who has studied human cheating and lying for years (purely as an academic pursuit, of course!). She noted that there's a kind of pleasure felt by the fooled as well as the fooler after a well-played joke.

    "Sometimes people like lies, they like deception," she said. "It's like when we're at the movies. We like suspending disbelief. We also like tricksters: You find them in every culture."

    Many experts, including the late Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, have contended that children learn best in an environment of tenuous equilibrium - a sense that you're not quite on top of what's going on but still under control. "Being surprised jogs you into increasing your information store," O'Sullivan said.

    Experiencing harmless foolery also serves as a dress rehearsal for dealing with more serious deception - touching something elemental in our trickster brain. A similar explanation has been put forth for "why we seek out an eek."

    "There's a kind of mastery of what we fear," O'Sullivan said.

    As for the fooler, there's an obvious pleasure that accompanies pulling off a successful deception. That probably goes back to the evolutionary mists of time, when our ancestors' brain chemistry provided a reward even before the first taste of a pilfered piece of mammoth meat. Psychologists call that "duping delight" - and the subtle signs of that delight, at seemingly inappropriate times, can sometimes unmask a liar.

    Now that we're well into April Fools' Day itself, I can point to a couple of examples of well-played pranks on the Web. This BBC video spot about migrating penguins is fantastic.  And Google has come up with its own plan to go to Mars. (Considering that Google's co-founders are really, truly sponsoring a moon prize, and that others have talked seriously about one-way expeditions to Mars ... is the Virgle business model that far-fetched?)

    On our own Web site, Forbes Traveler contributes this guide to Martian tourism. Have you seen other examples of April foolery? Go ahead and add them as comments below.

  • Embrace the dark side

    AP
    These photos show the skyline of Sydney in Australia before and during Earth Hour
    in 2007. On Saturday, about 200 cities around the world are due to take part.

    Lights are going dark for a round-the-world, voluntary rolling blackout at 8 p.m. local time Saturday. Earth Hour - which originated in Australia a year ago and is now going global, thanks to the World Wildlife Fund - focuses awareness on saving energy and doing something about climate change. But the turn to the dark side didn't just begin last year, and it's about much more than one consciousness-raising hour. Saturday night also marks the beginning of a whole week of activities aimed at making our skies darker for good.

    National Dark-Sky Week got its start five years ago - and this year, the week's organizers are teaming up with Earth Hour (as well as the folks behind Lights Out America) to support Saturday's hourlong celebration of the dark side. In hundreds of cities around the world, people will be dousing their lights from 8 to 9 p.m. local time as a symbolic gesture for action on the climate change issue.

    During that hour, some folks will be hosting Earth Hour candlelight dinners. Others will be staging glow-in-the-dark Frisbee games. But for stargazers, Earth Hour and Dark-Sky Week offer golden opportunities to see the night sky the way it was meant to be seen, at least partly free of the glare from urban lights. That's why scores of astronomy clubs are sponsoring star parties over the next few nights. (To find a club near you, check this Web link, and this one, plus this one, and this one.)

    "National Dark-Sky Week is a great opportunity to dust off the old telescope from the attic and share in the wonder of the universe that has been part of the human tradition for thousands of years," the event's founder, Jennifer Barlow, said in a statement distributed by the International Dark-Sky Association.

    The association's senior technical adviser, Pete Strasser, said surveys have shown that 90 percent or more of all Americans younger than 18 have never seen the glow of the Milky Way galaxy with their own eyes. "They literally don't know what they're missing," Strasser said.

    People may think it has to be that way in order to protect the streets from predators that lurk in the dark. But Strasser, who lives in Tucson, Ariz., said that's mostly a case of "fearmongering."

    He said the fault lies in poorly designed urban lighting systems, which waste most of their light by shining it up into the sky.

    "Our crime rate is no higher or worse than any other community's, and yet I can see the Milky Way from my driveway at night, in an area with a population of over a million people," he said.

    In Strasser's view, Americans can have their safety as well as the stars. "Our organization says 'Dark-Sky,' it doesn't say 'dark ground,'" he said. "Reasonable lighting practices will solve the problem."

    Street lights, for example, can be shielded on top so that more of the light is aimed directly on the ground, and less of it is wasted on the sky. At home, outdoor lighting systems can be equipped with timers and sensors to keep the lights dark when they're not needed. Environmentally friendly, energy-efficient lamps can make a huge difference. The Dark-Sky Association's list of frequently asked questions provides plenty of tips and loads of Web links.

    Stargazers will be among the big beneficiaries of darker skies, to be sure, but there'll be a benefit even if you don't look up into the heavens.

    "The conception of the whole dark-sky impact has evolved from astronomical concerns into a broader spectrum. ... Of our 12,000 members, 5 percent are astronomers," Strasser said.

    The wiser use of lighting - outdoors as well as indoors - is much more than a symbolic one-night gesture. Lighting represents as much as 25 percent of residential electrical use, and up-to-date technologies can cut that consumption by more than half. You can get those savings by switching to compact fluorescent lights or LEDs, by getting smarter about sensors, and by simply switching off the lights in empty rooms.

    So as you turn off the lights for an hour on Saturday night, think about ways to improve the planet (and your view of the night sky) during the other 8,759 hours of the year.

    For more about Earth Hour, check out this dispatch from NBC Field Notes. For more about light pollution, there's this report from U.S. News and World Report. And to see the glories of the night sky from your computer, click through the latest installment of our "Space Shots" slide show.

    Update for 3:05 a.m. ET March 29: Based on the comments coming in, some people may have gotten the misimpression that the cities participating in Earth Hour would somehow shut down the power grid or force people to turn their lights off.  This event is totally voluntary, and of course no one will force you to go dark. I'd expect that traffic lights and other lights judged essential for public safety will stay on as usual.

    In the Earth Hour cities, there will be special events, and I'm betting that a lot of the lights that are kept burning in empty offices may be turned off for at least an hour. But it's totally up to you whether you want to turn any of the lights off at your house. I've added the word "voluntary" in the frst paragraph in hopes that will make the situation clearer. Check the Earth Hour Web site for lists of cities that are project partners or supporters.

  • Doomsday fears spark lawsuit

    EIROforum / CERN
    A hardhat worker is dwarfed by the inner workings of the Large Hadron
    Collider's ATLAS detector. Click on the image for a larger version.

    The builders of the world's biggest particle collider are being sued in federal court over fears that the experiment might create globe-gobbling black holes or never-before-seen strains of matter that would destroy the planet.

    Representatives at Fermilab in Illinois and at Europe's CERN laboratory, two of the defendants in the case, say there's no chance that the Large Hadron Collider would cause such cosmic catastrophes. Nevertheless, they're bracing to defend themselves in the courtroom as well as the court of public opinion.

    The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, is due for startup later this year at CERN's headquarters on the French-Swiss border. It's expected to tackle some of the deepest questions in science: Is the foundation of modern physics right or wrong? What existed during the very first moment of the universe's existence? Why do some particles have mass while others don't? What is the nature of dark matter? Are there extra dimensions of space out there that we haven't yet detected?

    Some folks outside the scientific mainstream have asked darker questions as well: Could the collider create mini-black holes that last long enough and get big enough to turn into a matter-sucking maelstrom? Could exotic particles known as magnetic monopoles throw atomic nuclei out of whack? Could quarks recombine into "strangelets" that would turn the whole Earth into one big lump of exotic matter?

    Former nuclear safety officer Walter Wagner has been raising such questions for years - first about an earlier-generation "big bang machine" known as the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider, and more recently about the LHC.

    Last Friday, Wagner and another critic of the LHC's safety measures, Luis Sancho, filed a lawsuit in Hawaii's U.S. District Court. The suit calls on the U.S. Department of Energy, Fermilab, the National Science Foundation and CERN to ease up on their LHC preparations for several months while the collider's safety was reassessed.

    "We're going to need a minimum of four months to review whatever they're putting out," Wagner told me on Monday. The suit seeks a temporary restraining order that would put the LHC on hold, pending the release and review of an updated CERN safety assessment. It also calls on the U.S. government to do a full environmental review addressing the LHC project, including the debate over the doomsday scenario.

    On Monday, District Judge Helen Gillmor assigned the case to a magistrate judge, Kevin S.C. Chang, for an initial conference on June 16. Wagner said he planned to ask for a more immediate hearing on the request for a restraining order - that is, once he has served the federal government with the court papers.

    The case is currently being handled by the U.S. attorney's office in Hawaii, where Wagner and Sancho both live,`but that may not necessarily be where the legal proceedings end up. The Justice Department's Environmental and Natural Resources Division, based in Washington, is also being brought in on the case, assistant U.S. attorney Derrick Watson told me in an e-mail Wednesday.

    In Washington, Justice Department spokesman Andrew Ames noted that the court papers had not yet been received. "We don't have any comment," he told me Thursday. "We'll comment in court when it's appropriate."

    Debating doomsday
    The defense attorneys would likely dwell on the regulatory and procedural questions rather than the worries over a cosmic catastrophe. Those worries have been around for years, and most physicists have scoffed at them for almost as long. The doomsday scenarios raised by Sancho and Wagner include:

    • Runaway black holes: Some physicists say the LHC could create microscopic black holes that would hang around for just a tiny fraction of a second and then decay. Sancho and Wagner worry that millions of black holes might somehow persist and coalesce into a compact gravitational mass that would draw in other matter and grow bigger. That's pure science fiction, said Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist at the City College of New York. "These black holes don't live very long, and they have microscopic energy, and so they are harmless," he told me.
    • Strangelets: Smashing protons together at high enough energies could create new combinations of quarks, the particles that protons are made of. Sancho and Wagner worry that a nasty combination known as a stable, negatively charged strangelet could theoretically turn everything it touches into strangelets as well. Kaku compared this to the ancient myth of the Midas touch. "We see no evidence of this bizarre theory," he said. "Once in a while, we trot it out to scare the pants off people. But it's not serious."
    • Magnetic monopoles: One theory suggests that high-energy particle collisions might give rise to massive particles that have only one magnetic pole - only north, or only south, but not the north-south magnetism that dominates nature. Sancho and Wagner worry that such particles could be created in the LHC and start a runaway reaction that converts atoms into other forms of matter. But physicists have seen no evidence of such reactions, which should have occurred already as the result of more energetic cosmic-ray collisions in Earth's upper atmosphere.

    The cosmic-ray argument has been applied to the black-hole and strangelet scenarios as well. If such dangerous things can be created, why haven't they already eaten up Earth, along with other planets, stars or whole galaxies in the billions of years since the universe arose? To answer that question, Sancho and Wagner pose a counterargument: Perhaps cosmic-ray collisions really are creating tiny black holes or strangelets, but those little bits of doomsday zip by too fast to cause any trouble. In the LHC, they say, the bad stuff could hang around long enough to be captured by Earth's gravity and set off a catastrophe.

    In response, particle physicists are developing counter-counterarguments -  based on their theoretical work as well as data from astronomical observations and experiments at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider. For instance, the physicists would say that enough of the doomsday particles still should have been captured by neutron stars or cosmic gas clouds to have an impact. No such impact has ever been seen. Therefore, no doomsday.

    CERN spokesman James Gillies told me that a 2003 assessment of the doomsday scenarios was being updated with the new information. Release of that updated report - the one that Sancho and Wagner apparently have been waiting for - is "imminent," Gillies told me.

    Questions about the doomsday scenarios may well come up at CERN on April 6, during a public open house at the LHC. Some researchers have gotten the word to be prepared to talk about microscopic black holes and strangelets if asked.

    Reality check
    Saying something is absolutely impossible doesn't always come easy. Some scientists find it difficult to state categorically that such-and-such a theoretical catastrophe has no chance of happening, and Fermilab spokeswoman Judy Jackson told me that the doomsayers have "cynically distorted" that natural reluctance to rule out even the most outlandish theoretical possibilities.

    The doomsaying can continue as long as scientists hold out even a tiny sliver of uncertainty. Jackson cited the example of Paul Dixon, a psychology professor at the University of Hawaii at Hilo who has been saying for more than a decade that experiments at Fermilab's Tevatron accelerator are in danger of touching off an artificial supernova. Dixon is still going strong: He submitted an affidavit in support of the LHC lawsuit filed by Sancho and Wagner.

    The current lawsuit could well be decided not by scientific arguments but rather by narrower regulatory issues. On that point, Jackson said that Fermilab has followed U.S. environmental regulations, just as CERN has followed European regulations. "Of course there are plenty of environmental laws and regulations, and they have all been followed to the letter," she said.

    However, Jackson said CERN shouldn't be held to U.S. requirements when it comes to operating the LHC - even if the collider happens to be using magnets built by Fermilab. "Just because we built them doesn't mean we have any say over French environmental regulations," she said. 

    For his part, Wagner said he hoped Fermilab and the other defendants in the lawsuit would take another look at the doomsday scenarios - and speculated that a restraining order might not even be necessary. He noted that the startup schedule for the LHC has been repeatedly delayed, which would give more time for further safety assessments. (CERN's schedule currently calls for first collisions by the end of August, and the word is that the collider may not reach its full power of 14 trillion electron-volts until next year.)

    Wagner suggested that cosmic-ray observations by the Pierre Auger Observatory and the yet-to-be-launched Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, or GLAST, could shed new light on the debate. "The way I look at it, this should be a basis to look for more funding to find a solution to the problems we raised," he told me.

    I'm pretty sure most physicists won't see it that way. They're generally anxious to spend their time and their grant money using the LHC rather than chasing down cosmic improbabilities. The doomsday lawsuit could conceivably be dismissed once it comes up for a hearing - that's basically what happened to Wagner's earlier lawsuit against the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider. But in the meantime, feel free to make your own arguments, counterarguments and counter-counterarguments in the comment section below.

    Bonus round: For a different perspective on doomsday, check out this little tale from the late science-fiction great Arthur C. Clarke.

    Update for 2:20 a.m. ET March 27: Documents relating to Sancho v. Department of Energy have been uploaded to LHC Concerns, a Web site that voices worries about the Large Hadron Collider. Also, CERN has a Web page that addresses the worries, plus links to safety reports for the Large Hadron Collider and the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider. You'll find more discussion of all this on Slashdot.

  • The science of baseball stats

    NIST / Notre Dame
     A wind-tunnel test shows
     the turbulent air flow
     around a baseball.

    Was there ever a team sport better-suited for statistical modeling than baseball? The heart of the game involves one pitcher vs. one batter at a time, allowing for a dizzying array of individual statistics. The regular season, as well as the typical player's career, will generally last long enough to build up an encyclopedia's worth of those statistics.

    No wonder so many statisticians and physicists love to theorize about the game's winning factors - and no wonder new statistics are being created on a regular basis.

    Batting averages and earned-run averages were just the start: Nowadays, you can track win shares and win probability, defense-independent ERA and range factor. But there's always a farther frontier for baseball analysis, and a couple of new twists came to light at last month's annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

    As Major League Baseball kicks off the new season this week, here are a few Web links you just might get a kick out of - even if you're not a fan of the game:

    SAFE or out?
    The University of Pennsylvania's Shane Jensen caused a stir with his proposed method for judging fielding performance, involving a new statistic called spatial aggregate fielding evaluation, or SAFE.

    "Things like hitting or pitching are a little bit easier to quantify ... because they're easy to tabulate. There's a finite number of outcomes," Jensen said. "Fileding is a much more challenging endeavor because you're trying to estimate people ranging toward a ball in play on a continuous surface."

    SAFE uses mathematical modeling to determine the "overall measure of fielding quality" for each player in the 2002-2005 period - that is, how many runs each fielder saved or cost his team over the course of a season. The stir came about when Jensen noted that Yankees star shortstop Derek Jeter ended up rated as one of the worst fielders in the majors.

    That sparked some choice headlines in the home of the Red Sox, the Yankees' archrivals: The Boston Herald headlined its blog item "Science Proves Derek Jeter Does Indeed STINK." Of course, Jeter's spot is still safe - if not because of his fielding, then because of his hitting and his history. Nevertheless,  Baseball Musings' David Pinto explained that statistics like SAFE could make a difference when it comes time to evaluate trades and negotiate contracts.

    "You're spending money, where can you get the runs?" Pinto said. "If we do fielding better than we've done in the past, here's a way of saying, 'Oh, I can have an edge over some other team by knowing that this person can save me 10 runs.' And 10 runs is usually a win."

    The model manager
    OK then, how do you evaluate the contribution of the team manager? Swarthmore College's Steve Wang delved into the machinations of managers - how long they left their starting pitchers in the game, for example, or how many different lineups they used in the course of a season.

    "Certain styles might be more effective with certain kinds of teams," he explained in a news release about his research. "A manager who prefers to stay with his starters might be best suited for a team with veteran starting pitching, whereas a team with fragile young arms might do best with a manager who uses his bullpen aggressively."

    Wang grouped managers together into clusters, based on the similarities he saw in the statistics. Last year's division-leading managers in the American League - the Red Sox's Terry Francona, the Angels' Mike Scioscia and the Indians' Eric Wedge - clustered together as moderate managers in the pitching-related categories. They didn't get too hot about their pitchers, nor did they play things too cool. But in a follow-up e-mail, Wang cautioned that you can't read too much into that.

    "I would be hesitant to put too much weight on that conclusion," he told me, "since I was not systematically looking for such correlations, and it's also not clear which way the cause-and-effect runs (i.e., whether being moderate causes success, or whether being successful enables the manager to be moderate, or yet some other relationship)."

    Statistics vs. steroids?
    A similar caveat would apply when considering whether statistics could be used to sniff out steroids. Jensen said it would be "incredibly difficult to infer any causation from a statistical analysis."

    In an analysis written for The New York Times, Jensen and three of his colleagues at Penn take a look at the Roger Clemens steroid case and confirm that there was something definitely unusual about the pitcher's late-career surge. However, it would be impossible to attribute the surge definitively to steroid use, they said.

    Part of the problem is that the information about steroid use in the majors is so murky. Perhaps if the players who used steroids could detail exactly when they used them - say, as part of an amnesty program - statisticians could check for correlations in the performance data.

    "I think we can look for people who we might want to test more," Pinto said. "I think if we now see someone in their 30s having a huge career surge, that should raise a red flag. It can happen, but if it happens over two or three years, I might want to test him every month rather than twice a year."

    Make your virtual pitch
    For more about the science of bats and balls, check out this archived article, and this one, plus this report on last year's "gyroball" controversy).

    Elsewhere on the Web, you should visit Alan Nathan's compendium of baseball physics and take a glance at this infographic from the San Francisco Chronicle. The Exploratorium has a great home page for "The Science of Baseball." If you want to find out for yourself just how hard it is to throw a strike, you can try your hand at pitching virtual curveballs, courtesy of NASA's "Aerodynamics of Baseball" Web site. The same site offers a HitModeler applet that shows you how different factors affect the trajectory of a batted ball.

    Can you shed additional light on the scientific curiosities of the national pastime? Or would you care to come up with an alternative answer to my opening question, and expound upon the scientific glories of other sports? Basketball, perhaps ... or hockey? Feel free to call 'em as you see 'em in the comment section below.

  • Chasing phantoms on film

    Twentieth Century Fox
    Click for video: Watch a spooky
    scene from the movie "Shutter."

    For more than a century, photographers have been capturing spooky stuff on film: semi-transparent figures standing in the cemetery, for example, or glowing clouds of "ectoplasm" above a seance table, or orbs floating in a forest, or arcs of light encircling someone's head.

    Ghostly pictures play a key role in the plot for the horror flick "Shutter" - and the movie's producers are asking people to upload their own spirit photographs. Is there anything substantial behind the spookiness?

    Even the people who take spirit photography seriously admit that most cases can be explained away as hoaxes or optical glitches. "I'd say 95 percent of it is just crap," said Barry Taff, a psychophysiologist who played a part in one of the most celebrated cases of the past 50 years.

    Back in 1974, Taff and other researchers were called in to investigate the case of a single mother in Culver City, Calif., who said she was being tortured by a demonic supernatural being. The investigation team saw flashes of light and snapped pictures. "At one point we had over 25 people in this woman's bedroom," including several photographers, Taff said.

    One photograph taken during the case appears to show an arc of light, with the woman cowering underneath. "Whatever this image was, it was in space," Taff said. "Well then, what was it? ... Is it coming from her, or is it her with something coming from us?"

    The case stirred quite a controversy, and spawned the 1982 horror film "The Entity" - which starred Barbara Hershey and credited Taff as a technical adviser.

    "The Entity" is Taff's biggest claim to fame, but he's seen plenty of spirit photography before and since. "It's one of the elements we've been investigating over the last 40 years," he said.

    Taff figures he's taken on about 4,000 cases over those four decades, "and the majority don't go beyond one interview." In most cases, he has seen a correlation between reports of spooky visions and not-so-spooky explanations: a history of epilepsy or seizures, for example, or a tendency toward psychological instability.

    "If we don't experience something and/or measure it in terms of video or still film, or if we don't measure it with our instruments, it's just not worth our time," he said.

    But he's not willing to write off spirit photography entirely. In addition to the "Entity" case, he's seen some linkages between high magnetic readings and optical anomalies - the sort of thing studied by Canadian-American psychologist Michael Persinger. Taff thinks electromagnetic phenomena, coupled with our own bodies, may explain some of the reports about poltergeists, and perhaps even the "Entity" case.

    "No dead people, no ghosts," he said. "This appears to be coming from us - living people."

    That's why he's still investigating cases, when he's not involved with his "day job" as co-owner of a medical-device company. He declined to identify the company because of the stigma associated with the spooky business, but said "I think we're getting closer" to the day when such research might seem respectable.

    "We're at a point now, after 40 years, that I believe we might be able to electromagnetically drive the phenomenon, whatever it is," he said. "If we can trigger it, rather than sitting around like a bunch of clowns, then we can document it."

    Courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox
    This photo, submitted to the "Shutter" Web site, shows a misty pattern seemingly
    superimposed over the scene. "The articulated detail of this image is quite
    fascinating and really makes one wonder as to what other type of paranormal
    events are associated with the location or the man in the shot," Barry Taff says.

    Reality check from the other side
    Researchers from "the other side" - that is, the scientific skeptics - don't think that day will come anytime soon.

    Investigator Joe Nickell, who works for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, has been looking into purported cases of spookiness almost as long as Taff has. Nickell literally wrote the book on photographic investigation - and so far, he's not impressed.

    "To date, since the invention of photography, not a single ghost or spirit photograph has been authenticated by science. Not one," he told me. "And yes, I'm sure."

    Nickell makes a distinction between spirit photography, which were the supernatural studio portraits that became so popular during the heyday of 19th-century spiritualism; and ghost photography, which refers to the weird stuff seemingly caught by accident in somebody's snapshot.

    Using that definition, Nickell said that all spirit photographs are obvious fakes - while ghost photographs are still fakes, but not so obvious.

    "They're always directly linked to photographic trends and techniques of the period," Nickell said. "Once the public is able to get cameras, and you get rolled film, you start getting anomalies. ... Usually it's a double exposure of some kind, or maybe a mysterious blurry spot."

    The rise of digital cameras has led to new types of phenomena. "Today, a lot of so-called ghost photographs don't look anything like people," Nickell said.

    Some flash photos reveal glowing orbs of light that weren't noticed when the picture was taken. "They're caused usually by particles of dust in the air bouncing the flash back," Nickell said. The light comes back into the camera as an out-of-focus spot, appearing as a bright circle on the picture.

    Other photos may show mysterious blurs or complex, smoky-looking shapes.

    "Almost anything that can get in front of the camera, and particularly can be emphasized with the flash on, will produce ghostly effects," Nickell explained. "Someone smoking, or even one's breath on a crisp, cold night, can produce misty effects. Some bright object in the background reflecting the flash can make an area look washed out or misty."

    Nickell has seen effects created by wandering fingertips, strands of hair, jewelry or tree twigs that get in front of the lens. He said the camera strap is a notorious spook-generator: "That can create what's called an 'energy vortex,' or strands of 'ectoplasm.'"

    Ghost-hunters with gizmos
    What about the idea that high magnetic fields can generate anomalies?

    "There's not good evidence for that," Nickell said. "I've investigated haunted houses for more than 30 years, and the idea that there were high concentrations of electromagnetic radiation in the places where people were experiencing those things is unlikely in the extreme. ... I believe that's a pseudo-explanation. A far more powerful influence is the power of suggestion."

    Nickell doesn't necessarily dispute claims that the electromagnetic field meters are picking up high readings.

    "The problem is, the instrument may be measuring something indeed, just exactly the kind of thing that the instruments are made to detect, such as faulty wiring or microwave radiation from nearby broadcast towers," he said. "What it is not measuring is ghostly energy."

    He said it's a "fool's errand" to look for ghosts by waving around scientific instruments.

    "Much of what is offered as evidence for ghosts, or other forms of paranormal activity, is something where the person who is reporting it does not know what it is, but is drawing a conclusion about it," he said. "It's a logical fallacy called 'arguing from ignorance.' Because we don't know what's causing the sound of footsteps on the stairs late at night, it must be a ghost. Well, no, if you don't know what it is, then you don't know.

    "You can't say, 'I don't know, therefore I do know.' ... That's at the root of so much of this."

    Nickell applies that rule not only to ghost photography ("I don't know what caused this blur on the photos, so because I was at a haunted place, it must be a ghost"), but also to UFO sightings as well as claims of miraculous cures ("My cancer is in remission, therefore it's a miracle").

    Psychologist http://www.skeptic.com/archives03.html">Ray Hyman, another skeptical inquirer (and sometime magician), emphasized that most of the fake ghost pictures are not intentional hoaxes, but rather cases of misinterpretation known as pareidolia. Just as some people can see the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich, or a man in the moon (and on Mars?), they can also jump to conclusions about a spooky spot in a snapshot.

    "Once you've convinced yourself that you see something, you can't undo that," Hyman told me.

    For more on how perceptions can add to a scene's spookiness, check out this Halloween edition of Cosmic Log as well as this 2002 interview with Hyman.

    Now it's your turn: Have you seen some spooky photography worth a second look - or pictures so scary you don't want to take a second look? Have you had a paranormal experience that turned out to have a normal explanation - or no natural explanation whatsoever? Feel free to add your recollections or observations as a comment below.

  • The next X Prizes

    Team Italia via XPF
    Click for gallery: See
    concepts for the Google
    Lunar X Prize contest.

    Even as the X Prize Foundation kicks off its $10 million competition for super-efficient automobiles, it's working on plenty more prizes to come. X Prize co-founder Peter Diamandis says he's aiming for two new prizes every year, focusing on five fields.

    Much has happened in the three and a half years since the foundation passed along its first $10 million check, to reward the winners of the Ansari X Prize for private-sector spaceflight.

    Two years ago, the foundation has established yet another $10 million prize, the Archon X Prize for Genomics, which is backed by Canadian millionaire geologist Stewart Blusson and would reward the first team to decode 100 different human genomes in 10 days, at a cost of less than $10,000 each. (To date, just a handful of complete genomes have been sequenced, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars per person, if not more. Among the X Prize competitors are Harvard geneticist George Church and the British company Base4 Innovation.)

    Last year, the foundation rolled out the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize to encourage privately funded exploration of the moon's surface. (To date, no one has landed a spacecraft intact on the moon for more than 30 years, although NASA's Lunar Prospector and Europe's SMART-1 made smash landings.)

    The X Prize Foundation has also been involved with other projects, ranging from a feasibility study for an orbital space prize to the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, which carries a $2 million purse put up by NASA.

    It's taken well more than a year to put together the backing for the Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize, and there are still a lot of details to be worked out over the next couple of months before teams can officially register for the contest. But Diamandis is already deep into the strategic planning for the next X Prizes. Here's what he had to say about the challenges to come:

    "We've refined our strategy, and we are planning X Prizes in five vertical fields that we've defined. The first is exploration, which includes space and underwater. And we are looking at some deep-ocean X Prizes that would help get at 97 percent of the ocean floor, for example.

    "We are looking at life science-related X Prize, where the Archon X Prize for Genomics is the first. We're looking at areas such as cancer and human longevity.

    "Our third vertical is energy and the environment, where Automotive [X Prize] is the first of that. But we're looking at the production, storage and transmission of energy. Education is the fourth vertical. And the fifth vertical is global development, trying to address issues of poverty and the needs of the developing world. ... We expect to roll out two a year."

    Diamandis – who won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Innovation for bringing the $10 million Ansari X Prize to fruition four years ago – also paid tribute to the science-fiction author he called his "friend and mentor."

    "He told me something once that I thought was incredibly valuable. He said, 'Peter, there are three phases of a good idea. The first phase is, people tell you it's a crazy idea, it'll never work. The next phase is, they say, it might work but it's not worth doing. And the third phase is when people tell you, "I told you that was a great idea all along."'

    "The X Prize has definitely gone through those three phases, and I think of Arthur every time I talk about that. I'm thankful for his support ... and also for his absolute passion regarding the need of the human race to evolve beyond the earth."

    Clarke must have loved thinking in threes: In addition to the three phases of a good idea, he came up with Clarke's Three Laws of Prediction, and passed along three wishes for his 90th birthday last December. He also expressed these three wishes for the next 50 years in an interview with Saswato Das for IEEE Spectrum:

    1. A method to generate limitless quantities of clean energy.

    2. Affordable and reliable means of space transport.

    3. Eliminating the design faults in the human body

    It sounds as if the X Prize agenda is on the right track to help those three wishes come true.

    By the way, IEEE Spectrum has brought forth Clarke's "last interview," conducted by Das in January at the author's hospital bedside. Check out the article as well as the companion podcast for Clarke's final thoughts on building the space elevator, terraforming Mars and looking for E.T.

  • Arthur C. Clarke's DNA odyssey

    AFP - Getty Images
    Arthur C. Clarke

    Science-fiction great Arthur C. Clarke never made it to outer space - but his DNA did, as part of a suborbital flight staged last year from New Mexico. And the odyssey isn't over yet. The capsule containing a sample of Clarke's hair was recovered, and some of that hair could be sent to the moon sometime in the next few years on a Google Lunar X Prize flight. A little bit of it will be saved for an even longer trip, into deep space … and a kind of immortality.

    The tale of Clarke's hair begins back in 1999, when space entrepreneur Rick Fleeter journeyed to the author's home in Sri Lanka to snip some strands of hair for a project aimed at sending DNA samples to the stars. The project, called Team Encounter, appealed to Clarke because it left open the possibility that an advanced civilization could reconstruct a person's genetic code from the hair.

    "Instead of launching a whole body into space, why not send a few DNA strands?" Clarke asked in his account of the hair-snipping operation. "Then in principle at least any human being could be re-created, physically if not mentally."

    Clarke even included a handwritten note addressed to the future, reading, "Fare well, my clone."

    Team Encounter ended up going nowhere, but the sample was retained for years by the venture's corporate heir, Houston-based Space Services Inc. "It was a bumpy road with Team Encounter, but Arthur was good enough to tell us we could keep his DNA," the company's chief executive officer, Charles Chafer, told me today.

    Chafer said Clarke's DNA finally had a fleeting date with space last April. A small capsule containing the hair was included with more than 200 other capsules bearing bits of cremated remains - including ashes from the late NASA astronaut Gordon Cooper and "Star Trek" actor James "Scotty" Doohan.

    All those capsules took a suborbital ride to space and back on an UP Aerospace rocket launched from New Mexico's Spaceport America. After three weeks of searching, the payload was recovered, and most of the capsules were returned to loved ones.

    But not Clarke's.

    "It's sitting right here in front of me," Chafer said. "Capsule No. 74."

    He's planning to put some of the hair on the next mission to send memorial capsules on the moon, most likely in cooperation with one of the teams trying to win the multimillion-dollar Google Lunar X Prize. Space Services' subsidiary, Celestis, played a part in a similar operation to send the remains of planetary scientist Gene Shoemaker to the moon aboard NASA's Lunar Prospector probe back in 1999.

    Chafer noted that the moon served as one of the key settings for Clarke's best-known tale, "2001: A Space Odyssey." That's where spacefarers found the first in a series of mysterious monoliths that figured so prominently in the story.

    "It's really the right place, I think, to send his DNA: to the moon," Chafer said.

    The Celestis service offers a lunar option for paying clients, priced at $12,500 for sending a gram of material to the moon's surface. Chafer said he expects to have 400 to 1,000 clients for the next "Luna" flight by the time a spacecraft is ready to launch, probably sometime in the next couple of years.

    Clarke's hair would fly gratis, of course. "This one's on us," Chafer said.

    It's part of the routine at Celestis to hold back a portion of each memorial sample in reserve, in case the first flight fails. In Clarke's case, Chafer said he'll be holding back a little extra for a future one-way trip to deep space, with the timing yet to be determined. The sample capsules are more likely to stay intact during the long "Voyager" mission - meaning Clarke's DNA could conceivably meet up with interstellar travelers, just as the author had always hoped.

    "That will give him a greater chance than just having him parked on the moon," Chafer said.

    Someday, perhaps a super-civilization will indeed create a copy of Arthur C. Clarke - but something tells me that even a Clarke clone won't reach the heights that the original did during his 90 years on Earth.

    After all, Clarke was formed by the scientific enthusiasm of the early 20th century, the technological challenges of World War II and its aftermath, and the cultural ferment of a society that reached out beyond Earth for the first time in the 1950s and 1960s. Would his clone turn out the same way if he were nurtured by alien super-beings?

    Clarke's writings may well be as enduring as his spaceborne DNA. Although his best-known works were written decades ago, they still resonate in the 21st century. If you had to choose a place to start, would it be "2001"? Or "Childhood's End," the tale of a long-running alien encounter? How about "Rendezvous With Rama"? Or "Dial F for Frankenstein," the short story that foreshadowed the World Wide Web?

    Longtime Cosmic Log correspondent Wade Whitlock has his own suggestion - which is worth passing along as a recommendation for the Cosmic Log Used Book Club:

    "A light has gone out. Sir Arthur C. Clarke died today. It is a pity he couldn't live to see a space elevator rise! May I suggest that 'Profiles of the Future' be a Used Book Club book. It is a very interesting look at prediction of the future. Not given as much credit as it deserves."

    The Cosmic Log Used Book Club (or CLUB Club for short) highlights books with cosmic themes that can be easily found at your local library or used-book shop. Many of Clarke's dozens of books and story collections would fit that description. Feel free to leave your own reading suggestions - as well as your tributes to Sir Arthur - in the comment section below.

  • Dark matter in the classroom

    NASA / CXC / UVic. / CFHT
    Photo gallery: Click on
    the image to learn how
    scientists know dark
    matter exists.

    If physicists are right, most of the matter in the universe is made up of exotic stuff you can't see, called dark matter.

    Usually, people think of dark matter as existing only on the far edge of galaxies, posing such a deep, dark mystery that only the professionals can understand it. But that would be wrong on two counts: First, there's probably some dark matter zipping through you right now. Second, the mystery of dark matter is now explained in an education kit that has been designed for high-schoolers - and is freely available over the Web.

    "The Mystery of Dark Matter," released last month by Canada's Perimeter Institute, is the first in a series of kits that will take on the big questions in physics, ranging from quantum mechanics to black holes. The Perimeter Explorations kits provide high-school science teachers with a DVD explaining the mysteries, as well as student worksheets and a teachers guide.

    The education kits were created to respond to requests from teachers who have participated in the institute's seminars over the past few years, said John Matlock, director of external relations and outreach.

    "The No. 1 request was for content that had 'hooks' in their curriculum, whether it was the math or the science ... but also addressed the cutting edge of science," Matlock told me. "They wanted concrete, complex, abstract ideas made visual, and they wanted to hear and see real-life researchers who are working on real problems."

    Matlock said the dark-matter mystery was a good topic to kick off the series.

    "It's a modern problem," he said. "This isn't your old Newtonian physics."

    In the course of explaining the modern mystery, the DVD does gives students a healthy but relatively painless dose of that good old Newtonian physics as well as newfangled Einsteinian relativity. The equations for gravitational measurements vs. visual measurements solve themselves on the screen. (If only the math were that simple in real life!) You also see how gravitational lensing - a phenomenon explained by general relativity - has helped scientists map the unseen dark matter.

    There's even a simple lab experiment to do - requiring a paper clip, a plastic tube, some metal washers hanging on a string, and maybe a little LED light if you want to get fancy. The experiment shows why the rotation rate of distant galaxy clusters led scientists to conclude that they were missing a whole lot of mass in their observations.

    "It's actually quite dramatic when you do that in classes," Matlock said.

    The kit doesn't exactly solve the mystery surrounding dark matter, but it does trace the different theories about its nature: Is dark matter nothing more than objects in outer space that don't emit light? Or cold neutrinos? The prevailing view is that at least some of it has to be more exotic - perhaps as-yet-undetected particles that permeate every part of our galaxy, including high-school physics classrooms.

    Last year, CERN theoretical physicist John Ellis told me that there should be, on average, one particle of dark matter zipping through a one-liter bottle of water at any one time.

    "However, this dark-matter particle is traveling quite fast," he explained. "It's traveling at some fraction of the velocity of light, so it doesn't stay inside the bottle. ... Most of the time, it would pass straight through the bottle without leaving any trace."

    That part of the mystery could be addressed starting this year in the world's widest science lab, the Large Hadron Collider on the French-Swiss border. It's conceivable that one of the students swinging around those washers on a string will end up unraveling the dark-matter mystery at the LHC.

    The Perimeter Institute's education kit is designed to be used as an optional supplement for senior high-school physics classes. The content, developed in cooperation with researchers around the world, was tested by about 100 teachers and 1,000 students who have come through the institute for seminars over the past 18 months.

    Matlock said the final version was released just a month ago, and 1,000 of the kits have already gone out to schools, at no charge. The initial reaction has been "fantastic," he said.

    "So far, it's off to a great start," Matlock said. "We think we've hit a real nerve here."

    He expects the initial run of 2,500 kits to be exhausted by summer. "In theory, if each teacher were to use the kits twice, this could reach about 125,000 students in relatively short order," he said.

    If those 2,500 kits run out, the Perimeter Institute will just do up another batch. Teachers can get the whole kit sent to them for free if they sign up, while non-teachers are free to download the video and the guide online.

    The next kit on tap will tackle quantum physics, including the spooky phenomena of entanglement and teleportation. Matlock said the key to success will be to show how quantum mechanics enters into everyday applications such as laser scanners, CD players and super-secure data transmissions.

    "As soon as the kids are turned on to that, you've got them pumped," Matlock said.

    For more on the mystery, check out our brand-new Weird Science gallery as well as our dark-matter interactive. Are there other cosmic mysteries you'd love to learn about? Put them in the suggestion box by leaving a comment below.

  • How geckos land on their feet

    NAS / PNAS / msnbc.com
     Click for video: Watch a
     falling gecko use its tail.

    Geckos use amazing sticky pads on their feet to walk on walls, but not even a gecko can stick to the wall all the time. Now scientists have analyzed high-speed video to figure out how the lizard, like a cat, always lands on its feet.

    Unlike cats, geckos owe their landing prowess primarily to their tails - which can also keep them from falling in the first place.

    The active tail of a gecko is the focus of a research paper published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The genesis of the study was actually an unusual case of robots imitating life, biologist Robert Full of the University of California at Berkeley told me today.

    "This is an outstanding example of how important interdisciplinary collaborations can be in research," said Full, the research paper's principal author.

    For some time now, engineers at Berkeley and elsewhere have been working with Full and his fellow biologists on a robot that can mimic a gecko's wall-climbing ability. (Check out this video from the gecko-bot project, known as Robots in Scansorial Environments or RiSE.)

    Full said the RiSE engineers came back and told him, "We need to use a bar, kind of like a tail, to make the robot more stable."

    That suggested that a gecko's tail was more important than the biologists had thought. So Full and the other researchers behind the paper in the Proceedings - Ardian Jusufi, Daniel Goldman and Shai Revzen - set up a series of experiments to study how geckos used their tails in slippery situations.

    "We inspired the engineers, and they came back with a good, testable biological hypothesis," Full said.

    The first thing the biologists noticed is that the geckos tended to keep their tails off the wall - except when the going got tough. Then they pressed their tails against the wall, to keep their front feet from sliding off a slippery surface. "Imagine that it's kind of like a teeter-totter, with the fulcrum being the hind legs of the animal," Full explained.

    When the geckos started to lean backward off the wall, they avoided a fall "by placing their tail in a posture where the last two-thirds of the tail pressed against the wall similar to that of a bicycle's kickstand," the researchers wrote. They could pitch backward as much as 60 degrees and still manage to regain their hold.

    To make sure the tail was the deciding factor in a gecko's performance, the researchers put tailless geckos through the same vertical course and found that they fell down far more often.

    Then the researchers set up an even tougher task: They placed the lizards upside-down on the bottom of a light, loosely mounted platform that mimicked the underside of a leaf. The geckos with tails almost always landed right side up, and the high-speed video showed how they did it.

    Within about a tenth of a second, the geckos flipped their tails around to induce body rotation. Then they spread out their tails as well as their feet into a "belly-down skydiving posture" position to stabilize the fall. All of the geckos that used their tails in this way landed on their feet, even in wind-tunnel tests - while none of the tailless geckos could do the same trick. In less than 10 percent of the tailed-gecko trials, the animals didn't rotate their tails - and those hapless lizards landed as badly as their tailless kin.

    Full said the experiments demonstrated that the self-righting technique for geckos is different from the one used by cats. Over the course of more than a century, cat-flipping experiments have shown that tailless kitties land on their feet as well as tabbies with tails. "A cat does it by twisting its body around, but the gecko does in just by using its tail," Full said.

    But wait ... there's more: Full said the geckos could actually move forward as they fell by oscillating their tails up and down, "kind of like a dolphin kick." That trick might help a gecko choose a good place to land as it's falling from a tree in the jungle.

    "We really don't know how they use the tail as a control device in nature," Full said. "And that's what we want to find out next."

    Full said all this gecko lore is being shared with the engineers so they can design better gecko-bots.

    "They've built an active tail on RiSE now," he told me. "It doesn't do as much as the gecko tail does, but they're working with it. Maybe we can realize the dream, to ultimately have a search-and-rescue robot that can go anywhere. ... I'm much more optimistic that the future is not as far away as we thought."

  • Take the Venusian vortex tour

    Alan Boyle writes:What's behind the vortex on Venus? Astronomers have been studying the atmospheric swirl at the Venusian south pole for more than three decades, and the latest crop of imagery from the European Space Agency's Venus Express orbiter documents quick changes in what appears to be the eye of a 1,200-mile-wide (2,000-kilometer-wide) hurricane. But they still haven't figured out the exact mechanism behind the vortex.

    The fresh view of Venus' giant swirlie is just one of the curiosities documented in this week's wave of interplanetary imagery - taking its place alongside fresh close-ups of a mysterious Saturnian moon and dark halos on the planet Mercury.

    ESA
    An animated image from Venus
    Express shows the swirl of gases in
    the Venusian vortex. Click on the
    image for a larger view.

    First, about that swirlie: When scientists reviewed the Venus Express imagery, they were surprised to see how quickly the polar vortex could change shape. The core of the vortex shows up brightly in thermal infrared imagery of the storm structure, and that probably indicates that a lot of atmospheric gases are moving downward in the polar region. In this week's Venus Express advisory, ESA scientists say that action creates a depression in Venus' cloud tops, raising the core temperature.

    "Simply put, the enormous vortex is similar to what you might see in your bathtub once you have pulled out the plug," said Giuseppe Piccioni, co-principal investigator for the probe's Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer, or VIRTIS.

    The VIRTIS team's findings were published last November in the journal Nature, but this week's pictures serve as a virtual public tour of the vortex. The animated image you see here is a time-lapse compilation of imagery from just five hours, showing how the vortex changes its shape in a matter of days or even less time.

    Scientists didn't expect to see the shape-shifting happen so quickly, and they're still trying to work out the atmospheric dynamics behind the phenomenon.

    "One explanation is that atmospheric gases, heated by the sun at the equator, rise and then move poleward," the University of Oxford's Colin Wilson said in the advisory. "In the polar regions, they converge and sink again. As the gases move toward the poles, they are deflected sideways because of the planet's rotation."

    The Venus Express team plans to keep a close eye on the vortex to gain a better understanding of its inner workings. That puts the Venusian vortex right in there with the Saturnian hexagon and Jupiter's red spots as alien storms worth watching.

    Next stops on the tour
    Venus isn't the only stop on this week's tour: We've already mentioned the Cassini orbiter's Enceladus flyby and the Messenger observations of Mercury's dark halos.Today, the European Space Agency is highlighting an image from its Mars Express orbiter showing ancient lava flows on a plain called Daedalia Planum. The interesting thing about this landscape is that it shows evidence of multiple epochs of volcanic activity. The most recent eruptions are thought to have come perhaps 100 million years ago, when dinosaurs walked on Earth.

    This week also brought a fresh batch of images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, including overhead views of the proposed landing sites for the Mars Science Laboratory, a Hummer of a rover due for launch in 2009. You'll also find a very weird picture of defrosting dunes in Mars' north polar region. When the ground thaws, dark dust trickles down the dunes, creating bizarre patterns. 

    Coming back to Earth
    Closer to home, the space shuttle Endeavour's mission to the international space station is starting to yield some great pictures, ranging from the launch to close-up views of the shuttle as seen from the station. As Endeavour's flight continues, you can check for updates from NASA's shuttle mission Web site and its space station photo gallery.

    Meanwhile, Earth-watching satellites are providing fascinating perspectives on the planet below. For example, Europe's Envisat spacecraft has documented this month's breakup of the massive A53A iceberg, just east of South Georgia Island in the southern Atlantic. NASA's Earth Observatory always has something worth seeing, including this unorthodox view showing how Earth's nighttime side looked during different phases of last month's total lunar eclipse. And there's something new every day from NASA's MODIS Web.

    Take the grand tour
    For the ultimate tour of space imagery, click through the latest installment of our "Space Shots" slide show.  You'll find killer views of the lunar eclipse, northern lights and other space attractions.

    Folks always ask where they can find larger versions of the slide show images, for use as desktop wallpaper or for printing on photo stock. Many of the images come from copyrighted sources, but here are pointers to some of our sources:

     

  • Savor a virtual piece of pi

    Exploratorium / Linden Labs
    A Second Life resident visits Pi-Henge, one of the Exploratorium's Pi Day exhibits.

    San Francisco's Exploratorium makes an irrationally big deal out of pi: For 20 years, geeks have gathered at the science museum to troop in circular processions, solve pesky puzzles, string beads and consume mass quantities of pie - all building to a peak on 3/14 at 1:59 p.m., when the time lines up to form the first six digits of the mysterious and marvelous number.

    This year marks a nice round number for Pi Day, an observance honoring one of the least-round numbers in mathematics. You don't even have to be at the Exploratorium to savor the 20th-anniversary celebration. Online resources, ranging from Web sites to the virtual world known as Second Life, are serving up a substantial slice of the Pi Day experience.

    Physicist Larry Shaw told me he had no idea Pi Day would be such a big deal when he came up with the idea back in 1988. The first observance was something of a lark, a spin-off (so to speak) from Shaw's musings on the rotational relationship between one dimension and another.

    The idea behind pi is simplicity itself: the ratio of a circle's circumference to its width. But putting a precise value on the number seems to be beyond the power of the world's most sophisticated computers. Pi's value has been calculated to a length of more than a trillion digits, with no end in sight.

    It's that combination of pi's simplicity and irrationality that continues to capture Shaw's imagination, even after 20 years. "It is not ultimately determinable - that's basically the mystery behind it," he said today.

    It's also a good excuse for a party - and the party is a good excuse for getting future generations hooked on math, just as Archimedes was hooked more than 2,000 years ago.

    "Part of science teaching is engendering interest in the kids," Shaw said. "Anything that has some fun to it, the kids will just jump into it. And that's part of the reason for doing it. ... It's an excuse for a lot of things that are out of the ordinary in the classroom."

    For the first observance, Shaw and his colleagues installed a small brass plate, engraved with the first 100 digits of pi, at the very center of a circular classroom at the museum. They walked around their shrine to pi. "People go around things to show respect to them in many cultures and religions," Shaw explained. Then they did something which is not a feature of all that many religions: They had pie.

    Shaw, who has since retired from his post as a staff physicist, has been gearing up for Friday's observance for some time: The celebrants will walk around the shrine a little more than three times, add beads representing the numbers zero through nine to a ritual string of more than 1,600 digits - and, of course, gobble down pizza pie as well as fruit pie.

    So go ahead and check out the offerings at the Exploratorium's Pi Day site, at PiDay.org and WikiHow. If you're a Second Life resident, take in the Leaning Tower of Pie-sa, Pi-Henge and other educational exhibits built by the Exploratorium. You can even sing a song to pi. (I like this archived video from Rocketboom, but Shaw goes with a synthesized voice singing to the tune of "Pomp and Circumstance.")

    Oh, and don't forget to sing "Happy Birthday" to Albert Einstein while you're at it. Friday marks the 129th anniversary of the late physicist's birth - making the day a doubly fitting occasion to raise a glass (or a forkful of pie) in his honor.

  • New brain map on tap

    Allen Institute for Brain Science
    This cross section of a mouse brain, based on data from the Allen Brain Atlas, shows where genes are "turned on." The blue color
    shows all cells sampled. Red and green indicate cells where types of
    gene expression are active. Click on the image for a bigger version.

    With the backing of a billionaire, researchers today launched a project that builds on their earlier atlas of the mouse brain and goes after a challenge 2,000 times bigger: a 3-D genetic map of the human brain. And that's not all: They're planning to produce a similar map of the mouse spinal cord, as well as another atlas showing how the mouse brain develops from the fetus to adulthood.

    The multimillion-dollar effort could help researchers develop new treatments for maladies ranging from spinal cord injury to autism.

    Today's triple play marks a new phase for the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Brain Science, which was founded in 2003 with $100 million in seed money from software billionaire Paul Allen. The first phase of the Allen Brain Atlas focused on the mouse brain - and looked specifically at which genes were active in which areas of the brain.

    Genes in the brain serve as chemical switches, providing the instructions for making proteins that have various effects on brain chemistry. For example, a little oxytocin in just the right place gives you a warm, fuzzy feeling. A little less of a protein called p11 could leave you feeling depressed.

    Medical researchers can use information about gene expression to figure out the biochemistry behind activity in the various regions of the brain - and the institute says the information in its 180-terabyte online atlas gets a lot of use.

    Since the mouse brain atlas was validated in a paper published in Nature little more than a year ago, the research has been cited more than 100 times in other scholarly papers, said Allan Jones, the institute's chief scientific officer. The Web site that houses the brain data records 10,000 unique visits per month, and about 500 of those visitors spend more than an hour each on the site monthly, he said.

    Mouse studies can often be applied to human biology as well - and indeed, one of the high-profile spin-offs from the mouse atlas is a Pentagon-funded study on sleep deprivation that may lead to battlefield applications. But there's nothing like having the real thing, particularly when you're studying the brain. That's why the institute is moving ahead with the human brain atlas.

    The Allen Institute already has a head start on the human brain, thanks to its studies of gene expression in the human cortex. Today marks the official beginning of a four-year campaign to characterize gene activity in the entire human brain.

    Jones said the institute spent about $41 million to create the mouse brain atlas, and about half of that work can be leveraged for the new project. However, he estimated that completing the human brain map would require $55 million more, spread over four years.

    "The human brain is 2,000 times as large as the mouse brain," he observed. "The first thing that you're faced with, right out of the gate, is that it's 2,000 times as big."

    Breaking down the process
    To handle the scientific challenge, the brain-mapping project will be done in two phases.

    In the first phase, the human brain will be broken down into about 2,000 smaller structures per hemisphere. Fresh-frozen samples from up to 10 brains, selected from tissue banks around the United States, will be analyzed to produce an inventory of genes specific to each structure. Jones said the process would narrow down the focus from a total of 20,000 genes to between 50 and 500 genes per structure.

    Then, researchers will build up a fine-resolution database pinpointing which high-value genes are turned on, right down to the cellular level.

    When researchers combine the gene-expression database with insights from other brain-mapping techniques, they should be able to figure out the biochemistry behind typical brain function. And that could help them figure out how to fix glitches in the black box known as the brain.

    "These are fairly low-resolution maps that tell you the area ... but you're missing key information about what's going on there at the biochemical level," he told me. "We will be getting to that information with this human brain atlas that we're creating. We're actually going to be able to see what genes are turned on in these particular areas of the brain."

    Studying diseases ... and evolution, too
    Jones said potential subjects for study include autism, epilepsy, schizophrenia, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, multiple sclerosis, spinal cord injuries - and traumatic brain injuries, which affect a significant number of Iraq war veterans.

    "There are clearly lots of interesting questions," Jones said.

    For example, researchers have spotted subtle differences in gray-matter distribution that may hint at a mechanism behind autism. Using a map of gene expression, researchers might be able to figure out which proteins come into play in the target regions - and come up with new drugs to address the chemical causes of autism.

    It will take more than the atlas alone to do such research, said David Anderson, a biology professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the California Institute of Technology.

    "The atlas is a starting point," said Anderson, who is a member of the institute's scientific advisory board. "The atlas will identify a set of cell markers that can be used, for example, to identify different regions of the amygdala, which may be implicated in autism. Now what you have to do is take those markers and go out and obtain postmortem samples of autistic brains and age-matched normal brains, and take these markers in parallel and compare them."

    The atlas could point to, say, 10 significant markers in the amygdala for comparison. "That would save you the trouble of looking at 4,000 markers," Anderson said.

    Anderson said the atlas also could come in handy to assess the evolutionary differences between human brains and the brains of other species, ranging from mice to monkeys. "We could ask whether our brains simply have more of the same kinds of cells, or if we have fundamentally different types of cells in different arrangements," he told me.

    More about the mice
    In addition to the human brain atlas, the institute plans to delve more deeply into mouse biology. A two-year, $15 million project will produce gene-expression maps for mouse brains at different stages of development, ranging from early formation to adulthood. This would help researchers see how gene expression changes over time.

    "Instead of a 3-D atlas, effectively we're going to have a 4-D atlas, where we'll be able to watch movies [showing] data-driven models of the brain as it's growing," Jones said.

    The project would focus on 3,000 to 4,000 of the "more interesting" genes thought to be linked to developmental disorders, he said.

    Yet another project would target the mouse spinal cord. Jane Roskams, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia's Brain Research Center, likened the spinal cord to an interstate highway, where genes serve as the stop and go signals.

    "You've got many roads leading to many different places, and in order to get to those places you have to have an address," said Roskams, who belongs to the International Consortium on Repair Discoveries and served as a scientific adviser to the Allen Institute. "The directions are encoded in the genes that are expressed."

    Knowing how gene expression works could help researchers develop new drugs or cell-transplantation procedures to restore the signaling pathways in the spinal cord, Roskams said.

    "Being able to restore those signals at each step of the way is the biggest part of the challenge," she told me. "If we lose cells through an injury to just one part of the spinal cord, we've lost the directions that the nerves need. ... This project will tell us those signals."

    Work is already under way on the spinal-cord project, with financial assistance coming from a consortium of associations and foundations. The Allen Institute expects the atlas to be complete by the end of this year.

    Free and on the Web
    Jones emphasized that the data from the three new projects will be freely available over the Web, just as the mouse-brain database is today. Unlike most scientific projects, the Allen Institute doesn't hold back the raw data for its own big publication, but rather puts everything it has into the database as soon as it's available.

    "These data sets are so massive that there's no way we can ever be comprehensive about these analyses, and it's better to get the data out there," Jones said.

    The open-access nature of the atlas projects reflects the institute's status as a philanthropic organization rather than a business. But the scope of the project is too big for any one philanthropist, even if he's No. 41 on Forbes' list of the world's richest people.

    With the ramp-up of the new atlas projects, the institute has set up a series of milestones and budgets so that it can plead its case to additional contributors, chief operating officer Elaine Jones said.

    "It's run according to a business model - that's how people see it, so they're far more willing to invest in this type of a project," she said. "In their lifetime, they're going to see tangible results."

    But potential donors are told right up front that their "investment" won't bring them future financial advantage. Instead, it's an investment in basic science, and in hope for future generations.

    "When you lay that out for people, it's reasonable," Elaine Jones said. "They understand what they're getting in return."

    Update for 3 p.m. ET: The three new atlas projects are likely to streamline the process of drug discovery, said Genentech's Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a scientific adviser to the Allen Institute.

    Tessier-Lavigne, who is Genentech's senior vice president for research drug discovery, told me in a follow-up phone call that the already-existing atlas of the adult mouse brain has helped researchers search for the genetic clues that could lead to new drug targets. The new efforts will widen the search to include the adult human brain, as well as spinal cord science and developmental issues in mouse models.

    "Those are the three clicks of the [computer] mouse that we'd like to be able to make, and we can't make them today. But with this new project, we will," he told me.

    So how long will it be before the brain atlases yield new treatments? "Typically, it might take three to four years, starting from a target, to get a drug candidate ready for clinical development," Tessier-Lavigne said. Going through the clinical trials and actually marketing the drug could take another eight to 10 years, he said.

    But another track for drug development could take much less time, and that's "what is wonderful about 21st-century biology," he said. A comprehensive atlas of the brain might point up some gene-specific targets that are already familiar to researchers. For example, a drug already being developed for cancer treatment might have an effect on gene expression in the brain as well.

    "This type of information may reveal the involvement of various mechanisms in brain disorders that are already being studied in other areas," Tessier-Lavigne said..

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