The Occupy Wall Street movement which originated in the Big Apple has spread to other large US cities. Protestors are using the Internet and social media to create momentum similar to the Arab Spring movements now remaking the Middle East and North Africa. This week some of them even made themselves up as zombies shown above and marched around with arms outstretched moaning for money instead of the traditional fresh brains. That was nice touch! Occupy has even spring up in my comfy little progressive hometown of Austin:

We stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters who Occupy Wall Street and occupy around the world. We are dedicated to non-violently reclaiming control of our government from the financial interests that have corrupted them.

One of the local Austin protests goes from 3 PM to 10 PM this Thursday, Oct 6 at Austin City Hall. I don’t know if I can make that or not, it’s a work day for me and I’m trying to recover from a fairly severe injury. But I’d love to hear how it goes and maybe look at some pics of it if anyone happens by. Check about any search engine using Occupy ____ to see if your metro area has one planned too.

A comprehensive map made by the Cassini-Solstice mission examining Saturn’s tiny, icy moon Enceladus has netted a surprising result. The little world is coated in super fine ice crystal estimated to be hundred of meters deep in some places:

This powder would likely make pe­r­fect ski­ing ma­te­ri­al, ac­cord­ing to Paul Schenk of the Lu­nar and Plan­e­tary In­sti­tute in Hous­ton, Tex­as. He pre­sented find­ings by his re­search team Oct. 3 at the 2011 joint meet­ing of the Amer­i­can As­tro­nom­i­cal So­ci­ety’s Di­vi­sion for Plan­e­tary Sci­ences and the Eu­ro­pe­an Plan­e­tary Sci­ence Con­gress in Nantes, France.

The ice crystals are theorized to build up over millions of years from cryo-geysers. On earth a skier would sink to the bottom of such a powder pile, in fact the powder itself would be converted to firn and hard ice over time by gravity and weathering. But in Enceladus’ weak 0.11 G field and near absolute vacuum the powder can accumulate basically, forever.

The Nobel Prize for physics has been announced and, like the one for Medicine yesterday, it’s a three-way split:

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said American Saul Perlmutter would share the 10 million kronor ($1.5 million) award with U.S.-Australian Brian Schmidt and U.S. scientist Adam Riess “for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe through observations of distant supernovae.”

In other words, Dark Energy. The most revolutionary discovery in cosmology since the Big Bang.

And that’s saying it nicely. Hank Williams Jr., is a fucking idiot is more like it. Apparently this morning on Fox and Friends Williams went full Godwin:

They’re the enemy! Obama! And Biden! Are you kiddin’ me, the Three Stooges!” So there you have it: Obama is both the modern incarnation of Hitler and also Moe, and Joe Biden is double-timing it as Larry and Curly.

Here’s the thing about Godwin: there are times when assholes hide fascist behavior behind it. There are times when comparing someone to Hitler is fully warranted. It’s just that taxing billionaires at the same rate secretaries pay is not one of those times. Requiring insurance companies to cover childrens’ preexisting conditions isn’t exactly on par with cooking millions of men, women and children down to ash in industrial human kilns.

A lot of iconic images come to mind when Hitler is brought up, but harmless slapstick comedy is not one of them. Maybe Williams watched too much Hogan’s Heroes growing up, where Nazi’s were depicted as lovable bunglers, I dunno. But a person cannot be a genocidal monster and an adorable comedic legend at the same time. Williams got booted off of ESPN and imo he absolutely deserved it.

Chile’s Atacoma Desert is rapidly becoming THE place for optical astronomy. The combination of altitude, bone dry conditions, and clear skies make it arguably the best location on earth for telescopes. Now the site also features an array of radio telescopes under construction and some of the first images coming in reveal the inner workings of one of the most interesting galactic scenes in the nearby cosmos:

The new images reveal a flurry of star formation within thick clouds of gas and dust at the Antennae Galaxies’ impact zone, 45 million light-years away. Older star-forming regions appear as a faint orange in the image while the youngest — some 3 to 4 million years old — glow bright yellow.

The Antennae Galaxy is really two spiral galaxies in the midst of a collision lasting hundreds of millions of years. The space between individual stars is so vast that they rarely collide. But the clouds of dust and gas in each galaxy slam into one another at high speeds, sometimes in the neighborhood of a 100 miles a second. Even extremely diffuse matter heats up under those conditions, hot enough to emit microwaves in some cases, and giant shock waves echo back and forth, ringing the galaxies like a bell. In the compactions produced by the passing shock waves globs collapse to form stellar nurseries and a burst of star formation occurs deep inside pockets of dust and gas.

That’s where the Atacoma Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) comes in. Visible starlight from the baby stars can’t penetrate the layer of dust and gas, but invisible light in the lower portion of the spectrum can and that’s ALMA detects. The array is not even half-finished, but already the resolution is uncanny. Not bad for a test run!

The winners are Bruce Beutler and Jules Hoffmann for their discoveries concerning the activation of innate immunity. Sadly, the third and primary recipient of the prestigious award died just a few days shy of formally receiving it:

Ralph Steinman, a biologist with Rockefeller University, “discovered the immune system’s sentinel dendritic cells and demonstrated that science can fruitfully harness the power of these cells and other components of the immune system to curb infections and other communicable diseases,” the university said in a statement Monday. Steinman died Friday at the age of 68. “He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer four years ago, and his life was extended using a dendritic-cell based immunotherapy of his own design,” the university said.

Immunity, wat many researchers see as the final frontier, is a topic near and dear to me: I suffer from Anklyosing Spondilitis, a condition fairly well controlled with a very expensive drug. Congratulations to all three, and condolences to Dr Steinman’s family.

Climate change comes with all sorts of consequences, most of them miserable, by some accounts catastrophic. But if this report caught by my friend Joe Romm is true, it’s on:

A new report out from the International Center for Tropical Agriculture finds that between 2030 and 2050, land area suitable for cocoa production will fall dramatically. While rising temperatures and changing rainfall pattern may shift cocoa production to land currently not suitable, the net impact to this $9 billion-per-year industry could be severe.

Forget mass extinctions, a world without cocoa is a world gone mad, it’s hell incarnate. Energy industry you are on notice, don’t get between a man and his sweet, semi-sweet chocolate.

Leave it to Tricky Rick to dive ass first into science and come up with a wedge controversy benefitting quack cronies. A few months ago Perry had some fat sucked out, collected the adult stem cells in the waste, and then had them implanted hoping to speed recovery from back surgery. Now he wants to monetize the untested procedure:

The legislation, a bill amendment passed in the special session, would allow private companies to maintain banks that store stem cells taken from prospective patients for future treatment — a service for which Jones’ newly established bank charges $50,000 per patient. The legislation’s original draft was written by Jones and tweaked by Perry, according to correspondence obtained through the Texas Public Information Act.

So, collect adult stem cells from a patient, charge them a cool 50 grand, then charge them even more to inject those cells back into the same patient they came from. What am I missing? These adult stem cells are going to magically do something the zillions of adult stem cells already in the patient’s tissue aren’t doing? To my uninformed mind that sounds like a great way to induce raging, pre-mestatized cancer, and that’s on the very slim chance it has any effect at all.

But of course this isn’t about advancing research or helping patients. This is about promoting the myth that adult stem cells are the only ones researchers need, daring the dastardly FDA and other socialist agencies — with crazy ideas about protecting vulnerable people from dangerous quackery — to intervene, and most importantly, fleecing desperately ill people to enrich one of Perry’s many cronies.

We are ruled by delusional sociopaths and they’re brutally ignorant to boot.

You wouldn’t know it from our political discourse or Sunday morning TV programming, but that’s what the Guardian is reporting:

Far from being in thrall to its religious leaders, the US is in fact becoming a more secular country, some experts say. “It has never been better to be a free-thinker or an agnostic in America,” says Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the FFRF. The exact number of faithless is unclear. One study by the Pew Research Centre puts them at about 12% of the population, but another by the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture at Trinity College in Hartford puts that figure at around 20%. Most experts agree that the number of secular Americans has probably doubled in the past three decades – growing especially fast among the young. It is thought to be the fastest-growing major “religious” demographic in the country.

It’s odd to be classified with other religions, kinda like classifying not collecting stamps as a hobby. But if our little hell-bound group is growing by leaps and bounds, soon to dominate all of space and time, I can look the other way.