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.

Because we don’t tax a handful of extremely wealthy people and corporations and offer them all kinds of distasteful deductions, we have a big deficit. Via Daily Kos Labor:

We are the 99 percent. We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we’re working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent.

We middle-class taxpayers bailed out the super wealthy CEOs and mega-corporations when the malfeasance of a few almost cost the rest of us everything. We ponied up hundreds of billions to stablize a global portfolio of toxic assets and provided trillion dollar lines of credit at no interest. Thanks to our colletive credit, our generosity, our future tax receipts that tiny minority got to keep their mansions and investment income, fat exceutive bonuses and sweet government subsidies, and their lavish vacation homes. It’s way, way past time for that goodwill to be recognized and for everyone to pay their fair share.

This idea polls at 70% to 80%, across party lines, it’s as popular as a basketful of bipartisan kittens. Anger over the bailouts is what originally fueled parts of the Teaparty, before they were deftly folded into the religious right’s dreamworld and turned into cheerleaders for the rich by shady operators. It’s what’s behind the growing Wall Street protests today.

Any politician who does not agree with that is a bought and paid for whore.  Any politician who successfully harnesses that resentment will balance the budget, inspire voters, and could well cruise to victory in 2012.

Nothing like a little perspective when discussing space travel with a blog full of skeptics. Granted the distances between planets, moons, and asteroids are huge, the environment is harsh and unforgiving, the challenges and danger are unique, unlike any we have ever faced, and our bodies are frail. Maybe the solar system is too much. But over long periods of time we can and have accomplished feats of exploration no single generation could contemplate. Given more time, better technology, and old fashioned persistence it may be possible to repeat those ancient voyages on a far grander scale.

Our plans for Godless domination of all space and time continue apace.  Exceeeelent! Today I’m happy to announce several new, talented bloggers. Although new here is relative, some of these guys and gals have been writing great stuff and doing important work on behalf of sanity and reality for years.

Dana Hunter at En Tequila Es Verdad is a science blogger, SF writer, complete geology addict, Gnu Atheist, and owner of a – excuse me, owned by a homicidal felid.

Al Stefanelli owns and operates A Voice of Reason, he is a veteran journalist and bravely serves as the Georgia State Director for American Atheists, Inc.

Russel Glasser at The Atheist Experience is a fourth generation atheist and both his parents are physicists, gotta love that!

Ian Cromwell of the Cromunist Manifesto is a polymorph and long-time observer of race and race issues. His interests, at least blog-wise, focus on bringing anti-racism into the fold of skeptic thought.

JT Eberhard blogging at What Would JT Do? is a young rabble-rouser who serves the Secular Student Alliance and contributes to Atheism Resource.

Justin Griffith at Rock Beyond Belief is, praise no one and pass the ammunition, an atheist soldier serving his country and serving as Military Director for American Atheists.

Kylie Sturgess at Token Skeptic is a busy skeptic. She also hosts a podcast, and regularly writes for numerous publications including CSICOP’s Curiouser and Curiouser online column.

Head on over to their website and give them a warm skeptical welcome … which I guess would be something like “OK, I’m listening, what-do-ya got?

Interesting articles about the scope of the challenges involved in interstellar travel:

To send spacecraft to other stars in the space of a human lifetime, new methods of propulsion are going to be needed to provide the necessary ‘oomph’ to break free of our Solar System. Currently the best bet is nuclear fusion power, but there’s a problem – it hasn’t even been shown to be a commercially viable source of energy on Earth yet.

There’s no harm in dreaming, but most people I talk to don’t even appreciate the difference between sending a sizable spacecraft to the moon and a survivable trip to Mars. The distance to Mars is so much greater than I can’t even the trajectories on this page without reducing the earth and moon to little bitty points. The moon is a quarter million miles distant. On average, Mars is roughly 100 million miles away. More over the moon is always the same distance away, we can get there and back with Apollo technology in about a week. Using traditional elliptical orbits it would take about two years to Mars and back.

But there may be another way, and the Apollo trips to the moon are a useful illustration: Cyclers. [Read more…]

Most people would consider a Blastocyst an early stage in mammalian development, a rich field of study, perhaps a source of research material to drive potential miracles of regenerative medicine. But in the great liberal state of California a few nutburgers have another idea, and they’ve cooked some nifty framing for it:

“Human personhood is the final chapter of the Civil Rights movement,” said CCRF founder and President Walter B. Hoye II in a statement. ”It proposes commonsense values for otherwise convoluted jurisprudence. From the pre-born child, to the senior citizen facing end of life decisions, to the disabled veteran, we believe all human beings should be protected by love and by law.”

Because nothing says civil rights and small government like using the power of the State to force a rape victim to bear the rapist’s child. This ugly idea didn’t come out of nowhere, it’s a legislative template developed by a dozen extremist organizations now being introduced by purportedly small-government Teaparty Republicans in states all over the nation. The supposed motive? Why it’s all about love, dominionist style:

The Primary Mission of Personhood USA is to serve Jesus by being an Advocate for those who can not speak for themselves, the pre-born child. We serve by starting / coordinating efforts to establish legal “personhood” for pre-born children through peaceful activism, legislative efforts and ballot-access petition initiatives.