Astrophysicists are examining the possibility for a rather dramatic explanation for the enigmatic Dark Matter thought to comprise a significant fraction of the mass of the universe. While the leading idea for Dark Matter is a WIMP – Weakly Interacting Massive Particle – the particles being sought here make WIMPS look like sissy’s:

These collisions would not destroy the black hole or the star. Although their characteristics are uncertain, Kesden and Hanasoge’s simulations posit that primordial black holes could have masses of 1018 kilograms (a million trillion kilograms, about the mass of a largish asteroid), which is too small to destroy a star as they pass through. “The black hole is like a very dense bullet passing through the Sun, which is like a fluffy feather pillow,” says Kesden.

Would a black hole with the mass of a mountain moving through the earth (Or a human body) be noticeable? I have no idea, but it sure seems like it should.

Posting may be a bit light most of today as I deal with non blog chores. And pain, lots and lots of pain, from the grand injury two weeks ago. But here’s a few interesting science-y stories and I’ll probably throw a few more in over the course of the day:

• Astronomers are said to be pleading for the James Webb Telescope to be funded. Good luck with that given that some politicians are insisting we can’t even afford disaster relief.
• A nearly priceless moonrock that was missing for decades has turned up, mixed in with other articles and papers left behind by Bill Clinton when he left the governor’s office in 1980. Cue conspiracy moon landing conspiracy theorists, or can this be tied to Obama’s Kenyan birthplace somehow?
• Speaking or Things From Spaaaace … a NASA satellite is expected to burn in around Friday afternoon, but no one knows where or exactly when. But a chunk of it would be worth some dough. Good luck space junk hunters!
• Lastly, on a depressing note, the fossil fuel indsutry and the forces of ignorance they have assembled are winning:
  

  Global emissions of carbon dioxide, the main cause of global warming, jumped 45% between 1990 and 2010, and reached an all-time high of 33 billion tons last year, the European Commission reports.

A controversial execution has been postponed in the state of Georgia this evening. Troy Davis has narrowly escaped death just a few minutes ago while courts consider issuing a formal stay. But his immediate fate is still in doubt, the execution could reportedly move ahead at anytime:

The last-minute decision caused confusion outside the prison in Jackson, Georgia, where family, supporters and civil rights campaigners broke into celebration as they believed the court had granted Davis a stay of execution. But it quickly emerged that the delay was only temporary, while the justices considered whether to issue a stay.

The case has become a lightning rod for capital punishment for several reasons. Eye witnesses have recanted, most of the jury which convicted Davis has since said they would not have asked for the death penalty had they known facts now in evidence.

My own opinion is there are situations where the death penalty is appropriate, or at least defensible. The idea the state would strap someone down and kill them is a little creepy, it harkens back to a more barbaric time not all that long ago, and I sympathize with those who object on purely moral grounds. Nevertheless, I could be persuaded to make exceptions. If the suspect confesses and provides information that only he or she would know, like Ted Bundy for example, I could support it. So in principle maybe I support the death penalty. But not as as its practiced in the real world. The flaws in the criminal justice system are simply too well documented, too frequent, and too great.

Eyewitnesses and police make honest mistakes, the career benefits for DAs who clear cases or the political ramifications for governors can cloud judgement. We know sometimes corruption or negligence can result in conviction of the innocent. We see this over and over again in cases big and small. The idea that it could never happen in a death penalty case because the safeguards are perfect is ridiculous. Considering the finality of death, there’s no way I could go along with capital punishment in the vast majority of cases, and given the stakes that just seems like it ought to be a no brainer for anyone.

A new study from Baylor University clarifies something that’s been bothering me for a while: how is it that supposedly rational people are not only able to ignore or deny recent history when it comes to the disastrous conservative policies that destroyed the economy, but insist the only way to reverse the widespread failures they produced is to implement them again? It’s the cliché definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Now we have a hint: for many wingnuts it’s part of their religion:

About one in five Americans combine a view of God as actively engaged in daily workings of the world with an economic conservative view that opposes government regulation and champions the free market as a matter of faith … “When Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann say ‘God blesses us, God watches us, God helps us,’ religious conservatives get the shorthand. They see ‘government’ as a profane object — a word that is used to signal working against God’s plan for the United States. To argue against this is to argue with their religion.”

One has to admire the flexibility of the extreme right-wing godbots. For staunch absolutists their vision of morality and ethical behavior is as malleable as warm cheese. Not long ago merely criticizing the government for any reason was tantamount to insulting the troops. Harsh criticism directed at senior cabinet officials was considered an act of treason against the Commander-in-Chief in a time of war. In just two years this same group has been retrained to hate the government and believe God himself is an enemy of big government, taxes on the rich, and any kind of regulation — at the federal level only of course.

It seems a winning no brainer, Obama proposes rasing taxes on zillionaires. The public is behind this by a margin of three to one or more. Republicans will stall and stamp their feet of course. But then all of the sudden, out of left field, a democrat starts running intereference for the wealthy. What’s going on?

To understand why it’s so hard for politicians to raise taxes on the rich, and so tempting to defend them no matter what, you have to understand what a politician does all day. Before I started hanging out with people who manage modern campaigns, I had this generic picture of the politician giving speeches, meeting with other politicians and making deals, meeting with constituents, doing an occasional interview, that kind of thing.

They do that stuff, but it turns out most politicians, candidates or incumbents, spend the majority of their day fundraising. For most of them this means cold calling or warm calling. It means the candidate sits in a room and calls people from lists prepared by staffers, sometimes with accompanying dossiers on the prospects, for as many hours a day as a campaign manager can keep them in the chair. Five to seven hours a day is common and persuasive staffers can often keep their guy or gal on the phone even between campaign events, sneaking in donor calls on the campaign bus or in the minutes between speeches or events. Indeed, in the heat of the campaign season, speeches and other activities may be a candidate’s only break from call time drudgery.

The boiler room strategy is done because federal contribution limits are currently $2,500 per person, per cycle (This may confuse some readers who remember past election limits of $2,400, but the limits are indexed to inflation in odd-numbered years and have since gone up). Typically, you ask big donors to max out for both primary and general election — that’s 5 grand right there folks! Do the same for a spouse and that’s 10,000 bucks. Add kids or grandkids and their spouses, and a single phone call to a wealthy family can result in $30,000 or more. Even in high profile races with national visibility, a call netting 10 to 30 grand is a huge score. If a candidate only closes on one or two such calls a week the campaign war chest grows.

Think about what that means: all day long the candidate is talking to people who can give serious loot, in many cases he or she has called before, maybe several times, and struck up a relationship with the prospect. The candidate is having dozens of in-depth conversations a day with very wealthy people, asking them what they want to see in politics, trying to convince them that s/he sincerely cares about their day-to-day problems, and affirming if the donation is made and candidate successfully elected the prospect’s political wish list will come true.

Campaigns are happy to take smaller donations too, money is money, and smaller amounts move the average amount down in such a way as to help the candidate claim they are a people-powered movement. But a 20 dollar check goes by webpage or call center, there’s no interaction with the power, not even close. So it’s not surprising that after a few months of this crazy, non-stop, sleep deprived campaign lifestyle the candidate simply no longer knows what regular people think, but is intimately aware of any wacky rumor or anecdote making its way through the privileged class. This applies to democrats too.

The only way for us regular non wealthy people to over come this is for the candidate to be more afraid of us voters than the rich donors.

A team of planetary scientists from Tucson, Arizona have identified at least two locations on Mars that may have once been ideal environment for simple microbes. The sites are much younger than the Noachian formations associated with most of Mars’ ancient, wetter past:

The troughs were discovered at Noctis Labyrintus, also known as ‘the labyrinth of the night’ – a region that is noted for its system of deep, steep-walled valleys. “We discovered these locations that show many kinds of minerals that formed by water activity,” says Catherine Weitz, lead author of a paper featured in the journal Geology and a senior scientist at the Institute. “The clays we found, called iron/magnesium [Fe/Mg]-smectites, are much younger at Noctis Labyrinthus relative to those found in the ancient rocks on Mars, which indicates a different water environment in these depressions relative to what was happening elsewhere on Mars.”

The circumstantial evidence for life on Mars has grown fairly interesting. It seems a reasonable speculation that microbes might be passed back and forth between early earth and Mars and that some of those microbes could survive on the surface of the smaller world. Whether that happened or not, or how the organisms fared afterward, is a big question.

Greg Paul has an article up today on the WaPo blog titled Atheism on the upswing in America which includes this interesting bit:

According to the tabulations of the World Christian Encyclopedia, the globe was fairly consistently religious circa 1900. It no longer is. The WCE concludes that atheists from committed to agnostic currently number about a billion. Pew calculates that some 1st world countries are only a quarter or a third as religious as are the most pious 2nd and 3rd world nations. In some of the secularized democracies large pluralities and even strong majorities qualify at atheists–including agnostics, while the devoutly religious are small minorities, and those churches that are not nearly empty on most Sundays have been converted to other uses.

I can understand why people were religious in times past, for one thing they lived in a world surrounded by inexplicable miracles and the science that would one day resolve them as natural events was in its infancy. What I don’t get is how or why religion persisted beyond that point. Is religion replicating itself in the menome like parasitic DNA, does it offer cultural adaptive value or is it a consequence of some other behavior which has adaptive value, is it running on social inertia and near the end of the road?

I sure as hell can’t figure it out. Anyone want to take a crack at it?

This time lapsed photography was made of the Aurora Australis as the ISS traveled over Australia and New Zealand at 200 miles in altitude. Enjoy!

Here’s an interesting example of how the flat-earthers think. Welsey J. Smith writes at Secondhand Smoke:

If they weren’t trying to destroy the economy of the world, keep destitute countries mired in poverty, undermine national sovereignty, and misusing science as a club to promote favored political policies, I might have some sympathy for all of the failed hysteria. You know what I mean, anytime there is an extreme weather event–small hurricanes, heat waves, snow storms, arctic chills, etc.–the usual suspects start bleating, IT’S GLOBAL WARMING. WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE UNLESS WE TURN EVERYTHING OVER TO THE SCIENCE-TECHNOLOGICAL ELITE!

Mr. Smith appears to be deeply confused. Hardly surprising if he consumes industry propaganda and wingnut misinformation in place of legit science. But here in the reality-based world I can’t remember a single credible science writer who covers global warming who has said 1) that some small weather event was the piece of evidence that nailed the case shut — the case has been nailed shut on global warming ever since the globe begin to warm, or 2) said we’re all going to die, or 3) wants to turn everything over to some monolithic science-technological elite. If anyone is being hysterical here it’s Wesley.

But you know what I do remember? The usual suspects commenting on just about every major winter blizzard over the last several years and using them to mock climate science. I remember plenty of cable news pundits and wingnut bloggers following suit. Why I even recall snowmen made to look like Al Gore. Would anyone be surprised if Smith and his buddies were in the thick of that?

Pointing to a blizzard as evidence against global warming is evidence for dishonesty or ignorance. Whereas a record heat wave actually contributes heat to the global temperature record, the converse is not true of a blizzard. Record cold and record snowfall are different phenomena. The only thing snow tells us about temperature is that it’s cold enough for water to freeze. Doesn’t matter if it’s 30 above or 30 below.

In fact, says climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State University, warmer winters can mean more frequent record snowfalls because warmer air holds more water vapor than colder air. “As long as its cold enough to snow in the U.S. during winter–which it well be in any foreseeable scenario for the next century,” said Mann, “Global warming may actually lead to more blizzards in many parts of the U.S.”

Controversy continues over the cost and schedule of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Congress seems supportive even in this environment of budget cutting mania. But some NASA scientists are split over whether JWST is worth it or not:

But the astronomy community as a whole isn’t sure this is good news. Some now fear that the behemoth telescope, which is 7 years late and vastly over budget, will end up devouring money allocated to other planetary science and solar physics projects. When JWST, the heir apparent to the Hubble Space Telescope, was named a top priority for NASA astrophysics in 2001, it was supposed to cost $1 billion and launch by the end of this year. It is now expected to cost at least $8.7 billion for launch and operations and to launch no earlier than 2018, a dramatic overrun that prompted Congress to propose axing the telescope.

Meanwhile, a new addition planned for Paranal Observatory in Chile already housing the sharpest optical telescopes on earth could rival the JWST in resolving power and undercut the cost of the space based telescope by billions of dollars:

When it is completed in 10 years, it will be the most powerful eye on the sky anywhere in the world. The size of a football stadium, its main mirror will be 138 feet wide. That is four times bigger than the mirrors on any existing telescopes anywhere. … The telescope will cost about $1.5 billion, weigh over 5,000 tons and will be made to withstand major earthquakes, a serious consideration in Chile. Astronomers say the images it produces will be 15 times sharper than those sent to earth by the Hubble.

Of course in a sane nation we’d be willing to pay what it costs us to fund Bush’s asinine Iraq War for a few days to put a next generation infrared telescope into space. But given our budget priorities and the argument raging today about whether or not teachers and police officers should pay a higher tax rate than billionaires, it’s pretty clear we do not live in a sane nation. Fortunately this addition to the Paranal should be able to do some of the same science JWST would be capable of, and for a fraction of the cost.