NASA is featuring the first high-resolution images of asteroid Vesta as taken by the DAWN spacecraft during a low-altitude orbit. The images show a very interesting surface, battered with old and more recent craters, plus "textures such as small grooves and lineaments that are reminiscent of the structures seen in low-resolution data from the higher-altitude orbits. Also, this fine scale highlights small outcrops of bright and dark material." (from the NASA piece).

Los Alamos National Laboratory's top 10 science stories of 2011 include alternative energy research, world record magnetic fields, disease tracking, the study of Mars, climate change, fuel cells, solar wind, and magnetic reconnection. 

Mars Habitability 

Three Los Alamos technologies are aboard the Mars Science Laboratory mission's Curiosity rover, set to touch down on the surface of the Red Planet this coming August. Los Alamos radio-isotope batteries are providing power and heat to Curiosity, which is the largest rover vehicle ever deployed to Mars. These power sources will help drive the 10 scientific instruments on board the vehicle.

What is a paltry $195 billion in real cost versus $1 trillion in potential savings? Fans of 'jobs created or saved' fuzzy economics will love a report by the Joint Center For Political and Economic Studies, which says that six new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) air quality regulations, which will cost about $195 billion over the next 20 years, will save well over $1 trillion. 

I italicize $1 trillion because it works best if you use a Dr. Evil voice to read it so I wanted to give you a visual hook. Like him, it may take some trial and error to figure out what number will have enough impact to mobilize people into action so, like these numbers, just make them up until you get the desired effect.

Have you ever looked at a histogram with the data displayed as counts per bin in the form of points with error bars, and wondered whether those fluctuations and departures from the underlying hypothesized model (usually overimposed as a continuous line or histogram) were really significant or worth ignoring ?

Do sperm whales use sonar to stun giant squid? In a word: maybe. I delved quite enthusiastically into the topic last year, and came out tantalized and frustrated by limited evidence.

So I was very excited to see an article in the Smithsonian called The Sperm Whale's Deadly Call. Is this new research, finally showing once and for all that sperm whales knock out their prey by very loud shouting?

Frankincense is a milky, fragrant resin used in incense and perfumes across the world and is also a key part of the Christmas story but trees are declining so dramatically that production could be halved over the next 15 years, according to a new study in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Applied Ecology.

But global warming isn't the culprit on this one, it is most likely insect attack.  Frankincense is obtained by tapping various species of Boswellia, a tree that grows in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian peninsula. Yet despite its economic importance – incense has been traded internationally for thousands of years – little is known about how tapping affects Boswellia populations.

How old is the water in your drinking glass? What about the ice cubes floating in it? Any answer is bound to make reference to the water cycle (evaporate, rain, repeat). Still, for most practical purposes, water is both eternal and constantly replenished.

As I have a long train journey and not much to do, I can use it to write about this recent open access paper on Eyjafjallajökull written by a couple of my colleagues in the lab. As it is open access you can go and read it for yourself if you wish, but I thought I would first explain a few of the key concepts discussed in the paper.

First, a quick reminder on the eruption itself. The timings of the various eruptive phases are important, as the researchers were looking not just at the eruption as a whole, but on how the magma changed during the eruption.

In the previous blog post we familiarized ourselves with a most remarkable device. A device resulting from 20th century science: Albert's chest of drawers. This chest, although presented as a gedanken gadget, is real in the sense that devices with the same characteristics have been built, although none of these take the actual shape of a chest of drawers. In fact, the devices built so far are way smaller in size. They are based not on drawers, but on photons or sub-microscopic particles.

A number of midwives believe modern births rely too heavily on medication and technological intervention and they instead have created 'birthing rituals' to send the message that women's bodies know best and that birth is about female empowerment.

It's no surprise the Pacific Northwest, home of progressive anti-vaccine efforts, is also on the vanguard of this latest fad in anthropology. In Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Melissa Cheyney,  assistant professor of medical anthropology at Oregon State University, documented rituals used by midwives and conducted interviews with midwives and new mothers.