Pollyanna joins world Blog Action Day re Food

This week Pollyanna

Pollyanna goes shopping for food

is taking part in Blog Action Day which is why we are out on Sunday 16.10 instead of our usual Friday.  She still, however, wants to share the Succot holiday,

 
Saturn and its moons and a bit of humor with you as well.

As you all know, Pollyanna undertakes to introduce you to the family of moons of Saturn, since her brother, Titan, is only interested in showing himself in his blog.  Here is an example that shows that the Solar System was created with some humor in mind.  Hyperion is a small moon. It has an irregular shape and surface appearance, chaotically rotates, and tumbles along its orbit.   The shape is irregular because its self-gravity is insufficient  to crush its materials together and eliminate gaps in its interior. Its strange, spongy texture, its dark-floored craters, and its landslide morphology are very difficult to explain.

Crescent Hyperion Credit: NASA / JPL / SSI / mosaic by Emily Lakdawalla

It orbits outside of Titan in a 4:3 resonance, i.e. it completes a revolution around  Saturn four times in the time that Titan does the same three times. Whenever Titan comes by it gives Hyperion a gravitational shove and changes its rotation axis, which causes it to tumble.  Pollyanna and I think this is cool. 
Stats:
Size: Irregular, 410 x 260 x 220 kilometers - 8th largest moon of Saturn
Orbital radius: 1,464,100 kilometers - 24.3 Saturn radii
Orbital period: 21.3 days - 4/3 of Titan’s
Discovery: 1848 by George Phillips Bond and William Lassell
In Greek mythology, HYPERION was the Titan god of light, one of the sons of Ouranos (Heaven) and Gaia (Earth), and the father of the lights of heaven--Eos the Dawn, Helios the Sun, and Selene the Moon. His wife was Theia, lady of the aither--the shining blue of the sky. Hyperion's name means "watcher from above" or "he who goes above" from the Greek words hyper and iôn.

NOW ON TO OUR TOPIC, FOOD
FOOD is something that we well-fed people in industrialized countries who happen to be reasonably well-off take for granted, in fact consume too much of and then worry about our weight.  Obesity is a First World epidemic whereas in the Third World acute food shortages are the order of the day.  Indeed, even Pollyanna,who tries to find something to be glad about everywhere, says that something must be drastically wrong. In every industrialized country of course you can poison yourself very effectively by patronizing fast food restaurants.  Andy Borowitz tells us how fast fast food can really get.
This is really fast food. 

Jokes.com
Andy Borowitz - Faster Food
comedians.comedycentral.com
Jokes Joke of the Day Funny Jokes

 FAMINE
Let us start with Somalia.  The famine there is something unbelievable, but alas it is very real.  I cannot begin to describe it, but  Save the Children UK has posted some blogs and we are linking you to one of them  in the hope of conveying some idea of the immensity of the humanitarian disaster.

A starving child in Somalia.  Credit New York Times

Image from http://newsone.com/world/associatedpress2/somalia-famine/

The efforts made by the world community are to a large extent being thwarted by the Islamist militias that control large parts of the country.  How can one reconcile religious belief with the infliction of starvation on innocent people?   In the US, Republicans  are holding up aid and to our great shame, Israel is refusing asylum to refugees from Somalia in defiance of UN guidelines.  I cannot avoid thinking of people in Madrid in 1943 objecting to Jews infiltrating into Spain through the Pyrenees.   Collective memory can be very short.

I have no idea what the Quran has to say about starving people, but in synagogue on Yom Kippur, just last week, we read the words of a prophet (Deutero-Isaiah, Is. 58,6-7) who told us what God really expects from people who fast for forgiveness of sins:
הֲלוֹא זֶה, צוֹם אֶבְחָרֵהוּ--פַּתֵּחַ חַרְצֻבּוֹת רֶשַׁע, הַתֵּר אֲגֻדּוֹת מוֹטָה; וְשַׁלַּח רְצוּצִים חָפְשִׁים, וְכָל-מוֹטָה תְּנַתֵּקוּ.  ז הֲלוֹא פָרֹס לָרָעֵב לַחְמֶךָ, וַעֲנִיִּים מְרוּדִים תָּבִיא בָיִת:  כִּי-תִרְאֶה עָרֹם וְכִסִּיתוֹ, וּמִבְּשָׂרְךָ לֹא תִתְעַלָּם.
For the Hebrew-challenged:
6 Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
   and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
   and break every yoke?
7 Is it not to share your food with the hungry
   and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe them,
   and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?
 Note the coupling of human rights to freedom and justice in verse 6 to the economic human rights in verse 7.  If I were a Hindu believer I would strongly suspect the soul of the author of the above to have been reincarnated as  Peter Benenson

Peter Benensen credit AI Canada

who founded Amnesty International in 1961, just fifty years ago.

FOOD AND POPULATION
Another issue linked to food is the projected inability of the planet to support our ever increasing population.  This was understood by Thomas Malthus in the late 18th century, but the paying of the bill has been staved off repeatedly by advances in agricultural technology.  Eventually, the bill will have to be paid.  We are told that the most ecologically responsible thing is to start  eating insects

not exactly an appetizing prospect.  Nonetheless, the question of availability of sufficient food supplies is inextricably linked with the need to reduce population growth. This in turn brings progressive looking people, who want to confront this looming danger, into conflict with almost all religious establishments all over the world.  The Abrahamic religions all hew to the line of "be fruitful and multiply" although therein lies the danger of the ultimate demise of life on this planet.  Public opinion is, alas, very poorly informed on these issues but the blogosphere can make noise where the corporate media chose to remain silent.

FOOD AS A WEAPON
We see countless examples of food being used as a weapon in addition to the dire example of Somalia mentioned above.  We saw how it was used in the civil war in Sudan and to maintain control of the population in Zimbabwe, to mention a few examples.  There will be a meeting of the leaders of the rich countries in November.  Please  raise your voice to call upon them to put an end to the  most obscene f-word of all, FAMINE.

FOOD SCIENCE
Pollyanna likes to include matters of science in her biweekly blog. This week she is referring you to a source of information about food science where you can see where the struggle to keep us going is taking place. These efforts are admirable but cannot be expected to replace population control in the long term as a means of maintaining our viability as a species.

Pollyanna does not want this post to be all doom and gloom so she is sharing a discussion from XKCD of the expiry date of yogurt.

Pollyanna says Shana Tova and Best Wishes

Pollyanna

 took Rosh Hashana off and is thus a day late. 

She wishes all a Shana Tova and a G'mar Chatima Tova that is roughly translatable as "may you be inscribed for good in the Book of Life."  Pollyanna is not extremely religious, but we did go to synagogue these last few days and will go on Yom Kippur that is coming up in a week.  It does no harm to take a moment and think about our lives, our actions and as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy put it, Life, the Universe and Everything.   If religion helps people be better and more moral, enhances social justice and contributes to peace and well being, we are all for it.  Alas, historically, it has often done the opposite.  We refer you to some insight on the God/god question from  Wes Nisker in the Huffington Post.  It smacks of satire, but there is some substance as well.
A FAMILY OF MOONS
This week we look at Tethys, the satellite of Saturn, and its coorbitals Telesto and Calypso.

Meet Tethys battered and bruised, credit Cassini Imaging Team

                                                                          
 Like Mimas, Tethys has an enormous impact crater on one side, named Odysseus. But Odysseus is a very different crater from Herschel (the big crater on Mimas). While Herschel has very steep scarps, the floor of Odysseus is quite smooth in its topographic profile; the surface of Tethys has "relaxed" so that the crater floor follows the shape of the moon. All of the features on Tethys draw their names from Homer's Odyssey. Curling across Tethys' surface is a gigantic canyon system called Ithaca Chasma. Views of Ithaca Chasma during a close flyby by Cassini show that it has been battered with impact craters, indicating that it is extremely old.
Size: 1,072 x 1,056 x 1,052 kilometers - 5th largest moon of Saturn
Orbital radius: 294,660 kilometers - 4.88 Saturn radii
Orbital period: 1.888 days - about 1/8 of Titan’s
Discovery: 1684 by Giovanni Domenico Cassini
It shares its orbit with Telesto which is a tiny moon that orbits in Tethys' leading  Lagrange point  (L4). That is, Telesto orbits Saturn on the same circular path that Tethys does, but ahead of Tethys, and the centers of   Tethys, Saturn, and Telesto form an equilateral triangle.    

Saturn's moon Telesto
This raw image was captured by Cassini during its closest planned encounter with Telesto, on October 11, 2005. Credit: NASA / JPL / Space Science Institute

Size: Irregular, 34 x 28 x 36 kilometers
Orbital radius: 294,660 kilometers - 4.89 Saturn radii - within the E ring - at Tethys’ leading Lagrange point (L4) - co-orbital with Tethys and Calypso
Orbital period: 1.8878 days - about 1/8 of Titan’s
Discovery: 1980 by Brad Smith, Harold Reitsema, Stephen Larson, John Fountain                                           

Tethys also has a follower, Calypso a tiny moon that orbits in Tethys' trailing Lagrange point (L5). That is, Calypso orbits Saturn on the same circular path that Tethys does, but behind Tethys, and the centers of Tethys, Saturn, and Calypso form an equilateral triangle.  
Size: Irregular, 34 x 22 x 22 kilometers 
Orbital radius: 294,660 kilometers - 4.89 Saturn radii - within the E ring - at Tethys’ leading Lagrange point (L4) - co-orbital with Tethys and Telesto 
Orbital period: 1.8878 days - about 1/8 of Titan’s 
Discovery: 1980 by Dan Pascu, P. Seidelmann, William Baum, D. Currie

Saturn's moon Calypso
This is the best view that Cassini will likely ever produce of Calypso. It was captured on September 23, 2005 from a distance of 101,000 kilometers. It is shown here magnified by a factor of three. Source: NASA / JPL / Space Science Institute

In mythology TETHYS was the Titan goddess of the sources of  fresh water which nourished the earth. She was the wife of Okeanos, the earth-encircling, fresh-water stream, and the mother of the Potamoi (Rivers), Okeanides (Springs, Streams and  Fountains) and Nephelai (Clouds). Tethys was imagined feeding her children's streams by drawing water from Okeanos through subterranean aquifers. Her name was derived from the Greek word têthê, "the nurse" or "grandmother."  TELESTO was one of the daughters of Oceanus and Tethys  while CALYPSO was a nymph, who lived on the island of Ogygia, where she detained Odysseus for a number of years.   She is generally said to be the daughter of the Titan Atlas.                            
SAVE THE AMAZON
Usually Pollyanna does not get into politics etc. which she leaves to her ranting brother Titan.  She does, however, have strong feelings about ecological issues and would like to ask you to help stop the paving of a highway in the Amazon regions of Bolivia.  Avaaz asks you to sign the petition and Pollyanna supports it.

WOMEN'S RIGHTS She goes orbital about abuse of women, such as seen in  Saudi Arabia that has long been a country about which she has never been glad.  It is therefore good news that women there have been given the right to vote for the first time in history.   It would be even nicer if they could drive to the polls.                                                                                                                  
CERVICAL CANCER
Pollyanna is very glad about advances in the early detection and treatment of cervical cancer that are saving lives, especially in Thailand.   Thanks to Yosefa for pointing this story out to us.  This killer disease can be fought if efforts are made.

Anuree Talasart, a nurse provider in Roi Et Province, Thailand, teaches a group of women about the female reproductive system. Credit New York Times

Pollyanna also says cheers for the people at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem who have come up with a cheap and effective way of fighting deadly mosquitoes by means of poison nectars that can be placed as bait and serve to eliminate them. This is a major contribution to the fight against malaria.
“You can’t move flowering trees around,” said Yosef Schlein, a parasitologist at the university’s medical school. “So you have to use movable bait. That’s how we came up with fruit juice.”  Supported by a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Dr. Schlein and his research partner Günter C. Müller concocted an array of nectar poisons known as Attractive Toxic Sugar Baits that are easy to make, environmentally friendly and inexpensive.

MALARIA VECTOR Anopheles sergenti sips the nectar of the Nile tamarisk. Credit Josef Shlein

                                                                                    
TOO FAST NEUTRINOS
Pollyanna was quite concerned about the report of neutrinos making the trip from CERN to the OPERA detector in the Gran Sasso Laboratory faster than light. The group reports that the travel time of the ultrarelativistic neutrinos is about 60 ns less than expected as described last week by Titan.. 
We are grateful to Bob Park in his What's New blog for pointing us at the paper by  Cohen and Glashow that shows that the neutrinos could not have done what was attributed to them because of Cherenkov energy loss via electron-positron pair production.  Physics can relax and go on.

DINOSAUR FEATHERS
We think it is cool that very ancient  feathers have been found from 79 million years ago that offer an unusually wide-ranging view of what late dinosaurs and early birds were wearing.

A cluster of small barbs (shown), which once branched off a main feather upright, show remains of pigment but not interlocking hooks. The barbs might have come from the ends of the outermost layer of body feathers. Science/AAAS

SCIENCE NEWS TIDBITS
Here are a few goodies from  Science News magazine.  I recommend subscribing to it.  You get the latest gossip of what is going on in science around the world, especially from fields outside your own.   You  will probably find this article interesting as well.

OUR BOOK REVIEW
This weeks book review is of Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science by Jim al-Khalili reviewed  in the Guardian by Tim Bradford..

llustration by Clifford Harper/agraphia.co.uk

 It deals with a period of total intellectual darkness in Europe.  During these times the  Muslim world had discovered the works of the Greeks and Byzantines and was busy expanding upon them.  Of course, Jews and Christians in these countries participated, vid. Maimonides and many others.  If the subject interests you, you can sign up for a Webinar involving the author.  Registration is required.From the blurb of the Webinar.

We learn at school that Newton is the father of modern optics, Copernicus heralded the birth of astronomy, and Snell deduced the law of refraction. But what debt do these men owe to the physicists and astronomers of the medieval Islamic Empire? What about Ibn al-Haytham, the greatest physicist in the 2000-year span between Archimedes and Newton, whose Book of Optics was just as influential as Newton’s seven centuries later? Or Ibn Sahl, who came up with the correct law of refraction many centuries before Snell? What of the astronomers al-Tusi and Ibn al-Shatir, without whom Copernicus would not have been able to formulate his heliocentric model of the solar system? In this lecture, Jim Al-Khalili recounts the stories of these characters and more from his new book Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science.

From the review we have a quote from an 11th century Persian polymath  Al-Biruni, who measured the height of a mountain and the angle of dip of the horizon to calculate the circumference of the planet  to within an accuracy of 1%.   He warned that the extremist "would stamp the sciences as atheistic and would proclaim that they led people astray, in order to make ignoramuses of them, and to hate the sciences. For this will help him conceal his own ignorance, and to open the door to the complete destruction of the sciences and the scientists." He might have been talking about the mullahs of modern Tehran, or the ranters of the US religious right.

BRAIN SURGEONS VS ROCKET SCIENTISTS
Since Titan, Pollyanna and I belong to the rocket science community, we keep a close watch on what our competitors the brain surgeons are up to.  Before giving you the Andy Borowitz take on this, let us tell you a true story from San Francisco passed on to us by Ray Goldstein and his spouse Jane. They were on their way to have dinner with us in SFO but were held up by a police cordon protecting the King of Jordan.  While waiting, they got into a conversation with a policeman who, when hearing that they were in town for the American Geophysical Union meeting, told them the following tale:  In the pre-computer era when they would scoop up the comatose drunks off the street, they had to fill out a form which included the occupation of the scoopee.  Since these characters were beyond speech and the police were required to complete the booking form, they would write in either rocket scientist or brain surgeon.   With that in mind, we pass on to you the latest communique.                                                               

Pollyanna ponders morality and science

Pollyanna is glad to be back with you and to tell you of her new job modeling bras...  For the record, this picture came up when I googled Pollyanna/Images.

Glad to model bras

With the equinox coming up Pollyanna has been thinking a bit about astronomy.  Right now, if you look at the eastern sky a few hours after sunset, you will see a lovely combination of a full moon with Jupiter as it were catching up to it

A Moon-Jupiter conjunction on Aug. 26, 2010. Credit: Tom Cocchiaro. 

Last year Jupiter came as close as it ever does to the Earth at opposition and was the brightest object in the sky after the moon.  It is quite bright now as you can see by looking.

This sky map shows how the moon and Jupiter  appeared on Sept. 15, 2011 at 10 p.m. to skywatchers with clear skies in mid-northern latitudes.
CREDIT: Starry Night Software

View full size image

Oppositions (the Sun, Earth and Jupiter lining up)of the Earth and Jupiter occur roughly every 400 days, because  Earth catches up to Jupiter and laps it in its race around the sun.  Because the orbits of the planets are slightly elliptical, the distances between oppositions vary, and  the next time [Earth and Jupiter] will be as close as they were in 2010 will not  be until 2022.  This year the opposition will be in late October. 

Since Pollyanna's egomaniac brother Titan was so much into himself last week, she will attempt to make it up to a few smaller satellites of Saturn, in this case Pandora and Prometheus.

Pandora credit Cassini

From zebratigerfish.blogspot.com do not open that box!

Prometheus credit Cassini

Credit jegsworks.com Careful with that fire!

Here they are hard at work as  shepherds of the F-ring of Saturn.   This link includes a movie of the pair in action.  Between them they keep the ring intact and have an orbital resonance that helps them do the job, although there is some suspicion of chaos here. The mythology of both of them is well known.  Pandora opened a famous box(actually a jar, but mistranslated in the 16th century) and Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans, for which he was punished by Zeus by being bound naked to a pillar in the Caucasian mountains. A griffon-vulture ate at Prometheus' liver all day long. During the bitter cold of the mountain night, the liver became whole again--poor chap, he only meant well.
Pandora stats: Size: Irregular, 114 x 84 x 62 kilometers - 13th largest moon of Saturn 
Orbital radius:141,700 kilometers - 2.35 Saturn radii - outer shepherd of the F ring 
Orbital period: 0.6285 days -about 1/25 of Titan’s 
Discovery: 1980 by S. Collins et al.
Prometheus stats: Size: Irregular, 145 x 85 x 62 kilometers - 11th largest moon of Saturn
Orbital radius: 139,353 kilometers - 2.28 Saturn radii - inner shepherd of the F ring
Orbital period: 0.613 days - about 1/26 of Titan’s
Discovery: 1980 by S. Collins et al.

BINARY STAR PLANET

The planet eclipses, or transits, both stars; and the stars regularly eclipse each other too

Some of you may remember the Asimov science fiction story Nightfall in which a civilization lives on a planet orbiting a binary pair of stars.  We now have an observation of such a planet from the Kepler space telescope.  For a brief exposition see BBC news.  The scientific paper is in the latest issue of Science  for those having access.  It is a most exciting discovery and Pollyanna is thrilled.

PALEONTOLOGY
Pollyanna is quite taken with the new finding  about a possible human ancestor. Just be careful about telling any of the Republican candidates about it. They should fear the competition. I refer you to the  details.  Alas there is a 24 second popup commercial in the video, but it is worth the wait and the noise.

Fossils of the extinct hominid known as Australopithecus sediba were accidentally discovered by the 9-year-old son of a scientist in the remains of a cave in South Africa in 2008,   The fossils' mix of human and primitive traits found in the brains, hips, feet and hands make a strong case for it being the immediate ancestor to the human lineage, scientists report in the Sept. 9, 2011, issue of the journal  Science.

The fossils included remains of a male juvenile (whose cranium is shown here) along with a female of the same species, who was likely in her 20s or 30s.

CREDIT: Brett Eloff.  

MORALS AND YOUTH
Pollyanna and I have been discussing an article in the NYTimes that Yosefa sent us about the lack of moral sense among young people, in particular the moral relativism that has become so common.  The idea that "if it feels good it is OK" can have terrible implications.   David Brooks deplores this and received some interesting feedback. We recommend the article. In a recent New Yorker the issue of a universal morality is discussed in a profile of the philosopher Derek Parfit. Unfortunately, as usual, the New Yorker access depends on subscription, but there are many other sources of information about Parfit and his work.   He believes he has a formulation:
 "An act is wrong just when such acts are disallowed by some principle that is optimific, uniquely universally willable and not reasonably rejectable."
BTW, I could not find optimific in my full-sized Webster, but the OED online had it, (adjective: Philosophy, producing the maximum good consequences. Origin: 1930s: from Latin optimus 'best' + -ific) so it is not a made up word.  In any case, the formulation by Parfit makes sense.  I tried my own experiment with youth and morality by asking an educated young woman (nameless) what she thinks about the nefarious plan of our government to relocate by force 30,000 Bedouin citizens of Israel.  She had not heard of the issue, which brings to mind the famous exchange:
Q.: What is the difference between ignorance and apathy?
A.: I don't know and I don't care.
One commenter welcomed Brooks to old age.  I recall that Herodotus, the 4th century BC Greek historian, had many complaints about the youth of Athens and the future their moral laxity might engender.

Book Review: How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival, David
Kaiser W. W. Norton, New York, 2011. $26.95 (372 pp.). ISBN 978-0-393-07636-3

The book is  reviewed in Physics Today  by Silvan Schweber.  If the link does not open for non-subscribers, there is another review in the New York Times by George Johnson. I quote from the Physics Today review:
"In this book David Kaiser contends that a small group of graduate students “planted the seeds that would eventually flower into today’s field of quantum information science.” He would like to have us believe that this self-titled Fundamental Fysiks Group, with parallel efforts from “a few other isolated physicists, contributed to a sea change in how we think about information, communication, computation, and the subtle workings of the microworld.” Starting in May 1975, the Fundamental Fysiks Group met weekly at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. Their primary concern was the exploration of the foundations of quantum mechanics in search of explanations for parapsychological, or ‘psi,’ phenomena. From the “spooky actions at a distance” phenomena in the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) gedanken experiment, the Fysiks Group was led to hidden-variables descriptions of quantum mechanics and to Bell’s theorem."   Obviously Schweber is not convinced and I will reserve judgement until I have a chance to read the book.

When I was a student we were told that "Quantum Mechanics works, so shut up and calculate". The advent of recognition of the EPR critique of quantum physics, awareness of the implications of  Bell's Theorem and the new experimental results on  retrocausality which are indeed spooky and weird, may well have been helped by the nonconformism of the FFG.  It is certainly interesting.

The 2010 Wolf Prize in Physics was given for work related to retrocausality. The prize was given to Prof. John F. Clauser of the US,   Prof. Alain Aspect of France’s École Normale Supérieure de Cachan and Prof. Anton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna. The jury in this field praised them “for their fundamental conceptual and experimental contributions to the foundations of quantum physics, specifically an increasingly sophisticated series of tests of Bell’s inequalities, or extensions thereof, using entangled quantum states.” I went to their symposium and it was like entering Wonderland. The experiments reported were the most counterintuituve results I had ever heard. The bottom line is that we must either give up Special Relativity or give up reality as we understand it. Here is a video and some links. Enjoy!

In a lighter vein Betty White can still sing and dance in a tribute to Morgan Freeman on the occasion of his receiving a life achievement award from the American Film Institute--thanks to Yosefa for sending this clip to me

One thing that does not amuse Pollyanna is the content of many talkbacks.  In particular, she shares XKCD's opinion of comments on YouTube films:

Since Gene Weingarten has remained silent for a while, I can only update you on American politics with some theology from Rick Perry  and a disclaimer from God re Pat Robertson as delivered to us by our guru Andy Borowitz.  As you may know, Robertson says it is OK to divorce a spouse with Alzheimer's disease. That is not amusing at all.

Pollyanna shows up late, but here she is

Pollyanna wishes to start with best wishes for the holiday that just ended, Eid el Fitr, marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan 1432 AH,  to all her Muslim friends.and a Happy Labor Day to all our friends in North America

She also wishes to apologize for the delay in the blog caused by an internet glitch that lasted for a few days. For several days YandA had no Internet. They survived the deprivation by actually talking to each other of which Pollyanna approved and in fact they did better than the XKCD folks.

 She would like to share with you an infrared view of the Cat’s Paw Nebula (NGC 6334).

The Cat's Paw Nebula (NGC 6334) is a vast region of star formation. The whole gas cloud is about 50 light-years across. (Credit: Image courtesy of ESO)

This new portrait of the Cat's Paw Nebula was created from images taken with the Wide Field Imager (WFI) instrument at the 2.2-metre MPG/ESO telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile, combining images taken through blue, green and red filters, as well as a special filter designed to let through the light of glowing hydrogen.

SOCIAL PROTEST
Last night Pollyanna went with her blogger friends, Titan and YandA to a massive demonstration in Tel Aviv.
It was possibly the largest demonstration ever in Israel and it showed the depth of anger and dissatisfaction of young Israelis with their situation under a neoliberal capitalism that has enriched a very few and effectively destroyed the future of an entire generation. While we support the aims of the protesters and their tent cities that have sprouted up around the country, we cannot but share the regret of Diana Kimmerling over the lack of political content in their protest. Despite this, Pollyanna believes that they are worthy of the support of all decent people. They are in real trouble and people who are not sure where they will live next month or how they will feed themselves and their families can be forgiven for not having a broader view. They also have been indoctrinated since birth with the Israeli ethos, which is basically a totalitarian type of democracy (vid. Titan's blog last week) and generations of brainwashing cannot be overcome easily or quickly. . The fact that they are finally able to reject the spurious arguments about "security" that are being thrown at them now is in itself a minor miracle. Dr. Shiri Tannenbaum, who is both a medical resident leading the young doctors' protest against the recent collective wage agreement signed between the government and the Israel Medical Association and an activist in Physicians for Human Rights,  spoke fervently. She  raised the issue of the blatant inequality in medical care including the state of the Arab and Bedouin communities and was received  positively by the participants. Let us hope for the best.

GOOD THINGS HAPPEN
Pollyanna is glad that a  child in Pennsylvania who was about to be tried in adult court for a murder he committed at age 11(now he is 13) has been transferred to juvenile court. This was a case about which Amnesty International and other human rights groups raised a mighty outcry and it worked. We are all very pleased as well about a man who was wrongly convicted was exonerated by DNA evidence and finally met the people whose  technology freed him.. In particular we like it because Yosefa's son Adam is the Sr. Manager, Business and Product Development and the Israel Site Director of Life Technologies.

OK, now for some GOODIES FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE
One very exciting new result is that  gastric bypass , a surgical procedure designed to help obese people lose weight has a surprising side effect. It can reverse the progress of Type 2 diabetes. This was initially considered almost alchemy, but now the biochemistry has been elucidated as well. We wish this had been known long ago.

 SUSY is elusive or in trouble:No this is not a runaway child, just supersymmetry in elementary particle physics. It appears that the Large Hadron Collider is not coming up with the anticipated particles. “For supersymmetry, this is a decisive moment in time,” said theorist Lars Bergstrom of Stockholm University.

Supersymmetry is a model that solves some significant problems of the Standard Model of particle physics. SUSY doubles the zoo of elementary particles by adding a partner for each of the particles we already know. It handily relates different types of particles in the  Standard Model and offers an appealing candidate for dark matter.  So far, scientists have found no evidence of SUSY particles at the LHC.

Things are  looking bad for the simplest models of supersymmetry. Scientists at the LHC have been chipping away at two basic SUSY theories since they began analyzing data in 2010. But dozens of other models are still in the running, and scientists have more than one way to test them. Still, as Prof. Bergstrom says, never underestimate theorists. On the other hand, the lower limit on the mass of the Higgs boson seems to be coming down. Stay tuned!

GEOPHYSICS AND SEISMOLOGY  have some news for us as well. It appears that life is older than we thought and recent discoveries in Australia indicate that life was around and metabolizing sulfur something like 3.4 billion years ago. The results are out in Nature . If anyone has difficulty bringing up the paper, just email Pollyanna and she will be glad to help. On the physical side, new research is revealing more details than we have ever known about the core of the Earth. To understand what form it might take under the extreme conditions at the center of the Earth, Professor Kei Hirose set himself a seemingly impossible challenge: to recreate the  conditions at the core in his lab at the SPring-8 synchrotron near Osaka, Japan. After 10 years of trying, he has finally succeeded. Others have used .wave propagation through the core to deduce its characteristics

Our Science News in Brief for this week deals mainly with astronomy. We hope you find it of interest.

Our book review is about a the cells of a woman who died of cancer but whose immortal cells have served medical research for over sixty years. The book Eternal Life by Rebecca Skloot  was recently reviewed in the NYTimes by Lisa Margonelli.

Gene Weingarten is still not around, but Pollyanna is glad that Colonel Gaddafi

has been run to earth albeit in an unlikely place, reported by Andy Borowitz and our friends from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal have a solution for the problems of existence.

Pollyanna greets you

Pollyanna is back after a long hiatus. Last week you all took a blast from grumpy brother Titan, so she will try to be a bit nicer. Not that she has any illusions about the world in which we live, but she still tries to live up to her name and be glad.  She would also like to tell you that Googleblogs have been creative and have decided to  "improve" the system so now it takes two clicks instead of one to open a link.  Last week Titan showed you lovely Helene who orbits ahead of Dione around Saturn. Pollyanna would like to show you the tinier brother Polydeuces

His stats:

Size: Roughly 13 kilometers Orbital radius: 377,400 kilometers - 6.26 Saturn radii - within the E ring -at Dione’s trailing Lagrange point (L5) - co-orbital with Dione and Helene Orbital period: 2.7369 days -about 1/6 of Titan’s Discovery: 2004 by Carl Murray  Polydeuces orbits Saturn on the same circular path that Dione does, but behind Dione, and the centers of Dione, Saturn, and Polydeuces form an equilateral triangle.

The little moon is named for the twin brother of Castor, together the Dioscuri or Hero Twins; better known by his Roman name Pollux. Polydeuces was considered godly enough to be admitted to the divine court on Mount Olympus, while his brother was sent to Hades as a mere mortal. But Polydeuces could not bear eternal separation, so the  gods allowed the twins to remain together forever, spending half the year in the Underworld and the other half on Olympus. Pollyanna thinks that is cool to wander around in the Elysian Fields and that Polydeuces should be admired for his sacrifice of Olympus for the sake of being with his beloved brother.

Maybe the gods were nice to him because of the Pollux jokes that he had to put up with in the Roman world. Pollyanna has just threatened to fire me and to write the blog herself. 

IN MEMORIAM NANCY WAKE 

This great lady who was a true hero of WWII passed away at age 98. 

Adam Butler/Associated Press

Nancy Wake, a French Resistance hero of World War II, in 2004.

It is thrilling to read of her life and deeds and to think that there are people who will take risks and struggle for causes that they regard as greater than themselves. May she rest in peace.

RIGHTS OF WOMEN

One area of human rights in which Pollyanna takes a strong stand is the rights of women. As you know, she is a committed feminist. Today she applauds two news items from the Center for Reproductive Rights. One is from the United States, "Today’s decision by the Department of Health and Human Services to require health insurance companies to cover a full range of contraceptive methods without co-payments is a tremendous victory for women and represents a huge stride towards reducing unintended pregnancies in the U.S. and promoting healthier, planned childbirth," says the Center for Reproductive Rights.

The other is from Brazil and involves justice eight years after a tragedy. Alyne da Silva Pimentel would have been 37 years old today if Brazil’s government had honored its responsibility to protect her fundamental human rights. Instead, because she was poor and Afro-Brazilian, she died in 2002 after being denied basic medical care to address complications in her pregnancy. She was only 28 years old. And her death was completely preventable. Although nothing can reverse Alyne’s fate,  a groundbreaking decision handed down today by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women means that Alyne’s mother and daughter will finally see justice served—and women worldwide will benefit from the ruling issued in her name.  

AROUND THE WORLD

We can start out with some good news on the human rights front. Six activists who were under political detention in Malaysia  have been released .  Of course, they never should have been detained in the first place.

SERENGETI ROAD PLANS SCRAPPED--HURRAY! 

Bat eared fox who depend on the herbivore migration for his food

The government of Botswana has scrapped a plan to build a tarmac road across the Serengeti. This would have had devastating effects on the indigenous wildlife and Pollyanna is very glad that sense prevailed in this case. Here is someone who certainly is happy about it.

DINOSAUR EXTINCTION NEWS
There has been much discussion about the three meter gap in the fossil record at the time of the presumed extinction of the dinosaurs and many other species. Of course, there is another view: supported by Rick Perry and the Tea Party folks.  It may be the first senior moment in history,  to say something of the judgement of old man Noah:

It now appears that the finding of a fossil specimen has put this problem to rest. . The abstract is free and open. If anyone wants the full article, please let me know and I will download it for you in pdf format. While we are into paleontology, there is a new report from Alaska of the finding of the nearly complete fossilized skeleton of a  thallatosaur,

a long-tailed sea creature that plied warm, shallow waters in the early days of dinosaurs and became extinct at the end of the Triassic period some 200 million years ago.

With all this attention to evolution and such heresies, Pollyanna would like to even up with some attention to the DAWN OF RELIGION Many of us have visited Stonehenge and marveled at the ability of prehistoric people to build such a structure. It appears that there exists a site in Turkey that eclipses Stonehenge both in age and in the technological sophistication involved. There are dozens of massive stone pillars arranged into a set of rings, one mashed up against the next. Known as Göbekli Tepe (pronounced Guh-behk-LEE TEH-peh), the site is vaguely reminiscent of Stonehenge, except that Göbekli Tepe was built much earlier and is made not from roughly hewn blocks but from cleanly carved limestone pillars splashed with bas-reliefs of animals—a cavalcade of gazelles, snakes, foxes, scorpions, and ferocious wild boars. The assemblage was built some 11,600 years ago, seven millennia before the Great Pyramid of Giza. I

strongly recommend reading this report   from National Geographic--even very busy people who lack the time to follow the links.

Apropos religion, it is interesting that at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem there is a 53 year old project going on to try to find a definitive text for the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible. It is a daunting project. This is an endeavor so meticulous, its pace so disconnected from that of the world outside, that in more than five decades of work the scholars have published a grand total of three of the Hebrew Bible's 24 books. (Christians count the same books differently, for a total of 39.) A fourth is due out during the upcoming academic year.

If the pace is maintained, the final product will be complete a little over 200 years from now. This is both a point of pride and a matter of some mild self-deprecation around the office.

MARS IS WET--WELL SOMETIMES

Rill indicating flow of water:NASA image

Evidence has been found that might well indicate that at certain times ofthe year, water might actually flow on Mars, mainly on slopes facing the summer sun. NASA first found signs of water on Mars more than a decade ago, but earlier indications were that any existing water would be frozen and concentrated at the poles. Recently analyzed images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite show dark, finger-like features that extend down some slopes and crater walls on the planet during its late spring through summer, fading in the Martian winter. Here is the press release,  the NASA announcement and also the scientific paper, which is a bit more reserved than the press, as it should be.  This is the free abstract and if anyone wants the full paper, I will be glad to provide it through my library access.  Pollyanna and I think it is exciting and we hope you share our excitement.

CORRUPTION AT THE COLOSSEUM 
When Pollyanna and I saw this item, we were sure that someone was fixing the gladiator matches at the Colosseum and that someone should inform the Emperor.

Emperor Augustus

This could only lead to the decline and fall of the Empire and to the writing of a colossal book by some 18th century Englishman.On closer inspection, it turns out to be a bit more contemporary.

 I recall that Daphne was relieved of 150,000 lire (about $100) at the Colosseum by some enterprising Roman pickpocket. Yosefa got ripped off in an Athens hotel elevator for about 80 Euros by some skillful practitioners of the craft.There must be something about women connected to me.

Pollyanna also has some strong opinions on environmental matters and would be grateful to any of you who
would (very quickly) sign off on a petition to the President of Brazil to prevent concessions to loggers that would greatly endanger the Amazon basin and its great rain forest along with the environment of the entire world.

We would like to pass on some science tidbits  and refer you to a review of an interesting book. by Simon Baron-Cohen (cousin of Sascha, but not accountable for him) and send you off with a dose of humor, first from our friend XKCD

 and then Gene Weingarten, who arouses empathy in all of us who have ever tried to learn to play golf.