Enlarge NAOJ/Subaru

Spiral arms in this disk surrounding a young star may be driven by a young planet.

NAOJ/Subaru

Spiral arms in this disk surrounding a young star may be driven by a young planet.

We are used to seeing spiral arms in galaxies, but the physics of rotating astrophysical disks doesn't care too much about size. Thus one can find spiral arms in galaxies that are tens of thousand light-years wide, the rings around planets like Saturn that are tens of thousand mile and, in between, the billion mile wide disks of gas and dust surrounding young stars.

In each case there is some gravitational tug which gets the spiral pattern started. In the image above the "disk perturber" is probably a newly forming planet. When you gaze at those beautiful arcs you are seeing indirect evidence of a world in the throes of creation.

Sweet!

If you want details you can read the NSF press release. Here are a few choice quotes including comments from Carol Grady one of the lead astronomers of the work

The newly imaged disk surrounds SAO 206462, a star located about 456 light-years away in the constellation Lupus. Astronomers estimate that the system is only about 9 million years old. The gas-rich disk spans some 14 billion miles, which is more than twice the size of Pluto's orbit in our own solar system.

"Detailed computer simulations have shown us that the gravitational pull of a planet inside a circumstellar disk can perturb gas and dust, creating spiral arms. Now, for the first time, we're seeing these features," said Carol Grady, a National Science Foundation (NSF)-supported astronomer with Eureka Scientific, Inc.

"The surprise," said Grady, "was that we caught a glimpse of this stage of planet formation. This is a relatively short-lived phase."

The Smithsonian's Hominid Hunting blog has chosen the top 10 fossil and archaeological discoveries of the year that shed light on human prehistory.

Item #10 highlights the dating of modern humans' first occupation of Europe to 45,000 years ago, via fossil bones and teeth. While earlier remains may someday be found, it's clear that our species first arose in Africa, around 200,000 years ago.

Item #6 showcases the world's first known art studio, created by Homo sapiens in South Africa at 100,000 years ago— many millenia before our ancestors first painted the walls of Western Europe's now-famous art caves.

This pair of findings underscores what other items on the blog list also demonstrate, a fact paleoanthropologists have known for years: Our evolution, culturally as well as biologically, is African through and through.

You can connect with Barbara on Twitter.

What is the value of not knowing? What is the value of boundaries between what we think we know, and what we do not even know how to formulate?

The poet, playwright and statesman Vaclav Havel took on these issues in an address to the Forum 2000 conference last year (he died on Dec 11). It is well worth reading the entire speech. Here I wanted to just give you a feel for his argument.

He begins by recounting his experiences of the changing structure of his own city.

What was until recently clearly recognizable as the city is now losing its boundaries and with them its identity. It has become a huge overgrown ring of something I can't find a word for. It is not a city as I understand the term, nor suburbs, let alone a village. Apart from anything else it lacks streets or squares. There is just a random scattering of enormous single-storey warehouses, supermarkets, hypermarkets, car and furniture marts, petrol stations, eateries, gigantic car parks, isolated high-rise blocks to be let as offices, depots of every kind, and collections of family homes that are admittedly close together but are otherwise desperately remote.

This unchecked growth, in Havel's eyes, denudes the texture of human experience.

Our cities are being permitted without control to destroy the surrounding landscape with its nature, traditional pathways, avenues of trees, villages, mills and meandering streams, and build in their place some sort of gigantic agglomeration that renders life nondescript, disrupts the network of natural human communities, and under the banner of international uniformity it attacks all individuality, identity or heterogeneity.

Taking the city as a metaphor for the global culture now emerging, Havel sees the growth of a terribly misplaced sense of confidence.

I sense behind all of this not only a globally spreading short-sightedness, but also the swollen self-consciousness of this civilization, whose basic attributes include the supercilious idea that we know everything and what we don't yet know we'll soon find out, because we know how to go about it...

But with the cult of measurable profit, proven progress and visible usefulness there disappears respect for mystery and along with it humble reverence for everything we shall never measure and know, not to mention the vexed question of the infinite and eternal, which were until recently the most important horizons of our actions.

Seeing the recent economic crises as indicative of a far greater problem he insists on the importance of not knowing.

In all events, I am certain that our civilization is heading for catastrophe unless present-day humankind comes to its senses. And it can only come to its senses if it grapples with its short-sightedness, its stupid conviction of its omniscience and its swollen pride, which have been so deeply anchored in its thinking and actions.

It is necessary to wonder. And it is necessary to worry about the non-self-evidence of things.

It's well worth reading the full text. And it is well worth considering why it must be the poet who reminds us of mystery's necessity?

For fun, I'm reading up on unusually-themed science centers. One of my favorites is the Duke Canine Cognition Center (DCCC), directed by evolutionary anthropologist Brian Hare.

One DCCC study showed that dogs are more closely attuned to human gestures than are chimpanzees (see the video clips). Another, in progress, asks about the formation of trust in dog-human relationships.

What's especially cool is that the subject dogs are recruited from families in the local community. The dogs show up, solve cognitive puzzles, then return home. DCCC's approach is an excellent model for rigorous yet humane observational research on our companion animals.

Enlarge NASA

The Earth as seen from the Moon on Christmas Eve 1968 via the Apollo 8 mission.

NASA

The Earth as seen from the Moon on Christmas Eve 1968 via the Apollo 8 mission.

It's worth remembering that just around this time in 1968 Apollo 8 astronauts were orbiting the moon.

The first time in history any one of us had gotten that far.

As they swung around in lunar orbit they took this iconic image and, for the first time, we could see the truth about our place in the Universe.

In my 49 years on the planet I have observed that Happy and Holidays don't always go together, much as we wish them too. We love our families but sometimes they drive us nuts. We hope for togetherness but sometimes find ourselves feeling alone.

The holidays, like life, can be a mixed bag.

Here at 13.7 Cosmos and Culture we are all about looking into the nature of reality so I say let's get real and lower the bar a bit. Today I want to wish everyone a "Well-Being Holidays".

Having a sense of well-being is so much simpler than the demands of being happy. With well-being we can let the world be exactly as we find it. Our job is simply to show up, watch and wonder. Planets just spin in their orbits. Stars just shine in the night. The cousins you only see at Christmas just are insane. It's all OK.

May we all be thankful for what we have and who we have in our lives. Whatever tension might arise over the presents, the holiday meal and just who brought that woman to the party, may we remember that it's all just a glorious dance of atoms and energy.

If we feel alone, may we know that feeling to be an illusion. As Carl Sagan was forever reminding us, we are children of the stars and the stars will always be there for us, as will be the solid Earth, the bite of the wind and sound of our own breath.

And so for tonight and tomorrow may we know the two most simple of truths.

All is just as it is.

All is well.

For my final post of 2011, I want to share some of the best animal video clips of the year. I've made my choices in a time-honored category: "clips that increase our scientific understanding of animal behavior and are fun to watch, besides."

Erik Olsen/NYT/YouTube

A screen grab from The Wild Dolphin Project

These five mini-movies offer a new appreciation for the behavior of tool-using wild monkeys; stone-stealing wild penguins; fluid and fluent wild dolphins; one mourning, rescued elephant; and newly liberated laboratory chimpanzees.

In a nod to the season, I close with a bonus clip, starring a blind cat and a Christmas tree.

Let's jump right in. Choose your favorite species, or enjoy all six.

Enlarge Wikimedia Commons

Adoration of the Magi by Giotto di Bondone

Wikimedia Commons

Adoration of the Magi by Giotto di Bondone

In his masterful Adoration of the Magi, completed in 1304, the Florentine painter Giotto di Bondone reproduced the iconic Christmas scene where the travelers from the East meet baby Jesus. Up in the sky, the Star of Bethlehem is depicted as a bright golden comet. Giotto had witnessed the appearance of Halley's Comet in 1301 and the event clearly impressed him deeply.

What he didn't know is that the comet had also appeared in 12 BCE. There were other comets sightings around the time, as cataloged in David Hughes's book The Star of Bethlehem: An Astronomer's Confirmation.

Giotto's connection between comet and the auspicious star was derided by many, including Thomas Aquinas (the reader interested on the eschatology of comet lore can consult my book The Prophet and the Astronomer). Comets don't shine during the day, he argued, and furthermore comets were a bad omen, not a good one: "On the seventh day all the stars, both planets and fixed stars, will throw out fiery tails like comets," he wrote.

This pretty much says it all.

I hope to build on some of the greatest thinkers and philosophers in our Western tradition concerning "living a good life." In particular, Aristotle, Emerson, Thoreau, James, Dewey and C.S. Pierce, the last four American pragmatists.

Unlike Descartes who places mind, res cogitans, in a what has been called the "Cartesian Theater" by Daniel Dennett, where the world of awareness is present to the mind like a disembodied awareness, the pragmatists emphasize our lives as embodied humans living in a culture.

Enlarge AFP/AFP/Getty Images

While the United States continues to use chimpanzees in biomedical research, other countries have stopped the practice. This chimpanzee is one of 13 previously used by the Dutch for animal testing. The group was moved in 2006, when this photo was taken, to a retirement facility.

AFP/AFP/Getty Images

While the United States continues to use chimpanzees in biomedical research, other countries have stopped the practice. This chimpanzee is one of 13 previously used by the Dutch for animal testing. The group was moved in 2006, when this photo was taken, to a retirement facility.

This morning the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academies issued a report that opens the door for chimpanzees' continued use in certain biomedical research projects. (Our friends over at Shots also report on this today.) Though the report says that "most current biomedical research use of chimpanzees is not necessary," it sees "notable exceptions" in specific areas.

That the IOM does not endorse an outright ban on pain-causing research using these apes is a disappointment, especially considering the report acknowledges chimpanzees are highly intelligent primates capable of feeling grief and depression.

Enlarge ESO

The Crab Nebula — 6,000 light-years away — is the remnant of a supernova explosion. It was observed by man almost 1,000 years ago, in the year 1054.

ESO

The Crab Nebula — 6,000 light-years away — is the remnant of a supernova explosion. It was observed by man almost 1,000 years ago, in the year 1054.

This past Sunday I was asked to give an opening lecture at an international conference on astrobiology, linking cosmology to the emergence of life on Earth and other planetary platforms. We, and any other alien creature that might exist, are products of the same laws of physics and chemistry that operate across the cosmos.

At its most basic level, life is a set of self-sustaining chemical reactions capable of metabolizing energy and, crucially, of reproducing according to Darwinian evolution.

So, living creatures are self-organizing bundles of molecules capable of creating copies of themselves. Since molecules are made of atoms and atoms are made of protons, neutrons and electrons, living creatures need, as their most basic ingredients, the particles of matter that fill the cosmos.

Enlarge ATLAS Collaboration/CERN

A proton-proton collision in the ATLAS detector at CERN shows signs that may, or may not, indicate a Higgs signature.

ATLAS Collaboration/CERN

A proton-proton collision in the ATLAS detector at CERN shows signs that may, or may not, indicate a Higgs signature.

So the big news from the world of science today is that there is no big news. Just a big "maybe" and that, my friends, is essentially important. Let me explain.

Today, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider announced that — after a year of sorting through their petabytes of data (debris from protons smashed together at tremendous energies) — they had excluded lots possibilities and found a hint of something interesting in their hunt for the particle known as the Higgs boson. But, so far, there is nothing conclusive to report, nothing to write home about, nothing worth a call to the Nobel Prize committee.

To understand why this search is so important we have to step back a few paces and recall something about the Higgs. Marcelo and I have both written on the search for the Higgs before and to quickly understand its importance you have to note two points.

The first is that the Higgs is the only critical player in the Standard Model of particle physics that remains unseen. The Standard Model is a towering intellectual achievement through which we understand all directly observed forms of matter and energy (except for the Dark Matter and Dark Energy; another story, indeed).

The second point to note is that Higgs is more than just a particle, it's a mechanism. Discovered simultaneously by six different researchers in 1964 (including Carl R. Hagen of the University of Rochester), the mechanism that came to bear the "Higgs" name is the means by which some particles gain their mass and others don't. Since mass is a really elemental property of elemental properties, the Higgs mechanism is an elemental hinge on which much of particle physics swings.

In today's New York Times, the writer Henning Mankell reflects on the deeply ingrained human propensity for story-telling. Mankell's words, themselves the making of a gorgeous story, tell of his 25-years split between his native Sweden and his adopted Mozambique.

There are different ways, he finds, to be Homo narrans. In the West, life moves so fast Mankell must hurry his answer to a question. In Africa, people listen intensively and allow him time to talk.

Mankell's column reminds us to slow down, even during this rush-rush season, and listen to each other's stories.

You can keep up with Barbara's very brief stories on Twitter.

Enlarge Princes Czartoryski Foundation/National Gallery London

Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani ("The Lady with an Ermine") by Leonardo da Vinci, about 1489–90.

Princes Czartoryski Foundation/National Gallery London

Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani ("The Lady with an Ermine") by Leonardo da Vinci, about 1489–90.

The title of the Leonardo da Vinci exhibition now up in London at the National Gallery is Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan. It focuses on Leonardo's work at the court of Ludovico Sforza from the artist's arrival as a 30-year old in 1482 until his departure in the late 1490s. But the show might have been entitled "Hands," for the paintings on display are a riot of hands and the exhibition itself offers a surprising exposition of the human hand.

Leonardo was interested in the way the body expresses the soul. What is remarkable here is the way he brings hands into focus as, psychologically speaking, every bit the equal of faces, looks and posture.