NASA / JPL-Caltech

If astronomers could pull planets out of the sky and analyze them in the lab, it might look something like this artistically altered image illustrating new research from NASA's infrared Spitzer Space Telescope. Spitzer allows astronomers to study the atmospheres of "hot Jupiter" exoplanets, which orbit very close to their parent stars.

By Mike Wall
Space.com

Scientists are starting to get a bead on "hot Jupiter" alien planets, huge and exotic worlds that have no counterpart in our own solar system.

Observations by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope are giving researchers some good looks at these scorching-hot gas giants, revealing howling winds and a variety of climates. But as often happens in science, the new finds are generating as many questions as they answer.

"The hot Jupiters are beasts to handle. They are not fitting neatly into our models and are more diverse than we thought," Nikole Lewis of MIT, lead author of a new Spitzer paper that examines a hot Jupiter called HAT-P-2b, said in statement. [The Strangest Alien Planets]

"We are just starting to put together the puzzle pieces of what's happening with these planets, and we still don't know what the final picture will be," Lewis added.

Uncommon giants
Hot Jupiters orbit extremely close to their parent stars, usually completing an orbit in just a few days. As a result, they're blisteringly hot and often tidally locked, showing only one face to their star (just as the moon is tidally locked to Earth).

Because of their enormous size and orbital proximity, hot Jupiters are relatively easy to detect. The first exoplanet ever detected around a sun-like star, in fact, was the hot Jupiter 51 Pegasi b, which Swiss astronomers found in 1995 by picking up on the wobble the planet's gravity induced in its parent star.

While researchers soon found dozens more hot Jupiters, it turns out that the planets are not terribly common in the cosmic scheme of things. Observations by NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope, for example, suggest that small, rocky planets like Earth are much more abundant throughout the Milky Way galaxy.

Spitzer probed the atmosphere of a hot Jupiter for the first time in 2005, in the process becoming the first telescope ever to detect light emitted by an alien world. Since then, the instrument has gotten looks at dozens of hot Jupiters, yielding insights about their composition and climate.

"When Spitzer launched in 2003, we had no idea it would prove to be a giant in the field of exoplanet science," Michael Werner, Spitzer project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement. "Now, we're moving farther into the field of comparative planetary science, where we can look at these objects as a class, and not just as individuals."

The longest look yet
In the new study, which was published in March in The Astrophysical Journal, Lewis and her team stared at HAT-P-2b for six days — the longest Spitzer observation of a hot Jupiter yet. During this time, they saw the planet cross the face of its host star, disappear behind it and then emerge again on the other side.

HAT-P-2b has a very eccentric orbit, coming as close to its star as 2.8 million miles (4.5 million kilometers) and as far out as 9.3 million miles (15 million km).  

"It's as if nature has given us a perfect lab experiment with this system," co-author Heather Knutson, of Caltech in Pasadena, said in a statement. "Because the planet's distance to the sun changes, we can watch how fast it takes to heat up and cool down. It's as though we're turning the heat knob up on our planet and watching what happens."

The team found that it takes HAT-P-2b about a day to heat up as it nears its star, and four or five days to cool down as it moves away again. Spitzer also observed strange and unexpected behavior in the planet's carbon chemistry, which further adds to the mysteries posed by hot Jupiters.

"Theories are being shot down right and left," co-author Nick Cowan of Northwestern University in Illinois said in a statement. "Right now, it's like the wild, wild West."

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

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CREDIT: Chris Danforth and Peter Dodds, hedonometer.org

A five-year look at global happiness, courtesy of millions of English-language tweets.

By Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience

April 15, 2013, the date of the Boston Marathon bombings, was the saddest recorded day in five years, according to a measure of global happiness created by using Twitter data.

As reflected by English-language users' posts, the date saw a leap in the use of negative words, such as "sad," "victims" and "tragedy," and a decline in positive phrases, such as "hahaha." The finding comes as researchers launch a new public website, hedonometer.org, that shows daily global mood swings as expressed via Twitter.

"We're trying to develop a complementary measure of well-being for society," said Chris Danforth, a mathematician at the University of Vermont who developed the site along with his fellow University of Vermont mathematician Peter Dodds. Policymakers use gross domestic product, consumer confidence and polls to measure the happiness of large groups of people, Danforth told LiveScience. Twitter provides another, faster, way. [7 Things That Will Make You Happy]

"We're trying to take advantage of people's expressions online and measure something that is really important," Danforth said.

Mass moods
The researchers use Twitter's Gardenhose feed to create their "hedonometer," which roughly translates to "happiness meter." This feed is a random sample of about 50 million tweets per day, which represents about a tenth of the messages posted on the site.

The common words in these tweets have been previously rated as sad or happy on a scale of 1 to 9 in earlier experiments. Twitter users are only a fraction of the globe — about 15 percent of American adults use the service, Danforth said — but they are becoming both more common and more representative. As of December 2012, the social media site claimed more than 200 million active monthly users, and that group has become increasingly diverse as the site's popularity broadens, Danforth said.

"It's becoming more and more reflective of what's going on for people," he said.

Ups and downs
What's going on turns out to be rather predictable, with a few major exceptions. People are sadder on Mondays and happier on weekends, Danforth and his colleagues have found. Napa, Calif., appears to be the happiest city (and no wonder, given all those wine-soaked tweeters passing through), while Beaumont, Texas, is the least happy.

The hedonometer tool also lets researchers track happiness through time. Especially happy days tend to be predictable, Danforth said. People share their positive feelings on holidays, when they're off of work and with family.

Unhappy days, though, happen in response to unexpected events.

"We very rarely see a big uptick in happiness in response to some event that is unexpected," Danforth said. "Most of the downward ticks are unexpected events," such as the death of a celebrity or a natural disaster.

Even the death of Osama bin Laden brought a swirl of negativity, likely because "a very negatively viewed character met a very negative end," the researchers write.

The saddest day of them all was the date of the Boston Marathon bombings, with a happiness score of 5.88 on a scale of 1 to 9. But even though it had less-sad score, Dec. 14, 2012, the date of the mass shooting at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school, may have actually been sadder, Danforth said.

That's because the Newtown shooting happened on a Friday, a generally happy day when people otherwise would be tweeting positive vibes, he said. The Boston bombings happened on a Monday, when unrelated grouchy tweets about returning to work would have driven the average happiness down.

So far, the hedonometer measures English-language tweets only, but Danforth and his colleagues are working to expand the number of languages as well as sources. They hope to add other online indicators, such as Google Trends. So far, however, the Twitter data alone has matched up well with more controlled measures of happiness such as Gallup polls, Danforth said.  

Before the flood of Twitter and other social media data online, a tool like the hedonometer would have been available only to large corporations or the most well-funded of labs, said Scott Golder, a doctoral candidate in sociology at Cornell University and a staff sociologist for the data analytics company Context Relevant who was not involved in the research.  

"Whether what this tool is measuring is actually personal or collective happiness is open to interpretation, but I think that this is a very interesting tool for visualizing the conversations that are taking place in public life," Golder told LiveScience.

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

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Lynette Cook

This artist's conception shows the inner four planets of the Gliese 581 system and their host star. The large planet in the foreground is Gliese 581g, which is in the middle of the star's habitable zone and is only two to three times as massive as Earth. Some researchers aren't convinced Gliese 581g exists, however.

By Charles Q. Choi
Space.com

Alien worlds resembling giant eyeballs might exist around red dwarf stars, and researchers are now proposing experiments to simulate these distant planets and see how capable they are of supporting life.

Red dwarfs are small, faint stars about one-fifth as massive as the sun and up to 50 times dimmer. They are the most common stars in the galaxy and are thought to make up to 70 percent of the stars in the universe — vast numbers that potentially make them valuable places to look for extraterrestrial life.

Indeed, the latest results from NASA's Kepler space observatory reveal that at least half of these stars host rocky planets that are half to four times the mass of Earth. [Gallery: A World of Kepler Planets]

Tidally locked 'eyeball Earths'
When looking for alien life as we know it, scientists typically focus on worlds that have water, since there is life virtually everywhere there is water on Earth. As such, they concentrate on the habitable zone of a star — the area surrounding a star where it is neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on a planet's surface.

Since red dwarfs are relatively cool, their habitable zones are often closer than the distance at which Mercury orbits the sun. This makes it relatively easy for astronomers to spot worlds in a red dwarf's habitable zone — the exoplanets' orbits are small, meaning they complete them quickly and often, and researchers can in principle readily detect the way these worlds regularly dim the light of these stars.

When a planet orbits a star very closely, the gravitational pull of the star can force the world to become tidally locked with it.

Beau.TheConsortium

An artist's concept of a planet where one side always faces its star, with the dark side covered in ice.

"This means that they always show the same side to their star just as our moon does to the Earth, which means they have one permanent day and one permanent night side," study lead author Daniel Angerhausen, an astronomer and astrobiologist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., told Astrobiology Magazine.

This scenario of permanent day and permanent light could lead to a striking kind of world — one resembling an eyeball. Its night side would be covered in an icy, frozen shell, while its day side would host a giant ocean of liquid water constantly basking in the warmth of its star. [9 Exoplanets That Could Host Alien Life]

"For me, the eyeballs are just one example of the plethora of crazy things we are finding out there in space," Angerhausensaid. "In the field of exoplanets we find hot Jupiters, highly eccentric planets that light up like comets when they come close in to their host star, or evaporating Mercurys — all of them planets that we don't have in our solar system and that astronomers did not even dream about 10 or 20 years ago."

The idea of an eyeball Earth, as such a world is called, was spurred by the detection of an exoplanet called Gliese 581g about 20 light-years away, which may be the first known potentially habitable alien world (although scientists continue to debate whether the planet really exists). Planetary geophysicist Raymond Pierrehumbert of the University of Chicago suggested that if Gliese 581g is real, it could be an eyeball Earth.

"We already have telescopes that detect planets that might be eyeballs," Angerhausen said.

www.swisseduc.ch/

Transition zones - geographical areas that shift from mainly ice to mainly rock - such as this location in Antarctica, could provide some real-world data about eyeball Earths.

Given the profound differences between the day and night sides of eyeball Earths, "they are potentially the easiest habitable terrestrial planets to detect and distinguish," Angerhausen said. However, little is known about precisely how easy they are to detect and how habitable they really are.

"Our proposal will find out how common and stable these eyeballs are," Angerhausen said.

Modeling eyeball Earths
To learn more about what eyeball Earths might be like, Angerhausen and his colleagues are proposing a project they hope to carry out in Brazil dubbed HABEBEE, short for "Exploring the Habitability of Eyeball-Exo-Earths." The plan is to for the first time see what a stable eyeball Earth needs to support life.

The scientists first aim to construct a variety of eyeball Earth models that vary in mass, distance from their stars, how much radiation they receive, magnetic field strength and their ice composition and density. By providing general and extreme cases of stable and transient eyeball Earths, they can help predict how well existing and future telescope surveys can detect and characterize them.

An eyeball planet is one of several possible scenarios for planets in a red dwarf's habitable zone.

"A little bit closer to the star — that is, hotter — they would completely thaw and become water worlds; a little bit further out in the habitable zone — that is, colder — they would become total iceballs just like (Jupiter's moon) Europa, but with a potential for life under the ice crust," Angerhausen said. "These planets — water, eyeball or snowball — will most probably be the first habitable planets we will find and be able to characterize remotely. Thats why it is so important to study them now."

The ocean of an eyeball Earth will likely span a range of temperatures. "It's probably pretty hot in the center of the eye and then gradually gets colder towards the edge of the ice crust," Angerhausen said. Still, much remains uncertain — for instance, if the ocean transports heat well, the planet might warm enough all over to turn into a water world without ice, he suggested. [Two Oceanic Earth-like Exoplanets Found? (Video)]

The researchers also plan an expedition to the Antarctic Peninsula to gather specimens of microbes at transition zones between ice and water that might be analogous to oceans on eyeball Earths. The aim is to see what metabolism of life on the alien worlds might be like.

The researchers finally aim to see how well life can survive on eyeball Earths using an existing planetary simulation chamber originally designed to imitate Mars at the Brazilian Astrobiology Laboratory. Antarctic microbe samples can be tested in atmospheric, radiation and other conditions that simulate a number of possible eyeball Earth scenarios. The researchers can test the survival and genetic activity of the microbes to see how well they behave.

"I like the idea of having a few cubic meters of space that mimic another world in a chamber," Angerhausen said. "It's like having a probe from a world light years away in a jar."

Detecting life?
Over the course of their lifetimes, red dwarfs can go from barely to highly active when it comes to dangerous bursts and flares, causing ultraviolet radiation to jump by 100 to 10,000 times normal levels and potentially sterilizing the surface of a nearby planet or even helping to strip off its atmosphere.

To see what harm such radiation might wreak on the habitability of eyeball Earths, the researchers plan to monitor the radiation levels of known red dwarfs over time and investigate previously gathered red dwarf radiation data, knowledge that can help them simulate red dwarfs better.

They also plan on understanding the effects of streams of energetic particles from red dwarfs on the surfaces and atmospheres of eyeball Earths by using the Brazilian National Synchrotron Light Source at Campinas to blast ice with radiation.

"It is not obvious that these planets could be stable for long periods, which we believe is necessary for the origin, maintenance and evolution of life," said astrobiologist Douglas Galante at the Brazilian Synchrotron Light Source, who organized the Sao Paulo Advanced School of Astrobiology where Angerhausen and his colleagues initiated the HABEBEE proposal.

"Many more studies have to be done, theoretical, experimental and observational, so that we better understand the habitability of these planets," Galante added.

Upcoming and current telescopes such as NASA's James Webb Space Telescope might be able to see if planets have eyeball structures. When telescopes improve further, astronomers could look for molecular signs of life on eyeball Earths, researchers said.

"To finally detect life or what we call ‘biomarkers,’ we probably have to wait for next-generation telescopes, such as the 30-meter-class ground-based telescopes that are currently getting built and future space-based platforms such as the Terrestrial Planet Finder," Angerhausen said. "However, history shows that astronomers are quite creative using current available instruments and telescopes, so maybe one of my colleagues may come up with a new, exciting observation strategy that will make it even possible earlier."

The scientists detailed their findings in the March issue of the journal Astrobiology.

This story was provided by Astrobiology Magazine, a web-based publication sponsored by the NASA astrobiology program.

• The Strangest Alien Planets (Gallery)
• The Search For Another Earth | Video
• Astrobiology Roadmap Goal 1: Habitable planets

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Arno Burgi / AFP - Getty Images

Rhesus macaque "Joe" lies on a rock at the zoo in Dresden, Germany, on August 10, 2012. Harvard's New England Primate Research Center has a 1,500-rhesus macaques colony.

By Brian Hare, Duke University 

Brian Hare studies the cognitive abilities of primates and dogs as associate professor of Evolutionary Anthropology and Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University and received his Ph.D. from Harvard. He recently co-authored the New York Times best-seller "The Genius of Dogs" with Vanessa Woods. He contributed this article to LiveScience’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Nothing is more controversial in the realm of animal research than medical testing on primates. So when a primate center that is run by the Harvard Medical School announces that it will close, the world takes note.  

Last Tuesday, Harvard announced that the New England Primate Research Center in Southborough, Mass., will be shuttered over the next two years. All of the current research projects will be moved or shut down. The 1,500-individual-strong rhesus macaque colony and the collection of critically endangered cotton-top tamarins will need to be relocated (or potentially euthanized).

Both the Boston Globe and the New York Times ran articles that were structured similarly: The center had a troubled past because of mistreatment of animals in its care. But, Harvard is claiming that the center is being closed down for economic reasons. A journalist looking for an angle must wonder — which is it? Both papers covered "both" sides of the story by interviewing researchers and what the Boston Globe dubbed "animal rights activists." [Image Gallery: Monkey Mug Shots]

The answer, of course, is that both likely played a big role in the decision. Improving welfare conditions to meet federal standards can be expensive in many cases — this type of research is expensive to start with — and there is now less funding due to federal budget cuts. With fewer projected funds and more expenses, it was unlikely Harvard could meet welfare standards and conduct research without burning millions in cash. It seems they made a very rational decision. Closing the center has the added benefit of preventing future bad PR for Harvard.  

Given how clear this seems, a couple of things bothered me about how the papers covered the story. First, the Boston Globe's casual use of "animal rights activist" to characterize an employee at the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) is inaccurate. HSUS is an animal welfare organization that works to prevent cruelty to animals by helping encourage enforcement and improvement of existing welfare laws. These are typically laws regarding food, water, space and provisions for psychological health. This is a very different stance than someone who is an animal rights activist who fights for animals to have humanlike rights that would prevent any form of research.

In fact, all federal employees are legally obligated to take a welfare stance when working with federally owned research animals. Too often, welfare and animal rights are being confounded. As a result, nongovernmental organizations and researchers striving to improve the lives of animals in their care are being branded as animal rights activists instead of being celebrated for finding new ways to protect both human and nonhuman health and well-being. 

Second, both papers failed to note that cotton-top tamarins are critically endangered in the wild but are used in research at Harvard's center. It seems the National Institutes of Health and Harvard should find housing for all the monkeys, but Harvard likely can euthanize the monkeys with no legal consequences. This is known as a "humane endpoint" in biomedical research. Legally, there will be nothing to compel Harvard to move the endangered primates to a sanctuary, or even another lab. The only protection the monkeys have is an informed press that can alert everyone to Harvard's actions. 

Supreme hypocrisy would be on display if the richest university on the planet cannot find a suitable sanctuary for a colony of endangered monkeys while they preach the importance of biodiversity to developing countries. Sadly, the journalists were so busy trying to polarize the wrong issue they missed blowing the giant whistle in the room.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.  

Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

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NASA

Sunlight glints off the International Space Station with the blue limb of Earth providing a dramatic backdrop in this photo taken by an astronaut on the shuttle Endeavour just before it docked after midnight on Feb. 10, 2010 during the STS-130.

By Charles Q. Choi
Space.com

Advanced strategies to fight cancer are taking inspiration from experiments in the final frontier of outer space, researchers say.

The gravity experienced in low-Earth orbit, which is 10,000 to 1 million times less powerful than that felt on Earth's surface, allows researchers to study cell behavior that's normally masked by responses to gravity. Learning more about these processes is shedding light on how cells usually work, and how they can malfunction in the case of cancer.

"When you take away the force of gravity, you can unmask some things you can't readily see on Earth," said cell biologist Jeanne Becker of Nano3D Biosciences in Houston. "When gravitational force is reduced, cell shape changes, the way they grow changes, the genes they activate change, the proteins they make change." [6 Cool Space Shuttle Experiments]

Scientists have been taking note of such effects for decades. For instance, experiments in the 1970s on Skylab, the first U.S. space station, discovered that red blood cells develop bumpy surfaces in space, a change that disappeared within hours once astronauts returned to Earth.

More recently, research investigating 10,000 genes found that the behavior of 1,632 of them — including genes linked with cell death and tumor suppression — was altered in microgravity.

Although microgravity can distort normal biology, conventional procedures for studying cells on Earth can introduce their own problems. For instance, experiments on Earth often grow cells as flat layers in dishes, obscuring how they behave in real life when they can interact with each other in three dimensions in complex ways.

"When you grow cancers in three dimensions as opposed to flat layers, their response to drugs is vastly different — they become more resistant to drugs," Becker told Space.com.

These discoveries spurred the creation of devices that could mimic the effects of microgravity on Earth so researchers could see how cells behave in three dimensions. For example, so-called rotating wall vessel bioreactors constantly spin cells, keeping them as close to the free-fall seen in space as possible.

Other devices use magnetic fields to levitate cells and counteract the pull of gravity.

Such machines have supported analyses of a wide variety of cancers, such as those of the breast, cervix, kidney, colon, liver, skin, lung, bone, ovaries and prostate.

"The work we do can help address how cancer grows, reveal new ways of tackling drug resistance," Becker said.

Although devices that seek to mimic or induce microgravity are valuable to science, they cannot fully replace the effects seen in orbit. For instance, the crew of the final doomed flight of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003 found that prostate cancer cells grown in space developed into golf-ball-size structures, while clumps grown in rotating wall vessel bioreactors only reached 3 to 5 millimeters (0.1 to 0.2 inches) in size.

"With the International Space Station, we have a lab that doesn't exist anywhere else," Becker said. "It's an exciting platform for discovery."

Space-based science also has improved microencapsulation technology that envelops molecules in capsules, helping develop new delivery systems for cancer drugs. In addition, research exploring how plants respond to light has also shown new ways to reduce pain associated with cancer treatments.

Although NASA's space shuttle program retired in 2011, "we have commercial access to the space station coming up the pipeline, and we still have access to it through vehicles like the Russians' Progress spacecraft," Becker said. "So the opportunities are really limitless."

Becker and her colleague Glauco Souza detailed this research online Friday in the journal Nature Reviews Cancer.

Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

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Department of Defense

The R/V Sally Ride, a Neil Armstrong-class AGOR ship, is the U.S. Navy's first research vessel named after a woman. It is named after the late Sally Ride, first American woman in space.

By Robert Z. Pearlman
Space.com

The United States Navy's first academic research ship to be named for a woman will be christened after NASA's first female astronaut to fly in space.

NASA

Seen on the flight deck of the space shuttle Challenger, astronaut Sally K. Ride, STS-7 mission specialist, became the first American woman in space on June 18, 1983.

Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus announced Friday that the next ocean-class auxiliary general oceanographic research (AGOR) ship will be named the R/V Sally Ride.

"As secretary of the Navy, I have the great privilege of naming ships that will represent America with distinction as part of the fleet for many decades to come," Mabus said in a statement revealing the names of seven ships, including the Sally Ride. "These ships were all named to recognize the hard-working people from cities all around our country who have contributed in so many ways to our Navy and Marine Corps team."

Mabus named the future R/V Sally Ride in memory of the astronaut, who also served as a professor, scientist and innovator at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California in San Diego. Scripps will operate the R/V Sally Ride when it enters the Navy's fleet in 2015.

Ride died on July 23, 2012, from pancreatic cancer at age 65.

She made history when she lifted off with the STS-7 crew on space shuttle Challenger in 1983. The first U.S. female astronaut to fly into space, she was only the third woman worldwide to reach orbit, following two Soviet cosmonauts, Valentina Tereshkova in 1963 and Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982.

This June will mark the 30th anniversary of Ride becoming the first American woman in space. [Photo: Female astronauts honor Sally Ride] 

After her second launch on the shuttle, Ride left NASA to become a physics professor and a champion for improving science education. She founded her own company, Sally Ride Science, to pursue her passion for motivating girls and young women to pursue careers in science, math and technology. 

"Sally Ride's career was one of firsts and will inspire generations to come," Mabus said. "I named R/V Sally Ride to honor a great researcher, but also to encourage generations of students to continue exploring, discovering and reaching for the stars." 

Traditionally, AGORs are named for nationally recognized leaders in exploration and science. In September 2012, Mabus named the first of the Navy's new class of modern AGOR ships the R/V Neil Armstrong after the first man to walk on the moon, who died a month after Ride. 

According to the Navy, the Sally Ride will include acoustic equipment capable of mapping the deepest parts of the oceans and modular laboratories to provide the flexibility and capability to meet a wide variety of research activities conducted by academic institutions and laboratories. The R/V Sally Ride, which will be a Neil Armstrong-class AGOR ship, will be the U.S. Navy's 28th auxiliary general oceanographic research ship. 

The research vessel will be 238 feet long (72.5 meters), have a beam length of 50 feet (15 meters) and will be able to operate at more than 12 knots. The R/V Sally Ride will be built by Dakota Creek Industries in Anacortes, Wash. 

In addition to the Ride and Armstrong, the Navy has three other ships named after U.S. astronauts. The USNS Alan Shepard, named after the first American in space, was launched in 2006; the USNS Wally Schirra, named after the only pilot to fly Mercury, Gemini and Apollo capsules, was launched in 2009; and the USNS John Glenn, named for the first American to orbit the Earth, is scheduled to be delivered to the Navy in 2014. 

Follow collectSpace.com on Facebook and on Twitter at @collectSpace. Copyright 2013 collectSpace.com. All rights reserved.

• Women in Space: A Gallery of Firsts
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By Tia Ghose
LiveScience

In the wake of several scandals in psychology research, scientists are asking themselves just how much of their research is valid.

In the past 10 years, dozens of studies in the psychology field have been retracted, and several high-profile studies have not stood up to scrutiny when outside researchers tried to replicate the research.

By selectively excluding study subjects or amending the experimental procedure after designing the study, researchers in the field may be subtly biasing studies to get more positive findings. And once research results are published, journals have little incentive to publish replication studies, which try to check the results.

That means the psychology literature may be littered with effects, or conclusions, that aren't real. [Oops! 5 Retracted Science Studies]

The problem isn't unique to psychology, but the field is going through some soul-searching right now. Researchers are creating new initiatives to encourage replication studies, improve research protocols and to make data more transparent.  

"People have started doing replication studies to figure out, 'OK, how solid, really, is the foundation of the edifice that we're building?'" said Rolf Zwaan, a cognitive psychologist at Erasmus University in the Netherlands. "How solid is the research that we're building our research on?"

Storm brewing
In a 2010 study in the Journal of Social and Personal Psychology, researchers detailed experiments that they said suggested people could predict the future.

Other scientists questioned how the study, which used questionable methodology such as changing the procedure partway through the experiment, got published; the journal editors expressed skepticism about the effect, but said the study followed established rules for doing good research.

That made people wonder, "Maybe there's something wrong with the rules," said University of Virginia psychology professor Brian Nosek.

But an even bigger scandal was brewing. In late 2011, Diederik Stapel, a psychologist in the Netherlands, was fired from Tilburg University for falsifying or fabricating data in dozens of studies, some of which were published in high-profile journals.

And in 2012, a study in PLOS ONE failed to replicate a landmark 1996 psychology study that suggested making people think of words associated with the elderly — such as Florida, gray or retirement — made them walk more slowly.

Motivated reasoning
The high-profile cases are prompting psychologists to do some soul-searching about the incentive structure in their field.

The push to publish can lead to several questionable practices.

Outright fraud is probably rare. But "adventurous research strategies" are probably common, Nosek told LiveScience. [The 10 Most Destructive Human Behaviors]

Because psychologists are so motivated to get flashy findings published, they can use reasoning that may seem perfectly logical to them and, say, throw out research subjects who don't fit with their findings. But this subtle self-delusion can result in scientists seeing an effect where none exists, Zwaan told LiveScience.

Another way to skew the results is to change the experimental procedure or research question after the study has already begun. These changes may seem harmless to the researcher, but from a statistical standpoint, they make it much more likely that psychologists see an underlying effect where none exists, Zwaan said.

For instance, if scientists set up an experiment to find out if stress is linked to risk of cancer, and during the study they notice stressed people seem to get less sleep, they might switch their question to study sleep. The problem is the experiment wasn't set up to account for confounding factors associated with sleep, among other things.

Fight fire with psychology
In response, psychologists are trying to flip the incentives by using their knowledge of transparency, accountability and personal gain.

For instance, right now there's no incentive for researchers to share their data, and a 2006 study found that of 141 researchers who had previously agreed to share their data, only 38 did so when asked.

But Nosek and his colleagues hope to encourage such sharing by making it standard practice. They are developing a project called the Open Science Framework, and one goal is to encourage researchers to publicly post their data and to have journals require such transparency in their published studies. That should make researchers less likely to tweak their data.

"We know that behavior changes as a function of accountability, and the best way to increase accountability is to create transparency," Nosek said.

One journal, Social Psychology, is dangling the lure of guaranteed publication to motivate replication studies. Researchers send proposals for replication studies to the journal, and if they're approved, the authors are guaranteed publication in advance. That would encourage less fiddling with the protocol after the fact.

And the Laura and John Arnold Foundation now offers grant money specifically for replication studies, Nosek said.

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• Top Ten Unexplained Phenomena
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Karl Tate, LiveScience infographic artist

This is an artist's interpretation of Bigfoot. A study, panned by skeptics, says the legendary beast's DNA shows it is a human relative.

By Benjamin Radford
LiveScience

In November of last year, a Texas veterinarian made national news claiming that genetic testing confirmed that not only is the legendary Bigfoot real, but is in fact a human relative that arose some 15,000 years ago.

The study, by Melba S. Ketchum, suggested such cryptids had sex with modern human females that resulted in hairy hominin hybrids: "Our data indicate that the North American Sasquatch is a hybrid species, the result of males of an unknown hominin species crossing with female Homo sapiens," Ketchum said in a statement. The scientific community was rightly skeptical, partly because Ketchum's research — which spanned five years — had not appeared in any peer-reviewed scientific journal.

Now the study has finally been published, kind of, and it raises more questions than answers. The piece, written by a team of researchers led by Ketchum, is titled "Novel North American Hominins: Next Generation Sequencing of Three Whole Genomes and Associated Studies" and published in the "DeNovo Scientific Journal."

The study, which used 111 samples of alleged Bigfoot hair, blood, mucus, toenail, bark scrapings, saliva and skin with hair and subcutaneous tissues attached, were collected by dozens of people from 34 sites around North America. Hairs were compared to reference samples from common animals including human, dog, cow, horse, deer, elk, moose, fox, bear, coyote, and wolf, and were said not to match any of them. [Rumor or Reality: The Creatures of Cryptozoology]

The report concluded, "we have extracted, analyzed and sequenced DNA from over one hundred separate samples... obtained from scores of collection sites throughout North America. Hair morphology was not consistent with human or any known wildlife hairs. DNA analysis showed two distinctly different types of results; the mitochondrial DNA was unambiguously human, while the nuclear DNA was shown to harbor novel structure and sequence ... the data conclusively proves that the Sasquatch exist as an extant hominin and are a direct maternal descendent of modern humans."

DNA sampling
So what can we make of this? The most likely interpretation is that the samples were contaminated. Whatever the sample originally was — Bigfoot, bear, human or something else — it's possible that the people who collected and handled the specimens (mostly Bigfoot buffs with little or no forensic evidence-gathering training) accidentally introduced their DNA into the sample, which can easily occur with something as innocent as a spit, sneeze or cough.

Though the study claims that "throughout this project exhaustive precautions were taken to minimize or eliminate contamination" in the laboratory, the likelihood that the samples were contaminated in the field by careless collection methods, normal environmental degradation, and other factors was not addressed. In some cases the person(s) submitting the alleged Bigfoot sample also contributed a sample of their own DNA to help rule out contamination, but the possibility of DNA contamination by others (such as hunters or hikers) could not be ruled out.

How did the team definitively determine that the samples were from Bigfoot? Well, they didn't; the report details where Bigfoot samples were retrieved: "hair found on tree" and "hair found on wire fence" are typical. In other words, the people collecting the samples didn't see what animal left it there, possibly weeks or months earlier — but if it seemed suspicious it might be Bigfoot. [Beasts & Monsters: How Reality Made Myth]

Scientific journal?
Ketchum's study had been rejected by other scientific journals. So what about the journal that finally published the study, "DeNovo Scientific Journal"? The journal has no other studies, articles, papers or reviews. Ketchum's is the only paper the journal has "published." No libraries or universities subscribe to it, and the journal and its website apparently did not exist three weeks ago. There's no indication that the study was peer-reviewed by other knowledgeable scientists to assure quality. It is not an existing, known or respected journal in any sense of the word.

This raises some red flags: If the results of the Ketchum et al. study are so valid and airtight, why didn't they appear in a respected, peer-reviewed scientific journal? Surely any reputable journal would fight Bigfoot tooth and Sasquatch nail to be the first to publish groundbreaking valid evidence of the existence of an unknown bipedal animal.

In fact, researchers from Oxford University and the Lausanne Museum of Zoology announced last year that they would test any supposed Sasquatch samples that believers volunteered to send.

"I'm challenging and inviting the cryptozoologists to come up with the evidence instead of complaining that science is rejecting what they have to say," geneticist Bryan Sykes of the University of Oxford told LiveScience in May 2012.

In an interview on the MonsterTalk podcast, Dr. Todd Disotell of the New York University Molecular Anthropology Laboratory dismissed the idea that Bigfoot could be a primate that arose as recently as Ketchum's DNA results claim: "If it's a primate that is so similar to us, that's only separated from us about 15,000 years ago, that's us," he said. "Even with people of European extraction, we've got 50,000 years of common ancestry since we left Africa." In other words, there is far more than 15,000 years of genetic diversity among ordinary humans, so the idea that something that split from our lineage would be as different from us as Bigfoot is absurd. 

It seems that the Ketchum Bigfoot DNA study, which was supposed to rock the world with its iron-clad scientific evidence of Bigfoot, is a bust, and tells us more about junk science than about the mysterious monster. Scientists will not be impressed, but Bigfoot believers might be; the report is available to the public for $30 from Ketchum's web site.

Benjamin Radford is deputy editor of "Skeptical Inquirer" science magazine and author of six books including Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore.  His Web site is www.BenjaminRadford.com.

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Sue & Wayne Trivelpiece

A colony of Adélie penguins on the West Antarctic Peninsula.

By Govert Schilling, LiveScience

MCMURDO SOUND, Antarctica — Suppose someone monitors your whole life, from the moment you were born through childhood, puberty, adolescence and your midlife crisis, all the way to your ultimate death — recording what you eat, where you go, who you make love to, when you raise children and how your body ages. Pretty scary, right?

But that's exactly what biologist David Ainley is doing. Not with humans, but with Adélie penguins in Antarctica. If he could put TV cameras in the birds' master bedrooms, he wouldn't hesitate.

No detail too private
For 17 years now, Ainley has studied three penguin colonies in and around McMurdo Sound, located at the southern extent of the Ross Sea. "It's rare in science to collect data throughout the whole age structure of a population," Ainley told LiveScience, noting Adélie penguins live, on average, about 20 years. Some of the sedate, elderly colony members were just "screaming" newborn chicks when he first arrived here in 1996.

Back then, the three colonies were growing rapidly, at a rate of about 10 percent per year. "My original goal was to find out what caused this increase, and why the smaller colonies grew even faster than the larger ones," said Ainley, who is a biologist at H.T. Harvey & Associates, an ecological consultancy in San Jose, Calif.

Surprisingly, the baby boom

Along the way, penguin privacy has gone out the window: To keep track of a representative selection of individual penguins, Ainley has banded them on one of their flippers, making it easy to identify each from afar through binoculars. [ Image Gallery: Private Sex Lives of Penguins ]

turned out to be a side effect of the Antarctic ozone hole (an opening in the protective atmospheric layer), which reached huge dimensions in the 1990s. "A larger ozone hole means a cooler stratosphere, a more powerful polar vortex and, as a result of stronger winds, more open water in the immediate neighborhood of the colonies," he said. The penguins need the open water for finding their favorite foods — krill and fish.

With funding from the U.S. Antarctic Program, through the National Science Foundation, Ainley has discovered a lack of competition for scarce food resources is what drives the smaller colonies to grow faster than larger ones. Also, predator leopard seals, which aren't very efficient hunters, are more interested in the bigger colonies, where they have a better chance to catch their nourishing penguin snack.

Moreover, at the exit of the colonies, Ainley has mounted electronic weigh bridges, over which the penguins have to pass when they go foraging in the open sea, and again when they return to feed their newborn chicks from their own stomachs. Radio-frequency chips identify the penguins, and the automatic measurements provide a detailed record of their foraging and feeding behaviors during the austral summer season.

An icy obstacle
All was going well with Ainley's research. But in March 2000, catastrophe struck. A huge part of the Ross Ice Shelf broke loose. The iceberg, nearly the size of the state of Connecticut, blocked access to the open waters of the Ross Sea, effectively cutting off the penguins' preferred route to their winter habitat, farther away from the pole. To reach these slightly warmer and less gloomy regions with their fish and krill in tow, the poor birds now had to take a 50-mile detour. Eventually, the iceberg would remain stuck for a period of five years, and the penguin colonies diminished markedly. [ Album: Stunning Photos of Antarctic Ice ]

"At first, I was very disappointed," said Ainley, as it looked as if the iceberg had wrecked his research program. "But then it turned out that there was a lot of new information to gain from the whole episode." In particular, Ainley discovered many penguins from the small colony at Cape Royds did not return home at all in the summer season, but started a new life at one of the other two Adélie colonies at Ross Island — at Cape Crozier and Cape Bird.

This was completely unexpected, said Ainley. "The scientific gospel was that penguins live in the same colony for their entire life, and that they never migrate elsewhere. But the gospel was written by people who had never witnessed an iceberg event like this one."

Contemplating the universe
By now, everything is pretty much back to normal again. Together with his colleague Jean Pennycook, Ainley started his 17th field expedition in early December. Every other day at Cape Royds, he walks through the penguin colony, armed with a pair of binoculars, keeping track of what the birds are doing. "There's not very much to do, really,” he said. “Actually, I spend most of my time at my laptop." Research results, as well as daily pictures from breeding nests, are published at a special website, www.penguinscience.com, partly for educational reasons.

The small colony at Cape Royds has a population of about 2,000 penguin pairs, as opposed to Cape Bird, with some 50,000 pairs, and Cape Crozier, the biggest colony in the world, with a staggering 280,000 pairs. "At the other colonies, there's more than enough work to keep two people busy for seven days a week," he said.

But despite the cold, Ainley doesn't seem to mind the relative lack of work. Pointing at the male penguins that are solemnly breeding two fresh-laid eggs each, he notes: "They're just sitting there, contemplating the universe."

To many researchers in Antarctica, the combination of utter remoteness and overwhelming natural beauty is the main atttraction of the frozen continent. In fact, Ainley admits he choose penguin research for his doctoral work just to get a chance to go to Antarctica. "I just had to go there," he said. "I could've chosen geology instead, since I also majored in that discipline."

Then again, monitoring the full life cycle of a mountain or a glacier, from birth to death, is a bit beyond human scope. In the case of the Adélie penguins, Ainley almost accomplished this feat. "I'll return two more times on my current grant," he said. "If I'm creative enough to come up with a new research project, I may receive another five-year grant."

The penguins aren't likely to mind. Who knows, they might start to miss their human friend if he weren't to show up anymore.

Dutch freelance science writer Govert Schilling visited McMurdo Station and the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in early December as a selected member of the National Science Foundation's Antarctic media visit program.

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