Rapid, unconscious eye movements explain a famous optical illusion in which a still image appears to move.

When the eye movements, called microsaccades, were suppressed, test subjects reported that the Enigma illusion — an illustration that seems to flicker and turn — remained stationary.

Scientists don't yet understand exactly how microsaccades contribute to vision, but they seem to help us perceive peripheral details while fixated on an object. (To experience this yourself, focus on the dot in the image at right. The fixation will reduce your microsaccades and cause the surrounding circle to fade.)

"Our subjective experience is that sometimes our eyes move, and sometimes they don't. But they're moving all the time," said Susana Martinez-Conde, a visual neuroscientist at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona.

Martinez-Conde's findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, do more than explain a neat trick. They also suggest an answer to an optical controversy: whether motion in static images originates in our eyes or our brains.

The eyes have it.

"If we can prove that microsaccades are involved, this rules out the hypothesis that the illusion comes solely from the visual cortex. It may be involved, but the illusion starts with the eye," she said.

Martinez-Conde still doesn't know exactly how microsaccades create the false perception of motion. She suspects that each slightly differing peripheral image either displaces or is superimposed over the previous image, resulting in movement.

Further research is needed on the causes, she said, but her findings may be immediately insightful: microsaccade disorders may underlie some vision disorders.

"Individuals could produce too many microsaccades, or not enough," said Martinez-Conde. "But they're not typically studied in eye exams."

Microsaccades drive illusory motion in the Enigma illusion [PNAS]

Images: 1. Isia Leviant's "Enigma" / Michael Bach 2. Troxler illusion / WikiMedia Commons

Welcome to the next generation of "ABORT!"

NASA test-fired the latest ejector seat for the Space Shuttle replacement this week, sending flames shooting into the Utah sky. 

To get the crew away from the launch rocket in case of an emergency, the Launch Abort System motor delivers half a million pounds of thrust; by design, it burns through more than half of its fuel in just three seconds, which will mean the astronauts in the escape vehicle will have to endure G-force of several times a standard Shuttle launch.

The new abort system will provide astronauts with a way to escape a catastrophic disaster during ascent. American manned spacecraft have exploded twice over the last couple decades, and there is no realistic escape route in the old Shuttle. So, for the next-generation Orion exploration vehicle and Ares rockets, NASA is reaching back into the history books. The new system is an updated version of Apollo's old-school abort system.

See Also:

• Orion Test Set-Up Parachute Fails, Mockup Crashes
• NASA Releases Plan For Ares I Vibration Problem
• While 'Awesome,' Shuttle is a 'Flawed Craft'
• U.S.-Russia Relations Threaten Space Station

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter, Google Reader feed, and webpage; Wired Science on Facebook.

In only eight years, a public health campaign has saved more than 6 million people from filarial worms, which cause elephantiasis and other grotesque maladies.

That victory was made possible by massive donations from GlaxoSmithKline and Merck, explained Eric Ottesen, in a report for the current issue of PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. Both companies provided antiparasitic pills, 1.3 billion of them, for the Global Programme to Eliminate Lymphatic Filariasis.

The disease affects at least 120 million people worldwide and is caused by nematodes that colonize their lymphatic systems. As those invaders reproduce, they cause ulcers and extreme swelling.

Albendazole kills the parasites by damaging microtubules in their intestines and brains. Ivermectin can destroy their nervous systems. Each treatment costs less than ten cents, and often has additional benefits, ridding its recipients of other infections including lice, roundworm, and hookworm.

In this year alone, half a billion people will receive the parasite-killing medications. By 2020, the disease may be history.

Photo: Wuchereria bancrofti worms are among the main causes of lymphatic filariasis. Credit: Centers for Disease Control

A public health campaign has saved more than 6 million people from filarial worms, which cause elephantiasis and other grotesque maladies, in just eight years.

Massive donations from GlaxoSmithKline and Merck, made the victory possible according to a report  this week in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. Both companies provided antiparasitic pills, 1.3 billion of them, for the Global Programme to Eliminate Lymphatic Filariasis.

The disease, caused by nematodes that colonize the lymphatic system, affects at least 120 million people worldwide. As the worms reproduce, they cause ulcers and extreme swelling.

The antiparasitic Albendazole kills the parasites by damaging microtubules in their intestines and brains. Another drug, Ivermectin, can destroy their nervous systems. Each treatment costs less than 10 cents and often has additional benefits, ridding its recipients of infections including lice, roundworm, and hookworm.

Half a billion people will receive the parasite-killing medications this year alone. By 2020, the disease may be history.

Photo: Wuchereria bancrofti worms are among the main causes of lymphatic filariasis. Credit: Centers for Disease Control

If you wanted close-up photos of the moon in the late 1800s, you were pretty much out of luck. Unless, of course, you built incredibly detailed plaster models of lunar craters and then snapped carefully lit pictures of them.

And that's exactly what an engineer and astronomer did in 1874 to tremendous acclaim.

James Nasmyth, the inventor of the steam hammer, and James Carpenter, then at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, released a hugely successful book, The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite, illustrated by their incredible moon mock-ups. The august journal Nature gave the book a rapturous review.

"The illustrations to this book are so admirable, so far beyond those one generally gets of any celestial phenomenon, that one is tempted to refer to them first of all," the reviewer wrote. "No more truthful or striking representations of natural objects than those here presented have ever been laid before his readers by any student of Science; and I may add that, rarely if ever, have equal pains been taken to insure such truthfulness."

But what's really appealing about the images isn't their "truthfulness" but their "truthiness," said Corey Keller, the curator of a new exhibit, Brought to Light, on early scientific photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

"Astronomers were perfectly aware of what they were looking at," Keller, whose exhibit includes the book's photos, said. "But they felt that because they were photographed, it added a layer of authenticity to the undertaking that simple drawings didn't have."

Looking at these photos, astronomers could get the feeling of actually being there, which is the same desire that has driven manned space exploration throughout the last half-century.

"It wasn't possible to actually make those photographs of the moon," she noted.

Imaging the moon, after all, was an immensely difficult task. Even as 19th-century photographers and dagguerreotypists figured out the basics of taking pictures of the moon, they were limited by the immense distance separating them from their subject. In fact, it wasn't until the Apollo missions landed on the surface of our only natural satellite that humans were able to make real versions of these mock-ups.

In this five-part series, we're walking through the Brought to Light exhibit with Keller, who spent five years researching the history of early scientific photography. This video segment looks at the early history of astronomical photography and at the story of the creation of a fake moon.

NOTE: The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite is in the public domain and available online through Google Books and Archive.org.

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter , Google Reader feed, and webpage; Wired Science on Facebook.

The nuclear waste buried beneath Yucca Mountain will be there for millennia, untouchable and lethal. Conceptual artist Jonathon Keats would put that time and radioactivity to use by turning the dump into a generator of new universes.

His plan is based on the laws of quantum physics, which state that each atomic particle exists in multiple states at once until observation fixes it in time and space. Keats, who recently built a temple of science to explore the implications of science-based religion, takes this literally.

In "Universes Unlimited," an exhibition opening today at the Modernism gallery in San Francisco, Keats unveils a do-it-yourself universe creation kit, on sale for just $20 and made from components bought on eBay — and, as he explains in a half-tongue-in-cheek letter to the Department of Energy, it could easily be scaled up to the dimensions of Yucca Mountain, dotting its 230 square miles with crystal towers glowing in a redemptive fount of creation.

After all, if the pebbles of depleted uranium-enriched glass in his DIY kit produce an estimated 200 universes a minute, the mind boggles at what 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste could generate.

I talked to Keats this week about his latest work.

Wired.com: Where did the idea come from?

Jonathon Keats: The Copenhagen interpretation says that in a quantum system, a particle exists in multiple positions until a measurement is made. It's when you measure it that you end up with a particle as you'd expect it in the classical world, at one place in time. Then there's some way the universe collapses. That didn't make much sense to Hugh Everett and his followers. The Everett interpretation is that the system doesn't collapse. Instead, when you make the measurement, you end up with two separate universes with no connection to each other. This was exactly the methodology I needed to build a technology that would generate universes.

Wired.com: Where did you get the parts?

Keats: I went onto eBay, and bought some uranium-doped glass. Uranium was used as a colorant in classic red glass Fiesta Ware in the 1950's, and in light green glass  made in the 1920's and 1930's. That provide my uranium. Then I found a guy who sells scintillating crystals, which are used by Homeland Security as a simple way to detect whether someone has a nuclear bomb under their coat. When a gamma ray hits the crystal, a photon is produced, so it glows a beautiful blue.

Wired.com: And when it glows, that's the measurement?

Keats: It sparks so subtly that you can't see it. It's singularly unspectacular. From the standpoint of being in the universe, making a new universe is very mundane. If you could stand outside it and see the universes cleave, I'm sure it would be very spectacular. But you're seeing nothing in terms of the crystal glowing. That's important to me: I didn't want it to seem like every time you get a new universe, it's Christmas. I wanted to fit it into the everyday humdrum nature of universal creation, to bring it down to a level where we recognize that creativity is what we do naturally, that it's always in everything.

In the case of the Yucca Mountain project, though, there would be a visible glow. Wired.com: What would it look like?

Keats: It would be quite beautiful: the idea is to sink two-mile-deep scintillating crystal stacks into the mountain, sticking out like chimneys, looking like a factory. But instead of sending out smoke, they'd glow in the night. I don't know if the government would go for it, but it'd be less expensive than other things that they've done in the past.   

Wired.com: Beyond being pretty, what's the point?

Keats: It's a way of letting us collectively address questions of creation and quantum science. At the same time, at a more basic level, it addresses the question of where we are as a society right now, when a nuclear waste dump is the ultimate monument to ill-thought excess. Yucca Mountain represents what our civilization has come to, in terms of the threat that the world now poses to us. But with this, you'd see Yucca Mountain at work, making new possibilities for us. 

Wired.com: So it's a form of redemption.

Keats: What made me look to Yucca Mountain as an ideal site for the universe factory is that here, more than anywhere, we could use some possibility of redemption.

It's also a way of taking us out of our paralysis, out of our fear for a world that now seems to be collapsing. We can make solutions to the problems we've made for ourselves.  If Yucca Mountain can bring us to consider all the many alternatives of our future, then not only will it be a factory for making universes in the literal sense, but for remaking whatever universe we happen to find ourselves in.

It's important that we recognize that the future could take any number of paths. We could continue to abuse the environment as we've done, and simply go for broke, or work towards stable state. All these possibilities exist. What's crucial is that we start considering some of them. At least one of these universes will be a future in which it all comes out okay.

Wired.com: But what if someone thinks nuclear power is a pretty decent source of energy, given the alternatives?

Keats: I don't say that nuclear energy is good or bad. There's a bigger question: how much energy of any kind do we need? If the costs of energy, by whatever means are technologically feasible, are going to be so great that we're going to pay for it in terms of our future, might we need to live on less energy? What I'm asking, without any polemical point or stance, is that we consider the cost of any type of energy.

Making new universes is partly a pleasure, and partly a means of activating our search for alternatives — not only across universes, but within our own.

Images: Images: 1. Text and Universe Kit prototype / Jonathon Keats 1a. Yucca Mountain aerial view / Department of Energy 2. Universe Kit assembly instructions / Jonathon Keats 3. Nature cover, circa 1957 / Nature 4. Universe Kit / Jonathon Keats 5. Yucca Mountain aerial view / Department of Energy 6. Yucca Mountain entrance tunnel / Department of Energy 7. Letter to the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management / Jonathon Keats 8. Approximation of crystal stacks in Yucca Mountain topography / Jonathon Keats

Download universes.doe.letter.pdf

WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook. 

Hoop Dreams made #26 on my favorite movies of the '90s list, but I think I only watched it the one time (twice at most) since its length and somewhat depressing nature didn't exactly lend itself to repeated viewings.  But it was a great film as far as I can remember and quite moving.  I certainly hoped that the young stars of the documentary - William Gates and Arthur Agee -- were able to find success in their lives in the years after high school, when their "hoop dreams" failed them - Gates with a serious knee injury and Agee without quite enough talent to get a college scholarship.  Unfortunately, a Chicago Tribune feature on the duo some 14 years after the film was released doesn't exactly paint a rosy picture.  Gates has been more successful, serving as a minister in the Cabrini section of Chicago, where he lives with his wife and four children, the oldest of which is a teenager himself (as Gates was at the start of filming in 1989).  Agee doesn't have a steady job and is unmarried, but lives with his girlfriend in Bartlett, a northwest suburb of Chicago, and their 8-month old son.  He also has four other children with four other women, who each live with their mother.  Agee played basketball longer -- getting an offer for a CBA contract as late as 1996, but has not embarked on any kind of steady career since then.  His latest effort involves selling "Hoop Dreams" merchandise.  Two other important characters from the film -- Gates's brother Curtis and Agee's father Bo were both murdered in recent years, the former in 2001, the latter in 2004.  In trials for their murders, suspects were eventually acquitted.  It's definitely a sad ending, and a sadly realistic one, chronically the lives of great young athletes who are among the 99% unable to fulfill their dreams of professional sports contracts, many from inner-city backgrounds where pro sports seem like the only chance of escape.  In this case, neither young man has "escaped," although both -- especially Gates -- seem happy with their lives and perhaps don't see any need to escape anymore.  Hell, I never escaped New Jersey and I'm not complaining about it.  Anyway, read the articles linked above if you're interested.  Very compelling stuff.

Agee from the film...

Gates greeting his parishioners...

Giant glaciers buried under the surface of Mars at much lower latitudes than any previously known ice are a potential source of drinking water for future astronauts.

The discovery, made using ground-penetrating radar on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, offers new possibilities in the search for life on the red planet.

"If there is life on Mars, this kind of ice would likely preserve ancient organisms and DNA," researcher Jim Head, a planetary geoscientist at Brown University, told Wired.com. "Examining the water ice could give you a good sample to try to detect if there had been life there."

The newly-discovered glaciers, reported Wednesday in Science, appear to contain the largest volume of Martian water ice outside the poles.

"Just one of the features we examined is three times larger than the city of Los Angeles, and up to one-half mile thick, and there are many more," said study leader John Holt of the University of Texas at Austin, in a press release.

Many scientists doubted that giant reservoirs of ice could exist on Mars so close to the equator, but calculations suggest these regions were once much colder than they are now, due to variations in the tilt of Mars' rotational axis. The ice was buried under debris, and as the areas warmed, the ice was insulated by its protective layer of surface rock.

Puzzling surface features above the glaciers, such as sloping deposits of rock near larger mountains, were first noticed by NASA's Viking orbiters in the 1970s. Some experts thought they represented rocky debris made slippery by tiny bits of ice mixed with dirt. But recent studies of buried glaciers on Antarctica, which look markedly similar, support the buried glacier hypothesis.

Recently Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter confirmed that there really are giant layers of ice hidden under the surface with data from its SHARAD radar instrument. When the radar scanned the regions, its reflected signal bounced back in a pattern consistent with traveling though a thick layer of ice, rather than rock. Furthermore, the velocity of the radar's reflected radio waves matched that expected from passing through water ice.

The glaciers are good news for future studies on Mars, because they lie at more easily accessible latitudes than the freezing cold poles. They could even prove helpful as a source of drinkable water to future astronauts exploring Mars.

"This says there may be samples of ice within our reach," Head said. "If we're thinking ahead to human exploration of Mars, it means we could go to some of these places and actually have water ice there."

See Also:

• Ancient Martian Ocean Would Have Been Salty 'Dead Sea'
• Rumors Abound About 'Potential for Life' on Mars
• Mars Phoenix Lander Runs Out of Juice
• Mars Phoenix Tweets: "We Have ICE!"

Citations:

1. "Radar Sounding Evidence for Buried Glaciers in the Southern Mid-Latitudes of Mars"
   John W. Holt, Ali Safaeinili, Jeffrey J. Plaut, James W. Head, Roger J. Phillips, Roberto Seu, Scott D. Kempf, Prateek Choudhary, Duncan A. Young, Nathaniel E. Putzig, Daniela Biccari, Yonggyu Gim
   doi:10.1126/science.1162780

Image: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin

It might not make sense to pull woolly mammoths from the Ice Age into an age of global warming, but resurrecting that lost species just became a bit less far-fetched.

Using hair from 20,000-year-old specimens preserved in Siberian tundra, an international team of scientists finished a draft genome sequence of Mammuthus primigenius.

About one-fifth of the genome remains unidentified, but that should take just a few more years and scans. Once complete, it could be a template for would-be mammoth makers.

"It may one day become possible," said Pennsylvania State University biochemist and study co-author Stephan Schuster, "to mammoth-ify an African or Asian elephant genome."

Schuster's team was concerned solely with sequencing, not bringing back the mammoth. Nor were such potential resurrection efforts the most scientifically noteworthy implication of the research, published Wednesday in Nature. As the first sequence ever made with cells taken solely from hair, the genome is a tour-de-force of modern DNA sequencing technology. The researchers also found that certain genes conserved intact across the animal kingdom had mutated in mammoths, suggesting a radical and as-yet-unknown cold-weather adaptation.

But those results don't stir the imagination as do daydreams of woolly mammoths, extinct for six millennia but maintained in cultural memory, thundering across the 21st century. The obstacles to such biotechnological time travel are significant — but scientific advances are coming fast.

The first fragment of woolly mammoth genome was sequenced just two years ago, and researchers have since deciphered their mitochondrial DNA. And though some hypothetical methods of mammoth restoration — building a genome from scratch and putting it inside an elephant egg, or fertilizing an elephant egg with mammoth sperm — pose mammoth-sized technical problems, Schuster suggests a hack: working backwards from modern elephants.

"We've identified most of the differences between mammoths and African elephants. One could imagine reverse-engineering an elephant genome to become more like a mammoth," he said.

Schuster's plan won't be easy, but it may be possible. Less-complicated but fundamentally similar reverse-engineering is already used in mice and farm animals.

It's certainly easier than coding a mammoth genome from scratch: The first wholly synthetic genome, constructed last year by the J. Craig Venter institute, contained about 600,000 base pairs of DNA, compared to 4,000,000 in the mammoth genome. And using a 10,000-year-old cell for reproductive purposes is — in an already far-fetched discussion — especially unlikely.

"Japanese researchers have tried to do this for more than ten years by looking for intact nuclei from mammoth tissue, and they got nowhere," said Schuster. "It's absolutely obvious why: the genome stored in those chromosomes is completely shattered."

But even though modern elephants and woolly mammoths are quite similar, having diverged less than the 98 percent-genetically-identical humans and chimpanzees, reverse-engineering won't be easy.

"It's easy to make one or two changes, and they're suggesting at least 20,000," said George Seidel, a Colorado State University animal reproduction expert who was not involved in the study. "And will an elephant egg process that information in such a way as to function correctly?"

Nevertheless, even Seidel said that re-creation "is not out and out impossible," and raised the possibility of making elephant-mammoth hybrids to serve as an intermediate species on the path to a full, modern woolly mammoth.

A modern mammoth could easily be introduced in their ancestral Siberian homes, said Schuster. They would face less competition from humans than elephants in Africa, and be a star attraction of the newly-opened Pleistocene Park.

But just because something can be done doesn't mean it should, he said.

"From a scientific perspective, I think we would learn very little from doing this. A lot of what you want to learn about body plan and tissues we can get just by studying the carcasses," said Schuster.

"I would file it under the category of boutique science. The public is very curious. But you'd just generate a few specimens, a freak creature that you could put on display."

Sequencing the nuclear genome of the extinct woolly mammoth [Nature]

Images: 1. 3-D visualization / Steven W. Marcus 2. Woolly mammoth hair / Stephan Schuster 3. Mammoth skeleton / Stephan Schuster 4. Cave paintings from Grotte Chauvet / Carla216  

WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook.

A new experiment may have found the first direct evidence of dark matter particles, a discovery that could begin to unravel one of the biggest mysteries in physics.

Theorists believe that dark matter, made up of of weakly-interacting massive particles, composes 23 percent of the universe, but no one has ever directly detected one of these WIMPs.

Now, physicists have announced they've spotted electrons with just about the amount of energy they would have expected to be made by a particular kind of WIMP entering the visible world.

John Wefel of Louisiana State University and colleagues report in Nature Wednesday that they could have detected "Kaluza-Klein" electron-positron pairs resulting from the annihilation of these WIMPS.

The KK particles are predicted by multiple-dimension theories of the universe and have long-been a leading candidate as the substance of dark matter. The new discovery then, if confirmed, would provide evidence that the fabric of space-time has many "compact" dimensions beyond the four that humans perceive.

The researchers say that could necessitate "If the Kaluza–Klein annihilation explanation proves to be correct, this will necessitate a fuller investigation of such multidimensional spaces, with potentially important implications for our understanding of the Universe," the authors conclude.

Dozens of teams are working to understand the invisible dark matter and dark energy that when combined astrophysicists believe make up 95 percent of the universe. Most of the evidence for the dark stuff's existence comes through indirect observations: as physicist Myungkook James Jee put it last year, "We can't see a wind, but we can see it blow." So, the first direct detection of dark matter would be a landmark discovery.

Wefel's team sent a balloon carrying the "ATIC" particle detector aloft over Antarctica, where it measured the telltale charges and energies of electrons.

But the new detection isn't a sure indication of the existence of KK particles. Harvard astrophysicist Yousaf Butt argued that other astronomical objects could explain the creation of these high-energy electrons, in an editorial that accompanied the original paper. The leftovers from supernovas, spinning pulsars, or microquasars could all be responsible for the observations, or things could get even stranger.

"And let’s not forget that a completely new type of astrophysical object could also produce the detected electron excess; after all, pulsars were discovered only in 1967, and until 1992 we were blissfully unaware of microquasars," he wrote.

Further experiments seem likely to reveal the true source of this cosmic electron anomaly. With longer observation times or better detectors, scientists should be able to puzzle out whether the spectral signature of the detected electrons fits the dark matter thesis.

See Also:

• Mapping Dark Matter's Invisible Super-Clumps
• Hubble Finds Huge Ring of Dark Matter
• Dark Matter Mystery Explained, Using the Sloshy-Bathtub Model
• Explainer: What is Dark Matter?
• Dark Stars: Giant, Invisible, Maybe Even Real
• Is Dark Energy Really Necessary?
• Musician, Researchers Create Dark Matter "Music Box"

Image: 1. Two trucks carrying helium gas cylinders are used to inflate this 30 million cubic foot balloon / Joachim B. Isbert / Nature. 2. "Content of the Universe"/ NASA. 3. The balloon awaits release from the launch vehicle / T. Gregory Guzik / Nature.  

Citations:

1. "An excess of cosmic ray electrons at energies of 300–800 GeV"
   J. Chang, J. H. Adams Jr, H. S. Ahn, G. L. Bashindzhagyan, M. Christl, O. Ganel, T. G. Guzik, J. Isbert, K. C. Kim, E. N. Kuznetsov, M. I. Panasyuk, A. D. Panov, W. K. H. Schmidt, E. S. Seo, N. V. Sokolskaya, J. W. Watts, J. P. Wefel, J. Wu & V. I. Zatsepin
   doi:10.1038/nature07477
2. "A message from the dark side"
   Yousaf M. Butt
   News & Views: NATURE|Vol 456|20 November 2008

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