The other day I was in the car with Mrs. Bad Astronomer, and while we were stopped at a light she suddenly pointed out the window and shouted, “Dust devil!”

I took a look, and sure enough, there was a little swirl of wind circling around in front of the car. It was about a foot across, and had picked up some leaves and detritus, whirling around like a miniature and delicate tornado.

Dust devils are in fact similar to tornados, but are not nearly so violent. I’ve seen lots of them, from small ones that can barely pick up leaves, to a big one once when I was in college. That one had formed — I think — due to the unusual shape of a building. Wind would come around the building, create a vortex, and was fed by warm air in the surrounding field. It was easily two or three meters across, and maybe 15 meters high. I watched it for quite a while, 10 or 15 minutes at least, as it would wander away from the building, wander back, pick up leaves, fling them around. It was fascinating!

It’s been known for a while that dust devils are not restricted to Earth. Mars is blighted with them.

Orbiting spacecraft show the view from a height. In the image above, we are looking straight down on a few of the devils. You can see their shadows above them! There are countless images like this one. As the funnel sucks up the sand beneath them, they leave the darker rock exposed, and so many images show winding, spiraling dark trails across the martian surface.

Then we landed rovers on the surface! Suddenly, dust devils got even more interesting, because we could see them from the side. Here’s an image from one of the rovers:

Not only that, but multiple images could be taken, and made into animations. You can watch them move! Atmospheric Scientist Mark Lemmon at Texas A&M University shares my fascination with these beasties, but he has access to the data, and the tools to make the data even cooler. On his website he has collected dozens of these events, and has created very cool animations from them.

By watching those movies, you are seeing weather on another planet.

Do I even have to say it? Science is so cool!

Note: This entry was featured in the 18th Skeptics Circle hosted at Wolverine Tom’s.

I remember once, many years ago, taking my dog out to the park. It was wonderful: trees, a lake, paths through the forest. The area was beautiful, the sounds serene, and even the smells delightful and earthy.

My dog and I had a tremendous time. We got home, exhausted, to rest for a while. But I noticed, even though she was wiped out, she was scratching at her ear, trying to dig at it.

I lifted her floppy ear up, and, just inside the canal, was a tick. Fat and repellent, it had obviously clambered on board while we were enjoying the forest. There it was, that disgusting parasite, its head was buried deep into the flesh of my dog’s ear, its fat hindquarters sticking up into the air. It had waited on a leaf or blade of grass somewhere, masquerading in a way as part of the beauty of the park, and pounced when it saw an opening. The parasite was taking advantage of our enjoyment of nature, sucking the blood out of my dog and potentially infecting her with some noisome disease.

I took action. Gathering my tools, I carefully removed it using tweezers. When it was out, I cleaned out the wound and applied a disinfectant.

Some people wonder why I fight antiscience and take on its proponents so often. To be honest, it gets tiring, the rewards unobvious, the goals sometimes distant and hidden. But then I remember that tick, hind legs twitching feebly in the air. Unable to create any nourishment on its own, it had to suck out the life blood of another, damaging it in the process.

Scientific parasites are lurking everywhere, just waiting to attack an unprepared person, ready and very willing to take advantage of our desire to appreciate nature. It’s our job — all of us, every single one — to make sure that those abhorrent ticks never get the chance to bury their heads in our flesh.

Note: Yeah, I know this is somewhat old news. I sometimes write these in advance, then update them slightly so I can post when I don’t have time to write. I’m having sinus issues right now and it’s hard to concentrate, so I’m posting this one. Also, I’m hoping to have an entry soon about NASA’s new vision of returning to the Moon, but I’ve been too busy to read up on it! I’ll rectify that very soon.

There’s a person who posts on my bulletin board who has a signature he uses that says “Think evolution is ‘just a theory’? Then fasten your seat belts, so is gravity!”

That always made me smile, and now it looks like the brilliantly satirical newspaper “The Onion” has caught on: read their article about Intelligent Falling. It really captures the ridiculosity of Intelligent Design (which, by the way, literally goes on trial today– check Red State Rabble, Pharyngula, and Panda’s Thumb for frequent updates).

And there’s more! The Onion plagiarized the idea. Maybe. They make a lot of stuff up, so it’s hard to tell.

While you’re at it, why not check out The Highest School, which takes “teaching the controversy” to the next logical step?

On Monday of this week, I had the pleasure of attending a talk by NASA scientist Chris McKay. Back in January 2005, a lander called Huygens (pronounced “HOY-gens”) touched down on the surface of Titan, Saturn’s biggest moon. It was an incredible achievement! McKay is a co-investigator on an instrument onboard Huygens. He came to my university to talk about that weird moon. Whenever I hear a good talk, I try to walk away with one cool thing I learned. This time I really did, and now I’m gonna share it with you.

Titan is big, as moons go. It’s 50% wider than our Moon, and 80% more massive. That means it’s less dense than our Moon. The Moon is mostly rock, and so Titan must be mostly material less dense than that. We know there’s a lot of water ice out there in that part of the solar system, so it’s a good bet that Titan has a lot of it.

But Titan is cold. Really cold: -180 C! At that temperature, ice gets very hard, like rock on Earth.

Now let me digress for a second. Titan has an atmosphere. It’s mostly nitrogen (like Earth’s!) with about 10% methane. At that temperature and pressure, it’s possible for methane to exist as a liquid, too. So methane can rain down from the air as a liquid, collect in depressions, and flow like water does on Earth.

Still with me? Great! Now look at this awesome picture:

That’s the surface of Titan, as seen by a camera on Huygens. The flat rock to the left of center is about 15 cm (6 inches) across, and the rounder one next to it is roughly 4 cm (1.5 inches) across. Now, those aren’t rocks: they’re ice! Like I said, on Titan, ice is like rock. To be honest, it’s not certain those are ice; some instruments on Huygens indicated they are, others said they aren’t. I suspect they are covered with some sort of material on their outside which is throwing off the instruments, but I’m no expert. Still, it seems likely they are mostly ice.

But look how round they are! Almost as if they’re eroded. It’s known also that there are riverbed-like features not far from the rocks, and the plain they sit in looks a lot like a dry stream bed. Could this have been the site of running liquid methane?

There’s more, and this is totally cool: there is an accelerometer on board Huygens, an instrument which measures how hard the probe was decelerated as it fell to the surface. When it hit, it measured that as well. If the surface had been solid rock, then the accelerometer would get a big spike as the probe smacked into the surface, and that’s it. If it hit a liquid, then you’d get up-and-down wiggles as it bobbed in the liquid.

But what the accelerometer showed was that the impact had a big spike, and then a single rebound. This is not what you’d expect from a solid or liquid surface, but just what would happen if it hit something gloppy like mud.

Mud! It seems as if it recently rained methane where Huygens hit. The methane would flow down, like a river, and drain into a basin someplace. As this happens many times over millions of years, the “rocks” of water ice erode and get round. But every time, just after it rains, the ground is soggy.

Did Huygens land right after a rain, maybe only a few months after a wet season? No one knows, and McKay only speculated. But what an amazing thought! We have a rainy season here in northern California, and if an alien probe landed here in, say, April, and plopped into the mud that causes Mrs. Bad Astronomer and me such grief in the garden every spring, they might get a reading much like we got from Huygens. But while ours has silicon, oxygen, dirt, and biological organic compounds in it, Titan’s mud has methane, ethane, and simple hydrocarbons… all at a seasonal 94 Kelvin.

So that’s my one thought from the talk: a billion miles away, but maybe Titan is not so alien after all.

I’ve said it before, and I’m sure I’ll say it many times hence: I love this stuff!

The American Astronomical Society (AAS) is the largest group of professional astronomers in America (I’m a member). They will occasionally put out a statement about important issues, and they just released one about Intelligent Design. AAS President Robert Kirshner said (and I love this quotation),

Science teachers have their hands full teaching the things that we actually know about the world we live in. They shouldn’t be burdened with content-free dogma like Intelligent Design.

Woohoo! That was pretty succinct.

The full AAS statement is on their website, but I like this part:

Evolution is a valid scientific theory for the origin of species that has been repeatedly tested and verified through observation, formulation of testable statements to explain those observations, and controlled experiments or additional observations to find out whether these ideas are right or wrong. A scientific theory is not speculation or a guess — scientific theories are unifying concepts that explain the physical universe.

They get in lots of jabs there– evolution is rock-solid, backed by evidence and experimentation. They also get in one on the idea that the word “theory” somehow makes evolution flimsy, when that’s not the case at all.

And they make their feelings about ID clear:

…“Intelligent Design�? fails to meet the basic definition of a scientific idea: its proponents do not present testable hypotheses and do not provide evidence for their views that can be verified or duplicated by subsequent researchers.

Since “Intelligent Design�? is not science, it does not belong in the science curriculum of the nation’s primary and secondary schools.

Hear hear.

Is a killer “chaos cloud” heading towards the Earth, spelling our ultimate doom?

Uh, duh. No.

A lot of people are emailing me about it though. Yahoo News, those goofballs, reproduced an article in (wait for it…) the Weekly World News, claiming that this criminal cosmic killer chaos cloud would annihilate us in 2014.

I didn’t write up a detailed debunking of this, since it’s from the Weekly World News. I mean, really! But I did write a brief Bad Astronomy article about it, and it’s up on my news section of the main site. Read all about it there.

Sheesh. Killer clouds. What’s next? Astrology? No, wait. That’s always in real newspapers. My work will never ever end.

It’s all too easy to stereotype people. For example, astronomers are nerds, and bloggers are self-indulgent egoists who just love to hear their own voice, metaphorically speaking. Well OK, nuts, maybe those aren’t great examples. But you get my point.

I hear the same thing about skeptics all the time: we’re naysayers, cynics, joyless, loveless, and have no sense of wonder. But that’s way, way off base. We’re human; we have a sense of wonder, we love, we hate, we stub our toes like everyone else.

One stereotype that’s a bit more on-the-mark is that skeptics tend to be men. I’m one of those, for example, and when I go to skeptics meetings that does seem to be the most common species. But women are there too. Lots of them! Maybe not enough, but the numbers are encouraging to me.

These are cool women. Funny, bright, sociable, sarcastic, and possessed of a great sense of humor, they call themselves skepchicks. They also have a fine sense of support; that is, they understand what a fragile thing skepticism can be for someone new to it, and they want to encourage others to join in.

To that end, two different groups of skepchicks have figured out a way to support critical thinking: sell stuff! And if it’s sexy stuff, all the better.

One group of skepchicks (which formed in large part due to James Randi’s website) has gotten together and done something I think is very, very cool: they have created a 2006 Skepchick calendar, on sale now. Proceeds from the calendar will go toward a fund to help support more women attending Randi’s Amaz!ng Meeting 4 in Las Vegas this coming January.

Their tagline is: “Smart is sexy”. Ain’t that the truth! Turns out fishnets help too.

Anyway, I’ve already ordered my calendar, though I have no idea where I can hang it. In my office means getting fired; in my house means Mrs. Bad Astronomer will shake her head pityingly at me. Hard to say which is worse.

The second site I want to plug is for Rationalitees, where you can get skeptical gear aimed (mostly) at women (I like this one in particular). This site is run by a skepchick from the Central New York Skeptics, an excellent group of folks who have done a lot to promote critical thinking.

So go buy stuff. It’ll do some good, and will keep the Skepchicks from hurting me at the next meeting.