About six "Santa months," according to Larry Silverberg, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University. He's a Santa math specialist (really) whose students took on the problem.

Here's how he got there: Santa has to deliver gifts to around 200 million children spread over 200 million square miles. Because each household has 2.67 children, there are about 75 million homes to visit and the average distance between homes is about 1.63 miles, Santa needs to cover 122 million miles.

To cover that distance in 24 hours on Christmas, Mr. Claus's sleigh would need to travel at a whopping average speed of 5,083,000 mph. Silverberg argues that the feat is possible because the sleigh would have to travel 130 times more slowly than the speed of light, which is 300 million meters per second, or 669,600,000 mph. Because something already moves that quickly, it would be difficult, but not impossible, for Santa to travel at 5,083,000 mph.

Traveling at 5,083,000 mph seems a bit fast for a plump old man so Silverberg and his students found a more realistic scenario: relativity clouds. Relativity clouds, based on relative physics, allow Santa to stretch time like a rubber band and give him months to deliver gifts, while only a few minutes pass for the rest of us. (Silverberg theorizes that Santa's understanding of relative physics is far greater than our own.)

Silverberg's theory is plausible, says Danny Maruyama, a doctoral candidate researching systems physics at the University of Michigan. If Santa were to travel at about the speed of light, share the delivery work-load with his elves and makes use of relativity clouds, he would be able to deliver the presents in about five minutes Earth time, Maruyama says. "While I don't know much about relativity clouds myself, I think it's very possible that a man who flies in a sleigh, lives with elves, and has flying pet reindeer could have the technology needed to utilize relativity clouds," he says.

And what if Santa deployed multiple sleighs? Silverberg says if Santa and his elves use 750 sleighs to deliver the gifts and, using their knowledge of relativity physics, take roughly six Santa months (to us humans, only 24 hours), each sleigh only needs to travel about 80 mph, a much more realistic scenario. "At 80 miles per hour, you just throw a couple jetpacks on either sides of the sleighs and you're there," Silverberg says.

Following the shooting of a tagged Yellowstone grey wolf just outside the park's borders in Wyoming--the eighth such wolf shot this season--the state of Montana has banned wolf hunting in areas adjacent to the park. The NYTimes quotes a Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Park commissioner who cites the "time and money and effort" that goes into the tagging and research of these wolves, as well as a Yellowstone biologist who still seems to be smarting from the loss, saying this is a "moderate" decision that addresses "some of the issues as far as the science." [NYTimes]

The millions of bats succumbing to a deadly fungal infection across the country will leave massive ecological holes in their wake--prime predators of insects are disappearing, for one, and cave flora and fauna that depend on bats could be in danger of collapsing. But research on the animals' immune responses could have one silver lining: helping AIDS patients.

Biologists think white nose syndrome kills bats in a couple of ways--first, by covering their faces and wings in a powdery white fungus that makes them itchy, causing them to wake up from hibernation and burn their precious fat reserves. Second, it damages the animals' sensitive wing membranes, which causes system-wide injury that is still not totally understood. That also hurts their ability to fly.


Bat immune systems try to fight off the fungus, and apparently the system goes into overdrive when hibernating bats wake up. This is called immune reconstitution inflammatory syndrome, or IRIS. It has never been seen before in the wild, and has only been observed once--in AIDS patients.

In people with AIDS, the immune system goes into overdrive after antiretroviral drugs suppress HIV infection and restore a person's health. The immune system then tries to fight off any other underlying infection. In bats, this happens after the animals wake from their winter torpor. During that stage, the immune system is suppressed, which allows the Geomyces destructans fungus to colonize the bats' skin in the first place. In both cases, the awakened immune system goes out of control and attacks healthy tissue as well as infected cells.

Carol Meteyer, a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, noticed the phenomenon while studying sick bats in Wisconsin. "It's cellular suicide. [The immune system] comes out in a huge wave, going out to those areas of infection and kills everything," she told the Washington Post. Now she and colleagues at the National Institutes of Health aim to study the similarity between bat and human immune systems, potentially learning how IRIS works in people.

The hypothesis about bat IRIS was published last month in the journal Virulence.

[U.S. Geological Survey, Washington Post]

It's not that political conservatives don't care about things like climate change, recycling and deforestation--it's that they don't care about it the same way liberals do. True, they tend to be less concerned about it at first, but when you give them the right messages, they do care. If environmental issues are couched as defending the Earth's purity and sanctity, that is.

Reframing rhetoric in a way that speaks to conservatives can reduce partisanship, according to a series of five studies by psychologists at the University of California-Berkeley and at Stanford University. They set out to test a hypothesis that conservatives would respond to ideas like patriotism, purity and "reverence for a higher authority," as explained in a Cal news release. They especially focused on the purity aspect.

Matthew Feinberg, the lead author and a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at Stanford, recruited a few hundred people via Craigslist. In a first step, participants rated their ideologies on a spectrum from liberal to conservative, and Feinberg gathered evidence that liberals are more likely than conservatives to consider sustainability as a moral issue. Then Feinberg and his colleagues set out to reframe sustainability.

The researchers took pro-environment videos on YouTube and more than 200 op-eds in national newspapers and sorted them according to two types: Depictions of "harm/care," which they thought would appeal to liberals, and "purity/sanctity," which they thought would appeal to conservatives. They recruited more Craigslisters and randomly assigned them some articles to read. After being bombarded with messages, the participants ranked their responses to statements like "I would support government legislation aimed at protecting the environment."

The purity/sanctity sample stressed that pollution has "contaminated Earth and people's bodies," the Cal news release explains. This was accompanied by images of a person drinking filthy water, a forest full of trash and other provocative dirty-Earth scenery. The article argued for "purifying" the environment. Overall, conservatives felt disgusted, and were thenceforth more likely to support environmental protection, the study found.

"These results establish the importance of moralization as a cause of polarization on environmental attitudes, and suggest that reframing environmental discourse in different moral terms can reduce the gap between liberals and conservatives in environmental concern," the authors say. This might be very important, said Robb Willer, a social psychologist at Cal-Berkeley and a coauthor of the study.

"Reaching out to conservatives in a respectful and persuasive way is critical, because large numbers of Americans will need to support significant environment reforms if we are going to deal effectively with climate change, in particular," he said.

The studies are published in the journal Psychological Science.

[via Science Daily]

The fossil record has a lot of strange stories to tell about the evolution of life on Earth, and one of the strangest is how life moved from sea to land. Though clues from the record give the rough outlines of the story--limbs grew from fins in a series of stages in which fins grew longer and narrower--scientists are still filling in the details, trying to determine what genetic changes might have allowed the limbs to grow.

One of the best ways to learn those details is to reproduce the changes that occurred some 400 million years ago--to virtually back in time and alter the development of the land-goer's living ancestors and see what happens.

Which is what biologist Renata Freitas and colleagues were up to when they added some extra Hoxd13--a gene known to play a role in distinguishing body parts during embryological development-- to the tip of a zebrafish embryo's fin, and watched as the developing fin kept growing:

Those round objects on the ends of the embryo's fins look a lot like autopods, the multifinger proto-extremities that evolved from lobe-finned fish, allowing life's first foray on to land. Here's a diagram from the researcher's paper, showing the changes that the extra dose of Hoxd13 allowed:

Their lab findings led the researchers to hypothesize that the secret to limb development may have been a new element in some lobe-finned fish's DNA. When present, this DNA element would have helped turn on the Hoxd13 gene on the fish embryo's fins, leading them to lengthen and grow into limbs.

Click to launch the photo gallery

Whether you rent or own the place where you live, odds are you'll either be tempted or driven by necessity to make some repairs and alterations. To do it well and efficiently, you will need tools. And while better tools might not turn you into the next Bob Vila, they should make your average home-improvement project infinitely less daunting. Here are nine tools for neophytes and super-skilled DIYers alike.

For a project titled Every Day of My Life, artist/programmer/designer Marcin Ignac used software to track, measure, and visualize his computer use every day for 2.5 years. The result: This beautiful, simple look at one of the most prominent aspects of daily life in the 21st century. Each line is a single day, with colors representing which app was being used at the time of day. (So, for example, your line might be red during this time, signaling that you're using your browser.) The black sections are times when he had his computer off--meaning that blacked-out section in every day is probably night.

You can check out more visuals based on Ignac's computer use at his site or Flickr.

[marcinignac.com]

A new silicon microchip can do what no other silicon microchip could before, generating and transmitting radio waves in the terahertz range. The tiny chip operates at 300 times the speed of the CMOS chip in your smartphone, and could someday be used to peer through walls, inside containers and into the food supply.

It can see a knife hidden inside a teddy bear, like the image above. It can even determine the fat content of a piece of chicken, apparently.

Terahertz scanners have long been touted as the future of security--electromagnetic waves in that frequency range can penetrate where other forms of radiation cannot, but they don't produce the damaging ionizing radiation of X-rays. T-rays can sense every molecule, so they could theoretically detect illicit drugs or explosives, or even hunt for cancer cells. They can see through walls and inside objects, so they would be useful security screeners. The problem has been that the scanners are huge, requiring lasers and many lenses to focus light, not to mention cooling equipment to keep everything at operating temperatures.

For that reason, electrical engineers have been trying to build terahertz scanners using common and cheap manufacturing processes, especially the complementary metal-oxide semiconductors that power most consumer devices. Earlier this year, researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas figured out how to build a special type of high-speed diode in CMOS, producing T-rays on a small scale. Now some researchers at Caltech have done one better, producing the world's first integrated T-ray arrays.

The mere fact that it operates at terahertz frequencies is a breakthrough. No standard transistors can amplify a radio signal in that range. Silicon chips aren't designed to operate in it. To get around those limitations, electrical engineering professor Ali Hajimiri and postdoc Kaushik Sengupta combined several transistors on one array, all operating in unison. When operating at the right frequencies, the transistors' collective power can be combined, boosting the signal's strength. In a Caltech news release, Hajimiri compared it to an army of ants hefting the same load as one elephant. "Nowadays we can make a very large number of transistors that individually are not very powerful, but when combined and working in unison, can do a lot more," he said.

What's more, they figured out how to get the entire chip to operate as an antenna, incorporating several pieces of metal instead of a single wire. (A wire wouldn't work at terahertz frequencies.) The result is a chip-scale scanner that can produce and distribute T-rays. IBM helped produce the chip, according to Caltech. Hajimiri and Sengupta describe their new chip in the December issue of IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

[Caltech]

Chinese leaders have fired three government officials involved in a study of genetically modified rice, after complaints that the study's subjects weren't properly informed. The subjects were kids whose parents didn't know what their kids were eating.

The study involves golden rice, a goldenrod-colored form of the grain developed more than a decade ago for the express purpose of addressing vitamin A deficiency in developing countries. It has been alternately hailed as a humanitarian breakthrough and denigrated as an empty promise to the poor--but one thing it has not been is actually approved for use. The study at the heart of this new controversy was a step on that path. It was partially funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and included some U.S.-based researchers.

In the study, some Chinese children were fed golden rice, which had been genetically modified to produce beta carotene, a precursor to vitamin A formation. Other children in the study ate meals containing spinach or beta carotene capsules. Scientists wanted to determine how well the beta carotene converted to vitamin A after the rice was eaten. Parents were told their kids were eating rice that contained beta carotene, but they weren't told it got this way through genetic modification. They were also not told about skepticism and controversy surrounding GMO foods generally and golden rice specifically.

Greenpeace pointed out this study back in August, and Chinese officials launched an investigation, culminating in a recent report about the trial on state-run TV station CCTV. In the program, Chinese officials admit that they didn't mention golden rice because it was "too sensitive," and that they wanted to save time and move the study forward. Now families are outraged, reports Nature News, which covers the controversy in depth. And three Chinese officials have been fired.

Most of the food we eat in this country contains some ingredients from genetically modified plants, whether it's weed-killer-resistant soybeans or pest-resistant corn, and most people don't know it--so it's in some ways this isn't all that shocking. But genetically modified food is met with more skepticism in China than it is generally in the U.S.

What's really at issue here is informed consent, a serious matter in any scientific study. People need to understand what they're volunteering to do--or volunteering their kids to do--especially when it involves ingesting something.

[Nature News]

The colored balloons on this map of Asia represent current levels of air pollution, namely particulate pollution, which are at harmful levels for nearly 70% of developing Asian cities, according to Clean Air Asia. But the brightly colored dots on the map probably weren't what caught your eye - maybe it was the giant pigtails sprouting from the lone nose on the right?

The nostril hair visualization is part of a strange campaign to raise awareness about the severity of air pollution in Asian cities. It is aptly titled the Hairy Nose campaign (Clean Air Asia probably figured that mildly offensive nostril hair was more compelling than a list of polluted cities?).

Turns out that nose hairs aren't completely random--in fact they're pretty important in straining out the harmful things we breathe in. Last year Popular Science reported that "nose hairs trap dirt, viruses, bacteria and toxins until we blow them out, sneeze, or swallow," so maybe it's not that strange after all to think about air pollution in terms of how much nostril hair we might eventually need to breathe safely.

It's still not entirely clear exactly how much particle pollution corresponds to the length of hair, the map only tells you where your city falls on the spectrum of "excellent" to "critical" air quality (and only for Asian cities right now). Still, it's an effective way to bring attention to a growing problem--Clean Air Asia says that "800,000 out a total 1.3 million people dying prematurely each year from air pollution are from Asia"--and if weirdly styled nose hair helps raise awareness, I'm all for it.

[Smithsonian]

When I was first asked to review Glenn Beck's new tome Agenda 21, I feared I could not accomplish the task objectively. After all, Beck--as recounted in my own book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars--once suggested that I, and indeed all of my fellow climate scientists, commit hara-kiri out of shame for promoting the purportedly bogus science of climate change. Hard not to harbor a bit of a grudge after that.

So I was relieved to learn that Beck did not actually write the book. In her recent article "I got duped by Glenn Beck!" (Salon.com, November 19), Sarah Cypher--the editor for an early draft of the book--revealed that Agenda 21 was in fact ghost-written by one Harriet Parke. Beck, it turns out, simply purchased the right to claim he'd written the book. Possessing an even lower opinion now of Mr. Beck, but satisfied there was no longer any conflict of interest, I proceeded to read the book with as open a mind as I could muster.

It resembles a collision between The Matrix, Soylent Green, and Atlas Shrugged.The premise of Agenda 21 lies in a set of principles, outlined in an actual early 1990s United Nations document of the same title, emphasizing the importance of environmental sustainability in plans for global economic development. In the book's paranoid imagination, however, such precepts become an Orwellian prescription for a future gone terribly awry. Agenda 21's dystopian vision resembles the remains of a fatal three-way collision between The Matrix, Soylent Green, and Atlas Shrugged.

While the story told by Agenda 21 is purely fictional, a very real agenda emerges. The author, and her facilitator Glenn Beck (as well as ultraconservative entities like the Scaife Foundations and the Koch Brothers who fund the larger anti-environmental disinformation campaign within which this latest propaganda effort is embedded) would have you believe that policies aimed at preserving our environment are the true threat to our future. The author imagines a society where human beings are trapped in concrete cells separated from the planet's natural fauna, flora, and water, and even their children (who are taken away from them at birth). They consume "nourishment cubes" in place of more recognizable food items. Adopting measures to preserve the health of the planet has somehow led to a world in which human beings have become more isolated from their natural environment. No satisfactory explanation for this paradox is ever provided.

The implausible premises don't end there. The author (and Beck) suggest that support for environmental policies was a diabolical plot to create a socialist world government that now rules the planet (chillingly referred to as "The Republic"). Yet the very same week the book was released, the World Bank-an organization founded on free market principles-issued a report confirming that business-as-usual carbon emissions represent a near and present danger to civilization. The report explains how our global infrastructure-agriculture, transportation, and energy systems-would be fundamentally compromised by warming of just a few more degrees. "We don't have time to lose" [in reducing our greenhouse gas emissions] the World Bank's Rachel Kyte was quoted as saying. This is one of the sternest warnings yet issued on the threat of climate change inaction. And in total contradiction to the book's' thesis, that warning comes from an organization whose very reason for creation was to guard against the potential rise of socialist governments (in the wake of the mass upheaval resulting from World War II).

The book problematically neglects the laws of thermodynamics.The book would also have you buy into the canard that principles of environmental sustainability are somehow in conflict with religious faith. The future envisioned in Agenda 21 is one where individuals are disallowed from open practice of religion. But in reality, some of the most passionate advocates for action to avert dangerous climate change are faith-based organizations such as Interfaith Power and Light who see protecting the environment as part of humankind's covenant to serve as stewards of the Earth and preservers of creation.

And what about the book's treatment of matters of science? I'm usually willing to suspend disbelief for the sake of a good fictional narrative. But the conceit that human beings might in some dystopian future be imprisoned as beasts of burden and raised and kept alive purely for the energy that can be harvested from them goes too far. Such a scenario problematically neglects the laws of thermodynamics. It makes little if any sense, after all, to employ a primary energy source (be it the incoming radiation from the Sun, the heat escaping from Earth's core, or the energy released from the burning of fossil fuels) to manufacture proteins or raise crops, only to feed an army of macrofauna (i.e. human beings), only in turn to harness the energy they produce. If it is only energy that is being sought, such a chain of energy conversion processes is inefficient to the point of absurdity. The only sensible option would be to exploit the primary energy source itself.

I did my best to ignore the implausibility of this plot device when it first reared its head in The Matrix. But it is far less tolerable when used as a foundation for a misguided anti-environmental narrative. We are forced to accept, without explanation, how decades into the future no effort has been made to take advantage of far more plentiful and efficient renewable energy sources like wind and solar energy (which, by some estimates, could provide 70% of our energy needs in the U.S. in less than two decades). Not only have renewable energy technologies apparently not benefited from the increased efficiencies expected after decades of further research and development, they appear to have vanished altogether!

It has a transparent agenda to sow distrust and cynicism in good faith efforts to protect our environment.Bad science is hardly the greatest sin in Agenda 21. The real problem is its transparent agenda to sow distrust and cynicism in good faith efforts to protect our environment. The great works of dystopian fiction yield lucid, cautionary tales of the potential dangers that may lurk in our future-be they nuclear holocaust, environmental catastrophe, or the subjugation by machine overlords-if we make imprudent choices in the present. The very worst of the genre, however, do the opposite; they obscure an actual looming threat (e.g. human-caused climate change) by instead drawing our attention away to a false, manufactured one. Nothing could be more dangerous or misguided than a screed like Agenda 21 that attempts to do just that.

Michael E. Mann is a climate scientist, the director of Penn State's Earth System Science Center, and the author of two books: Dire Predictions and The Hockey Stick and The Climate Wars. Follow him on Twitter here.

The pixel isn't perfect. For most everything, lining up tiny blocks and displaying them on a screen works well enough. But those blocks have limitations. Now a team of researchers is saying there's a better way to present onscreen images--one that'll replace the pixel in five years.

The team developed something called a vector-based video codec that attempts to overcome the challenges of a typical vector display. A typical vector display features drawn lines and contoured colors on a screen (rather than the simple, geometrical map of pixels we're all accustomed to). But it has problems--notably, areas between colors can't be filled in well enough for a high-quality image to be displayed, the researchers say.

A codec takes digital video and can both encode and decode it into a new format (in this case, a vector format). The team isn't releasing many details, but says it has developed a codec that gets around the in-between color problem. With the codec, they say, they'll have a "resolution-independent" system that delivers pixel quality without, well, the pixels.

When we last checked in on the DIY innovations of Mexican cartel drug smugglers, we found them lobbing four-pound bales of marijuana over the Mexico-Arizona border with a trailer-mounted catapult. But technology never stands still. U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents recently found 33 canisters of marijuana in a field on the U.S. side near the point where the Colorado River crosses the U.S.-Mexico border, and they think the pot got there after being launched from a huge pneumatic cannon.

This is by no means a record breaking haul for the Border Patrol: 85 pounds of grass worth about $42,500--peanuts in the larger drug war. But it is representative of the ever-shifting tactics used by smugglers to get their product to market on the U.S. side of the border. The recovered canisters of pot were believed to have been launched roughly 500 feet (agents also recovered a carbon dioxide tank, tipping them off to the pneumatic nature of this latest ballistic border-clearing method). That's no small distance for cans of pot that had an average weight of around 2.5 pounds.

[AP]

An Arizona-based company recently filed a patent for high-tech futuristic handcuffs that are, in a word, terrifying. In addition to restraining prisoners, the cuffs can also deliver electric shocks and sedatives.

They're still in the patent phase right now, of course, but when they do exist on a full commercial scale, they could work manually at a guard's behest or they could be programmed to automatically activate when someone in cuffs starts to act up or steps outside of certain boundaries. Safety mechanisms could--hopefully will--be set to prevent a guard from doping or shocking prisoners to the point where they suffer from major side effects. Death, for example.

As for the drugs: They could include "an irritant, a medication, a sedative, a transdermal medication or transdermal enhancers such as dimethyl sulfoxide, a chemical restraint, a paralytic, a medication prescribed to the detainee, and combinations thereof."

If the cuffs move past the patent office and into commercial production, it'll be interesting to see what sort of rules and regulations come attached. From patent photos, it looks like the developers might already have a prototype, which means we might be seeing them sooner rather than later. Note to self: Avoid jail.

[Patent Bolt via Daily Mail]

Today in Very Important Science: if you're drinking bagged or boxed wine--and we're not going to tell you not to, it's good for you--make sure to keep it at around 50 degrees Fahrenheit. You snooty oenophiles with your wines in bottles, who cares, do whatever you want with your single-varietal Monopoly Man swill.

The University of California, Davis tested the effects of storage temperature on all kinds of different wine containers--bottles, with or without corks, boxes, bags, bags in boxes. It's the first study to test all of these prominent ways wine is stored--sorry to canned wine devotees--and it found that the bag-in-box wine familiar to anyone who's ever been 18 years old is the most vulnerable to temperature changes. Wine at hot or even just warm temperatures (they tested 68 degrees and 104 degrees Fahrenheit) has a tendency to turn gross, changing color to a darker red and bringing out a vinegar flavor. But the bag-in-box wine "aged significantly faster," according to a tasting panel which was then confirmed by chemical testing.

All wines aged better when stored at 50 degrees. So the message here is, get a wine fridge, or just drink your box of wine as soon as possible. Both options are scientifically acceptable.

[UC Davis]