In my new brain column for Discover, I take a look at recent research on fear. As dread turns to terror, our brains look an awful lot like the brain of a mouse as it realizes the feline end is nigh. Check it out.

If you’ve been dying to get a kick-ass dragon tattoo but feel like it might not go over well with prospective employers or your mom, then here’s a sneaky, roundabout way to satisfy your yearning. You can get the tattoo using augmented reality–and for an extra dose of kick-ass, the dragon will flap its leathery wings.

The concept was developed by a Buenos Aires-based software company called ThinkAnApp. In the video below, you’ll see a guy’s arm tattooed with what looks like a plain rectangular box. But that box is essentially a barcode. The company has devised a camera with special software that reads this barcode, and then superimposes an animated image.

Dvice reports:

When viewed through a specially equipped camera, the seemingly plain box design suddenly displays a three-dimension dragon. The possibilities for art projects, information distribution, and social engineering via body art inherent in this idea are fascinating.

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Image: ThinkAnApp

It’s been nearly ten years since President Bill Clinton stood on the White House lawn with a team of scientists to announce the completion of the first survey of the human genome. “Today, we celebrate the revelation of the first draft of the human book of life,” he said. It’s a pleasing metaphor, but it’s deeply flawed. There is not a single Human Book of Life. If there were, after all, Clinton and the scientists and all the rest of us would all be identical clones.

There is a vast amount of genetic variation from person to person, and from one continent to another. The survey that Clinton was announcing was a cobbling-together of DNA from several individuals. Since then, researchers have produced much higher-quality reads of the genomes of actual people. They’ve learned a lot from those studies, but, in the scope of human genetic diversity, these studies have been timid ventures. If you compare someone from South Korea to someone of northern European descent, you’re only capturing a small sliver of the variation in our species. If you really want to get into the thick of it, there’s really one place to go: Africa.

This chart helps to illustrate why. If you trace the origins of the genetic material in our species, you end up in Africa. One reason we know this is that human populations outside of Africa share some genetic markers that Africans lack. That’s consistent with the hypothesis that Homo sapiens evolved in Africa, and then a small group of Africans migrated off the continent and gave rise to all the other populations of humans alive today. Another clue is in the genetic diversity of Africans themselves. Looking at relatively small collections of DNA, scientists have found much more genetic diversity in Africa than elsewhere. That would make sense if African populations have existed longer than populations elsewhere, giving them more time to accrue new mutations.

Africa is, of course, a huge continent, with a billion people and 2000 distinct ethno-linguistic groups. Some of those groups, including some of the most populous ones, are relatively young. In some cases, they expanded over large areas as they developed agriculture. Some smaller ethnic groups are only distantly related to other Africans, since their ancestors split off a long time ago. Those groups are crucial to a full-spectrum picture not just of African diversity, but the diversity of all humanity.

So it’s heartening to find that today scientists are publishing a genome of a man from one of those deeply diverging groups–the Khoisan of southern Africa, also known as the Bushmen of the Kalahari.

The Khoisan are not a single group of Africans, but a large number of small groups. They originally probably spanned much of southern Africa, making a living by hunting and foraging for food. Bantu farmers moved into southern Africa much later, taking up a lot of the arable land. Most Khoisan live now in Botswana and Namibia, eking out a precarious existence.

A team of scientists from the United States, Australia, and Africa sequenced the complete genome of a Khoisan named !Gubi (far left in the top photos). They also sequenced portions of the genomes of three other Khoisans from Namibia to gauge the diversity within the group. And, for comparison, they also sequenced the genome of a Bantu from South Africa. Not just any Bantu, mind you, but none other than Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

The survey confirmed the conclusion of earlier studies: Khoisans have a lot of genetic diversity. On average, each pair of the Khoisans differed at 1.2 out of every 1000 nucleotides (the “letters” of DNA). On average, a European and an Asian differ at 1 out of every 1000.

Khoisans lack some key adaptations that arose in Africans who have taken up agriculture. For example, they lack a mutation that allows adults to digest milk. They also lack a common mutation that provides resistance to malaria–a disease that took off when parasite-carrying mosquitoes could lay eggs in farm fields and bite farmers sleeping in nearby huts. But these absences don’t mean that Khoisans are primitive cavemen, or that their genomes are a time capsule from antiquity. Most of the distinctive features of their genomes arose only after their ancestors split off from the ancestors of other humans. A number of those new mutations show some indications of being adaptations for life in the desert, such as controlling levels of salt in the blood.

Understanding the genome of Khoisans is not just interesting in itself, but important to the well-being of all people on Earth. To figure out the effects of genes on our health, scientists scan DNA from lots of people, looking for variations that are strongly linked to certain diseases. As I wrote last year in Newsweek, it’s been a struggle. One reason is that the list of genetic variations we’ve been using has, until now, been too short. In the new study, the scientists found 1.3 million differences between Khosians and the reference human genome against which all human DNA is compared. Just as intriguing are some of the variants that Khoisans have that are found in other populations. Some of these familiar variants have been linked to serious diseases. Yet all the Khoisans who were tested in the new study were around 80 years old and in excellent physical shape. The effect of these variants may actually depend on variations in other genes. To figure out what any one human genome means for a person’s health, scientists need to look at a full spectrum of human genomes. The Book of Life is not enough. We need to read the Library of Life.

[Images: Schuster et al, "Complete Khoisan and Bantu genomes from Southern Africa," Nature, doi: 10.1038/nature08795, Campell and Tishkoff]

Are these the first steps to a nuclear renaissance? Yesterday the White House said it would give more than $8 billion in loan guarantees to make sure that construction of two new nuclear power plants gets under way in Georgia. If these plants go ahead, they would be the first new nuclear plants built in the country in more than three decades.

The loan guarantee is conditional. It hinges on the utility, the Southern Co., receiving a license from the US Nuclear Regulatory Agency to build and operate the new reactors. Based on the current timeline, the utility expects to receive its license during the second half of 2011, says David Ratcliffe, its chairman and chief executive officer [Christian Science Monitor]. The two reactors would each produce more than 1,000 megawatts, and would work with two existing reactors at a site near Waynesboro, Georgia.

The loan guarantees will allow Southern Co. to get massive construction loans from its bankers without assuming the risk; if the power plants aren’t profitable and if the company defaults on its loans, the federal government will pay back the money to the banks instead. Despite the government support, the new Georgia reactors are far from a done deal: their design has not yet been fully approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, whose staff has raised questions about whether changes made to harden the plant against aircraft attack had made it more vulnerable to earthquakes [The New York Times].

The loan guarantees are a provision in the 2005 Energy Policy Act, installed because nuclear power backers say new projects would be too great a financial risk to go forward without government support. Energy secretary Steven Chu announced that there’s more of this to come: The administration will ask for $36 billion in nuclear loan guarantees for 2011. However, ramping up the money could end up pouring good money after bad, skeptics argue. The guarantees represent money for “a limited set of reactors from a small number of first-movers,” says Ellen Vankco, a specialist on energy issues with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington [Christian Science Monitor].

The announcement garnered the expected political reaction. Republicans and nuclear power advocates praised the move, while many environmentalists balked at expanding nuclear power and free-market activists balked at the spending, saying taxpayers could get stuck with the bill if projects fail. However, green groups haven’t complained as loudly as one might expect, because of the political reality: Many large conservation groups appear to be tacitly accepting the need to increase federal nuclear support — along with offshore oil and gas drilling, another environmentalist anathema — to attract Republican votes for a measure to limit greenhouse gas emissions [Los Angeles Times].

And then there’s the issue the Obama Administration would probably rather not talk about as it makes this nuclear push: waste. Given the litany of the problems with the proposed Yucca Mountain waste storage site in Nevada—transporting waste across the country, the possibility of a fault line running underneath it, and so on—Obama axed the idea of using it. With no viable alternatives, all that’s left is continuing to store on site. Currently, 70,000 tons of radioactive waste are stored at more than 100 nuclear sites around the country, and 2,000 tons are added every year [CNN].

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Image: iStockphoto

We’ve collected enough data in our What Got You Interested in Science? poll to draw some conclusions. Not very firm conclusions, of course, as the whole process was wildly non-scientific, and there’s no reason to expect that the respondents were a representative sample in any sense. (The numbers were not bad; the smallest category, “the internet,” received 62 votes so far.) But conclusions, nonetheless!

And the main conclusion is: there are many different things that get young proto-scientists interested in the field. Books, both non-fiction and fiction, play an important role, but no one thing really stands out.

That’s interesting, and not really what I would have expected. Given that there certainly are many things that could get someone interested in science, I wouldn’t have been surprised if there was a dominant source for the pipeline, but instead it’s quite a diverse porfolio.

If we think getting people interested in science is a good thing, the lesson is: there aren’t any magic bullets. A broad-based strategy seems appropriate. Interesting books, educational classes, encouraging relatives, engrossing hobbies and school activities, inspiring movies and TV shows. I approve.

NASA’s fledgling Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) opened its eyes a few weeks ago, and astronomers have just released the first of a torrent of spectacular images from it.

Since its launch last December, WISE has been surveying the sky, taking data continuously as it spins on its axis and orbits the Earth. A few images have been released before, but these new ones are fully processed, scientifically-calibrated, and gorgeous.

I have to start with this one, because it’s just so pretty! Behold Comet C/2007 Q3, aka Siding Spring:

Holy dirty snowballs! That’s gorgeous, a classic comet. When this image was taken, on January 10, 2010, the comet was 340 million kilometers (200 million miles) from Earth. That’s a good ways off, so I’m impressed with the detail of this image! It’s actually a four-color image: blue is 3.6 microns (about 5 times the reddest wavelength the human eye can see, so well out into the infrared), green is 4.6, orange is 12, and red is 22 microns.

Since the temperature of an objects determines the kind of light it emits, we can estimate the temperature of the comet just by eyeballing this picture. It’s mostly orange, meaning the comet is pouring out light at 12 microns. A human being radiates infrared from about 7 to 14 microns, so this means the parts of the comet emitting IR (and therefore seen by WISE in this image) are around the same temperature as a person! Well, in physics terms; in human terms it’s pretty cold, about -40 Celsius. And it’ll get even colder now since it’s on its way out of the inner solar system, away from the Sun’s warmth. It’ll dim as it cools, too, returning back to invisibility once again.

WISE is expected to see quite a few comets, and in fact discovered its first just a few days ago. I wonder how many it’ll find, and if they’ll all be this pretty…?

Let’s take a step farther out for the next WISE image:

Recognize that galaxy? I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t, but it’s Andromeda! That’s the nearest large spiral to our Milky Way. It’s roughly 2.9 million light years away (estimates vary) and can be seen by the naked eye from a dark site. This stunning photo really accentuates how amazing WISE is: the field of view is 5 degrees across, the width of ten full Moons. The Hubble camera I used to work with would barely cover a pixel in this image!

Remember, this image is all infrared. What looks blue here is actually cold stuff compared to what we’re used to: old red stars, for example. The colors are a little different than in the comet image, but red is still the coolest material: dust. These complex molecules are created when massive stars are born and when they die. Since massive stars don’t live long, they tend to die near where they were born, so you see the dust constrained to very narrow areas where star formation occurs. Less hefty stars (like the Sun) live long enough to drift away from their nursery over billions of years, so they fill the galaxy’s disk (in blue). That’s why the dust is so vivid and tightly defined in this image.

If you look closely, you can see the left side of the galaxy is a bit distorted. That’s called a warp, and is probably caused by a nearby pass of another galaxy, or one Andromeda actually absorbed. The fuzzy blob just below the main galaxy is a dwarf elliptical companion to Andromeda, orbiting it like the Moon orbits the Earth. It’s mostly composed of old stars that look red to our eye, so again it’s blue in this false color image.

OK, one more. I like this one a lot: NGC 3603, a star-forming region about 20,000 light years from Earth:

It may not look familiar, but if you’ve been reading my blog for more than a couple of weeks, you’ve seen it: I wrote about a Hubble image of this very nebula. Now, if you’re like me, you’ll click that link, look at the Hubble image, and then try to figure out where it fits in this WISE shot. Pbbbt. Don’t bother. The Hubble image is only a tiny portion of this vast vista, a blip right in the middle of the brightest part of the WISE image. The S in WISE is for "Survey", which means it takes pictures of ginormous swaths of sky, far more than Hubble can do. In fact, Hubble could take picture after picture for weeks and not get a view of the sky as large as WISE does in a few minutes (of course, the Hubble image would be a whole lot more detailed…).

In this image, as before, red is warm dust, and blue is hotter material like stars. The green is what gets me though: at 12 microns, that reveals PAHs, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. These complex organic compounds form in cool conditions in nebulae, which are lousy with them. They’re everywhere where the temperature isn’t too high to disintegrate them. They can form even larger molecules, and some people think they may be important in creating the molecules necessary for life on Earth. That’s not to say those molecules form in nebulae like NGC 3603 and then somehow get here; they most likely form right here as well. The point is, they look like they’re pretty easy to make if conditions are right… on Earth as it is in the heavens.

And the sheer size and breadth of the nebula is simply stunning! I’m so used to narrow fields of view that I forget sometimes just how large these objects are. This nebula is dozens of light years across, forming thousands upon thousands of stars. It’s among the biggest such star factories in our galaxy, and is certainly easily visible from other galaxies as well. Even from 20,000 light years away — 1/5 of the way across our entire galaxy — it’s clearly a formidable object.

And that’s the strength of WISE. It can see large objects, investigate the bigger picture of the sky, and do it in the longest regions of the infrared spectrum, light that we simply cannot explore from the ground — our air absorbs it, and all the warm objects around us glow fiercely at those energies. It would be like trying to find a firefly against the Sun! So we must launch observatories into space to peer at the far infrared light from cosmic objects, and WISE will be our eyes to do just that.

And from these images it looks like it’ll do a fine job. I’m impressed with these images. I’ve seen a few early release observations in my time — I’ve made a few myself! — and these are excellent. The whole mission is only supposed to last a few months; there is coolant on board for the detectors that can only go so far. In that short time it has a whole sky to observe, and that’s a lot of space. But that also means there’s a lot to see: galaxies, asteroids, comets, nebulae… maybe even a gamma-ray burst or two. The next few months will be very exciting for infrared astronomy!

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Images credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA