I am jumping on a meme bandwagon: Seven Quick Takes Friday, hosted by Jen F. at Conversion Diary. Since this is a blog about science and faith, not a personal diary, I hope Jen will forgive me if my seven snippets consist of news, info, and thoughts about those subjects.

1.

If you grow your young in a uterus, but you have not evolved a placenta, how do you feed them? For the gray nurse shark, aka the sand tiger shark, the answer is incestuous cannibalism. Gray nurse shark pups in the womb eat each other for nourishment, so only two are born per pregnancy (females have two uteruses). Since they are endangered, marine biologist Nick Otway is trying to develop an artificial uterus for gray nurse shark pups. Back when I worked as an aquarium biologist, we had several of these huge sharks. They are quite docile despite their fearsome complement of teeth.

At right: Grey nurse shark at the Minnesota Zoo, courtesy Joe Lencioni. (CC) Some rights reserved.

2.

Check out this video of comedian Stephen Crowder, hosted by the Raving Theist (formerly the Raving Atheist). He does an over-the-top parody comparing Planned Parenthood to a used car salesman.

3.

From the world of physics (via Scientific American) comes a story about the continued dissonance between Einstein's special relativity and quantum mechanics. This particular story has to do with a principle of special relativity called locality, which conflicts with a principle of quantum mechanics called entanglement. Of note is a comment buried on page 4 of the online article:

The old aspirations of physics to be a guide to metaphysics, to tell us literally and straightforwardly how the world actually is—aspirations that had lain dormant and neglected for more than 50 years—began, slowly, to reawaken.

This is good news for philosophers who, like me*, view reality as a concrete thing and truth as absolute.

*Not that I am any kind of philosopher.

4.

Shame on the New York Times for its headline, "For Catholics, a Door to Absolution is Reopened." The article is about the church's promotion of indulgences — which are decidedly not the same as absolution, and which have never had the door closed, having always been available. The Times notes that the tradition of indulgences is "one of the most complicated to explain," then proceeds to do a rotten job of explaining it. In particular is the omission of the crucial point that Purgatory is a process of purification, of making us more like God so we can enter his heaven, not a place in space-time where one serves a sentence of days or years. (Hat tip to Science and Religion News.)

5.

When Pluto was removed from the list of planets, it became the first discovered member in a brand-new class of space objects: the dwarf planets. In a way, this is actually a promotion, not a demotion. But apparently a lot of people are emotionally attached to Pluto as a planet. In 2007, the State of New Mexico (home of Pluto's discoverer, Clyde Tombaugh) declared Pluto officially a planet. (Hat tip to Spaceports blog.) This reminds me of the apocryphal tale of one of the Appalachian states (Tennessee?) trying to declare the mathematical constant pi as equal to exactly 3.

At right: Image of Pluto and its moons by the Hubble Space Telescope (courtesy of NASA).

6.

If you are Catholic, and the Pope himself told you to your face that you were wrong on some issue, would you reconsider your position? Apparently, Nancy Pelosi would not. She shows no signs of easing from her pro-choice stance despite a face-to-face reprimand from Pope Benedict XVI. One prays that at least a seed was planted.

7.

Until now, the Alavesia fly was an insect known only from amber fossils from the Cretaceous period, before the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs and many other species. Now two species of living Alavesia have been found in Namibia and have been dubbed "living fossils" by the media. A completely new suborder of insects, the Mantophasmatodea, was discovered as well. There is still much we do not know about the mysterious world of living things. It's no surprise the new discoveries were insects; there are an estimated six to ten million species of insects, but only about a million have been described.

Above: Space shuttle Columbia lifting off at the beginning of STS-107, its 28th and final mission. Courtesy of NASA.

To NASA, it's STS-107. To most of the rest of the world, it was the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster of 2003. A briefcase-sized chunk of foam weighing a little over a pound hit the orbiter's wing at 800 feet per second — that's about 550 miles per hour — damaging the thermal protection system (TPS). The compromised TPS was not adequate to the 3000° F reentry temperatures, and on its landing approach, the shuttle broke up into a handful of fireballs over Texas and Louisiana.

The shuttle disaster happened on my birthday. It's the worst birthday I have ever had.

This catastrophic event recalled to mind the Challenger disaster of 1986, seventeen years and four days earlier. I was in elementary school, and they wheeled a TV into our classroom so we could watch the shuttle explode over the Atlantic Ocean.

Stephanie Barr is a NASA engineer who writes the blog Rocket Scientist. She was part of the STS-107 team, and has a blog post remembering the Columbia tragedy. Go over and read it right now. I'll wait.

Then come back and tell me where you were when the Challenger and Columbia disasters happened.

The first photographic images of exoplanets (planets orbiting stars other than our Sun) have recently been reported in sources including Scientific American, Space.com, and NASA. Exoplanets are typically discovered through indirect observation. Direct observation and photography of these worlds is notoriously difficult for a host of reasons: their tiny size (by definition, a planet must be smaller than even a dwarf star), their dimness, and their relatively close proximity to their parent stars, whose bright light drowns them out.

The image pictured comes from the University of California at Berkeley and depicts a planet orbiting a star called Fomalhaut. This composite image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows the planet's position in 2004 (bottom) and 2006 (top); from these data astronomers have calculated and graphed the planet's orbital path. Fomalhaut and its planet are relatively nearby, about 25 light years away.

Another amazing image consists of a system of three exoplanets, pictured at left, which have been detected orbiting a star with the unassuming name HR 8799. The Keck Observatory, which sits at the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, claims the honor of creating these images.

There is a catch in calling these "the first" images, though. The devil is in the details, which not even many of the science writers reporting these images seem to have caught. As a matter of fact, at least two direct images of exoplanets already exist! I should know, because I wrote an article about them last month. One was taken as far back as 2004, and the other was reported (again, incorrectly as "the first") earlier this year. Oh, how quickly these science writers forget!

Neither the Fomalhaut nor the HR 8799 images are the first direct images of exoplanets.

As nearly as I can tell, the "firsts" for these images are this: the Fomalhaut images seem to be the first planet discovered through direct observation of visible light. The HR 8799 system images seem to be the first family of exoplanets discovered through direct observation of infrared light. The previously existing images I mentioned above, on the other hand, were discovered through the indirect methods that so far have been the main way of detecting exoplanets; the images were created only later.

All of these images are exciting. Planets outside our solar system intrigue the imagination! But please, I wish the science reporters would do a little fact checking and get their stories straight.