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As I mentioned on Friday, when I first heard about the Italian Space Agency’s announcement of water on Mars, I was skeptical. Various space agencies have cried wolf on major discoveries before – most famously, with “NASA Confirms Evidence That Liquid Water Flows on Today’s Mars (it’s actually sand) and Discovery of “Arsenic-bug” Expands Definition of Life (it wasn’t, and it doesn’t). This is not a conspiracy — it’s just overexcitement. Scientists work hard to keep themselves free of confirmation bias, but they’re still human, and sometimes they still see what they want to see.

Given this history, how do we know that it really is a wolf this time? I’ve found that it helps to ask the obvious question.

Aside… This is what bothers me most about global warming deniers. They will go on for pages and pages about July temperatures in Paraguay, without even trying to answer the obvious question: why did global temperatures start to increase at exactly the time when we started releasing into the atmosphere a gas that is known to increase temperatures?

In the case of water on Mars, here is the obvious question. We know for sure that there is liquid water on one of the nine planets in the Solar System: here on Earth. The research team claims that there is liquid water under the polar ice caps on Mars. Could the same techniques they used have detected water under Earth’s polar ice caps, where we know there is water?

It’s right there in the second sentence of the paper that published the announcement (Orosei et al. 2018): “Radio echo sounding (RES) is a suitable technique to resolve this dispute, because low-frequency radars have been used extensively and successfully to detect liquid water at the bottom of terrestrial polar ice sheets.”

The technique they used is the IN SPAAAAAAAAAAAACE version of a commonly-used technique called ground-penetrating radar (GPR). GPR involves transmitting radio waves into the ground, then listening for the echoes of those waves reflecting off various underground layers. The strength of the return signals reflected off each layer tells you what the layer is made of, and nothing reflects quite like water. And that water-related pattern is exactly that kind of reflection that the research team saw on Mars.

Obvious question answered, wolf found. We really did it this time!

We found water on Mars!

We found water on Mars!

We found water on Mars!

(“We” = humans)

I’ll admit that when I first heard the news, I was skeptical. Although we try to avoid it, scientists can sometimes fall victim to their own wishful thinking just like anyone else can. But I read the report, and the evidence is solid. We really did it this time.

We’ve known for a while that there is H₂O on Mars, as water vapor in the atmosphere and as layers of dust and ice near the north and south poles. The question was whether we could find liquid water.

The answer came from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft. It carries a radar instrument that broadcasts radio waves at the Martian surface and listens for those waves reflecting back from layers under the surface. When the spacecraft flew over a region near Mars’s south pole – shown below – it picked up echoes from a layer buried below the surface.

The radar echo was so strong that it could only be one thing: liquid water.

There’s a lot more to say about this discovery, but first:

WOW!

One of the most fascinating stories of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election was the story of how a well-planned social media campaign based in Russia may (or may not?) have influenced the result.

There is now no doubt that this campaign existed, according to multiple reliable sources. And the fact that we had no idea at the time should make us very, very worried.

If we didn’t know it at the time, can we at least look back with hindsight understand how it happened? That’s the idea behind a new analysis, published yesterday on my favorite source for news and analysis, FiveThirtyEight.com.

The article describes the research of two professors at Clemson University, Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren. They used Clemson’s Social Media Listening Center to recover tweets from 3,841 Twitter handles associated with the Internet Research Agency, the most prominent of the Russia-based organizations accused of creating fake accounts to influence the election. Their dataset covers the period from June 2015 to December 2017, and includes nearly three million tweets.

The result of the two researchers’ work is a preprint called “Troll Factories: The Internet Research Agency and State-Sponsored Agenda Building,” currently undergoing peer review (PDF available on Warren’s website).

The image below, from the FiveThirtyEight article, shows how the number of tweets from these accounts varies with time.

The best part of all this is that Linvill and Warren have worked with FiveThirtyEight to publish their entire dataset online through FiveThirtyEight’s GitHub account. And I have uploaded their dataset into the SciServer online science platform. If you’re interested in looking at this data with me, send me an email.

Of course, a dataset is only as useful as the questions that you ask of it. So what can we learn from this one? I have no interest in questions that reduce to “lol Trump voters are stupid” – that is neither useful nor even true. What questions will give us insights into how social media can influence public perception? And what questions will give us insights into how to make sure this doesn’t happen again in the 2018 elections?

Here are a few questions off the top of my head:

• How did the topics discussed by these troll accounts change after Trump won the election?
• What strategies did the trolls employ when talking to Democrats?
• If we identify a control sample of accounts who are genuine Trump supporters (or genuine Black Lives Matter activists, etc.) and blindly run a content analysis, can we tell the difference? If so, how?

What research questions occur to you?

The world’s most unexpected Buddhist temple:

This is the Golden Temple of Elista, the capital of the Russian Republic of Kalmykia, on the western shore of the Caspian Sea in European Russia. The Kalmyks migrated here in the 1600s from what is now Mongolia.

Kalmykia is thus the only place outside Asia where the predominant religion is Buddhism.

Explore it yourself!

Bonus entertainment: a full-on flame war in reddit’s r/buddhism: “You must be new here. You don’t want to try to debate with me… You are not an awakened being.”

My colleagues and I are thrilled to announce the latest release of our SciServer online science platform.

SciServer a suite of tools to manage, visualize, and understand large-scale datasets in all areas of science, from astronomy to genomics to soil ecology. SciServer allows anyone to work with Terabytes of data, running server-side analysis and visualization tools in real time, without needed to install anything.

The beating heart of SciServer is SciServer Compute, a browser-based virtual computing environment. Anyone can create a free SciServer account and create analysis scripts in Python, R, or Matlab.

Today’s release is called SciServer Betelgeuse, succeeding the previous system SciServer Altair (#lolSeeWhatWeDidThere). SciServer Betelgeuse adds group functionality for file and data sharing, and also the ability to run asynchronous time- or memory-intensive jobs. We’ve been working on this update for more than two years, and we’re eager to see how everyone can make use of it.

We’re grateful to the generosity of the National Science Foundation (award ACI-1261715) for their generosity in allowing us to create and maintain this resource, forever free to users.

The “we” I keep referring to here is a team of incredibly talented scientists and coders at the Institute for Data-Intensive Engineering and Science (IDIES) at Johns Hopkins University. I’m honored to have been part of this team for the past eighteen years.

And on a personal note, this new release is a major new step in my career. I’ve devoted my entire professional life to finding new ways to bring the real process of science to the world, and this is the realest real way yet.