I’ll be speaking tomorrow at SUNY Plattsburgh on the occasion of the publication of the new edition of Parasite Rex. I’ll be talking about the many ways in which parasites have infiltrated my mind since the book first came out a decade ago. I hope some Loominaries will be able to attend, and be infiltrated as well.
Where: SUNY Plattburgh, Plattsburgh NY. Room 206, Yokum Hall. (Directions and campus map)
When: Friday, April 15, 12:15 pm.
More details here.
As a fish swims over the ocean floor, it’s being watched by hundreds of rocks. The rocks are actually the eyes of a chiton, an armoured relative of snails and other molluscs. Perhaps uniquely among living animals, it sees the world through lenses of limestone, and its eyes literally erode as it gets older.
Chitons are protected by a shell consisting of eight plates. The plates are dotted with hundreds of small eyes called ocelli. Each one contains a layer of pigment, a retina and a lens. People have known about the ocelli for years, but no one knew what they were made from or how much the chitons could actually see with them.
Daniel Speiser from the University of California, Santa Barbara has solved the mystery by studying the charmingly named West Indian fuzzy chiton. It all started with a surprising bath. Speiser had removed the lenses from a chiton and dipped them in a mildly acidic liquid, which was meant to clean them. Instead, it quickly dissolved them!
The vast majority of animal lenses are made of proteins, which should be unharmed by weak acid. The chiton lenses were ...
An interview with me is running on the latest episode of “Consilience,” a podcast on science and skepticism out of South Africa. The conversation, which takes up the second half of the podcast, covers lots of ground. We talked about my new book, A Planet of Viruses, the secret weapons whales use for fighting cancer, and the enduring, tiresome mistake people make of thinking of bloggers as angry children. Check it out.
What’s the News: Geologists have known for years that tectonic plates affect climate patterns. Now they say that the opposite is also true, finding that intensifying climate events can move tectonic plates. Using models based on known monsoonal and plate movement patterns, geologists say that the Indian Plate has accelerated by about 20% over the past 10 million years. “The significance of this finding lies in recognising for the first time that long-term climate changes have the potential to act as a force and influence the motion of tectonic plates,” Australian National University researcher Giampiero Iaffaldano told COSMOS.
How the Heck:
The researchers plugged information from research on monsoonal patterns and the Indian Plate’s movement into a model, which indicated that the monsoonal erosion that has battered the eastern Himalaya Mountains for the past 10 million years erodes enough material to account for the plate’s counter-clockwise rotation. By gradually shaving off rocks from the eastern flank and decreasing crustal thickness, the monsoonal rains essentially lighten the load on the ...
What’s the News: Japan raised its assessment of the severely damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to Level 7, “Major Accident,” the highest ranking on the International Atomic Energy Agency’s International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale. The explosion at Chernobyl in 1986 is the only other nuclear accident to be ranked at Level 7. Both accidents were extremely severe, the two largest nuclear power accidents ever—but there are some big, important differences between them.
What’s Similar:
A Level 7 accident is a “major release of radioactive material with widespread health and environmental effects requiring implementation of planned and extended countermeasures,” according to the IAEA. Both plants clearly meet these criteria: Fukushima will require an extensive clean-up effort, and the international community is still working to make the area near Chernobyl safe.
The situation at Fukushima also qualifies as Level 7 by the numbers. Japanese officials estimate the reactors have released between 370,000 and ...
Perusing Google Earth’s quilt of aerial images is good for hours of stalkerish fun (Find your house! Find your ex’s house!). But every now and then, Google’s geo toy can also bend the fabric of reality—literally:
Something’s wrong with this picture…
Get ready for a bumpy ride!
Artist and programmer Clement Valla has discovered 60 strange, beautiful scenes where Google Earth’s mapping has gone awry, as you may have seen in a post on Boing Boing. So what’s really happening in these pictures? Here’s Valla’s explanation:
The images are the result of mapping a 2-dimensional image onto a 3-dimensional surface. Basically, the satellite images are flat representations in which you only see the topmost object—in this case you see the bridge, and not the landmass or water below the bridge. However, the 3D models in Google Earth contain only the information for the terrain–the landmass or the bottom of the ocean.
When the flat image is projected onto this 3-dimensional surface, the bridges are projected down onto the terrain below the bridge. In other words, the bridge appears to follow the terrain that it actually goes over.
The view is further complicated ...
At the end of May, 2010, the European Space Agency’s orbiting Herschel telescope was pointed toward a dark cloud in space over 2500 light years away. What it saw may solve a bit of a scientific mystery… and is also truly beautiful:
[Click to ennebulanate.]
This object is called IC5146, and consists of the Cocoon nebula on the left, and two long streamers of gas extending to the right. Herschel is very sensitive to cold dust in the very far infrared; in this image blue shows gas and dust emitting at a wavelength of 70 microns (the reddest color the human eye can see is roughly 0.7 microns), green is 250 microns, and red 500 microns — that’s over 700 times the longest wavelength light the eye can detect.
The Cocoon nebula is a well-known gas cloud being lit up by a massive, hot star in its center. In the visible light image inset here — grab the stunning high-res version to compare to the Herschel shot — the dust is dark, since it absorbs the kind ...
Heads up, this article has *spoilers* about the movie Hanna.
Joe Wright’s new film, Hanna, staring Saoirse Ronan is being hailed as the anti-Sucker Punch for its portrayal of a rich, rounded, and compelling female lead. Hanna is a young woman in her late teens (her age is indeterminate) who can beat you up, break your neck, and shoot you down six ways from Sunday. Why is she able to do that? Well, that right there is an interesting question. You see, Hanna was genetically engineered to have “high intelligence, muscle mass, and no pity.” But here’s the rub: she was also raised to be a trained assassin.
So who is to credit (or perhaps, to blame) for Hanna’s ability to crush faces with naught but her hands and an emotionless grimace? Is it her genes or her training?
The film ostensibly portrays Hanna as a naive heroine striving against her draconian and demonic “mother” figure, Marissa Wiegler, with the help of her noble father, Erik Heller. But I submit that is not the case: I believe the “teaching” and “nurture” Heller gives to Hanna makes him as much a monster ...
Sensory and rheological properties of Polish commercial mayonnaise.
“Sensory and rheological analyses were performed to compare seven commercial mayonnaises having various fat contents and containing, or not, thickening and stabilizing agents. It was found that mayonnaise samples differed in their sensory and rheological properties. The samples with a higher fat content scored higher in sensory analysis than the low-fat ones. The mayonnaises studied showed non-Newtonian, pseudoplastic flow with yield stress and thixotropy. All mayonnaises, although to a different degree, exhibited a decrease in the apparent viscosity at constant shear. The mayonnaise samples which contained thickeners and stabilizers had a greater rheological stability.”
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Photo: flickr/ ryPix
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One of the aspects of genetics which I think tends to reoccur is that people have a fixation on the two extreme ends of visible genetic inheritance. On the one hand you have discrete Mendelian or quasi-Mendelian traits where most of the variation is controlled by only a few genes, and which may exhibit dominance/recessive expression patterns. And you also have the classic quantitative traits which exhibit continuous variation and a normal distribution. Mendelism leads to strange ideas about atavism/throwbacks, and a promiscuous utilization of the idea of dominance/recessivity (e.g., “non-white genes are dominant to white genes”). Continuous traits are more comprehensible in their confusion, as they are the intuitions which led to the models of “blending inheritance” which were in the air before the triumph of Mendelian genetics in the first decade of the 20th century. But they lead to the logical inference that variation should slowly “blend away” through admixture. This was a major problem with 19th century models of evolution through natural selection; blending eliminated the variation which was necessary for the action of selection to be effective. A blending model also explains why there is a common perception that racial admixture will lead to the elimination ...
So I’ve been seeing headlines like this today: Physicians Recommend Different Treatments for Patients Than They Choose for Themselves, Study Finds. Here are the numbers:
A total of 242 physicians returned the colon cancer questionnaire (response rate of 48.4 percent), and when asked to imagine they had received the cancer diagnosis, 37.8 percent of physicians chose the surgical procedure with a higher rate of death, but a lower rate of adverse effects. Conversely, when asked to make a recommendation for a patient, only 24.5 percent of physicians chose this option.
The second scenario asked 1,600 physicians to imagine that a new strain of avian influenza had just arrived in the U.S. One group of physicians were asked to imagine they had been infected, and the other group was asked to imagine that his or her patient was infected. One treatment was available for this strain of influenza: an immunoglobulin treatment, without which persons who contract flu have a 10 percent death rate and a 30 percent hospitalization rate with an average stay of one week. The treatment would reduce the rate of adverse events by half, however it also causes death in 1 percent of patients and permanent neurological paralysis in ...
This is quite simply the bestest thing ever.
Man, if my school had an assembly like this for us when I was a kid, I might’ve stuck with studying dinosaurs. Also? I want one for Dragon*Con.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Hard to believe it’s almost over - something to be proud about I guess. Seems quite appropriate to have the clip narrated by William Shatner.
I’ve been posting some amazing time lapse videos of the night sky here lately, and I’ve been trying to set the bar pretty high. I like all the ones I’ve seen, but they have to have something special, something that sets them apart, for me to embed them here.
This one does just that. Earlier this month, photographer Terje Sorgjerd went to Mt. Teide in the Canary Islands to photograph the sky. He was upset when a Saharan sandstorm blew across the sky, ruining his video… or so he thought. What really happened was magic. Pay attention 30 seconds in to see the stunning results*:
Simply breathtaking. The dust blows overhead, glowing golden as it’s illuminated from below by city lights, while above and beyond the Milky Way itself ponderously looms into view.
As the galaxy shows itself, look at the dark lane bisecting it. Feathery and ethereal, those dark fingers and tendrils are actually vast complexes of dust, long chains of carbon-based molecules floating in between the stars. Created when stars are born, age, and die, this dust litters the plane of the galaxy. Seen edge-on, it absorbs and blocks the light from stars behind it, creating ...
Zack Ajmal has been methodically working his way through issues in the public genomic data sets. Often it just involves noting duplicate samples across data sets, which need to be accounted for. But sometimes there seem to be problems within the uploaded data sets, for example relatively close related individuals. Today he highlights an issue which early on was noticeable in the Behar et al. data set:
Behar as in the Behar et al paper/dataset and not the Indian state of Bihar. The Behar dataset contains 4 samples of Paniya, which apparently is a Dravidian language of some Scheduled Tribes in Kerala.
I had always been suspicious of those four samples since one of them had admixture proportions similar to other South Indians but the other three were like Southeast Asians.
…
Since the Austroasiatic Paniya samples originated from Behar et al, I guess at some point before the Behar data being submitted to the GEO database the Paniyas got mislabeled.
I pulled down the Behar et al. data set too, and the Paniya just look weird enough that I just avoided them. Ideally this sort of stuff should be caught, but errors happen. Best to get as many eyeballs looking over everything.
The Pith: In this post I review a paper which covers the evolutionary dimension of human childbirth. Specifically, the traits and tendencies peculiar to our species, the genes which may underpin those traits and tendencies, and how that may relate to broader public health considerations.
Human babies are special. Unlike the offspring of organisms such as lizards or snakes human babies are exceedingly helpless, and exhibit an incredible amount of neoteny in relation to adults. This is true to some extent for all mammals, but obviously there’s still a difference between a newborn foal and a newborn human. One presumes that the closest analogs to human babies are those of our closest relatives, the “Great Apes.” And certainly the young of chimpanzees exhibit the same element of “cuteness” which is appealing to human adults. Still there is a difference of degree here. As a childophobic friend observed human infants resemble “larvae.” The ultimate and proximate reason for this relative underdevelopment of human newborns is usually attributed to our huge brains, which run up against the limiting factor of the pelvic opening of women. If a ...
Mark Liberman at Language Log has looked through the Science paper Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa. Overall he seems to think it is an interesting paper, but he has some pointed criticisms. Here’s the utility of the post: Liberman uses analogies to domains (e.g., genomics) which are comprehensible to me. My main issue with linguistic evolution is that I’m so ignorant that I barely understand the features being discussed. I may know their dictionary.com definition, but I have pretty much no deep comprehension with which to test the inferences against. By analogy, imagine trying to evaluate a morphological cladistic model with no understanding of anatomy. Here’s the part which may be of particular interest to readers of this weblog:
However, this combination of coarse binning into ranges, for functionally-defined subsets of elements with radically different numbers of members, seems to me to be much more problematic for Atkinson’s purposes. It’s as if a human genomic survey made geographically localized counts of the number of alleles involved in color vision and in blood physiology, divided each set of counts into a few bins (“a little variation”, “a ...
I’ve been a bit skeptical of the details of Greg Mortenson’s story in his book Three Cups of Tea for years. It seems be to so predicated on contemporary biases about the basic universal goodness of human nature. I hoped everything was true, but it seemed too good to be true. Other people who worked in Afghan NGOs tended to tell a more gritty and gray story, so either Mortenson was embellishing, or he had a special magic touch. Since I don’t believe in magic touches, I wondered as to the nature of embellishment.
Now 60 Minutes has made some allegations as the veracity of Mortenson’s narrative in Three Cups of Tea, and more importantly the finances and efficacy of his charity. In Mortenson’s response he seems to admit embellishment in terms of the “hook” in Three Cups of Tea. But the work of his charity is much more important than the details of some book, so we’ll see how that pans out. Not all investigative reports exhibit proper context, so I don’t necessarily assume that CBS News is giving the most accurate accounting.
UPDATE: SOLVED by Jeff at 12:10
Is everybody ready for us to run another bonus riddle? Okay, you talked me into it! We’ll have the bonus riddle ready for your consideration Monday, May the 2nd. In a few days I’ll put up the bonus riddle rules and a list of who will be eligible to submit guesses. That means there are just three more chances to get your name on the list. If you haven’t solved a regular riddle yet this cycle, you might want to work on that.
For today, I think I’ll mess with your minds a little. I’m taking today’s answer from the SciFi genre, so… GET YOUR GEEK ON!
Atlantic Tall Ships Gallery, this is the "Amazon" in 1861 - author unknown
This does not exist in the “real world”. Yet. That we know of.
Very recent experiments with human DNA by a Nobel Prize winning scientist show indications that we may have this potential encoded naturally.
We think of this in relation to modern science fiction, but the idea has actually been kicked around for centuries.
US Gov/CIA educational documents, reported UFO in New Jersey, July 31, 1952 -- enlarges slightly
Some forms of this would cause immense issues in ethics and law. Really staggering issues.
While other forms of this same thing present no problems whatsoever.
Still, its application would solve a whole boatload of serious problems we’re currently facing.
Gotta' love quantum mechanics!
As a plot device, any third-grader with a taste for SciFi can discuss this.
Although mostly associated with SciFi, it’s not limited to one genre. You’ll trip over it in works of fantasy, spiritualism, and philosophy.
It’s even shown up in a Disney movie. Of course, what hasn’t shown up in a Disney movie?
William Shatner as Captain Kirk, Star Trek - image owned by Paramount, all rights reserved
This has been offered as a possible explanation for cases involving cryptozoology and spontaneous human combustion.
Within the past 10 years there has been application made to the United States Patent Office for a device to accomplish this artificially.
If it works, it would be quite the deux ex machina.
Iconic image
Are you intrigued? Think you already know the answer? Give it a guess – I’m waiting in the comments!
Reassurance for you from Tom. Don't you all feel better now?
What’s the Context:
What’s the News: Researchers have grown neurons from the cells of people with schizophrenia, in a study published online yesterday in Nature, the first time a complex mental illness has been modeled with living cells in a lab. This approach provides a new way to probe the little-understood biological processes underlying the disease and to test potential drug treatments. In preliminary experiments, the researchers found that the neurons weren’t as interconnected as healthy neurons are, and that individual patients’ neurons differ in their reaction to various drugs used to treat schizophrenia.
How the Heck:
The researchers took small samples of skin cells from four patients with schizophrenia, and programmed the cells to become induced pluripotent stem cells, a process that turns tissue-specific adult cells into undifferentiated stem cells. By treating those stem cells a certain way and putting them in a particular medium, the researchers nudged the stem cells to turn into neurons.
By infecting the cells with ...
