Category Archives: Science

The rats dunnit

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Terry L. Hunt, anthropology professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, proposes a new explanation (PDF) for the environmental degradation of Easter Island.

What Hunt believes happened is that people brought rats with them, and the population of rats mushroomed (“the rat population could have exceeded 3.1 million”). The rats fed on the island’s palm nuts, and that’s what led to the deforestation.

His theory undermines the validity of Easter Island as a 1:1 parable for the consequences of population and deforestation; he thinks it’s unlikely that the local population grew to as many as 15,000 people, or that it was man’s deforestation of the islands (for building and fuel) that rendered it inhabitable.

The article is a long one with a lot of detail on how Hunt came to his conclusions. Reluctantly, btw.

The great divide

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I haven’t been reading much nonfiction lately (although my dad has given a copy of Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf by Ben Hogan, which I’ll be looking at after work today, lol) but The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine sounds way too interesting to pass up:

“The Female Brain” weaves together more than 1,000 scientific studies from the fields of genetics, molecular neuroscience, fetal and pediatric endocrinology, and neurohormonal development. It is also significantly based on her own clinical work at the Women’s and Teen Girls’ Mood and Hormone Clinic, which she founded at UCSF 12 years ago. It is the only psychiatric facility in the country with such a comprehensive focus.

Although I’m wary of over-intellectualizing my fiction writing, I have another motive besides straight curiosity for my interest in the book: in my current WIP I’ve moved to third person, so instead of a first-person female narrator observing men (something I’ve spent some time researching, ha ha) I’m going to have to hover a bit within a man’s head — oooh, scary!

(Or maybe not. According to the article on Brizendine’s book, “Thoughts about sex enter women’s brains once every couple of days; for men, thoughts about sex occur every minute.” So to make my guy authentic, all I need to do is have him think about sex all the time! How hard can that be? :-D)

You’ve probably also caught the AP story on the recent RWA conference by Kate Brumback, which reports that a growing percentage of romance readers are male (22 percent in 2004, up from from 7 percent in 2002).

That article includes a bit about Don’t Look Down, the “military romance” collaboration between Jennifer Crusie and former Green Beret Bob Mayer.

I read the book on Friday (staying up until waaaay past my bedtime to finish it btw — when will I learn?) If you want to write commercial fiction, this is a great book to mull over — the characters are so quickly drawn, the pacing triptrops along–and then there’s the link-up between Lucy & J.T., crafted with its built-in reality check:

Mayer and Crusie met at the Maui Writers Conference three years ago. Both were looking to do something different, and they decided to collaborate. Crusie writes the parts that come from a woman’s point of view, while Mayer weighs in with the male perspective.

“Usually, you have women writing the male point of view, too. I read some sometimes and go, ‘No, that’s not what the guy is really thinking,’ ” Mayer said.

“He’s actually thinking about sex.” ha ha ha Mayer didn’t really say that :-)

I plan to read the book a second time as a writer, just to pick apart the male female stuff. For example, when the narrative follows Lucy, that’s how she’s referenced — by her first name. When it follows J.T., he’s referenced by Wilder, his last name — the only time he’s called “J.T.” is in dialogue, or when Lucy is thinking about him. It’s a subtle thing but it alone really masculinizes his piece of the story. How cool is that?

From Renaissance Lit to Neuroscience

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Read a review (no longer online, sorry) of The Creative Brain: The Science of Genius by Nancy C. Andreasen. She was a Renaissance Lit professor who went on to study neuroscience. How’s that for a sweet jump?

The book is about the neuroscience of creativity.

The reviewer, Nigel Leary, offers a caveat to the assertions in Andreasen’s book: while they are backed by studies, much research remains to be done. Nonetheless, it seems likely that creativity is marked by its own, unique neural processes, some sort of momentary disorganization — free association — that while “remarkably similar” to “psychotic states of mania, depression, or schizophrenia” yields not misery but scientific and artistic epiphanies.

When life gives you toxic waste . . .

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Not recommended you make lemonade, but it turns out there might be some good that can come of it.

Scientists are racing to identify the weird microorganisms growing in Berkeley Pit Lake in Butte, Montana, before it’s cleaned up.

The “lake” was once a copper mine. It filled with water when the mine was closed 24 years ago.

Dissolved metal compounds such as iron pyrites give the lake a pH of 2.5 that makes it impossible for most aquatic life to survive. In 1995 Stierle discovered novel forms of fungi and bacteria in the lake. More recently her team has found a strain of the pithomyces fungi producing a compound that binds to a receptor that causes migraines and could block headaches, while a strain of penicillium fungi makes a different compound that inhibits the growth of lung cancer cells.

This week they reveal that a novel compound called berkelic acid from another new strain of penicillium fungus reduces the rate of ovarian cancer cell growth by 50 per cent (Journal of Organic Chemistry, vol 71, p 5357).

Wild.

Take that, deathists!

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In February, I blogged about Aubrey de Grey, the Brit who thinks science may help us live far longer than we do today.

Other scientists, it turns out, are bothered by de Grey. Gee, what a surprise. It’s another example of how the scientific community, when confronted with new ideas, reacts emotionally instead of rationally — which is not only unseemly, but also a breach of public trust.

The issue in question doesn’t have to be earth-shattering, even — as I posted here, when George Brooks figured out that lactic acid doesn’t cause post-exercise muscle soreness, he was harassed for thirty years: he had trouble getting grants funded or papers published. Over lactic acid. C’mon, guys, RELAX.

In de Grey’s case, the scrapping took an interesting twist last year when Technology Review and de Grey’s charitable foundation, the Methuselah Foundation, put together a $20,000 prize for anyone who could prove that de Grey’s anti-aging prescription was “so wrong that it was unworthy of learned debate.”

Nobody was able to claim the prize, although Technology Review‘s admission of that point is a bit mealy-mouthed:

In the end, the judges felt that no submission met the criterion of the challenge and disproved SENS, although they unanimously agreed that one submission, by Preston W. Estep and his colleagues, was the most eloquent. The judges also noted, however, that de Grey had not convincingly defended SENS and that many of his ideas seemed somewhat fanciful.

LOL

Translation: “nobody came close, but how BEAUTIFULLY written their failed arguments were!!!! And even if they lost, de Grey didn’t win either, so nyah nyah nyah!!!”

Me, I’m not so sure I’d want to live 1000 years, although I’m hoping to beat the actuary tables. OTOH, scientists need to welcome — not just tolerate, but welcome — odd ideas and challenges to their thinking.

Because as I noted in my post about Brooks, the public is poorly served when scientists care more about preserving the status quo than, well, science.

Regrow your teeth?

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Looks like it’s actually possible. Via CBC.ca:

The treatment, called low-intensity pulsed ultrasound, massages the gums to stimulate jaws, encourage growth in the roots of teeth and aid healing in dental tissue.

“If the root is broken, it can now be fixed,” said Dr. Tarak El-Bialy of the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry. “And because we can regrow the teeth root, a patient could have his own tooth rather than foreign objects in his mouth.”

Bring it on :-)

The world’s deepest hole

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Man. Oh man. Seven miles.

The Russians did it–it took them twenty four years. They were stopped by the heat.

Despite the scientists’ efforts to combat the heat by refrigerating the drilling mud before pumping it down, at twelve kilometers the drill began to approach its maximum heat tolerance. At that depth researchers had estimated that they would encounter rocks at 100°C (212°F), but the actual temperature was about 180°C (356°F)– much higher than anticipated. At that level of heat and pressure, the rocks began to act more like a plastic than a solid, and the hole had a tendency to flow closed whenever the drill bit was pulled out for replacement. Forward progress became impossible . . .

A bunch of old theories about the Earth’s crust were disproven by that drill. I can remember being taught some of them in school — like that the crust is granite over a layer of basalt. Nope. ‘Tisn’t either.

The article’s by Alan Bellows.

The aliens have landed????

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No joke!

As bizarre as it may seem, the sample jars brimming with cloudy, reddish rainwater in Godfrey Louis’s laboratory in southern India may hold, well, aliens. In April, Louis, a solid-state physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University, published a paper in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Astrophysics and Space Science in which he hypothesizes that the samples — water taken from the mysterious blood-colored showers that fell sporadically across Louisâ’s home state of Kerala in the summer of 2001 — contain microbes from outer space.

They don’t have any DNA, but they seem to reproduce. Wild stuff. Click to read the full article, written by Jebediah Reed in Popular Science.

War on chemistry

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This seems an awful shame: a variety of government agencies are using a variety of pretexts (including the War on Terror, anti-drug laws, and even regulations governing the use of fireworks) to crack down on companies that offer DIY home chemistry kits.

Steve Silberman has the story covered in Wired.

I can understand the impulse to ban these things. But I think we’ve crossed the line from reasonable caution to cut-off-our-noses paranoia.

I mean for crying out loud — we can’t even allow chemistry experiments in school any more?

The chemophobia that’s put a damper on home science has also invaded America’s classrooms, where hands-on labs are being replaced by liability-proof teacher demonstrations with the explicit message Don’t try this at home. A guide for teachers of grades 7 through 12 issued by the American Chemical Society in 2001 makes the prospect of an hour in the lab seem fraught with peril: “Every chemical, without exception, is hazardous. Did you know that oxygen is poisonous if inhaled at a concentration a bit greater than its natural concentration in the air?” More than half of the suggested experiments in a multimedia package for schools called “You Be the Chemist,” created in 2004 by the Chemical Educational Foundation, are to be performed by the teacher alone, leaving students to blow up balloons (with safety goggles in place) or answer questions like “How many pretzels can you eat in a minute?”

“A lot of schools don’t have chemistry labs anymore,”  explains CEF educational coordinator Laurel Brent. “We want to give kids lessons that tie in to their real-world experiences without having them deal with a lot of strange chemicals in bottles that have big long names.” 

“Big long names”???? You must be kidding me.

You know, my kid is bright, I’ll hand you that. But if she tests bright, I can guarantee you one reason is that the adults in her family NEVER talk down to her — we NEVER “kidify” our explanations of things, or dumb down our vocabulary.

When we’re looking at insects, for example, I don’t just do “oh, look at the fly. Oh, look at the beetle.” We catch it. We pull out the field guide. We do genus and species. We read about why a bug is a bug, why a Painted Lady is a brush-footed butterfly.

And she is a little sponge — she picks it up, quickly, and retains it. For two reasons: because I provide her the information, and because I’m obviously enthusiastic about it, which is infectious.

Meanwhile, at school — and ours is a good school, comparatively — the curriculum doesn’t bother providing this level of information. And I take issue with that.

I mean, life cycle of a butterfly is well and good, but if you repeat that the scientific name of a Painted Lady butterfly is Vanessa cardui, kids will learn it. Maybe not all the kids, but some of them will — and what’s more, I’m convinced it has a snowball effect. It’s like opening a door and showing a kid just how much information is out there. They naturally increase their capacity to learn, based on a sampling of just how much there is to learn.

But what are we doing, collectively, instead? We’re teaching kids to be passive. Worse yet, fearful.

Many students are ill at ease when faced with actual compounds and lab equipment for the first time at school. A study of “Chemistry anxiety”  in the Journal of Chemical Education concluded in 2000 that “the presence of this anxiety in our students could be a contributing factor in the overall poor performance of high school students in science.” (Commonly reported fears included “lighting the Bunsen burner,” and “getting chemicals on skin.”) Restrictions on hands-on chemical experience is “a problem that has been building for 10 or 15 years, driven by liability and safety concerns,” says John Moore, editor in chief of the JCE.

“The liability issues are a cop-out,” says Bassam Shakhashiri, the author of a four-volume guide to classroom chemistry who has taught for 36 years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Kids are being robbed of the joy of discovering things for themselves.” Compared with students in previous generations, he says, undergraduates raised on hands-off science seem passive: “They want someone to do things for them. Even those who become chem majors and grad students are not as versatile in the lab, because their experiences in middle school and high school were so limited. This is a terrible shame. By working with real substances, you learn how to ask the right questions about the physical world, which is half the battle in science.” 

What this guy doesn’t perhaps realize is that it’s starting much, much younger than middle school. I had the pleasure of accompanying a field trip with my daughter’s 2nd grade class last week. They’re studying pond life. One of my responsibilities was to stand on the edge of a pond and help kids scoop mud from the bottom to find critters living in it.

I was astonished to find that some of the kids were bizarrely timid. Weirdly passive. They would sort of touch the strainer to the water and then, almost instantaneously, say “I can’t find anything.”

This floors me. You get a kid outside, out of the classroom, he’s got a chance to maybe catch a real life pollywog or something really awesome or creepy — and he doesn’t even have the most basic impulse to plunge a strainer into the water and DIG?

Argh. Argh.

So no wonder that by the time these kids get to middle school, they’ve progressed from passive to fearful — to being afraid not only of fire and chemicals on the skin but of “big long names.”

But such fear is not natural. It’s learned.

Shame on us, for condemning our children’s minds to darkness that way. Shame.

Lactic acid reflux

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If you’ve ever been sore a day or so after a workout, you’ve probably “known” that the cause of the pain was a build-up of lactic acid in your muscles.

After all, that’s what “they” always told us.

Well, turns out, “they” were wrong. (NY Times article; registration required.)

Not just a little wrong. Really, really wrong. Not only is lactic acid no culprit where post-exercise muscle soreness is concerned. On the contrary, lactic acid is a good thing.

Lactic acid is actually a fuel, not a caustic waste product. Muscles make it deliberately, producing it from glucose, and they burn it to obtain energy. The reason trained athletes can perform so hard and so long is because their intense training causes their muscles to adapt so they more readily and efficiently absorb lactic acid.

But here’s the part of this article (reported by Gina Kolata) that really made me roll my eyes. George Brooks, the guy that figured this out, was pilloried by other scientists.

Dr. Brooks said he published the finding in the late 70’s. Other researchers challenged him at meetings and in print.

“I had huge fights, I had terrible trouble getting my grants funded, I had my papers rejected,” Dr. Brooks recalled.

Look at those dates. The late 1970s. Some thirty years he has to fight for this.

I’ll tell you something. You hear all the time about how the public mistrusts journalists, and the public mistrusts Congress. Well, the public isn’t very well-served when scientists heap scorn on other scientists for challenging received wisdom, either.

And lest you think, “no big deal, it’s only muscle soreness,” may I introduce you to Gilbert Ling, a highly credentialed scientist who’s been arguing (also for decades) that one of our most treasured beliefs about human cells — that they are sacks of liquid that use a “sodium pump” to transmit molecules across their exterior membranes — is also totally bogus.

Ling furthermore claims that our erroneous assumptions about how cells work has perverted much of contemporary medical research.

Is he right? I don’t know.

Can we lay people trust other scientists to set aside their egos long enough to give his arguments the merit they deserve?

I’m not holding my breath.

/end rant.