Blue Sky Studios

Not so very long ago the wizened gatekeepers of scientific orthodoxy staged a vigorous and extremely nasty campaign designed to prevent any possibility that impressionable science students or the great unwashed masses might come to suspect that things in our cosmic neighborhood were ever anything but perfectly peaceful, perfectly ordered, and perfectly safe. It was the middle of the 20th century, a bit over 150 years since the staid scientists at the Royal Society in London had discovered the hard way that stones really can fall from the sky despite their pronouncements to the contrary.

Yet the publication of Worlds in Collision in 1950 – and Ages in Chaos in 1952 – purported to demonstrate that the Earth had suffered some serious cosmic upheavals within the memory of human civilizations. These ideas drove such astronomical lions as Harlow Shapley to use every underhanded method and scheme available to destroy the author and reassure the public once again that, despite all evidence and witness through the ages, stones do NOT fall from the sky, comets do NOT wreak havoc on the Earth, and the perfect clockwork of cosmic orderliness is NOT violated by disorderly events. Thus did the notorious Velikovsky Affair take its place in the annals of science’s ample history of internal turf wars.

Many young people today are quite used to the idea that our planet has been bombarded by cosmic billiard balls of one sort or another, learning about the epochal events that marked transitions from one age to another, usually by causing mass extinctions of life forms and altering the course of evolution. Even children’s books and movies portray the catastrophic events of 65 million years ago when a large asteroid ended the age of the dinosaurs. Yet apart from those now-recognized disasters in the distant past of our planet, scientists have tended to remain skeptical of the notion that such world-shattering events have ever occurred – or been recorded – in the short (~100,000 year) history of human beings on this planet.

Archaeologists, geologists and paleontologists do know that there was a mass extinction of megafauna such as wooly mammoths, giant bison, saber-tooth tigers, etc. in North America and Siberia just 13,000 years ago, when early Americans of the Clovis culture were known to hunt these huge mammals. Some scientists believed that they were driven to extinction by a drastic climate change that began the last ice age, others believed those early human hunters had driven their prey to extinction. But over the last few years a new narrative that reads like a fine detective novel has come to the fore, and it begins with the death of a nearby star 41,000 years ago.

In 2005, nuclear scientist Richard Firestone of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory published research findings that linked the extinction of the mammoths with the supernova explosion of a star just 250 light years from Earth. The initial shockwave hit our planet 34,000 years ago, evidenced by tiny impact craters on mammoth tusks from that time, produced by iron-rich grains that bombarded the Earth at 10,000 kilometers per second. More debris from the explosion was said by the researchers to have formed a comet approximately 10 kilometers in diameter, which hit the Earth 13,000 years ago and caused the extinction.

Now another team of scientists led by anthropologist Douglas Kennett also conclude that a comet was responsible for the extinction of North American megafauna, and have even pinpointed the impact site to somewhere close to Chicago. The event caused an ice age along with the extinction of the giant mammals and disappearance of the human culture that relied upon them for sustenance.

There is of course no universal consensus about this theory despite evidence from many scientific fields, but the authors have stated that a collision so recent in human history underscores the importance of trying to detect and deflect cosmic debris that may be coming our way. And, in the end, we do now know that things are not nearly so peaceful and serene in our neck of the galaxy as scientists once assumed.

Links:

Supernova Explosion May Have Caused Mammoth Extinction
Scientists Say Comet Killed Off Mammoths, Saber-Toothed Tigers

It was bound to happen. Science Daily reports that research from the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil entitled The non-equilibrium nature of culinary evolution has established that regional cuisines don’t evolve much. Even in a small world.

The researchers examined historical food preferences for ‘national’ diets in Britain, France and Brazil, and found that certain staples as well as unique ingredients remain in the cuisines despite modern access to restaurants specializing in regional or ‘national’ foods. And despite the modern availability of regional foods in grocery stores.

In other words, the Irish still love potatoes, the French still eat snails and frogs’ legs, the Germans still love sausages and sauerkraut, the Japanese still rely on fish stock and Central and South Americans still choose tortillas over Wonder Bread. Mediterranean peoples still consume lots of olive oil, and still have longer lives, less heart disease and lower cholesterol than the average American.

One thing that struck me odd in the article’s conclusion was the statement that…

“Some low fitness ingredients present in the initial recipes have a strong difficulty of being replaced and can even propagate during culinary growth. They are like frozen ‘cultural’ accidents.”

“Low fitness?” As in ‘fit’ for what? Last I checked, amaranth was still a high quality grain as well as greens supplying as much nutritional value as spinach (which, next to peppers, are highest in certain vitamins of all foods). Parsley and cilantro are still high-value greens as well, whether in salsa or tabouli. Potatoes – which originated in Peru – are still the closest thing to a ‘perfect food’ that exists, and the lowly chayote of Central America (singled out in this article) is rich in amino acids and vitamin C. It’s an important vegetable not just in Central and South America and the Caribbean, but also in Australia, Africa, Asia and Europe.

I expect that the foods one grows up with, the ones most associated with both family history (grandma’s pasta sauce) as well as ethnic heritage, are strongly imprinted in us as preferences at a young age. So while we might look forward to eating Thai on Wednesday or Mexican on Friday or Italian whenever the opportunity arises, day to day food choices will tend to be those we’re most familiar with. That’s cabbage and potatoes for me. What is it for you?

Fun Links:

American Recipes & History by Region
Chinese Regional Cooking Styles
Hawaii Regional Cuisine
Indian Regional Cuisine

Bird-watching is one of the most popular pastimes in the world, for people from all walks of life. Our fascination with birds in all their sizes, colors and habitats thus makes for a ready field of study in biology, where bird evolution used to maintain a fairly rigorous tree-of-life.

Not so much any longer, since researchers with the Early Bird Assembling the Tree-of-Life Project centered on the Field Museum examined DNA from all major living groups of birds and discovered that phylogenics had it all wrong!

Huge Genome Phylogenic Study of Birds Re-Writes Bird Evolution

As an indicator of just how wrong it was, DNA analysis has determined that falcons – those swift and trainable birds of prey – are NOT closely related to hawks and eagles. Whoa. Spokespersons for the project say the entire understanding of bird evolution will need to be re-written with this new information, and that information itself raises some further questions about concurrent and repeated evolution of certain traits at different times in different families.

“We now have a robust evolutionary tree from which to study the evolution of birds and all their interesting features that have fascinated so many scientists and amateurs for centuries,” Reddy said. “Birds exhibit substantial diversity (largest of the tetrapod groups), and using this ‘family tree’ wwe can begin to understand how this diversity originated as well as how different bird groups are interrelated.”

[Photo Credit: Zina Deretsky, NSF]

Scientists at Indiana University Bloomington and Harvard published a report in Science June 20 describing a protein “clutch” that disengages the bacterial tail from the “tiny but powerful engine” that powers its rotation. The flagellum is the means that many bacterial cells – including Bacillus subtilis used in this research – use to ‘swim’ in liquid environments where they live.

Microscopic ‘Clutch’ Puts Flagellum in Neutral

The clutch mechanism was discovered by accident when the researchers were studying the formation of bacterial “biofilm,” where the cells accumulate and become stationary, biofilms are involved in bacterial infections. It is hoped that the discovery will give nanotechnologists some ideas about how to regulate tiny engines they create in the lab.

“We think it’s pretty cool that evolving bacteria and human engineers arrived at a similar solution to the same problem,” says IU biologist Daniel Kearns, leader of the project.

Way back in 2005 researchers at Texas A&M determined that humor – an appreciation of the absurd hilarity of life – can significantly increase Hope, and that hopefulness helps people cope with stresses in daily life and during illnesses as well.

In January of this year a communications professor at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, demonstrated that in a medical setting, laughter is the best medicine. Humor helps both the doctors and the patients cope. The finding was extended to the workplace and to educational situations as well, eventually reaching the conclusion that regardless of the content, humor seems to be beneficial and productive. It helps to get the point across in almost any situation.

Then on June 12, 2008 Alastaire Clarke published his Pattern Recognition Theory of Humor, which purportedly explains the reason that humor is common to all human societies. In Humor Shown to be Fundamental to Our Success as a Species, Clarke claims that humor is fundamantal to the evolution of human beings, and continues to be important in the cognitive development of infants and children.

Alas, Clarke’s Pattern Recognition Theory can’t tell us what’s funny or why, so it probably won’t be used by comedy writers or clowns to formulate their skits any time soon. And while humor can progress from basic slapstick to childish jokes to ridicule to satire, he does not attempt to explain why slapstick still makes us laugh even if we’ve progressed all the way to dry British satire. A clown would have a handy explanation for that, but I don’t think Clarke asked one. Oh, well.

The articles do make a strong case for the survival value of humor to human beings, and that may be all we really need to know about it.

Links:

Humor Can Increase Hope, Research Shows
Laughter is the Best Medicine

A research scientist at UMich School of Public Health has established through interviews with 475 undergraduates that humans exchange resources (or merely clout) for sex, just like penguins, hummingbirds and other species of beings on this planet. His paper, “Young Adults Attempt Exchanges in Reproductively Relevant Currencies,” is published in this month’s Journal of Evolutionary Psychology.

Not that the idea of trading sex for resources is something unheard of in human society. Or even that in cultures where marriages are arranged among parents and grandparents before the young are old enough to walk, the arrangements are all about relative wealth and social standing – things considered valuable in the societies.

It is interesting that biologists (yes, the evo-psych folks too) have just recently figured out that their traditional reliance on exclusivity in sexual selection as a primary mechanism of directional evolution is not nearly as cut and dried as they long assumed it was. Given that cheating on spouses and general promiscuity have turned out to be fairly rampant in birds and beasts – the beauty of that peacock’s tail or the size of that ape’s manly parts doesn’t prevent lesser males from getting their genes into the pool after all…

There’s a reason we call it “The Oldest Profession.” Turns out, it’s even older than humans!

The science blogosphere erupted this week after biology professor Paul Myers [a.k.a. PZ Myers] was summarily expelled from a pre-release screening of the Ben Stein movie Expelled, even while his wife, daughter and guest Richard Dawkins were allowed in to see the film.

Myers blogged about the incident in several posts to his #1 rated science blog for Seed Media Group, Pharyngula. Other science bloggers for the same outlet also blogged about it – Greg Laden bestowed sainthood on PZ and compiles the buzz from Dawkins, other bloggers, national and international media… it’s an exhaustive (but dated) list.

And the whole affair is really quite humorous, in my humble opinion. I am still holding out the suspicion that Myers – who appears in the film for about five minutes, according to reports – is getting a cut of the net for all his promotional efforts. This suspicion is further enhanced by Myers’ crashing an ‘invitation only’ media conference call on Friday. He has an explanation for how he managed that on his blog, but I’m taking the whole thing with a large grain of salt.

The buzz and massive publicity being stirred by irate science bloggers is guaranteeing the film’s commercial success, even if it’s as bad as Myers claims. That seems highly suspicious to me, given the sheer antiquity of the Creationism versus Evolution debates, the generations of religious believers and biologists who have come and gone without changing a thing, and the actual legal situation in the U.S., where it is unconstitutional to teach Creationism or Intelligent Design in public school classrooms.

If PZ is not getting paid to promote this film, he’s a bigger idiot than the IDiots he rails against so frequently on a science blog that is mostly NOT about science. Amazing.

Researchers at the University of Bath in England, Imperial College London, and the University of Waterloo in Canada have analyzed the last 550 million years of evolution in the fossil record, and determined that the First ‘Rule’ of Evolution Suggests that Life is Destined to Become More Complex.

This may be news to evolutionary biologists and interested laity who were taught that evolution is solely a matter of random mutation and natural selection with no direction toward greater complexity. Dr. Matthew Wills from the University of Bath explained it thus…

“If you start with the simplest possible animal body, then there’s only one direction to evolve in – you have to become more complex. Sooner or later, however, you reach a level of complexity where it’s possible to go backwards and become simple again.”

But does this happen? Wills explains…

“What’s astonishing is that hardly any crustaceans have taken this backwards route. Instead, almost all branches have evolved in the same direction, becoming more complex in parallel. This is the nearest thing to a pervasive evolutionary rule that’s been found.”

The National Research Council has identified and reported on Ten Questions that will shape 21st century earth science. Some may be a little surprised that these questions are still unanswered, having been told in no uncertain terms in science classes in the last century that science already had definitive answers to questions like how the earth and other planets in our solar system formed. Live and learn. Here’s a bare list of the identified questions…

1. How did earth and other planets form?
Scientists still do not know enough about how our planet got its elements to understand its evolution, or why other planets in our system are very different.

2. What happened during the first 500 million years?
Current scientific belief is that another planet collided with ours during the late formation stage, creating the moon and melting this planet all the way to its core. Yet unknown is how (and when) the Earth developed its atmosphere and oceans.

3. How did life begin?
Scientists hope to obtain evidence from rocks and minerals, as well as investigations of Mars and other members of our system.

4. How does earth’s interior work, and how does it effect the surface?
Science still cannot precisely describe the magnetic field-producing convection currents in the mantle and core, which means they have not yet modeled past evolution and cannot predict future evolution of the surface environment.

5. Why does earth have plate tectonics and continents?
Scientists still do not know when continents first formed, how they were preserved for billions of years, or how they will evolve in the future.

6. How are earth processes controlled by material properties?
Scientists hope to gain more understanding of plate tectonics and mantle convection by reducing the macroprocesses down to the atomic microscale. It is hoped this will allow prediction.

7. What causes climate to change – and how much can it change?
Study of our planet’s past climate extremes may lead to improved models that can predict the magnitude and consequences of climate change.

8. How has life shaped earth – and how has earth shaped life>
The ways that geology and biology influence each other are still unknown, though scientists do suspect life had a role in oxygenating the atmosphere, and know of geological events that caused mass extinctions.

9. Can earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and their consequences be predicted?
Scientists admit they may never be able to accurately predict earthquakes, but are getting better at predicting volcanic eruptions. Knowledge of the mantle movements could help.

10. How do fluid flow and transport affect the human environment?
Scientists hope to produce mathematical models that can predict the performance of natural fluid systems (surface and underground water, primarily), to contribute to better human management of natural resources and the environment.

Link:
Ten Questions

This is the final installment of our 50 Weird Science tidbits, odd factoids and strange-but-true trivia. There are of course more weird things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. But these 50 should get you through at least one championship round down at the pub. By the way, the word “dreamt” is the only word in the English language that ends in “mt.” That’s a freebie!

41. Plants Have Family Values Too

Researchers from Canada found that plants can have complex social interactions despite being… um, vegetative. Plants will grow more aggressively near unrelated plants than when they grow near relatives from the same maternal family.


42. The World’s Most Dangerous Animal

The not-so humble mosquito wins this award hands down. Mosquitoes transmitting countless diseases kill more animals – including humans – than any other animal (or plant) on Earth.



43. Hot Bed [Bugs] of Sexual Deception

Both the males and females of the African bat bug, a relative of bed bugs, have evolved fake genitals in order to protect themselves from the species’ violent mating practices. Some females have fake genitals of both male and female variety! The species does manage to reproduce prolifically anyway.


44. One Species In Which Dad Does All The Work

In seahorses it’s the male who gets pregnant. He incubates the offspring for three weeks, spends about 72 hours in labor, then gives birth to up to 200 baby seahorses at a time.


45. Alternative Recycling of Humans

A Swedish company has developed a new, environmentally friendly means of dealing with the bodies of the dead. They freeze the bodies in liquid nitrogen, then use sound waves to smash them to powder. From which water is removed in a vacuum chamber and metals are screened out.


46. And Now for the Weather Report…

In the days when apothecaries kept leeches in jars, it was observed that when the weather was calm the leeches stayed at the bottom of the water jar. But when a change in the weather was coming, the leeches would rise to the top of the water. For storms the leeches would rise quickly, descending again when the storm passed.


47. Forecast: Sunny

A solar panel array covering an area of 100 by 100 miles in the US Mojave Desert would produce enough electricity to replace all the coal fired power plants in America.


48. Old Sol Is Expecting Visitors

A red dwarf star labeled Gliese 710 is traveling toward our sun at nearly 50 times the speed of sound. In a million years it will be within just over half a light year away. Our current closest neighbor is Alpha Centauri, just over 4 light years away. But don’t worry. In only 10,000 years a red dwarf called Barnard’s Star will be our closest neighbor.


49. Please Don’t Lick the Walls

The world’s only hotel made entirely of salt (including the dining tables and chairs) is the Hotel de Sal Playa in the Uyuni salt flats of Bolivia.


50. …And Don’t Drink the Water

97% of the water on earth is undrinkable. An estimated 20% of the world’s surface fresh water supply is contained in Lake Baikal in southern Siberia (the world’s deepest lake at more than mile in depth).

The Entire Series:

1-10 of 50 Weird Science Tidbits & Oddities
11-20 of 50 Weird Science Tidbits & Oddities
21-30 of 50 Weird Science Tidbits & Oddities
31-40 of 50 Weird Science Tidbits & Oddities
41-50 of 50 Weird Science Tidbits & Oddities