Author: Jay Wile

The human body is truly incredible. It has been so intricately designed that we are still discovering new things inside it, despite the fact that scientists have been studying it in detail for nearly 2,000 years! Just a few months ago, I wrote about the discovery of a previously undetected feature of the human body, and just this month, a team of medical scientists from Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard University, and Dongguk University (South Korea) have discovered something else: channels that connect the skull directly to the brain!

The authors made this discovery while they were investigating how certain immune responses work in the brains of mice. White blood cells, the cells of the immune system, are produced in bone marrow, a soft tissue found inside some bones. The authors developed a technique to identify white blood cells produced in a leg bone (the tibia) of a mouse and distinguish them from white blood cells produced in the skull of a mouse. They induced a stroke in the mouse to activate the immune response and studied what happened. As expected, white blood cells were sent to the brain, but unexpectedly, most of them came from the skull.

Why was that unexpected? It has always been thought that white blood cells must travel through the circulatory system to get to the brain. As a result, it was assumed that any white blood cells found in the brain should come equally from all parts of the body. The fact that most of the white blood cells came from the skull indicated that there must be some “shortcut” between the brain and the skull, so the researchers used microscopes to look at the inside of the skull and the surface layers of the brain. What they found is shown in the image above.

The darkest splotches in the image are bone from the skull. The skull’s bone marrow is labelled in the figure, as is the top layer of brain tissue (labelled “Brain membrane”). Notice that there are “Channels” which connect the skull’s bone marrow directly to the brain membrane. That’s the shortcut the white blood cells took. They traveled directly from the skull’s bone marrow to the brain, making the immune response more rapid than if the white blood cells had to travel through the circulatory system.

Even though the discovery of these “brain channels” was made in mice, the authors examined skull tissue removed from patients who had been through a neurosurgical procedure. They found similar channels that were roughly five times as large as the ones they saw in the mice. Of course, they couldn’t do similar experiments on people, so they don’t know for certain that the channels serve the same purpose in humans as they do in mice. However, it makes sense that they should.

The human body is so fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139:14), I am sure this isn’t the last new feature to be discovered!

Have you met STEVE? It’s a strange event that has been photographed by several people who spend a lot of time photographing auroras. One of them (Chris Ratzlaff) suggested the name “Steve,” which was inspired by the animated movie Over the Hedge. Apparently, one of the characters in the movie named something he didn’t understand “Steve.” When the scientific community began studying this phenomenon, they kept the name but made it more “scientific.” They called it STEVE for “Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement.”

Since STEVE events happen where auroras are found, it is reasonable to think that they are related to auroras in some way. However, auroras are visible every night when you are at high latitudes and the viewing conditions are favorable. By contrast, STEVE events are visible only a few days each year, at least according to the photographers who have documented them. Also, auroras produce a glow that spreads wide throughout the night sky, while STEVE events produce ribbons of light.

So what causes these events? Currently, scientists can’t say. The initial study said they might be similar to auroras, which are caused by high-energy charged particles that have been trapped by earth’s magnetic field interacting with molecules in the upper atmosphere. This interaction gives the molecules excess energy, and they emit that energy in the form of visible light, mostly reds, greens, and blues. Scientists looked at satellite imagery that was taken during a documented STEVE event, and they did see charged particles moving at high speeds through the appropriate region of the atmosphere, but they couldn’t say for sure that they were related to the event.

Now, some of the authors of that study have published an analysis that indicates STEVE events are not very similar to auroras. They looked at imagery from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s polar orbiting satellites that happened to be over a documented STEVE event on March 28, 2008. It was in the perfect position to see if high-energy charged particles were interacting with the upper atmosphere during the event, and it saw none.

As a result, there is currently no explanation for what causes STEVE events. I look forward to seeing where the research goes on this!

The picture above shows a phenomenon that can be seen during the summer by people who live at latitudes of 50-65 degrees. They are called noctilucent (“night shining”) clouds, and they appear to glow in the twilight sky. They aren’t actually glowing, and they aren’t really clouds, either. Instead, they are bands of ice crystals that are way above the clouds, in an upper part of the atmosphere called the mesosphere. There is very little water in the mesosphere, and it is extremely cold there. When conditions are right, however, what little water that exists there can freeze into tiny ice crystals, forming short-lived “clouds.”

Why do they appear to glow? Well, at twilight, the sun is below the curve of the earth, so you can’t see it directly. However, if you were up higher, you could still see it. Indeed, this video shows a drone observing the sunset at a height of 80 feet and then rising to 400 feet to see the sun set again. So even though you can’t see the sun once it sets, higher altitudes still “see” it. That means the sun’s light is still shining brightly on things that are high in the sky, including the ice crystals. Some of that light scatters off the crystals and heads to the earth. If you are at the right place on the earth and it is dark enough, you can see that light, and it looks like the light is coming from the “clouds” themselves. Here is an excellent time-lapse series that shows both noctilucent clouds and an aurora.

Why am I blogging about this phenomenon? Because this year has been an unusually good year for seeing it. Indeed, reports of these “glowing clouds” have tripled this year compared to last year. What’s causing it? According to Dr. Lynn Harvey of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, it’s because there is an unusual amount of water in the mesosphere this year. It is also a bit colder than normal. Combine those two effects and you have more ice crystals and therefore more noctilucent clouds.

Why is it wetter and colder this year in the mesosphere? We don’t really know. In fact, noctilucent clouds are a bit of a mystery in general, since they were first reported in the summer of 1885. Whether that means they just started forming then or just happened to be noticed then, we don’t know. However, most other striking atmospheric phenomena had been observed much earlier. Auroras, for example, were reported in ancient china and were named by Galileo in 1619. It’s hard to believe that a similar atmospheric phenomenon that can be seen at the same latitudes existed but remained unnoticed until 1885.

Of course, unlike auroras, noctilucent clouds are rare and short-lived. After all, they occur only in the summer and, in order to see them, it needs to be pretty dark, since sunlight overwhelms the small amount of light coming from the ice crystals. Thus, the sun has to be below the curve of the earth for the observer. However, once the sun is well below the curve of the earth, it no longer shines on the ice crystals in the mesosphere above the observer. This fact might have made them less likely to be observed and, even when they were observed, less likely to be believed, since they would “disappear” after a while.

So it may be that noctilucent clouds clouds are a fairly recent phenomenon caused by human activity, and it may be that whatever human activity is causing them is increasing their frequency. Of course, it may also be a natural phenomenon that ebbs and flows over time. We just don’t know. That’s the great thing about science. There always seem to be more questions than answers!

In 1619, Orazio Grassi (a mathematician, astronomer and architect) wrote about three comets that had recently appeared in the sky. He gave evidence that they must have been far from the earth, even beyond the moon. Galileo wrongly believed that comets were in earth’s atmosphere, and so he wrote Il Saggiatore (The Assayer) in reply. Although Galileo’s overall argument was wrong, the piece does contain a statement that is quite profound:

Philosophy [he is referring to what we call “science” today] is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth.

While most scientists who use this quote are talking about physics and perhaps chemistry, the fact is that mathematics seems to be the language in which God wrote His creation. As a result, all areas of science (even biology) require the use of mathematics to unlock the true secrets of creation. I recently ran across a paper that illustrates this point rather well.

The authors were using a mathematical technique called Voronoi Diagramming to model how certain cells in an embryo pack together to form the shapes of the organs that are developing. Generally speaking, most biologists assume that the cells become column- or bottle-like in shape so that they can squeeze together and form the smooth curves that characterize the shapes of the organs. However, their mathematical model predicted that another set of shapes would develop – shapes that are so unique they don’t even have a name. As a result, the authors call the shapes scutoids, which refers to the scutum and scutellum, features found on certain insects, like beetles.

Drawings of two scutoid-shaped cells are shown on the left side of the illustration below, and the way those two shapes fit together are shown on the right side of the illustration.

Now, of course, the authors didn’t just believe the results of their mathematical model. After all, the mathematical model contains assumptions, and those assumptions could be flawed. However, armed with the knowledge of those shapes, they examined specific tissues in developing fruit fly larvae. Sure enough, they found tissue structures that are composed of scutoid-shaped cells.

Why do cells form these shapes in developing fruit fly embryos (and presumably other embryos)? The authors state:

Using biophysical arguments, we propose that scutoids make possible the minimization of the tissue energy and stabilize three-dimensional packing. Hence, we conclude that scutoids are one of nature’s solutions to achieve epithelial bending.

In other words, they produce the most stable tissue at the lowest energy.

Now remember, the reason the authors found this brand-new cell shape is because they started with mathematics, just as Galileo instructed. Writing more than 300 years after Galileo, Sir James Hopwood Jeans (English physicist, astronomer and mathematician) tells us why he thinks Galileo was right:

Lapsing back again into the crudely anthropomorphic language we have already used, we may say that we have already considered with disfavour the possibility of the universe having been planned by a biologist or an engineer; from the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician. [The Mysterious Universe, Cambridge University Press 1931, p. 122]