Modern Science Archives : Page 30 of 53 : Proslogion

Sofishsticated Swimming

This is a glass knifefish like the one used in the study (click for credit)

Many aspects of nature are a mystery to science, and at least part of the reason is that nature has been designed so incredibly well. There are systems running in nature that are simply too complex for us to understand and, as a result, their functions remain a mystery. Not all that long ago, for example, many biologists were silly enough to actually think the human genome was mostly junk, simply because they couldn’t understand what the vast majority of the human genome does. Of course, as we have learned more about DNA, we have learned that what was once considered “junk” is vitally important (see here, here, and here, for example). Since the Encode project published its first major results, most reasonable biologists have slowly started to realize what creationists have said all along – there really isn’t much (if any) junk DNA.

Even on a larger scale, there are many aspects of nature that are very hard to understand. A recent article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America provides an example:¹

Animals often produce substantial forces in directions that do not directly contribute to movement. For example, running and flying insects produce side-to-side forces as they travel forward. These forces generally “cancel out,” and so their role remains a mystery.

Why would a moving animal expend energy to produce forces that are perpendicular to its motion? Those forces don’t contribute to the animal’s forward motion, and they tend to cancel each other out. As a result, they are often called “antagonistic forces.” Such forces seem like an utter waste of energy. Nevertheless, lots of animals do this. In addition, some animals exert antagonistic forces even when they are not moving in a given direction. Hummingbirds, for example, produce antagonistic forces when they are hovering over a flower.

To understand the purpose of antagonistic forces, the authors of the study examined the glass knifefish (Eigenmannia virescens). When this fish is “hovering” in the water, it uses its fins to produce antagonistic forces. It has been thought that these forces might improve the fish’s ability to control its position and orientation in the water, but no one understood how.²

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Overly Honest Moments in Science

I don’t tweet. If you have been reading this blog for any length of time, you know why. I have a hard enough time constraining my writing to a few hundred words, much less 140 characters. Nevertheless, it is interesting to see how scientists use Twitter to communicate what they are doing. For example, I recently wrote about a particle physicist who used Twitter to explain to people what was happening in the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster. He became a bit of a celebrity as a result and has used that platform to do some serious science related to the level of radioactive contamination in Japan’s food supply.

Why in the world am I discussing a social media tool that I don’t even use? Because a reader posted a link on my Facebook page. It contains a series of tweets posted with the hashtag #overlyhonestmethods, which was started by a scientist known as “dr. leigh.” The hashtag has become a bit of a phenomenon. Essentially, scientists use it to explain the real reasons behind some of their methods.

The picture at the top of the post is a classic example of a tweet that contains the hashtag. I immediately related to it, because as a nuclear chemist, I have built a lot of systems that blew up or failed in some other spectacular way. However, when I finally got a version of the system to work, I would refer to it as “representative.” That’s just the way it is done.

If you have some time, scroll through a few of the tweets. Some of the language can be a bit foul, but the tweets give you a brief glimpse into the real world of scientific research. You might be a bit surprised at what you read!

Why Do We Have to Sleep?

sleeping3 — Scientists might finally be understanding why we need to sleep. (click for credit)

When I was doing nuclear chemistry experiments, one of my greatest enemies was the need for sleep. Those experiments required the use of a particle accelerator, and the demand for time on the accelerator always exceeded the amount of time available. This meant that each experiment was tightly scheduled for a certain amount of time, and it was almost impossible to get any kind of extension. As a result, when the particle beam was directed to my experimental chamber, every second was precious. Generally, I would stay up for as long as I could, trying to get as much as possible from the experiment. Eventually, however, I had to go to sleep and let someone else take over. I hated that. In fact, during my main thesis experiment, I stayed up for so long that I actually feel asleep in the middle of typing commands on the computer console!

Why do we need to sleep? When I ask this question to students, I generally get a response that deals with energy. Students think that sleep somehow allows us to build up our energy reserves so we can stay active and alert while we are awake. However, that’s clearly not true. Our energy comes from the food we eat. If it were just a matter of building up energy reserves, we could eat rather than sleep.

For a long time, scientists have speculated that sleep has something to do with recovery. Being awake does something to our bodies from which we must recover, and sleep takes care of the recovery process. The problem, of course, is that no one could actually say what the body has to recover from. Well, a team of researchers led by Dr. Maiken Nedergaard, a scientist at my Alma Mater, might have figured out at least one thing from which our bodies recover when we sleep.

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Astounding: Your Baby Can Heal You!

fetus_cells — This Facebook Meme is actually correct!

I avoided Facebook for a long time, but a few years ago, I finally gave in. Not long after I started connecting with long lost friends and finding out what everyone was eating, I learned the joys of Facebook memes. Every day now, I see lots of pictures with snarky sayings on them coming across my news feed. Some of them are funny, and some try to make a point. Many times, the ones that try to make a point are just dead wrong. They include either outright falsehoods or an incredibly mischaracterized fact. Thus, whenever I see a “science meme” or a “political meme,” I generally ignore it.

However, when the meme at the top of this article came across my newsfeed, I had to investigate it. If you have been reading this blog for a while, you might remember that almost two years ago, a talented writer named Amanda Read posted a story about how a baby’s cells reside in his or her mother long after the baby is born, and they may aid the mother in healing certain kinds of tissues. I was incredibly skeptical of the story, but when I did some investigation, I found out that it was true. Later on, I learned about a study that showed how a baby leaves DNA behind in his mother’s brain, and those “fetal remnants” might even fight against neurological disorders!

Since we are still barely scratching the surface in our understanding of the the amazing design behind pregnancy, I decided to pay attention to this Facebook meme. Of course, I knew that the statement on the left is true. All sorts of things pass through the placenta from the mother to the child, and that includes blood proteins which fight disease and shape the development of the baby’s B-cells.¹ Those B-cells will affect the child’s ability to fight disease for the rest of his or her life.

I was, however, very skeptical of the statement on the right. Surprisingly, there is strong scientific evidence to back it up!

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Those Who Say Religion Is Important Are More Likely to Lie?

gossips — Statue of two gossipping ladies in the old town section of Sindelfingen, Germany. (click for credit)

There has been a lot of research regarding what personal characteristics make a person more or less likely to lie. The results of this research have been decidedly mixed. Some research suggests that pretty much everyone lies. Some research suggests that men are more likely to lie than women.¹ Other research, however, shows no difference in the amount that men and women lie.²

A new study ³ was recently published regarding the personal characteristics of those who tend to lie, and it has gotten some attention from the atheist community. Why? Because one of the results indicates that people who claim religion is important to them are more likely to lie for financial gain. Indeed, as one popular article on the study put it:

However, he [the author of the study] discovered other factors predicted a greater likelihood of telling an untruth — including the assertion that religion plays an important role in your life. Somewhere (or not), Christopher Hitchens is chuckling.

Now before I begin discussing the study, please understand that in my personal experience, Christians are less moral than the general population. I don’t suggest that this is a general trend; I have no idea. It is simply what I have gathered from my own personal experiences. For example, if I look back on my professional career, I have had several bosses – people who exercised authority over me at work. Some of them were atheists, and some were Christians. At least one of them would never speak about his religious beliefs. The most moral among them was one of the atheists, and the least moral among them was one of the Christians. This is consistent with my overall experiences as well. In general, I think that Christians do a very poor job of representing Christ to the world, especially when it comes to whether or not you can believe what they say.

I am always interested in looking at studies that try to quantify whether or not my personal experiences are representative of a general trend. When I first heard about this new study, then, I wasn’t surprised about its conclusions. However, a detailed look at the study did offer one surprise.

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Christianity and Science – What History REALLY Tells Us

education_sg — This is part of a stained-glass window called "Education." It is found in room 102 of Linsly-Chittenden Hall at Yale University, and it portrays science and religion in harmony. (click to see the entire piece)

You hear it all the time. Science and Christianity are in conflict. For example, Dr. Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote:¹

The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories, of the modern world have grown out of Greece and Rome—not by favour of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachings of early Christianity, to which science, art, and any serious occupation with the things of this world were alike despicable.

and that was back in 1899. My favorite atheist, Dr. P.Z. Myers, says it more succinctly:

Christian faith is at odds with science

The problem, of course, is that such statements are demonstrably false. Indeed, as I have written before, historical scholarship has shown that modern science is a product of Christianity (see here and here).

I recently ran across an excellent essay by Dr. Michael Keas that makes this point very well. I strongly recommend that you read it in its entirety, but there are two quotes from it that I would like to highlight.

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Fusion Milestone? Yes, But Not The One Reported

nif — This is the reaction chamber at the National Ignition Facility. (public domain image)

“Nuclear fusion milestone passed at US lab.” That’s how the BBC reported it. The science editor, Paul Rincon, wrote:

The BBC understands that during an experiment in late September, the amount of energy released through the fusion reaction exceeded the amount of energy being absorbed by the fuel – the first time this had been achieved at any fusion facility in the world.

Popular Science titled its report, “The National Ignition Facility Just Got Way Closer To Fusion Power.” Right under that headline, one reads:

In a major first, an experiment in the California lab got more energy out of its fuel than went into the fuel. We’re one step closer to ignition, when the reaction becomes self-sustaining.

Before you start having dreams of clean, limitless power, however, you need to know what actually happened at the National Ignition Facility. So let’s start from the beginning to find out what all the hype is about.

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Has Voyager 1 Left The Solar System?

The earth and the other seven planets (in case you didn’t know, Pluto is no longer considered a planet) orbit the sun, which is a very special star. Nevertheless, it is just one of probably more than a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) stars in the universe. Each of these stars has a gravitational field, and at least several of them have planets orbiting around them. In other words, each star has its own solar system.

Well, at some point, our solar system has to end and interstellar space (the space between the solar systems of different stars) has to begin. But where, exactly, is that? The robotic spacecraft known as Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are trying to answer that question. They were both launched into space in 1977 (Voyager 2 was launched 16 days earlier than Voyager 1), and they have been traveling away from earth ever since. While they still have fuel, they don’t use it to propel themselves forward. Where they are, the sun’s gravitational field is so weak that they experience essentially no resistance to their travel, so they just keep traveling with the speed their engines gave them long ago. The only thing they use their fuel for is to change orientation, a process called “attitude adjustment.”

Even though Voyager 1 was launched later, it picked up a bit more speed than Voyager 2, so it is farthest away from the earth and the sun. As of the time this article was written, Voyager 1 was more than 18,800,720,000 kilometers (11,682,230,000 miles) from the sun. That’s a long way, but is it far enough to be considered out of our solar system? The surprising answer is that we aren’t really sure!

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“Oil” in Weeks, Not Millions of Years

In 2008, plant pathologist Dr. Gary A. Strobel and his colleagues published a paper about an odd fungus (Gliocladium roseum) they found in a Patagonian rainforest. It is endophytic, which means it lives within a plant and takes nutrients from the plant, but it is not a parasite. Other endophytic fungi have been shown to produce all sorts of benefits to plants, including giving them much-needed chemicals and allowing them to communicate with one another, so this fungus probably gives some benefit to the plants in which it grows. However, that wasn’t the focus of Dr. Strobel’s paper. Instead, he and his colleagues noted that this fungus actually produced a wide variety of chemicals, including those found in diesel fuel! As the authors stated:¹

The hydrocarbon profile of G. roseum contains a number of compounds normally associated with diesel fuel and so the volatiles of this fungus have been dubbed ‘myco-diesel’.

The prefix “myco” means “fungus,” so the authors basically were calling some of the chemicals that G. roseum produces “fungus diesel.”

Well, it seems that Dr. Strobel and his colleagues have been busy trying to coax G. roseum to make more “fungus diesel,” and they have produced some rather dramatic results. They built a tabletop device they call “The Paleobiosphere”², which is supposed to mimic the conditions under which oil might form. It consists of two layers of shale, a type of rock that often contains oil. Sandwiched in between those two layers is a mixture of the fungus as well as leaves from maple, aspen, and sycamore trees. The container is flooded with water periodically, and in a mere three weeks, the shale layers contain a rich mixture of chemicals that is very similar to the oil found in the shales of Montana!

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Yet Another Global Warming Prediction Falsified

sea_ice2 — The extent of sea ice in the Arctic. (Click for credit and larger image)

Those who believe that global warming is happening and is caused by people are constantly making predictions about what will happen in the future. Those predictions, however, generally turn out to be incorrect. Not long ago, for example, I showed how miserably the predictions of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change compare to the data, even those that are most friendly to the global warming hypothesis. Well, now that the September equinox has passed, the Northern Hemisphere has officially moved out of summer and is experiencing Autumn. As a result, we can confidently declare that yet another prediction made by global warming advocates has failed.

I doubt that you’ll see this reported in many news outlets, but way back in 2007, Dr. Wieslaw Maslowski, a research professor in the Department of Oceanography at the Naval Postgraduate School, stated that based on his research, the Arctic would be ice-free by the summer of 2013. His prediction was based on a “high-resolution regional model for the Arctic Ocean and sea ice forced with realistic atmospheric data,” and he thought it might be a bit conservative. In fact, he said:

Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007…So given that fact, you can argue that maybe our projection of 2013 is already too conservative.

Well, as you can see from the graph above, Dr. Maslowski’s “too conservative” prediction has failed miserably. Not only is there ice in the Arctic, there is significantly more ice than there was in 2012. Now, of course, the amount of ice is still way below the average, but it is also way above zero, the prediction that Dr. Maslowski thought might be “already too conservative.”

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