and giving them your E-MAIL address. Don’t worry – they won’t sell your address to anyone.
If you get the eBook, I strongly recommend you read the article entitled “Of Cormorants, Cats, and Kids” by Diana Waring. It is excellent.
Category: Modern Science
Riddle of the Feathered Dragons
(Click for credit)
Dr. Alan Feduccia is a world-class evolutionary biologist whose research has focused on the natural history of birds. He is the S.K. Heninger Distinguished Professor Emeritus at The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and even his abbreviated list of publications is the envy of most scientists. He has received numerous honors for his scientific accomplishments, including having an extinct species of bird named after him: Confuciusornis feducciai.
Despite his incredible scientific accomplishments, he is ridiculed by some in the scientific community because he doesn’t think that dinosaurs evolved into birds. There are those who call him a “BANDit” (BAND stands for “Birds Are Not Dinosaurs) and lump him in with the hated creationists and the global warming “deniers.” Why don’t these people listen to a man who has contributed so much to the biological sciences? Because they follow the consensus, and the consensus is that birds evolved from dinosaurs. Anyone who questions this consensus, regardless of the data they present, are simply ignored and ridiculed.
In his latest book, Riddle of the Feathered Dragons, Dr. Feduccia has something to say about this consensus:
The word “consensus” has no place in science and is never a validation of any hypothesis, yet one frequently sees trust in “consensus” for validation of important scientific concepts. (pp. 4-5)
I couldn’t agree more. When you hear the word “consensus” used to support a scientific argument, you know the speaker has stopped thinking. Rather than examining evidence for himself or herself, the speaker is simply allowing the majority to rule. Majority rule might be a good system in some social applications, but it is the worst possible method for doing science.
Want to Lose Weight? Ask Your Bacteria for Help.
Gastric bypass surgery has been done on many people who are thought to have a medical need to lose weight but cannot do it on their own. The most common technique is called “Roux-en-Y,” and it involves using a small part of the stomach to make a “stomach pouch” that is about the size of an egg. That pouch is then connected to the jejunum, which is the middle section of the small intestine.1 This means the food eaten by the patient bypasses most of stomach and the first section of the small intestine. Studies that have followed patients for 2-12 years show that the surgery does help them lose weight and keep it off.2
While most experts think this kind of gastric bypass surgery works because it forces people to change their eating habits, recent evidence suggests that at least one other factor is involved. As Science News reports:3
Previous studies of people and rats have found that the natural mix of microbes in the intestines changes after gastric bypass, with some groups growing more prominent and others diminishing. No one knew whether the altered microbial composition was merely a side effect of the surgery, or if shifting bacterial populations could help generate weight loss.
Well, a recent study was published that indicates at least some of the weight loss experienced by gastric bypass patients is attributable to the microbes.
Continue reading “Want to Lose Weight? Ask Your Bacteria for Help.”
Archaeologists May Have Found a Palace Used by King David
There are some Biblical scholars who think that King David never existed. Dr. Philip R. Davies, Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies at the University of Sheffield, says:
I am not the only scholar who suspects that the figure of King David is about as historical as King Arthur.
Others think that David might have been a real person, but he was not the ruler of a mighty kingdom, as depicted in the Old Testament. Dr. Michael Carden suggests:
Was there a David? Possibly. Possibly a bandit and maybe eventually a warlord with some authority in Judah during the ninth century BCE, from whom a subsequent dynasty in Jerusalem claimed descent.
The main reason some think that David could not have been ruler over a great nation is that there is very little archaeological evidence that indicates Judah was anything but a rural backwater during the time when David reigned. That view, however, might be changing.
Continue reading “Archaeologists May Have Found a Palace Used by King David”
CAPTCHA – Why We Can Read It and Robots Can’t
People can read the two words - no automated system can.
We’ve all seen it. Whether it’s there to keep automated spammers away from your blog comments or to make sure you are a real person who is registering for an account, at some point we’ve all had to deal with a graphic like the one above. It’s called CAPTCHA, which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. While there is some controversy over who invented it, the process was first patented in 1998 by Mark D. Lillibridge, Martin Abadi, Krishna Bharat, and Andrei Z. Broder at AltaVista.
Why is CAPTCHA so effective? Because even though it is relatively simple for you and me to read the obscured and distorted words in a graphic, so far no one has been able to program an automated system to do the same thing. Computers can be programmed to scan a picture of a page of printed text and read the words in the picture. However, when the words are obscured or distorted too much, the program doesn’t recognize them anymore. A human looking at the same picture can read the words, even when the most sophisticated automated system cannot.
A team of scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies is starting to reveal the amazing complexity behind our ability to interpret such images.
Continue reading “CAPTCHA – Why We Can Read It and Robots Can’t”
A Surprising Study of People Living Near Fukushima
Even though his academic research has nothing to do with nuclear power and its radioactive byproducts, he decided to devote his time to studying the effects of the disaster. In December of 2011, for example, he and some colleagues published a paper1 that contained detailed maps of the Cesium-137 contamination in the soil. This isotope is the most abundant contaminant in the environment around Fukushima. The authors specifically stated that their data should be used to guide the efforts of government officials who were trying to protect Japan’s food supply.
As time went on, government officials began offering assurances that the food supply was safe, but they were not providing any hard facts to support their claim. As a result, Hayano decided to do his own research. He began analyzing school lunches that were being served in Minamisoma, which is only 25 kilometers from the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Once a week, he would take everything on a lunch tray from an elementary school and a nursery school, throw it into a blender, and measure the radiation level. Every week, the levels were well below the safety limit. For example, the level of Cesium-137 allowed in the U.S. food supply is 370 Becquerels per kilogram. Hayano rarely found a reading greater than 1 Becquerel per kilogram in the food that he analyzed.2
Continue reading “A Surprising Study of People Living Near Fukushima”
Another Example of Three-Way Mutualism
As anyone who has been reading this blog for a while knows, I am fascinated by the phenomenon of symbiosis: two or more species living together in a relationship. In my opinion, the most interesting form of symbiosis is mutualism: two or more species living together in such a way that each species benefits. I have written several different articles about it over the years (see here, here, here, here, and here, for example), and I personally think it is a picture of what creation was like before the Fall.
As scientists have studied mutualism over the years, they have found some really complex examples. In the past, I wrote about a three-way mutualistic relationship that exists between a grass, a fungus, and a virus. Later on, I wrote about a three-way mutualistic relationship that exists between seagrasses, clams, and bacteria. Well, I just learned about another example of a three-way mutualistic relationship. Scientists have known about it for more than 10 years, but it was the subject of a recent study that comes to some rather startling conclusions.
The biggest member of this relationship is the mealybug, which is shown above. It feeds on the sap of plants, but that presents a bit of a problem. In order to make all the proteins it needs to survive, the mealybug must have certain amino acids at its disposal. It can get some of them from its diet, but plants don’t make all the amino acids that the mealybug needs. As a result, it must manufacture some of them. By itself, however, it can’t get the job done. It can make some of the chemicals that are necessary to produce the amino acids, but it can’t make them all. If left on its own, then, the mealybug could not survive.
In 2001, Carol von Dohlen and her colleagues demonstrated that the mealybug has help in making those amino acids. A bacterium, Tremblaya princeps, lives in the mealybug, and it helps the mealybug make the amino acids it can’t get from its diet. However, the bacterium can’t do that job on its own. As a result, a smaller bacterium, Moranella endobia, lives inside it. Together, these two bacteria make the chemicals that the mealybug needs but cannot make itself. All three species are needed in order for the mealybug to survive.1
So here’s the arrangement: a bacterium inside a bacterium inside a bug. It reminds me of an exchange from one of my favorite Dr. Who episodes:
Lily:Where are we?
The Doctor:In a forest, in a box, in a sitting room. Pay attention!”
Optics Is Starting to Catch Up to the Arthropods
There are two basic designs for animal eyes: “simple” eyes and compound eyes. Your eyes are called “simple” eyes, because each has only one lens. The lens focuses light that enters your eye onto a layer of tissue called the retina, which has light-sensitive cells. Those cells detect the light and send electrical impulses to your brain, which then produces an image of what the eye is seeing. In contrast, many arthropods (a broad class of animals including insects, crustaceans, spiders, etc.) have compound eyes. Each compound eye has many lenses, and each lens focuses light onto its own set of light-sensitive cells. The brain then collects the information from each of these optical units (called ommatidia) and produces a composite image.
Each eye design has its own strengths and its own weaknesses. A simple eye produces a very sharp image of whatever the lens is focused on. However, the farther anything is from the center of a simple eye’s vision, the more distorted it becomes. In addition, a simple eye has a narrow depth of field. When it focuses on an object, other things in the field of view are blurry if their distance from the eye is much different from the object being focused on. The compound eye, on the other hand, does not produce very sharp images. However, because its lenses are so small, there is very little distortion of objects that are away from the center of the eye’s view. In addition, the small lenses have a nearly infinite depth of field – objects stay in focus whether they are near or far from the eye.
The practical upshot is that compound eyes tend to be very valuable if you want a wide, panoramic view. In addition, they are very sensitive to motion. If you’ve ever tried to swat a fly, you understand that. The fly seems to see your hand no matter how slowly you move it or where you are relative to the fly. Simple eyes, on the other hand, are more valuable if you want very a very sharp, clear image of what you are focused on. So far, the cameras produced by human science and technology have been modeled after simple eyes. They give sharp, clear images of what the camera focuses on, but the view is not panoramic and the depth of field is narrow.
Now that has changed.
Continue reading “Optics Is Starting to Catch Up to the Arthropods”
Hundreds, not Millions
If you are sick and tired of reading about the rocks at Hopewell Cape on the Bay of Fundy, I think this will be my last post about them. In my first post about my Canadian speaking trip, I showed a picture of them and briefly mentioned them. In the next post, I gave a relatively detailed account of the tides that have carved them.
In that second post, a commenter suggested that it must have taken the tides millions of years to carve the rocks into those interesting shapes. Another commenter, who is a geologist, did some digging and posted three references to geological studies of the rocks. The third one1 seemed very intriguing, so I decided to get the paper and read it for myself.
The study discussed several details regarding the rocks (which they call “stacks” and “stack-arches”), including the fact that they were most likely carved over hundreds of years, not millions.
Will Scientists Be Able to Clone Mammoths?
Mammoths are an extinct group of mammals whose fossils are found in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. As the drawing above shows, they probably looked a lot like elephants, but they had significantly more hair and long, curved tusks. Scientists have learned a lot about these animals, since they left behind plenty of well-preserved remains. Some have even been found frozen, with skin, internal organs, and even DNA preserved. Well, a find out of the New Siberian Islands might have just surpassed all other finds when it comes to preservation.
Russian scientist and head of Northeast Federal University Mammoth Museum, Semyon Grigoryev, led an expedition that was specifically looking for well-preserved mammoth remains that could possibly be used to bring mammoths back from extinction. Since parts of the permafrost in Siberia have been thawing in recent years, they believed that frozen mammoth remains might be in the process of being exposed for the first time. They thought that if they could find such remains, some of them might be well-preserved enough to contain the materials necessary for cloning, which might end up producing living mammoths!
Recent reports indicate that the team might have, indeed, made just such a find. According to news reports, the researchers found a mammoth whose lower body was encased in ice. Not frozen soil – actual ice. This resulted in remarkable preservation for that portion of the body. The team says that the muscles are pristine, and they have the red color you would expect from muscle tissue. Even more impressive, they say they have found what appears to be blood in the remains! The article linked above has a picture of tube that contains some of the liquid that the team thinks is mammoth blood. If the researchers can find living cells in the blood or any other part of the remains, they will be given to the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation for cloning in the hopes of producing live mammoths.
While this is all very exciting, I do have to add a few words of caution.
Continue reading “Will Scientists Be Able to Clone Mammoths?”