So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Astrobiologists at the Cardiff Centre have built a model of our solar system travels through our galaxy. Our solar system is on the outer edges of one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way, taking its sweet ole time to complete a complete revolution (around 250 million years, if I remember correctly). But that's not the only movement of the solar system. Apparently, it bounces up and down through the plane of the Milky Way every 35-40 million years -- and with each bounce through the plane, the solar system is exposed to a denser region of the galaxy -- the plane has much more stuff. A bounce through that stuff could lead to catastrophic events -- such as comets colliding with Earth. In fact, the 35-40 million year cycle coincides quite well with mass extinction events on Earth.

Now here's the bad news. We're up for another bounce through the galactic plane -- tomorrow in fact -- so place your head firmly between your knees, it's going to be a rough ride.

Pioneers of the Pacific

History tells us that Captain James Cook conquered the Pacific back in the late 18th century. Of course, the peoples he discovered were not really people, so they just didn't count. What was completely lost on Cook was that he was over 3,000 years too late. The Lapita, a people originating from somewhere in the Pacific, conquered the Pacific Ocean in their day, spreading their language, culture and customs to most of the Pacific islands, including Tonga, Fiji, Samoa, New Zealand, Easter Island, and Tahiti -- where their influences can still be seen today. Unfortunately, no one knows who they were, how they sailed the Pacific, and why they ventured so far. Read more at the National Geographic site.

The Dirty Truth About Plastic

Plastics were making the news this week in Canada, with Health Canada not really announcing much that they haven't already announced. In effect, what Health Canada said this week was, yes, plastics do represent a risk, however, at the end of the day, plastics are so ubiquitous in our environment, that an outright ban due to the risks of chemicals such as Bisphenol A would create a vacuum that would cause more harm than good. And to be sure, the economic ramifications to an outright ban would be tremendous. That doesn't mean that Health Canada made a political decision and closed the door. The door remained open, even if it is just slight. Health Canada label Bisphenol A toxic, and that will now allow the government to regulate the chemical. It's a warning to industry that the days of using human health and the environment as a test bed, are gone.

Will there be changes overnight? Not the dramatic ones that vocal critics of the chemical industry had hoped for. Sure, there were forward thinking retailers who saw the financial risks of still carrying such products -- and they reacted, even to just the rumour of Health Canada releasing findings, but that will not be the end of it. The chemical industry needs to innovate, and that will result in some hits and misses -- but it also represent an opportunity for companies to deliver alternatives and shift the game in their favour.

As much as Bisphenol A is a problem, there are also a slew of other chemicals that are in plastics that remain a potential risk, and these will be examined over time by Health Canada. Verdicts will be delivered. The old ways of industry doing as they please are changing. Consumers are more educated, and a vocal subset are advocating for more transparency and social responsibility. Businesses have to respond. It's a moral imperative. To not respond to this awareness would be unethical. Responses at this juncture will signal whether corporations respect their customers and the environment, or are simply evil.

This month's Discover magazine is also running an article on the Dirty Truth About Plastic. As I said above, phenols aren't the only concern -- so are phthalates and the sheer volume and longevity of plastic. We live in a plastic world it seems, and are slowly getting buried under the stuff. There are viable alternatives out there, so why aren't they being used?

Why do we let this shit happen?

Inner Cow

This has got to be one of the most bizarre things I've ever seen. Researchers cut holes into the sides of cows and insert an cannula, which allows access to a live animals stomach. These holes are so big, you can actually see what's going on inside -- literally, reach into the stomach of a cow. Cows stomach have millions microbes that aid in digestion, and surprisingly, cannulated cows are usually the healthiest of the herd. You would think that walking around with a hole in your stomach would be bad for you, but apparently not. Some farmers apparently keep cannulated cows in their herd so they can serve as microbe donors to sick cows. Just bizarre.

[Source: Oddity Central]

Fat Man Revealed

Wikileaks has released an early drawing of the "Fat Man" bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki in the closing of the second world war. The drawing had remained censored and not publicly available until this release. There's nothing secret about it, since the design has long been superseded.

Polluting Via Sewage

Karen Kidd [PDF] from the University of New Brunswick has done something terrible -- she has poisoned a lake in North Ontario -- to prove a point. The point being, that what we flush down the toilet, or otherwise allow to pollute our water system, threatens to have a horrible repercussions down the food chain.

Kidd, a ecotoxicologist purposely introduced estrogen into a lake in northern Ontario to test the effects on the lake. What her study revealed, was that while algae, bacteria and invertebrates weren't impacted, fishes were. Fishes with smaller body mass was first impacted, leading to the entire species dying off. The the larger fish -- and even the larger fish -- a combination of declining food source, and estrogen poisoning. Estrogen introduced to the lake caused fishes to mature slower; males to become feminized, to the point where sperm production ceased, and egg production started.

Estrogen is dumped into our sewage system as it is excreted from the human body, but is also introduced via artificial sources. Organic compounds widely used in industry, for everything from plastic and epoxy production, to oral contraceptives, are estrogen receptor agonists -- meaning, they act as estrogen by traversing cell membranes and activating estrogen receptors. Unfortunately, many sewage treatment facilities do not remove these chemicals from the waste water, and as Kidd has demonstrated, this can cause severe damage when it arrives in our waterways.

What does Toronto do before we pump waste water back into our waterways? I contacted the city's waste water treatment department last week, but have gotten no response yet.

The Day Before Genesis

In the mispent youth of science classes and houses of ignorance, where robed mystics babble incoherently, we were led to the belief that there was a beginning. That the beginning was something miraculous and mysteriious, and if we stared too long we'd probably go mad with more questions -- or worse, blind. In the beginning, there was nothing, and from it, everything emerged -- space, time and the very laws of nature.

The Man (Purusha) has a thousand heads, a thousand eyes, a thousand feet. He pervades the earth everywhere and extends beyond for ten fingers' breadth. The Man himself is all this, whatever has been and whatever is to be. He is the lord of immortality and also lord of that which grows on food. Such is his greatness, and the Man is yet greater than this. All creatures make up a quarter of him; three quarters are the immortal in heaven. With three quarters the Man has risen above, and one quarter of him still remains here, whence he spread out everywhere, pervading that which eats and that which does not eat. From him Virj was born, and from Virj came the Man, who, having been born, ranged beyond the earth before and behind. When the gods spread the sacrifice, using the Man as the offering, spring was the clarified butter, summer the fuel, autumn the oblation. They anointed the Man, the sacrifice, born at the beginning, upon the sacred grass. With him the gods, Sdhyas, and sages sacrificed. From that sacrifice in which everything was offered, the clarified butter was obtained, and they made it into those beasts who live in the air, in the forest, and in villages. From that sacrifice in which everything was offered, the verses and the chants were born, the metres were born, and the formulas were born. From it horses were born, and those other animals which have a double set of incisors; cows were born from it, and goats and sheep were born from it. [Source]

At one point in my life, that all made sense, and I was at peace knowing that I knew all there was to know. Then I got some education and it made me think, and doubts and questions arose. If Vishnu never woke up, would the world have been created?

I stopped pinning my hopes on the Big Bang after a while. The Big Bang implied something came before, and even though I wasn't supposed to ask, I asked -- quietly. Thinking of everything, at the vast scale of the universe to the weirdly, wonderous quantum scale, one can get lost. The human species may never find the answers before we go extinct, but that possibility isn't stopping us. In the April issue of Discover Magazine, Adam Frank teases us with three tantilizing prospects that dares venture beyond the Big Bang and conventional thinking. Cosmological heresey, if you will.

(1) The universe is more than we can see, and at the fundamental level, are one-dimensional objects called strings. The promise of string theory is the unification of general relativity and quantum mechanics -- and it's all dizzyingly complex mathematics, that may prove itself unobservable. There are many interpretations of string theory, including the possibility of dimensions beyond the four that we are familiar with. In this theory, our four-dimensional universe is a brane (short for membrane) inside a higher-dimension space, called the bulk. There could be many branes within a bulk, all with different laws of physics. Think of bedsheets hung out on clotheslines to dry in the summer. Each bedsheet would be a four-dimensional universe, flapping in the wind. When bedsheets touch each other in the bulk, the results materialize in the brane, like, well -- a miracle. One such effect would be the Big Bang. In this version of the universe, ours is but one in a multiverse. The concept of a beginning disappears, as universes are constantly being popped into the multiverse. Each new universe is a brane, that could likewise interact with other branes to create more branes, and so the multiverse continues.

(2) In seeking to explain the Big Bang and the resulting universe, the concept of inflation has been proposed -- and while the mechanism that precipitated it is not understood, it has made predictions that have been confirmed by observations. The universe as we know it today, is expanding from a distance past; seeming to originate from a single point; is flat; and in whichever direction we look, appears the same. The concept of inflation states that at some point in the beginning of everything -- perhaps just after the Big Bang -- the universe underwent a period where it expanded exponentially, driven by negative pressure vacuum energy; i.e. stuff appearing out of nothing, and flung out to create the universe. As crazy as it might sound, stuff does appear out of nothing, all the time. What if then, inflation isn't as unique as once thought, but occurs on quite a regular basis? The result would be a multiverse, in which the Big Bang really isn't unique, but is constantly happening. A multiverse of infinite, interconnected universes. An interesting outcome from this thinking is that time has no meaning. Our inflation only pushed time in the direction we experience it today. It could very well happen that other inflations have time running in the opposite direction.

(3) The craziest idea of the three, and my favourite, cause it seems to make the most sense, is that time is an illusion. Time doesn't exist. It's an idea proposed physicist Julian Barbour. In this theory, the universe is like pages in a book. Every page exists at the same time. There is no past, and no future. The flow from one Now (page) to another Now (page), produces the illusion of time (narrative) that we experience. In such a universe, nothing changes. Everything just is. This may sound crazy, but there is hard mathematics to support it.

If you're still here, you may want to check out some related reading. (The Adam Frank Discover article, The Day Before Genesis, isn't online as yet.)

• Before the Big Bang -- Discover Magazine
• What Happened Before the Big Bang? -- Discover Magazine
• The Cosmic Triangle: Revealing the State of the Universe -- N. Bahcall (Princeton), J.P. Ostriker (Princeton), S. Perlmutter (LBNL), P. J. Steinhardt (Princeton)
• New Ekpyrotic Cosmology -- Evgeny I. Buchbinder, Justin Khoury, Burt A. Ovrut

Super Human

Wim Hof and Lynne Cox can do an amazing thing -- they can withstand extreme cold temperatures with no adverse effects. Hof ran a half-marathon, bare foot, dressed only in a swimsuit, at the Arctic Circle. He swam 80 metres under an ice sheet at the North Pole. He climbed Mount Everest in shorts. Cox on the other hand swam the Bering Strait and a mile through icebergs in the Antarctic. Neither suffered from frostbite or hypothermia due to their prolonged exposure to frigid temperatures. That has left doctors wondering how they do it.

Amazingly enough, Hof and Cox are quite normal. There is nothing in their physiology that differentiates them from everybody else. The only theory with some merit, is that both have used their brains to mentally prepare their bodies for the extremes. This is a tantalizing prospect, as it speaks to some untapped potential of the brain. Being able to take control of the body -- the organs, and the physiological response to external stimuli is amazing. If the mechanism can be figured out and it can be taught, the possibilities are endless.

Reading about Cox and Hof made me think of the feats of mental agility I'm personally capable of. I can appear to be superhuman at times. Like Cox and Hof, I've learned to prepare my body so as to not respond physically to the monotony and general apathy I sometimes find myself subjected to in meetings. I sometimes amaze myself at the interest and attention I can generate for dull topics -- where weaker souls would be fantasizing about hari-kari.

The Racist Gene

Bruno Maddox's Blinded by Science column (as of this posting, not yet online) in Discover Magazine this month, raises the whole question of a genetic basis for intelligence that exploded last October, when James Watson remarked that blacks are just not as smart as whites. Watson let his tongue get ahead of his brain, and it was too late to take the words back. He got sacked, and his entire career would never be viewed the same again. That being said, in Maddox's column, a myth continues to be perpetuated. The myth of race and a genetic basis for it.

The human species may be varied on the outside, but inside, at the genetic level, we're all the same. Race is a social affliction that the best of us seems to find a difficult hurdle to get over. There is more evidence that race is a byproduct of our environment, not our genes. Our environment determines how our genes express themselves -- and while this may have been obvious from early genetic studies, evidence is now being accumulated to support that view. Race should never be part of a genetic dialogue, other than to state that the two don't belong together -- and that's a mistake I find surprising in a science magazine.

The other point raised by Maddox is on intelligence, and I fear it may have been missed because of the column got muddied with race. Intelligence -- what is it? Isaac Asimov remarked that scoring high on IQ tests simply mean that people are "very good at answering the type of academic questions that are considered worthy of answers by people who make up the intelligence tests." Nothing more. There are a good deal of people, who may score high on standard IQ tests, but may appear brilliant in their execution of assessments of their own devising. A car mechanic; a carpenter; a chef; they would no doubt be very successful when testing their acumen in repairing a vehicle; building something from wood; or cooking their favourite meal. Adversely, being academically smart, could just mean being dumb as a stump -- as evidenced by James Watson's remark on race and intelligence.

Related reading:

• Does Race Exist? -- Scientific American
• Race, Evolution and Behaviour -- J. Philippe Rushton

Human Ocean Footprint

Humans have left little of the planet unexploited and unspoiled. A team of researchers now have an aggregated view, showing us just how extensive our pillaging has been. The oceans, once vast, untamed and much larger than human greed, are now bearing the burden of our species footprint. The researchers looked at 17 different human impacts, including fishing, coastal development, fertilizer runoff and pollution from shipping. The results show that coral reefs, seagrass beds, mangrove forests in estuaries, seamounts, rocky reefs and continental shelves are feeling the brunt of human activity. Threatened are the North Sea, the South and East China Seas, the Caribbean Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Bering Sea, along the Eastern Coast of North America and in much of the western Pacific.

The study used available data, which was limited, to create this view, and the researchers suggest that reality may actually be worse than they've shown. As climate change gallops across the globe, the researchers also expect that new areas of risk will be opened, especially in the polar regions. This all comes at a time when countries around the world are busily trying to extend their borders as new mapping is done on shed light on where continental shelves, end. Already, Russia, the US, Canada and Denmark are squabbling over the Arctic, in hopes of plundering its future potential when the ice finally melts. This shortsighted view can only lead to long term pain, and future generations will look back on us and lament our insanity.

Related links:

• A Global Map of Human Impacts to Marine Ecosystems
• The Human Footprint and the Last of the Wild [PDF]
• Atlas of the Human Footprint
• Human Impact on the Biosphere

Extremophile Hunting

In seeking to understand ourselves and our place in the universe, we continue to look for the possibility of life elsewhere. This search has led to us to look many places -- in the deep reaches of place; within our solar system; and closer to home, right here on our beloved blue marble. There are places on Earth that we've never explored, even while we're busily destroying it. One such place, is Lake Untersee, in Antarctica, where a team of NASA scientist have just departed for, looking for alien life. Alien, not in the extra-terristrial sense -- but alien in that they may find life like we've never seen before.

Lake Untersee is an extreme environment. It is a subglacial lake that is permanently covered in ice (for now anyway), fed by the Anuchin Glacier, the lake has no outlet. Water loss is via evaporation and ablation. The upper 70 metres of the lake is highly alkaline, with a pH similar to bleach, and the lake's sediment produces more methane gas than any other natural body of water on the planet. (As a side note, this is one of the dangers of global warming. There are huge amounts of methane trapped in the Arctic and Antarctic ice. Its release will only accelerate the pace of climate change.)

The conditions in Lake Untersee are similar to what is found in similar bodies in space: Mars, comets and the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn. If life is found in the lake, the probability increases that we will find extra-terristrial life where similar conditions exist. Lifeforms found in extreme environments, extremophiles, have already been found in other extreme regions of the planet. One such extremophile, a bacteria found in an Alaskan tunnel, was frozen for 32,000 years, and returned to life once thawed.

Gives a new perspective on life and Earth's ability to endure -- endurance that may not be a trait of the human species.

A Map of the Universe

Ever wonder how large everything is? Well, at least the known universe? People have been wondering for a long, long time about it. Some folks over at Princeton produced this map published in 2005, in the Astrophysical Journal [PDF], of the known universe.

We have produced a new conformal map of the universe illustrating recent discoveries, ranging from Kuiper belt objects in the Solar system, to the galaxies and quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. This may projection, based on the logarithm map of the complex plane, preserves shapes locally, and yet is able to display the entire range of astronomical scales from Earth's neighborhood to the cosmic microwave background. The conformal nature of the projection, preserving shapes locally, may be of particular use for analyzing large scale structure. Prominent in the map is a Sloan Great Wall of galaxies 1.37 billion light years long, 80% longer than the Great Wall discovered by Geller and Huchra and therefore the largest observed structure in the universe.

Feel small?

Dark is Cool

It's blacker and than black, darker than dark ... it's a material made of the ever versatile carbon nanotube, configured to reflect 0.045% of all light shone on it. The material was created by researchers at Rice University who were never as cool as the kids who wore black when they were younger. The material will be used to make really black jackets.

80 Million Tiny Images

It's a visual dictionary of all the nouns in the English language, arranged by semantic meaning, and linked to 79,302,017 images culled from image search engines. Randomly click on the tiny images to see a popup of the hidden word and thumbnails representing the word. Totally cool ... in a "I not sure why they did this" kinda way. See the related research paper on the work for the techno-babble.

Electricity from Body Heat

Scientists have developed a more efficient thermoelectric silicon nanowire that could be used in generators to covert heat from various sources, including the human body, to electricity. While the physics of the new nanowires are not fully understood, the results are. Previous nanowire-based converters were not efficient for production, but if the promise of these new nanowires hold through, we could see countless applications hitting the market. The US DOD & DOE would definitely be interested, but so would commercial interests. Think of powering your laptop or other gadgets and toys using your own body heat ... makes power trips to the local fast food trough almost excusable.

OJ287: Really, really BIG!

The most massive black hole known, has been discovered -- weighing in at a massive 18-billion Suns. And it gets better. This black hole is so massive, it has another black hole, weighing about 100-million Suns, orbiting it. The smaller black hole makes a complete orbit of the larger one every 12 years, ploughing through its accretion disk twice during an orbit. Each time the smaller black hole moves through the larger's accretion disk, huge outbursts of radiation is released, causing the system to brighten. The two black holes form the heart of the quasar QJ287. As general relativity predicts, astronomers have observed the decay of the smaller black hole's orbit. At the rate of decay, the smaller black hole will be swallowed by the larger in 10,000 years.

Beauty, Eh!

Never judge a book by the cover ... so we're told, cause you never know what's lurking beneath the covers. But how often do we actually heed those words? Everyday we practice our prejudices -- even when we know better, our subconscious betray us. Biologically, there may be something there. The way someone looks, usually is a good indicator for what we can expect from them. It has served our species well in the past. We are prejudiced. We can't help it.

We are attracted to the beautiful. They are showered with love, while the ugly are avoid. And while beauty may be subjective, there are definitely quite a number traits that we all agree on as being beautiful. Those are usually associated with how healthy a person appears to be: skin and hair for example are very susceptible to illness. Studies also show that the beautiful are also smarter -- scoring better at general intelligence than those less attractive. So prejudices aside, your first take on someone may actually be an accurate judge.

Which sorta explains my household. There are a bunch of really beautiful people in my house -- and damn smart too. Go figure! :)

Related reading:

• To those that have, shall be give -- the Economist article that prompted this post.
• Intelligence tests with higher g-loadings show higher correlations with body symmetry: Evidence for a general fitness factor mediated by developmental stability -- Mark D. Prokosch, Ronald A. Yeo, Geoffrey F. Miller; Department of Psychology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.
• Facial attractiveness -- Randy Thornhill and Steven W. Gangestad.

Smaller is Stronger

Science has long known that at the nano-scale, materials get stronger. Take a sheet of nickel for instance: you can bend it with little force; but a nano-sized piece of nickel would require far more force to deform. Although this has been well known for sometime, what hasn't been known is why that happens. Until now.

Materials deform because of existing defects in the planes of the materials crystalline structure. As force is applied to a macro-sized material, these defects increases, colliding with each other and multiple. In effect, with the right amount of force, you can cause a runaway increase in defects in a material, which results in deformation. In nano-scale materials however, the opposite happens. As force is applied, defects in the material dissipate in a process called mechanical annealing. In effect, as force is applied to nano-scale materials, the material becomes stronger, as defects disappear. (With enough force however, defects return and rapidly increase, resulting in deformation -- but that's a lot more force than it would take to deform a macro-scale material.)

Ain't that cool?

Physics is Fun

Physics is sooo much fun! Click and play.

Updated: Jan. 25, 2008

Science, Evolution, and Creationism

The US National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine has just published Science, Evolution, and Creationism -- a book "designed to give the public a comprehensive and up-to-date picture of the current scientific understanding of evolution and its importance in the science classroom." In the book, the Academy makes it quite clear that evolution is central to modern biology, yet continues to be challenged in the classroom by proponents of creationism and intelligent design. The Academy states in the book that science and religion can coexist, and present different ways of understanding the world.

This book is an update from previous versions published in 1984 and 1999. The Academy is trying to appeal to religious moderates in the face of rising religious fundamentalism in the US and educate the masses of uneducated in the US (aka: the general public).

In science, explanations must be based on evidence drawn from examining the natural world. Scientifically based observations or experiments that conflict with an explanation eventually must lead to modification or even abandonment of that explanation. Religious faith, in contrast, does not depend only on empirical evidence, is not necessarily modified in the face of conflicting evidence, and typically involves supernatural forces or entities. Because they are not a part of nature, supernatural entities cannot be investigated by science. In this sense, science and religion are separate and address aspects of human understanding in different ways. Attempts to pit science and religion against each other create controversy where none needs to exist.

Whether this education of America will actually work is up for debate. I'm not going to be an optimist on this one. Those that believe have no reason to want the education. They already have their belief that religion is correct, and science is the work of the devil. And on that score, they're already preparing for the battle.

Killing the Dinosaurs

What killed off the dinosaurs? Asteroid impact has been the leading candidate in most scientific circles -- with Fred, Barney and the great flood in others -- but now a new argument has been put forth in the book What Bugged the Dinosaurs? Insects, Disease and Death in the Cretaceous by George and Roberta Poinar. In the book, the Poinars suggest that the extinction of dinosaurs, which may have occurred from hundreds of thousands to millions of years, could have been caused by the appearance of insects and the diseases they carry. The authors don't discount the effects of geologic and catastrophic events, but contend that those events by themselves couldn't have led to the slow death of the dinosaurs. The Poinars have accumulated a lot of evidence for diseases to back up their claims, via insects preserved in amber and dinosaur feces. They also suggest that insects played a further role of changing the vegetation of the planet, favouring more flowering plants. The combination of diseases and a dwindling food supply could have put the final nail in the dinosaur coffin.

Solastalgia

Glenn Albrecht coined the term solastalgia to describe the sadness, distress, sense of loss and depression that result from missing one's home and sense of belonging -- not because of a move away from home -- but because environmental change has resulted in the change in the identification one feels for home. Home can mean different things to different people -- at different times -- and in different context. Home can be one's country; hometown; or even online locale. Albrecht aptly describes it as,

... the homesickness you feel when you're still at home.

We now have a name for the condition some of us are already experiencing -- and more of us will come to experience as our world changes for the worst. 2007 ended with an awakening of the general public to the threat of climate change. Granted there are those with their heads still firmly buried in the ground, but enough awareness has been raised. As futile as our efforts may now be to halt large scale changes, there is still much that can be done to limit the effects on the planet -- our home. It will take the efforts of you and me -- to influence industry, to make personal changes, and to do the right thing.

Related reading:

• Sustainability [PPT] -- Albrecht's presentation at the 2007 Australasian Slag Association's conference.
• Global Mourning [PDF] -- Wired Magazine article on this topic.

Whales talk French at the bottom of the sea?

A college professor in Red Oak, Iowa, claims he's been fired for giving an academic treatment to Christianity in his western civilization course. In the course, Steve Bitterman, teaches that the Biblical story of creation should not be taken literally. At the end of a recent class, he remarked to a couple of students that the story of Adam and Eve was just a fairy tale. Oops. The students apparently threatened a lawsuit in response, and the whole matter go escalated to the college administration -- who, with the usual intestinal fortitude of administrations everywhere, recoiled from confrontation -- and fired Bitterman.

This of course, is Bitterman's claim only -- but the college has done little in their official response to counter his claim.

So, WTF Iowa? I'm well aware that America is reveling in its new new found religious fundamentalism -- but surely the people in charge know that the recent surge of the religious right is only a phase -- and should be limited to a very short one. Those in academia -- the educated -- better is expected of you. Giving in to the mindless morons of fundamentalism the way unchallenged is not the answer -- and leads to death of reason. We've seen the results of this. It's playing itself out in the Middle East right now.

The Heresy of Pi

The Bible defines Pi as 3. A whole number, as pointed out at the Gospel of Reason. So just how do fundamentalist Christians reconcile the Biblical proclamation with Mathematics? Well, a helping hand. I Kings 7:23-26 references something "circular in shape" -- not a circle. So really, it wasn't a circle. Just more evidence of God testing the faithful.

The Peopling of the World

Humans have had a short and spectacular history on this planet. Short. Extremely short. To some of the species we're busily taking to extinction, we've just barely blinked into existence. We're quite the surprise for the planet. Follow this link for an animated view of how we took over the planet. In a brief period of time, we've forced frightening changes on our world -- but the planet has seen its share of disasters. It has bounced back from mass extinctions. It will survive the one we're bringing. Will we?

Melanized Microorganisms Hunger for Radiation

In research just published, scientists have found that microorganisms with the melanin pigment, have a natural hunger for radiation, and may be using the pigment to consume radiation in much the same way that chlorophyll converts solar radiation in plants. Organisms studied, the fungi Cryptococcus neoformans, Cladosporium sphaerospermum and Wangiella dermatitidis, all consumed high levels of ionizing radiation, resulting in exponential growth – sometimes even when they were not in a nutrient rich environment.

The ability of melanin to confer protection against radiation is well known. Melanin is responsible for our skin pigmentation, and has been found in organisms inhabiting extreme environments. Melanized microorganisms have been found in high altitudes, Arctic and Antarctic regions, and recently, colonizing the walls and surrounding soil of the damaged Chernobyl nuclear reactor. There is also fossil evidence that suggests that melanin has been around for some time, conferring protection to plants and animals.

This finding could have numerous applications. The obvious is cleaning up after radiation accidents or as a way of neutralizing spent nuclear fuel. Space travel however, could also benefit from radiation eating fungi. There's a lot of radiation out there, and the ability to convert it from something dangerous to useful could be boon for astronauts on long-haul missions. It also makes me think that all those bad B-movies, in which radiation creates monstrous goo that oozes everywhere devouring people, may not be that far off the mark.

15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense

Back in 2002, Scientific American published 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense -- an attempt to rebut "some of the most common "scientific" arguments raised against evolution." Having to refute creationists arguments against evolution isn't a new thing. As SciAm points out, Charles Darwin was similarly challenged in his day by scientists, until evidence from numerous scientific disciplines mounted a bulwark against "creationist nonsense." Today of course, science faces a the challenge of misunderstanding, misinformation and just plain lies. Even the informed is challenged to face the barrage of idiocy.

Here's some help then. 15 common arguments that creationists raise, and answers you could wield to knock them back to the dark ages (let's face it, some will never see the light).

1. Evolution is only a theory. It is not a fact or a scientific law.
2. Natural selection is based on circular reasoning: the fittest are those who survive, and those who survive are deemed fittest.
3. Evolution is unscientific, because it is not testable or falsifiable. It makes claims about events that were not observed and can never be re-created.
4. Increasingly, scientists doubt the truth of evolution.
5. The disagreements among even evolutionary biologists show how little solid science supports evolution.
6. If humans descended from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?
7. Evolution cannot explain how life first appeared on earth.
8. Mathematically, it is inconceivable that anything as complex as a protein, let alone a living cell or a human, could spring up by chance.
9. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that systems must become more disordered over time. Living cells therefore could not have evolved from inanimate chemicals, and multicellular life could not have evolved from protozoa.
10. Mutations are essential to evolution theory, but mutations can only eliminate traits. They cannot produce new features.
11. Natural selection might explain microevolution, but it cannot explain the origin of new species and higher orders of life.
12. Nobody has ever seen a new species evolve.
13. Evolutionists cannot point to any transitional fossils--creatures that are half reptile and half bird, for instance.
14. Living things have fantastically intricate features--at the anatomical, cellular and molecular levels--that could not function if they were any less complex or sophisticated. The only prudent conclusion is that they are the products of intelligent design, not evolution.
15. Recent discoveries prove that even at the microscopic level, life has a quality of complexity that could not have come about through evolution.

Bullet-Shaped Solar System

As results from our various instruments pour in, we get an increasingly accurate view of our universe, and our place in it. Recently, researchers analyzing data from the Voyager spacecrafts, began to piece together an image of our solar system’s place within the galaxy. The solar system travels in an invisible bubble, created by solar particles streaming towards interstellar space. The edge of our solar system is in fact, defined as the point where particles from the Sun and those of interstellar space, reach a happy medium -- undulating against each other. Our solar system moves through the Milky Way, carving it’s way through interstellar space -- with the bubble of solar particles shaped like a bullet, forming a protective shell around the system. The edge of this bubble, carves a path through the Milky Way’s magnetic field at an angel of 60-degrees, traveling at 1/3 the speed of light. The bullet shaped is formed from the solar particles hitting the galactic magnetic field.

Ain't that cool?

They're Made of People!

We send a lot of stuff into space. A lot. Not everything that goes up and stays out there, necessarily had a primary mission. Upper rocket stages of spacecrafts for instance -- they're just there to make sure the crafts we send up, get to where they're going, and have a chance at completing their missions. Upper rocket stages -- well, they just sort of get left to their own devices when they've been spent. As Space.com points out in a recent article, an interesting possibility arises from that scrap metal. The spacecrafts that get sent out are usually sterilized to ensure they're clean -- not so with the upper rocket stages. They're teeming with bacteria from the engineers who built them. The amazing thing about bacteria is their ability to survive. Bacteria has been known to hibernate for millions of years -- waiting for the right conditions to arise so they continue doing what bacteria do -- multiple, and evolve. Right now, upper rocket stages are hurtling out of our solar system to destinations unknown. Space is quite large. Time is very long. With some wild imagination, the possibilities can be really freaky.

Tunnels Under Anthill

Ever wonder what "the architecture of the subterranean nests of the Florida harvester ant" looks like? How about what the tunnels under an anthill looks like? Walter R. Tschinkel wanted to know, so he poured plaster into an anthill to find out. What he found was just another cool surprise from nature. The tunnels can be as deep as 3m, with about half the total area of the nest contained in the first 25% of the nest depth. The nest in the thumbnail image to the right was created by about 5,000 worker ants excavating 20kg of sand in about 4-5 days. A typical ant colony constructs one or two of these nests per year. In the nests, the ants arrange themselves with older ants in the upper parts of the structure, and the younger ants taking up positions in the lower parts -- with the younger ants tending to dig more than their older counterparts. The ant colony behaves like a superorganism. The findings are an interesting read -- and totally cool!

Second Earth, Gliese 581 c

Astronomers using the ESO's 3.6m telescope, have discovered a planet orbiting Gliese 581, a red dwarf star, that bear a striking resemblance to Earth. The planet has a radius 50% larger than Earth, with five times more mass and is 14 times closer to its star. Its orbit allows the planet to complete an orbit in 13-days. At that proximity to its star, you'd think the planet would be hot, but because Gliese 581 is smaller, cooler and is less luminous that our star, this new planet may actually have comfortable temperatures, and possibly even liquid water.

Gliese 581 is just over 20-light-years away from us, in the constellation Libra. It belongs to the group of most prevalent and stable stars in our galaxy. Due to their low luminosity however, they are difficult to observe. While the newly discovered planet is gaining a lot of press lately for being Earth-like, the chances that the system could support life as we know it, is fairly small. While red dwarfs are stable, handing around for a lot longer than stars like our Sun, they exist with much variability, emit light mostly in the infrared and would most likely lock habitable planets close to them in a tidal orbit.

For more, see: The HARPS search for southern extra-solar planets : XI. An habitable super-Earth (5 MEarth) in a 3-planet system. [PDF]

Plastic Ignorance

A recent survey of Americans, polling their basic understanding of plastic, revealed that mostly, Americans are woefully ignorant of the world they live in. From the pollster press release:

• 72% of respondents do not know that plastic is made out of oil/petroleum
• On average, respondents estimated 38% of plastic is recycled (the reality is less than 6%, according to the EPA)
• Nearly 40% (38.1%) of respondents said plastic will biodegrade underground, in home compost, in landfills, or in the ocean (plastic will not biodegrade in any of these environments).
• After learning that plastic is made from oil and never biodegrades, half (50.1%) of respondents stated they would be likely or very likely to pay 5-10% more for a natural, biodegradable plastic. Only 24% were unlikely/very unlikely to pay this much more.
• 62% of respondents rate their own level of environmental knowledge as fair or poor, with only 5.6% rating it as excellent.

These are the same folks I bet, who have a distrust of science, take religious dogma literally, and believe that climate change warnings are just hype.

48% of Americans Think Evolution is Rubbish

A Newsweek poll on the belief of god finds that Americans are deeply religious. 91% of Americans believe in god -- and 82% of them are Christians. Further, 48% of Americans think the scientific theory of evolution is a load of shit -- with 34% of college graduates believing the Bible's take on creation is fact.

Goes to show you -- we really do need population control.