Category: Science

Crows Use Tools Too

NewCaledonianCrowStickTool2011-11-09.jpg

“A captive New Caledonian crow forages for food using a stick tool.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D3) New Caledonian crows, found in the South Pacific, are among nature’s most robust nonhuman tool users. They are well known for using twigs to dislodge beetle larvae from tree trunks.

And there’s a good reason. By foraging for just a few larvae, a crow can satisfy its daily nutritional needs, which explains the evolutionary advantage of learning how to use tools, researchers report in the journal Science.

For the full story, see:
SINDYA N. BHANOO. “OBSERVATORY; Crows Put Tools to Use to Access a Nutritious Diet.” The New York Times (Tues., September 21, 2010): D3.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated September 20, 2010.)

Huge Variance in Estimates of Number of Species

(p. D3) Scientists have named and cataloged 1.3 million species. How many more species there are left to discover is a question that has hovered like a cloud over the heads of taxonomists for two centuries.
“It’s astounding that we don’t know the most basic thing about life,” said Boris Worm, a marine biologist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia.
On Tuesday, Dr. Worm, Dr. Mora and their colleagues presented the latest estimate of how many species there are, based on a new method they have developed. They estimate there are 8.7 million species on the planet, plus or minus 1.3 million.
. . .
In recent decades, scientists have looked for better ways to determine how many species are left to find. In 1988, Robert May, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford, observed that the diversity of land animals increases as they get smaller. He reasoned that we probably have found most of the species of big animals, like mammals and birds, so he used their diversity to calculate the diversity of smaller animals. He ended up with an estimate 10 to 50 million species of land animals.
Other estimates have ranged from as few as 3 million to as many as 100 million. Dr. Mora and his colleagues believed that all of these estimates were flawed in one way or another. Most seriously, there was no way to validate the methods used, to be sure they were reliable.

For the full story, see:
CARL ZIMMER. “How Many Species? A Study Says 8.7 Million, but It’s Tricky.” The New York Times (Tues., August 30, 2011): D3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated August 23 (sic), 2011.)

Fossil Shows Placental Mammals 35 Million Years Earlier

PlacentalMammalFossilEarliest2011-11-07.jpg

“The earliest known eutherian from the Jurassic of China.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D3) The split between placental mammals and marsupials may have occurred 35 million years earlier than previously thought, according to a new study.
. . .
The newly identified mammal was small, weighing less than a chipmunk. Based on its claws, it appears to have been an active climber. “This was a skinny little animal, eating insects,” said Dr. Luo. “We imagine it was active in the night and capable of going up and down trees.”
Its discovery helps reconcile fossil evidence and molecular analysis. Modern molecular studies, which use DNA to estimate dates of evolution, also put the emergence of placentals at about 160 million years ago.

For the full story, see:
SINDYA N. BHANOO. “OBSERVATORY; A Small Mammal Fossil Tells a Jurassic Tale.” The New York Times (Tues., August 30, 2011): D3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated August 24 (sic), 2011.)

Innovative Entrepreneurs Finance Basic Research in Mariana Trench

OceanDepthGraphic2011-08-10.jpgSource of graphic: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D1) A new generation of daredevils is seeking to plunge through nearly seven miles of seawater to the bottom of a rocky chasm in the western Pacific that is veiled in perpetual darkness. It is the ocean’s deepest spot. The forbidding place, known as the Challenger Deep, is so far removed from the warming rays of the sun that its temperature hovers near freezing.

“When I was a kid, I loved not only amazing ocean exploration but space, too,” James Cameron, the director of “Avatar,” “Titanic” and “The Abyss,” said in an interview. “I can think of no greater fantasy than to be an explorer and see what no human eye has seen before.”
The would-be explorers can afford to live their dreams because of their extraordinarily deep pockets. Significantly, their ambitions far exceed those of the world’s seafaring nations, which have no plans to send people so deep.
The billionaires and millionaires include Mr. Cameron, the airline mogul Richard Branson and the Internet guru Eric E. Schmidt. Each is building, planning to build or financing the construction of minisubmarines meant to transport them, their friends and scientists into the depths. Entrepreneurs talk of taking tourists down as well.
The vehicles, meant to hold one to three people, are estimated to cost anywhere from $7 million to $40 million.

For the full story, see:
WILLIAM J. BROAD. “Ambitions as Deep as Their Pockets.” The New York Times (Tues., August 2, 2011): D1 & D4.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated August 1, 2011.)

“A Landmark Achievement for Regenerative Medicine”

TracheaMadeInLab2011-08-09.jpg “A lab-made windpipe was implanted June 9 into a 36-year-old patient whose own windpipe was obstructed by a tumor.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A3) Doctors have replaced the cancer-stricken windpipe of a patient with an organ made in a lab, a landmark achievement for regenerative medicine. The patient no longer has cancer and is expected to have a normal life expectancy, doctors said.

“He was condemned to die,” said Paolo Macchiarini, a professor of regenerative surgery who carried out the procedure at Sweden’s Karolinska University Hospital. “We now plan to discharge him [Friday].”
The transplantation of an entirely synthetic and permanent windpipe had never been successfully done before the June 9 procedure. The researchers haven’t yet published the details in a scientific journal.

For the full story, see:
GAUTAM NAIK. “Lab-Made Trachea Saves Man; Tumor-Blocked Windpipe Replaced Using Synthetic Materials, Patient’s Own Cells.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., July 8, 2011): C8.

The Huge Value of Exposing Ourselves to Unexpected Evidence

Bill Bryson tells how much we learned from the remains of a man from the neolithic age, who has been called Ötzi:

(p. 377) His equipment employed eighteen different types of wood – a remarkable variety. The most surprising of all his tools was the axe. It was copper-bladed and of a type known as a Remedello axe, after a site in Italy where they were first found. But Ötzi’s axe was hundreds of years older than the oldest Remedello axe. ‘It was,’ in the words of one observer, ‘as if the tomb of a medieval warrior had yielded a modern rifle.’ The axe changed the timeframe for the copper age in Europe by no less than a thousand years.

But the real revelation and excitement were the clothes. Before Ötzi we had no idea – or, to be more precise, nothing but ideas – of how stone age people dressed. Such materials as survived existed only as fragments. Here was a complete outfit and it was full of surprises. His clothes were made from the skins and furs of an impressive range of animals – red deer, bear, chamois, goat and cattle. He also had with him a woven grass rectangle that was three feet long. This might have been a kind of rain cape, but it might equally have been a sleeping mat. Again, nothing like it had ever been seen or imagined.
Ötzi wore fur leggings held up with leather strips attached to a waist strap that made them look uncannily – almost comically – like the kind of nylon stockings and garter sets that Hollywood pin-ups wore in the Second World War. Nobody had remotely foreseen such a get-up. He wore a loincloth of goatskin and a hat made from the fur of a brown bear – probably a kind of hunting trophy. It would have been very warm and covetably stylish. The rest of his outfit was mostly made from the skin and fur of red deer. Hardly any came from domesticated animals, the opposite of what was expected.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

The Lancet Accused Snow of Being “in the Pocket of Business Interests”

(p. 365) It is hard now to appreciate just how radical and unwelcome Snow’s views were. Many authorities actively detested him for them. The Lancet concluded that he was in the pocket of business interests which wished to continue to fill the air with ‘pestilent vapours, miasms and loathsome abominations of every kind’ and make themselves rich by poisoning their neighbours. ‘After careful enquiry,’ the parliamentary inquiry concluded, ‘we see no reason to adopt this belief.’

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.
(Note: italics in original.)

We Tend to Ignore Information that Contradicts Our Beliefs

BelievingBrainBK2011-08-09.jpg

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

We learn the most when our priors are contradicted. But the dissonance between evidence and beliefs is painful. So we often do not see, or soon forget, evidence that does not fit with our beliefs.
The innovative entrepreneur is often a person who sees and forces herself to remember, the dissonant fact, storing it away to make sense of, or make use of, later. At the start, she may be alone in what she sees and what she remembers. So if we are to benefit from her ability and willingness to bear the pain of dissonance, she must have the freedom to differ, and she must have the financial wherewith-all to support herself until her vision is more widely shared, better understood, and more fruitfully applied.

(p. A13) Beliefs come first; reasons second. That’s the insightful message of “The Believing Brain,” by Michael Shermer, the founder of Skeptic magazine. In the book, he brilliantly lays out what modern cognitive research has to tell us about his subject–namely, that our brains are “belief engines” that naturally “look for and find patterns” and then infuse them with meaning. These meaningful patterns form beliefs that shape our understanding of reality. Our brains tend to seek out information that confirms our beliefs, ignoring information that contradicts them. Mr. Shermer calls this “belief-dependent reality.” The well-worn phrase “seeing is believing” has it backward: Our believing dictates what we’re seeing.
. . .
One of the book’s most enjoyable discussions concerns the politics of belief. Mr. Shermer takes an entertaining look at academic research claiming to prove that conservative beliefs largely result from psychopathologies. He drolly cites survey results showing that 80% of professors in the humanities and social sciences describe themselves as liberals. Could these findings about psychopathological conservative political beliefs possibly be the result of the researchers’ confirmation bias?
As for his own political bias, Mr. Shermer says that he’s “a fiscally conservative civil libertarian.” He is a fan of old-style liberalism, as in liberality of outlook, and cites “The Science of Liberty” author Timothy Ferris’s splendid formulation: “Liberalism and science are methods, not ideologies.” The “scientific solution to the political problem of oppressive governments,” Mr. Shermer says, “is the tried-and-true method of spreading liberal democracy and market capitalism through the open exchange of information, products, and services across porous economic borders.”
But it is science itself that Mr. Shermer most heartily embraces. “The Believing Brain” ends with an engaging history of astronomy that illustrates how the scientific method developed as the only reliable way for us to discover true patterns and true agents at work. Seeing through a telescope, it seems, is believing of the best kind.

For the full review, see:
RONALD BAILEY. “A Trick Of the Mind; Looking for patterns in life and then infusing them with meaning, from alien intervention to federal conspiracy.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., July 27, 2011): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Book reviewed:
Shermer, Michael. The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths. New York: Times Books, 2011.

Lunar Entrepreneurs

(p. A1) Now that the last space shuttle has landed back on Earth, a new generation of space entrepreneurs would like to whip up excitement about the prospect of returning to the Moon.
. . .
(p. A3) “It’s probably the biggest wealth creation opportunity in modern history,” said Barney Pell, a former NASA computer scientist turned entrepreneur and now a co-founder of Moon Express. While Moon Express might initially make money by sending small payloads, the big fortune would come from bringing back platinum and other rare metals, Dr. Pell said.
“Long term, the market is massive, no doubt,” he said. “This is not a question of if. It’s a question of who and when. We hope it’s us and soon.”
Like the aviation prizes that jump-started airplane technology a century ago, the Google Lunar X Prize is meant to rally technologists and entrepreneurs. It is administered by the X Prize Foundation, which handed out $10 million in 2004 to the first private team to build a spacecraft that could carry people 60 miles above the Earth’s surface. (The winner, SpaceShipOne, was built by the aerospace designer Burt Rutan with backing from Paul Allen, the software magnate.)

For the full story, see:
KENNETH CHANG. “In a Private Race to the Moon, Flights of Fancy Are in the Air.” The New York Times (Fri., July 22, 2011): A1 & A3.
(Note: the online version of the story is dated July 21, 2011 and has the title “Race to the Moon Heats Up for Private Firms.”)

John Crandon Proved Scurvy Caused by Lack of Vitamin C

(p. 167) . . . , in 1939 a Harvard Medical School surgeon named John Crandon decided to settle matters once and for all by the age-old method of withholding Vitamin C from his diet for as long as it took to make himself really ill. It took a surprisingly long time. For the first eighteen weeks, his only symptom was extreme fatigue. (Remarkably, he continued to operate on patients throughout this period.) But in the nineteenth week he took an abrupt turn for the worse – so much so that he would almost certainly have died had he not been under close medical supervision. He was injected with 1,000 milligrams of Vitamin C and was restored to life (p. 168) almost at once. Interestingly, he had never acquired the one set of symptoms that everyone associates with scurvy: the falling out of teeth and bleeding of gums.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.
(Note: ellipsis added.)