It’s been a while since I last posted a YouTube video as a post and since I’m busy at work today, here’s a video showing how well a modern computer equipped with suitable sensors can parallel park a car. Note that there’s a human driver in the car but he’s just there for safety reasons and is not driving the car in the maneuver shown in the video. Certainly few human drivers will be able to pull this off.
Originally seen on Marginal Revolution.
Four articles this month. Three of them are about humans the last one, about giraffes, is just something I threw in for fun. The three articles about people deal respectively with yet another mooted cause for schizophrenia, how our sense of touch affects our judgment and an unconventional, but very intuitive, way of determining whether or not someone is lying.
Schizophrenia
The first article is from The Economist and deliberately evokes a scenario that could have come right out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. There have been many different causes mooted for schizophrenia over the years and some of the theories I’ve read even include pathogens. But this is the first time I’ve heard that it’s caused by one that explicitly causes behavioral changes in its host to ensure its own propagation.
Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (June ’10)
Four articles this month with three of them related to human biology. We’ll start with the biggest scientific news of the week however, which I suspect will also be the most important news of the year, about the creation of what is considered to be the first example of synthetic life.
This particular news has been reported in many outlets of course (though strangely I failed to notice it in any local publications) but the particular piece I’m linking to is from the BBC. The team responsible was led by Craig Venter who has already established his place in scientific history for being one of the winners of the race to sequence the complete human genome. This particular project involved creating a synthetic version of an existing bacterial genome and transplanting the result into a non-synthetic host cell. This new cell then replicated itself over a billion times, proving that the synthetic genome worked just as well as the natural one to regulate the bacterium over its life cycle.
Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (May ’10)
A timely post on QT3 today reminded me that the venerable space shuttle is scheduled for retirement this year. The current mission by the Atlantis is its last one. The last mission for Discovery is in September later this year and the last mission for Endeavor will be in November. Huge crowds are expected at Cape Canaveral for these final two launches. After that, NASA will be relying on Russian spacecraft for its missions until the alternatives currently under development by private companies like SpaceX and Orbital Sciences come to fruition.
It’s sort of hard to believe that the space shuttle has been in service for close to 30 years now given that it’s such a icon of technology and humanity’s ambitions for space. Reading through its extensive Wikipedia page however, it’s sobering to realize how much of it is still based on 1970s technology. Its computers are probably less powerful than the cheapest netbooks you can buy today. Until 2007, the shuttles could not even be used in missions that started at the end of December and ended in January of the next year as the software couldn’t handle the transition to a new year.
Yet back in the 1980s, the space shuttle seemed like only a foretaste of greater things to come. I remember newspaper articles crowing about space habitats and colonies, complete with artists’ renditions of such wonders as torus-shaped stations large enough to create their own gravity and grow their own crops. It’s pretty humbling how far back we’ve scaled our ambitions since then. In an age when governments are busy dealing with economic recessions and unemployment, it seems that even keeping the International Space Station from falling out of the sky is an achievement.
Even my own views on space exploration have come a long way since I was a kid. Back then, I’d have happily voted for any big ticket space project, regardless of cost. Nowadays, I see that these projects yield relatively few benefits other than prestige and that actually useful scientific work can be better performed with unmanned spacecraft and at far lower cost. It’s clever stuff like the Mars Pathfinder that is the future of NASA while the development of manned spacecraft should depend on its ability to sustain itself financially through space tourism.
Of course, the space shuttle has more than earned its place in history even if it did cost too much and didn’t do as much real science as its boosters like to pretend. It’s so recognizable and has fueled so many dreams that it simply can’t be otherwise. I understand that one of the shuttles is to be given to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum while the two others will be sold off to private collectors. It would be interesting to see in whose hands they end being.
A little late this month because I chose to write something about Ip Man 2 first this week. Four articles this time around with three of them on biology and the last one on astronomy. We’ll start with the more innocuous of the three biology articles first.
This is an article that appeared in Discover and concerns itself with gut bacteria, specifically those found inside of Japanese people. The Japanese as we all know, eat quite a lot of sushi and one of the main ingredients of sushi is seaweed. What most of us probably don’t know is that sea algae such as seaweed is a bit different from land-based plants and contain special sulphur-rich carbohydrates that are difficult for most of us to digest.
Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (April ’10)
My wife was introduced to collagen supplements over the weekend, which rang all of my skeptical alarm bells. I’ve actually heard of this before (LYN is full of people trying to sell this kind of stuff) but I never took the time to think about them properly. Once you do however, it’s immediately obvious to me that there’s something fishy about the whole idea.
The basic concept is that collagen is the main protein that is used to construct connective tissues in animals and is hence a vital component of skin tissue. However, as the body ages, collagen production slows down and the degradation of collagen causes aging. Therefore, the idea goes, taking collagen supplements orally should replenish the body’s supply and retard the formation of wrinkles.
Except that biology doesn’t work that way. Collagen is a type of protein and your body needs to create all of its own protein for it to use. In fact, it doesn’t matter what you put into your stomach as your stomach acids will just digest it and turn it into more basic substances. This is the reason why the protein supplements that bodybuilders use to build muscle don’t contain pure protein. Instead, they contain amino acids, the basic building blocks from which all proteins, including collagen, are made.
As this New York Times article points out, it’s not as if collagen supplements don’t do anything. It’s just that the body treats them as a source of protein like any other and breaks them down into amino acids which it can then use to build proteins of its own. You might as well just eat a piece of chicken and it would work just as well but be much cheaper. If you want a megadose of collagen, you might try eating gelatin based desserts, which are almost pure collagen.
What’s sad is that this sort of misinformation is pervasive in the cosmetics and beauty foods industry. While manufacturers make all sorts of claims about the effectiveness and health benefits of their products, most people are not aware that generally such claims are not verified by independent authorities. This is unlike the situation for pharmaceutical drugs where manufacturers must be able to prove to the government that they work as claimed before being allowed to sell them.
Consumers are also either not scientifically literate enough or lack the critical thinking skills needed to evaluate the various claims made by manufacturers. In the Internet age, it is easy enough to Google for more information when you’re in doubt, but it seems that few people make it a habit. This allows companies to get away with selling products that are the modern equivalent of snake oil, but dressed up in scientific language.
Three articles for this month, mainly focusing on biology. The first two articles are about animals, one being about how some birds in North America are shrinking due to warmer temperatures and the other one is about the only true immortal animal on Earth. The last article is about an attempt by a French reality tv show to replicate the controversial Stanley Milgram experiment of 1961.
I’ve read about shrinking animals that may be caused by climate change before but I believe this is the first time I’ve chosen to highlight this issue. This particular article from the BBC covers a study involving almost half a million birds from over a hundred different species that passed through the Carnegie Museum’s Powdermill ringing station in Pennsylvania, US between 1967 and 2007. By studying the records of weight and wingspan measurements, the researchers found that most of the species have grown slightly smaller over time. The average loss is small but it appears that birds that winter in the tropics have shrunk the most.
Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (March ’10)