Just three articles this month, all of them related to biology in one way or another. The first one concerns what looks like an evolutionary adaptation in humans to living in the tropics. As this article from BBC News explains, scientists have long known that the birth rates of boys and girls vary across the world and that one of the factors that determine this variance is environmental stress. Biologically, males are considered more fragile than females and since having children is a huge investment, it makes sense that in a harsh environment, women tend to give birth to more girls since they would be likelier to survive.
According to research by Dr. Kristen Navara published in Biology Letters, people who live in the tropics produce more girls than boys compared to more temperate regions, even after adjusting for differences in lifestyle and socio-economic status. As Dr. Navara explains, this could simply be because male sperm works in a different way closer to the equator or that miscarriage rates might be affected somehow, but it could also be interpreted to more generally mean that living in the tropics is itself a form of environmental stress on the human organism.
This is an invention that could have come straight from a sci-fi movie: a remote-controlled helicopter drone equipped with a highly accurate sniper rifle capable of seven to ten aimed shots per minute. It’s all over the various news outlets now, but because a QT3 member actually worked on it, it got posted there before the news really spread out. The Wired article even leaves out the best part. It mentions that it uses a videogame-type controller, but Charlatan on QT3 reveals that it uses an actual Xbox 360 controller to control its flight.
As other posters on QT3 have jokingly pointed out, this must be a great way to save on operator training costs. Look at how many people are playing Halo with the same controllers already!
Since my last entry in this series was a bit light, here are four articles for this month. Two are from The Economist, with one of them on how physics might help answer an age-old philosophical question and the other on how appearances count for more than we think. Of the remaining two, one is from CNN on a novel use for the laser technology originally conceived for the Star Wars anti-missile program and the last one is from the BBC on yet another piece of news “proving” that playing games is good for you.
The philosophy problem to start with. The question is no less than whether or not reality exists when we’re not looking at it, and if it exists, does reality behave in a different way when we’re not looking than when we are? Drawing on the theoretical work of Lucien Hardy who proposed a thought experiment whereby a pair of matter and antimatter particles could meet but do not mutually annihilate themselves under the condition that the interaction remains unobserved, two independent teams of physicists successfully performed the experiment as described. So it seems that people can indeed tell whether or not someone is honest just by looking at his or her face.
Just a quick link to the news that the Texas school board is voting this week on a new curriculum that would challenge the principle of evolution. It’s pretty depressing that the chairman of the school board is someone who believes that God created the Earth less then 10,000 years ago. So again, for anyone who still has any doubt about evolution and wants to educate himself or herself on the mechanics and literature behind what is now of the most solidly well-documented principles in science, just go spend some time on the TalkOrigins Archive.
One thing that I’m somewhat grateful for is that Muslims at least don’t seem to have jumped onto the Creationism bandwagon in a big way. Then again, our Education Minister in Malaysia has just called the leader of the opposition a race traitor so that’s not much of an improvement.
I saw this link on QT3 today. As the original poster says, this is certainly a reminder of a simpler and more innocent era that Fallout 3 captured so well. Imagine Polonium-210, the same substance that Russian assassins likely used to kill Alexander Litvinenko, being sold as part of a science kit for children! I guess the manufacturers were really serious about properly educating young children about the different types of radiation. They even included a form that you could use to order new radiation sources once you’d used yours up. How handy is that? Even better, buy this set and if you find a natural uranium source with it, the U.S. government will pay you a $10,000.00 prize!
Of course, what they didn’t know then was how dangerous radiation really was. Nowadays it seems that not a day goes by without something familiar being classified as a cancer risk. Incidentally, for anyone interested in buying one of these things, it’s worth noting that since Polonium 210 has a half-life of only 130 days and the set was made available only from 1951 to 1952, I can’t imagine there being much of it left even if you could find one of these very rare sets intact.
I’ve only noted one science article of any interest this month. Perhaps the financial crisis is taking its toll on scientific research as well? This one is from The Economist and covers how social animals make collective decisions. One study by Christian List of the London School of Economics and Larissa Conradt of the University of Sussex examined how bees choose a site to migrate to and start a new nest. As described, scouts are sent out to find suitable locations and when they get back they perform the bees’ infamous waggle dance to tell the rest of the hive what they’ve found out. The longer the dance goes on, the better the site. The entire hive needs to sort out which site is the best one and make a collective decision to move the queen and the worker bees to it.
The scientists found that the hive manages to make extremely reliable decisions even though there are only minor differences in quality between the sites. In order to find out how they did this, they created a computer model to simulate the results from different variables. They found that two aspects of their decision-making process were crucial towards correctly determining the best course of action: one, freely sharing information between the scouts and the rest of the hive and two, the independence of other bees to confirm the scouts’ findings by following their routes, checking out the site for themselves and then confirming the results to the rest of the hive by performing waggle dances of their own.
The implications for human behavior are obvious, though I think that the attempt by The Economist to link this to the theories of the 18th-century philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet, who believed that decisions taken collectively by a large group of people are more likely than those taken by a select few, is a bit of a stretch.
Again, I’m a little late on this one, so apologies. Three articles for this one, two on different aspects of human nature, and one on cloning. It does seem that I’m focusing a lot on biology these days, but that’s because such articles are more interesting in how they shed light on the human condition and have more potential to fundamentally alter how we view life and the universe than yet another article showcasing some new technological development.
The first article is from The Economist and deals with measuring the difference between the levels of prejudice that people admit to and that they actually seem to have. It summarizes the findings of two different groups of researchers, one at the University of Chicago and the other at York University in Canada, who looked into the matter.
