Category Archives: Science

Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (March ’09)

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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.

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Science

Evolution education under attack in Texas (again)

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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.

Fun, Science

Exciting! Safe! Radioactive toys!

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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.

Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (February ’09)

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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.

Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (January ’09)

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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.

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Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (December ’08)

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Three articles for this last installment from 2008, though two are from The Economist, both of which are related to human sexuality in some way. The last one is speculation about a device that could one day be used to let someone see what another person is dreaming about.

The first article from The Economist covers a paper by Rosalind Arden of King’s College, London and her colleagues on correlations between genetic fitness, general intelligence and, of all things, sperm quality, in human males. Researchers have recently discovered that general intelligence is correlated with many aspects of an individual’s health including his or her lifespan. This is unsurprising, because it can be expected that people who are more intelligent might take extra care to live healthier lives, but evolutionary psychologists are also interested in the idea that intelligence is a manifestation of a general, genetically-based healthiness which is attractive to the opposite sex. They believe that humans evolved general intelligence above and beyond its usefulness in everyday life as part of a genetics arms race to attract mates, in the same way that male peacocks have evolved elaborate tails.

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Religion, Science

Religiosity linked to brain damage (again)

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The role of the brain in determining religiosity gets put into the spotlight again by a new study by the University of Missouri. As reported by ScienceDaily, this is one of the first studies that use individuals with traumatic brain injury to investigate the connection between religion and the human brain. The data gathered from this particular study lends support to a neupsychological model that links specific forms of spiritual experiences with decreased activity in the right parietal lobe of the brain.

The type of religious feeling that is relevant here is selflessness and the transcendence of feeling a strong connection with others and the universe. The researchers found that people who had suffered brain damage in that area of the brain reported higher levels of these types of spiritual experiences. The researchers also suggest that it is possible to induce such feelings by reducing activity in that part of the brain through conscious meditation or prayer.

As my post title indicates, however, this is far from the first time that religious inclination has been linked to brain damage. This BBC article from 2003 for example, suggests that people who suffer from temporal lobe epilepsy are prone to suffer from hallucinations that they may interpret as being religious in nature. Even more interestingly, that article references an experiment that involved studying the brain activity of a Buddhist who was meditating and found that the parietal lobes of the brain were almost completely shut down during that time, the same part of the brain that was involved in this new study. According to the BBC article, this area of the brain is responsible for giving us our sense of time and place, which might help explain why shutting it down would make humans feel that they’re not an individual but are instead a part of the wider universe.

I don’t really have the time to examine this in-depth today but this new study does raise an interesting perspective for me personally. In the BBC article, Richard Dawkins, probably the most famous living atheist today, was found to be more or less immune to the effects of a magnetic field directed around the temporal lobes of his brain, while others who had undergone the experience reporting feeling some sort of “presence”. This led the article to suggest that different people may have a variable “talent” for religion. In the same way, would this mean that humans whose parietal brain regions are naturally more active or well developed innately feel more individualistic and self-centered?