Three articles for August and surprisingly for this blog, not a single one of them has anything to do with human nature. Two are related to biology but are more interesting in the way that they serve as examples of how science can correct a past mistake, even a long held one, as well as how popular reporting can easily misinterpret a scientific finding. The remaining one is a piece on dark energy, found via The Sycologist.

The first article deals with what is commonly taught as the most useless of human organs: the lowly appendix. As this article which appeared on Yahoo! by way of Livescience.com explains, all of us have probably been taught at some point in our lives that the appendix not only serves no purpose, being a relic of our evolutionary past, but is in fact a potentially lethal liability if it becomes inflamed.

Recent research led by William Parker of Duke University Medical Centre suggests that this is not quite true. His team found that not only has the appendix been present in our ancestors for far longer than previously thought, at least 80 million years, but that it is also more prevalent in many different species than previously believed, having evolved into existence on at least two independent occasions. This strongly suggests that it is in fact a useful organ.

Exactly what this purpose might is still a matter of some debate, but clues may lie in earlier research which indicated that the appendix may be a repository of beneficial bacteria which is used to repopulate the gut after a case of diarrhea and may also play a role in making and directing white blood cells. Dr. Parker further suggests that inflammation of the appendix may be at least partially caused our current living standards that are too sanitary, leaving our immune systems with too little to do. One possible remedy might to find a way to incite our immune systems in a controlled and safe manner in order to train and condition their responses. As someone who suffers from bouts of skin allergy, this sounds like a great idea to me.

If the above article makes for a great example of the way that science can correct past misconceptions, this next one shows something like the opposite, on how sensationalist reporting can wildly distort what the scientists are really claiming, harming science in the process. This article from The Daily Telegraph is one of many around the world to greet the discovery of a new species of pitcher plant in the Philippines by calling them rat-eating plants. As most people should know, pitcher plants are carnivorous plants that look like pitchers inside which they trap insects. Once trapped, the bugs are slowly dissolved and digested by the chemicals inside the plant, yielding nutrients to it.

What is unusual about this new species, which has been named Nepenthes attenboroughii in honour of the famed naturalist Sir David Attenborough, is its tremendous size. This led the media to state that the plants regularly trap and consume rats and other small rodents, which would be quite amazing if true because such mammals normally have very sharp claws and teeth which should be able to shred any plants that tried to trap them. If you check the Wikipedia page for the species however, you’ll find that while the plants certainly are large enough to hold rodents, none of the scientists have actually reported seeing any actual rodents inside them and the consensus is that, like all other pitcher plants, these ones consume mainly insects of both the flying and crawling variety. The real news is still pretty interesting but not quite as sensational as the media tried to make it out to be.

Finally, our last article concerns a theoretical explanation of why scientists have so far been unable to find any trace of the elusive dark energy that everyone has heard so much about since they were first mooted ten years ago. According to Blake Temple and his team from the University of California, Davis, the explanation is simple: it doesn’t exist. To understand their point, it’s necessary to know that dark energy was essentially invented to explain the disparity between the observed rate of expansion of the universe and the theoretical rate if no dark energy were present.

However dark energy remains a purely theoretical construct with no direct evidence of its existence. Temple’s team has therefore proposed that the concept isn’t necessary and that the observed expansion of the universe can be explained by positing that the Milky Way galaxy is instead located in a relatively low density region of the universe. This would have been created by huge wave-like distortion in space-time soon after the Big Bang that swept through the universe. Our local region of space would on the inside of this supposed wave while the parts of the universe outside of the wave would have been thrown into the distance away from us. This would explain why they are so far away from us without needing to accelerate as required by conventional models of gravity.

All of this is pretty heady and speculative stuff and could be thrown aside in an instant once newer data appears, but it does illustrate some of the more interesting things that are going on in modern astrophysics.