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Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (Nov ’11)

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I didn’t exactly forget to write one of these for November 2011. It’s just that between personal issues, my participation in the 2nd International Melaka Walkathon and most of all, spending lots of time on my entry for the AI Challenge 2011, I just never got around to it. Well, better late than never and here’s a whole bunch of articles to make up for the tardiness:

  • This is purely based on survey data, i.e. asking people what they believe rather than observing it in them, but this article reports how happiness is correlated with high ethical standards.
  • One of the most interesting events in November was how the Earth was almost destroyed by a passing asteroid. Of course, almost is a relative term and astronomers have long calculated that the asteroid, 2005 YU55 will miss our planet, coming no closer than about 320,000 kilometres. This article has all the details.
  • One of the basic assumptions in science is the laws of nature remain constant. This extensive blog post looks at one very intricate experiment that suggests that this may not necessarily be true. In particular, the experiment looks at the fine-structure constant, itself a combination of several constants including the electron charge, Planck’s constant, the speed of light and ? by studying the spectra of quasars. Their observations currently suggest that the fine structure constant appears to have been different in the distant. If this checks out, it could mean that the laws of physics themselves change over time.
  • This Freakonomics blog post covers the work of an economist who thought to ask: hey, with all those sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, I wonder what that means for their membership and donation numbers? It turns out that the scandals have indeed led to a drop in the number of people attending Catholic Church with commensurate gains elsewhere. In particular, it looks as if Baptist churches picked up most of the fleeing Catholics.
  • Can animals laugh? In particular, can animals laugh when they’re being tickled? This blog post covers the work of Jaak Panksepp who tickled rats to find out. It seems that rats make a chirping noise in the 50 kHz range under certain conditions and this researcher sought to prove that this response has an ancestral relationship to human laughter. They found out all sorts of things, for example, that the most playful rats tend to be the most ticklish, that tickle response rates drop after adolescence, that the tickle response tends to help with social bonding and that rats will even run mazes for the sake of being tickled.
  • Ever since quantum mechanics was invested, physicists have long argued over how it can be interpreted. Lately, most scientists prefer to treat it as a purely statistical tool, absolving them of the need to treat the results as something that exists physically. A recent preprint of a paper suggests that this interpretation is flawed and that the results of quantum mechanics do reflect intrinsic physical reality after all.

 

Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (Oct ’11)

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Only a couple of articles for this month and one of them is a general feature about a subject rather than a recent discovery. But anyway:

  •  The feature in question is an article on how intelligent octopuses are from Orion Magazine. There are interesting anecdotes in there about how they can recognize and form relationships with humans, solve puzzles and engage in playful behavior with toys. My favorite part is how three-fifths of their neurons aren’t in their brain at all but in their arms, which allows the arms to act independently even when severed from the main body.
  • The other article is from The Economist and is about how happiness not only has a genetic component but that due to genetics, different races may have different levels of ingrained tendencies to be happy. The mechanism the  team in question fingered is a gene that encodes the serotonin-transporter protein. This gene comes in two variants, a long one and a short one, and the team found that those with the long versions were more likely to report themselves as being happy. Where things get really interesting is that different ethnic groups tend to more of one variant of the gene than the other. Black Americans for example tend to favor the long version of the gene while Asian Americans tend to mostly have the short version. ‘Lo and behold this blends in nicely with observations that newly rich Asia reports far lower levels of happiness than their GDP per person figures suggest. This also adds weight to earlier findings that societies composed of people with the short version of the genes lean towards collectivist political systems that emphasize social harmony and de-emphasize individual independence and freedom.
Science

Nobel Prizes 2011

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As usual the announcement of the recipients of the Nobel Prizes for 2011 happened with almost no fanfare in the mainstream press. As I did last year, here’s a summary of this year’s winners.

  • The Physics prize goes to Saul Perlmutter, Brian P. Schmidt and Adam G. Riess for a discovery that all astronomy buffs now knows: that the universe is not only expanding but the rate of expansion itself continues to accelerate. This was worked out by studying distant supernovae and noting the Doppler Effect on its light as the distance between the supernovae and the Earth increases. Today, physicists still have no real explanation of why the universe continues to expand at an increasing rate, indicating that some force, other than the residual energy of the Big Bang, is pushing space apart. This is what physicists label “dark energy” for now while they search for a better understanding of what is going on.
  • The Chemistry prize goes to a single individual, Daniel Shechtman, for a discovery that will make mathematicians as well as chemists proud. While studying a slice of aluminium-manganese alloy, he inadvertently stumbled on quasicrystals a heretofore unknown form of materials. Normal crystals consist of atoms that are packed together in a symmetrical and repeating pattern. Shechtman however discovered a type of crystal that have orders of symmetry that  that were previously thought to be impossible, allowing them to fit together in such a way that the pattern never perfectly repeats itself. In 2D form, mathematicians know this as Penrose tiling, named after the British mathematician Roger Penrose, who first formally formulated this form of geometry. Islamic artists however have been known to use this sort of motif in their work for centuries. Today, quasicrystals are used in many areas of materials science, such as the liquid crystals in display screens and some types of steel.
  • The Physiology prize goes to three persons who all worked on the immune system though the discoveries are not directly related. Bruce Beutler and Jules Hoffmann discovered a protein-binding mechanism that helps the immune system recognize invaders and trigger a defensive response. Ralph Steinman discovered the dendritic cell, which he found helps to activate T-lymphocytes, which play a role in the immune system’s ability to adapt to different types of threats. The prize underwent a bit of controversy this year as the rules state that Nobel Prizes may not be awarded to deceased individuals. As it turned out, Steinman passed away just before he received the news that he had been awarded the prize. As the Nobel committee was unaware of his death at the time of their decision, the decision was allowed to stand.
  • The Economics prize goes to Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims. Both economists worked on uncovering cause and effect in macroeconomics, in particular addressing how to incorporate changing expectations by rational actors in a macroeconomic model. Sargent showed how businesses and households learn about economic conditions and adjust their expectations accordingly and how this in turn should be taken into account of within macroeconometrics. Sims developed the statistical tool of vector autoregression that is used to work out the effects of how a change in economic conditions affects both the supply and demand curve in complex ways.
  • The Literature prize goes to a Swedish poet, Tomas Tranströmer, who is not well-known outside of his home country. His oeuvre, which is not large, is characterized by the committee as being economical and granting fresh access to reality. This is the first time that a poet has won the prize since 1996.

As usual, detailed information on the recipients and explanations of their work can be found on the official Nobel Prize website.

Science

Steve Jobs’ death used as example by natural health advocates

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By now most people will have read all manner of eulogies about the co-founder of Apple, but you’ve probably haven’t read anything like this ridiculous editorial. Natural health nuts all around the world who decry conventional, evidence-based medicine and claim that cancer can be cured simply using vitamins and health supplements are pointing to Jobs’ death as proof that chemotherapy and radiotherapy doesn’t work. The article also goes on to a weird tangent on how Jobs was a once in a lifetime creative talent who was sadly abused by the capitalistic forces of society.

The irony of this particular editorial is that Jobs seemed to actually favor alternative health remedies, for the all good it did him. As his bio on Wikipedia makes clear, Jobs is pretty much the living embodiment of the counterculture, pot-smoking, hippie demography. So much so that he saved money from his first job to go on a pilgrimage to India and came back as a Buddhist with a shaved head. In short, he’s exactly the type of person who would read a website like Natural News and be skeptical of evidence-based medicine. According to this Fortune article from 2008, when Jobs first learned of his cancer, he resisted treating it with conventional methods and chose instead to go on a special diet and explored alternative treatments.

It was only nine months after his cancer was first diagnosed, following pressure from his company staff and investors worried about his health and after learning that his tumor had grown despite the alternative medicine he was using, that Jobs agreed to undergo the surgical procedure his doctors had recommended. At that time the surgery was considered a complete success but even back in 2008, it was pointed out that by delaying the procedure for so long, Jobs had dramatically increased his chances of his cancer recurring. It is arguable that things might be different today if Jobs had chosen to heed his doctors advice immediately.

On a personal note, I knew a colleague while working in the Solomon Islands who was diagnosed with head and neck cancer. Being a Johor native, he underwent treatment in Singapore but was eager to come back to work. A short time after he arrived back in the Solomon Islands, some symptoms recurred. Instead of flying back to Malaysia immediately, he listened to some of the local people and decided to have a local traditional medicine man treat him in a remote village. Most of the staff of the company opposed this as we were worried about him and it was difficult to stay in contact with him. According to his account, the treatment consisted of various oils and using hands to press the fluid out of his developing tumor. He stayed at the village for more than six months. Eventually, his condition deteriorated until he was forced to fly back and he was immediately hospitalized in Singapore. He died less than two months later. I remember his case keenly because he was the exact same age as me and died in his late twenties.

 

Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (Sep ’11)

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Only three articles this month as I’ve had very little to browse. Note to friends: I’ve since resigned from my job in Seremban as it was a little too busy for my schedule and wasn’t really what I wanted anyway. This means that Ill probably have a bit more time for my blog from now on.

  • The biggest science news in September is of course the announcement that scientists at CERN seem to have observed neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light. The particle accelerator in Switzerland sent a stream of neutrinos that traveled through to planet to the San Grasso facility in central Italy. However, the neutrinos arrived some 60 nanoseconds earlier than it would take light to travel the same distance, prompting a lot of excitement among the scientific community. If it is validated, this finding would overthrow Einstein’s theory of special relativity and the entire foundation of theoretical physics. The best working theory at the moment is that some variant of superstring theory is true and the neutrinos are taking a shortcut through one of the extra curled-up dimensions postulated in the theory. Most scientists are still wary as the discrepancy might more plausibly be explained as a measurement error but it is telling that a less publicized experiment known as MINOS in the US noticed unusually fast neutrinos back in 2007.
  • Science-fiction writers have long played with the idea of inorganic life but Lee Cronin of the University of Glasgow is making actual cell-like structures made of metallic molecules. Rather than using carbon-based building blocks, his team uses “polyoxometalates” made of metal atoms such as tungsten. They are able to get their molecules to self-assemble into cell-like spheres in a solution and get their surfaces to behave like cell membranes. Unfortunately, he still doesn’t have an analogue of DNA yet, which is arguably the true key to a life form that is able to self-replicate, but this is a decent theoretical framework to start imagining how inorganic life might evolve in a vastly different environment from ours.
  • The Economist has an article on moral philosophy, in particular on research on the psychology of the kind of people who would actually adhere to a fully utilitarian set of values. A famous utilitarian thought experiment is the runaway train which if it continues on its present course will kill several people. However, if someone were to divert the train to a side track these people would be saved but one person would die. If you were the person who had the switch in your hand, would you pull it and sacrifice one person to save many? It turns out most people, ninety percent of them in fact, would choose not to intervene at all and allow fate to take its course but this is not the utilitarian response. So two researchers had the idea of taking a bunch of undergraduates and quizzing them about a variety of situations to find those who would choose the utilitarian response. Then they correlated this with a standard personality test. It turns out that the people who leaned towards utilitarianism tended to have psychopathic tendencies, which when you think about it makes perfect sense.
Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (Aug ’11)

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Four articles for the month of August 2011. While I’m going to try to continue with this as a regular feature, I’ve decided to be briefer and to summarize less, since readers can always go read the original text anyway. So here goes.

  • MedicalXpress has an exciting story about a new broad spectrum viral therapy that can seemingly target any sort of virus. The treatment works by identifying cells that have been infected by viruses by detecting the presence of double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) and instructing such cells to commit suicide. Many people are expressing skepticism about the broadness of the claims being made or that it would safe to assume that all cells that contain dsRNA may be destroyed without harm. But if this checks out, it will be huge.
  • Like some people, I’m very adverse to spoilers of any kind for any media I intend to read or watch for myself. But the psychology department of the University of California at San Diego begs to differ. According to their study which involved asking participants to read one of twelve short stories, around half of which were prefaced by a spoiler paragraph, including the spoilers seemed to increase the entertainment value of the story. This was true even for genres like mysteries and ironic-twist stories. The authors suggest that this isn’t as unintuitive as one might expect as this nicely explains why people like to reread a favorite book or rewatch a favorite film.
  • The Economist covers new evidence to support a theory of why some traditional societies are patriarchal and others matriarchal. The key lies in whether or not each society developed and adopted the plough as part of its traditional farming practices. It explains that before the advent of the plough, women were in charge of farming while men fought or hunted. But the plough, while improving yields, required greater physical strength that only men possessed. Such societies subsequently became more dominated by men. The researchers involved found that whether or not the ancestors of an ethnic group used the plough is a good predictor of attitudes about women in the workplace or about women as leaders in society.
  • Lastly, Wired has an article about the discovery of a planet that appears to be composed almost entirely of diamond-like crystals. The planet has an unusually high mass to volume ratio and orbits so close to its parent star that a single revolution just takes two hours. Furthermore, it’s parent star is itself a pulsar that rotates at more then 10,000 times per minute. Now that would make for an interesting star system for a spaceship to explore.
Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (Jul ’11)

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For the curious, I’ve recently moved to Seremban and have taken up a new job. This has left me with far less free time than I had previously, so I will no longer be able to update this blog regularly. Nevertheless, I shall try my best. So here is my belated round up of three of the most interesting science related articles I came across in July. Two of the articles in this entry deal wit optics, though in very different ways. The last article is a psychological study on the values championed in television shows.

The first article is from New Scientist and covers a new range of devices that might be called social x-ray specs. It’s basically a pair of spectacles that come with a built-in camera that tracks whatever the wearer is looking at. This data is then fed into computer about the size of a deck of cards and the results displayed to the wearer inside the spectacles itself. What’s interesting about the device is what it looks for. As everyone knows, when engaged in any sort of social interaction with other people, humans will inevitably give out all sorts of unconscious physical responses to their interlocutor. Think of examples such as subtly nodding your head, arching your brow or pursing your lips.

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