Tag Archives: biology

Recent Interesting Science Articles (May ’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.

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Recent Interesting Science Articles (April ’10)

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.

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Recent Interesting Science Articles (March ’10)

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.

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Recent Interesting Science Articles (December ’09)

Three articles this month, all of them on biology. The first one is only a scientific article in the vaguest sense and talks about the cognitive benefits to gained from travel. The second one weighs in on the age old debate of cats versus dogs and the last one concerns a recent development that could lead to superhuman strength being a reality.

The first article is less formal than the usual stuff that I link to as part of this series and frankly I didn’t think it’s a bit too long for the ideas it presents, but it does make for a rather good if somewhat obvious point: that travel expands the mind and opens us to possibilities that otherwise wouldn’t have occurred to us. What sets this observation apart is that the article cites experiments performed by psychologist Lile Jia at Indiana University. He assigned tasks to two group of students with one group told that the task was from a place far away while another group was told that the task came from somewhere nearby.

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Recent Interesting Science Articles (November ’09)

A little late with this one as I’ve been busy with my gaming blog. Three articles this month and all them are about human nature. The first one examines whether or not there is a placebo effect in the consumption of coffee, the second one examines if the habit of overspending has a genetic component and the last one tells about the surprising fact that the most successful male athletes also tend to be the most good looking ones.

Like many other people, I have the habit of drinking a cup of coffee every morning, but unlike some people, I’m not conscious of whether this actually has any effect on my concentration. Plenty of people seem to think it’s essential for them to function properly in the office so scientists are understandably curious about whether or not the effect is real. This post on Neuroskeptic links to and summarizes a new paper about a study that tried to determine whether or not the claimed benefits of caffeine are attributable to the placebo effect.

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Dolphins are smart

I’m not sure why Marginal Revolution only just now linked to a Guardian article from 2003, but it’s still a seriously good read. The dolphin in the article was trained to help keep her pool clean by bringing any waste paper that falls into her pool to the keepers for a reward. Over time, one of the dolphins learned to trick the humans. Instead of immediately giving a big piece of litter to her keepers, she would hide it and only tear off small pieces to give to a keeper each time one passed, thereby earning more fish as a reward.

What’s even more impressive is that since she has also been trained to bring gulls (I’m not sure if they’re dead or alive at this point) that fly into her pool to the humans in return for a reward, she learned to keep some of the fish that she’d been given. Once the humans went away, she used the extra fish as bait to lure gulls to fly into her pool to catch them so that the humans would give her more fish for the gull. The rest of the article is filled with similarly fascinating anecdotes.

Science-fiction of course has long been full of stories about dolphins being intelligent, the entire plot of the fourth Star Trek film being the most obvious example. But this article lead me to thinking back to opinions of people like Australian SF author Greg Egan, who believes that our current treatment of some animals amount to human rights violations that will one day be recognized as a historically shameful era of our species.

Recent Interesting Science Articles (October ’09)

A bit early this month but I need to make space for more updates next week. The most unusual thing about this installment is that none of the three articles this month are from The Economist! Two of the three articles are about biology while the last one is very speculative, very theoretical physics.

The first of these articles discusses a controversial book about a topic that I’m sure everyone has thought of at one point or another: were our ancestors really faster, stronger and tougher than the humans living today now are? According to the author of Manthropology: The Science of the Inadequate Modern Male, Peter McAllister, the answer is yes. An anthropologist, he bases his conclusions on a wide range of evidence. For example, he examined fossilized footprints of Australian aboriginals who lived 20,000 years ago to estimate their running speed.

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