Science

This is a pretty remarkable story any way you look at it. Chris Heward, a prominent anti-aging researcher, was recently diagnosed with late-stage cancer. With his life on the line, he's going to try a new, yet unproven therapy. And you can help. Another researcher was apparently able to create a cancer immunity in mice. You can read about that here and here. Basically, the concept is that certain people's white blood cells seem to have cancer-fighting properties. That could explain Keith Richards. But seriously, this is a chance at finding a cure for cancer in which you could play a critical role. Find out more on this blog entry and this Facebook group.

A comedian visits the Large Hadron Collider experiment at CERN. "Massive bosons blew my unit." The descriptions are amazing.

Several recent published science results improve the odds of finding other Earths. At the University of Arizona, a survey of sun-like stars found many showing evidence of having formed planets. Scientists at UC Santa Cruz simulated the formation of our nearest neighbor, Alpha Centauri, and found that it could form a planet in a stable, habitable orbit.

The next generation of telescopes should be able to detect small planets like the Earth around nearby stars. The Kepler spacecraft will be launched in a year expressly for that purpose. (Finally! I recall seeing the mission proposal thirteen years ago). Space-based telescopes have already been able to detect some chemical constituents (including oxygen) on some of the known extrasolar planets (hot Jupiters). They, or more likely, follow-on telescopes, should be able to look at the light from the hypothetical nearby Earths. It is easy to imagine that within a decade or so, we'll be finding planets in habitable zones and discovering some with elevated levels of oxygen, water, CO2, etc.

Life, in ever-evolving complexity, seems to be a natural occurrence everyplace it possibly can, always making more and more efficient use of the energy available. So it would seem that the universe must be teeming with life, lots of it intelligent. So where are they? This is known as the Fermi Paradox after Enrico Fermi, who mused about it (ironically, he may be better known for this rather than for the first artificial nuclear reaction).

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This is a partial catalog of the most revolutionary ideas our species has encountered: some historical, many developing in my lifetime, and a few that remain conjectures. Progressively, science has stripped down our anthropocentric conceits. If the past is any guide, this trend should continue. All of these ideas were at one point, heretical by the religious and/or scientific establishment.

• The Earth is not the center of the universe. There is no center.
• Nature was not placed here solely for our benefit. And it cannot be easily "managed."
• The universe is incredibly old. And has changed continually.
• Evolution continues, our species is not the end point.
• We are not the only species to use language or tools.
• We are not the only species to experience emotion.
• We are not the only species to use reason, logic and memory. Consciousness is a continuum whose upper limit is unknowable to us.
• We may not be the most intelligent species on the planet.
• Intelligence is possible in other "substrates"; i.e. Artificial Intelligence. Or in simulations of substrates.
• Extraterrestrial intelligence is possible, even highly probable.
• Other worlds in the solar system may have developed life. Perhaps before the Earth did.

What other ones should be on the list?

Over at badastronomy blog, the top ten [good astronomy] images of 2006 are ranked, with HiRISE's Opportunity at "Victoria" Crater taking a respectable #6. Huzzah! Also on a related note, the ESA Mars Express folks have fairly high-res view of the so-called Face on Mars. It's really shaped a lot like "A" Mountain here in Tucson. Here's a quick-n-crude comparison with "A" Mountain from Google Earth. Maybe the latter will one day be a popular tourist and teen make-out spot?

Let me say right off that I would be the first person to claim that the Old Testament story of "The Flood" is nothing but mythology, and this only strengthens that belief. With that out of the way, this story about a recently discovered impact event is remarkable, and has received scant attention. Apparently many cultures around the world have stories of a great deluge in there mythology.

Bruce Masse, an environmental archaeologist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico... analyzed 175 flood myths from around the world, and tried to relate them to known and accurately dated natural events like solar eclipses and volcanic eruptions. Among other evidence, he said, 14 flood myths specifically mention a full solar eclipse, which could have been the one that occurred in May 2807 B.C.

What really makes this astounding is that other geological researchers, using Google Earth, found characteristic features of a giant tsunami in the Indian Ocean. The features are called chevrons, enormous deposits of sediment pointing radially back to a common center. Analysis of satellite sea-surface data led to the discovery of a crater ("Burckle Crater") that seems to be about the right age, 5000 years or so. The crater would have created a tsunami with "waves 600 feet high" and deposited "25 feet of rain globally".

A substance called Resveratrol has been in the news lately. This is an antioxidant chemical found in red wines and thought to be associated with longevity and health. Caloric restriction has also been shown to be associated with increased longevity. And, as reported in the NY Times Science Times podcast, a study of caloric restriction in mice showed increased production of resveratrol. So perhaps this will be the next wonder drug. I'd certainly like to live as long as possible. Red wine gives me headaches for some reason (sulfites?). And cutting calories by 20% - 25% or so ... that ain't gonna happen!

I don't really want to write about the 150-year-old evolution vs. creationism debate, the recent refactoring of creationism as intelligent design, last week's Kansas school board decision, or even Flying Spaghetti Monsterism. Those are all interesting topics in their own way, but I suspect that most people have their minds made up. Well, I guess the majority of Americans may be unsure whether species could change into new species over time, or whether that could occur naturally or would require Intelligent intervention, but I'd be surprised if those folks were reading this blog. I welcome any comments either way. What is interesting is this new theory called 'Evo Devo'. Cool name. To be clear, it is not a new theory of evolution, it is an addition to the existing theory. Now I gotta step back a step. Evolution is what is observed in the fossil record. The theory to explain it is in two parts: 1) genetic mutation and 2) natural selection. Unfortunately, the opponents of evolution have done a really good job of confusing the debate, as in "it's just a theory" and "other theories are just as valid". The proper debate is about whether genetic mutation and natural selection can explain all the changes seen in the fossil record, and in fact, changes in species that are seen in our own time. Creationists would have you believe that species never changed; IDers that supernatural guidance was needed; scientists that evolution is natural; evolutionary biologists that it happened naturally through mutation and selection. Okay, so what evo devo is saying is that there is more to mutation than we previously knew. That mutation to genetic code isn't as simple as making new & different stuff (proteins), it also, and much more frequently, to change the order in which that stuff is built. And the order in which stuff is built determines what that organism ends up physically being. This is a pretty radical insight (like all great scientific breakthroughs, it'll probably be seen as obvious in hindsight) because it shows how simple change can lead to profound differences. And that is just what had been difficult for biologists to fully explain: the exact mechanisms of evolutionary change. I hope everyone agrees that kids should be taught critical thinking. Science is all about taking theories apart and finding out where they don't work. Some would say that is all it is: never determining truth, only destroying falsehoods. A theory is not scientific unless it could be proven wrong. That is of course what is so frustrating about these school board decisions: they end up teaching kids things that cannot be proven or disproven as being equivilant to those that can. Given the century of failure to put this debate behind us, I'd like to see a complete reversal of tactics. Encourage skepticism and doubt about evolutionary theory! Go ahead and put creationism and intelligent design into the curricula! Show what is known, what is theorized, what has been proven, how something could be disproven, what could not. This will only encourage critical thinking and highlight the differences between science and dogma. The strategy of presenting only evolution has played into the fundamentalist's hand of demanding equivilance for their alternative. By encouraging any and all alternatives, equivilance would be exposed as a myth. Of course, that assumes teachers are smart and have no agendas of their own, that they themselves would take a scientific approach to teaching science. And that is no doubt false, particularly in places like Kansas, where given half a chance, many teachers will selectively skip those parts of the curricula they don't agree with. But they were doing that anyways; with kids not being taught evolution at all.

At the Princeton website is this amazing gallery of tripadelic visualizations from scientists in the Art of Science competition. Check it out!

Elizabeth Kolbert's 3-part series on Global Warming ("The Climate Of Man") is all online. Here are the links.

• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
and also, for completeness, this Q&A addendum
• Q & A

The New Yorker is a pretty good magazine, my renewal check is on the way! About one issue per week (46 per year) and about sixty cents an issue, and they're usually quite excellent. Featuring some of the best writers in the biz like Richard Preston, John McPhee, David Remnick, etc. Only some of the content is available on their site, and that can only be found by googling.

Here we go again. It's reported that Splenda (sucralose) causes shrinkage, not that kind of shrinkage, shrinkage of the thymus. Furthermore,

To ensure the safety of the consumption of Splenda, the FDA reviewed the data gathered from a few short-term human tests, which were all conducted by McNeil Nutritionals. The manufacturer disregarded negative results by claiming that the Sucralose was unpleasant for the lab animals to eat in large doses and that the shrinkage of the thymus was due to the starvation of the animals. [Skeptics] are angered by the fact that no independent or long-term (more than 12 months) research was done.

From the I-Told-You-So Department: The New Yorker magazine is doing a series which sums up global warming, as we currently understand it. Part One is online.