The Nature of Things

The contributions of women to scientific research and resultant breakthroughs are frequently overlooked or their importance downplayed. This has undeniably been a continuing theme throughout history.  One of the most egregious examples was that of Rosalind Franklin . Franklin, using X-ray crystallography at King's College in London, was able to obtain images of DNA which allowed James Watson and Francis Crick to create their famous double helix model. Franklin unfortunately died from cancer in 1958 at age 37 and when the Nobel Prize was awarded to Watson and Crick in 1962, Franklin was not mentioned even though at that time there was no rule against awarding the prize posthumously.  I've been pondering this recently because I've been reading a book called The Tangled Tree by David Quammen , a book which details the history of the struggle to understand evolution at the molecular level. Again, women have participated in the research and, in some cases, have made significant...

“It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”      - Carl Sagan In the mid-19th century in the United States, there was a political party that was called the Know Nothings. It was a movement that was based on nativism and xenophobia. Its adherents strove to curb immigration and naturalization, specifically of Irish and German Catholics. Its sentiment was virulently anti-Catholic. Membership was limited to white Protestant males. The movement was never particularly powerful and ultimately it fragmented over the issue of slavery. The Know Nothing movement fragmented but it never really died in the United States. It has always existed as an undercurrent in American political life and, finally, in the 21st century, it seems to be coalescing and rearing its ugly head once again, but now the Know Nothingness has expanded into other areas of life than simply religious prejudice and fear and suspicion of f...

The ice is thick in Antarctica. Moreover, there are record cold temperatures in the Northeast and Midwest. There have even been cold days recently here in Southeast Texas. Therefore, global warming must be a hoax, because if it is cold where I am at the moment, then the idea that Earth is heating up is a fallacy. At least, that is the theory of the climate change deniers as gleefully expressed on Twitter, right wing talk radio, and Fox News this week. Of course, none of these wackos acknowledge the fact that while Antarctica is always cold and it is cold in winter in the northern hemisphere, in the southern hemisphere, many places are experiencing record heat waves. Australia, for example, where temperatures are expected to be above 120 degrees Fahrenheit in some areas over the next few days.  And Earth overall IS   warming up . Alarmingly. The reasons for record cold temperatures in the northern hemisphere in winter and for record storms throughout the year are explained by...

The Pew Research Center is a respected non-profit organization that regularly polls Americans on a variety of subjects. They also have devised several online quizzes that we can take to find out just how smart we are about particular subjects. They are fun and instructive and even ego-boosting if you happen to do well on them. I've taken some of the quizzes before, but I was reminded of them when I read the Bad Astronomy blog today. The subject of the blog was the tests on science and religion. The results from those who have taken the tests seem to indicate that - surprise! - Americans know more about science than they do religion. The bad news is they don't know much about either. Now, these tests are pretty simple and are based on general knowledge that any reasonably well-read adult should have. They are brief - one has 13 questions and one has 15 - and only take a few minutes to complete. At the end, you get to see your results and how you ranked among others who have t...

I was reading a story about Bill Nye, the Science Guy , a couple of days ago when I came across a sentence that literally made me groan out load. It said, "In June, a Gallup poll revealed that 46 percent of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago." So much for science and the fossil record. So much for critical thinking. These people prefer to accept the Bible as their scientific and historical text and not worry their little heads about any more complicated explanations. Oh, well, I guess we should just be relieved that the percentage wasn't even higher. As the story pointed out, the United States stands alone among modern industrialized states in this Know-Nothingism. It's only in the most backward and theocratic places on earth that you would find such a high percentage of people who refuse to acknowledge evolution as settled science. The same disheartening assessment can be made regarding human-caused global warming. ...

Did you read the story this week about the discovery of giant Jurassic fleas ? It seems that scientists in northeastern China have found fossils of fleas from the Jurassic period! Think about that for a minute - flea fossils. Will wonders never cease? Not only have they found these fossils but they are really, really big as fleas go. The female of the species was up to one-half inch long, a veritable giant in the world of fleas. The male was smaller but still much larger than modern fleas. In fact, these Jurassic fleas were ten times as big as today's fleas. The scientists speculate that these giant fleas may have fed on dinosaurs. They had very elongated and sharp mouth parts made for sucking blood and it is believed that these siphons were long enough and sharp enough to have pierced the dinosaurs' leathery skin. Although there were some mammals around in the Jurassic era, they were small and probably were not hosts to the big fleas. I am fascinated by the fact that these sc...

A team of Russian scientists claims to have generated living plants from the tissue of a plant which died 32,000 years ago. This is amazing stuff and, if confirmed, would be the oldest plant from which living offspring have been created. In the past, there have been stories of seeds taken from the tombs of pharoahs, thousands of years old, that have germinated and produced plants. On closer examination and carbon dating, those seeds were proved to be modern contaminants in the tombs. Currently, the oldest confirmed case is a date palm that was grown from a 2,000-year-old seed from the Jewish fortress of Masada. Carbon dating has confirmed the age of the seed in that instance. So far, studies of the Russians' claims for their plant, an Arctic flower called the narrow-leafed campion, have supported their claims. The seeds for the plant were taken from an ancient squirrel's nest that had been sealed by sediment and frozen for thousands of years. The scientists first tried germina...

I am always fascinated to read about the ways in which evolution works to create an integrated and interactive ecology. It's especially interesting to read about the defenses which both animals and plants perfect through the mechanism of natural selection over the course of thousands of years. And not just defenses as such, but also the ways that the bodies of animals - or plants - change over time in order to take advantage of the environment in which they live. That's how the giraffe got its long neck or the elephant its trunk. And, of course, it is how humans developed their upright stance and their big brains. But how did zebras get their stripes? And why did zebras get stripes? Well, the obvious answer is that in the tall grasses where they often grazed, the stripes helped to camouflage them and hide them from predators like lions and cheetahs. It turns out though that the stripes also seem to hide them from a much smaller predator. Scientists have recently completed a st...

There was an interesting story - interesting to me anyway - in The New York Times today about a discovery recently made by Russian scientists drilling on Antarctica . It seems that these scientists stationed at the Vostok Research Station have been drilling through the ice there for a decade. They sent their drill cutting through two miles of solid ice and, finally, at a depth of 12,366 feet, they hit water. It is water from a pristine freshwater lake the size of Lake Ontario which has never before been touched by humans or their equipment. The water in the lake has been sealed off from water and air for somewhere between 15 and 34 million years. This is one of more than 280 lakes that are known to exist deep under the miles-thick ice of the frozen continent. So why do scientists want to drill to this sealed lake? Well, because it's there, of course, but, also, there are theories that ancient unknown life forms may exist there. If such life forms could be found, it would lend cre...

Don't you hate it that science is always coming up with some new research that tells us that something that we were told years ago would benefit us is really going to kill us?  I can give you a prime example - HRT.  Hormone Replacement Therapy.  For years, women of a certain age were told that it was the magic pill, the key to keeping ourselves young and supple, and many of us took the little magic pills.  Then one day out of a clear blue sky comes new research that proves rather definitively that, as young and supple as we might be, our chances of getting certain forms of cancer were greatly increased! Every year it seems that some researcher comes up with another of these magic formulas and everybody jumps on the bandwagon and then a few years later we find that it wasn't magic after all.  Vitamin D3 was another recent example. Anyway, happily, it works the other way around as well.  Sometimes we find out that things which we thought were bad for us, or a...

These past few days, I have been laid low by a tiny, vicious bug, one that made me unable to raise my head off the pillow or drag myself to the keyboard to connect with the world. Consequently, when I finally was able to make that trek from my bed to the chair in front of my computer today, I found my Google Reader full to overflowing with posts from the blogs that I follow. Skimming through those posts, there were a number of very interesting ones to which I need to give further thought, but one in particular caught my eye. It was an entry from Skeptical Science about a peer-reviewed scientific paper that explores the roots and the methods of scientific denialism. Here, I quote extensively from that post. The authors define denialism as "the employment of rhetorical arguments to give the appearance of legitimate debate where there is none , an approach that has the ultimate goal of rejecting a proposition on which a scientific consensus exists". They go on to identify 5 ...