waka waka waka

According to today’s Physorg.com newsletter, fascinating things are afoot at the University of Reading. Researchers are growing little biological brains made of rat neurons, and training them to control robots by way of a Bluetooth connection.

The scientists have in fact created several of these wee brains, which even seem to have their own personalities.

“It’s quite funny — you get differences between the brains,” said [professor Kevin] Warwick. “This one is a bit boisterous and active, while we know another is not going to do what we want it to.”

It is still early days, and the homegrown brainlets, however boisterous, are nonetheless capable so far of only the most rudimentary mentation, roughly equivalent to a record-company executive, Biblical literalist, or member of Congress. But the project shows great promise. Learn more here.

I do hope to resume normal operations before too much longer, and to get back to the fascinating and important topics we’ve been looking at recently. A lingering ennui and lack of mental focus have hampered my attempts to get properly back in harness just yet; I look forward to the salutary effects of sea air, ample sleep, healthful exercise, absence from Midtown, and deliverance from enforced labor — all of which will commence this coming weekend, and last until after Labor Day.

Meanwhile: researcher Dr. Ana Maria Cuervo, of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshive University, has been working on the mechanisms by which the body rids itself of accumulating protein wastes. This system of “protein clearance”, like just about everything else, works less well as we get older, and in turn the accumulation of toxins in our cells leads to many of the other indignities of advancing decrepitude.

Dr. Cuervo (with whose cousin Jose I have been all too familiar for a great many years, to the cumulative detriment of my own cellular resilience) has now succeeded in halting the decline of this system in the livers of mice, by introducing a suitable genetic modification. This is, I think, pretty big news, and I think she is starting with exactly the right organ.

Learn more here.

The subset of our behavior, dispositions, reactions, and so forth that happens with our conscious awareness and endorsement is trivially small, and one of the areas where we respond most automatically and unconsciously is our interaction with others. We react subliminally to an enormous variety of cues: posture, gesture, tone of voice, choice of words, pupil dilation, odor, and many more. One of our most powerful automatic responses is the “read” we make of a person’s face, and now a pair of researchers from Princeton have done some quantitative research on just what is is we look for. Learn more here.

This is a giddy week for particle physicists: very soon now the Large Hadron Collider, the most potent instrument ever built for the investigation of nature’s most private parts, will be brought on line. (How soon? Have a look here.) [Note: the LHC countdown site now (August 18th 2008) seems to be down. -MP]

There are those who fear that the collider, which occupies a 17-mile-long tunnel straddling the border of Switzerland and France, may kill us all by creating a world-devouring black hole or strangelet. While we can all enjoy a little frisson at the thought of such a gaudy exit, it is not going to happen. Here’s why.

There is an inverse relation between the scale we can examine and the size of the instruments required; we have come a very long way indeed from the first cyclotron, which Ernest Lawrence built for a cost of about $25, and which could be held in one hand. The LHC is an enormous, and enormously complex, triumph of human ingenuity and engineering skill.

I’ve just run across a beautiful collection of photographs of the project; you can have a look at them here.

Finally, our friend Eugene Jen has sent along a YouTube clip of a rap song about the LHC, written by Kate McAlpine, a science writer covering the project. If you think you might enjoy such a thing, it’s here.

We’ve been giving morality, and the universality of moral intuitions, a good going over lately (particularly in this discussion, which now has over 100 comments). Readers with an interest in this topic might like to have a look at Harvard University’s Moral Sense Test. Feel free to share your thoughts here.

Note: Don’t read the comments below before you take the test!!

Our reader JK continues to deliver: in this case a highly unsettling article about the possibility of a devastating collision with an asteroid or comet. Because such objects often strike the ocean, or detonate in the air, leaving no crater at all (as in Tunguska 1908), our estimates of their frequency may be far too low.

Learn more here.

With a hat tip to Bill Vallicella for the link, we direct you to the current issue of the American Physical Society’s newsletter Physics and Society, in which this august body announces its wish to get to the bottom of the hotly debated issue of anthropogenic climate change.

(more…)

In today’s Times, John Tierney calls our attention to the possibility that the government may soon be imposing “Title IX” requirements on university science departments, because there aren’t “enough” women going into fields like physics and engineering.

This is dangerous territory, of course; we all remember the shameful pillorying of Harvard president Lawrence Summers for merely suggesting that there might be innate reasons for the asymmetrical distribution of men and women in science. His perfectly reasonable remarks were taken as an outrageous and impermissible thought-crime, and he was hounded from his post.

Now the dispute turns on whether there might be fewer women physicists and engineers simply because women are inherently less attracted to these disciplines, or whether it is a symptom of a lingering and pernicious discrimination that must be remedied by intrusive government action.

Learn more here.

Tomorrow, June 30th, marks the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska Event, an immense cataclysm that occurred, mercifully, in a remote and mostly uninhabited region of central Siberia. Its cause is still debated, but it is generally agreed to have been an “air burst”, equivalent to 10 or 15 megatons of TNT, that occurred at an altitude of about five miles.

Over the years various explanations have been attempted. The most likely is a strike by a meteoroid or comet fragment, but some have imagined that the cause was a black hole or blob of antimatter passing through the Earth, or even a UFO crash. A more recent, if dubious, hypothesis is that the Event was caused by a titanic release of methane gas.

Whatever it was, it was a stupendous detonation; if it had happened a few hours later, once western Europe had rotated into the descending object’s path, it might have pulverized a major city. As it was, very few died, and otherwise it merely knocked over a great many trees.

But now we learn (with a hat tip to reader JK) that there may have been other consequences as well. Vladimir Shaidurov, of the Russian Academy of Sciences, has raised the possibility that the Tunguska Event may be to blame for the apparent global warming of the last century. Water vapor is a more influential greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and Shaidurov suggests that it may have been not human emission of carbon dioxide, but rather the Tunguska object’s effect on high-altitude ice clouds, that altered the planet’s heat economy.

Learn more here.

In yesterday’s post we looked at the possibility of an impending “Singularity”, a convergence of various accelerating lines of progress in a number of technical and scientific fields that futurist Ray Kurzweil thinks will be an unparalleled historical disruption. When a sort of critical mass is reached, Kurzweil suggests, the result will be a colossal explosion of technology and artificial intelligence that will radically alter nearly every aspect of human existence.

Meanwhile, however, as reported in yesterday’s Times, fundamental physicists and cosmologists, far from readying the champagne, are confronting what might be called a “Kuhnian crisis“: recent observations of the universe at the largest scales have presented them with data for which no existing theoretical model can account.

(more…)

In today’s New York Times is yet another mention of a notion that seems to be attracting a lot of attention lately: Ray Kurzweil’s idea of an impending technological “Singularity”.

The concept is simple enough: if we look at the history of the world, we see a consistently accelerating rate of progress — first biological, and then technological — which, if extrapolated into the future, predicts that something extraordinary is about to happen.

(more…)

With a hat tip to our friend Jess, here is a link to a post at the science blog Gene Expression that reports a result which, if true, is hardly a surprise.

So caught up was I in holiday-weekend bacchanalia that I almost neglected to note that the Phoenix Mars Lander made a successful descent in the Red Planet’s north polar region yesterday.

“For the first time in 32 years, and only the third time in history, a JPL team has carried out a soft landing on Mars,” [NASA adminstrator Michael] Griffin said. “I couldn’t be happier to be here to witness this incredible achievement.”

There is water just beneath the surface in Mars’s polar areas, and this mission’s purpose is to have a look, with particular interest in the possibility of finding signs of biological activity. You can read the story here, and visit the mission website here.

A couple of days ago I linked to Steven Pinker’s discussion of the recent report by the President’s Council on Bioethics, and mentioned that one of the contributors, surprisingly given the overall makeup of the Council, was the irreligious and materialist philosopher Daniel Dennett. In his essay, he is in fine, feisty form.

(more…)

Steven Pinker, writing in The New Republic, takes aim at The President’s Council on Bioethics for mulish opposition, on largely theological grounds, to a variety of promising medical and scientific efforts.

(more…)

For those of you who don’t know, our friend Kevin Kim has a new website, created for the purpose of chronicling his upcoming transcontinental walk — a trek whose purpose is to explore the many parallel currents of religion in America, and if possible to help build bridges between them. The walk itself won’t get going for a few weeks yet, but you can’t keep a good blogger down, and Kevin has been posting as regularly as ever. Kevin himself is one of the more unusual religious figures I know: a trained theologian and an elder of the Presbyterian church, he’s also a non-theist.

Today he offers an interesting rumination on the Vatican’s position on Christianity for extraterrestrials; it’s well worth a look.

(more…)

My daughter Chloë has sent along a link to an article about Piotr Wozniak, the inventor of SuperMemo, a software application that uses some neglected facts about the workings of human memory to help users retain more of what they learn. The system is designed to remind users at specific intervals of items they have studied; the spacing of these reminders is carefully tuned to occur just as the material would normally be about to be forgotten. Wozniak has dedicated himself with single-minded zeal to applying this system to himself; it appears to be effective, but is clearly not for everybody.

It’s an interesting story; you can read it here.

It’s already well-known that affluence and education are positively correlated with any number of desirable outcomes: longevity, general health and happiness, that sort of thing. Now we find that it not is only disadvantageous to be poor and ignorant, it hurts. Story here.

We note with sadness the death of this great scientist. He was one of the giants of 20th century physics, and mentor to an extraordinary assortment of disciples. His New York Times obituary is here.

Here’s another item from Physorg.com: it appears that there might have been something to the old saying after all.

Since the Big Bang was first proposed as a cosmological model for our universe — a model that has since been accepted with confidence by the astrophysical community — it has been assumed that it might well be impossible in principle to say anything about the state of the world prior to the initial singularity. But according to a story in yesterday’s Physorg.com newlsetter, a promising theory known as Simplified Loop Quantum Gravity now suggests that the previous iteration may have left readable traces in our present environment, and that this relic information indicates that the previous go-round was a time-reversed mirror image of our own.

(more…)

I tend to be a fairly hard-nosed naturalist, as readers may have noticed. This arises from an inveterate intellectual conservatism: I think that the most parsimonious approach to understanding the world around us is to try to explain the phenomena we observe — the “phaneron”, to use Charles Sanders Peirce’s lovely word — in terms of the productive theoretical models we already have. We continually test our theories against new observations, holding their feet always to the fire, and when inconvenient results strain them to the breaking point — as, say, the Michelson-Morley experiment did for Victorian physics — we can be confident, before discarding them, that they have had a fair shot.

(more…)

An item in today’s Washington Post informs us that our only hope to avoid total annihilation is to reduce our carbon emissions to zero. Now.

(more…)

New research has determined that the Earth, barring any manipulation of its orbit on our part, will be consumed by the dying Sun in 7.6 billion years.

Experts are divided on whether this will allow sufficient time for the completion of the proposed Second Avenue subway line.

Learn more here.

Don’t trade in that gas-guzzling Detroit road boat just yet. The Cassini space probe, which has been buzzing about the Saturn system gathering data, has revealed that the giant moon Titan has hundreds of times more combustible hydrocarbons just lying around on its surface than are in all the known oil and gas reserves on Earth.

Could get mighty interesting, as well as being bad news for Hugo Chávez and the House of Saud. Learn more here.

There has been a good deal of excitement lately about global warming, as readers may already have noticed. It having been announced that the cause is an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide due to human activity, various segments of society have whipped themselves into rather a frenzy, and some of those in the public eye have made noble and ostentatious gestures of self-sacrifice — even going so far as to arrive at televised awards shows in Toyota Priuses, and to retrofit their palaces with compact fluorescent bulbs.

(more…)

Yesterday I offered readers a link to a video of a thought-provoking conversation (transcript here, video here) between J. Craig Venter and Richard Dawkins (if you haven’t found the time to look at it yet, I do hope you will). In the ensuing thread, however, rather than discussing any of the forward-looking topics that had come up, our commenters focused exclusively on the various ways that people found Dawkins annoying or disappointing, and I piled on as well.

Yes, he can be a bit of a pill. But in that video, I saw something that shouldn’t go unremarked.

(more…)

Here’s Richard Dawkins, opening a conversation with J. Craig Venter at a recent conference in Germany:

I thought I’d begin by reading a quotation from a famous philosopher and historian of science from the 1930s, Charles Singer, to give an idea of exactly how much things have changed. And Craig Venter is a leader, perhaps the leader, in making that change today. So, this is a quote from 1930, Charles Singer:

“Despite interpretations to the contrary, the theory of the gene is not a mechanist theory. The gene is no more comprehensible as a chemical or physical entity than is the cell or, for that matter, the organism itself. If I ask for a living chromosome, that is, for the only effective kind of chromosome, no one can give it to me, except in its living surroundings, any more than he can give me a living arm or leg. The doctrine of the relativity of functions is as true for the gene as it is for any of the organs of the body. They exist and function only in relation to other organs. Thus, the last of the biological theories leaves us where the first started in the presence of a power called life, or Psyche, which is not only of its own kind but unique in each and all of its exhibitions.”

You couldn’t ask for a more comprehensive destruction of a conventional view than that. That is not just wrong. It is catastrophically, utterly, stupefyingly wrong. It’s wrong in an interesting way, and Craig is the best person to tell us what’s wrong with all that.

(more…)

Following on yesterday’s post, here’s a story about another gruesome malady: it turns out that meat-processing workers in Minnesota are developing a strange neurological illness as a result of being splattered with atomized hog brains.

(more…)

NASA’s MESSENGER (Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging) vehicle made a close pass by the innermost planet today, executing a gravitational “slingshot” maneuver in preparation for an orbital insertion on on March 18, 2011, after which it will settle in for some long-term observations. As it passed by, it photographed parts of the planet that have never been seen before.

Learn more here.

A little while ago I ran across an interesting, if rather sad, item in the Physorg.com daily newsletter, having to do with the small stature of pygmies. Previous notions had been that having such wee bodies better adapted them to food shortages, or to moving about in dense forests, but neither of these explanations has held up well.

(more…)

After a truly debilitating holiday bacchanal last night, followed (almost immediately, it seemed) by a long day at work, I’m far too pooped to post. But I do have something interesting for you to read, if you like.

Anyone who pays attention to scientific and technological topics (or who reads the little messages generated by email spam filters) has probably heard of Bayes’ Theorem. If you’ve ever wondered what it was all about, you need wonder no more. Eliezer Yudkowsky has put together a wonderful essay about Reverend Thomas Bayes, “by far the most enigmatic figure in mathematical history”, and his marvelous theorem. Have a look here.

It was a long day at work; I didn’t get home until after ten, and haven’t had time to prepare anything for tonight. But, saving the day, my friend Jess Kaplan has brought an awfully provocative story to our attention. The topic is an exotic one, right at the edges of human knowledge and understanding, and I am certainly not in an position to comment on it tonight. It comes to us from Lawrence Krauss, for whom I have a great deal of respect. Have a look here.

I’m still in southern California, and have had no time for writing today. So here is some more Richard Feynman for you. This clip is about ten minutes long, and unfortunately begins in mid-sentence; of particular interest, however, is the section from about 5:15 on, in which he talks about the built-in uncertainty of science, the nature of doubt, and how hard it is for someone constituted as he is simply to “believe”.

Feynman articulates my own feelings about all of this almost exactly. How sad that he is gone.

(more…)

A couple of days ago the Nobel laureate James Watson was all over the news: he had expressed, in an interview for the London Times, his opinion that scientific results indicated that black Africans were, on average, less intelligent than white Northerners. In a subsequent article, we read:

Dr Watson, who runs one of America’s leading scientific research institutions, made the controversial remarks in an interview in The Sunday Times.

The 79-year-old geneticist said he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really”. He said he hoped that everyone was equal, but countered that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”.

He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because “there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don’t promote them when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level”. He writes that “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so”.

It’s not surprising that this has caused quite a stir. From the Left, we hear cries of racism. And from the Right, we hear that Dr. Watson is being unfairly vilified for refusing to put political correctness before impartial scientific inquiry.

(more…)

My son Nick has sent along a link to a video, in four parts, of a marvelous lecture by Richard Dawkins on the topic of Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder. Dawkins is, of course, a controversial figure nowadays for his staunch criticism of religion, but like him or not he is a brilliant communicator, and we see him here at his very best.

Here.

Today’s Physorg newsletter (which, as always, I recommend to those of you who like to keep up with science news) contained a story about what looks to me like an important piece of medical research, involving the role played by tryptophan in cancer and other diseases. Have a look here.

From my son Nick, a splendid young man, restless Internet spelunker, and the prop of my dotage, comes a link to what looks like an worthwhile website: The Worlds of David Darling. I’d never heard of the fellow, but according to Wikipedia he is a well-known British astronomer who has written scads of books.

Anyway, his site is glossy and professional, and the premier attraction therein is a promising resource called The Internet Encyclopedia of Science. Do have a look.

To do physical science, one needs uniform references for fundamental quantities: length, duration, mass, and so forth. Over time, as the need for accuracy has increased, attempts have been made to place the fundamental units on ever more precise footing. For example, the reference meter, which was declared in 1791 by the French Academy of Sciences to be one ten-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator along a meridian running through Paris¹, is now taken to be “the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second.”

(more…)

1. By the way, the measurement of this distance by a seven-year surveying expedition undertaken by Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre and Pierre François André Méchain is a fascinating story, and is told in the recent book The Measure of All Things, by Ken Alder.  

As one who has taken, shall we say, a rather nonstandard path through life, I’m always gratified to see mavericks and autodidacts come through with the goods, and I’ve just run across a particularly noteworthy example. Inventor John Kanzius, of Erie, PA, who is battling leukemia, has developed a technique, using nanoparticles and radio waves, that may be a powerful new weapon against cancer. Learn more here.

We are still more occupied with sun and surf than the glowing screen, but will be back in town, with nose reapplied to grindstone, this week.

Meanwhile, a rather odd item from the frontiers of astrophysical research: it appears that there is an enormous hole in the visible universe, a billion light-years across. Lately it seems that the more we see of the cosmos, the less we know. Learn (a little bit) more here.

A few days ago we made passing mention of the Oxford philosopher of science Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Argument, which makes the claim that we are probably living in some sort of Matrix-like computer program. This dismal notion, which we looked at a bit more closely back in May, was also the subject of a brief article in last week’s New York Times.

(more…)

Here’s another interesting item about climate change, sent our way by Mike Zaharee. It appears that some of the data about which of the past hundred years or so have been the warmest may have been a bit off. See this post as well.

Freeman Dyson, one of our greatest living scientists, has always been known for the originality and independence of his thinking. I’ve just read a remarkable essay by this formidable man, and hope you’ll read it too.

(more…)

Recently blogger Dennis Mangan, the proprietor of Mangan’s Miscellany, offered his readers information suggesting that animal products in the diet are the cause of numerous health woes. It grieves me to offer more grist for his mill on this one, as I am a carnivore’s carnivore¹, but he might be interested in this, which accuses meat-eaters of causing global warming.

1. I’ve even considered attempting a diet that consists solely of animals that are themselves carnivores, just to get right up on the tippy-tippy top of the food chain.  

Those of you with an interest in astronomy, and a fondness for order, might like to take a look here.

Today’s Physorg.com newsletter (which I enthusiastically recommend as an excellent source of news about all branches of science) had an interesting item about social hierarchies in fish. As is so often the case with discoveries of organizing principles in nature, the research is likely to help us understand not just the particular system under examination (in this case reef colonies of gobies), but ourselves as well.

(more…)

Each year the website Edge.org — which I will recommend once again to you all, as it is one of the Web’s most stimulating destinations — asks the intellectual community a carefully chosen question, presents the answers on its website, and then gathers them together into a book. Previous questions have included What Questions Are You Asking Yourself?, What Do You Believe is True, Even Though You Cannot Prove It, and What Is Today’s Most Important Underreported Story? (you can see the whole list here).

(more…)

The late Victorian era was a time of smug certainty in the scientific world. The Darwinian revolution had the God of the Gaps on the run, technological innovation was accelerating briskly, and the great intellectual cataclysms of the 20th century — relativity, quantum mechanics, and Gödel’s theorem, foremost among many — were still nothing more than dim smudges on the horizon.

(more…)