Science Archives

Even monkey boys and girls play with different toys. This will require some explaining among the "it's all society's fault" crowd.

Which is not to say that similar behavior in human children isn't influenced by social conditioning. But the argument has always been that that conditioning is somehow creating artificial constructs from whole cloth, or running against the genetic grain of our natural instincts. If social conditioning is working with instincts that are already there, well, there's no reason to think there's anything wrong with that.

I've thought from the very beginning that the move to outlaw Edison's great invention, the incandescent light bulb, was basically foolhardy and possibly just a ploy to force consumers to buy $7 lightbulbs that (in my experience, at least) don't necessarily last much longer than regular bulbs. But that was before I really started to focus on the extent to which (as discussed here and here) the mercury in the bulbs presents a real health hazard that wasn't previously present in the home, and which - like the now-infamous introduction of MTBE into gasoline (also, at the time, claimed to be an environmental measure) is probably going to end up getting pulled off the market after the plaintiffs' personal injury bar gets done with it. Government's natural tendency to folly is exponentially enhanced by runaway environmentalism divorced from common sense.

Yes, it's a newly-discovered fish with front-facing eyes and fins that double like arms for crawling:

The fish was discovered by divers near a reef off the Indonesian coast.

Also on the subject of the animal kingdom, Cracked.com's list of 6 endangered species that are not endangered enough. They manage to ignore the geopolitical implications of the last one. I guess it's not endangered, so they left off the candiru, a/k/a the toothpick fish.

Cool. Video here.

The deep sea truly is the last fronteir on earth. I have no doubt that we yet have much to learn of its inhabitants and its properties.

*Michael Lewis is a wonderful writer and a guy who understands and loves markets. You have to read (here and here) his take on the subprime lending crisis. (Not everyone is amused). Lewis himself was a bond trader for a few years in the 1980s, leading to his smash hit book "Liar's Poker," and he poses here as a Gordon Gekko-type hedge-fund manager who blames poor people for evertything. The great thing about these pieces is that they are double-edged satire, containing enough cold-hearted economic truth to effectively skewer subprime borrowers and Capitol Hill demagogues, but at the same time mocking the misanthropic (at best) attitudes he parrots.

*Speaking of which, Gekko himself is apparently coming back as a hedge-fund manager (improbable given his insider-trading conviction, but that's Hollywood - it wouldn't be as much fun if he was running a car insurance company). I wonder how he reacts when he finds out Martin Sheen ended up President.

*Medieval scholastics would have been awed by the effort exerted by the Third Circuit to determine that putting on a hair net is "work". Of course, I am thankful not to work in a place of employment that has an "evisceration" department.

*The Constitution stops at the frat house door, as the Second Circuit upholds a college's right to use anti-discrimination policies to deny recognition to a fraternity on grounds of not admitting women. There's a case to be made for greater autonomy of educational institutions and a case to be made for the fundamental ambiguity of right-to-association law, but the reasoning used in this opinion is almost as flimsy as the public policy at issue is blinkered.

*An ex-parrot who was impressively intelligent.

*Of course, Michael Moore's new movie is loaded with untruths. (H/T). That's like going to a Jackie Chan movie and seeing a lot of kicking.

*Seems like a whole lot of nothing to me.

Giant squid are cool. Accordingly, I give you: news about a "colossal" squid.

A permanent moon base?

Hollywood may be right on time.

A 17 year old creates fusion in his parents' basement:

Thiago's mom, Natalice Olson, initially was leery of the project, even though the only real danger from the fusion machine is the high voltage and small amount of X-rays emitted through a glass window in the vacuum chamber -- through which Olson videotapes the fusion in action..

But, she wasn't really surprised, since he was always coming up with lofty ideas.

"Originally, he wanted to build a hyperbaric chamber," she said, adding that she promptly said no. But, when he came asking about the nuclear fusion machine, she relented.

"I think it was pretty brave that he could think that he was capable to do something so amazing," she said.

Thiago's dad, Mark Olson, helped with some of the construction and electrical work. To get all of the necessary parts, Thiago scoured the Internet, buying items on eBay and using his age to persuade manufacturers to give him discounts. The design of the model came from his own ideas and some suggestions from other science-lovers he met online.

Wow.

Well, OK, walking shark, anyhow.

I kid you not. Via Allahpundit.

*As I've said in the past, I accept that the Earth has been getting warmer as a historical matter, but there are several more steps required from that simple proposition of historical global warming to the proposition that such warming (1) constitutes a man-made phenomenon (2) with predictable future consequences (3) that can be altered by future human actions (4) at a cost we can all live with compared to the marginal benefits of such actions. Dale Franks at the outstanding blog QandO offers a lengthy look at reasons to doubt that the current climate models have really proven much of anything about (1) and (2). Among his less technical objections:

1. Despite the fact that, since the end of the 19th century, human produced CO2 emissions have increased exponentially, the earth's temperature has increased in basically linear fashion since 1800, despite the fact that modern industrialization did not add any signifigant amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere until well into the 20th century.

2. Despite the fact that huge increases in fossil fuels—and commensurate increases in CO2 output occured during the last part of the 19th and early 20th centuries, global temperatures cooled signifigantly between the 1940s and 1960s.

3. The abrupt global temperature rises in the last few years of the 1970s occured far too fast to be the result of any linear relationship with CO2 output.

Yes, cancer-sniffing dogs.

This is just cool (picture and more here), but I have trouble seeing the practical application, except maybe for crowd/riot control. It doesn't seem powerful enough for the battlefield or mobile enough for regular police work.

If you haven't seen them by now, the first-ever pictures of a giant squid in the wild are indeed pretty cool, as blurry and distant as they are. The squid - huge, believed to be highly intelligent, thought to exist in large numbers, and long able to elude human observation even in this high-tech era - is in many ways the most impressive member of the animal kingdom.

Forensic scientists have recovered and deciphered the diary kept on board the space shuttle Columbia by Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon, a little over two years after the shuttle's fiery explosion.

The Mad Hibernian's post on Friday on Michael Crichton's new book questioning "global warming" and similar environmental dogmas (which followed on this powerful speech by Crichton last year denouncing global warming theories) prompted some interesting comments and links. Now, I'm no expert on the subject myself, but I did think it was worth repeating here something I said in the comments to that post. I'm very skeptical of hearing "global warming" discussed as if it is a single concept, like "the earth is round." Basically, "global warming," as I understand its popular meaning, is really three different concepts:

1. The earth has, for some period of time, been getting warmer.

2. This past warming trend is not a random or cyclical phenomenon but is a trend that will continue into the future unless interrupted by human intervention.

3. The past trend and its continuation into the future are the results of specifically identifiable human activities, i.e., carbon emissions.

It is entirely possible to believe #1 without believing #2 and #3, or even to believe #1 and #2 without believing #3. Beware of anyone who tries to use evidence supporting just one of those propositions to convince you of all three.

I’m intrigued by Michael Crichton coming out as a global warming skeptic in his new novel, see here and here, but probably not intrigued enough to actually buy it. Crichton’s highly intelligent and has a lot of interesting ideas, but doesn’t seem to be writing very entertaining stories these days. This book in particular sounds like it would work a lot better as non-fiction, although it would almost certainly reach a much smaller readership that way.

Anyway, I’m a certified dunce when it comes to science and would hardly claim to be an authority one way or another, but am a relative skeptic on environmental matters. Thus, before reading Crichton’s book, I should probably try and tackle this one.

UPDATE: Via Instapundit, here is a very positive review of Crichton’s new book.

So, we think we know dinosaurs. But answer this: how do we know they didn't have feathers? After all, research seems to indicate that they were closer relatives to today's birds than today's lizards.

Well, scientists have now unearthed an early ancestor of Tyrannosaurus Rex who had feathers. And that could suggest that the most fearsome meat-eater of all did too.

China admits that the Great Wall of China can not be seen from outer space. This was apparently common knowledge to people who follow these things, but I'd always heard it cited that the Great Wall was the only man-made structure visible from space (granted, it did seem odd that something that low and narrow would be visible from space).

I can foresee an Orwellian world ahead for people on probation. Microsoft unveils a prototype for a camera you can wear that automatically takes 2,000 pictures per day to show everyone you see and everywhere you go.

I don't care how much you want to avoid getting colon cancer, I'm not recommending this as as preventative measure.

Scientists have announced what they believe to be the discovery of "a frozen object 4.4 billion miles from Earth that appears to be more than half the size of Pluto and larger than the planet's moon," the largest discovery within our solar system since Pluto itself in 1930. The "planetoid," "dubbed 2004 DW [they'll need a better name], lies at the outer fringes of the Kuiper Belt, a swarm of frozen rock and ice beyond the orbit of Neptune."

This MSNBC report speculates that the 1918 influenza epidemic was caused by a strain of flu similar to the bird-borne virus currently erupting in Asia:

So far this year only 16 people have been killed, but there is some evidence it may have begun spreading from person to person. If that happens, experts fear the virus has the potential to be as bad as the 1918 epidemic.

Given that the 1918 epidemic killed more people than World War I, that's not a comforting thought.

I previously noted a report painting a bleak picture of the great ape population in Central Africa, but this recent report on a census of endangered mountain gorillas suggests that this particular type of ape, at least, may actually be on the road to recovery.

This MSNBC report has a disturbingly grim analysis of the future of the great apes, noting specifically that the ape population in Africa has been decimated by ebola epidemics. I'm certainly nobody's idea of an environmentalist, but this is clearly something we need to do something about -- the great apes are our nearest relatives in the animal kingdom, and would represent a particularly egregious loss. Unfortunately, the article suggests that people working to address the issue don't even have a good idea of a solution to implement in the Magical Land of Unlimited Resources, let alone in the world we live in.

USAToday had an interesting story the other day about the large number of people in Italy living in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, and the high likelihood of another eruption in the near future. Yet, people refuse to move even off the mountain itself.

A series of studies suggest a link between breast implants and suicide, and MSNBC's writeup suggests that this could be problematic for the makers of silicone implants, who are trying to get FDA approval to get back on the market after waves of litigation based on junk science connecting silicone implants to everything but prostate cancer. Even this article concedes the obvious: this could just as easily be a case where, for many women, suicidal tendencies and the desire to get breast implants are both symptoms of the same set of problems: women who have seriously low self-esteem and/or are heavily dependent on other people (employers, husbands) who place and overemphasis on their looks.

What's frustrating is that the article is vague as to whether the studies involved only silicone implants and not other cosmetic implants.

Apparently, monkey don't like unfairness any more than people do.

Another setback for cloning animals.

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, David Bernstein notes that the media is jumping to conclusions about a recent study showing lower than expected birthweights by babies carried by "women who were pregnant and at or around the World Trade Center during or after the terror attack": he's right that the correlation between low birth weights and exposure to smoke and dust does not prove causation.

Um, why smoke and dust? I know the article he links to rules out "post-traumatic stress disorder" based on surveys, but isn't it possible that women who were in or near the towers on September 11 suffered from a greater than normal amount of stress, fear and anxiety?