Category Archives: science

Alien Postcards

This week New Scientist printed the winning entries in their New Year Competition. The challenge was to compose a text message of no more than 160 characters, sent home by an alien who has just arrived on our planet. I particularly liked:

Arr. Earth. Dominant species “car”. Colourful exoskeleton and bizarre reproduction via slave biped species. Aggressive but predictable. Intelligence uncertain.

We followed the wormhole, and have now discovered the source of the wet socks (of the singular kind) which are spontaneously materialising on our planet.

Parallel evolution of intelligent life. One carbon based, one silicon based. Carbon form domesticated by silicon form to feed it with all its needs.

OMG you have to see how they procreate.

Full results here. Enjoy!

Thought-provoking Science

There have been a number of interesting articles recently in the more popular scientific magazines.

First of all, catching up on the December 2006 issue of Scientific American, there was a one page item by Michael Shermer “Bowling for God” in which he asks “Is religion good for society? Science’s definitive answer: it depends”. Along the way he supports my theory that more secular and less rigidly moral societies have lower rates of teenage pregnancy and STD infection. Shermer concludes “Moral restraints on aggressive and sexual behaviour are best reinforced by the family, be it secular or sacred”.

This week’s issue of New Scientist also contains some interesting articles. Ed Douglas, in “Better by Design” asks “If only we built more lasting relationships with the tings we buy. Could better design cure our throwaway culture?” Douglas’s thesis is that we need to go back to a culture which doesn’t throw things away and doesn’t build everything with built-in obsolescence. One way to fix our environmental problems is to build products which we cherish and can sensibly repair, and/or which can be reused and recycled when we have finished with them. Almost all products these days are ephemeral; little has a useful life of more than 6 months. And yet it wasn’t always like this. Remember the teddy bear you had, and cherished, as a child? Bet you still have it! What if we cherished all products in the same way? Yes, OK there would be fewer manufacturing jobs. But we’d see an increase in service jobs: repairing and recycling stuff. Wouldn’t this make more economic and environmental sense?

Another article I found interesting, “Under the Cover of Darkness”, is all about how animals see in the dark. Scientists have discovered that, unlike most animals which can see only in shades of grey in the dark, geckos see in colour even in low light situations.

Following that is an article on “Extreme Childbirth” and the move by some women, so called “freebirthers”, to give birth without any medical intervention whatsoever. While our forebears would not have had the medical intervention we have it seems to me that women would normally have given birth with at least a help-mate (later to become the midwife) to hand — as I believe is still the case today in primitive societies. Freebirthers don’t necessarily shun the presence of a help-mate, although there are groups who insist on being alone — something the article suggests is dangerous because of the peculiarities of human anatomy. The article even contains a box on “How to recycle a placenta”! Interesting, but not tea-table reading.

Unfortunately New Scientist doesn’t provide access to its current articles unless you subscribe, so I can’t link direct to their articles here.

Philosophy of Science

Over the holiday I’ve been reading the 50th anniversary edition of New Scientist (dated 18/11/2006). Amongst the articles on “The Big Questions” there are a number of thought provoking and/or revealing quotes, including the following:

One of the great outstanding scientific mysteries is the origin of life. How did it happen? When I was a student, most scientists thought that life began with a stupendous chemical fluke, unique in the observable universe. Today it is fashionable to say that life is written into the laws of nature – easy to get started and therefore likely to be widespread in the universe. The truth is, nobody has a clue.
[Paul Davies, Arizona State University]

Nothing truly revolutionary is ever predicted because that is what makes it revolutionary.
[John D Barrow, Professor of Mathematical Sciences, University of Cambridge]

[Life is] any population of entities which has the properties of multiplication, heredity and variation.
[John Maynard Smith, Evolutionary Biologist ]

Life is a self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution.
[Noam Lahav, Hebrew University of Jerusalem]

Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.
[Alan Turing]

How we know what we know

There’s a very interesting and thought provoking article in this Week’s New Scientist magazine under the above title. In it Harry Collins looks at the ways and effects of individual mavericks on mainstream science. He concludes that the mavericks do have their place and that mainstream science and scientists are often blibkered and misdirected in their responses to them. Here are a few quotes from the article:

If science were a matter of combining unambiguous data from perfectly conducted experiments with flawless theories, assessing the claims of “outsider” scientists and their maverick ideas would not be that hard. But the logic of science is not so far removed from the logic of ordinary life … and so fallible human judgement still determines what happens at the heart of even the hardest science.

… it is impossible to explore every new scientific idea to the standard set by science: there are just too many.

… after a hundred years, no one has absolutely proved the non-existence of extrasensory perception. If anything, the findings run very slightly in its favour.

No-one has definitlely proved its existence either.

Take the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism affair in the UK. Andrew Wakefield, the doctor behind the furore, published some evidence in The Lancet suggesting a link between autism and measles-related virus particles in the gut. But these particles were never linked to MMR vaccine. There was word-of-mouth testimony from some parents, but no link between MMR and autism has ever been proved. Wakefield simply speculated about a relationship at a press conference – and no one has ever gone further than to hypothesise about it … Because it is so hard to prove a negative, none of this shows that there is not a hidden link between MMR and autism lurking below the statistics. But there is no evidence to show there is.

A tentative claim about, say, telepathy, can provoke a sort of fundamentalist zeal among some scientists refuting the claim, which in turn undermines their claims for science as an exemplar in a divided world. They should say merely this: “Well, it’s not inconceivable, I can’t absolutely prove you wrong, but my time is better spent doing things I judge to have more potential.”

I am also not sure how it helps if they assume omnipotence in the name of science, as Richard Dawkins did recently when he insisted that scientists must be atheists. And Stephen Hawking has been turned into a new kind of religious icon, with his books taking the place of the incomprehensible Latin Bible in our homes … The Dawkinses and the Hawkings threaten to make the hard-won victory of science over religion a pyrrhic victory by replacing old faiths with new.

Ah-ha! At last someone else has seen through Dawkins and exposes him for what he is: as big a bigot, and science fundamentalist, as any religious believer knows how to be. He claims to have an open mind. Very far from it. His mind is closed unless things conform to his fundamentalist scientific view. Bah! Humbug! Evil man!

If science is essentially ordinary life albeit conducted in extraordinary circumstances, it must contradict literal interpretations of texts that clash with its findings, but it should not claim the right to address deeper questions of existence.

Russian Cure

As I’m currently trying to get rid of the latest vile seasonal virus, I thought I’d share a little Russian cure, which isn’t Polonium-210.

A couple of weeks ago a Russian acquaintance was telling me about the traditional Russian cure for a sore throat:

  1. Drink a large measure of neat Russian vodka. If you wish swill it around your mouth in the process and swallow slowly (if that’s possible).
  2. Wait 10 minutes.
  3. Then drink the squeezed juice of one whole fresh lemon. Oh go on, lemon juice it isn’t that bad! Again swill it round the mouth and swallow slowly.

The sore throat should miraculously disappear.

Do not be tempted to mix the vodka and lemon — they need to be taken separately as the cure is supposed to work by using the vodka to weaken/kill the bugs and the acid lemon to then wash away the debris. Hmmm. Sounds logical, but I’m not convinced. Good excuse for a couple of shots of Stolichnaya tho’. And even if it doesn’t effect a cure it ain’t going to do the sore throat a lot of good.