The Oracle and the Monkey

By: | August 31, 2012

For nearly five decades, a scientific loner guarded a great labyrinth of lines on the desert floor near the small Peruvian town of Nazca. Day after day, until she was too elderly and too ill for such solitary work, Maria Reiche set out into the barren vastness with camera, compass, and papers, mapping thousands of straight lines and dozens of immense ground drawings inscribed on the desert floor more than 1500 years ago by the Nazca, masters of maize agriculture and irrigation.

Reiche had studied mathematics as a young university student in Weimar Germany. She thought that the Nazca Lines formed a vast celestial calendar, an early scientific masterpiece akin to the calendar that Maya astronomers created and preserved in bark-paper books known as codices. Reiche believed the desert was a Nazca codex, and she brooked no intruders, no vandals on the lines. She paid for guards herself, and by the strength of her convictions she persuaded the Peruvian government to protect the lines. After her death in 1998, Alberto Fujimori, then president of Peru, talked of renaming them the Reiche Lines.

I was reminded of all this, when I came across a Reuters news story from Lima last week.   Continue reading →

The Baijiu Bender

By: | August 30, 2012

During a recent reporting trip to central China, I went to a banquet honoring a group of visiting foreign scientists. I’d heard about these banquets: red tablecloths, elaborate dinnerware, a procession of courses long enough to turn eating into an athletic event. But what were these miniature wineglasses, filled so deftly with clear liquid? The woman next to me, an American energy expert with long experience in China, looked at the sparkling glasses with a mixture of amusement, disgust, and resignation. “Baijiu,” she sighed. “They never forget the baijiu.”

Baijiu, usually distilled from sorghum, has been part of Chinese life for hundreds if not thousands of years. The reaction of the first laowai to taste it is lost to history, but for well over a century foreigners have described baijiu with escalating horror. “One can hardly imagine what pleasure the Chinese find in imbibing these burning drinks, which are absolutely like liquid fire, and, moreover, very ill tasted,” the French Catholic missionary Évariste Régis Huc wrote in 1854. Dan Rather, reporting on Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, described Maotai, a famous variety of baijiu, as “liquid razor blades.” Others go further: “Socks with AIDS.” “Pure distilled evil in liquid form.”

Continue reading →

Guest Post: Guilt & Shame & Climate Change

By: | August 29, 2012

The six undergrads that trickle into the Aquatic Ecosystems Research Laboratory at the University of British Columbia are unsure about what they’re in for. The room they enter is all black from the carpet to the walls and the ceiling. A conference table partitioned into six sections is illuminated in the middle. They each take a seat and anonymously play ten rounds of a computer game. Fifteen minutes later the players file out, different amounts of cash in hand. They glance at each other furtively: were you the defector that ruined the game for all of us, they wonder, or were you the irrational altruist?

In this experiment Jennifer Jacquet, an environmental economist, and Christoph Hauert, a mathematician at the University of British Columbia, have pitted  self-interest against collective gain in order to tease apart what induces and destroys cooperation on climate change.  We tend to think of climate change as a global issue that technology and science will solve. Think again. It’s just as much a question about human nature. Ergo, mitigating climate change may not lie in cutting edge biofuels. It may lie in our very nature. Just how to tease it out is what Jacquet is after:  “All the models will tell us cooperation is best but none of them tell us how to get there.”  Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: The Creation, part 3

By: | August 28, 2012

As you undoubtedly know, quantum theory — the most precisely accurate most fundamental theory about the universe’s most basic particles and forces — comes down to the uncertainty principle.  That is,  if you know where and how forcefully and how fast a particle is going (its momentum), you can’t at the same time know where it is (its position). And vice versa.  That the most precise and accurate explanation of the world ends in uncertainty seems — unsatisfying.  To say the least.  It’s another of Abstruse Goose’s arguments with God.  Here are the first and second ones.

_______

http://abstrusegoose.com/455

Top 3 Reasons to Stop Fretting About Being an Old Dad

By: | August 27, 2012

You probably heard about last week’s Nature study on older dads and autism; it got a lot of attention. The basic findings were fascinating but, in my opinion, far less sensational than what most of the news articles would have us believe.

The researchers, led by Kári Stefánsson of deCODE Genetics in Iceland, showed that the average 20-year-old man passes on about 25 new single-letter DNA mutations to his child. (These kinds of mutations happen spontaneously in sperm cells, so they don’t affect the DNA in the father’s other cells.) With each passing year of age, the man’s sperm acquires two more mutations. This makes sense, biologically. Sperm Primordial sperm cells divide over and over throughout a man’s life. To use an over-used metaphor: Each time the code gets copied, it creates an opportunity for a spelling mistake. Eggs Primordial eggs, in contrast, go through far fewer divisions. Women, no matter what their age, pass on about 14 mutations to each child, the study found.

The researchers also showed, using demographic data of Icelanders going back to 1650, that the average age of fathers has recently shot up, from 27.9 years in 1980 to 33 in 2011. Based on their calculations, that means the average number of mutations passed on to each kid (from mother and father combined) went from 59.7 to 69.9.

Here’s the sensational part. Stefánsson says, given that these mutations have been linked to autism, the increase in older fathers could partially explain why autism rates have risen over approximately the same time period. This is a plausible idea, sure, in theory. But there’s actually not much data to back it up (more on that later). And yet the assertion — reported in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and more than 250 other outlets (Slate’s XXfactor blog even ran a piece titled, “Dude, Bank Your Sperm. It’ll Get You Laid.”) — was enough to scare some potential fathers. As one of my friends Tweeted, “great, my 34yr-old gonads may be ticking neuro-disorder timebombs.”

It’s an unsettling feeling, I’m sure. I’ve felt a similar panic about being an older mother (though for different reasons). But honestly, men, of all the things to spend time worrying about, this study is not one of them. Here’s why.
Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | August 25, 2012

August 20 – 24

This week, Cassandra opened up a big, foamy can of whoop-ass all over the people who uncritically told you eggs were as bad for you as cigarettes.

Cameron told us why we may get more motion sick as we get older.

Ann presented an open and shut case for why you need to read Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist.

Michelle wondered what we mean when we say we want to conserve nature. What is nature at the dawn of the anthropocene?

And Christie sent us into the weekend with an analysis of the penis as earworm.

 

 

TGIPF: Penis in My Head

By: | August 24, 2012

It’s time for another edition of  Thank God It’s Penis Friday! 

As many as 99 percent of us get a song stuck in our heads at some point. This may happen because the song sparks a cognitive itch or because it contains a repetitive motif that the brain latches onto and starts echoing. Researchers have a name for songs that implant themselves in our brains — earworms.

But not all earworms are song. Some people find non-musical words or phrases stuck in their heads too. This happened to Doctor Popular, and he wrote a comic about it.

Continue reading →

Review: Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist

By: | August 22, 2012

Take up where the last review left off:  “. . . and if nonfiction writers are so entranced by the techniques and effects of fiction, why don’t they for chrissakes just write it?”   Well, they do, they just do it cheesily.  Fiction about reality – about history or, say, science — often follows the cupcake tactic and sprinkles a little history or science on top of some standard plot and conventional characters.

But what’s interesting is the fiction which doesn’t do that, fiction in which the science is integral.  In Loving Little Egypt  the plot depended at least partly on electromagnetism and the characters’ motives and acts were those of scientists.  Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist by Russell McCormmach, does the same only more thoroughly and with radical intent:  he wants the reader to be the physicist; to be at home in the physicist’s institutional, social, political contexts; and to face the time when the science on which this physicist bases his work and philosophy and the meaning of his life falls to pieces. Continue reading →