Science Made Cool

You'll Thank Us In The Morning

As a public service to our readers who like to celebrate heavily on New Year's Eve:  Hangover Cures Don't Work.

A group of British and Dutch researchers evaluated fifteen different clinical trials of hangover treatments.  Most had no observable effect at all, and the ones which did affect the patients didn't seem to relieve their hangovers.

Which leaves us with the best cure of all:  don't drink more than you can handle. 

Good Times!

BONE WARS got mentioned in a New York Times article, and the result has been a gratifying spike in orders.  Thanks, everyone!

The article, by top-notch science writer Cornelia Dean, is for subscribers only, but it's pretty interesting.  She describes various humorous takes on the Kansas evolution controversy, including the eldritch and terrible Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Kepler's Birthday

December 27 marks the birthday of Johannes Kepler, one of the most important figures in the history of physics and astronomy.  (Evidently late December is a good time for birthing physics geniuses:  Isaac Newton was a December 25 baby).

Kepler is of course best known for Kepler's Laws of planetary motion, which he derived by rigorous mathematical analysis of observational data collected by Tycho Brahe.  The laws are:
   
1.  Planets orbit the Sun in elliptical paths.
2.  Planetary speed varies such that a radius from the Sun to the planet sweeps out equal areas in equal times.
3.  The square of the length of a planet's year is proportional to the cube of its distance from the Sun.

But the Three Laws were just an intriguing digression as far as Kepler himself was concerned.  His primary interest was in what he grandly called the Secret of the Cosmos, which he explained in the book Mysterium Cosmographicum.  Put simply, the Secret of the Cosmos is that the orbits of the planets can be described as a set of near-spheres inscribed within a nested series of Platonic solids. 

The Platonic solids are the three-dimensional shapes whose sides are all matching regular polygons.  Dungeons and Dragons players know them as the polyhedral dice:  there's the 4-sided tetrahedron, the 6-sided cube, the 8-sided octahedron, the 12-sided dodecahedron, and the 20-sided icosahedron.  Kepler found a way to match the orbits of the planets to the Platonic solids.  He thought this was the most important discovery of his life.

Nobody else cared.  At one point in college I tried to find any astronomer of Kepler's era who even mentioned his cool Platonic-solids theory.  I couldn't.  As far as I can tell, the universal reaction to the Secret of the Cosmos was a round of embarassed throat-clearing and a quick change of subject.

This is not an uncommon situation with scientists:  the things that make their reputations aren't always the things they are most interested in.  Isaac Newton wrote more on alchemy and Biblical chronology than on physics and mathematics.  In our own time, Linus Pauling turned from his important discoveries about proteins to quackish medical theories about Vitamin C.  Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA, teetered on the edge of crackpot-hood with his insistent advocacy of panspermia as the origin of life on Earth.

For the rest of us, watching a first-class mind go off into a dodgy digression is frustrating, because it's such a waste.  The time and effort Kepler frittered away messing with model polyhedrons could have been used to anticipate Galileo -- or even Newton.  He might have derived the inverse-square law, for instance.  As for Newton himself, he might have anticipated half the mathematical and physical discoveries of the 18th Century, especially if he wasn't damaging his brain with mercury fumes trying to create the Philosopher's Stone. 

And yet sometimes these dodgy digressions turn out to be important stuff.  John Von Neumann was a great mathematician, but as a result of his wartime Manhattan Project work he got interested in mechanical computing.  The result was the ENIAC computer, an ancestor of the machine you're using to read this Web log.  Luis Alvarez followed his career as a physicist by getting interested in some crackpot idea about the extinction of the dinosaurs and wound up helping discover the cause of the K-T event -- which in turn has made catastrophism much more respectable in modern geology and planetary science.

Unfortunately there's no way to tell in advance if something is going to turn out to be important or a dead end.  If Newton's alchemy research had paid off, leading to widespread availability of Philosopher's Stones capable of bestowing immortality, we'd all be grousing about the time he "wasted" on mathematics.  So perhaps it is for the best that scientists feel free to go exploring in odd byways off the beaten track. 

Judgement Day

The U.S. District Court for central Pennsylvania handed down a decision in the case of Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School District on Tuesday, and dealt a serious blow to the Creationists trying to sneak the doctrine of divine creation into high-school science classes.  The court decided in favor of the plaintiffs (a group of parents and teachers) and against the school board. 

In 2004 the Dover school board voted to change the school curriculum to include a disclaimer stating that Darwinian evolution was just a theory with gaps which could not be explained.  They also added an "Intelligent Design" textbook to the course.  All this was justified in the name of giving equal time to a rival scientific theory.

The judge didn't buy it.  "The effect of Defendants’ actions in adopting the curriculum change was to impose a religious view of biological origins into the biology course, in violation of the Establishment Clause."

Judge Jones (who is, by the way, a Republican and who goes out of his way to point out that "this is manifestly not an activist Court.") was obviously very unhappy with the Dover school board members behind the curriculum change.  In his 138-page decision (which can be found here), the judge concluded that "Intelligent Design" is not science at all, for three reasons:

"(1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980's; and (3) ID’s negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community."

The judge noticed that the "Intelligent Design" proponents were being deliberately deceptive in their attempt to sneak it into the curriculum:

"Moreover, ID’s backers have sought to avoid the scientific scrutiny which we have now determined that it cannot withstand by advocating that the controversy, but not ID itself, should be taught in science class.  This tactic is at best disingenuous, and at worst a canard.  The goal of the IDM is not to encourage critical thought, but to foment a revolution which would supplant evolutionary theory with ID."

The really devastating part is where the decision scolds the defendants for their dishonesty in lying about their motives and actions.  He practically throws his gavel at them:

"Defendants’ previously referenced flagrant and insulting falsehoods to the Court provide sufficient and compelling evidence for us to deduce that any allegedly secular purposes that have been offered in support of the ID Policy are equally insincere."

Finally, Judge Jones seems to have run out of patience entirely: 

"The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial."

So, no discount on BONE WARS for Pennsylvanians.  Sorry, folks.

Hazy Date of Winter

December 21 marks the winter solstice, the shortest day and the longest night of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.  North of the Arctic circle the Sun won't rise at all.  Meanwhile in Antarctica it's endless sunshine.  Here in Massachusetts we're going to have a little more than 8 hours of sunlight and more than 15 hours of night.

And on every radio station in the United States an announcer will report something along the lines of "today is officially the first day of winter," accompanied by a lame joke along the lines of "so how come it's been so cold before winter even started?" 

It's a good question, really:  why is the solstice used as the start of winter, when it's obvious that winter -- or at least the cold-weather season -- has been around for a month or more?

This confusion isn't new.  Another name for the winter solstice is Midwinter's Day.  According to the mighty Oxford English Dictionary, this usage has been found in print as far back as 900 A.D.  It would seem obvious that a day cannot simultaneously be the middle and the beginning of winter.  Cultures around the world and throughout history have celebrated the solstice as the rebirth of the Sun -- in other words, the turning point of winter, when the days start getting longer again and the promise of life is renewed.  Hardly appropriate for the beginning of the cold weather.  Indeed, the OED cites a definition of winter from 1550 which mentions winter beginning on the 12th of December when the Sun passes into the zodiacal constellation of Capricorn, and in most traditional cultures winter began after the harvest, whenever that happened to be.

And yet even so august an authority as the United States Naval Observatory refers to the solstice as the beginning of winter: 

"The astronomical season of winter begins at the instant of the Winter Solstice, which occurs on the 21st at 1:35 pm EST."

The problem seems to be one of clashing definitions.  The astronomical season of winter extends from winter solstice to spring equinox, but astronomical winter isn't the same thing as winter in the conventional sense.  To most of us, winter is the time of year when it's cold.  In New England, that's roughly December through March, but in New Orleans it's just January and February.  (Running the air conditioner on Christmas Day was practically a New Orleans tradition.)  Trying to shoehorn local conditions into an astronomical straitjacket seems useless, at best.  When the radio announcers joke about it being cold before the beginning of winter, they are essentially making a pun on two definitions of winter -- astronomical winter and climatic winter.

So let us propose a new standard:  winter begins when it's cold where you are, and ends when it isn't.  Radio deejays can retire the annual solstice joke, language purists can stop grumbling at the absurdity of beginning the season on Midwinter's Day, and we can all devote more time to important things like playing the many entertaining products of Zygote Games.

Why Do Narwhals Have Horns?

The narwhal (Monodon monoceros) is a smallish (3-5 meters long) member of the cetacean family chiefly found in Arctic waters.  It's unique among marine mammals in that it has a single long tusk sticking out of its front end.  The tusk is the whale's left upper incisor tooth, and grows forward, spiraling around to form a pointed lance about 2 meters long. 

There was once a fairly lively market in narwhal tusks, because they matched the popular image of the horn of a unicorn.  Since the unicorn's horn was believed to be an infallible remedy against poison, various affluent paranoids among Europe's nobility bought narwhal tusks until about the 18th Century.  By then the true nature of the narwhal's tusk was becoming well-known and the nobles of Europe were becoming more worried about guillotines than poison.  Many old "unicorn horns" can be seen in European museums, including a remarkable poison-neutralizing unicorn cup in the Vienna Kunsthistoriches Museum.

But the reason why the narwhal has its tusk was not really known.  One theory early on was that the narwhal used its tusk as a weapon.  In Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Captain Nemo's mysterious submarine is first identified as a giant narwhal when it rams a steamship. 

But not all narwhals have tusks, which means it can't be essential for feeding.  Since male narwhals have them, another theory was that it was used for mating battles -- the marine equivalent of a stag's antlers.  Indeed, male narwhals have been observed rubbing their tusks together, which was interpreted as a kind of cetacean "fencing."  Trouble is, some tusk-bearing narwhals are females, which kind of blows the whole mating-battle theory out of the water.

Recently Dr. Martin Nweeia, of the Harvard Medical School's dentistry department (really!) did some serious examination of the internal structure of narwhal tusks and found something very interesting indeed.  The tusk may be a sensory organ.

Apparently narwhal tusks are filled with sensory nerves, up to 10 million or so, and can provide the whale with information about water temperature, pressure, and salinity.  These may help the narwhals navigate in polar water and find prey.  (This doesn't explain what the male narwhals are doing rubbing tusks, though -- maybe it just feels good.)

There's an interesting parallel in aerodynamics:  high-performance jet airplanes, especially experimental models, are often fitted with a Pitot tube at the nose.  The tube isn't just to make the plane look extra-pointy; it carries pressure sensors and puts them out in front of the disturbed airflow created by the body of the plane to determine airspeed.  The narwhal's tusk may do much the same, putting water sensors out where the whale itself doesn't interfere.

Dr. Nweeia's research still leaves some questions:  why don't all narwhals have tusks?  Is there some unique feature of the narwhal's life which makes it an advantage?  It would be interesting to see if swordfish bills have a similar sensory purpose.

Caught in a Dark Web

The world that we see is just bright dew gleaming on a vast web of darkness. 

No, seriously, it is. 

A crew of astrophysicists at the Johns Hopkins University Space Telescope Science Institute used the Hubble Space Telescope to map the dark matter in a distant galaxy cluster by studying subtle gravity lensing effects on light from very distant objects. 

Gravity lensing, as every third-grader knows, is the effect on light from distant sources created by the gravity fields of massive objects.  Gravity can bend light, sometimes creating double images of distant quasars and galaxies.  By studying how the light gets bent, one can learn something about where the massive dark objects are.

When they got done crunching the numbers, the Hopkins team produced the inevitable three-dimensional computer-generated image which appears to show that the galaxy cluster is filled by a huge webwork of filaments of dark matter, with the bright matter (i.e. galaxies) gathered where the filaments meet.  It seems likely that the increased density of dark matter is what collects the bright matter.  Presumably this result holds for the rest of the universe as well. 

So what is dark matter anyway?  Nobody knows.  It's there, it has mass and thus affects us via gravity, but otherwise dark matter is like ghost-stuff.  You can't see it, you can't touch it, and apparently other dark matter can't touch it either.  Particles of dark matter pass through each other when they collide.  And something like 90 percent of everything that exists is dark matter.  Bright matter -- the stuff we're made of -- is just the icing on the cosmological cake. 

Yet it appears that the structure of the universe is determined by dark matter.  This vast, mysterious webwork of titanic filaments is what the universe "really" looks like.  The clumps of bright matter formed where the filaments come together are apparently just epiphenomena, cosmic by-products, like dust in the corner of a room. 

A Big Day In Science

December 10 is the date of the Nobel Prize award ceremonies in Stockholm and Oslo.  No doubt the tailgate parties have already begun. 

But we're going to talk about something really important that happened on that date, long before Alfred Nobel started giving away medals and bags of money:  On December 10, 1684, Edmund Halley read a paper to the Royal Society.  It was called De Motu Corporum in Gyrum, by a reclusive Cambridge mathematician named Isaac Newton.

Newton's paper explained Kepler's laws of planetary motion in terms of a theory of gravity, in which gravitational attraction drops off in an inverse-square relationship.  The inverse-square law was an idea which was kicking around at the time -- Robert Hooke had proposed something similar, and so had Christopher Wren.  But Newton showed how to prove it from Kepler's observed laws of planetary motion, and tied it to Galileo's ideas about falling bodies.

What's really amazing is that Newton originally worked that out in 1666, while living at home in Woolsthorpe to avoid the Plague.  Having satisfied his own curiosity about gravity and the motion of the planets, he proceeded to sit on his results for nearly twenty years until Halley began the process of mining Newton's brain.  With Halley's assiduous prodding, Newton expanded De Motu into his masterpiece the Principia Mathematica.  That made him Europe's scientific superstar, a role which he apparently grew to enjoy.

Isaac Newton was quite possibly the most intelligent human being who ever lived.  To do his physical calculations he invented calculus.  (His version wasn't as useful as Liebnitz's, because Newton invented it for his own use, and most people aren't Newtons.)  In an appendix to the Principia he invented a sub-field of hydrodynamics, solely to disprove Descartes's ideas about the planets being moved by a kind of swirling vortex driven by the Sun's rotation.  His very difficult personality and battery of neuroses may simply have been the result of growing up and living in a world populated by people vastly stupider than he was.  A human child raised by chimpanzees would be terribly maladjusted by chimp standards. 

A River Runs Through It

Dr. Gary Parkes of the University of Illinois has studied riverbeds on Titan (via photos from the Huygens probe) and discovered that rivers on Titan look a lot like rivers on Earth.

Duh, you say.  Rivers look like rivers.  For this we spent umpty billion dollars?

But these aren't your ordinary rivers.  They aren't water, for one thing -- they're streams of methane.  Rivers of liquid natural gas.  And the rocks they're flowing over and eroding aren't really rocks.  They're ice.  On Titan water is a mineral and methane is a liquid.  Yet the methane rivers tumble and round the ice stones just like silicon rocks in a water river on Earth. 

And assuming you packed some hip waders with your heated spacesuit, could you fish in those methane streams?  Nobody knows so far.  Titan's atmosphere isn't in a state of disequilibrium the way Earth's is (all that oxygen here is a dead giveaway that something's laboriously breaking up the carbon dioxide).  Sunlight at Saturn's distance and beneath Titan's heavy clouds wouldn't support much in the way of plants.  But there could be organisms making use of geothermal (titanothermal?) energy on the bottom of those methane seas or deep below that icy crust. 

A world of organic chemicals has great potential for life -- one can imagine life-analogs using long-chain hydrocarbons instead of DNA.  They'd be made of tar and wax and petrochemicals in a realm where -170° Celsius is a warm day.  To them, we'd be creatures of molten lava, breathing fire and moving with incredible speed, living on a world of boiling rocks and superheated steam. 

But a river, it turns out, looks like a river.

Under The Red Star

A team of French and Swiss scientists working in Chile have found an interesting extrasolar planet.  It's one of the smallest planets seen beyond the solar system, only about the size of Neptune or Uranus.  (Since astronomers locate extrasolar planets by their effects on the motion of their primary stars, it's easiest to find big ones.)

The second interesting thing about the new planet is that it orbits a red dwarf star, Gliese 581 in the constellation Libra.  That's interesting because red dwarfs are the most common type of star in the Galaxy.  If they often have planets, that means that there are a heck of a lot of planets out there.  That, in turn, increases the possibility that somewhere is another world with living things or even intelligent beings.

Of course, this inevitably raises the same question first posed by Enrico Fermi back in 1945:  Where are they?  The more we learn about the Universe, the more it seems that planets are fairly common, conditions for life may be fairly common -- but where are the signs of life?  Where are the traces of other civilizations?

Maybe we're the only intelligent life -- after all, it took more than a billion years for life on Earth to evolve intelligence.  If we are alone in the Universe, that's at once a humbling and exalting thought:  the Universe is vast and empty -- and we really are the most important things in it, after all.