Science Made Cool

Friday Parasite #34: A Parasite Book By Dr. Zuk

As the Zygote Games Science Guru, it was my job to pore through piles of scientific papers and technical books looking for juicy details to incorporate into Parasites Unleashed. And most of the books and papers I read through were, to put it mildly, dry. So it was fun to pick up Marlene Zuk’s lively new book, Riddled With Life: Friendly Worms, Ladybug Sex, and the Parasites That Make Us Who We Are (Harcourt, 2007).

Moon Mirages

Ever since the invention of the telescope, people have been seeing weird things on the Moon.  Paranormal packrat Charles Fort compiled lunar anomalies going back as far as the 18th Century.

More recently, weird stuff on the Moon has been dignified with a Three Letter Acronym:  TLP, or Transient Lunar Phenomena.  They exist in a kind of scientific "neutral zone," and attract attention from both serious astronomers and, well, crackpots. 

Now one of the former group has come up with an interesting correlation between observed Lunar transients and episodes of radon gas emission on the Moon.   This suggests that when people see strange spots and shadows on the Moon, plumes of erupting gas may be the culprit. 

It's worth remembering how little we still know about the Moon.  Sure, a dozen people have walked around on its surface and a dozen automated probes have landed on it or observed it from orbit.  But the Moon is a world with as much land area as Africa.  Humans have lived in Africa as long as there have been humans, and the continent still manages to surprise us.  So it's no surprise that the Moon still holds plenty of mysteries.

Maybe someone should go back there and look around some more.  Wouldn't hurt.

Another Satisfied Customer

Brian Switek got his very own copy of Bone Wars: The Game of Ruthless Paleontology. Last month, he blogged about how much he was enjoying it. We're glad you like it, Brian!

Tuesday Parasite

Parasite mania continues to sweep the nation!  Now the New York Times is getting into the act.

Keep Refrigerated

Hibernation is a common feature in the animal kingdom.  Creatures can go dormant for months at a time, letting their body temperature drop and conserving energy when food is scarce.  Humans, having evolved in equatorial Africa, don't hibernate.

Which is a pity, because sometimes it would be really convenient to just go dormant for a long period.  The most obvious application is in long space voyages -- instead of having to bother with elaborate regenerative life support systems, just chill your crew down to near freezing and let the computer do the driving.

Not surprisingly, science fiction writers thought of this a long time ago.   (In the classic roleplaying game Traveller, voyaging in hibernation was the ultimate steerage class on merchant starships -- especially since there was always the chance of never waking up again!)  But then, science fiction writers also thought of anti-gravity, teleportation, time travel, and giant insects, none of which have come to pass. 

But now human hibernation seems to be moving rather quickly from fiction to fact.  There are apparently multiple teams doing tests on various techniques, and a group at Massachusetts General Hospital is even getting ready to do some human trials.  (One suspects that team has an edge because Boston has a high proportion of perpetual grad students willing to support themselves as medical experiment volunteers.)

If this pans out it could give a tremendous boost to plans for manned expeditions to Mars and the outer Solar System.  If humans can be kept in hibernation for arbitrarily long periods, this might even make interstellar travel feasible in the next couple of centuries.   The Army is also interested, as hibernation might help keep injured soldiers alive during transport to medical facilities.

One can also imagine a huge potential market for home hibernation kits among parents of energetic small children...

Friday Parasite #33: A Galling Parasite

Over the past few months, we’ve looked at a lot of animals that parasitize other animals. But there are also animals that engage in a little cross-kingdom parasitism, making their living inside of plant stems and leaves instead of animal muscle or intestine.

Some species of sawfly are plant parasites, at least during the larval stage of their life cycle. Despite their name, they’re closely related to wasps. Females have a saw-like ovipositor that they use to cut into plant tissue when they lay their eggs. The parasitic species also deposit something extra with their eggs: enzymes that make the plant form a gall around the developing larvae.

Gold of the Nile Kings

A team of crack University of Chicago archaeologists have discovered an ancient gold-processing facility on the Nile north of Khartoum.  Four thousand years ago, subjects of the kings of Kush used grindstones to powder gold-bearing ore, which was then panned to separate the gold flakes from the rock dust.

What is it about gold?  As a metal it's almost useless (before the discovery of electricity, anyway), but for all of history people have gone to incomprehensible lengths to get it.  Even nowadays one still finds crackpots who think that currency should go back to the gold standard, as if gold is somehow magically "real money."

The gold refinery site is one of thousands of archaeological sites being excavated right now in a great hurry because of rising water from the Meroe Dam project.  The dam is causing massive disruption of the environment in the region, displacing thousands of people, and flooding sites of historical importance.  But the Sudanese government hopes it will make their country richer.  Doubtless the kings of Kush thought the same about making people grind rocks for gold.

So Simple, and Yet So Addictive

I’ve been fooling with a nifty new toy all weekend -- the Flip-‘n-Stack Acrobatz from Zing Toys. It’s really incredibly simple: a $14.95 kit gets you a metal square with a target printed on it, a small plastic launcher, and four chunky magnetic acrobat figures in blue and red. You put the magnetic figures on the launcher and flip them onto the target. It’s amazingly addictive. The blue and red figures stick together: one has north magnetic poles exposed on the ends of its little hands and feet; the other has south poles exposed. You can flip the figures onto one another and make them stick in stacks. There’s a simple scoring system so you can play competiively with another person, but everyone in my family seems to be just as happy to keep trying to build little towers of men. We may have to break down and buy a booster pack to get some extra magnetic figures soon. Our towers are starting to look a little puny.

Friday Parasite #32: Really Old Parasite Infections

Here’s an SEM image from a paper by Denis Bates and David Loydell showing some surface growths on graptolites that were left behind by their parasites some 450 million years ago.

For those of you who don’t already know, graptolites were common planktonic animals in Earth’s oceans from the Cambrian period to the middle of the Carboniferous. They were tiny, wormlike, and formed colonies held together by a skeleton of collagen fibers. The skeleton is what’s usually preserved as a fossil -- in this case, the tubular blisters caused by a parasite infection got preserved too.

Bates, D. E. B. and D. K. Loydell 2000. Parasitism on graptoloid graptolites. Palaeontology 43(6): 1143-1151.

Catapult Construction: Phase 1

For some months now we’ve had Backyard Ballistics sitting on our reading list for everyone to see. But what have we been doing with it? Well, this week we finished a catapult. 

                        

The book had instructions for pounding a large washer into a throwing cup . That didn’t work out terribly well, so we improvised. Our cup is made out of half of a doorknob cover. Normally, the cover is supposed to make opening doors too complicated for little kids, but this particular device didn’t stand up to one determined and frustrated preschooler. But drill a hole through the surviving half, and it has a new lease on life. I admit, it’s a little sloppy (it was put together by 11-12 year old Girl Scouts), but it still throws nuts about 5 feet. And they found that delightful.

But this is only the model. The next stage of the project is to scale the catapult up to a 4-foot high version. We’ll keep you posted.