Science Made Cool

Animal Anatomy on Display

The newest entry in Dr. Gunther von Hagens' series of exhibitions displaying painstakingly dissected and plastinated bodies set in lifelike poses just opened at the Neunkirchen Zoo. If the site is something of a departure from the usual run of science centers and museums, so is the exhibit: while the other Body Worlds exhibits focus on the human form, this one only contains non-human animals, including a giraffe, ostrich, giant squid, and a pair of elephants. All proceeds from this exhibition will help the zoo build a new set of predator enclosures. 

Thanks to John Hutchinson for the pointer! 

Watching Sperm Compete

 It’s a classic part of TV nature shows: male bighorn sheep (or elk, or whales, or whatever) duke it out over a female who’s ready to mate. I expect you’ve seen it. But competition among males doesn’t necessarily stop when victorious male copulates with receptive female. In species where a female chooses more than one mate, the males – more specifically, their sperm -- start another scrum inside her reproductive tract.  Left in the same vagina, sperm from multiple males compete for access to one female’s eggs. Only a single sperm can fertilize each egg, making this a statistical game: the more sperm a male leaves behind, the more chances he gets to become a father.

Sperm competition has left its mark on males of all shapes and sizes. Chimpanzees have big testicles that can pump out lots of sperm. Black winged damselflies have bristled penises that can scrub traces of an earlier mate out of a female. Male honeybees have seminal fluid that somehow kills off sperm from rival males.  But scientists haven’t been able to watch how competing sperm actually behave when they're inside a female. It’s not just that it’s tricky to see in there – it’s that all the sperm look alike. 

Competing With Our Cars

There's an interesting study out from the University of Illinois about how a bad harvest in the Corn Belt could affect food prices (because just about everything we eat in this country involves corn somewhere). PhysOrg has the story here.

Apparently part of the problem is that Federal mandates requiring the use of ethanol (made from corn) currently don't allow cutbacks in case of a corn shortage. Which means in a bad harvest year we humans would find ourselves competing with our cars for the same grain supply. And as I've noted earlier, humans, considered as machines, are terribly, terribly inefficient. In brute economic terms it makes far more sense to devote corn production to supplying fuel to efficient machines rather than inefficient bodies.

. . . which is why mandating the use of food crops for fuel is a dumb and dangerous idea. Let's power our machines with stuff we can't eat ourselves, so we're not competing with our cars at dinnertime. And someday, when we learn to tap the mighty power of the atom, this will no longer be an issue. 

Math, Patterns, and the Natural World

Cristobal Vila has released a beautiful little movie about mathematical relationships, using biological examples to illustrate the Fibonacci sequence, the Golden Ratio and Voronoi Tesselations. (OK, his animator's commentary makes it clear that the nautilus doesn't actually grow in a Fibonacci sequence. It's still very pretty, and it got my 7 year old asking about patterns in nature.) 

Quick Link: The TIMES on Museums

Edward Rothstein has a very interesting article in the New York Times about something that's been bugging me for a while: science museums neglecting science in favor of advocacy and crowd-pleasing.

More Astro News

This was released a couple of days ago but I just ran across it. The European Corot satellite observatory has discovered an extrasolar planet which seems to have a temperature in the liquid-water range.

This is rare because of the way astronomers look for exoplanets: they search for visible fluctuations in the star's output -- which are usually caused by massive objects passing in front of the star's disk, blocking some of the light. It's easiest to detect when the object is really close to the target star. Not only does that mean it's blocking more light, it also means the planet's orbital period is nice and short, so it can turn up in a relatively small sample of observations. For example, if you're on a planet of another star and you're watching our Sun to see if it has planets, you're much more likely to spot Mercury crossing the face of the Sun than Earth, because Mercury makes seven orbits around the Sun for each one that Earth does. (It's also possible to look for Doppler shift fluctuations caused by the motion of a massive body around the star, but that also favors large, close-in, fast-moving planets.)

But the Corot team have been watching long enough to spot a giant planet orbiting at the right distance from its parent star to have temperatures in the liquid water range. Now despite the headlines on the pop-science articles, it's more than unlikely for a gas giant -- no matter what its temperatures -- to have life. That's not really the important thing about this find. What is important is that it's the first large exoplanet which doesn't have insanely high temperatures, and that means scientists can compare it to the giants of our own Solar system, and thus learn more about how planets form and develop.

Astronomy is one of those sciences which don't allow experiments. You're limited to one set of data, which happens to be the observable universe. Any new data point, especially about planets, is valuable.

The Seas of Titan

There's an interesting article at PhysOrg about the possibility of life on Saturn's moon Titan. Since the 1940s humans have known that Titan has an atmosphere rich in complex carbon compounds, and that fueled (heh) speculation about living beings there. Kurt Vonnegut put a civilization there in The Sirens of Titan, and Robert Heinlein made it the home of The Puppet Masters.

Another Lost Tribe Heard From

According to BBC News, a tribe in Zimbabwe and South Africa called the Lemba may well be descended from Jews who left the Middle East about 2,500 years ago -- about the time the Kingdom of Israel got turned into the battleground for nearby empires to fight each other in. Not only do the Lemba preserve several key Jewish customs, their DNA shows kinship with Semitic peoples.

The "Lost Tribes of Israel" have been a kind of anthropological Holy Grail for centuries now. In about 700 B.C. the Assyrians conquered the Kingdom of Israel, and in their charming Assyrian way dispersed the population throughout their vast empire. The nine or ten Jewish tribes of that kingdom dropped out of history. The remaining Israelites in the Kingdom of Judah managed to preserve their identity better, even though they got the conquest and dispersal treatment from the neo-Babylonians about a century later. It helped that the Persians soon beat up the Babylonians and allowed their Jewish subjects to return to their homeland and rebuild the Temple.

This Looks Like a Job . . .

. . . for ROBO-FRIGATE!

Apparently drug smugglers in Colombia have begun building small diesel submarines (or quasi-submarines) to run cargoes of cocaine into the U.S. and Mexico. Tracking them is hard, especially now that the drug lords have hired "foreign experts" (Russians, apparently) to help make them harder to spot with infrared scopes.

Subs capable of delivering five to ten tons of cocaine covertly could just as easily deliver other cargoes less attractive to hard-partying post-Yuppies, and it's scarcely "paranoid" to desire secure borders on land and sea. But patrolling shallow coastal waters with expensive antisubmarine warfare vessels isn't cost-effective.

Or is it? Remember our post from last month about robot antisubmarine ships? It seems those would be absolutely perfect candidates to intercept and track suspicious minisubs. They can't be bribed, they can follow the target almost indefinitely, and the addition of a missile rack or minigun would end the Colombian sub fleet very quickly. Given that some of the drug subs are said to be remote-controlled, one can imagine entire unmanned battles at sea. Fiberglass ships and virtual men!

Not Dead Yet

Luke Pearce went to the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales to look for an endangered fish. He found a little lagniappe -- a population of the Yellow-spotted Bell Frog, an amphibian  that no one had seen live in the wild since the 1970s. In this footage, they take field measurements of the adult frogs.