Science Made Cool

Take Two Bottlenose and Call Me In the Morning

Swimming with dolphins can alleviate depression.  Seriously.  A group of researchers in Honduras got patients suffering from clinical depression and divided them into two groups.  One bunch went snorkeling on a nice tropical beach (which Honduras has a good supply of).  The other group did the same, but with dolphins. 
    Not surprisingly, both groups saw a reduction in the severity of their symptoms, but the dolphin group saw a significantly greater reduction.  In other words, dolphins make you happy, even more than snorkeling does.
    This result is similar to findings in past studies involving domestic animals like dogs and cats.  We're social animals, and even having a nonhuman animal around is better than being alone.  Moreover, we do tend to pick up mood cues from those around us -- if you're in a crowd of happy people, you get happier.  Apparently being around dolphins (famous for being relentlessly cheerful animals) does the same.
    This also suggests that sad people who live inland should invest in very large bathtubs and find some Web site offering next-day cetacean delivery.

King Tut

November 26 marks the 83rd "rebirthday" of the Pharaoh Tutankhamen.  On that day in 1922, archaeologist Howard Carter opened Tut's hidden tomb in the Valley of Kings near ancient Thebes.  Here's the original National Geographic story.
    Tutankhamen went from being an obscure and unimportant Egyptian ruler (he only reigned a couple of years at most) to being the most famous ancient Egyptian man, second only to that Macedonian interloper Cleopatra.  In one of history's great practical jokes, the unassuming Tut is far more well-known today than his megalomaniacal successor Ramesses II, despite the latter's titanic building projects and habit of inscribing his name on every available surface in the kingdom.
    Almost as famous as Tut himself is the famous Curse of King Tut.  After the death of Carter's backer Lord Carnarvon the year after the tomb was opened, newspapers seized on the idea of a deadly curse striking down those who invaded the tomb.  The idea became a staple of weird fiction and probably led indirectly to Boris Karloff's classic role as The Mummy.
    Except that the Curse is pure hokum.  By that I don't mean that it's just a bogus explanation for Carnarvon's death -- he was in poor health anyway and fatal infections were unfortunately not uncommon before antibiotics.  It's simply not true that most of the expedition members died after opening the tomb.  Carter himself spent another 17 years pestering dead Egyptians.  You'd think he would be the first to go. 
    Dr. Mark Nelson of Monash University in Australia published a landmark study of the Mummy's Curse in the British Medical Journal.  He compared the lifespan of the 25 Westerners associated with the Tut expedition to that of Westerners identified as being in Egypt at the time.  The Tut crew's average lifespan was 70 years as opposed to 75 for the control group.  Note that both groups lived past the overall average lifespan for that era. 
    The responses to Dr. Nelson's study are worth reading, both for the intelligent comments by other researchers and for some total frothing crackpot lunacy.

Serious Santa

If you want to know where Santa Claus is going on Christmas Eve, who do you ask?  You ask the professionals:  NORAD.  Each year they set up a Santa Tracking Page so that kids and parents everywhere can make use of America's high-tech defense radar systems to keep track of the man in the sleigh.  These guys have radar, they have satellites, they've got a nuclear bomb-proof command center -- and that's just the stuff they tell people about.  They're not fooling around.  Guy in a sleigh comes into North American airspace, they're gonna know.  And if some Grinch comes looking for trouble, they'll give it to him.

Make Mine Milky

I always said it was evil stuff, and now I've got science in my corner to back me up:  drinking decaffeinated coffee may be harmful to heart health.

The magnificently wrongly-acronymed Caffeine And Lipoprotein Metabolism study led by Dr. Robert Superko of the Fuqua Heart Center in Atlanta compared the effects of decaf and real coffee on 187 volunteers.  They each got three to six cups of black coffee per day, same brand brewed the same way. 

Then the researchers did a lot of bloodwork, checking various heart-disease indicators:  blood pressure, heart rate, body-mass index, cholesterol, triglycerides, HDL (coyly known as "good cholesterol"), insulin level, blood sugar, fatty acids, apolipoprotein B (a sign of "bad cholesterol"), and the annoyingly virtuous HDL2 ("really good cholesterol" -- I'm not making this up). 

Here's the money quote:

"Researchers found no significant changes among the three groups’ levels of blood insulin and glucose, or other major risk factors." 

The study went on to find a slight (but real!) positive correlation between decaffeinated coffee and the bad cholesterol.  Translated into bad science journalism-ese:  DECAF KILLS!

Tell that to the next irritating health fascist who tells you not to drink so much caffeine.  Why, coffee's so healthful that in Brazil they're giving it to children for free.

It's possible to make a case that modern civilization as we know it was built by coffee.  In the Middle Ages, people drank wine and beer, pretty much exclusively.  Much of the history of medieval Europe makes a lot more sense when you realize it was populated largely by drunk teenagers.

Then Europe discovered caffeine.  Boom!  The Scientific Revolution.  The Enlightenment.  The Industrial Revolution.  Heavily-caffeinated Europeans built global empires to ensure reliable supplies of tea, coffee, sugar, and chocolate.  Without coffee, we'd still be fatalistic drunken peasants.

Dinos On The Grass Alas

For a long time it was thought that dinosaurs didn't eat grass -- indeed, the development of flowering plants was once one of the explanations for what drove the dinosaurs into extinction.  But now it seems that at least some dinosaurs ate grass with gusto.  See the New Scientist article here.

Paleobotanist Caroline Stromberg of the Swedish Museum of Natural History has discovered traces of five different types of grass in some fossilized dinosaur droppings from India.  So it turns out dinosaurs could, and did, eat grass perfectly well.

This is another nail in the idea that the dinosaurs were somehow doomed to failure.  We still use the word to describe something which is obsolete and no longer effective.  The unconscious assumption is that the dinosaurs may have been big, but they lacked some key quality which allowed mammals (and thus Our Glorious Selves) to be fruitful and multiply.

But it's becoming more and more clear that the dinosaurs were a very successful, adaptable group of animals.  Had it not been for the Chixclub asteroid impact, they could have survived.  Which means that we don't have any particular magic immunity to extinction.  Our ancestral mammals just got lucky. 

As intelligent beings, we do have the advantage that we can try to foresee and plan for disasters.  But what, realistically, could we do if an asteroid impact were predicted in the next year?  Or if the Yellowstone supervolcano began to erupt?  In films a space program or volcano-neutralizer can be whipped up in time to save at least some of the attractive cast members, but in the real world such things take time.  We shouldn't count on getting lucky again.

CARD GAME ENTERS EVOLUTION DISPUTE

We're making good on our threat. Starting immediately, we're offering a 20% discount to anyone in Kansas who buys BONE WARS: The Game of Ruthless Paleontology from our online retail store. The offer is valid through December 31, 2005. We'll also give the discount to anyone shipping to Kansas, so feel free to send a copy to your cousin in Topeka.

Why give a discount to Kansas? Simple: the Kansas Board of Education has attempted to give equal space in the state public school biology curriculum to the doctrine of "Intelligent Design," claiming that it is a "scientific theory" of the origin and development of life. When real scientists complained that "Intelligent Design" fits none of the criteria for an actual scientific theory, the Board responded by redefining "science" so that it is no longer limited to the search for natural explanations for phenomena.

So we're doing our part for science. BONE WARS shows players how a scientific theory is developed and tested, and they can learn lots of fun dinosaur lore along the way. Best of all, one of the four "ruthless paleontologists" in the game, Charles Sternberg, was actually raised in Kansas and collected many important fossils in the state.

If you're one of the many Kansans that love science for what it really is, you have our sympathy. We wish we could do more to help. But we don't have the awe-inspiring power of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Primeval Primate

Jack Rink, a scientist at Ontario's McMaster University, has determined that a giant extinct primate was a contemporary of early humans.  See the press release here.

Gigantopithecus blackii was the biggest primate that ever lived (that we know of, of course).  It weighed up to 1,200 lbs. and lived in southeast Asia.  Gigantopithecus was first identified in the 1930s when a Dutch scientist found huge ape-like teeth in a Chinese market and realized they were from an extinct primate.  Dr. Rink used electron spin resonance to date the Gigantopithecus teeth to about 100,000 years ago, which is of course well after the emergence of modern humans.

This of course raises the interesting question of whether Gigantopithecus was killed off by early humans, either directly as a prey animal or indirectly via competition for the same habitat.  Exactly how humans armed with nothing but stone tools could tackle apes weighing half a ton is hard to imagine, though Robert E. Howard could probably describe it.

Of course, humans co-existing with giant apes has been documented as far back as 1933.

Paging Steve Irwin

In the late Jurassic there was a scary type crocodile lurking in coastal waters.  A really scary crocodile:  13 feet long, with a massive head like a tyrannosaur and four-inch serrated teeth like steak knives.  Something like that wouldn't eat fish and small animals like a modern crocodile; Dakosaurus andiniensis probably dined on big prey -- possibly other marine reptiles or unfortunate dinosaurs wading in the shallows.  Interestingly, D. andiniensis couldn't come up on land, as it had fins instead of legs.  It may have been able to flop up on the beach like a seal to lay eggs.

The scary crocodile fossil was discovered by paleontologists Zulma Gasparini and Luis Spalletti, of the University of La Plata in Argentina.  They found the bones on a dig in Patagonia.  Diego Pol, of Ohio State University, identified the creature as a scary crocodile.  Read the university press release here. 

Starship

This is more technology than science but we have to mention the fact that the US Patent Office just granted someone a patent on an anti-grav spaceship.

A cooled hollow superconductive shield is energized by an electromagnetic field resulting in the quantized vortices of lattice ions projecting a gravitomagnetic field that forms a spacetime curvature anomaly outside the space vehicle. The spacetime curvature imbalance, the spacetime curvature being the same as gravity, provides for the space vehicle’s propulsion. The space vehicle, surrounded by the spacetime anomaly, may move at a speed approaching the light-speed characteristic for the modified locale.

Watch this space for the announcement on venture funding! And see additional comment by Science Made Cool blogger Jim Cambias after the jump. (via Gizmodo)

News From the New Millennium

Here's a sentence you wouldn't have seen in news stories back in the Twentieth Century:  "A cruise ship fended off pirates with sonic blasters."  But it actually happened off the coast of Somalia.  See the news story here. 

The sonic  blaster is more properly known as a Long Range Acoustic Device, and was developed by the U.S. Navy as a nonlethal means of defending its ships against terrorist attacks.  Nonlethal weapons have been an important area of Pentagon research programs for more than a decade, ever since it became obvious that terrorists and other "asymmetrical warfare" opponents are perfectly willing to use innocent civilians as human cover.  Nonlethal weapons deprive them of one of their most effective weapons:  ugly images on the news. 

Still, it certainly would be the high point of any cruise ship captain's career to be able to give the order, "Pirates off the starboard side!  Run out the sonic blasters!"