Science Made Cool

A Looke at a Booke About Hooke

I've been a fan of Robert Hooke for many years.  I wrote my B.A. paper about him in college.  One of the most frustrating aspects of that project was the lack of a good modern biography of the man (although it did make me rely on primary sources like Hooke's diaries, which is always a Good Thing).  So when I heard about Lisa Jardine's biography The Curious Life of Robert Hooke, I had high hopes.  Ms. Jardine is an expert on the early history of Britain's Royal Society and the dawn of the Scientific Revolution.  Perhaps my hopes were a little too high, for I came away from Jardine's book feeling unsatisfied.

She does an excellent job investigating Hooke's life, especially his early years on the Isle of Wight and his important work reconstructing London after the Great Fire of 1666.  We tend to think of Hooke as a scientist only, but he was also a surveyor and architect, and Jardine makes the important point that he may not be as well-remembered as his contemporaries Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, or Christopher Wren precisely because he was involved in so many fields of endeavor that he never found the time to really excel in one of them.

Her research is thorough -- she has even dug up what may be a portrait of Hooke, a real find since it was believed all existing pictures of the man were discarded by the Royal Society after his death as an act of petty revenge by Isaac Newton.  Certainly the portrait matches the description of Hooke given by contemporaries.

The two great flaws of the book are that it neglects the details of Hooke's scientific work, and suffers from a bit too much hero-worship.

Perhaps leaving out detailed descriptions of Hooke's scientific work was a conscious decision.  This is, after all, a book intended for the mass market rather than historians of science, and it would be all too easy to bore readers with endless accounts of quaint Restoration-era research.  But Hooke was one of the first professional scientists in modern history, and a bit more detail about certain experiments would give readers a useful glimpse at how science was done. 

In particular, I was amazed at her lack of attention to Hooke's Micrographia.  It was more than a revolutionary scientific book, it was a best-seller -- possibly the first "coffee-table book."  It sparked a fad for microscopes among the educated class in Britain which lasted a century or more.  (Check out King George III's microscope.)

In the hero-worship department, Jardine is sometimes too quick to excuse Hooke for his outbursts of paranoia and credit-hogging.  As a result, she winds up downplaying his long feud with Newton, partly because it reflected so badly on Hooke.  Quite simply, his claim to have anticipated Newton's work on gravity was just plain wrong.  When Newton said that making a guess isn't the same as rigorously proving it, he was correct.
   
On the other hand, the strongly favorable tone of the biography does go a long way toward correcting some long-standing errors.  Other writers frequently cite Newton's description of Hooke as a man of "strange unsociable temper"; Jardine points out that it was Newton who spent twenty years holed up at Cambridge doing alchemy while Hooke was at the center of London's intellectual and commercial life.

Jardine also indulges from time to time in unwarranted speculations based on thin evidence.  She theorizes that Robert's niece (and occasional mistress) Grace Hooke may have been the unidentified mother of an illegitimate child fathered by a landowner on the Isle of Wight, and cites Robert's diary as proof because he mentions Grace being ill with measles at about the time the child was born.  Jardine speculates that "measles" was the public excuse.  But why would Robert have written the cover story in his personal diary?  It's hard to believe that a man who candidly recorded every time he slept with her would be so delicate about recording her pregnancy.

Despite the shortcomings I've detailed, this is a very readable and interesting book, and paints a picture of a man who has been very unjustly neglected in the history of science. 

More Calamari Calamities

Back on October 10, I posted a little squib about the discovery of giant squid in the oceans.  Well, now it's octopuses that are acting like something out a Harryhausen film.  This link connects to a news story about an octopus attacking a remotely-piloted sub.  The RPV escaped safely without damage to either it or the octopus, but it looks as if someone has been watching 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and getting ideas.

Something to Make You Feel Fine

If you've ever been so fed up with things that you just wish the world would end, here's some bad news.  It's really hard to destroy the world.  How hard?  Sam Hughes has done the math, and it doesn't look good.  Turns out the Earth is a pretty tough proposition.  The energy to get rid of a ball of iron 13,000 kilometers wide is immense.  Even smacking it in the early days with a body the size of Mars didn't do anything but blow off a chunk which formed the Moon.

So next time you're feeling cranky, try chocolate instead.

The Main Squeeze

When a screenwriter wants to put the hero in danger, what could be better than to throw some venomous snakes in his path? So movie cowboys wake up to find a rattlesnake staring them in the eye, and Indiana Jones faces down a pit full of asps. But venomous snakes are a small minority of all snake species. Most snakes kill their prey by constriction. And some new research has pointed out just how deadly that can be.

When a constrictor strikes, it quickly wraps its body around its hapless victim and squeezes it to death. The prey, whether it’s a rat caught in a black snake’s coils or a deer grabbed by an anaconda, is pinned inside a mass of solid muscle. As the prey struggles, the snake squeezes harder. Death usually comes within seconds.

This was the confusing bit. It was long assumed that constricting snakes killed by suffocation – having your ribcage squeezed certainly makes it hard to breathe – but death by suffocation usually takes several minutes, and these snakes could kill much faster than that. A few scientists had suggested that the snakes might squeeze hard enough to interfere with the prey’s circulatory system, but no one had been able to measure how hard a snake could squeeze.

Brad Moon changed that. Several years ago he developed a technique that let him measure a snake’s constriction strength – he implanted pressure transducers in mice, then let gopher snakes capture and eat them. He found that the snakes could squeeze at pressures as large as 232 mm Hg, well above the top pressure produced by mouse hearts (around 125 m Hg). When a snake wraps itself around a mouse, it effectively squeezes its heart shut.

Gopher snakes are about three feet long. What kinds of force can a really big snake produce? Moon recently had the chance to find out. Working with National Geographic, he measured constriction in an 18-foot long anaconda. The pressures this snake could exert could cause cerebral aneurysms, or snap the backbone of a large animal like a capybara or a deer. Moon thinks that these large snakes aren’t deliberately breaking the backs of their prey – it’s just a fortuitous side effect of their size and the mass of muscle they use in the squeeze. The cerebral aneurysms are probably what they’re really after.

Important safety tip. Stay far away from large snakes.

Moon presented these data at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology earlier this month. I tried to blog about it direct from the conference, but the hotel had a lousy internet setup. Sigh. Maybe next year.

HELD OVER

So many people have emailed us about the discount that we've decided to extend it. Kansans (and their friends shipping there) can now get a discount on Bone Wars until January 31, 2006.

Go for Pluto!

The final hours before launch are ticking away for the New Horizons probe.  Currently on the pad at Kennedy Space Center, New Horizons is due to lift off on Tuesday bound for Pluto.  It's a long trip, even with a helpful shove from Jupiter a year from now.  New Horizons won't even reach Pluto until 2015, even though it's going to be cruising along at better than 10 miles per second, making it one of the fastest objects ever made by humans.

The official Web site for the mission includes a countdown clock until launch.  Presumably once New Horizons is off the ground it will switch over to counting down the next 80,000  or so hours until the probe gets where it's going.

Update (Jan. 19):  It's off!  New Horizons launched at 2:00 p.m. today after two days of delays due to wind and other glitches.  Watching the launch live at the project Web site did reveal some key flaws in using Webcams to view brief events like rocket launches:  one great shot of the engines started, followed thirty seconds later by a picture of a big cloud of smoke.

Falling Stardust

If you live in the western United States, tonight NASA may provide you with quite a show.  The Stardust space probe is coming down.

Stardust was sent to collect dust from Comet Wild back in 1999, and as I write this is plummeting past the Moon toward a landing site in Utah.  NASA has helicopters standing by, and if all goes well, they plan to pick up the sample return capsule and hurry it to a clean room in order to get a look at virgin space dust.

NASA has a nifty Stardust Web site, complete with an impact countdown.  The Bad Astronomy Web log also has a good account of how the probe works and what it may bring back.

Talking of "bringing things back" from space means the inevitable reference to Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain.  It's probably Crichton's best book -- it certainly made his career -- and it was also a cracking good movie.  In it, a germ brought back from space aboard a probe just like the Stardust mission nearly wipes out humanity with a deadly plague.  The fear of interplanetary contamination Crichton's scenario provoked eventually led to a quarantine program for the Apollo 11 astronauts. 

Of course, since the discovery of Martian meteorites it's becoming increasingly obvious that if there are space germs, they won't cause a plague because we get bombarded by stuff from space all the time.  We've been there, done that, and our immune systems are evidently prepped to handle interplanetary invaders. 

Too bad about the Martians.

UPDATE: It's down, intact, and in the clean room. Three cheers for gravity!

Godzilla's House: Big and Green

There's an interesting column by Daniel Akst in today's Wall Street Journal about "environmentally friendly" houses which are anything but.  Put simply, Akst argues that it's not very friendly to the environment to build a 4,000-square-foot vacation home a day's drive into virgin forest, no matter how much passive solar heating it uses.  Read the full article here.

Happy Birthday, HAL!

January 12 is the birthday of the most famous artificial intelligence ever to travel in space:  HAL 9000.  HAL was activated at the plant in Urbana, Illinois on January 12, 1997.  Sadly, in 2001 HAL suffered a catastrophic malfunction during the ill-fated Discovery mission to Jupiter and had to be forcibly shut down.

The name HAL is an acronym, for Heuristically-programmed ALgorithmic computer.  As the name suggests, HAL was capable of developing new algorithms (i.e. programs) to cope with unexpected situations.  Unfortunately, conflicting mission goals for the Discovery project led to HAL's failure and the death of several crew members.

Perhaps we'll learn more about the exact nature of the malfunction when the joint US-Russian Leonov mission reaches Jupiter in 2010.

DOG Scan

This week's bizarre but encouraging biomedical news:  dogs can detect cancer.  It sounds like some kind of bogus feel-good Reader's Digest story, doesn't it?  "Muffin:  The Dog Who Smelled Cancer."  But it's real.  You can download the paper here.

A group of researchers in California apparently were inspired by anecdotal evidence of the Muffin variety to investigate the subject scientifically.  They tried dogs on several patients with lung or breast cancer.  The results were definitely significant:  the dogs were able to sniff out cancer 80 to 90 percent of the time. 

Before the paranormal crowd start making profound-seeming remarks along the lines of "there's still so much we can learn from animals" it's worth noting that the researchers have a very non-paranormal mechanism for this cancer sensitivity:  smell.  Dogs are notoriously good at smelling, so it's actually not all that strange for them to be able to detect chemicals given off by cancerous cells which are different from those emitted by healthy ones. 

It seems likely that researchers will be able to compare assays and figure out which molecules are the cancer indicators, so that diagnosis can be carried out by exciting machines which go ping, rather than dogs in the examining room. 

But until then, let your dog smell your breath from time to time.  Can't be too careful.