Science Made Cool

Joining the Darwin Swarm

In just a couple of weeks we'll be celebrating Charles Darwin's 200th birthday by – what else? – blogging. We've joined the Darwin Blog Swarm: between February 12th-15th, 2009 we'll write posts focusing on some aspect of Darwin's life -- and so will a growing list of science bloggers.

Want to be part of the event? There's still time to sign on at Blog for Darwin: they're even providing a handy page of topics to riff on if you find yourself with Darwin writer's block.

Super Bridges

Here's an interesting piece from Wired about bridges designed to be disaster-proof. What's interesting is that the bridges are not, in fact, disaster-proof. Instead, they're designed to mitigate or avert disasters.

The replacement I-35 bridge for Minneapolis, for instance, is apparently going to have lots of active systems to guard against icing and cold damage. It's not so much that the bridge will be immune to cold -- it's that it will have sensors to tell people when the bridge is encountering dangerous conditions. It could still be destroyed by the passage of time and the brutal temperature extremes of Minnesota -- but people will know about problems before they become disasters.

The same is true for the new Stonecutter Bridge linking Hong Kong with the mainland: it's full of sensors. So in addition to resisting typhoon winds, the bridge will tell when it is about to fail.

By contrast the replacement East Bay Bridge in San Francisco sounds as if it isn't so much earthquake-proof as earthquake-friendly. The supports are designed to crumple and absorb the shock of a quake. Now if a bridge is "crumpling," that's pretty much a failure. Nobody's going to be using it until it has been "uncrumpled." But a bridge which collapses (okay, "crumples") in a controlled, survivable way is better than one which just dumps you right in the bay when a quake hits.

This is reminiscent of the changes in auto design over the past thirty-odd years. When I was a kid, cars had strong metal frames and steel bumpers -- so when you got in a crash, the car might survive but the driver would be hurled through the windshield or impaled on the steering column by the force of the impact. Designers got wise and began designing cars to collapse ("crumple") on impact. So now after a collision your car is more likely to be a total mess, but you won't.

So our lesson for the day:  learn to fail gracefully.

I, For One . . .

Japanese (where else?) researchers are developing tentacled "living robots" to study how primitive life forms move, hunt, and evade danger. I hope the Japanese Self-Defense Force has Ultraman or Godzilla on speed-dial, because this just sounds like a B-movie waiting to happen. Did I mention they have tentacles?

Discarded Science

Discarded Science, by John Grant (Surrey, UK:  Facts, Figures & Fun, 2006) is an engaging but ultimately unsatisfying little book about the dead ends and false trails of scientific inquiry. Grant ranges widely over the history of science, covering topics like Ptolemaic cosmology, luminiferous aether, Velikovsky, Atlantis, Lamarckian evolution, Creationism, Ufology, Homeopathic, and scores of others. It is well-written and admirably complete. Unfortunately, Grant's desire for breadth and completeness has led him into a couple of dead ends or false trails himself.
   
First of all, his definition of "discarded science" wanders far astray. Things like Ptolemy's epicycles, the luminiferous aether, phlogiston, and Lamarck's theory of evolution by inheritance of acquired characteristics are all legitimately discarded -- they were once part of the mainstream of scientific thought, but were abandoned when contradictory data or better theories came along.

But the bulk of the book's length is not about interesting dead ends and how they came to be abandoned. Instead Grant spends a lot of time discussing theories which were pseudoscience from the start and never gained an iota of respectability -- the colliding planets of Velikovsky, Erich von Daniken's ancient astronauts, UFO cults like the "Aetherius Society," Chromotherapy, and similar nonsense.

Now good crackpottery is always entertaining, and Grant's book would be a lot less fun to read without these interludes, but they do rather wander from his topic. They also wander rather heavily over the pages of Martin Gardner's landmark study of crank science, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. And since Grant never goes into much detail about the crackpot theories he covers, I found myself thinking again and again "Martin Gardner did it better."

Grant's second wrong turning is that he throws in opposition to science and ideological suppression along with discarded science and quackery. For instance, he spends several pages quoting religious leaders opposed to abortion and contraception, including Jerry Falwell, Pope John Paul II, and the Ayatollah Khomeini. Fine -- but none of those gentleman base their arguments on science. They say that abortion (or contraception, or even complete nudity) is wrong on moral or scriptural grounds. So what are they doing here at all? "Because John Grant doesn't agree with them," is apparently the answer.

This desire to throw in everything including the kitchen sink means that Grant's book is maddeningly superficial. Nothing gets more than a couple of pages, and many topics are covered in just a paragraph or two. In the end, that is the book's greatest flaw: it dilutes its subject matter like a dose of homeopathic medicine. One learns little about the process or history of scientific thought, just a collection of factoids. It's entertaining but nothing more. A deeper and more narrowly-focused approach would have been much more rewarding to the reader.

Mind-Blowing Miscellany

All of these are quite interesting, but I'm damned if I can figure out how to work them into a single discussion. So it's Intellectual Salad Bar time at Science Made Cool!

First, here's an interesting press release from Texas A&M University. It describes how a group of researchers in the chemical engineering department used color-marked yeast cells to actually observe evolution going on in realtime. I hope someone develops this into a classroom aid -- being able to watch how evolution works would clear up a lot of misunderstandings and ignorance on the topic.

Second, I ran across this New Scientist interview with James Lovelock. Lovelock, of course, is the originator of the much-misunderstood "Gaia" hypothesis concerning planetary self-regulation. (Perhaps that's why New Scientist assigned a writer named "Gaia" to interview him.) In the piece he has some harsh words about current efforts to control carbon emissions. It's interesting to note that he's at least open to the usefulness of nuclear power, and he suggests burying large amounts of carbon waste to remove it from the atmosphere. (Isn't that what we did before recycling?)

Finally, a paper by Nick Bostrom which almost defies classification. His ostensible topic is how to make philosophy more useful -- which sounds like a little faculty-lounge power play to me -- but along the way touches on topics like the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, transhumanism, artificial intelligence, and the potential end states of civilization.

Mysterious Martian Methane

The astrobiology community is all abuzz about some recent findings indicating outbursts of methane gas on the planet Mars. The source of this methane is currently unknown, and one theory suggests it may be biological in origin. The mighty Carl Zimmer gives a more detailed account, including liveblogging the NASA press conference.

Methane is a simple gas, a carbon atom bonded to four hydrogens. It's present in interstellar nebulae and the atmospheres of the outer gas giants. But Mars is too small to have held onto its primordial methane. Methane is often released in volcanic eruptions on Earth -- but apparently the Mars gas emissions don't have any of the other gases you'd expect to find in a volcanic event. No water vapor, no nitrogen oxides, no ammonia, no cyanide. Just methane.

The other source of methane, of course, is biological activity. Earth's natural gas wells are all methane (and other hydrocarbons) produced by ancient life and trapped in the rocks.  So this Martian methane may indicate either current or ancient life on the Red Planet.

Apparently this discovery has prompted some hurried changes in plan for upcoming Mars probes. Discovering the origin the Martian methane now enjoys a high priority. Of course, the logistics of doing what would amount to deep gas drilling on another world sound pretty daunting. Still, it's an important new finding and we'll be paying close attention to any new developments.

New Frontiers in Robotics

From Japan (where else?) comes this new robot designed to do push-ups and then, um, fall apart. It's a contender for the Japanese (where else?) Baka RoboCup -- the Stupid Robot competition. I do think there's something fundamentally right-thinking about a society which warns children about the dangers of physical fitness. 

Thanks to the nipponomaniacal Pink Tentacle blog.

Elegant Evolution

From Nature, via Wired magazine, in honor of the upcoming Charles Darwin bicentennial, here's a list of a dozen "elegant examples of evolution." Biologists love to show off things like this as a way to demonstrate how well the concept of evolution by natural selection helps us understand the world. Unfortunately, I've always wondered if this doesn't support the Creationist view by giving them more "how could blind chance do that?" ammunition. To demonstrate evolution I would think it might be more useful to compile lists of really kludgy, inelegant, badly-designed systems in nature. (I searched for such a list while writing this entry and couldn't find any.)

Awesomest Picture Ever

Saturn, backlit by the Sun, taken by the Cassini probe. Who knew that rockets and computers can produce such beauty?

(From Astronomy Picture of the Day)

Most Disappointing Headline of 2009

This one, from Discovery Channel News:  Great Lakes Facing Wide Alien Species Invasion. Turns out they mean things like zebra mussels and blueback herring, not Martians or Triffids. Darn.

To be sure, invasive species are a big problem -- though interestingly one hears of it more in North America and Australia than in other continents. My suspicion is that since the human societies in North America and Australia are wealthy and trade a lot, there's more opportunity for species invasion. But is there also something Darwinian going on here? Are the organisms of the Europe-Asia-Africa island more competitive? Or is it simply that millennia of human activity and species transplanting in those lands have already eliminated the native species vulnerable to invasives?

There's also an oddly aesthetic component to this issue:  we worry over zebra mussels and lampreys in the Great Lakes because they clog pipes and kill fish we like. But we're also taking great pains to preserve the "invasive" species of honeybees in North America. Not that I'm complaining -- but we shouldn't fool ourselves that we're preserving the "natural" environment so much as we are weeding a garden.