Science Made Cool

Friday Parasite: Under My Skin

This is a mite you don’t want to meet. Unlike dust mites, which merely live off the crud of your household and may never set foot on your skin, Sarcoptes scabiei prefers to get much closer to its food source. It also eats skin, but it doesn’t wait for you to shed it. Instead, the mites burrow into the outer layer of epidermis, making tunnels where they can live and lay their eggs. Where they set up housekeeping, they cause intense itching, and the scratching that ensues makes wounds that bacteria can thrive inside. We call the itching and lesions scabies (and related species of mite infesting our furry friends cause mange).

Image: Jens Mattssen, National Veterinary Institute, Uppsala, Sweden

Science In Your Wine Glass

It's always cool when scientists examine conventional wisdom. Sometimes they discover that it's just plain wrong, and that's fun because you can then lord it over the poor ignorant dupes who haven't read the latest postings on Science Made Cool. But it's even more interesting when researchers figure out why something "everybody knows" is actually true.

The Humpback Whale's Race for Mates

You've undoubtedly seen footage of large land mammals competing for mates: bighorn sheep smashing their heads together, elk locking horns, or elephants trumpeting and charging at one another. But when a female humpback whale goes into heat, males chase her in a race that soon escalates into an all-out brawl. And the BBC has captured it on film for all to see. Check it out.

Friday Parasite: Lungworms – Thanks, Mom

As parasites go, the dog lungworm Oslerus osleri leads a simple life. Adult worms live inside a dog’s trachea, snug inside nodules of tissue they’ve made their host grow to house them. Worms mate and lay eggs inside the nodules. When the larval worms hatch, they make their host cough them out of the lungs and into the back of its mouth. If they’re swallowed, the larval worms ride through the intestinal tract and enter the outside world in dog feces, ready to infect any potential host that comes sniffing around. But if they’re in a mother dog, they can also use her saliva as a route to her pups when she licks them clean.

Think of that the next time your dog kisses your face.

Image of larval dog lungworm by the Parasitology école Nationale Vétérinaire Lyon
Source: Zajac, A. et al. 2006. Veterinary Clinical Parasitology. American Association of Veterinary Pathologists.

Tails You Lose

The PhysOrg page, always a good source for the latest science-related press releases and news clips, has an interesting story about flipping coins. A trio of California researchers studied a large number of coin flips and determined that they are significantly non-random. Apparently the position of the coin before the toss is likely to be how it lands -- in other words, put the coin face-up on your thumb and there's a better than 50 percent chance of getting heads.

Long-time gamers (and probably most compulsive gamblers) know all about dice superstitions -- discarding dice when they give you "bad rolls," or keeping some dice unused to preserve the "good rolls" in them. My favorite was always the Stalinesque method of destroying dice that give bad rolls, in order to frighten the others into cooperating. These are somewhere between jokes and urban legendry -- except that they may not be, after all. Because if coin-flips are partly influenced by the starting conditions, it seems likely that dice rolls would be, as well. The greater number of possible results could make the effect less noticeable, but it would still be interesting to test.

The Futility of Debunking

The big buzz in the world of crackpotdom right now is the impending End of the World in 2012. In case you've somehow missed it, the story is that the Mayan calendar (in this case the approximately 400-year "Long Count" cycle) is due to end in 2012; obviously that means Something Big And Probably Bad will happen then. At present the leading SBAPB candidate is a close encounter or even collision with the imaginary planet "Nibiru."

Debunking this is about as easy -- and as productive -- as debunking a six-year-old's worry that there is a monster under the bed. Which is to say, it's impossible. You can show the six-year-old there is no monster under the bed as many times as you wish, but if the six-year-old wants to believe, you won't be able to convince him.

NASA scientist David Morrison has an excellent PDF article available for free at the Astronomical Society of the Pacific's Web site, debunking the 2012 myth like there's no tomorrow. Among other things, he points out how much of the current furor has been deliberately ginned up by the marketing department at Columbia Pictures to promote their upcoming film 2012 (which looks to be a pretty blatant knockoff of When Worlds Collide). Dr. Morrison's article is worth reading, but I'm afraid the only people who would be convinced by it are people who don't believe in post-Christian bogus millennialist viral marketing apocalyptic bullshit anyway.

That's the problem with all debunking of paranormal nonsense: debunking is by definition an appeal to reason, to hard evidence, to logic and common sense. People who think logically and want scientific evidence before they'll believe something won't fall for crackpottery in the first place. The believers are beyond the reach of the debunker's tools.

I've been wondering if other techniques might be more effective:  should debunkers fall back on simple scorn and mockery? Or make peace with existing established religions in order to combat the brushfire waves of idiocy which otherwise rage unchecked? Suggestions?

UPDATE: Phil Plait went through all this back in 2003 at his old "Bad Astronomy" Web site. See his savagely polite debunking of the "Nibiru" nonsense. And what did he accomplish? Six years later this garbage has moved from a couple of crackpots with Web sites to a major motion picture.

Game Variants

Quick link on a rainy Sunday afternoon, to some games suitable for a rainy Sunday afternoon: Unscrabbleink and Grandma's Dominoes. (From the always interesting if somewhat Dylan-infested Maggie's Farm 'blog.)

Ice Fishing

Ask anyone in the Astrobiology biz where's the best chance to find life beyond Earth, and most of them would suggest Europa, the second of Jupiter's four "Galilean" moons. (A few stubborn holdouts at the back of the room would still yell "Mars!") Europa is a good candidate for life because it seems likely to have liquid water in its interior, beneath a surface of ice. And now it seems Europa may have oxygen as well.

. . . the Ocean Blue

Back in August I took note of the date on which Christopher Columbus set sail on his voyage to the East Indies. Nearly seventy days later (with a stopover in the Canary Islands) Columbus made landfall somewhere near Watling Island in the Bahamas. He was nowhere near his destination.

For some reason the story of Columbus bugs the heck out of me. In elementary school, even though it was a good-quality private school in the 1970s, we still got the "proved the world was round" myth. No sooner was that put to rest than Columbus was de-rehabilitated (if such a word exists) and transformed into a villainous imperialist bringing ecological devastation and insensitive pronouns to the untouched, Eden-like environment of the New World. That's just as much hogwash as his proving the Earth is round.

Christopher Columbus was an absolutely great sailor, on a par with William Bligh. He planned and executed a round-trip across vast expanses of unknown water. He may well have worked out the Atlantic trade wind pattern, a remarkable feat decades ahead of its time.

He was a terrible geographer -- and when his estimate of the Earth's diameter was proved wrong by his own voyages, he began speculating that perhaps the Earth was really pear-shaped, with the New World on a kind of "breast" sticking out of one side. So, far from insisting the Earth is round, Columbus was actually willing to imagine other shapes just to avoid admitting he'd been wrong about something.

And as to his imperialist eco-whateverness, he's as "guilty" as the first human who stepped from Africa to Asia, or the ones who walked from Siberia to Alaska. Happy Columbus Day!

Friday Parasite: Beautiful Nematodes

Nikon announced the winners of their annual Small World photomicroscopy contest yesterday, and slide shows of the top 20 images are bouncing around the blogosphere. But buried deep in the contest's "Images of Distinction" section is J. Claire Hoving's beautiful picture of a female Nippostrongylus brasiliensis – a nematode worm found in the intestines of rats. Her body wall glows blue; her body cavity is stuffed with eggs that may, in time, find a new rat host to cozy up to.

Photo by J. Claire Hoving, Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine, University Of Cape Town, South Africa
Section of female Nippostrongylus brasiliensis (nematode) with eggs (200x)