Science Made Cool

200 Years of Economic History, Visualized

I had some fun over Thanksgiving weekend playing with the interactive economic charts at Gapminder World. But if you don't get a kick out of reading graphs, you can now sit back and watch Hans Rosling interpret his "Wealth and Health of Nations" data for you. No heavy lifting necessary.

H/T to PZ Myers for pointing out the new BBC program on statistics.

Chemistry of Money

NPR's Planet Money team wanted to know why people use gold for money -- the choice seems so arbitrary. But a tour through the periodic table showed them just how many elements are unsuited for the job. 

Their list of key requirements:

    1. Not a gas.

    2. Doesn't corrode or burst into flames.

    3. Doesn't kill you. 

I'll let y'all know if my cash starts really burning a hole in my pocket.

Nonsense, Organized

Ever wonder how much irrational nonsense can be believed by your fellow human beings? A whole periodic table's worth, apparently.  

(h/t: David Thompson).

Magic (and Neuroscience) in NYC

Most of the book events I've attended have been pretty low-key affairs: the author reads some of the book, answers questions, then signs copies until the room empties out. This is not how Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde are rolling out their new book, Sleights of Mind (written with Sandra Blakeslee) in New York later this week. Instead, they're giving a lecture at the New York Academy of Sciences on the neuroscience of magic and illusions, with demonstrations by the Amazing Randi. It sounds too cool to be believed, and well worth the $25 admission fee. (Alas, I'll be in the lab in Massachusetts with my mouse brains that evening.)

 

Mind over Magic: Thursday, November 18, 2010, 6:30-8:00 PM. At the New York Academy of Sciences, World Trade Center 7, New York, NY. $25.00, pre-registration required.

 

Friday Parasite: Introducing the ALDF Tick App

It’s fall, and our property is inundated with deer ticks. Our chickens keep them under control in the yard, but our dog is a hot-blooded tick beacon during her daily walks through the woods. She loves to tear around in the underbrush, which means I’m guaranteed to find at least one tick hiding under her fur each evening. And although I’m much taller and wear clothes, occasionally one makes it onto my skin too. 

But the American Lyme Disease Foundation clearly doesn’t want me to panic about it. Their new iPhone/iPod app may have a disturbing title (Lyme Disease), but the material inside it is designed to teach users how to identify ticks, deal with their bites, and best of all, how to assess their risk for contracting the disease if they happen to get bitten. It includes a map developed by the Yale University School of Public Health that shows where deer ticks live in the United States (live in Wyoming? No deer ticks for you!), full-color life-sized images of the beasts in all their life stages, tips to prevent tick bites, a video demonstration of proper tick removal so you don’t wind up with mouthparts stuck in your skin, and in case you don’t remove a tick in time, a summary of Lyme disease symptoms with images of its characteristic rash that you can compare to your own skin and a search function for local physicians.

My favorite part of the app is the comparison chart that helps you estimate how long a tick has been attached by the amount of swelling in its abdomen. Since the chance of getting Lyme disease depends on how long the tick has been eating, the scorecard helps you decide whether or not you need to call the doctor.

It's also reassuring to learn that most disease is caused by ticks in their nymph form – because they’re small and hard to see, they get overlooked and remain attached for the 48 hours the Lyme disease bacterium needs to infect a new host. The ticks I’m finding right now are all adults: the males don’t bite, and the females are big enough to find easily so long as I keep up those daily checks. I'll be sure to hold what I find up to the app.

ALDF Lyme Disease iPhone/iPod app $1.99, Apple iTunes Store.

 

I Do Not Understand This

I can't tell what's going on here. Either a very clever engineer has found a way to sail faster than the wind on land -- or a very clever engineer has found a way to fool people into thinking he has found a way to sail faster than the wind on land. Read all about it at Make Online, and be sure not to skip the comments.

Common sense says it's bogus. Sailing faster than the wind implies you could sail forward even if the wind speed is zero.

But the defenders of the claim keep pointing out that the vehicle is extracting energy from the wind, based on the difference in wind speed and ground speed. So in still air it would just sit there. Note that the propellor does not drive the wheels as it spins; the designers are very clear on that point. So they're not proclaiming free energy or perpetual motion.

One thing which makes it hard to tell who's right in this discussion is that both the skeptics and the proponents are quick to hit the flamethrower trigger. I can't tell which one is the petulant crackpot because everybody sounds like a petulant crackpot.

I'm not enough of an engineer to tell if this is sound science or clever handwaving. Either way, however, it's an interesting project. I look forward to seeing the experiment repeated by people other than the initial designers. And if someone can explain this without sounding like a petulant crackpot, I'd be very grateful.

UPDATE: Facebook commentator (commentatrix?) Francesca Pardo Berger furnished this link which sheds some light on the subject.

Neanderthal Park?

There's an odd and interesting article posted at Archaeology.org, about the practicality and ethics of cloning Neanderthals.

To his credit, author Zach Zorich doesn't even waste space worrying about the menace of Neanderthals rampaging through the streets, carrying off starlets and looting video stores. He's more concerned with whether it's right to do it, and what legal (and moral) rights a cloned Neanderthal would have.

This seems like a very simple issue to me. The "rightness" of doing it doesn't seem any different from any other sort of in vitro fertilization. Fertility clinics "create humans" all the time and nobody seems to think it's evil. Similarly a great deal of modern livestock (such as dairy cattle) are created by artificial insemination, and again, nobody minds.

As to what legal rights a cloned Neanderthal would have -- again, that seems pretty straightforward. Neanderthals are humans. Says so right in the species name, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. They presumably have all the rights and privileges of any human.

If it turns out a Neanderthal human is significantly less intelligent than the rest of us (and I tend to doubt that) there are legal mechanisms to determine competence. This is all a well-traveled road. No surprises.

To my mind, the biggest question raised by the article is one it kind of assumes. Why bother? Sure, it would be kind of cool to see a Neanderthal walking around -- except that it wouldn't be a real Neanderthal from the Ice Age, it would be a chimera assembled out of bits and pieces of surviving Neanderthal DNA, probably with a lot of sapiens DNA to fill in the gaps. It wouldn't really teach us anything about the ancient Neanderthals. All we would learn about is the design decisions made by the genetic engineers in charge of creating the pseudo-Neanderthal.

And we certainly wouldn't learn anything about Neanderthal psychology, society, or thought processes, because we'd be studying a Neanderthal human growing up in a setting no Neanderthal ever experienced -- the modern world. It's like studying alien life by playing Spore.

Cloning a Neanderthal human from ancient DNA wouldn't be very different from creating a unicorn by modifying a horse's genes. It would be interesting and fun. But the only thing you'd learn is how to do it.