Category Archives: Science

She blinded me with science!

Goodbye, Blue Monday

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2013_05_13_Goodbye Blue Monday

Goodbye, Blue Monday

First of all – thanks to The Other McCain and The Daley Gator for the Rule Five linkage.  Check out their extensive Rule Five catologs at the links.

This just in from the arena of paleoanthropology:  Who’re You Calling a Neanderthal?  Excerpt:

The “Neanderthals are inferior” attitude traces back to their earliest descriptions in the mid-1800s when the first Neanderthal was labeled as “freak” or an “idiot” or “incapable of moral and religious conception.” For many, the discoveries after 1865 confirmed these labels. Even the majority of human paleontologists supported this view.

But in the last 10 years there has been a major reassessment of the Neanderthals, and it turns out they share a lot of the behavior and capabilities of people in Europe today. This revolution in the way academics think about Neanderthals arises from discoveries in archeology, re-evaluations of their anatomy and revelations about their genetic makeup.

Neanderthaler1856Maedchen[1]It’s easy to think that primitive people were stupid, simply because they were primitive.  You see a variation of that attitude today in all too many people of urban and suburban attitude who decry “stupid rednecks” because rural people talk funny and like to hunt and fish.

But just as running a farm requires a great deal of planning, knowledge of crops and weather, capability with equipment and so on, survival in a howling Ice Age wilderness required a lot of brain power.  The Neandertal (the correct spelling is actually -tal) had that savvy and more.  They survived not just one but several ice ages, occupied Europe from Spain to the Levant, and hung around for over 300,000 years.  By Neanderthaler1856Maedchen4[1]comparison, our own species of human has been around for about 140,000 years.

What’s more, while our ancestors seem to have been jack-of-all-trades generalists, hunting and gathering everything available, the Neandertal were big-game hunters.  They were known to have hunted mammoth, the biggest creature extant in their Ice Age environs, and to have subsisted almost entirely on meat.

Granted our own generalist approach proved the successful one in the end, but remnants of the Neandertal hang on even now – if you are of northern European ancestry, roughly 4% of your genetic material is likely Neandertal.

Keep that in mind next time you’re fishing for an insult.

Best News of the Year.

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105-Year-Old Texas Woman Reveals Bacon as her Secret behind Long Life.  Excerpt:

Key to a Long Life.

Key to a Long Life.

A 105-year-old Texas woman has earned a place in almost all headlines by revealing the most unlikely secret to her long life.

Strangely, her key to longevity is bacon. Yes, you read it right; 105-year-old Pearl Cantrell loves to eat bacon and feasts on it almost every day. Her story, for sure, will be a subject of research for most health scientists.

Pearl Cantrell, who’s mostly referred to as the ’105-year-old bacon woman’, said in an interview with a local NBC station, “I love bacon and I eat it everyday. I don’t feel as old as I am, that’s all I can say.”

bacon-bikini-braResident of Central Texas, Cantrell, a mother of seven, has outlived three of her kids, as well as her husband. Her recent 105th birthday bash was a three-day affair that included more than 200 guests.

We all knew bacon was delicious.  We all knew that bacon adds its own unique goodness to almost any other food – from the ubiquitous bacon cheeseburger to Mrs. Animal’s own bacon quiche.  But know it can be revealed that bacon may well be the secret to immortality!

Well, that’s it.  You can’t argue with success.  Bacon – it’s what’s for dinner!

Dino-Tuesday

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She Blinded Me with Science.

She Blinded Me with Science.

This seems to be the day for dinosaur news.

Dinosaur Lineage Traced to Africa.  Of course, Africa as such didn’t exist then; the land that now comprises Africa was then part of the landmass known as Pangea – one giant continent, surrounded by a global ocean.

10 Unbelievable Dinos That Really Existed.  To anyone who has been following dinosaur discoveries in recent years, none of these are particularly unbelievable.  Some of them have been identified decades ago.  Still, interesting article.

Heavier Dino Arms Led to Evolution to Birds.  Well, of course – they became wings.  In fact, it seems that with every new discovery the line between non-avian dinos and avian dinos (birds) becomes harder and harder to define.  Consider this creature:

two-microraptor-illustration

Is this a dinosaur or a bird?  At the moment, it’s considered a dinosaur; this is an artist’s conception of the crow-sized predator Microraptor gui.  But if you saw one sitting in a tree looking down at you, you’d call it a bird.  An odd-looking, four-winged bird, maybe, but a bird.

Taxonomy just doesn’t come with any clear dividing lines.

And, finally:  How Did Dinosaurs Do It?  In some cases, very, very carefully.

Animal’s Hump Day News

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Happy Hump Day!

Happy Hump Day!

It seems like a day for science.

Anthropologists explain how to approach aliens parked in Earth orbit.  Excerpt:

It happens all the time in science fiction stories: aliens park their vessels in Earth orbit, and things go pear-shaped. But what if this scenario unfolded in real life? What would be the best thing for us to do? We asked several anthropologists the best way to go about communicating with truly unknown life forms.

For this thought experiment, you have to imagine a ship has parked in orbit, but has not shown any signs of hostility. It’s just sitting there. So what do we do next? More importantly, what would be an ideal, ethical response, rather the fist-in-tentacles response Will Smith made famous in Independence Day?

This very question has been a topic at the annual CONTACT conference for twenty-five years running. Anthropologist Jim Funaro, who founded the conference, said anthropologists are ideal consultants for extraterrestrial communication:

Because of their century of experience in “intraterrestrial” 2013_04_24_Hump Day (2)fieldwork and their commitment to a multicultural approach, anthropologists may be the most appropriately-trained scientists to inform protocol for, and initiate encounters in, contact situations whenever and wherever they occur. A primary rule in ethnographic field work: Make no assumptions.

It’s an interesting topic.  It’s a staple of science fiction that whenever the protagonists encounter an alien species, the aliens are humanoid enough to make a degree of social interaction possible.  They also are generally reasonably within the same technological range as the humans in the story.  Without that, you’d have little possibility of conflict; without conflict, you have no story.

But that’s fiction.  It’s fun, but it’s fiction.  Think about it; if the Klingons had been evolving for a hundred million years longer than humans, the Klingon language would have still had no word for “defeat” even after meeting James Tiberius Kirk.  No, to make a story, Captain Kirk had to be capable of kicking Klingon ass all over the galaxy – that’s the story we all know and love.

2013_04_24_Hump Day (3)In real life, if an alien species ever comes to Earth, it may well be a massive vat of sentient slime mold that communicates with other vats of sentient slime mold by exchanging bursts of gamma radiation.  It’s far more likely to be something really weird – something we don’t have any hope of ever communicating with.

That would make it really interesting.

Goodbye, Blue Monday

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Goodbye, Blue Monday

Goodbye, Blue Monday

23 years old, and Hubble is still taking images so amazing that the only thing that might match it is being there.

Meanwhile, NASA’s Kepler continues to uncover possibly Earth-like planets.  Excerpt:

NASA’s Kepler mission has discovered two new planetary systems that include three super-Earth-size planets in the “habitable zone,” the range of distance from a star where the surface temperature of an orbiting planet might be suitable for liquid water.

The Kepler-62 system has five planets; 62b, 62c, 62d, 62e and 62f. The Kepler-69 system has two planets; 69b and 69c. Kepler-62e, 62f and 69c are the super-Earth-sized planets.

Two of the newly discovered planets orbit a star smaller and cooler than the sun. Kepler-62f is only 40 percent larger than Earth, making it the exoplanet closest to the size of our planet known in the habitable zone of another star. Kepler-62f is likely to have a rocky composition. Kepler-62e, orbits on the inner edge of the habitable zone and is roughly 60 percent larger than Earth.

The third planet, Kepler-69c, is 70 percent larger than the size of Earth, and orbits in the habitable zone of a star similar to our sun. Astronomers are uncertain about the composition of Kepler-69c, but its orbit of 242 days around a sun-like star resembles that of our neighboring planet Venus.

Scientists do not know whether life could exist on the newfound planets, but their discovery signals we are another step closer to finding a world similar to Earth around a star like our sun.

2013_04_22_Goodbye Blue Monday (2)In the aftermath of an incident like the one last week, the two assholes who set off bombs in Boston, this is one of the things that can still produce some hope in mankind.  If we can find these worlds – and if, one day, we find one with the spectral signatures of oxygen and maybe even chlorophyll in the atmosphere – then one day we’ll figure out a way to reach them.  It may take a titanic generation ship and several lifetimes, but it could happen.

It has to happen.  It must happen.  Humanity must move onward and outward, or we’ll stagnate.  We can either continue to live or begin to die.  Living means progress.  Progress means exploration.  Exploration means moving outward.  I would prefer it be done by private enterprise, and indeed I think it will be.  I hope I live long enough to see it.

I’m afraid it’s either that or a new Dark Age.  The two assholes in Boston would prefer the latter.  Fuck them.  And the horse they rode in on.