Category Archives: Science

Rule Five Jurassic Park Friday

Much as I love dinosaurs, the Jurassic Park franchise, while fun, was horribly inaccurate. Apple TV’s recent Prehistoric Planet is vastly better, as is the somewhat-short-on-dinosaurs-but-still-good Netflix series Life on Our Planet.

But setting aside our own dinosaurs for the moment, a group of observers looking for biosignatures in nearby star systems make a good point; on our own planet, during the Mesozoic (dinosaur time) the Earth cast a much high biosignature than it does now.

Planets far away from Earth could be harboring species that resemble Earth’s dinosaurs and humans may currently have the ability to find them, according to a new study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society journal.

“Modern Earth’s light fingerprint has been our template for identifying potentially habitable planets, but there was a time when this fingerprint was even more pronounced — better at showing signs of life,” study author Lisa Kaltenegger said in a statement to The Sun.

According to the study, researchers on Earth could detect such life by searching for compounds that are not currently present on our planet but were during the age of the dinosaurs. That’s because the Earth had higher levels of oxygen, about 30%, during the time of the dinosaurs, allowing the complex creatures to grow. Today, Earth’s oxygen levels have leveled off to 21%.

Those high oxygen levels could be a clue to the kind of life that exists on a faraway planet, the researchers argue, noting that special telescopes can be used to detect similar conditions to what dinosaurs confronted millions of years ago.

They are, of course, correct about the oxygen levels; that’s another little tidbit that the Jurassic Park movies and other, similar flicks never address, namely that the huge beasts that wandered the Cretaceous would be awfully short of breath on our Earth today.  Of course, if that were the biggest scientific shortfall on those movies, that would be another story.

Tangentially, this ties in with a bone I’ve had to pick with the environmental movement and the climate change screechers for some time now; the Earth is now not at all typical of what it has been like through most of the planet’s 4.55 billion year history.  It’s been hotter, it’s been colder, oxygen levels have been higher and lower, and so on.

There’s another problem, this one in the linked article’s conclusion:

“Hopefully we’ll find some planets that happen to have more oxygen than Earth right now because that will make the search for life just a little bit easier,” Kaltenegger said. “And, who knows, maybe there are other dinosaurs waiting to be found.”

Hyperbole much? No, on no other planet will we find dinosaurs. There’s no reason to suspect that multi-celled life on another planet would resemble life on Earth in any way. It may not even be bilateral. Its blood chemistry and genetic coding may be completely different. To have an ecology, the planet would have to have producers and consumers, but that’s really the only hard and fast rule.  Producers wouldn’t have to be plants as we know them, and consumers wouldn’t have to be animals or fungi. We probably lack the imagination to know all the roads biology might take in another solar system.

And finally, I’ll make my usual comment on dinosaurs being extinct; dinosaurs are most assuredly not extinct. There are more species of the Therapoda alive today than there are mammals. We call them birds.

Animal’s Hump Day News

Happy Hump Day!

No extra notes this morning. A red-eye to Denver and then an early flight to Des Moines beckons, and I’ve other work to get to before heading to the airport.  So stand ready!  Here comes the Wednesday usual.

Now then…

Continue reading Animal’s Hump Day News

Animal’s Hump Day News

Happy Hump Day!

Housekeeping notes: A week from today we’ll be flying to Iowa, leaving our house-sitters in place here, where we will spend a week with the entire Animal family at our annual Thanksgiving/Christmas family reunion.  Posts will be scheduled for the balance of next week, and the week of the 27th will be taken up with some placeholder totty.  Regular posts will resume Monday, Dec 4th.

Now then…

Continue reading Animal’s Hump Day News

Animal’s Hump Day News

Happy Hump Day!

Note:  Since I have two weeks worth of my RedState posts here, this will be lengthy, but you can see it all beneath the cut. And I will also say this: It’s great to be home. I still love the Colorado mountains and had a great time, but we also spent a few days in the Denver area visiting friends and family, and boy have three years in the Great Land changed my perspectives on Denver.  Big cities are noisy, and they stink.

We’re really glad to be home, in Alaska.

Now then:

Continue reading Animal’s Hump Day News

Animal’s Daily Chimp Warfare News

Before we start, check out the latest installment of Riding the String over at Glibertarians.

Chimps, our closest genetic relatives, are mean critters. They conduct inter-tribal warfare, they kill members of enemy tribes -even the infants – and they indulge in cannibalism. I’m not sure what that says about us, but now we find out that chimpanzee warfare tactics are more complex than we thought – they actually conduct reconnaissance.

Researchers said on Thursday they have documented the tactical use of elevated terrain in warfare situations while observing on a daily basis two neighboring communities of wild western chimpanzees in Tai National Park for three years.

Information obtained during hilltop reconnaissance shaped whether the chimpanzees made forays into enemy territory, the study found, with these apes appearing more apt to do so when the risk of confrontation was lower. The study, the researchers said, records for the first time the use of this age-old human military strategy by our species’ closest living relatives.

“It shows sophisticated cognitive and cooperative skills to anticipate where and when to go, and to act upon gathered information in a safe way,” said University of Cambridge biological anthropologist Sylvain Lemoine, lead author of the study published in the journal PLOS Biology.

I’ve sat face to face with an adult male chimp at the Honolulu Zoo (there was a thick sheet of plexiglass between us) and have also had occasion to interact with a young female orangutan close up.  Both experiences were interesting in the extreme.  Looking into the eyes of an ape isn’t like looking at a dog or cat, but neither is it like looking into another humans’ eyes.  There is more behind an ape’s eyes than just a “dumb animal,” but not quite up to the human level.  It’s a weird kind of uncanny valley effect.

And chimps, especially, are disturbingly like us, from their gestures to their facial expressions to their social interactions. Chimps laugh, they hold hands, they hug – and they kill each other.

As I said, they are our closest genetic relatives.  And maybe they are more like us than we’d like to admit – or, in some cases, (I could point out recent events in the Middle East) it may be that we are more like them than should make us comfortable.

Animal’s Hump Day News

Happy Hump Day!

Some housekeeping notes: Last night I caught a red-eye to Denver, in order to recover enough (which takes longer every year) to leave Friday for Grand County, where loyal sidekick Rat and I will be sallying forth to do battle with antlered ungulates.  More news on that when/if anything happens; in the meantime, there will be some placeholder totty on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of next week.  Barring some catastrophe regular posts should resume on Thursday, the 2nd.

Now then…

Continue reading Animal’s Hump Day News

Animal’s Hump Day News

Happy Hump Day!

This mess in the Middle East has now officially gotten out of hand.  More on that in the links.

When you’re a nation the size of Delaware, surrounded by people who want to kill you, it’s in your best interest to keep your military and your intelligence services dialed in, but in this case Israel obviously missed something.

Now then…

Continue reading Animal’s Hump Day News

Animal’s Hump Day News

Happy Hump Day!

The very first brain cells may have been in evidence as long as 800 million years ago.

Researchers from Spain and Germany have discovered characteristics of specialized secretory cells in simple animals called placozoans which could identify them as a prelude to neurons in other organisms.

Roughly the size of a grain of sand, these basic creatures have no organs, consisting of little more than a colony of different cell types. Much as they still do today, placozoans once hunted microbes and browsed algae in the warm shallows of seas 800 million years ago.

So 800 million years ago we have evidence of emerging brains.  Any guesses as to when we might see evidence of brains in Congress?

And so…

Continue reading Animal’s Hump Day News

Animal’s Daily Xenotransplant News

Before I get into this, check out the latest chapter of License to Kill over at Glibertarians!

Meanwhile: In Maryland, surgeons may well have given a dying man a few more weeks or months of life by replacing his failing heart with the heart of a gene-modified pig.

The 58-year-old Navy veteran was facing near-certain death from heart failure but other health problems meant he wasn’t eligible for a traditional heart transplant, according to doctors at University of Maryland Medicine.

“Nobody knows from this point forward. At least now I have hope and I have a chance,” Lawrence Faucette, from Frederick, Maryland, said in a video recorded by the hospital before Wednesday’s operation. “I will fight tooth and nail for every breath I can take.”

While the next few weeks will be critical, doctors were thrilled at Faucette’s early response to the pig organ.

“You know, I just keep shaking my head – how am I talking to someone who has a pig heart?” Dr. Bartley Griffith, who performed the transplant, told The Associated Press. He said doctors are feeling “a great privilege but, you know, a lot of pressure.”

The same Maryland team last year performed the world’s first transplant of a genetically modified pig heart into another dying man, David Bennett, who survived just two months.

Here’s why the heart wasn’t immediately rejected:

The pig heart, provided by Blacksburg, Virginia-based Revivicor, has 10 genetic modifications – knocking out some pig genes and adding some human ones to make it more acceptable to the human immune system.

While I’m a big fan of right to try, and while this veteran and his family are doubtless glad to get a few more weeks or (hopefully) months of his company, this xenotransplantation issue seems like a stopgap – a good one, but a stopgap.  The ideal answer, of course, is to have a heart grown from the patients’ own stem cells, which would be accepted by the body with no need for immune-suppressants.

But that technology is a long way off yet.

The patient himself has released a statement:

“Nobody knows from this point forward. At least now I have hope and I have a chance,” Lawrence Faucette, from Frederick, Maryland, said in a video recorded by the hospital before Wednesday’s operation. “I will fight tooth and nail for every breath I can take.”

That’s a healthy outlook.  Here’s hoping Mr. Faucette enjoys the gift of extra weeks or (hopefully) months he has with his family, and hopefully the lessons learned in his case will move the science of transplantation forward.