The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

The future is now.

Via Wired’s Danger Room comes news from the US Army’s Future Combat Systems.

They need a new name because we’re already living in the future:

The Army has decided that its eight-year-old flagship modernization program, the Future Combat Systems, will get a new name.

“It’s not future anymore. It is here. We are bending metal now,” said FCS spokesman Paul Meheny.

So that’s nice to know. Now, where’s the civilian jetpacks?

Entered on 31 July 2007 at 6:08 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

The 62-mile-high club

Discover raises a slippery space question… as if NASA didn’t have enough scandal to deal with lately:

When missions lasted no more than a few weeks at a time, discretion was a reasonable policy. But as NASA and other international space agencies plan missions to Mars and beyond lasting more than a year, officials will have to take a position on this. As for now, Williams says it is an open question: “With regard to a sexual code of conduct, where do you draw the line between being invasive in someone’s life and the well-being of the mission?”

Entered on 30 July 2007 at 18:48 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Science Art: Chaetopoda by Ernst Haeckel

Chaetopoda by Ernst Haeckel.

More incredible illustrations by him here.

Entered on 29 July 2007 at 6:40 in the Science Art file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

My Mechanical Mom

From New Scientist comes news of the womb-on-a-chip:

Fujii’s team has created a “lab on a chip” that is 2 millimetres across and 0.5 millimetres high, in which up to 20 eggs can be fertilised and then grown until they are ready for implantation. Endometrial cells, which line real wombs, are also grown in the device, so that the chemicals they produce can reach the embryos and help them grow. “We are providing the embryos with a much more comfortable environment, mimicking what happens in the body,” Fujii says.

Experiments in mice suggest that the chip is more successful than traditional IVF at producing embryos that will grow into healthy fetuses. Of 50 fertilised eggs grown on the chip, 30 developed into early embryos, compared to 26 out of 50 fertilised eggs grown through “microdrop” IVF.

Better than test tubes.

Entered on 28 July 2007 at 6:23 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Maybe “overlords” isn’t an exaggeration

New Scientist reports that predatory jumbo squid have returned to California’s coast… and may be there to stay:

Ferocious, pack-feeding jumbo squid have invaded waters off California’s central coast and are devouring local fish populations. Researchers say global warming and overfishing are likely to blame.

Humboldt or jumbo squid (Dosidicus gigas) first appeared off Monterey, California during an El Niño event which warmed waters in 1997. Since 2002 they have taken up permanent residence.

They’re two meters long. And hungry.

Entered on 27 July 2007 at 6:49 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

The Amygdaloids

From Salon comes assurance that we are not alone:

All right, the occasion wasn’t a concert but a graduation ceremony for 10,000 students in the New York University College of Arts and Science. Still, this was no ordinary club band hired to entertain the students. The Amygdaloids are made up of four scientists from NYU whose chief singer and songwriter is Joseph LeDoux. Earlier in the evening, LeDeoux had given the faculty address. Although one must ask what kind of neuroscience professor invokes Tennessee Williams and surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel to send a graduating class out into the world, then picks up his white Stratocaster and launches into a rock ballad about the amygdala, that almond-shaped “nut” in the brain that processes primitive emotions like fear, love, hate and anger: “Why do we feel so afraid/ Don’t have to look very far/ Don’t get stuck in a rut/ Don’t have to look very hard/ It’s all in a nut, in your brain.”

Maybe it’s something in the air.

Entered on 26 July 2007 at 6:28 in the Music, Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Pleasure and placebo

Nature plumbs the depths of one of the most mysterious processes in medicine.

Researchers have found that the placebo effect – when “fake” medicine creates real results – gets a boost from expectation of pleasure:

Neuroscientists have found that people who experience a strong dose of pleasure at the thought of an upcoming reward are more susceptible to the placebo effect.

The research shows how the placebo effect, in which patients perceive a benefit from a medical treatment despite it having no genuine therapeutic activity, hinges on the brain’s ‘reward centre’ — a region that predicts our future expectations of positive experiences, and which is also implicated in gambling and drug addiction. Greater activity in this brain region, called the nucleus accumbens, is linked to a stronger placebo effect, the new research shows.

I want it… I can almost feel it… and there it is!

Entered on 25 July 2007 at 18:46 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

The Noble Bonobo

The New Yorker, of all publications, has a fascinating Ian Parker article on the natural history of the bonobo – the sexy primate that’s supposed to choose orgies over fighting to establish social roles. The “hippie chimp,” people call them. But they haven’t spent that much time observing them – not in the wild, nor in large groups in captivity.

Hohmann has witnessed a number of kills, and the dismembering, nearly always by females, that follows. Bonobos start with the abdomen; they eat the intestines first, in a process that can leave a duiker alive for a long while after it has been captured.

and

Jeroen Stevens is a young Belgian biologist who has spent thousands of hours studying captive bonobos in European zoos. I met him last year at the Planckendael Zoo, near Antwerp. “I once saw five female bonobos attack a male in Apenheul, in Holland,” he said. “They were gnawing on his toes. I’d already seen bonobos with digits missing, but I’d thought they would have been bitten off like a dog would bite. But they really chew. There was flesh between their teeth.”

Entered on 25 July 2007 at 6:24 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Ice Volcanoes of Charon!

Nature brings new observations of Ice Volcanoes in Outer Space.

Cook speculates that liquid water deep within Charon’s core is mixed with ammonia, which acts like antifreeze and lowers the freezing point. Volcanoes could then belch out this water, which would immediately freeze and snow back down onto the surface of Charon as crystals of ice and the ammonia hydrates that Cook detects in his spectra.

“We looked at several processes; none worked except cryovolcanism,” says Cook.

A beautiful image: a black planet, spewing out a haze of ice crystals, far, far from the sun.

Entered on 24 July 2007 at 18:42 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

SONG: A World Without Us.

SONG: “A World Without Us” _{(To download: right-click & “Save As”)}

ARTIST: grant. I’m the guy who put this questionable site up on the internet for the world to see.

SOURCE: “An Earth Without People”, Scientific American, July 2007.

ABSTRACT: This article is an interview with science writer Alan Weisman, about his new book The World without Us, in which he speculates what would happen to the world if all humans spontaneously vanished at once. The article focuses specifically on New York City – an abandoned metropolis, turning gradually back to an idyllic island of hills and rivers. I liked the Omega Man/”By the Rivers of Babylon” feel of the thing, especially recontextualized as a song about a breakup. The music was easier than the lyrics, for some reason – I spent most of my month trying to get lines to scan and still have something to do with an abandoned, beautiful New York. In a perfect world, Stephin Merritt would be singing the words: “In the years since you and I left Central Park consumed by fire….” So here, this is the first song on this site. I hope you enjoy it.

Entered on 23 July 2007 at 14:41 in the Music, Songs file | 3 Observations |  Print