The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

Gold atoms

In case you were wondering, gold atoms are cool.

Entered on 31 January 2008 at 6:27 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Skin Rhythms.

New Scientist stops the clock with timely news about skin. Apparently, skin is pretty deep – it’s somehow tied to the brain as part of our internal clock:

“Knowing that skin clocks ‘tick’ in the same way as brain clocks provides a nice tool to address whether a person is likely to be an early or late riser,” says Russell Foster, a circadian rhythm specialist at the University of Oxford, UK.

“It’s remarkable that measures from the skin allow predictions of brain-driven behaviour,” he adds.

Entered on 30 January 2008 at 6:19 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Night Lights Are Killing Us?

Man, what, are teddy bears next? The Lancet reports on a survey of studies that, combined, seem to show that night lights are causing cancer (registration required, but free):

Among the many different patterns of shift-work, those including nightwork are the most disruptive for the circadian clock.

Six of eight epidemiological studies from various geographical regions, most notably two independent cohort studies of nurses engaged in shift-work at night,2,3 have noted a modestly increased risk of breast cancer in long-term employees compared with those who are not engaged in shiftwork at night. These studies are limited by potential confounding and inconsistent definitions of shift-work, with several focused on a single profession. The incidence of breast cancer was also modestly increased in most cohorts of female flight attendants,4 who also experience circadian disruption by frequently crossing time zones. Limitations of studies in these flight attendants include the potential for detection bias, proxy measures of exposure, and potential uncontrolled confounding by reproductive factors and cosmic radiation.

Several different rodent models have been used to test the effect of disruption of the circadian system on tumour development. More than 20 studies investigated the effect of constant light, dim light at night, simulated chronic jet lag, or circadian timing of carcinogens, and most showed a major increase in tumour incidence.

OK, so it’s not literally night lights – it’s waking up in bright surroundings at odd hours, which throws off your circadian rhythms… which somehow leads to an increased risk of tumor growth. Having bright lights on at night shuts down the body’s secretion of melatonin, the sleepy hormone that also appears to fight cancer. Similar results have been found in people who’ve lost their pineal glands – the part of the brain that produces melatonin.

There’s a subscriber-only version (with well-linked references and sources) at Science News.

Sleep well.

Entered on 29 January 2008 at 6:15 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Health Magnet.

LiveScience notices something odd that’ll have some hard-minded skeptics practicing their eyebrow raises. Medical magnets – one of the old staples of alternative medicine pseudoscience, have gotten a strange boost from a study that shows these magnets really can do something:

In a tightly controlled study—a rarity in the world of alternative medicine—Thomas Skalak of the University of Virginia found that static magnets reduced swelling by up to 50 percent in the tiny hind paws of rats. Skalak published his results in the November issue of the American Journal of Physiology.

One of Skalak’s points was that rats would be immune from the placebo effect, since they wouldn’t know how to test if the magnet they were wearing was real or fake – a weakness in creating a blind study with human subjects.

Entered on 28 January 2008 at 6:51 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Science Art: “Anatomical Man,” Les Très Riches Heures by Duc de Berry

Human anatomy explained as an allegory for astrology, or vice versa. From the collection of the Musée Condé, Chantilly, France.

Entered on 27 January 2008 at 6:26 in the Science Art file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

The King of Paper Airplanes.

New Scientist reports on Japanese space scientists creating origami that’s out of this world:

The origami space plane will be a similar design, Suzuki says, but only about 20 centimetres long and with a rounded nose to minimize aerodynamic heating.

It will also be chemically processed to incorporate silicon in the paper structure, increasing its heat resistance….

When released from the International Space Station, it would be travelling at Mach 20, Suzuki says, but thanks to a large surface area and low weight it should slow considerably as it falls through the upper layers of the Earth’s atmosphere.

A smaller prototype paper plane was tested up to Mach 7 and about 200 °C in a hypersonic wind tunnel in Tokyo last week.

Shinji Suzuki, of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the University of Tokyo, is now working on creating a tiny, ultra-light tracking device so he can find his paper airplane once it makes it back to Earth.

More origami spaceplane coverage at Mainichi Daily News.

Entered on 25 January 2008 at 6:44 in the Science file | 2 Observations |  Print

Elephants evolve smaller tusks.

The Telegraph reports on the strange findings of Iain Douglas Hamilton and his colleagues, who appear to have discovered evidence that elephants are evolving smaller tusks due to ivory poaching:

In the last 150 years, the world’s elephant population has evolved much smaller tusks.

The average size of an African elephant’s tusks has gone down by half in the last century and a half. Indian elephants have undergone a similar tusk size reduction.

Experts believe the rapid evolution of the massive land mammals is due to poaching. Zoologists from Oxford University suggest that ivory poachers, who go for the largest males with the largest tusks, have caused the breeding behaviors of the animals to change rapidly in a short time.

On the evolutionary scale, this a lightning-fast development. One of my favorite fringe science theories is compressed evolution (or rapid evolution), in which organisms change rapidly (over a few generations, rather than over thousands of millions of years) due to extreme environmental pressure. Most studies have found suggestions of this taking place among fish, either due to overfishing (throwing the small ones back) or global warming. This kind of research makes some scientists uneasy because it’s a little too close to questioning Darwinism – but still, strange changes seem be happening in very little time.

Entered on 24 January 2008 at 6:52 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

SONG: You’ve Got Power

SONG: “You’ve Got Power” _{(To download: right-click & “Save As”)}

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “PopSci’s Best of What’s New 2007: Innovators”, Popular Science, December 2007, as used in the post One word: Plastics.

ABSTRACT: I like this story because I think there’s something poetic (and goofy) about turning trash into treasure. It’s really an alchemical goal – Mr. Pringle has created a kind of philosopher’s stone, turning base substance into gold. Except it’s discarded plastic (and, well, anything organic) that’s being turned into oil.

This was very nearly a carnival song called “Mister Pringle’s Amazing Machine,” and then it became sort of an acoustic folk song (with something like the current lyrics), and then I decided I really wanted to record something with a heavy beat on the two and the four, so this is what came out. The twangy bits are from a lap harp the kids in our house got as a Christmas present this year. Everything else is either a nylon string acoustic guitar or bits of someone else’s drums, cut up and remade.

Entered on 23 January 2008 at 6:31 in the Songs file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

That stuff you’re breathing.

Nature discusses new findings about how we’ll all get superpowers, like heat vision and wings, just by breathing! Well, what they really said was that air pollution mutates sperm (here’s a non-subscriber version):

Epidemiological studies in humans have suggested a link between air pollution and reduced male fertility, but such studies are often confounded by other lifestyle differences such as diet, genetic background, and economic class. No such research has been done on people in Hamilton Harbour, Canada, where the mouse studies were carried out.

Previous work had demonstrated that the offspring of wild birds that breed near steel mills inherit more DNA mutations than their rural counterparts. Then, studies in mice suggested a possible reason for that pattern. Canadian researchers found that filtering out particles from polluted air lessened the risk of heritable mutations in mice caged near Hamilton. And the bulk of mutations from pollution were coming from the father.

Now, in work published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Carole Yauk of Health Canada in Ottawa and her colleagues have returned to Hamilton. This time they monitored male mice for direct evidence of DNA damage in their sperm.

After three weeks of breathing the Hamilton air, the mice were already showing more signs of DNA breakage than control mice breathing filtered air.

Entered on 22 January 2008 at 6:00 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

It flowers itself to death

New Scientist reports on a frankly bizarre palm tree just discovered by a family picnicking in Madagascar:

“It’s a species that is so significant from all sorts of perspectives, it’s kind of embarrassing as a botanist that we didn’t find it until now,” says William Baker, head of palm research at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the UK.

…

“This thing just grows and grows, and then flowers itself to death,” says Baker, a study co-author. “It’s an amazing way to go.”

The giant palm was first found by Xavier Metz, a local cashew plantation manager who stumbled upon one of the trees while picnicking with his family, and was struck by the massive candelabra of flowers sprouting from its top.

More words and images at LiveScience.com.

Entered on 21 January 2008 at 6:30 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print