The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

Robinson Crusoe Found.

Yes, the plucky, inventive island castaway Robinson Crusoe was a fictional character. But author Robert Louis Stevenson, writing in the mid-1800s, based him on the very real Alexander Selkirk, who survived for four years after being stranded on a Pacific Island more than a century earlier. And now archaeologists have found his camp:

Science Daily:
An article in the journal Post-Medieval Archaeology presents evidence from an archaeological dig on the island of Aguas Buenas, since renamed Robinson Crusoe Island, which reveals evidence of the campsite of an early European occupant. The most compelling evidence is the discovery of a pair of navigational dividers which could only have belonged to a ship’s master or navigator, as evidence suggests Selkirk must have been. Indeed Selkirk’s rescuer, Captain Woodes Rogers’ account of what he saw on arrival at Aguas Buenas in 1709 lists ‘some practical pieces’ and mathematical instruments amongst the few possessions that Selkirk had taken with him from the ship.

(By the way, did you know Robert Louis Stevenson was the son of a famous engineer? In fact his grandfather designed and built numerous lighthouses in Scotland, and many descendants were also engineers. Robert just like the way a good story fit together better, I guess.)

Entered on 31 October 2008 at 6:30 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Living magnets, shaped like weapons.

Researchers peering through microscopes at ancient mud have found the fossilized remains of a truly bizarre life form:

“Imagine our surprise to discover not only a fossil bloom of bacteria that make iron-oxide magnets within their cells, but also an entirely unknown set of organisms that grew magnetic crystals to giant sizes,” said Caltech postdoctoral scholar Timothy Raub, who collected the samples from an International Ocean Drilling Program drill-core storehouse at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

…

In addition to their unusually large sizes, the magnetic crystals occur in a surprising array of shapes. For example, the spearhead-like crystals have a six-sided “stalk” at one end, a bulbous middle, and a sharp, tapered tip at the other end. Once reaching a certain size, spearhead crystals grow longer but not wider, a directed growth pattern that is characteristic of most higher biological organisms.

The spearhead magnetic crystals compose a minor fraction of all of the iron-oxide crystals in the PETM clay layer. Most of the crystals have smaller sizes and special shapes, which indicate that they are fossils of magnetotactic bacteria. This group of microorganisms, long studied at Caltech by study coauthor Joseph Kirschvink, the Nico and Marilyn Van Wingen Professor of Geobiology, use magnets to orient themselves within Earth’s magnetic field, and proliferate in oxygen-poor water.

They thrived 55 million years ago, when Earth experienced a major global warming episode. Is this what we have to look forward to now?

Photos of the living magnetic death stars at Caltech’s site.

Entered on 30 October 2008 at 6:35 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Baby, It’s Cold Outside.

The LA Times reports on a new psychological study in Science that proves something we all probably take for granted – that warmth is more than skin deep:

To their surprise, they found that people who held a cup of hot coffee for 10 to 25 seconds warmed to a perfect stranger. Holding a cup of iced coffee had the opposite effect.

If you want to make a good impression, advised study author Lawrence E. Williams, a University of Colorado at Boulder assistant professor of marketing, a fresh cup of coffee “may bias the situation in your favor.”

The study, to be published today in the journal Science, is the latest to show how physical properties such as distance or temperature can unconsciously influence emotional reactions.

Entered on 29 October 2008 at 6:19 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

One Step Closer to the Spotless Mind.

Did I post this before? I have no way of knowing. New Scientist tells me (for what I hope is the first time) that researchers have found a single enzyme that can erase specific memories:

Several years ago, researchers showed that injecting mice with a drug that stops new proteins from forming can block an old memory as it is recalled.

And last year, another team found that inhibiting a specific protein can erase old memories, even without recalling them.

…

Based on previous experiments that showed that α-CaMKII was important to a cellular phenomenon thought to underlie memory formation, [Medical College of Georgia neuroscientist Joe] Tsien’s team bred mice engineered to make extra levels of the enzyme. His team could return their α-CaMKII levels to normal by giving the mice a drug that blocked only the engineered copy.

To test the effect of the change, Tsien and colleagues at the East China Normal University in Shanghai gave mice a slight shock in a training chamber while playing a loud tone.

With thoughts of a jolt fresh in their brain, mice with normal levels of α-CaMKII froze up when they returned to the chamber an hour later, while mice with boosted levels remained calm.

Even a month after the shock – enough time for mice to store the memory for good – cranking up α-CaMKII eroded all memories of the shock treatment, Tsien’s team found.

Tsien believes α-CaMKII (also called calcium/calmodulin kinase II) acts something like a detergent, weakening or dissolving the connections between brain cells that are built when a memory forms.

You can read more about the discovery at eFlux Media.

Entered on 28 October 2008 at 6:53 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Fart Stink Controls Blood Pressure.

Perhaps not heart-stoppingly foul, but, as LiveScience informs us, that distinctive smell is enough to give the circulatory system pause:

The unpleasant aroma of the gas, called hydrogen sulfide (H2S), can be a little too familiar, as it is expelled by bacteria living in the human colon and eventually makes its way, well, out.

The new research found that cells lining mice’s blood vessels naturally make the gas and this action can help keep the rodents’ blood pressure low by relaxing the blood vessels to prevent hypertension (high blood pressure). This gas is “no doubt” produced in cells lining human blood vessels too, the researchers said.

“Now that we know hydrogen sulfide’s role in regulating blood pressure, it may be possible to design drug therapies that enhance its formation as an alternative to the current methods of treatment for hypertension,” said Johns Hopkins neuroscientist Solomon H. Snyder, M.D., a co-author of the study detailed in the Oct. 24th issue of the journal Science.

Hydrogen sulfide is part of a new family of body chemicals they’re calling (and I swear I’m not making this up) gastrotransmitters.

Entered on 27 October 2008 at 14:14 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Science Art: Polycera atra, Lateral View by F.M. MacFarland.

^{Click to embiggen slightly.}

Some call them sea slugs, but they’re so striking, so sensual, that nudibranch has to be the better term.

From the U.W. Freshwater and Marine Image Bank.

Entered on 26 October 2008 at 6:05 in the Science Art file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

SONG: Now the Snow

SONG:Now the Snow. _{(To download: double right-click & “Save As”)}

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “It’s snowing on Mars”, iTwire, 30 Sep 2008, as cited in the post It falls everywhere.

ABSTRACT: The Phoenix lander is lonely. (It’s also dying as I write this, but then again, so are we all.) It’s very far from home in a very empty place with not a lot to look at except that which one can see under a microscope. And yet it looks around. And then there’s snow. I’m well aware that Mars isn’t really as red as all that, but “red, red sand” has a nice resonance with The Waste Land, and makes the image somehow complete. White snow. Red sand. Endless plains. It occurs to me, too, that snowfall on Mars must look different than it does on Earth – Mars exerts slightly less gravitational force, and the atmosphere is much more diffuse, so I imagine snow falls slowly, in smaller circles than what we’re used to.

I recorded this song with a guitar and a ukulele. There’s some pitch-shifting upward, into the fragile, icy registers. I added some sine waves from a tone generator and made a loop from a sonar sound effect – both had a kind of NASA transmission feel to me. And I whispered. I tried to make this sound like Things In Herds, but it came out more like Philip Glass. I’m not complaining. It does what I wanted it to do.

Entered on 23 October 2008 at 6:24 in the Songs file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Glowing Proteins; Less-Than-Glowing Prospects?

Recently, Dr. Roger Tsien earned a Nobel prize for his work in creating a stunning array of colorful, glowing proteins. Not only are they, like, totally psychedelically intense, man, but they’re also very useful in tagging cells and seeing how they interact with things in their environment – like drugs, or viruses, or toxins.

CBS:
Tsien developed GFP-like proteins that produced a variety of colors so that multiple proteins or cells can be followed simultaneously.

“In one spectacular experiment, researchers succeeded in tagging different nerve cells in the brain of a mouse with a kaleidoscope of colors,” the Nobel citation said. The experiment was called the “brainbow.”

…

“This is a technology that has literally transformed medical research,” said Dr. John Frangioni, an associate professor of medicine and radiology at Harvard Medical School. “For the first time, scientists could study both genes and proteins in living cells and in living animals.”

But Tsien didn’t create his glowing proteins all by himself. He (and his two co-laureates) credit their success to Dr. Douglas Prasher, the man who first extracted the glowing protein from bioluminescent jellyfish. You might expect Prasher to be receiving the news of the Nobel in his chemistry lab, surrounded by enthusiastic lab assistants… or maybe in the workshops at NASA, where he worked until 2006.

When Prasher, a family man who’d just taken out a large mortgage, was laid off by the ailing space agency.

So he received word of his Nobel-inspiring work at his new job, driving a shuttle at an Alabama car dealership:

CNet:
He could have kept his work to himself. Instead, he mailed a couple of test tubes to Roger Tsien at the University of California and Martin Chalfie at Columbia University.

“It was more important to me to hand over the tool to other scientists with the funding than to have individual glory,” Prasher told London’s Daily Mail.

So how did he end up driving those nice folks in Alabama to and from Bill Penney’s excellent and, no doubt, munificent Toyota dealership?

“After I gave up my work on the jellyfish, I eventually found another dream job, with the U.S. space program, but I was laid off in 2006 and I haven’t been able to get another scientific position,” Prasher said.

There is something wrong with the big picture here.

Entered on 22 October 2008 at 6:35 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Big Stick.

Entolomologists working in Borneo have found what they believe to be world’s longest insect:

PhysOrg writes:
The specimen was found by a local villager and handed to Malaysian amateur naturalist Datuk Chan Chew Lun in 1989, according to Philip Bragg, who formally identified the insect in this month’s issue of peer-reviewed journal Zootaxa. The insect was named Phobaeticus chani, or “Chan’s megastick,” in Chan’s honor.

It’s 22 inches long, counting the legs, or 14 inches if you’re just counting the body. It looks like bamboo… until you see it start moving.

Entered on 21 October 2008 at 6:19 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Satellite Discovers Pyramid at Nazca.

You may have caught this on MSNBC, but Italian researchers studying imagery from the Quickbird satellite discovered a 97,000-square-foot pyramid on the banks of Peru’s Nazca river:

The discovery doesn’t come as a surprise to archaeologists, since some 40 mounds at Cahuachi are believed to contain the remains of important structures.

“We know that many buildings are still buried under Cahuachi’s sands, but until now, it was almost impossible to exactly locate them and detect their shape from an aerial view,” Masini told Discovery News. “The biggest problem was the very low contrast between adobe, which is sun-dried earth, and the background subsoil.”

Cahuachi is the best-known site of the Nazca civilization, which flourished in Peru between the first century B.C. and the fifth century A.D. and slid into oblivion by the time the Inca Empire rose to dominate the Andes.

So, by using these satellite scans, we could possibly finally figure out what the deal is with the famous lines.

Entered on 20 October 2008 at 6:27 in the Science file | 1 Observation |  Print