Elf Sternberg

A clever drug named DRACO has destroyed all viruses to which it was exposed in laboratory settings. The drug is a clever nanomechanical marvel: it recognizes cells in a unique state caused only by the presence of a virus, the manufacture of double-stranded RNA, the stuff viruses use to take over the cell's biochemistry, and releases the chemical signal for immediate cell death, causing the cell to self-destruct before the virus can begin reproduction.

DRACO is a general-purpose antiviral. It will kill every virus in the body in order to do its work. DRACO has worked well in mice, destroying all traces of a target influenza virus.

When we started mucking about with antibiotics, we discovered that there were nasty side-effects to killing every bacterium in your gut. Given that viruses are even more intimate with our biochemistry-- our cells show aeons of viri tinkering, genes inserted into us from other vectors-- I predict that killing off every virus in the body will also have particularly nasty side effects.

I would be nice if something this clever and obvious could be found to target bacteria. We need new antibiotics, and soon.

The Japanese have announced that they're putting an orbital space maser up in the next decade. A maser is a laser that transmits microwaves. The idea is that the orbital station will collect solar energy and convert it to a maser form, which will then be beamed down to a collection station and converted to electricity.

What happens when the ray gets off course? The Japanese will tell you that can't happen; the beam will shut down if it strays, but what if it does? Well, if it's aimed at a city, here's what happens: everyone within the radius of the beam will first feel very hot, and a clicking noise will happen in their ears. The liquid in the ears is highly susceptible to microwaves. The feeling of heat will rise, but there will be little pain. Then they'll go blind as the soft liquids in their eyeballs, a liquid highly exposed to the environment, solidifies like egg yolk. Finally, the pain will reach your brain centers shortly before your knees and elbows explode in blasts of steam and you collapse to the ground, your bone-shielded brain finally registering the damage done before it too ruptures.

"Look at all those proteins and fucking subunits all joining up and shit. Fuck. You know what else does that? FUCKING VOLTRON!"

ZOMG! SCIENCE!. Some science-lovin' graphic designer's pet project, and awesome in the extreme. Obviously, lots of profanity.

Ars Technica has an awesome takedown of the methodology, leading to the conclusion that the study is "suggestive" but hardly definitive. I have to agree with the reporter that the photo of the lab students looking "sciency" was indeed awesome, however.

I'm reminded of this comic, only backward.

A long time ago, I wrote the "Intelligent Grappling FAQ," in which I proposed that gravity was such an important force in the universe that it could never have happened by chance, and that "gravity" was a weasel-term physicists used to confuse the public. "Gravity only attempts to describe what objects do. It does not explain WHY they do them. It is that challenge that Intelligent Grappling is intended to meet." Later, I added:

6. In order to accept Intelligent Design, must I accept Intelligent Grappling as well?

YES. Intelligent Design says that there is a non-naturalistic, conscious designer at work at the biological level. Intelligent Grappling says that there is a non-naturalistic, conscious grappler at the physicial level. Accepting a naturalistic explanation for one phenomenon but a non-naturalistic explanation for another is a philosophically corrupt position and we do not advocate it.

While this is an important point at the end, and the key philosophical point (if you accept a tinkerer god in biology, you must accept one in physics), I never thought that the ID folks would be so stupid as to actually adopt it.

I was wrong:

Everything is made of atoms. Atoms have no means to relocate themselves in a rapid and precise way to build any living thing. To make an average adult's replacement red blood cells alone, over 4900 quadrillion atoms per second must be sorted from the food we have eaten, selected, assembled, and delivered to our blood stream; that is every second of every day of our adult life.

Muahahahaha! It's not just biology, it's every physical reaction that requires constant, divine intervention in order to happen with the accuracy necessary to keep us alive. This is divine providence made creepy: you're not just a bag of wet meat, you're a bag of wet meat that would fall apart instantly if it weren't for the angels holding you together.

I had been ambivalent about the Lucy exhibit from the beginning. I was one of those people who signed the petition last year begging the University of Houston to cancel the Lucy tour on the grounds that Lucy was a research specimen too fragile and too rare to have wandering the world. I know that museum-quality shippers are the best in the business, but accidents happen. The petitioners (PZ Myers among them) have reversed themselves on any boycotts because the exhibition was doing so poorly we feared it would send a signal to museums around the world that science displays were not financially viable. So off we went.

After picking up Kouryou-chan from her dance class, the three of us (Yamaraashi-chan was at her mother's and had indicated she wasn't interested anyway) stopped for a quick teriyaki dinner and then off to the museum. The weather outside was very cold, and waiting in line for 15 minutes was an exercise in staying warm. The line was quite long, and the elderly gentleman in front of us joked about how Kouryou-chan was not much bigger than Lucy herself.

The Empire of Auxum

What they don't emphasize in much of the material is the deal made between the government of Ethiopia, which owns Lucy, and the University of Houston: in order to get Lucy into the exhibit, at least half the exhibit had to be on the history and culture of Ethiopia. This annoyed Omaha, but to tell the truth I was fascinated by it. I'd only barely ever heard of The Auxum Empire before, although contemporaries of it describe is being as large, as educated, and as influential over its region as Imperial China or Imperial Rome. Reading up on the history, I become even more impressed, so much so that I strongly suspect it has disappeared from the mainstream historical memory (when was the last The History Channel did a show on it?) because, in case we forgot, those people were black. (A search of Discovery.com shows that the only mentions of Auxum are in relation to their claim to have the original Ark of the Covenant. Paging Doctor Jones...)

Minor parenting fail

Kouryou-chan wandered through the exhibit with a sketchbook in hand, drawing what she could. I saw another woman in her mid-20s doing the same thing, and introduced her and Kouryou-chan. My intent was to validate to Kouryou-chan what she was doing; instead, she became distraught that her drawings weren't nearly as good. She kept at it with our encouragement, but some of the fire had gone out of her.

An interesting attribution

There was a section on the religions of Ethiopia, and one display caught my eye. It was a panel on Ge'ez, the written language of worship used through Ethiopia. The audio portion was from a university professor, but the image of a page of Ge'ez had this attribution on the bottom of it: Written Ge'ez sample provided by Wikipedia. That's an interesting attribution.

AD and BC vs. CE and BCE

As I walked through the section on Ethiopian Christianity, I heard three women talking, and one of them said "A lot of these say CE. Those back there said BCE. What does that mean?" I interrupted to explain that they meant "Common Era" and "Before the Common Era," and were the same as "AD" and "BC." Archaeologists use CE and BCE these days mostly because Jewish and Islamic antiquarians preferred the religiously neutral terms to the Christianity-oriented Anno Domini. "Oh," said one woman with a bit of a huff, "It's all just political correctness."

I couldn't disagree with her.

The Paleoanthropology part

We made our into the Paleoanthropology section. There was a woman from the center there with the unenviable task of explaining how morphology lets us understand and place the bones found during evolutionary history. The questions were coming from an older couple who didn't seem to grasp both the undirectness of the process and the sheer idea of deep time.

After hearing and reading a brief discussion of the methods of paleoanthropology, we walked up a broad, darkened ramp to the Lucy exhibit proper, and in the middle of the ramp, each under its own light, was a skull. Each skull was from a different ancestor, showing where we had pieces to fit into the puzzle and where we had reconstructed the skull from the best available evidence. The skull of Heidelbergensis was especially menacing with its almost human shape but for the emphasized, almost angry brow. Striation from the fossilization process made it seem even more dangerous.

We gots Hobbitses

At the midpoint of the ramp it turned back toward the secure room, and on the wall against the back of the landing was a display of the best tree of descent we had for genus Homo. I pointed to the display on the right and pointed out Homo florensis, telling Kouryou-chan "Those are Hobbits."

"They are?" she said, her eyes going wide. Omaha has been reading The Lord of the Rings aloud to Kouryou-chan for some weeks now. I explained that florensis was an offshoot of human descent that had died out half a million years ago, but the examples we had of them were short and stout, so the researchers nicknamed them "Hobbits." They weren't really, of course, but that was the nickname that had stuck.

The Lucy Room

We then went into the Lucy room. This was a round room with two guards in it to let you know they were serious about protecting her. Three-quarters of the wall had been dedicated to a massive mural showing humanity's slow emergence from primitive apes all the way up to H. sapiens. In the center a box held what remained of Lucy, and two upright reconstructions, one showing the bones in relative positions, the other a complete reconstruction showing a best-guess as to what Lucy might have looked like.

Kouryou-chan asked to be picked up so she could be toe-to-toe with Lucy. "She is smaller than I am!" she said, and immediately wrote that down.

A group of men had formed around the Lucy box itself, and were discussing the features that caused scientists to believe she stood upright. One they missed was the muscle grooves on the pelvis itself, which indicated that it was used for balancing and standing, not just for powered forward locomotion, as we find on a chimp. There was an animated display downstairs showing just that, and I even mimed the difference. "Must have missed that," the younger guy said. It was actually a fun kind of conversation.

There really isn't all that much to Lucy herself. A handful of bones reverently laid out in a box barely four feet long. They're fascinating in the way all very old things like this are fascinating, a glimpse of our past, but I needed a concrete, founded context it which to make sense of it all, and it was the surrounding materials, the explanations, the way evidence and conjecture fit together affirmatively, that made the whole display interesting. Not the bones themselves.

One of the things that makes as show like this fun is eavesdropping on other conversations. I listened to two women talking about the Lucy display and a friend of theirs whom they couldn't convince to come. "She's very religious," one said. "We were playing Apples-to-Apples, and when the greet card read 'Things That Don't Exist,' she put down 'Fossils.' I think... I think she knows they do exist, but she can't figure out how to fit God into that knowledge so she has to, I think, act like they don't."

One thing I liked most about the the "emergence of man" display was the way it worded the section on modern man. Written with a wry tone as if telling space aliens about us, it mentioned that Homo sapiens has occupied nearly its entire globe and may even sometimes be found in orbit. "This species," it went on to say, "has developed to the point where it has its own specialists, called paleonanthropologists, who look back on its history and attempt to discern its own past. It is the only species on Earth to do so." The last panel contained a mirror.

Kouryou-chan was exhausted, her feet aching and tired, by the time we got back to the car. It was already past her bedtime. All in all, the trip was completely worth the time and money.

I had the pleasure recently of watching the PBS Nova episode Judgement Day: Intelligent Design on Trial. The show was quite good. If you google for it, you'll find a lot of complaints about it, most of which whine that it was "biased in favor of evolution" and "didn't show the science behind ID."

Well, there's a reason for that: there is no science behind ID, and reality itself is biased in favor of evolution.

One of the things that annoyed me was the explanation of Tiktaalik. In 1999, paleontologists discovered a plain in Northern Canada that exposed a rock bed, the best date of which was exactly between the era of the fish and the emergence of the amphibians. Evolutionary theory predicted that in that rock bed one might find a transitional fossil: something with characteristics of both a fish and an amphibian.

It took four years, but they did find something like that: Tiktaalik, a fish with hefty fins allowing for motility on muddy surfaces but, more importantly, a broad head with forward-pointing eyes, very un-fish-like. The explanation for why Tiktaalik was an excellent "transitional fossil" between fish and amphibian was quite solid.

And yet, something important was missing from the discussion of Tiktaalik. Something vital.

One of the most common statements you hear from the "intelligent design" side of the argument is that, to quote Of Pandas and People, "Intelligent Design means that various forms of life began abruptly - through an intelligent agency, with their distinctive features already intact-- fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, and wings, etc." A bizarre result of this is that the Intelligent Design yahoos, the useful idiots at the bottom of the ID intellectual foodchain, frequently write screeds (both in small-town punditocracies as well as simple letters to the editor) asking of what use is half a wing, or the partial evolution of a feather?

With questions like this, the ID people attempt to argue that there's no such thing as a "transitional" fossil form. You can't have a species halfway between a dinosaur and a bird, because, to quote from that same atrocious article I linked to above, "Imagine such a species surviving in such a miserable state over many millions of years waiting for fully-formed wings to evolve."

Tiktaalik is important not because it's a transitional form, but because it's a highly successful organism in its own right. By having a more robust undercarriage, and by having both eyes in the front, it was significantly more capable as a large organism of dragging itself to niches that prior to its emergence had probably only ever been visited by insects. The front-mounted eyes suggested that, although it had not left its icthyian nature completely behind, it was already preying upon insects its more fish-like ancestors could never have reached, and avoiding predators that were preying upon its ancestors.

Tiktaalik wasn't busy waiting for fully-formed legs to evolve. And it wasn't "miserable." (That's a value judgement, by the way. Nature Doesn't Care what we think about its day-to-day operation.) Tiktaalik ancestors didn't hope to someday have legs. Some of Tiktaalik's ancestors had stronger fins than others, and those that did found it advantageous to pull themselves up into the mud and snag a few tasty bugs. They lived longer; they had more children; stronger fins were selected. The same with the eyes; those with eyes a millimeter closer to the front found binocular vision advantageous in snagging said tasty bugs. That characteristic was selected for. Nature doesn't "want" or "wait" for these things; they happen as a consequence of living things doing what living things do within a constantly changing environment like our Earth.

While Tiktaalik happened, other fish remained in the sea, eating and breeding and following their own reproductively successful strategies. Tiktaalik found a new way to exploit a new niche. It didn't crowd out an old niche; it didn't supersede the other fishes. (Another popular whine among Creationists is "If man evolved from apes, why are there still apes?" The common and excused answer is that we didn't want the apes' niche. The horrific and true answer is that we do want their niche, we're just not done killing them all off. Evolution, even the "bad" aspects of it (again, note that's a human value judgement and Nature Doesn't Care), takes time.)

I would really have liked Nova to mention Tiktaalik's existence as a highly successful organism optimized for a specialized niche in its time and place. Tiktaalik's existence points out the vicious deception of two of the the Cdesign Proponentsists's favorite stupidities, and it would have been nice to have a biologist put the screws to ID's thumbs even harder.

PET Scanning the Female Orgasm

As the women were stimulated to orgasm, activity rose in one sensory part of the brain, called the primary somatosensory cortex, but fell in the amygdala and hippocampus, areas involved in alertness and anxiety. During actual orgasm, activity fell in many more areas of the brain, including the prefrontal cortex, compared with the resting state... Only one small part of the brain, in the cerebellum, was more active during female orgasm. The cerebellum is normally associated with coordinating movement, though there is also some evidence that it helps regulate emotions.

If you're not a ScienceBlogs subscriber, you should be!

Creativity Determines Sexual Success

"It could also be that very creative types lead a bohemian lifestyle and tend to act on more sexual impulses and opportunities, often purely for experience's sake, than the average person would. Moreover, it's common to find that this sexual behaviour is tolerated in creative people. Partners, even long-term ones, are less likely to expect loyalty and fidelity from them."

Damn, I'm behind on my quota or something. Either that or I'm losing braincells.