Category Archives: Science

A 20 Year Old Trapped In A 5 Year Old’s Body

We all know an adult who absolutely refuses to grow up, who doesn’t take responsibility for their actions, or who relies on others for basic necessities.  We normally say that they are trapped in a younger person’s body.  Well, here’s the story of a woman (girl?) who is 20 years old but has not grown at all since age 5.  She had all the normal functionality of a 5 year old.  Not the mutant power I would want to have.

Her name is Brooke Greenberg and she hasn’t had a terribly good life.  She’s had strokes, tumors, and been in a coma, but she’s survived this long.  Scientists are now studying her genome to see if they can figure out what is causing this mysterious lack of maturation.  They have already ruled out any hormonal problems.

This leads to some fascinating questions.  Can a perpetual 5 year old die of old age?  Will Brooke live forever?  Is what is wrong with her the answer to immortality for everybody?  Will we soon be able to choose an age to stop aging?  What would the implications of such technology?  Would we allow parents to keep a perpetual 5 year old?  What age would you have to be to make a decision like that?  18?  21? 40?  Would we become a world of perpetual 21 year olds?

It is not often that you can point to someone and say they are unique.  Brooke certainly qualifies.  If scientists can crack her mystery, she may go down as the most important person who ever lived.

Oh, Poo

This is certainly interesting.  You can send a company a fecal sample (you can also to oral or skin samples for those of you that are scatologically squeamish) and they will tell you what your gut flora is composed of and how it compares to everyone else who participates.  Not only that, but you will help them understand how dietary and lifestyle choices affect gut flora.  That is pretty cool.

If anyone that knows me is interested in participating, let me know.  The more you order, the less it costs.  I’ll order the kits and you can pay me.  Then we can brag about who has the best shit.  It’ll be fun.  And remember, it’s for science!

The Most Gorgeous Space Picture of 2012

Given that Saturn is farther from the sun than us, we don’t really get the opportunity to see what it looks like from the other side.  You know, with the sun in the background?  Unless, that is, we happen to send a spacecraft to Saturn.  Then you get pictures like this.  You want to click that link.  Then you want to click to get the large version of the picture.  Yowza!

Being able to get breathtakingly gorgeous pictures from spacecraft is a valuable side benefit to space exploration.  It humanizes the experience in ways that hard scientific study can’t.  But hard scientific study is the real mission of all those crafts we shoot up into the heavens.  Every time you look at one of these pictures, you should be reminded of it.  Pictures of the universe are being beamed back to Earth from hundreds of thousands of miles away but it’s only a microcosm of the information that these vehicles are relaying.  The rest is simply data to help us figure out how the universe works.  You know, science.  And it’s in danger of being drastically cut.  More the shame to us if we allow that to happen.

Why Do We Lie To Students?

Minute Physics points us to a fact that I’ve always wondered about.  Why do we lie to young physics students?

 

I recognize that general relativity is not the easiest thing for an 8th grader to wrap her head around, but why not tell the truth?  Why not preface everything with “What I am about to teach you is a lie.  It just happens to be a good enough lie that it will work for most of what you will have to do.”?  And then at least show them the truth.  Or at least the truth as we know it now.  (Come on, unified field theory!)  Having to unwind years of “truth” can be very difficult.  Letting kids know that the truth is out there even if we don’t teach it to them in full now could lead to a much brighter scientific future for the world!

Word of the Day: Bacteriophage

Today’s word of the day is brought to you by Emilia Czysczcon, a Purdue University bioengineering student who collected some mud from a cave for a project and ended up discovering a new bacteriophage virus.

A bacteriophage (a.k.a. phage) is a virus that invades bacteria and replicates itself thereby killing the bacteria.  This may have huge implications for medicine.  Despite being a virus, it is completely harmless to humans.  It may, however, be used to attack bacteria that is harmful to humans, like tuberculosis.  It sounds really weird, but we should be able to inject ourselves with an engineered virus to attack a harmful bacteria in our system.

The science behind bacteriophages is either really advanced or in its infancy depending on who you ask.  Phage therapy was showing good promise in Russia before the advent of the antibiotic.  With the emergence of superbugs that are immune to antibiotics, though, you can expect phage therapy treatments to start becoming popular once again.  And we will have scientists like Emilia to lead the way!

This S**t’s About to Get Interstellar

Remember Voyager 1?  Launched in 1977 to explore Jupiter and Saturn and completing her mission back in 1980, she’s still truckin’ to the edges of the solar system and sending back valuable data.  She is the little spacecraft that could.

NASA recently announced that Voyager 1 could be about to leave the outer limits of our solar system.  As Phil Plait points out, that would make humans an interstellar species.  Wowzers!  Now, this could still take a few years, but we are enticingly close.

Just how far from Earth is Voyager 1?  An astounding 1.823x10^{10} kilometers away!  At that distance, it takes a signal from Voyager 1 almost 18 hours to reach Earth.

Don’t get your hopes up on Voyager 1 travelling to another star, though.  The closest star, Proxima Centauri,  is 4.2 light years away and it would take Voyager 17,565 years to travel just one light year at its present speed.  And Voyager isn’t heading that direction.

It’s a great big universe and we’re all really puny.

Adventures in Non-Euclidean Geometry

My prior post on the shape of the universe got me thinking about spheres.  Spheres are difficult shapes to wrap your head around.  Luckily, we don’t really have to worry about them that often.  Unless, that is, you happen to be a pilot.

Most of our interaction with the concept of the Earth is in the form of a map.  Maps literally warp our view of the Earth, though.  They are a Euclidean representation of a non-Euclidean space.  Three dimensions projected onto a two dimensional object.  This works fine for extremely small sections of the globe like if you wanted to travel from one state to an adjoining state, just like Newtonian physics is fine for constant gravity and much slower than light velocities.  For larger sections of the globe, though, this will lead you to make very poor travelling decisions if you are using a map.  Those straight lines on the map are not straight on a globe.  No lines are straight on a globe.

How do pilots get around this?  Enter the Great Circle.  The math behind a great circle calculation is pretty complicated so let’s ignore the math for another day and wrap our head around the idea of a great circle.

In order to find the shortest path from point A to point B on a globe, you must find the great circle solution.  The great circle solution is simply the one circle that you can draw around the globe that does two things.  First, it must go through both point A and Point B.  And second, the circle must bisect the exact center of the globe.  That circle will have a unique property.  It’s diameter will always be the diameter of the globe.

The most obvious example of a great circle is the Equator.  If you wanted to travel the shortest distance between two points on the Equator, you’d always travel along the Equator to get there.  That is the only latitude line on Earth that can be a great circle solution.

Less obvious of an example is travelling from the North Pole to anywhere south.  No matter where you want to travel to, your great circle solution will travel through the South Pole.  This means that you will always travel along one of the longitudinal lines to get to your destination.  That’s right, every line of longitude is a great circle solution.

Now that you have two points on a sphere and you know the sphere’s diameter, you have everything that you need to figure out the great circle route.  Now all you have to do is the math.

Shutting That Whole Thing Down

Last night, I had a dream.  Either this was one of those incredibly simple dreams or I only remember the simple part.  In it, I was rinsing my mouth out.  That’s it.  That was the entire dream.  Or almost the entire dream.  You see, then in my dream, I spit.  And that woke me up.  Because I had just spit all over my arm.

Now, unlike during a rape, this is a legitimate time when the body is supposed to shut that whole thing down.  Me spitting on myself, sleepwalking, jumping out a window; none of these things are supposed to happen when you’re asleep.  The body, it turns out, doesn’t always get things right.  During rapid eye movement (or REM) sleep, the body releases neurotransmitters that prevent the muscles from acting out all those fun dreams. REM sleep, though, is a stage of sleep that happens just before and just after waking.  The boundaries can get a little blurry sometimes.  So if you go from REM sleep to waking at a particularly jarring moment in your dream, you can actually act out that part.  In the case of this dream, I spit on myself.

I had a long, complicated dream once where I was getting chased by a werewolf and it ended with him grabbing me by the shoulder from behind and spinning me around.  I woke up at that moment with a pain in my shoulder.  I didn’t think much of it and went back to sleep.  The next morning, I woke up and went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror and I had these three scratch marks along the front of my shoulder.  The werewolf was real!  Or I had just scratched myself.  Definitely one of the two.

What is the Shape of the Universe?

One of the hardest things for us mere mortals to wrap our heads around is the universe.  It’s huge!  There aren’t the adjectives to describe how big the universe is.  Take all the adjectives you know to describe something large and then multiply them all together and maybe you’ll have an inkling about how big the universe is.

But if the universe is this big…thing…surely it must have a shape, right?  Right!  Wikipedia has a decent description of the possible shapes of the universe.  Basically, there are three theoretical shapes of the universe: flat, spherical, and hyperbolic.  It’s still pretty confusing, though.  Let me see if I can make it a little easier to understand.

We are pretty sure that the universe is flat.  Using the word “flat” doesn’t really mean anything when we use our normal definition of “flat”, though.  After all, how can a very obviously three dimensional world be considered flat.  The trick is we’re not really talking about the shape.  We’re talking about the curvature of space.

Time for a geometry lesson.  Draw three points on a sheet of paper.  Connect them to form a triangle.  If you took a protractor and measured the three angles inside the triangle, they would add up to 180 degrees.  Now, take that same principle and apply it to the universe!  First, freeze time.  Then, pick any three stars that you can see.  Connect them to form a triangle.  If you took the universe’s largest protractor and measured the three angles inside the triangle, you’d come up with 180 degrees.  Flat!  All experimentation so far points to this holding for any three points in the universe.

“Well, duh!  How else would the universe be shaped?”, you ask?  A flat universe is completely understandable to most people with a high school education.  That’s because everyone has been exposed to Euclidean geometry.  The other two theoretical shapes are non-Euclidean.

But what does non-Euclidean geometry even mean?  Going back to our triangle example, a Euclidean triangle will always have it’s internal angles add up to 180 degrees.  A non-Euclidean triangle will NOT ALWAYS add up to 180 degrees.  (Sorry, complete aside here.  Euclidean starts with a vowel but saying “an Euclidean” just sounds weird.  That is all.)

The easiest way to wrap your head around this is to think of a sphere.  Take whatever ball you have handy and pick three points.  Draw lines again to form a triangle.  You have just created a non-Euclidean triangle in curved space!

Let’s take a very specific example using the Earth.  Pretend you’re on the equator.  Start walking north until you’re at the north pole.  Turn 90 degrees to your left.  Whoa, wait a second!  You’re facing directly south now!  That can’t be right.  But it is!  Ok, fine, you’re flexible, so start walking south again.  You will soon find yourself right back at the equator.  Turn 90 degrees left again and you’ll be facing east.  Walk east some distance along the equator until you reach your starting point.  Without a doubt, you just created an equilateral  triangle.  But wait, 90 + 90 + 90 = 270 degrees!  Welcome to non-Euclidean space.  So when they say there is a spherical universe, they mean that even though it may appear that you are walking a straight line, you are really walking a slightly curved line.

Despite the fact that all signs point to a flat universe, I find the idea of a spherical universe very attractive.  Imagine being able to walk across the universe in a straight line and eventually ending up right back were you started, just like if you walked along the equator and end up back where you started!  Of course, you’d have to not only freeze time, but you’d also have to stop gravity in order to do that.  It’s also possible that I’m just talking out my ass.

Though I understand the idea of a hyperbolic universe, words fail me in trying to describe it.  Basically, a hyperbolic universe is a strange combination of a flat universe and a spherical universe.  It ends up looking somewhat like a horse’s saddle.  Space is still curved, but it’s not curved uniformly like it would be on a sphere.  So when you are traveling along one of the sides of a triangle, it is possible that you can go from bending in one direction to bending in another and the line ends up looking more line an ‘S’.

The universe is a crazy, fun place!  Hopefully, this helps you guys understand it a little better.

What are Anthropologists Up to These Days?

Do you ever wonder what anthropologists are doing for fun these days?  Sure, there are still plenty of ancient cultures to figure out and there are plenty of modern “primitive” cultures to study, but that’s their bread and butter.  No one would do a double-take if an anthropologist said at a party, “I’m studying the ancient Mayans’ socio-cultural relationship with the llama.”, even if they had no idea what it actually meant.

It turns out that modern anthropologists mostly study much closer to home.  One anthropologist, Gabriella Coleman, spent three years studying the mysterious hackers of the San Francisco Bay Area.  Here’s the most interesting bit:

Wired: It’s hard to tell a good geek joke because there are all these layers to them.

Often, the humor you talk about is used as a way of identifying like-minded people. I think that a lot of people from that community spend a lot of their time not being understood or talking to people who don’t care about the same things that they do. So they need a shorthand to figure out, “OK we can have a conversation.”

It’s actually a hack that allows you to connect with people who it’s worth your time time talk to.

Coleman: One of the things in that chapter that I argue is that hackers, first of all, are good at joking because to hack is to rearrange form. That’s what jokes are. That’s a pragmatic utilitarian argument, but they really culturally value it for all sorts of reasons.

Even a wonderful piece of code is up for debate, but a very funny joke, it gets affirmed with laughter and then it’s kind of indisputable.

How cool would that be?  Following a sub-culture around for a few years and figuring out how they work.  Anthropology would be an awesome job to have if I were independently wealthy.  Just sitting and studying people.  Though, I guess I do quite a bit of that now.