Stories tagged Life Science
Bulletproof woman ignored by biased media
in Life Science, Structure of Matter, Flow of Matter and Energy, and Human Organism
They stop bullets: But only—ONLY—after the bullets have had a go at Croatian supercheek.
Courtesy chriskeefeThe news item goes thusly: a Croatian couple gets on the wrong side of a gunfight (the middle side) and is fired upon. A bullet ricochets off the woman’s cheek, and hits her husband in the mouth, striking his false teeth. The man spits out the bullet, terrifying his attacker, who makes like a banana and splits. The couple, uninjured, makes major news outlets. Headline: “Man catches bullet in teeth.”
Indeed, the guy sort of did catch a bullet in the teeth. And I won’t argue that that isn’t kind of awesome, but the local police believe that things worked out so swimmingly for the false-toothed man because the bullet lost so much of its speed after hitting his wife in the cheek. Remember, the woman was uninjured…
What are Croatian women made of? There’s the real story: Bullet bounces harmlessly off woman’s face.
So… Science blog, science blog… Well, we have firearms physics and ballistics in general, as well as material sciences. The composition of the teeth, of course, is relevant, but also what could that cheek be made of that it could repel a bullet so well? I initially assumed that she might be a Kevlar woman, but I believe Kevlar is intended to absorb the force of a projectile to bring it to a stop, and I’m not sure if Kevlar ricochets are common. The cheek may be composed of a similarly impenetrable, yet more bouncy, material.
While we’re here, let us consider this compilation of high-speed footage of various objects being shot. Note that none of the objects are cheeks or teeth, as the results are apparently much less dramatic.
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Take your time and think it through, guy: But don't worry about the MMR vaccine.
Courtesy paul+photos=moodyLet’s be careful how we put our words together, everybody.
I mean, when I get dressed in the morning, I know that I want to get underwear, socks, pants, and at least one shirt onto my body. However, if I were to forgo all rules of dressing order and arrangement, I might give off the wrong message: i.e., I’m crazy, and possibly dangerous to be around.
Why would I take any less care with my precious, precious words?
Because I’m pretty lazy, I don’t generally read most (any) of the articles on science that I come across every day. Instead, I read only the headlines. Or, better yet, I have them read to me—that way I can rest my head on my desk while I’m taking in the news. It’s very important, then, that all headlines are clearly worded. Otherwise I could dictate a Science Buzz post that is even more factually inaccurate than my posts normally are. That’s dangerous territory.
“Survey confirms parents’ fears, confusion over autism.”
I looked at that headline, saw the word “vaccine” in the body, and thought, “Oh, snap! Vaccines do cause autism?” Because, that’s what parents’ are afraid of, after all.
Nope. The existence of parents’ fear and confusion over autism is what has been confirmed here. The actual connection between vaccinations and autism remains non-existent.
A recent study found that a significant percentage of parents still believe that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine can cause autism, or are at least uncertain and fearful that such a connection does exist. This is despite the fact that scientists can establish no connection between early childhood vaccines and the development of autism.
The fear that early childhood vaccinations lead to an increased risk for autism originated from a 1998 study that linked autism to a particular mercury-based preservative in the MMR vaccine. It was later revealed that the study was based on bad research, and it was retracted by most of its authors and disowned by its publisher. In 2001, manufacturers of the MMR vaccine began removing the preservative from their vaccines anyway—and that’s probably not a bad thing, but it hasn’t lead to any decrease in the occurrence of autism. And people are still worried about the vaccine anyway.
This confusion wouldn’t be such a big deal, except that the better-safe-than-sorry attitude towards not having children vaccinated has lead to a resurgence in diseases that had essentially been eradicated in areas where the vaccine is available.
Science Buzz has had a lot of conversation on this subject already, and, if you’re interested, I’d recommend you check out some of the other posts on autism and vaccinations.
What on earth am I supposed to do with this thing?: A pterosaur considers his situation.
Courtesy John ConwayPaleontology, y’all, paleontology. We’ve got these bones, these fossilized bones. And they’re nice bones, don’t get me wrong, but sometimes they leave a little to be desired when it comes to reconstructing the nitty gritty and sticky details of what living dinosaurs (and pterosaurs, ichthyosaurs, mosasaurs, therapsids, etc) were actually like. A skeleton can give us a good idea of a creature’s general shape; it can show where the muscles went (more or less), what sort of food it ate, how it probably moved—that kind of thing. But how did they behave? What color were they? Exactly how strong were they? There are a whole slew of questions that get to be a little tricky.
So, how do paleontologists go about answering these questions? They get creative, they study all the tiniest details of the fossils, and, sometimes, they look to living animals for analogy—that is to say, if an animal alive today that lives in a similar environment to that of an extinct animal, and has a similar body type to the extinct animal, you might be able to base knowledge of the extinct animal on what you know of the living animal.
It’s a valuable avenue of study, but dinosaurs and their ilk were pretty different, after all, so how far do you think can we take analogies to living creatures?
And now on to the news item.
A Japanese researcher has opened up his sass-box and gotten all up in the faces of paleontologists around the world. Pterosaur specialist paleontologists are particularly fired up, and they’re a dangerous bunch. “Peer review” among pterosaur specialists, as I understand it, involves switchblades, and the majority of the community sports eye-patches.
This scientist, Katsufumi Sato of the University of Tokyo, is saying that pterosaurs (all of the huge extinct flying reptiles) probably maybe couldn’t actually, you know… fly.
Oh no you di’en’t!
Says Sato: Yes, yes I did. Specifically, what the scientist did was place accelerometers on the wings of a couple dozen sea birds on the Crozet Islands. The accelerometers measured, more or less, the flapping force and speed of the birds’ wings.
Among the birds studied were wandering albatrosses, which have the largest wingspans of any living birds. Large seabirds like this have often been used as analogies for pterosaurs for their somewhat similar body shapes. Many pterosaurs probably lived in a similar habitat to modern seabirds as well.
Albatrosses fly by riding shifting wind currents, and by flapping their wings when the wind isn’t suitable, or is absent entirely. Sato found that the seabirds he studied have two flapping speeds, a faster speed for taking off, and a slower speed for staying aloft in the absence of wind. He also noticed that, as this flapping speed is limited by the birds’ strength, it decreases in heavier birds with longer wings.
According to the calculations Sato based off of this data, birds (or pterosaurs) weighing more than about 90 pounds would be unable to fly without using wind currents—they simply wouldn’t be able to flap their wings fast enough to stay in the air. There were certainly pterosaurs that size and much smaller, but a lot of flying reptiles were probably a great deal larger than that (a very conservative estimate for the quetzalcoatlus, for example, would have it weighing around 220 pounds).
The article I read on this research doesn’t get into Sato’s hypothesis much more than that, but I’d assume that this means that larger pterosaurs would then also be unable to take off from anywhere other than, say, a cliff face. I wonder if the implication is also that they wouldn’t be doing any flying at all; that medium to large pterosaurs wouldn’t even be gliding on wind currents because, at some point, they’d need to gain some altitude on their own steam.
But, whatever the specifics, them’s fightin’ words, and pterosaur specialists the world over are no doubt sharpening their boot-spikes, and wrapping their fists in chains.
Is it a valid analogy? Maaaaybeeee… But I’m betting against it. There have been some interesting theories lately about how the largest of the pterosaurs may not have flown as much as we used to think, but they don’t imply that they couldn’t fly at all. In fact, the study I’m thinking of would further distance pterosaurs from large seabirds in terms of behavior and their ecological niches (making any analogies a little less apt).
Other scientists argue that in addition to anatomical and physiological differences that should be considered, the atmosphere of the Mesozoic was, on the whole, somewhat denser, and had higher concentrations of oxygen—factors that would have allowed flight for larger, heavier animals. Actually, I recommend checking out the discussion following the article. There are a bunch of explanations of how pterosaurs could have flown, despite what this study suggests. But, if you do go, bring your knives—they’re an angry bunch.
You kids get out of here!: Are those cigarettes? What do you have under that hat? Is that a gang sign?
Courtesy fromagieI’m tired of you hanging around with those riff raff friends of yours. I hear that they smoke. Do you think smoking is cool? Is cancer cool too, then?
And y’all listen to that loud gang music, and I know what that music is about: it’s about devil worship. Devil worship and gangs.
And no son of mine is going to wear eyeliner and dog collars. What do you think you are? A dog? A prostitute? Some kind of prostitute dog?
Didn’t I raise you right, Junior? Where’d all this garbage behavior come from?
And pause!
What’s happening here, folks? Where did Junior’s delinquent behavior come from? Well, I’ll tell you where it came from: it came from his parents, in more ways than one.
Recent genetic research has shown that the tendency of adolescent males to associate with delinquent peers has strong association with a particular variation of the dopamine transporter gene, DAT1. So, basically, there’s a genetic influence behind nogoodniks sticking together.
It’s sort of a disturbing finding, when you consider past efforts to isolate—and eliminate—“unfavorable” genetic traits (it’s called eugenics, and it’s bad, bad news). However, the research also demonstrated that not all males with the DAT1 variation were more inclined to associate with delinquent peers. In fact, a large group of boys with the genetic variation showed no increased tendency towards delinquent peer groups at all: boys with highly engaged and warm families.
Family environment seemed to be the deciding factor in a kid’s chosen social group. Boys most likely to run with a bad crowd had the DAT1 variations and a family life marked by maternal disengagement and lack of affection.
Once again, the answer to “Nature or Nurture?” seems to be, “yes.”
Turn around: I think I might know you from somewhere else.
Courtesy Aaron LoganSo here’s a project that researchers must have had a lot of laughs doing. They’ve found that chimps are as likely to remember a fellow acquaintance of their species by their butt as by their face.
Captive chimps were able to match up at a high rate of success photos of rear ends and faces of chimps they’d previously met. Here’s how it worked:
Each participating chimp was flashed a picture of another's rear end, with visible genitals, then shown the face of the derriere's owner and another face of the same gender.
Both males and females were successful in this anatomical match game, pairing faces and posteriors with much greater frequency than chance alone—but only if the photos showed chimps they already knew.
You are now free to go ahead and make up your own J-Lo joke.
Cute, nautical, and Scandinavian: But probably smaller.
Courtesy hans sSo… we’re learning about genetics, aren’t we? We can’t help it—here we have see-through frogs, there we have genetically engineered vegetables, here we have a fatherless child with the same hair color, eye color, and blood type as me. Genetics are all around us these days, in our schools, in our dinners, and calling our lawyers. As much as we might try to hide from it, the subject is unavoidable.
It’s nice, then, when some aspect of this genetic tsunami can take our minds off of all the tricky stuff. Things like mutant frogs are fun (All those legs! Somebody give them their own cartoon!), but they never last long (The frogs tend to die. Cancel the frog show.)
I think, however, that I may have found a winner: Viking mice. They’re genetically remarkable, and they’re lifespan is the same as any other mouse: about 2 or 3 years. Somebody start work on a Viking Mouse cartoon!
So what we have here is your common house mouse. The house mouse evolved into a variety of different strains as it spread into Western Europe about 3,000 years ago, during the Iron Age. Little French house mice learned to wear berets and smoke cigarettes, German mice developed a love of sausages and efficiency, and so forth; the Iron Age was a wonderful time, and it birthed many of our favorite cultural stereotypes. However, something interesting has come up in a recent genetic study of British house mice.
The surprising result of a nationwide rash of mouse paternity cases, the mice of Britain were surprised to find that they themselves were the products of unexpected parents. Studying their mitochondrial DNA (traceable genetic material from the mother’s side), it appears that most mice from mainland Britain are closely related to mice from Germany (the descendants of little Saxon mice?). Mice from the Orkney Islands of Northern Scotland, however, were found to be “Viking mice,” genetically similar to mice from Norway. And it makes sense—the Orkneys were an important center of the Norwegian Viking “kingdom,” back in the 11th and 12th centuries. These little mousies are the descendants of the warlike Viking mice, who hitched rides across the North Sea in the holds of Viking longboats a thousand years ago. Or… maybe they had their own tiny boats… Viking mice!
We pretty much already knew that Vikings were in the Orkneys at that time, but the genetic evidence from the mice are is a good example of how non-human DNA (mitochondrial DNA in particular) can be a tool for tracking other historical human migrations, and… and…
Just picture those little Viking mice. Tiny helmets, curly little beards, squeaky battle cries… they must have been adorable. Just to see them slaughtering little monk mice, it must have been too cute.
Oh, also, while we’re on the subject of house mice—I noticed this little section in Wikipedia’s article on them. After being accidentally introduced to the south Atlantic Gough Island, house mice, which normally have a body length of about 3 inches, began growing “unusually large” and feeding on albatross chicks. The mice kill the chicks, which can be about a meter tall, by “working in groups and gnawing on them until the bleed to death.” Talk about Viking mice.
This man is a professional: And his yelling can make anybody learn.
Courtesy xiangdianSo, it turns out that kids aren’t able to learn from their mistakes, at least not until they’re about 12 years old.
That is to say, negative feedback don’t mean a thing to an 8-year-old, as far as learning goes.
Now, don’t start worrying yet. All that time you’ve spent hollering at little children hasn’t been a total waste of time, it’s just been a waste of their time. And kids have time to waste—they’ll be alive for decades, while you could go any day now. With your days as numbered as they are, it’s important that you spend your remaining time living life to the fullest, and part of that involves yelling at young children, doesn’t it? Everybody needs a good yell now and again, and if you were to go around yelling at grown-ups all the time, you’d probably get punched in the mouth all the time. Because yelling at people is disrespectful.
And I don’t want you to walk away from this thinking that you should only yell at young kids. In fact, yelling at kids after they’re about 12, but before they’re old enough to crash your car on purpose, is particularly effective, because those kids can actually learn from negative feedback. This means that they’ll probably learn to provide you with fewer excuses to yell at them—and that makes each rarified yell that much sweeter.
See, it just so happens that kids develop a dramatically different learning style between the ages of 8 and 12. An 8-year-old (and younger kids) will only learn from positive reinforcement—so saying to them “Hey, JGordon Jr, good job bringing me my cigarettes!” is a good strategy, but yelling, “These aren’t my cigarettes, you accident, these are Darla’s!” at them is just going to go over their heads. You may have enjoyed yelling, but that’s not necessarily going to help you get the right cigarettes in the future.
Once they reach the age of twelve, your productive yelling options really open up. So, if you really wanted to, you could probably praise your 12-year-old for the stuff they do right, and they’ll learn. But you could also yell at them, with just as effective results. “Two and a Half Men season 3? What am I supposed to do with this? I wanted Three Men and a Baby! Three Men and a Baby! Charlie Sheen is a kitten killer!” is going to make sure you get what you want next Christmas.
Researchers are still unsure as to whether this change in learning styles is a result of the brain maturing, or if it simply comes from experience. But, as I see it, there’s only one good way to find out.
What, I can only lock this from the outside?: Scientists have observed behavior in ants in Brazil where a small group of ants sacrifice themselves each night for the good of the colony by covering the colony entrance from the outside, leaving them outside at night exposed to all sorts of natural forc
Courtesy Fir0002How do you secure your home at night? With a deadbolt lock? Switching on some high-tech electronic security system? A pit bulls (without lipstick)?
Whatever you do, it's probably not as problematic as what a few ants do each night in Brazil. Researchers have observed that one to eight ants from a colony each night sacrifice themselves for the well being of the colony. They stay above ground pushing sand over the entrance to the colony to protect their peers from predators during the night. Because they're left outside, they most often die in the night, either from freezing in chilly temperatures, getting blown away in high winds or being a midnight snack for a predator.
A typical ant colony in Brazil can number over 100,000, so the few ants lost each night for security is not a huge mathematical loss. How exactly the night workers are selected isn't known for sure, but researchers think they're probably older ants who are approaching the end of their natural life span.
Six-toed cats can remain at Hemingway museum
in Life Science, Diversity of Organisms, and Biological Populations Change Over Time
Hemingway cat: One of Snowball's many descendants takes it easy behind the Hemingway Home and Museum in Key West, Florida.
Courtesy Mark RyanThe fifty or so cats living around the former estate of author Ernest Hemingway in Key West, Florida, have been granted a reprieve from the US Department of Agriculture and are being allowed to remain on the grounds where the famed novelist once lived. The island property is now the Hemingway Home and Museum, and one of Key West’s more popular attractions. The federal agency originally wanted the cats removed or caged because the museum lacked the proper license to exhibit animals.
All the cats roaming the grounds are descended from a cat named Snowball given to the author by a ship’s captain in the 1930s. Snowball was a polydactyl cat, meaning its paws contained more than the usual number of toes. Typically a cat has 18 toes – five on the front and four on back. Polydactyls commonly have six or seven toes on the front, and sometimes an extra one on the rear, but the record is held by a California cat that had an incredible eight toes on each foot! Polydactyly is a congenital abnormality genetically passed down to offspring. In some cases the extra toes are like opposable thumbs giving the cats an almost human-like dexterity. Snowball’s descendents all carry the genetic trait but not all are polydactyl.
Ernie the cat
Courtesy Mark RyanOur family cat was a polydactyl, and we named him Ernie in honor of Hemingway and his six-toed cats. Ernie’s extra-large feet allowed him to gain lots of weight during his life with us. At his heftiest he weighed 24 pounds. He was huge, a real lard butt. His full name - Ernesto ”El Gato Gordo” Hemingway - was well deserved.
Could it be?: Precious ambergris? Or just beach cheese.
Courtesy saraeOh, Fergie, you’ve ruined my life. And music.
Anyway, New Zealand seems to be a little grosser these days. Several huge, greasy “lumps” have been found on the shores of the North Island in the last week, leaving locals confused, disgusted, and hopeful that a fortune in whale puke is right around the corner. (This may be the default feeling for kiwis, but I don’t follow the news there enough to say for sure.)
The 1000-pound lumps are whitish, lard-like, and a little smelly. The dogs of the beachcombers who first discovered the objects were reportedly reluctant to touch or eat the material, which is a strange thing for a dog that has found something on the beach.
Locals were quick to assume that the lumps could be precious ambergris, highly valuable whale vomit used in cosmetics, and were seen hacking chunks off of the mystery blobs. Their retirements, they reckoned, would be full of featherbeds and yams. (Again, I’m sorry, I just don’t know what New Zealanders are into.)
Ambergris’ name comes from the French for “grey amber” (as opposed to “brown amber,” fossilized tree sap), and is in fact, for those of you behind on your cetology, sperm whale puke. Sperm whales, like the rest of us, love to puke. And it’s important that your average sperm whale gets a good puke in now and again to eject any sand or stones they might have taken in over the course of… you know, I don’t really understand sperm whales any more than New Zealanders. But somehow they get grit in them, and they regularly and easily hurl it out. It seems, however, that some materials, like the beaks of cuttlefish and squid, are particularly irritating to whale guts, and something different happens—a special puke. It’s not known if the ambrein (the fragrant main ingredient in ambergris) comes from the beaks themselves, or if the chemical comes from the whale’s digestive process acting on the offending materials, but eventually a big ball of pasty goo is formed inside the whale, ready to be puked out. The ambergris initially smells pretty foul, but after floating around for a while, and being hardened and broken down by sunlight, it becomes a very complex and valuable material. Depending on the quality, it can fetch up to $15,000 per kg from perfume makers, to be used as a high-quality fixative.
Giant squids come in, I like to think, as an appropriate source for this bizarre, valuable material. Sperm whales are, after all, the prime predators of the giant squid, and giant squid have awfully big, gut-irritating beaks. It’s a link I like to make.
Anyhow, a lot of New Zealanders were set on making their fortune with this so-called whale puke. Ambergris, however, is said to burn with a blue flame when lit, and give off a pleasant aroma. When the mystery material was subjected to this test “it just melted and really stank.” Ooh. Ouch.
After this revelation, guesses on the material compositions were downgraded from ambergris to lard or cheese—“possibly brie.” The lumps are, it should be noted, about the size and shape of 44-gallon drums, which should have been a tip-off. But whatever.
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