Same-sex bonding among animal species is not a new discovery, and apparently isn’t even all that uncommon. This Smithsonian Magazine blog post cites a new study which showed that same-sex pairs of zebra finches preferred to stay with one another even when presented with the option of mating with female finches. Unfortunately, the researchers didn’t look to see what happens when one of the gay finches was presented with the opportunity to hookup with that hot bird from the health club, Evan.
You might have seen the news reports about more evidence of water on Mars. The human exploration of Mars is still a long, long way off, but the ESA’s “Mars 500″ mission simulation has reached a significant milestone. As of August 15, the “astronauts” have broken the record for the longest time spent in isolation: 438 days The record was previously held by a Russian cosmonaut aboard the space station Mir in 1994-95. The 438 days represent about 85% of the total duration of an anticipated mission to Mars, reflecting time traveling in both directions and a stay on the surface. The experiment is scheduled to come to a conclusion on November 5.
We’ve got climate change deniers.
We’ve got evolution deniers.
There’s even a Flat Earth Society.
So it really was just a matter of time before somebody got around to being heliocentrism deniers. A group of conservative Catholics (big surprise there) in Chicago are actively promoting a return to the pre-Copernican theory that the Earth is the center of the universe and that the Sun and all the other objects in the sky revolve around us rather than the Earth being a planet that orbits the Sun. It bears mentioning that the Vatican doesn’t support these guys and that they’ve been good with the theory of heliocentrism since the 18th Century. Heck, they even apologized to Galileo (sort of) back in 1992, although that statue of him they wanted to put up never happened.
Psst…Richard Sungenis…Eppur si muove
Discovery News reports that Japanese scientists have learned that about 15% of one species of snails eaten by birds survive the digestive process and emerge intact and alive on the other end.
Just one more reason never to leave the house: bird poop that can bust your head.
Drug-resistant bacteria are becoming a significant public health crisis (though perhaps not quite as significant as the media would like you to believe). Now, there is evidence that one vector for developing resistance to antibiotics comes from people eating chicken that was fed antibiotics. Industry groups have long challenged this claim, but this newest study was done in the Netherlands, where incidence of drug-resistant bacteria is still low, while the use of antibiotics in poultry production is still high, making the causation argument much stronger.
Holy Helioshpere, Batman! There are HOLES in the SUN! No wonder it’s so fucking hot! The sun is leaking! (Okay, not really.)
Do you remember the story from a few years ago that scientists had begun to seriously consider the idea that the universe might actually be just a computer simulation? Well, put the doobie down for a second and read this Wired story that says “Eh, not so much.” Probably.
What’s the difference between sea anemones and a room full of sorority girls? The sea anemones have distinct and individual personalities. Biologists have determined that individual sea anemones will behave in unique but predictable responses to stimuli, which how behavioral scientist define “personality”.
Fast Company had this infographic comparing the likelihood and severity of various climatological disasters that could occur. The graph comes from a study at the University of Exeter in the U.K. that argues that such catastrophic events could possibly be predicted through observation of smaller climate events. The meltdown of the ice cap in Greenland seems like a real threat according to this graph.
The X-Prize Foundation is offering a $10 million prize to whomever can develop a practical device similar to Dr.McCoy’s medical tricorder for diagnosing patients. And they’ve even called the prize the “Tricorder X Prize”, just so there’s no ambiguity over what they’re looking for. The press release I’ve linked to even features the requisite approving blurb quote from Rod Roddenberry, Gene and Majel’s son.
Other scientists in different fields have developed their own tricorder device for doing analysis of minerals, and there’s even a tricorder app for your Android smartphone that uses the phone’s built-in sensors to measure gravitational fields, your rate of speed as you move, and other bits of environmental data.
And check out this DIY phaser that has a laser in it powerful enough to pop balloons (Hey, kid, you’ll shoot yer eye out!)
Even though April is traditionally the month where Zombie Jesus returns from the dead to feast on the brains of the faithful, May is Zombie Awareness Month. So, in that spirit, the usually factually-challenged British paper The Daily Mail chimed in with the very-real story of how a parasitic fungus called Cordyceps turns ants into actual zombies to carry out its own evolutionary imperative. The article says that biologists have recently discovered that insects parasitized by Cordyceps almost always complete their death struggle at midday. Which is kind of contrary to the whole zombie aesthetic of “Night of the Living Dead”, but, hey, this is REAL, people!
Here is a segment from the BBC documentary series “Planet Earth”, narrated, of course, by David Attenborough that shows the whole zombification process, including the death grip and the über-creepy spore-spike through the head thing:
I have to admit, this actually gives me the willies to watch, even though I’ve seen it several times.
As it so happens, Cordyceps is also used as a pharmaceutical, primarily in traditional Chinese medicine. Apparently it demonstrates some anti-cancer properties and also is used to improve circulation. It was even implicated as a performance-enhancing drug used by Chinese Olympic runners in the ’90s. It’s also thought to have antidepressant properties. You can readily buy it as a “nutritional supplement” online. You can always tell who’s taking it, though, since they are the people missing big chunks of flesh wandering around at night, with huge spiky spores sticking out of their heads.
Screw Obama’a birth certificate…you want to talk about conspiracies, just look at how the Illuminati, the Tri-Lateral Commission and the Freemasons have figured out a nearly unbeatable way to kill me:
Sugar Is Toxic — not just bad for you, or “really, you ought to cut back a little”, it’s out-and-out POISON. And this isn’t some half-assed journalist’s misinterpretation of a sketchy study published in a less-than-respected journal, it’s right from the mouth of the endocrinologist doing the research.
Sitting is Lethal — again, not the tarted-up pseudo-scientific reporting from, say, New Scientist or The Weekly World News, and not the least bit equivocating in its conclusion. Sitting down will kill you, even if you are somebody who exercises regularly. The answer, according to the lead researcher: treadmill desks. No, seriously. As if corporate slavery weren’t already degrading enough.
Omega-3 Fish Oil causes Cancer — yes, it sounds like yet another scaremongering piece from the Daily Mail, but researchers really found that while omega-3 fatty acids were indeed good for your heart, they are also associated with an increased risk for a more aggressive type of prostate cancer, the kind that can actually kill you rather than the slow-growing sort that most men with prostate cancer have. And apparently it’s worse if you eat oily fish like salmon than if you take fish oil supplements.
I suppose there is some comfort to be had in the knowledge that none of us gets out alive, and that everybody dies of something in the end, but I’m beginning to think that they’re gunning for me on purpose. The joke is on them, though, because I died years ago and am just a hell-ghost restlessly wandering the earth. So there.
Much note is being made today of the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s spaceflight, inaugurating the beginning of human travel into outer space. The first decade of the Space Age remains its absolute pinnacle, while today, half a century later, it seems less and less likely all the time that we will ever explore strange new worlds.
Since 2001, people in cities across the globe have marked the anniversary of Gagarin’s orbit by celebrating “Yuri’s Night” with hundreds of parties and special events. This year there is also a downloadable movie called “First Orbit” which recreates what Gagarin might have seen on his flight by taking images recorded aboard the International Space Station and combining them with recordings of the actual radio communications between Gagarin and the Soviet space controllers at Baikonur, along with an original musical score. There is also a smartphone app you can download on your iPhone or Android phone.
Probably not in the movie: the Russian government recently released hundred of pages of declassified material about Gagarin’s flight, including a transcript of a conversation between Gagarin and Sergei Korolev, the famed “Chief Designer” of the Soviet space program. It’s a fairly mundane interaction, wherein Korolev tells Gagarin where to find his rations (some sausage, tea, jam, and candy…but no Tang) and asks him to slap some tape on a broken control.
Also not widely discussed: Gagarin nearly died during the re-entry of his spacecraft. The capsule failed to detach from the instrument control module, causing a small fuel leak that resulted in the spacecraft not slowing as much as planned. The vehicle dangerously overheated, and Gagarin later reported smelling something burning inside his capsule. Six years later, another Soviet cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, would indeed die during reentry due to mechanical failures. Komarov and others in the Soviet space program knew that the spacecraft intended for that flight was defective, and when political pressure from Moscow forced them to go ahead with the flight anyway, Komarov convinced his superiors to bump Gagarin, who had been scheduled to make that flight. Komarov knowingly sacrificed himself to save Gagarin’s life. It was a sacrifice made in vain, because Gagarin himself was killed less than a year later when his test plane crashed. The cause of the crash was not fully determined until last year, and was grist for speculation of conspiracy for decades.
The United States will commemorate the beginning of its own manned space program with the 50th anniversary of Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight next month. Despite, or because of, the early successes of the Soviet program, America would achieve the single greatest engineering accomplishment in human history to date — the first landing of human beings on the surface of the moon — less than a decade after Gagarin’s flight. But forty years after that milestone, the American manned space program has been diminished to almost non-existant. The final mission of the space shuttle Discovery was last month, and that shuttle is already in the decomissioning process on its way to becoming a museum piece. The shuttle Endeavour sits on the launch pad waiting to close out the last chapter of that history with its launch on April 29. Writing at Salon, New America Foundation think-tank policy head Michael Lind rather assiduously argues that manned spaceflight is unnecessary and unsupportable, and that NASA does and should continue to aggressively pursue space exploration with increasingly-capable robots and unmanned probes. Cosmos Online founder Alan Finkel argues even more deliberately that our technology has pushed our physical capabilities for spaceflight to their maximum in terms of both the physics involved in sending spacecraft into deep space and the biological limitations of human beings, and that we may not be able to exceed those limits for a long time, if ever. Even among the veteran astronauts, there is division over whether or not to continue a manned space program. Last year, Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan sent a letter to President Obama encouraging him not to cut back on the manned programs still underway at NASA, while Russell Schweickart (Apollo 9) sent another letter calling for a change in direction and the increased role of private business in space.
It does seem more likely that any further human ventures into space will be incremental for some long time to come, and perhaps Alan Finkel is correct that we may simply never find a way for human beings to travel even as far as Mars without asking the future astronauts to go on their own suicide missions. Maybe that explains why, as astronomers discover dozens upon dozens of new planets all the time, there is no sign of interstellar transit by the beings that must exist somewhere out there. Half a century after one man gently peeked beyond the curtain of our world for the first time, we are still not much beyond that window.
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