Nimble Books LLC » Science Phile

SIZING UP THE UNIVERSE by Gott and Vanderbei

Fred Zimmerman — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 17:39:23 +0000

This will be a must-read for me! Unfortunately, I don’t have a good mechanism to make sure that when this comes out in a year or two, I remember to order it …

Princeton professors J. Richard Gott III and Robert Vanderbei’s SIZING UP THE UNIVERSE, which provides new scientific research into the massiveness of planets, stars, and galaxies using scaled maps, beautifully done photographs, and object comparisons to demonstrate actual size, from Buzz Aldrin’s historic footprint to the visible universe and beyond, to Garrett Brown at National Geographic, by Jeff Kleinman at Folio Literary Management (World).

via Publishers Marketplace: The Latest Deals.

#agriculture kills

Fred Zimmerman — Fri, 01 May 2009 14:25:09 +0000

This makes sense if you think of agriculture as a device for enabling leaders to concentrate resources for their own benefit.

Agriculture and cities made human life better, right? Wrong, say archaeologists who presented stunning new evidence at the American Association of Physical Anthropologists meeting. They pooled data on standardized indicators of health from skeletal remains, including stature, dental health, degenerative joint disease, anemia, trauma, and the isotopic signatures of what they ate, and gathered data on settlement size, latitude, and socioeconomic and subsistence patterns. They found that the health of many Europeans began to worsen markedly about 3000 years ago, after agriculture became widely adopted in Europe and during the rise of the Greek and Roman civilizations.

via Civilization’s Cost: The Decline and Fall of Human Health — Gibbons 324 (5927): 588 — Science.

Wait, what? universe expanded FTL? #scifi #astronomy

Fred Zimmerman — Fri, 01 May 2009 14:20:43 +0000

Wait, what? sounds like a great big loophole to me …

The newborn universe supposedly expanded faster than the speed of light. That bizarre, hypothetical stretching should have set off ripples in space and time called gravitational waves, which 13.7 billion years later should have left traces in the afterglow of the big bang, the cosmic microwave background. The 400 researchers working with the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite hope to spot those traces–subtle patterns in the polarization of the microwaves called “B modes”–before anyone else does.

via …While Planck Dusts the Skies For the Fingerprints of Inflation — Cho 324 (5927): 584 — Science.

my #swineflu experience: from “1975″ to “Are you a carrier?”

Fred Zimmerman — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 14:00:39 +0000

last time I worried about swineflu: 1975

first Tweet on the recent outbreak: 4/22/2009

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=swineflu+since:2009-04-22+until:2009-04-22

(don’t bother clicking on the link at the target page — goes to a real-time news feed

first significant “alerting”: 4/23/2009

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=swineflu+since:2009-04-23+until:2009-04-23

Twitter maelstrom: as of 4/27, “Swine flu” items were showing up on twitter at a rate of 49 per 20 seconds, or ~ 150/min

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=”Swine+Flu”+OR+Flu

this morning: told my 17-y-o daughter I have a snuffly nose. ”Do you have swine flu?”

No, but there is a case in adjacent Livingston County, Michigan.

‘Theory of mind’, MRI, and Christianity

wfz-admin — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 15:41:38 +0000

Here is a good article that sums up my perspective on Christianity, especially the bolded paragraph. There is no question n my mind that evolution has provided a sort of boobytrap in that it causes us to impute intentionality to all sorts of things that don’t necessarily have it, but that’s a separate issue from whether there is a higher consciousness to the universe.

The argument for literal Christianity is that the resurrection of Jesus represents a unique intervention from that higher power that provides believers with a “path dependent” connection with God. ”I am the Way and the Truth and the Light.”

Any theologically sound Christian will tell you that without a literal resurrection, there is no Christianity. The pro is that there is an abundant historical record of Jesus’s life and the events following his death, the con is that we’ll never see the stone roll away from the tomb. I, for one, believe that “he is risen.”

The researchers found that religious beliefs “light up” the areas of our brain which have evolved most recently, such as those involved in imagination, memory and “theory of mind” – the recognition that other people and living things can have their own thoughts and intentions.

“They don’t tell us about the existence of a higher order power like God,” says Grafman. “They only address how the mind and brain work in tandem to allow us to have belief systems that guide our everyday actions.”

via ‘Theory of mind’ could help explain belief in God – life – 09 March 2009 – New Scientist.

Girl recovering after removal of (and reimplantation of!) 6 organs to remove tumor

wfz-admin — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 00:02:12 +0000

This is blogworthy.

In a 23-hour operation involving three different carefully coordinated surgical teams, doctors first removed the stomach, liver, spleen, pancreas, large intestine and small intestine along with the entwined tumor, placed the organs on ice with preservation solution, and then proceeded to extract the tumor while simultaneously preparing the body to receive the reimplanted organs.

via Girl recovering after removal of 6 organs, tumor – CNN.com.

Kepler’s Search Space

wfz-admin — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 20:08:32 +0000

Kepler Telescope's Search Space

Quackery> Ecstasy Pushed as PTSD Treatment

wfz-admin — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 23:10:52 +0000

Wow, how quacky. Isn’t one of the key side effects of MDMA that it burns out serotonin? How is that going to help PTSD sufferers?

MDMA has an interesting history. Developed by the pharmaceutical firm Merck in 1912, it was widely used in private psychiatric settings in the 1950s and ‘60s. The Army experimented with it briefly in its search for mind control drugs, Doblin said.

It induces feelings of extended euphoria — hence the name ecstasy — as well as heightened awareness and a greater connection to emotions.

But it was embraced by the counter-culture of the late 1960s, and by the 1980s it was competing with cocaine as the most popular party drug. In 1985, the Drug Enforcement Administration had it classified as a “Schedule I” drug, alongside LSD and heroine.

“It was really a shame because we were only beginning to understand its potential for medical treatment” when it was criminalized, Doblin said. “With drugs like this, there is a lot of misconception. … They are like the surgeon’s knife: If they are used properly, they can heal. If they are used poorly, they can kill.”

The research project began with people suffering from PTSD who were victims of crime – rape and childhood sexual abuse were the most common – and only recently expanded to veterans.

via Ecstasy Pushed as PTSD Treatment | Danger Room from Wired.com.

Homo Sapiens, the King of Adaptability?

wfz-admin — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 21:45:17 +0000

Homo sapiens, the adaptable animal?

I grew up reading a lot of science fiction that was written in the 1950’s and 1960’s, and for a variety of reasons (among them, a key editor named John A. Campbell) a very popular “meme” in that era was a rather triumphalist view of man as the most adaptable and successful of all animals (on this planet and any others!) To be sure, this was grossly exaggerated, and I don’t think the writers of that era fully appreciated the relatively short time window in which homo sap has flourished relative to, e.g., the croocodile (250mya).

This concept of taking pride in adaptability seems to have disappeared into the cultural trashbin during the 60s and 70s, which is odd since the adaptive pressures on society in the late 60s were among the most intense in recorded histories. It’s also odd that the concept has not become more common again as we appreciate more and more that the human appropriation of net primary productivity is somewhere between 30 and 50% (Imhoff, Haberl). We are nothing if not successful at adapting the environment to our needs! Instead, our dominant reaction to climate change seems to be “change is bad.”

Not that there isn’t a lot of bad news, but it’s odd that there isn’t a more balanced perception that it is, in fact, kind of good news that the Arctic Sea is becoming navigable. Generally, navigable seas are viewed as a good thing …

My question for the group: is adaptability back? Should we be urging people once more to take pride in human adaptability?

via LinkedIn: View Discussion: °AdaptAbility – The Climate Adaptation Network.

Key findings from Neandertal genome sequencing

wfz-admin — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 20:54:16 +0000

The rest of the article basically admits that it will be hard to know anything for sure from a partial (60%) sequencing of a very small amount of DNA from two individuals.

The genome is compiled from three shards of limb bone from Vindija Cave that turned out to be from two females. With publication and release of the data expected in the next 6 months, our ability to examine the molecular details of human evolution is poised to explode. So far, the new data suggest that the human and Neandertal lineages began to diverge some 800,000 years ago, in line with the most recent estimates from partial genomic data, Pääbo reported at the press conference. Early analyses have yielded no sign of introgression of modern genes into the Neandertal sequence, supporting the idea that Neandertals did not interbreed with modern humans during the thousands of years the two species shared territory in Europe (see p. 870).

via NEANDERTAL GENOMICS: Tales of a Prehistoric Human Genome — Pennisi 323 (5916): 866 — Science.