WORMHOLES
I feel like this is a bigger deal than just some Collgehumor video.
Electronic Tattoo Display runs on Blood
Remember getting your mind really blown by new technology?
Clive Thompson on Science Fiction
"If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best — and perhaps only — place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas."
Have you ever wondered what space smells like? Yeah, me neither.
NASA beams the Beatles into space
NASA broadcast "Across The Universe" into outer space using the Deep Space Network. Asked to comment, Paul McCartney wisely noted, "Amazing! Well done, NASA! Send my love to the aliens."
The Environmentally Non-Disturbing Under-ice Robotic Antarctic Explorer (ENDURANCE) is a $2.3 million project funded by NASA's Astrobiology Science and Technology for Exploring Planets Program. It's autonomous underwater vehicle designed to swim untethered under ice, creating three-dimensional maps of underwater environments, and ostensibly is a test for exploring Europa, the icy Jovian moon that just might harbor life.
The Archive of Scientists' Transcendent Experiences: as amazing as it sounds.
Literally!
I love it when the New York Times gets all tripped out on science stuff.
Hugest Black Hole Ever Discovered
18 billion times the size of our sun!
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animal life Archives
A Call to Paws
Archived From September 17, 2006 (7) Comments
These days, few things are as commonplace in the landscape of scientific research than the perpetual yowl of opposition. Despite the fact that huge announcements in the sciences often aren't, off the bat, that thrilling ("two galaxies a million light years away collided and we aren't sure where the mass went!"), there still always seems to be someone that's up in arms. Most of the time, it's the usual suspects -- Baptists, the Bush administration, pro-lifers, and school boards in the midwest -- people whose interests are threatened, ideologically, by the potential of specific knowledge. However, the numbers are growing, and researchers are more often having to defend their work against growing murmurs of antagonism. There's even an Oxford-based organization, Pro-Test, that marshals researchers and scientists into the streets to protest their right to do biological research. Not to mention the fact that science funding is at an all-time low.
Scientists protesting being protested? This is getting complicated, and probably because the issues scientists tend to be dealing with these days are more complex, relevant, and rife with implications than we're used to.
The thing is, Science has been around since Greek-guys-in-sheets times, and there just isn't that much "safe" research to be done. Centuries of experimental trial and error have gotten the rudimentary ideas out of the way, and now we're launched headlong into the big-picture stuff. Front-page science news is more and more mind-blowing, because it concerns the kinds of ideas that freak us out to the core: embryonic stem-cell research, evolution, our effect on the planet's climate, the beginnings and ends of the Universe. Hence, the roar of pundits grows larger, and more vitriolic. The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, for example, in a recent posting on their website concerning the deriving of totipotent stem cells from 8-celled human embryos (a process that doesn't harm the embryo) espoused that "today's scientists must move forward on a solid ethical footing or they risk falling into the same pit that doomed many of Nazi Germany's scientists to a legacy of disgust and moral outrage."
Yikes!
More surprising, however, is objection from leftist groups. I was recently struck by the thundering of dissent against the work of Dr. Charles Roselli, a biologist at the Oregon Health Sciences University, OHSU. Dr. Roselli, who works primarily with sheep, is the author of a series of papers about sexual orientation in rams -- the so-called "gay sheep" -- which suggest that sexual orientation is hard-wired in the animals' brains before birth. Provocative stuff, to be sure, since it may mean that homosexuality is definitely biologically programmed, part and parcel of the natural world, and, therefore, that the rights of homosexual humans should be beyond contention. Duh, I know.
It's unsurprising that Dr. Roselli's work would come under fire; what is surprising, however, is by whom. Of all organizations imaginable, the radically leftist People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA, infamous recently for their amazingly tasteless Beyonce Knowles coup, in which they verbally attacked the pop singer in a restaurant for her fur-oriented fashion choices) have taken the OHSU research as a misguided call to arms.
PETA, in a trenchant attempt to stop Roselli's work, posted a petition on its youth-oriented website, claiming that "these experimenters believe that homosexuality is a defect that needs to be fixed, and they're cutting open and killing gay sheep to do it." Meanwhile, Roselli has repeatedly told the media that his work is completely neutral, that he's trying to understand the biological impetus behind complex behavior, and, according to an interview with the Seattle Times, that he isn't even a "nature-versus-nurture kind of dichotomist."
Why would PETA target this kind of research? After all, Roselli and his team deal with a grand total of 16 sheep in their lab, while American meat-packing companies plow through over 4,000,000 yearly -- and no one learns anything from those, other than that they might taste good with a little mint sauce and some potatoes. Of course, a great deal of animal research is morally dubious and, frankly, unnecessary, but the work of these OHSU researchers -- and many others throughout the country -- is in a completely different league: no one's putting shampoo in puppies' eyes here.
Don't get me wrong, I love our animal brothers, but that doesn't necessitate a blind adherence to any and all political group which claims to represent them. It seems that PETA has cherry-picked the OHSU team and manipulated its hot-button modus operandi in order to turn people away from any kind of biological research involving animals, a politically-biased strategy that wouldn't be out of order among Intelligent Designists and those who deny the increasingly obvious presence of climate change. As if we needed another anti-Science group in this country!
PETA's rhetoric is questionable; the petition on their site ends with "I am sure that you want your university to be known for making real medical advancements that actually benefit humans, not for torturing animals and promoting homophobia." It is also sensationalist, borderline silly, and frighteningly similar to the language that the Southern Baptists' Convention uses to criticize stem-cell research. Alls I'm saying is, language is dangerous, but not as dangerous as extremism.
1:21 PM | Permalink | (7) Comments
This bird has blown
Archived From March 21, 2006 (3) Comments
If you can't infer from the heady smell of musk and cheap cologne emanating from your computer screen, let me inform you officially and scientifically that this is the Universe Sex Issue. Although, as a serious science forum, Universe tends to avoid this terrifically subjective topic, I was asked to write a column for the LA Alternative Sex Issue a few weeks ago, and decided to rise to the challenge. 2006 is all about getting into the spirit of things. Besides, I am not a square.
But before you loosen your belts too much, know that things are staying strictly Animal Kingdom. Although I am a firm proponent of putting the "hard" in "cold, hard facts," (ewww, sorry) there is enough smut, good-natured and otherwise, on the web to keep you busy for the rest of your perverted life, and I do not intend to add to it.
It is an interesting specificity of the human race that we are generally ignorant of the sex lives of animals. We people are so concerned with getting tail, it seems, that we easily forget that a large percentage of this planet is populated by creatures with tails (and fins, and wings, and claws) that are pretty much looking for the same thing. Of course, there are those Nature Channel documentary films of lions humping in the veldt. I can't help, when I see those, reacting with fascinated repulsion at just how similar that feline act looks to human sex. The inherent grossness of mammalian moans alone may explain our active disinterest in animal reproduction. Yet, while a great deal of the natural world is busy freaking us out with open-air acts of bestial pornography, there are droves of creatures getting busy in far more graceful ways.
Take the neatness of single-celled organisms splitting in half, for example. Or, the heroic struggle of salmon swimming upstream, already halfway to their deaths, just to fertilize their slimy eggs. And birds, home from some transcontinental migration, paired up in their nests, flagrantly making bird-sex, which, come to think of it
Wait, do you know how our feathered friends go about reproduction? Sure, they lay eggs, but what comes before that? If you are like me, the thought has literally never crossed your mind. Hopefully, you are having the same moment of awkward realization I just had. "Do male birds," you may be asking yourself, "have penises?" The thought is terrifying: If they do, then are we living beneath a sky full of tiny, flying phalluses? Gross, right?
The unsettling answer to this absurd question is: well, we are, kind of. The avian phallus, of which I have yet to find any photographic proof, remains tucked away in the feathered confines of the unholy bird-nooks of mostly land-lubbing birds (notably ostriches and turkeys). Apparently, there is one species of Argentine lake duck with a penis 42.5 centimeters long but that, thankfully, is an exception to the rule.
The rest of the flock (that is to say, almost all birds) are natural eunuchs. Both male and female birds, generally, have the same primary reproductive organ: the
cloaca, a little posterior hole used for all birdly bodily purposes. Although males keep their sperm in a little pocket inside the cloaca, and females have ovaries in theirs, their exterior reproductive organs are identical. As are, incidentally, their intestinal and urinary tract openings, since they are one and the same. This crosses out, of course, the standard sexiness of penis-in-vagina sex. Birds, with typical weird efficiency, have a neat and completely un-sexy solution.
During copulation, the female bird coyly moves her tail to the side and the male moves very close to her. He moves the opening of his cloaca close to hers -- a butt-to-butt movement that is both cute and, I imagine, compromising -- so that the sperm can enter the female cloaca, in what is very seriously referred to by ornithologists as a "cloacal kiss." This can happen very fast, sometimes in less than one second. I imagine that neither participant even makes a peep.
After the awkward butt-kiss, the female bird can store the sperm inside her for up to a year, or until she feels emotionally ready to raise chicks. Eggs then descend one-by-one from the female bird's ovaries and become fertilized by the stored sperm, before being laid into the family nest. No muss, no fuss.
And no ruffled feathers.
8:20 PM | Permalink | (3) Comments
Animal Liberation, Human Liberation
Archived From December 30, 2005 (3) Comments
I'm not going to lie: this blog will rarely concern iself with Pressing Science Ethics Issues. This sort of thing -- the morality of Stem Cell Research, "Is Cloning O.K"? -- should remain where it rightly lives, which is to say, "town hall" style discussions on public television. This is not to dub these issues irrelevant. They are, of course, more relevant than anything I will bring up in this forum. However, they are also instant boresville. No one needs an in-depth analysis to realize immediately that people opposed to mild levels of stem-cell research are either conservative wack-jobs or afraid of a cooler, more "future," society. I'm not interested in hearing luddites bluster about cloning. I'd rather think about and dwell on the "What the Hell is Going On" side of the science fence.
Which brings me to the issue of Chimeric research. The term "Chimera," appropriately, is mythological: the Chimera was a Greek fire-breathing monster dude, a composite of several creatures. "Chimera" is now being similarly used by geneticists to refer to a creature composed of two or more species, minus the fire-breathing part. Although there has been much fussbudgeting along the animal-human line throughout the years -- pig valves in human heart operations are the norm, for example, and human genes have been routinely used in agriculture for years now -- scientists have recently been making broad and unsure steps forward in this domain. In 2003, human cells in rabbit eggs proved to be the first true animal-human hybrid. Mice with at least 1% human brains have already been bred, and it's technically possible to go all the way to 100%. There's talk of cultivating human embryos in laboratory mice, creating the potential for people with mice parents.
Don't get PETA on me: the issue here is not about animal rights, or even particularly the truly confounding ethical issues Chimera raise. These hybrids are not animals, nor are they humans. They are both, and neither. They're zombies. There are no laws yet set in place to deal with them.
Plenty of parallels could precociously be drawn between the postmodern fetishism for hybridity, you know, "thirdness," and this kind of work: human-brain mice being concrete and fluffly examples of the righteousness of late 80's academia, here to gnaw and lord over the world of scientific research, who, Frankenstein-style, has only figured out too late the inherent dichotomy-destroying nature of such work, its collapsing effect on the very dualistic structures of our hegemonic society.
Jacques Derrida, even though I hate the chump, wrote that things which have properties of both states of a supposed binary also have neither, and hence belong to a new order of things (he uses zombies, but here chimera seem relevant). These "Undecidables," he aptly pointed out, are threatening. They destroy for us the comforting sense that we inhabit a world governed by decidable categories. My point, albeit vague, is that the Science Ethics Issues which will inevitably come all pitchfork and spade out of the woodwork in the next years will all be born, it seems to me, from this fear of the Undecidable.
1:48 PM | Permalink | (3) Comments