Strange Science
Page 17
When writing about natural selection, Charles Darwin noted that some individuals may “sacrifice themselves for the common good.” This is known as group selection, but it hasn’t gained much traction because it’s never been observed…until now, thanks to a six-year study of Anelosimus studiosus conducted by behavioral ecologists Jonathan Pruitt of the University of Pittsburgh and Charles Goodnight of the University of Vermont.
Researchers started three new wild colonies in Tennessee—one with two docile spiders, one with two aggressive spiders, and one mixed. The first year, the docile colony thrived; there was little infighting and the web grew considerably. But it couldn’t withstand outside attacks, so by the time the study concluded six years later, the docile colony was gone…and the other two were thriving. How? Group selection. When a colony had a lot of aggressive members but not a lot of external threats, the arachnids would “readjust,” sometimes by eating the eggs of aggressive females to keep them from reproducing. Pruitt and Goodnight wrote in the journal Nature, “Many respected researchers have argued that group selection cannot lead to group adaptation except in clonal groups and that group selection theory is inefficient and bankrupt.” The researchers proved that the group theory, like their spider colony, was doing just fine.
STRANGE MEDICAL CONDITION
SUBJECT: Natalie Adler of Melbourne, Australia
CONDITION: Unknown condition affecting the eyes
STORY: One morning in 2004, Adler, then 17, woke up and couldn’t open her eyes. The condition lasted for three entire days…and then she could open her eyes again. Three days after that, she couldn’t open her eyes, and three days after that, she could. Mind-bogglingly, that’s been happening ever since. (For the three days her eyes are shut, Adler is legally blind, able to see only through a tiny slit in her left eye.) She went to doctors in both Australia and the United States, but none could determine what was causing her bizarre symptoms. At first, most of them told Adler the problem was in her head, but they don’t anymore, because over the years, additional symptoms have appeared. They include headaches, nausea, stiffness in the neck and arms, and, most alarmingly, paralysis of Adler’s stomach muscles, which has resulted in her having to be fed through tubes permanently inserted into her stomach. Adler has been seen by more than 40 specialists—and they still don’t know what’s going on. The latest guess: Adler is suffering from a previously unknown genetic disorder. Tests are ongoing.
Cause for ConCERN
Q:What is the world’s largest machine?
A:The Large Hadron Collider, located on the Franco-Swiss border, is a 17-mile-long tunnel buried more than 500 feet below the surface where particles are charged and then accelerated to nearly light speed.
Q:What is the world’s most dangerous machine?
A:The Large Hadron Collider. According to Stephen Hawking, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and several other concerned scientists, the experiments being carried out by CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) could have catastrophic effects. Most worrisome is the “God particle,” or Higgs boson, which was discovered at the Collider in 2012. In layman’s terms, this is the subatomic particle that “gives mass to matter.” Tyson warns that experiments with this high-energy, unstable particle could, if they go wrong, cause the Earth to “explode.” (He actually used that word.) And if an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider goes really wrong, Hawking warns that it could “cause space and time to collapse.”
•The first Nobel Prize ceremony was in 1901, five years after the death of Alfred Nobel, who had mandated the prizes in his will. Nobel was a Swedish chemist who once blew up his own factory while working with nitroglycerin.
•Wangari Maathai of Kenya was the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, in 2004.
•John Enders cultivated polio in a test tube, and in 1954, he—not Jonas Salk, who developed the vaccine—got a Nobel Prize for his work.
•António Egas Moniz won the 1949 Nobel Prize in Medicine for developing the lobotomy.
•Gaston Ramon, a French veterinarian and biologist, was nominated for the Nobel Prize 155 times—but never won.
MORE MOVIE MAD
SCIENTISTS
RE-ANIMATOR
In the mood for a really over-the-top splatterfest? Re-Animator has got the goods, a nasty—and nastily funny—flick in the Frankenstein mode (based on a story by creepmaster H. P. Lovecraft). In a nutshell: Testy medical student Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) finds a formula to reanimate dead tissue, so he does. Hilarious and gory hijinks ensue. Not everyone’s cup of tea, to be sure.
DR. STRANGELOVE, OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB
Even if the entire film weren’t already a brilliant black comedy about the end of the world by way of nuclear holocaust (and it is), this would still be worth seeing for the great Peter Sellers’s portrayal of Dr. Strangelove, an expatriate Nazi scientist (very loosely modeled on Wernher von Braun). Strangelove is intensely weird, from the top of his toupéed head to the fingertips of his out-of-control (and self-homicidal) right hand. If actual nuclear scientists were anything like him, we’d all be glowing piles of ash.
EXPENDABLE ORGANS
GALLBLADDER
The gallbladder is a pear-shaped organ that sits just under the liver.
WHAT IT’S FOR: To store bile from the liver that’s released as needed to digest fatty foods.
WHY WE CAN DO WITHOUT IT: Your gallbladder can get blocked by stones, creating a backup and infection that can be life-threatening.
SIDE EFFECTS OF REMOVAL? The bile constantly goes directly from the liver to the small intestine without the gallbladder acting as a gatekeeper. Rarely, patients experience frequent or constant diarrhea from that.
ANCIENT DATING TECHNIQUE
No, we’re not talking about pickup lines. Since the 1700s, archaeologists have used what’s called relative dating techniques to learn the approximate date of ancient artifacts. In most cases, they could only date an artifact relative to other finds. Biostratigraphy is the oldest technique, dating to the late 1700s. Simply put: new rock layers have been continuously created out of sediment on the Earth’s surface for more than four billion years. Each layer contains fossils of the plants and animals that lived when that layer was created. For example: Tyrannosaurus rex fossils are found all over western North America—but only in rock layers corresponding to when T. rex existed (between 68 and 65 million years ago). So, if a new T. rex fossil is found, it—and fossils around it—can be relatively dated to that era. Biostratigraphy can be used to date artifacts from thousands to billions of years old, and was one of the key discoveries that led to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Today, it is used less often as more precise methods have been developed.
PSI-CHOLOGY
Is psi real—can people be “psychic”? Most reputable scientists will choose their words carefully and say that while telekinesis, clairvoyance, and the like may be possible, the existence of psi will not be accepted until 1) a scientist can orchestrate a controlled psi demonstration in a lab, and 2) other scientists can later re-create those results.
One reputable scientist set out to do just that. In 2010 Daryl Bem, a social psychologist at Cornell University, conducted several “retroactive precognition” tests on 1,000 college students. In one test, he showed them a series of two curtains on a screen, behind only one of which was an image. When the testers weren’t told anything about the images, they chose the curtain with the image 50 percent of the time…an expected result. But when informed that there was an erotic picture behind one of the curtains, the college students chose the correct curtain 53 percent of the time, leading Bem to conclude that there must be something else at work to account for such a noticeable discrepancy. His resulting paper—“Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect”—passed the peer review process and was published in the esteemed Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
So that means that t
he debate is over and psi is real, right? Not even close. Since the paper was published, no other scientist has been able to re-create Bem’s results, and his testing methods have been called into question—as has the entire peer-review process. Even the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology ran a retraction. So for now, psi remains psi-fi.
4 LESSER-KNOWN SCIENCES
1.Mycology—the study of fungi
2.Ornithology—the study of birds
3.Limnology—the study of inland waters
4.Geobotany—the study of plant distribution on Earth
A CURIOUS CURE
In 2005 Joyce Urch had a heart attack. The 74-year-old was rushed to Walgrave Hospital near her home in Coventry, England, where she underwent surgery and spent the next three days unconscious and near death. She finally woke up—and started shouting “I can see! I can see!” Urch had been blind for 25 years. “Then she leaned forward,” said her husband, Eric, “and she just looked at me and said, ‘Haven’t you got old?’ And I said, ‘Wait ’til you have a look in the mirror.’ ” Just as doctors were unable to explain why she lost her sight so many years before (they thought it might be a genetic condition), they could give no explanation for its return. But the Urches didn’t care. “When Joyce first went blind,” Eric said, “everything seemed to fall away from us. This has given us both our lives back.”
SNEAKY CORPORATIONS
The documentary film An Inconvenient Truth received a lot of attention and attracted huge audiences when it was released in May 2006. Narrated by Al Gore, the film argues that global warming caused by industrial pollution is altering Earth’s climate and melting the polar ice caps, and will eventually flood major cities and leave the planet uninhabitable.
But shortly after the movie came out, “public service” commercials began appearing on TV, calling global warming a myth and claiming that carbon dioxide—a by-product of industrial pollution and automobile emissions (and the “villain” of the movie)—is actually not a pollutant at all, because “plants breathe it.” They went on to say that industrial waste is not only harmless, it’s essential to life.
So who made the “public service” ads? A think tank called the Competitive Enterprise Institute, whose members are almost exclusively oil and automobile companies, including Exxon, Arco, Ford, Texaco, and General Motors.
“Everything that can
be invented has been
invented.”
—CHARLES H. DUELL,
COMMISSIONER, U.S. OFFICE
OF PATENTS, 1899
INDECENT DUCKS
In 2005 biologists at Yale University were awarded a research grant to study the reproductive anatomy of the duck. Specifically, the researchers studied the unique corkscrew-like shape of the male duck’s genitalia. After the study was showcased in Coburn’s Wastebook and lambasted by cable news pundits, lead researcher Patricia Brennan defended her work. “This is basic science,” she said. “The headlines reflect outrage that the study was about duck genitals, as if there is something inherently wrong or perverse with this line of research. Imagine if medical research drew the line at the belt! Genitalia, dear readers, are where the rubber meets the road, evolutionarily.”
The cost of the study? $384,989.
MORE USED-LESS INVENTIONS
BIRD TRAP AND CAT FEEDER
PATENT NUMBER: 4,150,505
INVENTED IN: 1979
DESCRIPTION: For the crippled cat or the sparrow hater, this invention promises to “continuously supply neighborhood cats with plenty to eat.” The trap lures birds with what appears to be an appealing perch and house, but once the feathered creature climbs through the entrance, it’s caught in a pivoting plastic tube. The tube then lowers, dumping the bird into a wire mesh cage. Specifically designed for sparrows, the mesh is just big enough for the bird’s head to poke through, which draws the cat’s attention. A feeding frenzy presumably follows.
ANTI-EATING FACE MASK
PATENT NUMBER: 4,344,424
INVENTED IN: 1982
DESCRIPTION: The anti-eating device fits to the shape of a person’s head with a series of flexible straps, rods, and hoops, while a gratelike mask covers the user’s mouth from chin to nose, completely preventing the intake of food—except in liquid form. It’s also fitted with a small padlock for insurance. Instead of locking the whole family out of the fridge, dieters can lock up their own mouths.
DANGEROUS APHRODISIACS
•Spanish fly, one of the most famous aphrodisiacs, is also one of the most dangerous. It has nothing to do with Spain or flies. It’s really the dried, crushed remains of an insect known as the “blister beetle.” Although it can constrict blood vessels, and thus may appear to be a sexual stimulant, it’s actually a deadly poison. It can do irreparable damage to the kidneys.
•For thousands of years, people (especially in the Far East) have believed that by eating part of a powerful animal, a man can absorb its sexual vitality. This has led to the ingestion of such weird stuff as dried and powdered bear gallbladders, camel humps, and rhinoceros horns. (In fact, animal horns have been considered sexual stimulants for so long that the term “horny” became slang for “a need for sex.”) It has also had a drastic effect on some endangered species. Poachers have slaughtered so many rhinos for their horns, which fetch up to $300,000 each, that only about 30,000 remain in the wild. And in North America, poachers have killed thousands of black bears to get their golf ball–sized gallbladders.
CAN’T SAY
HE’S HEARTLESS
In August 2006, 55-year-old Louis Selo of London died while on vacation in Ireland. His body was examined at Beaumont Hospital in Dublin, where it was determined that Selo had died of a massive heart attack. The corpse was sent home to England, where another autopsy was performed (a second autopsy is customarily done when English citizens die out of the country). That operation went a bit differently: When the English doctors opened up Selo’s chest, they discovered an extra heart and two extra lungs in a plastic bag inside him. An inquiry revealed that they were from an organ donor at the Irish hospital. Those organs were returned to the family of the donor, and an investigation to find out how they ended up in Mr. Selo was begun immediately.
How well do polar bears conserve heat? So well that they’re barely detectable on thermal cameras.
SCIENCE FACTS THAT SOUND LIKE
SCIENCE FICTION
I THINK IT CAN. In 2010 a swimming accident left 19-year-old Ian Burkhart paralyzed from the elbows down; he couldn’t even move his fingers. Four years later, doctors at Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center implanted a chip into Burkhart’s brain in the area that controls movement. Then a cable was plugged into his head that was hooked up to a computer, which was hooked up to an electronic stimulation sleeve around his forearm. Burkhart thought very hard, and then…his fingers moved. The device completely bypassed his broken spinal cord, and for the first time since the accident, he could open and close his hand.
RESISTANCE IS FUTILE. The demilitarized zone between North and South Korea requires constant surveillance, but South Korea has 655,000 troops to North Korea’s 1.2 million. So South Korea’s military is turning to the Samsung Techwin SGR-A1 for help. This stationary robot is equipped with a camera and a high-speed machine gun. The camera scans the area and sends images to a control room; if there’s trouble, the robot can be ordered to sound an alarm or fire 45-mm rounds. Multiple SGR-A1 are reported to be in place.
THAT HEALTHY
RADIOACTIVE GLOW
Marie and Pierre Curie discovered radium in 1898, but it took decades of research for the long-term effects of radiation exposure to be understood. But in the interim, the general public regarded the stuff with almost superstitious awe. After all, it glowed with a beautiful phosphorescence!
Within a few years of its discovery, radium was—with no evidence whatsoever—being marketed as a restorative for youth and vitality. For that healthy glow, people used radium-laced toothpaste and face po
wder. Patients soaked in irradiated water to relieve rheumatism; heating pads loaded with radioactive ore soothed arthritis.
In particular, radium was reputed to cure sexual impotence. It shed its magical light in places where the sun don’t shine as suppositories—and in the form of slender rods of radium-impregnated wax, to be inserted into the urethra. (Radiumdusted undergarments provided a less invasive option.) But then consumers and people who worked with radium started dying of cancer.
Now you can be grateful for those due-diligence regulations on the pharmaceutical industry. It may take years for innovative treatments to reach drugstores—but that’s the trade-off for making sure that your heating pad doesn’t give you cancer.
RANDOM ORIGIN:
GPS
You probably use GPS (Global Positioning System) on a regular basis, but do you know where it came from? Not long after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, a team of American scientists monitoring the satellite’s radio transmissions noticed that the frequency of its signal increased as it approached and decreased as it traveled away from them—a classic example of the Doppler effect. They realized they could use this information to pinpoint Sputnik’s precise location in space; conversely, if they knew the satellite’s location, they could use it to determine their own location on Earth. This principle served as the basis for the U.S. military’s NAVSTAR GPS, which became operational in 1993. The Americans intended to restrict the system to military use, but when the Soviets shot down a Korean Airlines flight in 1983 after it wandered into Soviet airspace, President Ronald Reagan announced that the system would be made available for public use.