Category: Science

Their home lies further beneath sea level than Everest’s peak rises above it. And yet tiny organisms have been found living at the very bottom of the Pacific Ocean’s deepest trench, the remotest spot on the globe.

The microscopic organisms, called foraminifera, live in mud at the bottom of Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, almost 11 kilometres beneath the waves of the western Pacific Ocean. The pressure at this depth is a crushing 1,090 times that at the surface.

This recent story causes me to raise my prior ever so slightly…

Here is the Harvard account.  I love his books, start with The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance.

More police officers die each year in patrol car crashes than at the
hands of criminals, and most of the time the accidents occur when the
officers are not speeding to an emergency, a new study says.

But
the researchers say the number of deaths could be reduced if police
departments did more to encourage officers to use seat belts. The
authors of the report, in The Journal of Trauma, reviewed hundreds of
police car accidents across the country from 1997 to 2001 and also
found that officers involved in crashes were 2.6 times as likely to be
killed if they were not wearing seat belts…

Dr. Jehle said that officers who were interviewed for the study were
surprised to find that about 60 percent of the deaths occurred during
routine driving. They tend to view the car as a haven. "It’s their
office," he said. "They’re in it all the time."

Here is The New York Times story.

The new [classificatory] system, which draws upon many of the words
used to describe the human brain and has broad support among
scientists, acknowledges the now overwhelming evidence that avian and
mammalian brains are remarkably similar — a fact that explains why
many kinds of bird are not just twitchily resourceful but able to
design and manufacture tools, solve mathematical problems and, in many
cases, use language in ways that even chimpanzees and other primates
cannot.    

In particular, it reflects a new recognition that the
bulk of a bird’s brain is not, as scientists once thought, mere "basal
ganglia" — the part of the brain that simply coordinates instincts.
Rather, fully 75 percent of a bird’s brain is an intricately wired mass
that processes information in much the same way as the vaunted human
cerebral cortex.

…behavioral studies in recent years have proved that many birds have more pallium power than your average mammal.

Even seemingly moronic pigeons can categorize objects
as "human-made" vs. "natural"; discriminate between cubistic and
impressionistic styles of painting; and communicate using visual
symbols on computers, according to evidence compiled by the consortium,
which spent seven years on the project with input from scientists
around the world.

Some birds can play games in which they intentionally
tell lies. New Caledonian crows design and make tools. Scrub jays can
recall events from specific times or places — a trait once thought
unique to humans. And perhaps most impressive, parrots, hummingbirds
and thousands of other species of songbirds are able to teach and learn
vocal communication — the basic skill that makes human language
possible. That’s a variant of social intelligence not found in any
mammal other than people, bats, and cetaceans such as dolphins and
whales.

Read more here.

The most detailed study ever conducted of mundane bodily movements found that obese people tend to be much less fidgety than lean people and spend at least two hours more each day just sitting still. The extra motion by lean people is enough to burn about 350 extra calories a day, which could add up to 10 to 30 pounds a year, the researchers found.

Here is the full story.  Here is another summary.  And check out the thin researcher.

All that methane has to be coming from somewhere, here is the story.  If any of you know the betting odds on this, please write me.

Elsewhere on the science front, humans may be an excessively in-bred species, rendering us unusually vulnerable to genetic diseases.  And our solar system may have formed in a violent nebula.

At least if you have the right gene.  I’m actually not very impressed with these correlation studies, experiments with mice and fruit flies where genes can be turned on and off are more convincing, but I don’t doubt that most behaviors are influenced by genes. 

Here; and for the more practical topologist, a Klein stein.  Need I point out that the Klein stein is perfect for dunking donuts?

Thanks to Rasmusen’s Weblog for the pointer.

Ethics campaigners today criticised a 66-year-old Romanian academic for becoming the world’s oldest woman to give birth.
 

Adriana Iliescu, who was artificially inseminated, delivered her baby girl Eliza Maria by Caesarean section on Sunday.
 

Josephine Quintavalle, director of the campaign group Comment on Reproductive Ethics, said women should be outraged by the news.
 

“A woman at grandmother age shouldn’t be having children. I can see no justification in this,” she said…

“It’s the whole concept of IVF. It started off as as fertility
treatment for couples who couldn’t conceive. It’s become a technique
that you can buy into whenever you like.”

Some countries in the world may be overpopulated, but Romania is not one of them.  Here is the story.

People who were in love and other people who were not in love were
asked to view film clips of couples interacting who were in different
levels of emotional involvement. The viewers who were in love were least able to identify which viewed couples were in love.

In fact many people had no idea at all who else was in love.  Read Randall Parker’s analysis here.  And here is Parker on whether gamblers enjoy gambling much at all.

Number one is:

Street brawlers sometimes arm themselves with potato peelers, according to the Home Office, which wants to make them banned weapons.

But we are wiser yet:

Crows apparently like the taste of windscreen-wiper blades.

Here is the full list.  And the nationality most likely to read spam?  The Brazilians, of course.  Sightings of UFOs are way down since the late 1990s, but for a step backwards:

Lasagne has replaced chicken tikka massala as the favourite dish of Britons.

If you want to lose weight, stop worrying about which diet is most effective and simply pick whatever programme you find easiest to follow.

Read more here.

Leading scientists and creative thinkers were asked to address this question.  My favorite answer was from Judith Harris:

I believe, though I cannot prove it, that three – not two – selection processes were involved in human evolution.

The first two are familiar: natural selection, which selects for fitness, and sexual selection, which selects for sexiness.

The third process selects for beauty, but not sexual beauty – not adult beauty. The ones doing the selecting weren’t potential mates: they were parents. Parental selection, I call it.

Nicholas Humphrey gave another good answer:

I believe that human consciousness is a conjuring trick, designed to fool us into thinking we are in the presence of an inexplicable mystery. Who is the conjuror and why is s/he doing it? The conjuror is natural selection, and the purpose has been to bolster human self-confidence and self-importance – so as to increase the value we each place on our own and others’ lives.

The New York Times offers the full list of responses.  Arnold Kling offers further commentary.

Addendum: Eric Crampton points me to 120 additional answers, including Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker, and many other notables.  My answer?  I will go with Denis Dutton, with honorable mentions to Robert Trivers and Alexander Vilenkin.  I like Carlos Rovelli too.  Yes I know you don’t all click on all of the links but these are worth checking out.