In the Headlights

Visible Man/Woman

Shawn sent me this link, commenting on the facta that it reminded her of our visit to the Body Works exhibit in Manhattan a year ago.

This is pretty cool stuff.  A web site called Visible Body allows you to look at different anatomical systems, individually, or layered, to learn about different parts or whole systems.  It looks pretty cool.  The link above includes a YouTube video about the site.

Here's the site itself.  It's free as long as you sign one of those long disclaimers.  I started the application, and then balked at:

2. When you become a Registered User, we collect certain information about you, including personally identifiable information, as well as information about your use of the Web site. The information will be treated in accordance with our Privacy Policy. By clicking on the "I agree" button or visiting this Web site, you agree to the terms and conditions of our Privacy Policy.

and other similar legalese, which had me envisioning my privacy being invaded.

Anyway, if you're more daring than I, check it out and let us know how you like it.  It looks to be a pretty neat site.  And I sign up for things all the time.  Don't know why once in a while I get wary.

[Image from Visible Body.]

I've Got Heartbeats by the Number

I wonder if it's true.  That we're each programmed to have a certain number of heartbeats.

1.5 billion.

Doesn't sound like much, does it?  A billion.  A thousand million.  And half again that.

Makes me want to slow my heart down.

I heard it on NPR a while back, and made myself a note on a scrap of paper.  1.5 billion.  Us, and the whale, and the elephant, and the shrew, and the wee timorous mouse.  Accordidng to this site  from Baylor University, the average human heart rate is 70/minute.  The mouse goes at 500/minute, the elephant a mere 28/minute.  I can't vouch for their facts, though, as they claim the African bull elephant can weigh up to 28 kg.  Hm.  I know a lot of people with dogs bigger than that.  A lot bigger.

Hard to know for sure, about the number of heart beats.  There are so many mitigating factors.  I mean, how can you do a pure scientific test.  Who ever gets the whole 1.5 billion.  At 60 beats a minute, it gives you 17,361.1 days.  Can't be right.  That's only 47 years.  I'm dead already.

But I find the concept that we're preprogrammed for obsolescence in a certain number of heartbeats interesting.  Other factors enter into it, of course:  disease, accidents, predators, how much time you spend with a high heart rate just burning those puppies up.

Might be why people who do cocaine tend to die young, and those on beta-blockers live long, even if they don't have as much fun.  Beta-blockers slow down your heart rate.

Why those animals with slow heart beats, elephants and blue whales, and tortoises live so long, and those with staccato heartbeats go in a flash.  Us, we're somewhere in between.

Makes you think about the idea that stress kills people.  In addition to raising hell with your cardiovascular system, it runs right through those heartbeats.

New leaf for me.  Meditate.  Take a beta-blocker.  Stop, smell the roses.  Fat chance.

[Image from Australian Fauna.com]

Over Their Heads

Natural selection.

Res Ipse Loquitur.

Thanks, Laura.  I hope that's a joke and not a live wire.

Really, Really Green

Stryder shared this link with us about the Svalbard global seed bank.

Countries from all over the world are sending seeds representing their native flora, to be stored permanently on an arctic archipelago, 1120 kilometers from the north pole.  And guess what?  They have refrigeration units to cool the vault, aiming for 0 degree temperatures designed to keep the seeds viable for 1000 years.

The remote location was chosen for security as well as its low temperatures.

The vault is being constructed 393 feet in a sandstone mountain under yards of reinforced concrete and blast-proof doors.

The mission, under the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources on Food and Agriculture is to store as many types of seed as possible, to prevent domestic and wild plants from becoming extinct in the event of a disaster like nuclear or biological warfare, global warming, plant epidemics or a meteor strike the like of which made the dinosaurs extinct.

The Gates foundation has given $30 million to this effort.

Moral of the story:  If you believe global disaster is looming, move to Norway.

The Hole Truth

There's a hole in the cosmos,
Dear Liza, dear Liza,
There's a hole in the cosmos,
Dear Liza, a hole.

  Stryder sent us this story, though I'd read it in the paper as well.  He commented that this is where lost socks go.  Lost everything, probably;  there's certainly enough room.

After reading The Canon, by Natalie Anagier, I almost understood the article.

Scientists noticed a slight cooling of some cooling in the cosmic microwave background, a remnant of the Big Bang. When these waves pass through a void, they cool slightly.  From this, they extrapolated the existence of a huge void in the universe.  When we look at the sky, we see starts and galaxies.  There are billions of them.  And black holes, and white dwarves and red giants. Using a Very Large Array (very creative names these astrophysicists use) radio telescope, they determined that the void was six to ten (ahem) billion light-years from home.  and nearly a billion light years across.

[Image via Sweet Georgia]

The Canon

I finally finished Natalie Angier's fine book, The Canon:  A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science.

It took me some time, because I'd have to stop every couple of pages to digest the beautiful new insights I'd gained into the world around and within me.  The chapters say it all:  Thinking Scientifically, Probabilities, Calibration, Physics, Chemistry, Evolutionary Biology, Molecular Biology, Geology and Astronomy.  If it sounds dry, let me be the first to tell you that it's anything but.  You won't earn a PhD reading it, but you'll at least have a grasp of all these sciences.

The Canon is  lovingly written, and full of puns.  Explanations are simple and clear, yet elegant, possibly the most fun I've ever had reading something that was good for me.

Angier's mind is interesting.  It deals with the rigid rules of science (she is, after all, a science writer for the New York Times), yet pushing at the boundaries of thought and language, and arriving at some metaphysical concepts that stop you (me, anyway) in your tracks.

For instance, after establishing that life is written in DNA, and that every cell passes life on through it, and that therefore we are all descended from the first cells, witnessed by the fact that we are all monophyletic:  "Gunter Blobel, a cell biologist at Rockefeller University, Nobel laureate and fair grist for a limerick, sees the plain splendor in life's unbroken tenure.  'When you come right down to it, you are not twenty or thirty or forty years old,' he said.  'You are 3.5 billion years old.  Some people say how terrible it is, this idea that we come from monkeys.  Well, it's worse than that--or better, depending on your perspective.  Wecome from cells from 3.5 billion years ago.'

"'There is this tremendous thread of life that goes back to when the firs cells arose, and that will continue on after any of us die as individuals' he said.  'It's continuous life and continuous cell division, and we are all an extension of that continuity.  Reincarnation and similar themes are poetic representations of biological activity.'"

Or this from the chapter on astronomy after expaling the Big Bang and how the stars became huge fusion pits where smaller atoms like hydrogen and helium fused to make larger and heavier atoms while giving off heat and light. "'We are star stuff, a part of the cosmos' said Alex Filippenko.' I'm not just speaking generically or metaphorically here.  The specific atoms in every cell of your body, my body, my son's body, the body of yoyr pet cat, were cooked up inside massive stars.  To me, that is one of the most amazing conclusions in the history of science, and I want everybody to know about it.'"  I love that stuff.

The most fascinating for me, because it's something I know very little about, was the chapter on astronomy.  The explanations of the origins of the universe and the Big Bang almost made sense to me, but the formation of the starts, then their depletion, implosion, explosion...star, supernova, red giant and dense white dwarf.

The chaper on geology gives the same treatment to our planet, where it came from, how it seethes and breathes.  How we get tsunamis and volcanoes and earthquakes, and why the Earth is not just one huge festering mass of open fiery pits and fissures.

Somehow, realizing how we are all atoms and cells, yet tiny specks on a tiny speck of a world in a  non-descript solar-system of a middling galaxy...should, somehow make you feel insignificant, but it doesn't.  It's just awesome.

What a wonderful book!

[Image of The Milky Way via Celestial Wonders]

Eggsactly

I was reading The Canon by Natalie Angier last night, and this fact boggled my imagination.  It had never occured to me before, which further boggled.

We all know that a sperm is a single cell, and an ovum is a single cell, but I'd never translated that into other types of ova.

So when she mentions, almost casually, that a chicken egg is a single cell, well, my jaw dropped.

In Angier's words:

"Yes, believe it or not, an unfertilized chicken egg of the kind you buy at the grocery store is a single cell, although strictly speaking, it's the cheery, marmalade-colored yolk of the egg that is bounded by the plasma membrane and thus qualifies as the cell proper."

She adds that the egg white and the calcium chloride shell are added later, as the yolk descends down the cloaca.  The largest egg in the world, and thus the largest cell in the world, she goes on to tell us, is the ostrich egg, which weighs abut three pounds with it's shell.

Elaborating, she goes on to say that for all its size, the ostrich egg is the smallest relative to the size of the mother.  Kiwis and hummingbirds, on the other hand, lay eggs which are 25% as big as they are.

Whew!

[Image by Tony Northrup.  He takes Pictures of Everything.]

Older AND Wiser

L.C. sent us this suggestion, mentioning that she has been lording it over her siblings since she read about this study.

A Norwegian study looking at 240,000 teenagers (from military conscript records for males in the 18-19 year old range)  found that firstborns are 2.3 I.Q. points smarter, at 103.2, than their next-eldest siblings, who average 101.2, which is higher than third-borns, who come in at 100.  Studies support this relative dummying-down in female children as well.

Since I thought the average I.Q. was 100, I'd like to know where they find the children who score below 100 to pull the average down ("Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, the men are good looking, and the children are above average.").

   There has been some speculation that this I.Q. bump comes about because parents shower their first children with so much attention.  This does not seem to be the case, however.  Only children, those whom you would think get the most attention, don't score as highly as a firstborn with siblings. I'd expect only children to get even more attention from parents than a first child with subsequent siblings.   And a second child who becomes eldest on the death of an older sibling scores higher than the average second child, but not as high as those born into that lofty position.

I wonder if being the first or only child confers the advantages of parental attention, but that subsequent siblings help hone the intelligence and keep the first child challenged in ways an only child can only dream of.  I've read that those with the most profound impact on us are our siblings.

One thing not taken into consideration is the possibility of a physiologic cause.  I've been reading a lot of Natalie Angier lately, so I have to consider that possibility.  I wonder if the age of a mother's eggs could have an impact on intelligence.  After all, it's a rather subtle difference.  Mothers of families with multiple children obviously have their youngest eggs with the first child, and the ova get subsequently older with each child.  Maybe parents with a single child tend to decide to have that child at a slightly advanced age over those having several.  I wonder if there is a difference in the I.Q. of a firstborn who is born when his mother is 20, and that of a firstborn whose mother is 35 at the time of birth.

Or maybe the father's age has an effect. 

Who knows?  But it sure is interesting speculating.

No matter what, I get to remain the eldest sibling.

[Image from TIME magazine.  That story is not related to this one.]

On Correlation and Causation

I'm an avowed skeptic.  Somewhat cynical, too, but hopefully without the bitter edge that can go along with that.

I've been reading Natalie Angier's The Canon A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science.  Angier starts at the beginning, with a chapter on thinking scientifically, followed by one on probability.  In the latter, she talks about our tendency to confuse correlation with causation.  "Just because two traits or events are frequently found in the same package doesn't mean that  one is responsible for the other."

Just because I show up for math class every day at 11 am, and George Clooney shows up there at the same time every day and sits in back of me doesn't mean he's stalking me (damn it).  Just because we're there at the same time every day doesn't mean he's there because I'm there (damn it, again).

Many people tend to equate correlation with causation, however, a phrase I ran into again today (twice in 24 hours!  There must be a reason!)as I read eSkeptic.  The topic was whether vaccines (specifically a preservative in some called thimerisol) are responsible for autism.  It is a timely topic, as nearly 5000 parents of autistic children have filed suit against the government  claiming that vaccines caused their children's disease.

I urge you to click on the link and read the entire fascinating article.  While many claim that the incidence of autism rose with the widespread use of thimerisol-containing vaccines, it is quite a leap to prove cause and effect.  And in fact, it probably can't be done, because there probably isn't one.

Fascinating information from the article:

There is little in the literature to imply a direct link.  For ethical reasons, there are no randomized, double-blind studies, the gold-standard of scientific literature.

One study by Mark and David Geier uses a flawed database to demonstrate a correlation between thimeriol and autism.  Much more interesting, shocking, even, is the fact that the Geiers, in addition to publishing data suggesting a correlation, have filed for a patent for two treatments for autism, using drug combinations and chelation.  And David Geier is the president of MedCon Inc.  (emphasis on the "con"), a legal firm that seeks compensation for people who claim to have been harmed by vaccines.  So much for the conflict of interest issue.  There is a reason that scientific rigor requires disclosure of all potential conflicts of interest.

The article also points out in 1992, in Denmark, thimerisol was removed from vaccines, yet the rates of autism continued to climb.

Finally, compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges.  It is fine to say that autism is climbing, and to give statistics, but the fact is that many new diagnoses are made based on different definitions.  Diagnotic criteria for autism were changed in 1994.  Autism is a diagnosis of inclusion and exclusion, with no single scientific marker.  Thus it has an element of subjectivity not found in a disease diagnosible by, say, a blood test.  The authors even point out the fact that sometimes the only way a family can get help and services is to have a diagnosis, which may make a medical practitioner more likely to give it a name.

This is fascinating stuff and highlights the importance of critical thinking.  It is so easy to be swayed and spun into believing something patently untrue.

It will be interesting to see if our legal system can win a major windfall in this case.  Harder against the government than it was against Dow-Corning in the silicone implant debacle.  But it is alarming that a good lawyer (I use the word "good" loosely) can make a jury completely ignore science, just as our government has done to the people in recent years.

Alarming and sad, this trend of swallowing untruths or partial truths whole when presented by a glib if unscrupulous flimflam artist.

And so I ask:  Be critical.  Do your homework.  Be skeptical.  Ask questions.  Ask more questions.  Read.  It's important.

[Image from Amazing Firms, Amazing Practices]

Phosphene

Did you ever wonder what caused you to see lights and starts when  you rub your eyes?

These sensations of light (for they are not actually light) themselves are called phosphenes.

They occur when the retina or visual cortex is stimulated by something other than light waves, which are the normal stimuli.  Mechanical pressure like rubbing the eyes when they are closed, or electrical or magnetic stimulation can cause the effect of light.  Pressure phosphenes can persist briefly after the eye is reopened.

Phosphenes can also accompany a blow to the head, or standing too suddenly...the "seeing stars" phenomenon.

They may also be the product of retinal or neural disease.

[image from sharonthebaron's moblog]