- Poor data from voluntary census,
- Funding cuts and beef recall, - The almost Montreal Yom Kippur controversy
- The sometimes hypocrisy of free speech
- Narcolepsy and the Flu, and - Our review of the 2012 Ig Noble Prizes
We discuss new data from StatsCan on the 2010 Canadian census shows communities of need are under represented in the data. We predicted this when the Conservative government arbitration decreed that the mandatory census become voluntary in spite of the vocal resistance from the head of StatsCan, social scientist and the majority of Canadian population.
We briefly talk about the potentially deadly delay of Canadian Food Inspection Agency at issuing a recall on beef products in the light of US officially issuing a recall weeks prior. We ask the question – to what degree are spending cuts responsible?
A potential controversy about religious accommodation in Montreal was averted but a lack of business. When a city counsellor raised the question that Montreal citizens would be better serves if city council did not adjourn for Yom Kippur but simply allow members to be excused for religious observance they were criticize as anti-Semitic. The meeting in question finished its agenda prior to the start of the Jewish holiday so the controversy was averted.
Ethan asks the question though if Quebec and Montreal are a secular governments to what degree should they provide religious accommodation for beliefs?
Don brings up an article he read at Slate.com by William Saletan which was inspired by the resent global uproar over the Innocence of Islam vid on YouTube. The article presented a binary choice between free speech and hate laws.
We discussed the logical fallacy of this opposition, the difference between offensive and hate speech, and the social context that leads to the inconsistent way hate speech is legislated around the world. We talk about how German’s history has resulted in a larger set of ‘speech crimes’, why blasphemy law are not intended to curb hate but promote social agendas and how Canada’s own Oakes Test provides a mechanism define the board between free speech and hate crime.
Since early 2011 there has been a known correlation between the H1N1 vaccine and narcolepsy used during the Swine Flu Pandemic used in some countries in 2009-10. We discuss how this case may be an excellent example of correlation NOT being causation as a link between genetics and respiratory infection (the flu) seems to be the cause according to recent research published on an H1N1 out break in China.
We point out the need to be informed and ‘on top of the issue’ because the possible manipulation of this incident by the Anti-Vax movement. Reference: Fatality of H1N1 0.03% – odds of Narcolepsy 0.004%
The Ig Noble prizes are awarded to scientific research that ‘first makes you laugh, then makes you think’. We give you are take on this years winners.
Winners:
PSYCHOLOGY - Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller”
PEACE - converting old Russian ammunition into new diamonds.
ACOUSTICS - SpeechJammer — a machine that disrupts a person’s speech, by making them hear their own spoken words at a very slight delay.
NEUROSCIENCE - demonstrating that brain researchers, by using complicated instruments and simple statistics, can see meaningful brain activity anywhere — even in a dead salmon.
CHEMISTRY - the puzzle of why, in certain houses in the town of Anderslöv, Sweden, people’s hair turned green. – It was copper
LITERATURE - a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports.
PHYSICS - calculating the balance of forces that shape and move the hair in a human ponytail.
FLUID DYNAMICS – studying the dynamics of liquid-sloshing, to learn what happens when a person walks while carrying a cup of coffee
ANATOMY - discovering that chimpanzees can identify other chimpanzees individually from seeing photographs of their rear ends.
MEDICINE - advising doctors who perform colonoscopies how to minimize the chance that their patients will explode.
Skeptical Highlights:
Face Blindness
Prosopagnosia, also called face blindness, is a disorder of face perception where the ability to recognize faces is impaired, while the ability to recognize other objects may be relatively intact.Don recently took several face blindness test and discovered that he can see ‘generic’ faces quite well but confirmed what he already knew; he has extreme difficulty recognizing particular faces (lowest percentile).
Check your self out here, and find out more here.
Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves A new book about Thomas Jefferson, was Jefferson a benevolent slave owner? Not according to this book. It alleges that generations of historians had been covering up Jefferson’s dark side: he wasn’t the lenient, soft-hearted, reluctant slave owner that he’d been made out to be. The book by Henry Wiencek is available now – sounds interesting.
– and on the seventh day we learn.
Each week I hope to give a synopsis of the interesting science stories I have heard on my plethora of science podcasts I listen to each week plus anything I pick up scanning the inter-web. This week’s top stories:
Words of the Week:
Theme Asexual reproduction
Fission – the subdivision of a cell (or body, population, or species) into two or more parts and the regeneration of those parts into separate cells (bodies, populations, or species). Binary fission produces two separate cells, populations, species, etc., whereas multiple fission produces more than two cells, populations, species, etc..
Budding – Some cells split via budding (for example baker’s yeast), resulting in a ‘mother’ and ‘daughter’ cell. The offspring organism is smaller than the parent. Budding is also known on a multicellular level; an animal example is the hydra, which reproduces by budding. The buds grow into fully matured individuals which eventually break away from the parent organism.
Vegetative reproduction – the formation of miniaturized plants called plantlets on specialized leaves (for example in kalanchoe) and some produce new plants out of rhizomes or stolon (for example in strawberry). Other plants reproduce by forming bulbs or tubers (for example tulip bulbs and dahlia tubers). Some plants produce adventitious shoots and suckers that form along their lateral roots. Plants that reproduce vegetatively may form a clonal colony, where all the individuals are clones, and the clones may cover a large area.
Fragmentation – where a new organism grows from a fragment of the parent. Each fragment develops into a mature, fully grown individual. Fragmentation is seen in many organisms such as animals (some annelid worms, turbellarians and sea stars), fungi, and plants.
Agamogenesis, Parthenogenesis, Spore formation, Apomixis and Nucellar Embryony – forms of reproduction that do not involve a male gamete, meiosis or syngamy.
This week’s top stories:
The obligatory stories on Zombies <for Halloween> -
Our appetite for zombies is becoming a growing trend. From computer games and films to organised zombie walks though Britain’s cities, the proliferation of zombies seems to be everywhere. Yet, this high interest in zombies enables researchers to link zombie-like behaviours to current models of public attitudes and actions.
Researcher Dr Nick Pearce will present findings from his new study of Britain’s zombie phenomenon at an event organised as part of the Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) Festival of Social Science 2011. The event will be an interactive talk on the metaphor of the zombie in everyday life, followed by a screening of the first ever zombie film, White Zombie (1932).
“Zombies are very now,” Dr Pearce points out, “but what’s really interesting and potentially worrying is how far today’s zombies – whether on TV, films or computer games have departed from the original concept.”
Early zombies, as first portrayed in the White Zombie film, were the demoralised, undead slaves of voodoo priests. “Crucially, the end of that film and others of its time, spoke of hope and featured the overthrow of the controlling voodoo master by his ‘zombie’ slaves,” Dr Pearce explains. From the late 1960s the nature of zombies changed and they were portrayed as hordes of brain-consuming monsters with no voodoo context and no controlling master.”
“With no voodoo master, today’s zombies have no clear controller to turn against and free themselves from,” Dr Pearce argues. “That means there are no effective plans for resistance and no hope for the future. Zombies may well be popular today because they speak to a similar feeling of powerlessness shared by many members of our society.”
“The key question,” he continues, “is why, like today’s portrayal of zombies, are we unwilling to take a stand against the powers-that-be and are overwhelmed by a lack of political interest. It seems the time is right to reclaim the original zombie concept of a controlling sorcerer but one that can successfully be resisted. Today’s zombie phenomenon is a really good opportunity to get people thinking about who may be wishing to control our brains and what resources we have to resist.”
But what do we feel powerless against? Among the many possibilities, researchers suggest private ownership is a high profile offender. Clearly it’s in the interests of competition to encourage mindless consumerism. “In the past, zombies wandered around consuming brains, but today’s zombies are encouraged to wander around consuming the latest, heavily advertised, branded goods,” Dr Pearce explains. And for those with power, it’s clearly useful to them to have a ‘zombified’ society that does not challenge their decision-making under any circumstances.
The Burmese Python may be best known for its dietary habits: it constricts its prey – which can be as large as the snake itself – then swallows it whole. And the python can go a full year without food. Eating habits like this require special demands, among them increased blood flow. That is why, after ingesting such a large meal, all of the python’s internal organs – including the heart – nearly double in size.
CU-Boulder Professor Leslie Leinwand et all published a study that shows that huge amounts of fatty acids circulating in the bloodstreams of feeding pythons promote healthy heart growth, results that may have implications for treating human heart disease. They found the amount of triglycerides — the main constituent of natural fats and oils — in the blood of Burmese pythons one day after eating increased by more than fifty fold. Despite the massive amount of fatty acids in the python bloodstream there was no evidence of fat deposition in the heart, and the researchers also saw an increase in the activity of a key enzyme known to protect the heart from damage.
“We found that a combination of fatty acids can induce beneficial heart growth in living organisms,” said CU-Boulder postdoctoral researcher Cecilia Riquelme, first author on the Science paper. “Now we are trying to understand the molecular mechanisms behind the process in hopes that the results might lead to new therapies to improve heart disease conditions in humans.”
There are good and bad types of heart growth, said Leinwand, who is an expert in genetic heart diseases including hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, the leading cause of sudden death in young athletes. While cardiac diseases can cause human heart muscle to thicken and decrease the size of heart chambers and heart function because the organ is working harder to pump blood, heart enlargement from exercise is beneficial.
The CU-led team also identified the activation of signaling pathways in the cells of fed python plasma, which serve as traffic lights of sorts, said Leinwand. “We are trying to understand how to make those signals tell individual heart cells whether they are going down a road that has pathological consequences, like disease, or beneficial consequences, like exercise,” she said.
The prey of Burmese pythons can be up to 100 percent of the constricting snake’s body mass, said Leinwand, who holds a Marsico Endowed Chair of Excellence at CU-Boulder. “When a python eats, something extraordinary happens. Its metabolism increases by more than fortyfold and the size of its organs increase significantly in mass by building new tissue, which is broken back down during the digestion process.”
Belief in God destroys your will to accomplish anything! -
Being reminded of the concept of God can decrease people’s motivation to pursue personal goals but can help them resist temptation, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.
Kristin Laurin, PhD, of the University of Waterloo in Canada. “This is the first empirical evidence that simple reminders of God can diminish some types of self-regulation, such as pursuing one’s goals, yet can improve others, such as resisting temptation.”
A total of 353 college students, with an average age 19 and 186 of whom were women, participated in six experiments to determine how the idea of God can indirectly influence people’s motivations, even among those who said they were not religious.
In one experiment, engineering students completed a “warm-up” word task. They were asked to form grammatically correct sentences using four words from sets of five. Some students were provided either God or God-related words (divine, sacred, spirit and prophet), while the control group used more neutral words (ball, desk, sky, track and box).
Next, each student had to form as many words as they could in five minutes, using any combination of specific letters. The researchers determined the students’ motivation level by the number of words they produced. The more motivated they were, the more words they produced. They were told that a good performance could help predict if they would succeed in an engineering career.
Several weeks before this experiment, the students had been asked if they believed outside factors (other people, beings, forces beyond their control) had an influence on their careers. There was no difference in performance among the participants who did not believe outside factors influenced their career success.
Researchers also measured the importance participants placed on a number of values, including achievement. Participants reminded of God placed the same value on achievement as did participants primed with the more neutral words.
A second set of experiments looked at participants’ ability to resist temptation after being reminded about God. Participants who read a short God-related passage reported greater willingness to resist temptations to achieve a major goal, such as maintaining a healthy weight, finding a long-term relationship or having a successful career. This effect was found only among participants who had previously said they believe an omniscient entity watches over them and notices when they misbehave.
The level of participants’ religious devotion had no impact on the outcomes in any of the experiments, according to the researchers.
If you think about it, bacteria procreate via fission…that is one mother cell becomes two daughter cells, each of these in turn becomes the mother with daughters of their own. Now, assuming (for the sake of argument) that one daughter is the ‘original’; that a single bacteri can (baring accident or bleach) live forever…or can it?
A study, conducted by Lin Chao et all, questions that longstanding paradigm. In a paper published in the November 8 issue of the journal Current Biology, they conclude that not only do bacteria age, but that their ability to age allows bacteria to improve the evolutionary fitness of their population by diversifying their reproductive investment between older and more youthful daughters.
“Aging in organisms is often caused by the accumulation of non-genetic damage, So for a single celled organism that has acquired damage that cannot be repaired, which of the two alternatives is better — to split the cellular damage in equal amounts between the two daughters or to give one daughter all of the damage and the other none?”
The answer — bacteria appear to give more of the cellular damage to one daughter, the one that has “aged,” and less to the other, which the biologists term “rejuvenation”.
In a separate study, the UC San Diego biologists filmed populations of E. coli bacteria dividing over hundreds of generations and confirmed that the sausage-shaped bacteria divided each time into daughter cells that grew elongated at different rates — suggesting that one daughter cell was getting all or most of the cellular damage from its mother while the other was getting little or none.
“We ran computer models and found that giving one daughter more the damage and the other less always wins from an evolutionary perspective,” said Chao
The mere presence of a predator causes enough stress to kill a dragonfly, even when the predator cannot actually get at its prey to eat it.
“As we learn more about how animals respond to stressful conditions — whether it’s the presence of predators or stresses from other natural or human-caused disruptions — we increasingly find that stress brings a greater risk of death, presumably from things such as infections that normally wouldn’t kill them,” says Rowe Locke.
Rowe et all raised juvenile dragonfly larvae (Leucorrhinia intacta) in aquariums or tanks along with their predators. The two groups were separated so that while the dragonflies could see and smell their predators, the predators could not actually eat them.
“What we found was unexpected — more of the dragonflies died when predators shared their habitat,” says Rowe. Larvae exposed to predatory fish or aquatic insects had survival rates 2.5 to 4.3 times less than those not exposed.
In a second experiment, 11 per cent of larvae exposed to fish died as they attempted to metamorphose into their adult stage, compared to only two per cent of those growing in a fish-free environment. “We allowed the juvenile dragonflies to go through metamorphosis to become adult dragonflies, and found those that had grown up around predators were more likely to fail to complete metamorphosis successfully, more often dying in the process,” says Rowe.
The scientists suggest that their findings could apply to all organisms facing any amount of stress, and that the experiment could be used as a model for future studies on the lethal effects of stress.
The imperial woodpecker — the largest woodpecker that ever lived –probably went extinct in the late 20th century in the high mountains of Mexico, without anyone ever capturing photos or film of the 2-foot-tall, flamboyantly crested bird. Or so scientists thought — until a biologist from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology tracked down a 16-mm film shot in 1956 by a dentist from Pennsylvania.
Escherichia coli (E.coli): if you are an average member of the public you might think of this bacteria in terms of some really nasty food poisoning. The name might conjure up warnings on the news about spinach and sprouts. On the other hand if you, like me, are something of a microbiologist you know E. coli as the most studied bacteria on the globe, and possibly the organism we know the most about on earth. What is important to remember, however, is that all of this research wasn’t conducted with “E. coli” but with a specific strain of the bug: K-12.
In science we accept certain limitations. You can’t study everything and so in biology and in microbiology you tend to study “model organisms.” These are defined species that researchers concentrate their studies on. The benefit of this approach is that everyone can compare apples to apples (or zebrafish to zebrafish, as the case may be). It is useful, however, to remember that when you’re studying a nematode, you’re not studying “worms” you’re studying a nematode (which is a worm), and when you’re studying a mouse, you’re not studying “mammals”, you’re studying a mouse. Obviously it’s important to keep this in mind when drawing conclusions about the implications of research. The questionable applicability of studies into one species to a separate species is precisely why there is so much controversy both inside and outside scientific fields about animal drug testing and its value: a mouse is not a human.
In the bacterial world there is incredible diversity. There is a far greater number of bacterial species than of animal species. For this reason, it’s important to remember to take a look at just how wide a spectrum is being distilling down to one point by concentrating on one organism. I attended a recent talk by professor Erick Denamurwho is interested in precisely this subject matter. His lab studies the diversity and “lifestyles” of E. coli from around the world, and how these variables relate to differences in their genetic makeup.
As a little bit of background, the scientific community has focused intense research effort into investigations of the K-12 strain of E.coli. This was isolated from the faeces of a single convalescent diphtheria patient in the early 20th century. To reiterate, this single strain is our basis for much of what we know about bacteria in general. E. coli does, however, have a much wider genetic and phenotypic range than this. The primary habitat for E. coli is as commensal organisms in the intestines of vertebrates. This means they live with us, without causing us any problems, and do the same for birds, pigs, and lots of other animals. They can also live in their secondary habitat: fresh water and sediments. This makes sense, as the contents of one’s intestine tend to end up on the ground if one is your average vertebrate. While these might seem a first glance to be two well defined habitats, there is actually great diversity in the conditions in the intestines of different species. Indeed, even in humans there are different “gut phenotypes” which support the growth of different bacteria in different individuals. Likewise, there are vast differences in conditions and available resources in different soil and water environments around the world. Studies conducted by professor Denamur show that to go along with all of this ecological diversity, the species E. coli also has massive genetic diversity. Depending on the strain, each one can have between 4300-5300 genes, and only just under 2000 are conserved in all the strains. This means that less than half of the genes can be compared in the same species of bacteria, and we’re extrapolating what we know about it to many other species.
As might be expected, Denamur’s lab also found that the different genotypes or genetic makeups correlated with different niches. For example, almost half of people sampled from the US are carriers of a specific strain whereas in a jungle in Africa, less than two percent of people carry the same strain. There are also different profiles for birds than for humans, and different levels of pathogenicity in the different strains: some kill mice, some don’t. This is all, of course, a product of the natural selection process.
So why is this a skeptical subject? Biological model organsisms are one of the most valuable tools that we can use such that each individual study contributes to a larger field, rather than each research group working on a different organism in isolation. Its a good idea, however, to do studies like those of professor Denamur to effectively take a skeptical look at the applicability of biological models by getting a handle on what you don’t know. Having a better idea of the diversity of the group that you’re using one member to represent allows us to more rationally draw conclusions about the group as a whole. Positive knowledge is great, but sometimes it can be just as powerful to estimate and accept the scope of what we don’t yet know.
We discuss new data from StatsCan on the 2010 Canadian census shows communities of need are under represented in the data. We predicted this when the Conservative government arbitration decreed that the mandatory census become voluntary in spite of the vocal resistance from the head of StatsCan, social scientist and the majority of Canadian population.
We briefly talk about the potentially deadly delay of Canadian Food Inspection Agency at issuing a recall on beef products in the light of US officially issuing a recall weeks prior. We ask the question – to what degree are spending cuts responsible?
A potential controversy about religious accommodation in Montreal was averted but a lack of business. When a city counsellor raised the question that Montreal citizens would be better serves if city council did not adjourn for Yom Kippur but simply allow members to be excused for religious observance they were criticize as anti-Semitic. The meeting in question finished its agenda prior to the start of the Jewish holiday so the controversy was averted.
Don brings up an article he read at Slate.com by William Saletan which was inspired by the resent global uproar over the Innocence of Islam vid on YouTube. The article presented a binary choice between free speech and hate laws.
how German’s history has resulted in a larger set of ‘speech crimes’, why blasphemy law are not intended to curb hate but promote social agendas and how Canada’s own Oakes Test provides a mechanism define the board between free speech and hate crime.
Since early 2011 there has been a known correlation between the H1N1 vaccine and narcolepsy used during the Swine Flu Pandemic used in some countries in 2009-10. We discuss how this case may be an excellent example of correlation NOT being causation as a link between genetics and respiratory infection (the flu) seems to be the cause according to recent research published on an H1N1 out break in China.
The Ig Noble prizes are awarded to scientific research that ‘first makes you laugh, then makes you think’. We give you are take on this years winners.
