Bajau: The Undersea Hunters

The Bajau people of Indonesia, Malaysia and the Phillipines live their whole lives in and around the ocean. They can dive for 13 minutes at a time to depths of 200 feet and their bodies are different from the rest of us. In particular, they have larger spleens and eyes adapted to water.

In Malaysia, they are banned from the land, so they have made villages on stilts.

The people has a founding myth of a mission to escort a princess, possibly to a marriage. They fail in their duty to deliver her safely. Through shame or banishment, they never return home but wander the ocean for the generations since.

Expired Drugs Probably Aren't

All those medications have expiry dates. Did you ever wonder what they mean?

They  mean that during the approval process someone showed that the drug could last this long without degradation. If the drug is manufactured in 1990 and in 1992 it was tested and it contained enough of the drug, the U.S. FDA will allow the manufacturer to claim a two year shelf life. It does not mean that anyone ever showed any drug degradation after two years.

That test is rarely done. When it is performed, tests regularly show shelf lives of four years beyond the advertised life. What's more, even if the drug decays, that is not evidence that it has become harmful. The two doctors in this article (Cantrell and Clancy) have never heard or read “of anyone being harmed by any expired drugs”.

I Could Outrun a T-Rex

Two studies say that the Tyranasaurus Rex could not have been the fiercely fast predator shown in Jurassic Park. One says he would have run out of energy before he got up to speed. The other says his bones were not strong enough to handle the weight at high speeds.

Sex Differences in Sports

	Here is a run-down on male-female differences and how they might affect sports performance. Oh, and here's one comparing athletes' bodies to average men.

The Secret History of SCUBA

Chris Lambertsen started working on underwater breathing as a teenager in the 1920s, on the beaches of the Jersey shore. He pursued this vision to become a doctor, inventor and have a few other adventures along the way.

Synthetic Blood

Scientists in England have isolated stem cells and persuaded them to produce red blood cells. The first goal is to get them to make complicated and rare blood types.

Farming Isn't What It Used To Be

Underwater farms...protected by robot shepherds

...that guard their flocks autonomously

...by shooting attackers with lasers! 

The twenty-first century is here and it's awesome!

Bellyaching about Autism

Now there's a claim that gut bacteria is related to autism.
Apparently gastrointestinal  problems are common among those with autism. This study claims that a transplant of fecal microbes reduces gastrointestinal problems 80%, not too surprising. More remarkable is that it improves social and sleep habits by 20%.

Dinosaurs Had Feathers

We have long imagined dinosaurs as mighty lizards: scales and all. Every once in a while it is good to be reminded just how little of what we know is fact and how much is speculation.

Our beliefs about dinosaurs are based on reconstructions of skeletons or parts of skeletons. No one has ever seen dinosaur skin. (Whoops, we have, or at least impressions of dinosaur skin.)

Only now, it seems we may have seen the tail of a dinosaur, down to the smallest detail of texture, possibly even some hints of coloring.

(Jun'17 - ...or maybe not.)

Slow Progress Expected for Zika

Above is an excerpt from an infographic for a Zika virus vaccine. It politely hints at the problem.

1. Zika most strongly affects pregnant women and their newborns.
2. Any tragedies, whether caused by the vaccine, unrelated to the vaccine or even mitigated by the vaccine will be blamed on the vaccine. There will be lawsuits and the damages will be astronomical.
3. Revenue will not be astronomical. 

 (July'16) I'm not sure I like where this is going.

DDT and the 100 Million

"In the last days of September 1943, as the U.S. Army advanced to the rescue of Italian partisans — some as young as nine — battling the Germans in the streets of Naples, the enraged Nazis, in a criminal act of revenge against their erstwhile allies, deployed sappers to systematically destroy the city’s aqueducts, reservoirs, and sewer system. This done, the supermen, pausing only to burn irreplaceable libraries, including hundreds of thousands of volumes and artifacts at the University of Naples — where Thomas Aquinas once taught — showed their youthful Neapolitan opponents their backs, and on October 1, to the delirious cheers of the Naples populace, Allied forces entered the town in triumph."

"But a city of over a million people had been left without sanitation, and within weeks, as the Germans had intended, epidemics broke out. [read on]"

Progress Towards Life on Mars

 A fungus from Antarctica has been proven to survive reasonably well in simulated Mars conditions.

This means that if we decide* to make Mars habitable, the technology to do so is at hand. We can send earth life that will survive and reproduce. If the photosynthetic species are also hardy enough, we can generate oxygen that would stabilize the atmosphere.

*That is to say, unless we have already sent it.
(June'18) Some promising cyanobacteria

The Pacific Garbage Vortex

It seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear spot.

Wakuya

In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments. ...he began referring to the area as the “eastern garbage patch.” But “patch” doesn’t begin to convey the reality. Ebbesmeyer has estimated that the area, nearly covered with floating plastic debris, is roughly the size of Texas.

 The tales of Garbage Island are lurid.

Like all good stories, it grew over time...“We even came upon a floating island bolstered by dozens of plastic buoys used in oyster aquaculture that had solid areas you could walk on.” Again no photo of the floating island, let alone of him walking on it.

 If you've wondered where those tales come from, read here. If you want to see the garbage patch, read here.

(Feb'17) If I wanted a sensational claim supported by the facts of this article, I could say that in the middle of the garbage vortex there may be 2-4000 pieces of garbage floating in every square meter of ocean.

Poison-injecting robot submarines

Queensland University of Technology has developed an autonomous, poison-injecting robot submarine to kill sea stars and save coral reefs.

The 21st century is upon us and autonomous assassination robots are here.

All Fish are Cold-Blooded

Except when they aren't. Biology teachers everywhere, adjust to the new reality.

The opah fish makes use of counter-flow heat exchange in the blood vessels coming from its gills to keep its internal temperature high. That keeps its muscles warm and lets it swim fast in the cold, deep water where it lives.

(July'15) It's not that warm. The opah keeps its temperature 4-5
°C above water temperature.

Smarter Every Day at the Motocross Track

There are some really good YouTube video sites. My favorite science channel must be Smarter Every Day. In 3-8 minutes, Destin finds some interesting thing to describe and investigate. His giddy enthusiasm, unfailing wonder and wholesome, humble southern demeanor make it awesome*.
(Having a $100,000 camera that shoots 250,000 frames per second doesn't hurt, either.)
Here is Destin investigating angular momentum at the motocross track.

*Destin-approved vocabulary

Having watched every video, here is my annotated list of Smarter Every Day episodes.

"I Don't Know How You'll Survive When Our Genes Are Gone."

The epic scale of the lyrics to the Big Bang Theory is no accident. The whole show is  a metaphor for the creation of the human race from Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal. You see, recent research on the Neanderthal genome suggests interbreeding.

The genes for red hair and pale skin didn't match well enough to show a correlation, but I found a correlation for genes linked to other traits. There's a gene cluster linked to advanced mathematics skills, information processing, logic, analytical intelligence, concentration skills, obsession–compulsion and Asperger's syndrome. That cluster correlates very strongly.

and the bad news:

The hybridization was successful in the Stone Age, but the environment has changed. I found that modern culture selects for socialization but against the Neanderthal traits for mathematics and intelligence, ... I don't know how you'll survive when our genes are gone."

Feb'15 Apparently Asians got two helpings of Neanderthal genes.

Don't Let the Bedbugs Bite

Our little corner of BC has been okay. But I am told North America is again plagued with bedbugs. Ironically, the worst places are often the most expensive addresses: New York, San Francisco and even Toronto are large cosmopolitan cities with strong environmental sensibilities. They attract people from all over the world, some of whom carry bedbugs in their luggage and they abhor the idea of effective pesticides (like DDT).
Those times may be over. Researchers at SFU may have found the magic formula that will attract bedbugs and thus allow them to be trapped. Their weakness is that they like to cluster together.

Scientist with the Greatest Legacy?

The greatest impact on the world of science would have to go to Newton, possibly Bacon or Aristotle. The greatest benefit to mankind from scientific work? I guess that would be Norman Borlaug.

Who?

Borlaug was a farmer and a researcher into farming practices. His main idea was to adapt the best practices of the western farmer to the third world: first Mexico, then Pakistan and India. His most famous work was to breed a "semi-dwarf" wheat that could be grown strong and full without growing too tall, then falling over and rotting.

In doing so, he allowed millions of people to live who would have starved to death, probably hundreds of millions. He may have saved more lives than were taken by Mao, Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot, combined. In the early 70's, the smart set had agreed that mass starvation was a fact of life that could only get worse. Intellectual discussions were how to manage the suffering.

Even as they published, Borlaug had already proven the technology and was implementing the green revolution.

Norman Borlaug passed away three years ago, today. He was 95.

(Or this video has a little more technical content)

Who Smells Better: Old Men or Teens?

Did you know that people smell different as they age. What's more, people are surprisingly good at distinguishing between old person smell and young person smell. Guess who smells better.