Searching for the World’s Worst Glass of Water

By: | July 3, 2013

It takes a few days to adjust to life at 13,300 feet in Potosi, Bolivia. As soon as I touched down in the tiny airport, I remembered the time I climbed Mt. Whitney and got desperately sick in camp at 13,000 feet. Whitney is the highest point in the lower 48 at 14,500. To visit Bill Strosnider’s research sites here, I’ll have to go way above 15,000.

I was sent here by Rotarian Magazine for an assignment to look at mining discharge. Strosnider, an environmental engineering professor from Saint Francis University who studies water pollution here, takes me around to a few pools whose pH gets down to the mid twos (about equal with lemon juice or vinegar). Their water is a deeply disturbing orange and and any fish are long since dead. But on the last day Strosnider takes his students to another site, far from his standard research area, on a quest to find something very special. Continue reading →

AG: The Lucasian Throne

By: | July 2, 2013

game_of_theories1) The Lucasian throne is the Lucasian Chair, a funded and highly honored academic position at Cambridge University that is famous, partly because it’s currently held by Stephen Hawking and partly because its first holder was Isaac Newton.  2) Who, as you know, invented/discovered the law of gravity.  Translating that equation up there, the force by which Mass #1 is attracted to Mass #2 depends on their distance, their radius, apart and on some entity called G.  3) G’s name is the gravitational constant, meaning it’s everywhere and always the same number.

4) Finding that number is not the job of theorists, like Newton, but of the “half-human creatures doing their bidding” (a quote from a physicist), the experimentalists.  5)  Experimentalists have the dirty job of dealing with reality, in this case, the reality of trying to measure a small gravitational constant while stuck in the earth’s large gravitational field.  “Just take the earth away,”  say the theorists.  6) So finding G took experimentalists over a century — “Experimentalists, get your shit together,” says AG’s little mouseover.

7) G turns out to be tiny and experimentalists are still fussing about its details, measuring it to higher and tinier accuracies.  8) Next problem: finding how gravity actually does it.  You know how light is carried by particles moving in waves?  Gravity should follow the same plan but they can’t find the particles and they can’t find the waves.  9)  Sorry, Newton.  It’s not getting better, is it.

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http://abstrusegoose.com/510

A half-million-year-old horse? Yawn. Show me a warm summer day in San Francisco.

By: | July 1, 2013

Przewalski_0130 500x332San Francisco is in the midst of a heat wave this week, and the ability to walk the summer streets without a parka is having a regrettable effect on our workforce. For once, the shorts-sporting tourists are properly dressed, and office workers are lingering alongside them on the downtown sidewalks, noticing that it actually feels more pleasant to be outside than in.

But the havoc that heat plays on our productivity is nothing compared to its catastrophic effects on DNA. Which is why, last week, when researchers announced that they had sequenced the oldest-ever genome of a living thing, scientists were almost blase about the feat. The genome in question came from a horse that was at least half a million years old, whose bones were found sticking out of the frozen Arctic ground in Canada’s Yukon Territory. Freezing DNA is the best way to protect it from decay, so to scientists in the ancient DNA field, sequencing the genome of very old, cold things is no longer all that noteworthy. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | June 29, 2013
Not really Father-of-the-Year material.
Not really Father-of-the-Year material.

June 24 – 28

In light of all that happened this week, Erik looked at what the animal kingdom teaches us about being gay, and wonders why we insist on looking to the animal kingdom for lessons at all.

So that mermaids show was a hoax, but Roberta had some good news about real mermaids.

The next Big One — whether it’s sneeze-able bird flu or some horrible new bat disease that infects humans — will likely come to you courtesy of the best person you know, says Jessa.

I explained why I will never sit comfortably again.

And we reposted one of LWON’s classic posts, Cassie’s rumination on “Hubble moments.”

 

 

Watching your back

By: | June 28, 2013

shutterstock_93649423Half a lifetime bent over peering into people’s mouths had left Martha Podleschak with spine problems.

One of the job requirements for a dentist is a constant, slightly sideways forward tilt. According to her x-ray technician, Podleschak’s particular leftward lean had compressed the discs between her vertebrae, causing a pattern of extreme wear on the left. By the time she was 40, the pain was constant and unbearable and forced her into early retirement. Desperate for relief, Podleschak tried several avenues. After yoga proved unsuccessful, she went to a chiropractor. He broke her neck.

She spent the next 18 months in a neck cast. When it came off, she was partially paralyzed and the pain was far worse. There was no position she could lie, sit or stand in that was not excruciating. The only way she could sleep was by injecting narcotics. The wheelchair that she’d probably be committed to for the rest of her life was on its way. Continue reading →

The True Mermaids

By: | June 27, 2013

Mermaid ladiesOne night in May, I idly watched a scene from a rerun of an Animal Planet show called Mermaids: The Body Found. An affable-looking biomechanics researcher named Stephen Pearsall was recounting an analysis of a mysterious marine mammal carcass. In what appeared to be a dramatic re-enactment, the camera zoomed in on torn animal tissue, then showed men in lab coats staring at a CT scan of the creature.

“I realized that this was like no tail we had ever seen before,” said Dr. Pearsall. “It became clear that this creature once walked on two legs. And there is only one animal that walks upright on two legs.”

Cut to another scientist, Rebecca Davis, who had studied the animal’s bones. “Hands,” she said. “They were hands.”

What the hell? I thought. Has Animal Planet found some fringe scientists who think they’ve discovered mermaids? Continue reading →

How Natural is Homosexuality?

By: | June 26, 2013

shutterstock_59303527-500x333Today, in light of gay pride month and all the gay marriage business all over the news, I thought it might be time we at LWON weigh in on this most hot-button of issues. We look to biology to explain so much about how we interact and why we act how we do. But what does it have to say about rainbow flags, Suburus, and men’s cutoff jeans? Continue reading →

Bless the Superspreaders

By: | June 25, 2013

superspreader

We were a ragtag bunch at the KyoRyuKan theatre in the year 2000, all washed up there for different reasons. One man had been a master kimono maker before his building burned down and he lost everything, including all of his precious silks. Another man arrived promptly at nine every morning to ride out the work day – he had lost his job and wasn’t ready to tell his family. The Butoh teacher was an outlier in her post-Hiroshima dance discipline. While Butoh hard-liners stripped naked and painted themselves white, pulling grotesque faces of agony, she preferred to prowl beautifully like a cat.

But the reason we were all there was Peter Golightly. Arrived in Japan a decade previously, the American had picked up polio in India but recovered unexpectedly and decided to become a dancer and generalized entertainer. What he lacked in elite training he made up in enthusiasm. The same amateur passion inspired the community he led, and this was liberating for me, who had neither experience nor aptitude for anything artistic.

Continue reading →