The Observer: John Huchra, 1948 – 2010

By: | October 13, 2010
Map of the universe, at present, in theory

“The universe is what it is, and we’re trying to find out what it is,” John Huchra told me.  “The explorers of the new world weren’t trying to prove theories, they were looking at what was out there.”

Huchra was an observational astronomer, as opposed to a theorist.  Theorists say that, given physics, the universe ought to look like this.  Observers go to telescopes and look, and report back, no, actually it looks like that.  Theorists put those observations into a theory and say, then if so, you observers should also see this other thing.  Observers look and say, yes but it looks more like that thing.  And so on, back and forth, their court, our court, until the whole tennis game – Huchra liked the word, “game” — results in a theory, an explanation, a lovely story we can all believe because it’s so thoroughly grounded in observations. Continue reading →

Not Tonight, Dear, I’ve Lost My Mucus

By: | October 12, 2010
Knit your own snails

A few years ago a friend of mine gave a party and screened the movie Microcosmos for the revelers. Perhaps it was the punch I had imbibed, but I seem to recall that the film – a montage of mesmerizing bug scenes including ants drinking from a dewdrop and caterpillars moving in single-file – had a strangely psychedelic effect on my brain. Especially hypnotic was the sight of two snails mating, their slimy bodies roiling and coiling around each other on a carpet of moss.

I thought of that snail sex scene when I read about some spiffy mollusc research recently published by a group of Swedish marine ecologists at the University of Gothenburg. This group of intrepid scientists have discovered that the females of the marine snail species Littorina saxatilis, or rough periwinkle, conceal their gender identity in order to avoid mating too much. They do this by refusing to label their mucus trails with chemical signals indicating their sex.

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The Immense Pleasure of Glass

By: | October 8, 2010

Each week, I’m torn between two warring emotions as I bear a large blue box of empty wine bottles and other glass detritus into the back alley. As I set the bin out for pick-up, I feel a certain satisfaction in a civic duty well done, dispatching this jumble of glass to the recyclers. But this personal pleasure battles with a something far less noble.  I pray the neighbors aren’t monitoring my alcohol consumption.

I always assumed that such recycling (soul-baring) was the brain child (fault) of modern environmentalists. But nothing could be further from the truth, as I discovered this week.  Some 1700 years ago, inhabitants of Roman Britain were dutifully recycling their glass too. And the more things crumbled and fell apart in the Roman Empire,  the more these ancient Brits recycled. Continue reading →

One Roman Helmet, Going, Going, Gone

By: | October 7, 2010

It’s hard not to feel depressed. As regular visitors to LWON know, British school children recently raided their piggy banks to help the Tullie House Museum buy an absolutely stunning Roman cavalry helmet discovered last spring in northwestern England (see here for the background). Well, the helmet went up on the auction block at Christie’s today, and the news isn’t good. All those donations by adults and kids alike hardly made a dint in the final selling price–a staggering $3.2 million,  far above the pre-sale estimate of some $470,000. Continue reading →

Science Metaphors (cont.): Metastable

By: | October 7, 2010

1200px-Bowling_Balls_Beach_2Metastable:  Down the block, along the street, is a steep bank on which trees have taken root and grown, slanting off the bank and over the road, balancing their holds in the ground with increasing height and occasional high winds and of course gravity.  One day sooner or later a good rain slightly liquifies the soil, the wind catches the leaves and branches, gravity (which always wins) wins again, and a tree drops like a rock.  What had seemed stable was not.  It was metastable and had been all along. Continue reading →

The Brain’s Dark Energy

By: | October 6, 2010

In the mid-1990s, neuroscientist Marcus Raichle noticed something funny going on in some of his brain-scanning experiments.

Here’s what usually happens, more or less: someone lies inside of the scanner and performs a specific task, like pressing a button. In response to that particular task, some parts of the brain become more active. Voilà: you have identified the regions involved in button-pressing.

But Raichle observed that a couple of areas actually quiet down during a goal-directed task—during many different tasks, in fact. One of these spots is in the parietal lobe, in the middle of the back of the brain. Raichle thought the data was curious, but didn’t dwell on it. He threw the scans into a folder, labeled it MMPA—for ‘medial mystery parietal area’—and filed it away.
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Flu Season

By: | October 5, 2010

Last fall, ninth-grader Jordan McFarland received a jab of seasonal flu vaccine and the vaccine to prevent pandemic H1N1 virus. The next day, he got a bad headache and the chills. His muscles began to spasm and shake. He couldn’t walk. One of the people working at Jordan’s after-school daycare called 911. He was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS), a rare disorder that occurs when the body’s immune system attacks nerve cells.

In the US, about 3,000 to 6,000 people contract GBS each year. No one knows exactly what causes the illness, but infections appear to play some role. In Jordan’s case, his parents blame the vaccine. “There is no doubt in my mind that Jordan got GBS from his swine flu shot,” said Arlene Connin, Jordan’s stepmother.

And who could blame Connin? Less than 24 hours after receiving a flu shot, Jordan was writhing around on a hospital bed, unable to control his muscles. “It was so shocking and scary for everyone, because we didn’t know what was going on,” she said. But Connin had one more reason to suspect a link.

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