Frankincense, Myrrh & Magi

By: | December 24, 2010

Each year by this date I’m pretty much done with Christmas carols. Few powers on earth could force me to listen one more time to Mel Torme’s The Christmas Song or the Pogues’ Fairytale of New York, superb as these recordings are. But despite all this frying of the synapses by cold, relentless, commercial repetition, there’s still one carol that can still spirit me away to the joy of the season: We Three Kings of Orient Are. The music is gorgeous; the lyrics wonderfully simple. “Bearing gifts we traverse afar/Field and fountain, moor and mountain/Following yonder star.”

The songwriter, John Henry Hopkins Jr., an Episcopalian deacon tending his flock in New York City in 1857, was clearly a man of his times, and the carol he wrote perfectly conjures up the spirit of adventure and exploration that pervaded the Victorian era. But the story of the Magi is, of course, a very old one, from the Gospel of Matthew.  And it has  long intrigued archaeologists–particularly the description of the gifts. Continue reading →

Mouse tail opens, shuts global insurance case

By: | December 23, 2010

A container full of sterile goods left Eastern China one day and ended up, four months later, in the Netherlands. As unpackers were rummaging through packing material, they turned up a tiny mummified mouse. The goods, evidently, were not sterile.

They were insured, though, and the insurance company needed to figure out who was to blame. Did the vermin board in China, or the Netherlands?

The corpse went to the Netherlands Centre for Biodiversity Naturalis for a taxonomical work-up. The company hoped that by identifying the type of mouse, scientists could pinpoint where it came from.

Researchers determined, based on anatomy, that the critter was an adolescent wood or field mouse from the Apodemus genus. But that didn’t really help: two species of Apodemus scurry through the Netherlands, and two other Apodemus species are native to Eastern China.

Luckily, the geographical boundaries of the Chinese species and the Dutch species do not overlap. So, the team reasoned, if they could identify this specimen’s species, they could solve the mystery.

This required a genetic screening. From browsing online gene databases, D.S.J. Groenenberg and R.W.R.J. Dekker discovered that analyzing the DNA-letter sequence of just one gene—Cytochrome B—would allow them to distinguish between these four species of Apodemus. So the researchers pulled the mouse out of the freezer and snipped off a 4-millimeter bit of its tail.

The extracted DNA betrayed the creature’s identity: it was Apodemus sylvaticus, a long-tailed wood mouse. This species spans a huge geographic range—as far east as Nepal, as far south as North Africa, as far west as Ireland and as far north as Sweden. But A. sylvaticus has never roamed Eastern China. The Dutch were to blame.

**

This work (cutely named “A mouse’s tail: How to settle an insurance dispute“) was published online 17 December in Forensic Science International.

Photo by jkonig, via Flickr

Notice: Smart Virginia

By: | December 23, 2010

Virginia wrote one of Nature‘s (very prestigious outfit) ten best features last year.   Nature‘s editors said so.  The feature, “Science in Court: Head Case,” was about the dicey use of MRI in death sentences for psychopathic murderers.  Fascinating science, real-world implications.   Go read it.

Photo: Gabriel Pollard

Waking the Dead

By: | December 22, 2010

The subtitle of the show is “Art and Magic,” but the word that haunted me when I visited “Houdini,” an exhibit at the Jewish Museum of Art in New York City, was science.

The magic was certainly there. The handcuffs that couldn’t hold him. The straitjacket that couldn’t contain him. The thrilling films of Houdini diving handcuffed into a river in Rochester, only to surface, unshackled, after barely a moment, or dangling straitjacketed upside-down over lower Manhattan, pupa-like, wriggling until he’s free. Continue reading →

First comes love, then comes the rubella test?

By: | December 21, 2010

Once upon a time, in a far off land, a boy and a girl courted and fell in love. Although they lived in the big city, they decided to tie the knot in Montana, where the boy’s parents live. But before the state would recognize their union, the girl had to have a blood test.

Pre-marital blood tests came into vogue in the mid-1900s as a way to stem the dramatic increase in syphilis. But by the 1980s, however, they had lost their appeal. Many states found that they weren’t cost effective. The number of cases detected was minuscule compared to the money being shelled out to test all the excited young lovers hoping to wed. When Massachusetts repealed its blood test requirement in 2005, officials said the test was outdated and an economic burden to the state and to couples, according to the Associated Press.

Today, only two states require blood tests before marriage: Mississippi and Montana. Continue reading →

Tonight: Blood Moon

By: | December 20, 2010

UPDATE:   I woke up, looked at the clock, then looked out the window at the moon — no eclipse.  “They must have gotten it wrong,” I thought.  I looked at the clock again, saw I had misread it, and realized with a little shock of joy, they never get this wrong.  Other phenomena of nature — snowstorms, earthquakes, tornadoes, visits by relatives, hurricanes — are unpredictable and easy to get wrong.  Eclipses are more like sunrise and sunset:  ancient physics and beacons of certainty in this uncertain world.  The eclipse went as predicted.

Tonight:  11:41 p.m. Pacific time, 2:41 a.m. eastern time, toward daybreak in Europe, the earth will begin to completely eclipse the moon.  I know this only because I got a press release from Sky & Telescope, a magazine for highly serious amateur astronomers.  The editors at Sky & Tel are also highly serious — they wear t-shirts with comets and have asteroids named after them —  and this press release is full of passion and poetry. Continue reading →

BMJ’s Bizarre and Boisterous Christmas Issue

By: | December 17, 2010


Scientific articles published in prestigious medical journals don’t usually begin like this:

A Little Red Hen lived in a university hospital where she took care of the sick animals in the different wards. She did this under the overseeing eye of her wise and learned mentors. There was the Cow, who had a degree from a prestigious overseas university. There was the Pig, who had led mergers of several high standing hospitals in the country. And there was the Sheep, who had an outstanding treatment record with almost no animal morbidity and mortality.

But it’s almost Christmas. And each Christmas, the 170-year-old British Medical Journal puts out an issue packed with articles that are funny, quirky, and downright bizarre. “The essence of the Christmas BMJ is strangeness. It’s our left brain issue. We want everything to be not as it seems,” wrote the journal’s editor, Richard Smith, in 2000. The above excerpt, for instance, comes from an article about the challenges of collaborations in medical research. The Little Red Hen in this tale does all the work and gets little of the pie she baked. (In the classic folk tale, of course, Little Red Hen asks for help turning wheat seeds into bread and receives none. But at least she gets to eat the bread!). Continue reading →

An Astronomer and a Theorist Walk Into a Bar

By: | December 16, 2010

One of the campuses where I teach is haunted. Everybody says so. They hear noises in the night. They encounter cold spots. They come to work in the morning and find a seemingly immovable file cabinet in the middle of a hallway. My role, you might not be surprised to hear, is that of resident skeptic.

The role isn’t one I cultivated, but it’s one I easily acquired. The faculty member who reported seeing lights in the windows of a room that, when she entered the building, she found to be dark? I walked her back outside, asked her where she was when she saw the lights, and offered an explanation. The path was icy; she would have been walking with her head down. When she did look up to see where she was going, she would have no more than glanced in the direction of the building. The windows of the room in question would have caught the reflection from the streetlamps along the path, and the windows of the next room over were in fact lit up. At a glance, the combination of lights could easily give the illusion of emanating from a room that was dark.

She said she now understood that what she’d seen could easily have been an optical illusion, and she thanked me, and then she went back inside and told the rest of the faculty that she’d seen a ghost. Continue reading →