The Latest Science Headlines

SCIENTISTS DISCOVER LINK BETWEEN OWN EXISTENCE AND AMAZING BREAKTHROUGHS

SCIENTISTS DISCOVER LINK BETWEEN VIEWING PORNOGRAPHY AND MALE SEXUAL AROUSAL.
Study is the largest of its kind in the world, in terms of both length and girth.

SCIENTISTS CONFIDENT OF CANCER BREAKTRHOUGH - IN GENERAL.
"This isn't based on any particular study or theoretical progress - it's just a general confidence. We're feeling pretty good."

SCIENTISTS "JUST WISH PEOPLE WOULD LEAVE US ALONE"

MANAGEMENT SCIENCE NOT A SCIENCE, SAY SCIENTISTS.
"We're rich and we can prove it," say management scientists.

PROCRASTINATION STUDY DELAYED AGAIN

STUDENTS STUDY STUDY STUDY.
A review of studying methods has been put under the microscope by students.

ENVIRONMENT IN "DEEP SHIT", SAY SCIENTISTS.
Environment agrees.

SCIENTIST THINKS OWN SHIT DOESN'T STINK
"We don't know shit," said JC Venter. "Which is why I've decided to make my lab the first to sequence the metagenome of a human's turd - my own of course."

SCIENCE IN THE MEDIA - AGAIN

INFRASTRUCTURE COLLAPSES
You would too if you'd been through what it has.

STEM CELL BREAKTHROUGH
Ethics committee approves research proposal.

MINDFUCK
Scientists have pinpointed 54 different areas of the brain associated with each of the 54 uses of the word "fuck".

Logolution and large celestial objects

Some measure words and others, birds. Some measure stars and others, Mars.
Some measure holes that can't be seen. I write about them with Charles Sheen.

I described the story about words in my last post. All I would add at this juncture is that I like to call the study of the evolution of words and languages logolution. Sadly this fondness was not shared by Professor Jim Hurford, from the Language Evolution and Computation Research Unit at the University of Edinburgh, who I asked about the research. "I can't see the point of the neologism 'logolution'," he said. "For one thing it focusses too much on words, as opposed to other features of language." I've taken Jim's comments on board, and hereby propose lingolution as a legit solution. In five years when there's a journal called Nature Lingolution, I want acknowledgement, royalties, and a wikipedia entry. In five years...

There's also been some amazing research done on black holes. Y'see, they've just found the biggest ever stellar black hole. Before you go calling your mum, bear in mind that it's not the biggest black hole - just the biggest stellar black hole.

A stellar black hole is formed from a collapsed star (typically out of exhaustion or its own gravitational pull, or both) and weighs exactly between 3 and 13 times the mass of our sun.

Some educated people believe that all galaxies have superdupermassive black holes at their centre, which are thousands to millions of times as heavy as our sun. They are called supermassive black holes. I don't know how they are formed, but if it's not from collapsing stars, what is it? Huh? Answer me! (There's also a song by the band Muse called supermassive black hole, which I suspect the physicists have ripped off)

The black hole they've just found is 16 solar masses. Ok, so it's not supermassive, but it's still freakin' big right? I mean, if you were standing next to it in a photo, you'd look bloody tiny. And get this, it's also in tight, tight orbit with a 70-solar-mass star. That's some big celestial objects.

So the next time you look up at the sun, see it for what it is - a pitiful 1/16th the size of the biggest stellar black hole, and an embarrassing 1/70th the size of this SBH's companion star. I'm so ashamed.

Bugs in space

For the first time, scientists have paid attention to microbes (which are related to bugs, but not as much as humans are) IN SPACE!

This article is worth reading for a couple of reasons.

- the future of astronauts depends on it. Or so some would have you believe. Essentially they think that microbes may be more deadly in space. They figured this out by taking salmonella on a shuttle, then infecting mice on earth and finding they died more than controls. What I really would have liked to see is mice in space being infected. After all, it's astronauts in space they're worried about, not astronauts on earth.
- it mentions the word panspermia. This is a mildly funny word. But it's used with deadly seriousness, for famed panspermioso Chandra Wickramasinghe believes the experiment suggests bacteria are evolved for space travel

There they are. The couple of reasons, laid out for you in the English language. My next article will be about the shock revelation that words that are used more often take longer to morph into other words than words that are rarely used. Alas, this probably means panspermiosi will have changed by its second usage. In the same story, there's research about how more and more English words end in 'ed' in the past tense, even though they used to not! This process is called regularisation, and it's happening as we speak. What else is being regularised? Our minds? Our media? Our owls? The answer is all around us.

Finally, I was pleased to see that research I covered in exciting depth won an Ig Nobel prize. I am prepared to wager a doubloon that this research, about the anti-jetlag effects of viagra (and cialis walium? Further tests required) in hamsters, becomes the first to claim the Ig Nobel / Nobel Prize sweep. You heard it first here, folks.

Kohagen, give the people air!

Whoops, wrong Arnie movie.

If it bleeds, we can kill it.

That's better. That's Predator. And predators are the subject of my latest article. Scientist says predation and biodiversity are tightly coupled (like my wife and I). What does this mean? Read the story (but ignore the comment at the bottom).

The story before that was about bacteria. Old bacteria. Hundreds of thousands of years old, in fact. Some say that old bacteria use the spore defence, whereby they shrivel up and cease metabolism and just hang on tight until things blow over. Now others are saying that without metabolism there would be no DNA repair, and the timespans involved mean DNA repair would be absolutely critical. You be the judge. Or foreman.

NEWSFLASH! Dingoes are cute

The Australian dingo has been tearing about the Australian mainland for about 5,000 years. Many dingologists believe it is at risk of disappearing completely due to hybridisation with domestic dog breeds. Especially common are the dinginese (Pekinese), the dingdog (bulldog) and the dingutt (mutt). Pure bred dingos are still to be found in southeast NSW, such as parts of Kosciuszko National Park. Recent satellite tracking research carried out on wild dogs by the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) has determined that for the most part individual animals have very large home range sizes, mostly around 10000 hectares (ha) in size but up to 40000 ha. Within these home ranges the dogs travel constantly. The relatively large distances moved by animals further increases the risk of hybridisation, particularly if purebred dingoes 'interact' with other dogs that are genetically compromised (aren't we all?). Photo by Andrew Claridge, NPWS. Text from NPWS with an Artful Science twist.

Note: the usually reliable google system of discerning alternate spellings of words failed me here. 'dingoes' gets 312,000 hits, 'dingos' 291,000. That may seem like a big difference, but I am not confident it is spellistically significant.

The good old days of science writing

"... a golden age when scientific papers were written in a discursive style that you could understand, and at a length that made it possible to visualise a real person doing real experiments in a real laboratory."

This quote refers to a paper on sponges from 1907 and it's from The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins.

~~~

I've written a few more descriptions of research, one on a cool map of Angkor (as in Wat), one on the movements of olden (as in 500,000 years) day humans / homos / hominins / whatever you wanna call 'em. Are Europeans really Asian? Well, it's a complicated story.

Climate change meets defence

A very interesting discussion of the Australian Government's latest words on defence includes a pointed reference to an elephant in the room: the impact of climate change on global security, which it seems the Government ignores.