Category Archives: Other science
Monken Drunkeys!
Nutritionally speaking, alcohol is a double-edged sword: it’s extremely energy-rich, but it’s also toxic and makes you fall down. So it makes sense that animals which eat fruit would develop a tolerance to alcohol, gaining its energy while avoiding getting so drunk that they start hitting on their predators at the bar. (Or, if you’re a fruit bat, flying into a tree.) And the tolerance these animals have for liquor would put the most gin-blossomed tippler to shame.
I'm Not Willing to Believe You
Question: How long would your Ph.D. have taken if everything worked?
We can use mine as an example. I did my grad studies in Microbiology and Immunology, but basically I was doing biochemistry type work (cancer research with a lot of molecular stuff). It took me just over five years to finish this sucker which is pretty typical in North America. Of course, when I take a critical look at my thesis and calculate: “What if this thesis literally shows all of my work, because everything I did, worked? What if I had magic fingers throughout my research and never had a failed experiment!?”
Using this rubric, I calculate that my Ph.D. in biochemistry/molecular biology type work could’ve taken about, DUM-DUM-DUM…
6 months
Note that this figure also includes the 3 months needed to write the damn thesis itself! This means that technically my thesis is reflective of only 3 months of successful experiments: or as I like to think of it — four and a half years of failed experiments!
Bull.
OK, it’s possible that the pathway to a degree in Microbiology and Immunology is very different from that of physics, but other than the subject matter, I don’t think so. I’m perfectly willing to believe that the data one uses for one’s thesis is gathered in three months, and my experience is similar, but that’s not the whole story. A Ph.D. is not just the dissertation — you can’t just write off the experience leading up to it. To claim that you could just walk into the lab and take data means that you had the requisite knowledge and lab experience, which you must have acquired as an undergraduate. And I don’t believe it.
To get my physics degree, I had a summer research grant, followed by two years of classes, along with part-time research, before more than three years of full-time research, then writing. I didn’t come into an established lab; I arrived at grad schools the same year my eventual thesis advisor did, so building up the lab took some time. I could have saved some time if things hadn’t broken — a hole in a new vacuum chamber, requiring it to be dismantled and sent back for repair, a broken feedthrough and ion gauge, problems with the atomic beam oven, lasers dying left and right. All of that added to the time it took, but I didn’t know anything about trapping atoms when I started in the lab, and you can’t fake that experience. Even if you start in an established lab, with more senior students to teach you the ropes, it’s going to take time to learn how all the equipment works and how to run everything. Best case for me, I think, would have been four years — two in the classroom and two in the lab. In reality, it was just a titch over six years from start to turning in the finished copy of my thesis.
Anyone out there with realistic estimates of how long your grad school career would have been, had everything gone right? Compare with the actual.
Turns Out There's a Third Option
Taking The Temperature Of A Dinosaur
A team of researchers led by Robert Eagle, a biologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, found that rare, heavy isotopes of carbon-13 and oxygen-18 clump together differently depending on temperature.
“It’s basic thermodynamics: At warmer temperatures, you get a more random distribution of these isotopes with less clumping,” Eagle said. “As temperature decreases things slow down and you begin to see more bonding.”
When this bonding takes place within an organism, such as in the formation of the mineral apatite to form tooth enamel, the pattern of bonds preserves a record of the animal’s body temperature, within a few degrees.
Jokes
Helium walks into a bar. The bartender says, “Sorry, we don’t serve noble gases here.”
Helium doesn’t react.
The bartender tries to take one of Helium’s electrons, but fails.
The Helium is nonplussed.
A superconductor walks into a bar. The bartender says “we don’t serve superconductors here.”
The superconductor leaves without putting up any resistance.
To get to the other side.
Why did the tachyon cross the road?
Schrödinger’s cat walks into the lab and says, “This experiment scares me half to death.”
An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first orders one beer. The second orders half of a beer. The third orders a quarter of a beer. The fourth orders an eighth of a beer.
The bartender says, “Screw you!” and pours two beers.
A termite walks into a bar, looks around, and asks, “Is the bartender here?”
Purity of Essence
Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous Communist plot we have ever had to face?
General Jack D. Ripper
Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb
Fluoride in Water Prevents Adult Tooth Loss, Study Suggests
For children whose adult teeth haven’t shown yet, fluoride still improves tooth enamel, the highly mineralized tissue on teeth’s surface. Fluoride also helps teeth damaged from the decay process and breaks down bacteria on teeth.
Guns, Germs and Steel: Short Version
World population by latitude and longitude
Map appears if you hover over the graphs
(title idea shamelessly stolen sincerely flattered)
What's Eating You?
A Lecture On The Psychology of Animals Swallowed Alive
From 1925
[Darwin] states that big sharks swallow the porcupine. fish, and has frequently found it floating alive and distended in the stomach of a shark. On one occasion a porcupine fish swallowed by a shark had eaten its way out, not only through the coats of the stomach, but through the walls of tlhe body, and thus destroyed its captor.
Darwin asks, Who would ever have imaginied that a little soft fish could have destroyed the great and savage shark? The diodon iniflates itself with air and water, which it expels with some force when it deflates. The jets of water must cause some curious ticklings to a shark with a lively diodoni in its stomach!
Turning, Turning, Turning Through the Years
Physicists say cosmic rays affect the length of day
I’d like to add a warning to this (along the lines of the Journalism Warning Labels by Tom Scott): Article title implies much more certainty than the article; the article is more restrained than the title would indicate, and the paper (at least the abstract) even more so. Changing the angular momentum of the earth would affect the moment of inertia, but the correlation here is with the sunspot cycle — the connection to cosmic rays is more tenuous.
The abstract actually says
We conclude that variations in mean zonal winds are modulated by the solar activity cycle through variations in irradiance, solar wind or cosmic ray intensity.
I’ll have to consult my local experts on earth rotation and get their opinion on this.
Another Dimension to Add to Your Nightmares
Radioactive Wild Boars Increase in Number
I wasn’t really all that concerned about wild boars, but now that I know they are radioactive and multiplying, a foul-tempered spider pig mutant becomes a terrifying idea. At least they aren’t zombie boars.
A couple of hiccups in the report
Although the radioactivity has been detected in other animals, such as birds, wild boar are more susceptible to contamination because they often eat mushrooms and truffles that absorb the harmful radioactivity. The radioactivity, in turn, can remain in the soil for years. In fact, levels in mushrooms and truffles are predicted to rise in the not too distant future.
Radioactivity isn’t a substance, it’s a process, so you don’t absorb radioactivity, nor is it left in the soil. (Iterations ofradioactive or radiation are almost universally preceded by harmful or dangerous. It’s apparently part of the pirate journalist code). But this (like heat) is a term that scientists will use carelessly, so it’s no wonder it propagates to the press, and I don’t take 10 points from Gryffindor for that.
Hunters aren’t idly standing by. They’ve found a concoction called Giese salt that supposedly causes wild boar to excrete radioactive substances after the animals have ingested the salt. Work performed in Bavaria, according to the Bavarian Hunting Federation, indicates the salt does the trick, presumably allowing the meat to pass government inspections.
One of the components in the salt strongly binds to the Cesium (or presumably any alkali), rather than just causing them to arbitrarily excrete any and all radioactive substances.
It’s already been 24 years since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, but experts are predicting the problem of radioactive wild boars will plague Germany “for at least the next 50 years.”
The reason being that Cs-137 has a half-life of 30 years. Still, if boars are exhibiting 7000 Becquerel per kilogram (1 Bq is one decay per second. We physicists must have our unit names!), and if this is primarily from Cs-137 being ingested, this isn’t going to drop below 2,000 in 50 years much less the target of 600, unless some other process is present that will get rid of the Cs-137. Otherwise we’re talking 100 years.