Category Archives: Other science

aka stamp collecting

Look! It's Forensic Reconstruction Man!

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Ironic Sans: Forensic Reconstruction of Famous Skulls of Fiction

I recently saw an amazing example of forensic reconstruction. A skull had been found, but police were unable to figure out the person’s identity. So a forensic artist examined the skull and created an illustration of what the person may have looked like while alive. When the person was finally identified, photos of the person looked strikingly similar to the artist’s rendition.

This got me thinking: What would a forensic reconstructionist make of some famous skulls of fiction? There are characters in film, television, and video games who we’ve only ever seen as talking skulls. Surely they couldn’t have grown to adult size without once being flesh and blood, right? So what did they look like?

No, I Called You a Skink!

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How To Swim Through Sand

The sand skink, Plestiodon reynoldsi, is famous for its ability to swim through sand at depths of up to 10 centimetres. That’s strange because although sand sometimes act like a fluid, it also acts as a solid supporting large loads such as human footfall. So how do sand skinks do it?

Today, Takashi Shimada at the University of Tokyo in Japan and a few buddies reveal the secret. They say that the sand skinks’ swimming action exploits sand’s fluid-like nature AND its ability to act like a solid. And they’ve built a computer model to simulate how this works.

Why doesn’t the sand skink sink?

Bring Out Your Dead

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Industrial robot hones virtual autopsies

The researchers are already pioneers of virtual autopsies, or “virtopsies”, which use non-invasive imaging of a body inside and out rather than the radical post-mortem surgery typically used to determine cause of death.

Now they are using a robot, dubbed Virtobot, to carry out parts of that process, making it more reliable – and standardised.

Their virtopsies combine 3D imaging of a body’s surface with a CT scan of its interior anatomy. The result is a faithful, high-resolution virtual double of the corpse (see diagram). This double can be used to accurately determine what killed someone. And it’s a more tactful approach: only needle biopsies are used to sample tissues, leaving a body essentially undamaged.

“Currently, organs are taken out and sliced for analysis of tumours and lesions, but if something is overlooked you have no chance of seeing it again,” says team member Lars Ebert. “All you have afterwards is a huge pile of organ slices.”

Mmmmm. Organ slices …

Training to Be an Amish Mechanic

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Vet School 2.0: Stick Your Hand Up a Virtual Cow Butt

(the title is based on a Robin Williams Joke)

There’s nothing tidy about sticking your arm deep into a cow’s backside, getting up to your elbows in warm and gooey bovine innards.

But for new vet students, there’s no avoiding the procedure: To diagnose pregnancy or check for infection, you’ve got to reach into a cow’s rectum and feel for the uterus, ovaries and stomach. Unfortunately, proper palpation is a tough skill to teach, because once your arm is buried inside a cow butt, no one can see what you’re doing.

No one can see what you’re doing? Nothing like a little animal “husbandry” until they catch you at it.

(now I’m stealing from Tom Lehrer)

As long as I’m this low in the pasture, I’ll complete the trilogy. A few weeks ago, we were doing some mundane inventory-task, and one the guys said, “Hand me the scissors,” and was corrected by another of us — they were shears, not scissors. This prompted him to say, on the topic of shears, “I can tell you that the act of shearing takes all the romance out of sheep farming.”

Pause for effect.

I then said something like, “I’m not really sure I want to hear the details about the romance you found in sheep farming. That’s between you and the sheep.”

In That Case, It's All Good

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Notorious ‘man-eating’ lions of Tsavo likely ate about 35 people — not 135, scientists say

Sounds like they should have gotten off with a warning. For the first fifty, file it under “cats will be cats.”

I love the wording here:

Two world renowned man-eating Tsavo lions are seen stuffed and on display at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History Monday

Stuffed? Not even room for a wafer-thin mint?

Beauty is in the Vision-Response of the Beholder

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Skulls in the Stars: Lord Rayleigh on Darwin

Darwin set out to show that insects play a crucial role in cross-pollinating plants, carrying pollen from one flower to another, and he published his results on orchids in a book in 1862, Fertilisation of Orchids. Among those results is the insightful observation that the colors and scents of flowers had evolved to attract insects and optimize the cross-pollination process.

This observation is what Rayleigh seems to be commenting on, and mildly criticizing. Rayleigh suggests that Darwin’s argument leads to the conclusion that insects must have vision similar to human vision — otherwise, why would a flower which is pretty to us be pretty to an insect? Rayleigh argues that this is a rather large assumption to make based on the limited evidence available in that era.

It’s well-known now that many insects are sensitive to UV, and plants look quite different to us in that spectrum. I have no idea what they look like to the bugs.

No Inoculation for Willful Ignorance

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An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All

This isn’t a religious dispute, like the debate over creationism and intelligent design. It’s a challenge to traditional science that crosses party, class, and religious lines. It is partly a reaction to Big Pharma’s blunders and PR missteps, from Vioxx to illegal marketing ploys, which have encouraged a distrust of experts. It is also, ironically, a product of the era of instant communication and easy access to information. The doubters and deniers are empowered by the Internet (online, nobody knows you’re not a doctor) and helped by the mainstream media, which has an interest in pumping up bad science to create a “debate” where there should be none.