Good stuff

So… If you’re taking fish oil, there are a few reactions you can have:

1. Look at the science, decide that science trumps your current beliefs, and change your belief.
2. Look at the science, but be unconvinced by it (which is okay, especially for smalland/ or poorly conducted studies)
3. Ignore the science, and since this bit of science contradicts your current beliefs, disbelieve all science.

Unfortunately, it seems that Option #3 seems to be the approach people take normally.  Bummer.

All I can say is… Science is the best thing we’ve got to understand the world around us.  It works pretty well, and most importantly, it’s self-correcting.

Try to keep an open mind.  Which, of course, doen’t mean, “believe anything anybody tells you,” but something more like, “be ready to accept new evidence as it comes along and don’t let your preconceived beliefs blind you to the new evidence.”

Check out the full story at Slate.

Click image for details on this guy.

Bat blocker. A tiger moth emits ultrasonic clicks to try and jam the attacking brown bat's sonar.

Moths Block Bats’ Sonar

By Michael Price
ScienceNOW Daily News
16 July 2009

(Unceremoniously copied from ScienceNow)

A hungry bat screeches out ultrasonic waves and listens as they echo off surrounding objects. One of those echoes sounds an awful lot like a tasty moth, so it swoops in for the kill–but grabs only air. Thwarted again by the tiger moth Bertholdia trigona. New research explains the clever defense; the moth emits ultrasonic clicks that throw off bats’ sonarlike echolocation, like jamming a radio signal. It’s the first time this type of acoustic interference has been demonstrated in the natural world.

For about 40 years, researchers have been intrigued by the clicking tiger moth, which ranges from Central America to Colorado. Lots of moths click by vibrating membranes on their abdomens, but B. trigona is an order of magnitude louder. “You can hold them up to your ear and hear them,” says the study’s co-author, biologist William Conner of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Researchers have noticed that clicking moths were eaten less often than their quieter cousins, but how the rapid, high-pitched zzt-zzt-zzt wards off bats has been a mystery. Three possible explanations have emerged. One is that the clicks startle the bats. If that were the case, though, you’d expect bats to learn to ignore the sound, Conner says. Another hypothesis is that the clicks serve as a warning, letting bats know the moth is distasteful. That’s thought to be the case with some toxic moths, such as the related dogbane tiger moth, Cycnia tenera; and other nontoxic moths might mimic the technique. Finally, the moths may somehow jam the bats’ echolocation, because the clicks occur in the same frequency range as the ultrasound used by the bats.

Conner and his grad students devised a test to find out which hypothesis was right. Over 9 nights, they presented brown bats with a series of moths tethered to the ceiling with super-thin fishing line. Some of the moths were B. trigona with their clicking apparatus intact, others had it removed, and still others were various silent or quieter-clicking species. Infrared cameras captured the action.

The bats made contact with nonclicking moths 400% more often than they did with clicking B. trigona. Right from the start, the bats went after the clicking moths, discounting the startling hypothesis, and kept going for them night after night, making the warning hypothesis unlikely. That leaves jamming as the most likely scenario, Conner says. Furthermore, in about one-third of the attacks, the bats seemed to hesitate in their approach, suggesting they were baffled.

Conner, whose team reports its findings in tomorrow’s issue of Science, says how the clicks interfere with bats’ echolocation is still up for debate. His working hypothesis is that they imitate echoes, creating “multiple acoustic images in space,” which “throws off the ranging software in the brain of the bat.”

Mitchell Masters, an evolutionary biologist at Ohio State University in Columbus, says that the authors “have made the most convincing case to date that jamming is, indeed, part of the equation,” but he’d like to see further experiments flesh out just how bats’ approach behavior is affected.

Behavioral ecologist, Gareth Jones of the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom is intrigued by the fact that only loudly clicking B. trigona seems to disrupt echolocation, whereas quieter-clicking moths don’t. That may suggest a dual-clicking strategy for moths, he says. Loud clickers jam bats’ acoustic signals, whereas quiet clickers try to mimic the sounds of unpalatable moths.

]]> http://www.crome.org/wp/2009/07/moths-jam-bats-sonar/feed/ 0 http://www.crome.org/wp/2009/07/jenny-mccarthy-body-count/ http://www.crome.org/wp/2009/07/jenny-mccarthy-body-count/#comments Thu, 23 Jul 2009 05:57:50 +0000 caleb http://www.crome.org/wp/?p=599

Go to http://www.jennymccarthybodycount.com for up-to-date deaths cased by Jenny McCarthy's anti-vaccination campaign

Listen to this 60 second podcast Holy #@!#*@.

Or read on here.

Click for more info

Click for more cute pandas @ zooborns

It turns out they kept over 800 complaints of loss of smell secret and did not inform the FDA as they are required to do.

The active ingredient, Zinc, has been shown to maybe shorten colds, if taken at the very onset of colds.  This is apparently a pretty tenuous link to begin with.  Any risk of such a serious side effect in an attempt to alleviate a self limiting disease (a cold) is absolutely not worth it, and does not pass the FDAs muster for safety.

The FDA has issued a warning, and with any luck will put those asses out of business for damaging people needlessly.

Zicam has removed the nasal products from the market, but are keeping 17 other versions on the market.   Check their official website: http://www.zicam.com/.

Read more here:  http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?s=zicam

Here are the results:

• Echinacea doesn’t work for colds
• Ginkgo biloba doesn’t improve memory
• Glucosamine and chondroitin don’t help arthritis
• Black cohosh doesn’t work for menopausal hot flashes
• Saw palmetto doesn’t work for  prostate problems
• Shark cartilage doesn’t help cancer

The only positive result so far is that ginger capsules *may* help with nausea from chemo therapy.  And that link isn’t even clear.

What a huge waste of money.

We should shut down any government funded research into specifically ‘alternative’ medicine, and let the alternative medicine fight for the same research dollars as main stream medicine (a.k.a. medicine that’s proven safe and effective).   There already is a branch of legitimate research into botanical remedies — that should be how research is funded.  Simply being called ‘alternative’ should not get any special research dollars from me and you.

Read the MSBC article, or listen to the SGU Podcast on the subject.

Thanks for the link Rob.

Barry; likes to hide, eat fish. Click image for more

Read this excellent description of the process here at NeuroLogica.

SGU 200th episode

Also, ScienceNow talks about the non-impressiveness of the fossil.

Click image to go to the story.

Highlight. The structure of the new infrared protein, and a shot of it glowing inside a living mouse (inset). Credit: X. Shu et al., Science, 8 May 2009, p. 804

Fluorescent proteins are used all the time in labs for tracing molecules and tracing gene expression.  That’s a really nifty way to reverse-engineer how life works.  But, the fluorescent proteins in normal use in labs work in visible light, which doesn’t travel too far through tissue.  Infrared light goes much farther.

So, some guys decided to try making some infrared fluorescent proteins.  They basically took a protein that already absorbed light in infrared and basically mutated and replicated it, and found that it fluoresced a little.  With more mutation and selection, they were able to make a protein that shone 4 times brighter.

This will let scientists track gene expression deeper into the interior of living organisms.

Read more here.

What’s the harm in believing in the Chiropratic cult?  This kind of horrible medical and financial advice.  Read more at http://whatstheharm.net/.

How can I protect myself from swine flu? Build your immune system! Get adjusted! Studies show that being adjusted twice a week can increase your immune system function by up to 400%.

http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/1302/lost_in_space.html

For example, you hear that unplugging your cell phone charger when not in use will save the planet.  Well, your cell phone charger takes 0.5 watts, and if plugged in all the time it takes 0.5 W * 24  hours/day = 12 W-hour/day Driving your car takes about 40 kW, and if you drive for 1 second a day, that’s 40,000 W * 1 s / (3600s/h) / (24h/d) =  46W-h/day.  So… unplugging your phone charger when not in use is approximately equivalent to 1 second of driving.

If unplugging your phone charger when not in use makes you feel good, that’s fine, but don’t think you’ve done your part because you do this.  It’s pissing in the wind.  We need to make BIG changes to have BIG effects.

Another fascinating tidbit:  A single annual intercontinental flight on an airplane that’s 80% full consumes approximately the same amount of fuel & energy as a daily commute of 30 miles in your car!  One flight, and you’ve doubled your annual fuel consumption!

Asymmetry in snails. They use the same gene we do for the purpose.

Humans are asymmetric — especially internally.  It’s critical that we are, we couldn’t live if we had symmetric innards.  PZ Myers just posted a really interesting article on the new discovery that snails use the same gene for asymmetry as we do.  Some scientists idientified the gene, then knocked it out.  The snails with that gene knocked out come out as straight tubes instead of curled up in an asymmetric manner.

For a science geek like me, it’s a pretty nifty experiement.

Dolphis can steer their sonar using some kind of beamforming technology.

Dolphins can steer their sonar +- 20 degrees left and right by emitting multiple clicks.  This seems somewhat similar to beamforming, or perhaps more akin to a directional microphone.  I don’t understand the physics of it, but perhaps I can get hold of the actual paper and figure out more.  Sounds pretty nifty.

http://www.crome.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/dolphin-sounds.mp3

Click the image to find out what you're looking at.

If there were a god, he clearly would have had a monkey hurl a coconut at W, not some poor Thai guy.

Watch this video:  You will not be sorry.  You may be late for work however. Click on the ‘Watch this video’ button when you’re t the site.

Click on image for more photos.

http://www.whynotchemeng.com/uk-and-ireland/teachers/top-ten-flash-bang-demos

Bedbug sperm depositor

Bedbugs reproduce by directly injecting little sperm-balls directly through the abdomen and into the female reproductive tract, bypassing the normal ‘use the opening that already exists’ method.  That’s normal for bedbugs and their ilk.  Turns out that there are some bedbug species that have figured out they can reproduce effectively by raping other males, putting their sperm into another male’s reproductive tract.  Then, when that male goes and mates with a female, he injects the other guy’s sperm into the female!

Click to read about the bedbugs and other terrifying penises.

One well hung crab

Rob and I were talking bout weird parasites. He told me about Rizocephala. This is a type of barnacle that, in its adult stage infects a crab, looses appendages, segmentation, and most organs. It attaches to the host crab, and grows like roots into the crab, centering on the digestive system. There is a bit of the barnacle that hangs out of the crab, its gonads. It grows in just the right spot shape and size to trick the crab into thinking it has a crab egg sack. And, crabs only molt after releasing their egg sack, so once infected, the crab never molts again. Oh yeah, and if this barnacle infects a male, well, the male treats the faux egg sack as if he were a female, and never molts again.

Click on the photo for the full story

I still like the green sea slug plantimal as the best cross-species gene transfer, but wasps are pretty good too.

There’s no consent for these surrogate parents. Tens of thousands of wasp species lay their eggs inside caterpillars [ed.  Google says there are more than 200,000 species of wasp], injecting toxins that paralyze the hosts and allow their young to feast on the innards with impunity. Researchers have long wondered what exactly these toxins are and where they came from. The answers, a new genetic analysis reveals, have to do with a virus that infected wasps millions of years ago.

That’s pretty sweet.  Wasp gets infected by toxic virus.  Wasp co-opts virus genes and uses it as toxin to let babies feast on a caterpillars.  Wasp has 10,000 descendant species.

Or…. if you prefer…. God made 200,000 species of wasps, and gave only 10,000 of them the ability to lay their eggs inside catapillars, and inject the caterpillars with virus-like toxin that coincidentally perfectly matches the DNA from an actual virus.  He does this just to tweak the collective nipples of anybody who might be sequencing DNA strands 6,000-10,000 years after the creation.

You know.  Whichever works for you.

Don't ya just hate it when that happens?

This guy seems to be a little worse for the wear after being struck by lightning.

He was 40 to 45 feet long, and weighed in 2,500 lbs.  Click the photo for more information.

Yikes.

This hypothesis, if true is a true eye opener to the true nature of the universe.  

It really takes some time to get your mind around, and I certainly don’t yet.  I’m not going to try to explain it all because others already have. 

This is a must read or listen item though.

From the SGU

http://media.libsyn.com/media/skepticsguide/skepticast2009-01-21.mp3

And a blog post from The Rogues’s Gallery. 

And finally from New Scientist.

Well, my wife hates them.  Can’t even stand to look at them.  But I always kinda liked them for their creepyness.  Well, Rita Mehta at UC Davis really took a liking to how they eat, and how they are similar to snakes.   

In any case, as you might know, fish have the regular-old type teeth in the regular old place, you know, in their mouth.  But they also have teeth in their throat (or pharynx).  

Radiographs of Muraena retifera with pharyngeal jaws "at rest" behind the skull (top) and fully protracted after prey capture (bottom)

Usually fish feed by opening their mouth quickly, and suctioning water and food into the back of their throat where their second set of teeth can get a hold of the food.  But morays are different.  Due to their long shape, they can’t generate the suction necesary to bring food back to the extra teeth.  So the moray developed the ability to actually move its extra set of teeth from its throat, right into its mouth, grab the food, and ratchet it down.

Look at the top image to the right.  It’s a bit unnatural, isn’t it?  It appears that there is a second, fake jaw placed behind the fish’s skull.  Well, that is really the natural rest position of the pharangual teeth.  

The bottom image shows the teeth actually move up into it’s mouth and grab food down.

And finally, for the coup-de-creep, check out these 2 short videos.

First is, “Eat Crap,”  from Slate, where the author makes a compelling argument that we don’t get enough crap in our diet.  

Second is about fecal transplants.  Take a turd, distill it to get pure essence of crap, and feed it back to yourself or perhaps somebody else after a course of antibiotics.  Read all about it here:  ”Fecal Transplants:  Getting to the bottom of the matter“.

Just Eat It.

Well, like bad guitar players that don’t have very good pitch (i.e. me), they match harmonics!  The Females flap at about 400 Hz (close to F# below middle A), and the males flap at 600 Hz, which makes for the first common harmonic for females the 3rd (400Hz * 3 = 1200Hz), and males the 2nd (600 * 2 = 1200Hz). 

So, the researchers wanted to know if the mosquitoes could actually hear at 1200Hz, which exceeded the previously known limit of hearing for mosquitoes, or if they used some other method for the pitch matching.  So what do they do?  You won’t believe it.  

First, a guy has to insert an incredibly tiny electrode into the ear of a mosquito.  Yes, you heard right, insert an electrode capable of monitoring the electrical impulses that the mosquito’s ear generates.  Then they basically check the frequency response of the mosquito’s ear.  They found that this species can hear up to 2000 Hz.    Unbelievable.  How can you do surgery on a mosquito’s ear without damaging the ear.

I sat next to an ear surgeon on an airplane flight a few months ago, and he said operating on human ears required about the same dexterity as soldering small electrical components (which I do all the time.)  It’s amazing what you can do if only you can see what you’re doing.  Needless to say, mosquito ears are much smaller than human ears.    

Another interesting tidbit.  They can’t do the mating & pitch matching experiment on the critters if they’re flying all around the room.  It also doesn’t work if they glue them to the table.  So, what do they do?  Of course!  Teather them to the table with really fine string.  That way they can watch closely and record every second of the 10 second lilliputian copulation.

Listen to this recording of the sound:

mos-snippet

The whole podcast is available here:  http://podcasts.aaas.org/science_podcast/SciencePodcast_090109.mp3

This guy's much bigger than your cat

Check out this cutie here:  http://charliesplayhouse.blogspot.com/2008/12/bonc-3-devil-frog.html

Read about it here among other places.

Check out the original patterns, and the reconstructed ones.

Is this the cutest baby pigmy hippo you’ve ever seen or what?

Check out all the newbors at ZooBorns.

http://scienceblogs.com/erv/2008/12/evolution_aint_got_nothin_to_d.php

Seems plausible to me.

This turtle has fully developed bottom shell, but only partially developed top. By the way, it also has a mouth full of teeth, unlike any modern turtle.

This newly discovered pre-turtle has a fully developed bottom shell, only partially developed top.  And, unlike Albert, actually could legitimately complained to his mother that he had a tooth ache!

Check it out at Science Magazine or pdf)

Read the full story here. 

Watch this video of 10,000 amoebas joining into a sort-of-multicellular-thingy and going for a walk.

Here's a piece of that meteor from the other week.

Hey, they found pieces of that huge meteor in Canada.

Check it out.  And if you missed the video, look below.

Who says plants and animals need to stay separate forever?

This sea slug actually acquired the ability to photosynthesize.  As far as I can tell, this guy seems to be mid-evolution (aren’t we all?).  The slug steals chloroplasts from the algae it eats, but it does not incorporate the entire algae cells.  Chloroplasts can’t perform the whole photosynthesis chemical reaction all by themselves, but rather need some genes/proteins from the host algal cell.  This sea slug has incorporated the actual genes from the algae into its own cells, thus this guy really seems to be a plant/animal hybrid!  It even has the extra genes in its gametes, so its offspring may not even need to do the steal-the-genes trick!  

There is still a step left to truly transform this guy into a plantimal.  I don’t believe the chloroplasts can be transferred to its offspring.  Once this happens though, this animal would never have to eat anything!  Super cool.  

 By the way, if this sounds at all fanciful to you, it’s not that surprising.  The cellular energy factories called mitochondria that are in most of your cell types were acquired in a similar fashion — though i suspect it was single-cell-guy eating single-cell-guy.  This is pretty different I guess.  

Check out the article on these guys at the New Scientist, and watch the video here.

To see whether estrus was really “lost” during human evolution (as researchers often claim), we examined ovulatory cycle effects on tip earnings by professional lap dancers working in gentlemen’s clubs. Eighteen dancers recorded their menstrual periods, work shifts, and tip earnings for 60 days on a study web site. A mixed-model analysis of 296 work shifts (representing about 5300 lap dances) showed an interaction between cycle phase and hormonal contraception use. Normally cycling participants earned about US$335 per 5-h shift during estrus, US$260 per shift during the luteal phase, and US$185 per shift during menstruation. By contrast, participants using contraceptive pills showed no estrous earnings peak. These results constitute the first direct economic evidence for the existence and importance of estrus in contemporary human females, in a real-world work setting. These results have clear implications for human evolution, sexuality, and economics.

Read the full paper here:  http://www.unm.edu/~gfmiller/cycle_effects_on_tips.pdf

The source of the movies are here: 

http://www.embl-heidelberg.de/digitalembryo/#Movies

The nuclear waste after 10 years of powering 20,000 homes is about the size of a football.  Yes, it’s one nasty football, but the waste from a traditional power plant to generate the same amount of power would overflow Mile High Stadium in Denver.  

This is super exciting news, and would allow all sorts of great applications.  For example, a major problem with plug-in hybrid vehicles is that the power grid isn’t designed to handle so much power.  It would be impossible to get enough power into urban areas to power large scale electric vehicles.  However, with these things distributed around, there would be plenty of power.

Of course, these things generate tons of heat too — they could generate heat for buildings and electricity with no problem.

One problem with the new Large Hadron Collider is that they can’t run it in the winter time because it takes too much power away from Geneva, which needs it for heat.  Perhaps they could install a few reactors and run year-round (or at least have a schedule independent of the seasons).

Read about the back-yard reactor here.

I just heard on the Science Podcast about a breakthrough that allows sequencing of the entire human genome in about an hour. 

Totally Awesome.  Listen to the podcast.

http://www.gamereclaim.com/2008/10/128/

Unfortunately, you can solve all levels pretty quickly.  Fantastic contraptions can keep you busy for a long time.

To get my favorites into your squeezebox easily, just plug the following URL into your squeezecenter.  Go to Squeezecenter Settings -> Podcasts and paste in this URL:

http://crome.org/calebspodcasts.opml

• Here’s one ugly solution I came up with: http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=2084594
• And another http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=2086118
• http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=2086559
• Wall Walker
• Mission to Mars solution
• Totally awesome: This one we didn’t do. It was already there.
  
• U-Turn solution
• The Bumper
• The Slingshot
• Saved Swinger Sadie, henry and I worked this one out.
• Back and forth and wedge is a cool one I did.
• Dog o 1 tail is a cool one
• The Conveyor (caleb & henry)
• Transplant This