So this one will be a little different. I've been accumulating some neat articles about science. Instead of posting about each one, I'm just going to list them here with a brief description, along with a link to the original article or blog post. I thought they were all very interesting, so I urge you to check them out.
From Not Exactly Rocket Science, here's a fascinating post about two new nano-scale robots, tiny machines made from DNA:
Two spiders are walking along a track – a seemingly ordinary scene, but these are no ordinary spiders. They are molecular robots and they, like the tracks they stride over, are fashioned from DNA. One of them has four legs and marches over its DNA landscape, turning and stopping with no controls from its human creators. The other has four legs and three arms – it walks along a miniature assembly line, picking up three pieces of cargo from loading machines (also made of DNA) and attaching them to itself. All of this is happening at the nanometre scale, far beyond what the naked eye can discern. Welcome to the exciting future of nanotechnology.
At The Loom, here's a blog post about the difficulty of raising bacteria in a laboratory. The reason we know so much about some species, but so little about others, is because the former are easy to grow in a lab:
Most of life on Earth is a mystery to us. The bulk of biomass on the planet is made up of microbes. By some estimates, there may be 150 million species of bacteria, but scientists have only formally named a few thousand of them. One of the big causes of this ignorance is that scientists don’t know how to raise microbe colonies. If you scoop up some dirt and stick it under a microscope, you’ll see lots of different microbes living happily there. If you mash up all the DNA in that mud and read its sequence, you’ll discover an astonishing diversity of genes belonging to those microbes–thousands in a single spoon of soil. But now try to rear those microbes in a lab. When scientists try, they generally fail. A tiny fraction of one percent of microbe species will grow under ordinary conditions in Petri dish.
(image from NASA/JPL-Caltech, via the NY Times)
There seems to be a pattern here. Do I have a thing for tiny creatures? Well, here's an article in the New York Times about archaea (one species pictured above). Never heard of them? Archaea are apparently one of the three great "domains" of life - the others being bacteria and eukaryotes (animals, plants, fungi, protozoa, etc.):
The third great lineage of living beings is the archaea. At first glance, they look like bacteria — and were initially presumed to be so. In fact, some scientists still classify them as bacteria; but most now consider that there are enough differences between archaea and bacteria for the archaea to count as a separate realm.
One neat thing is that archaea have their own set of weird viruses that parasitize them, thus demonstrating Jonathan Swift's verse: "So, naturalists observe, a flea Has smaller fleas that on him prey; And these have smaller still to bite ’em; And so proceed ad infinitum."
And speaking of parasites, here's a frightening article in The Economist about a common parasite that seems to change human behavior. In rats and mice, the same parasite causes rodents to lose their fear of cats, indeed to even become attracted to their smell (the parasite then spends part of its life cycle in the intestinal wall of cats). So what's it doing to us?
If an alien bug invaded the brains of half the population, hijacked their neurochemistry, altered the way they acted and drove some of them crazy, then you might expect a few excitable headlines to appear in the press. Yet something disturbingly like this may actually be happening without the world noticing.
(image by Jerilee Wei)
Yeah, science is fascinating, isn't it? Here's an article (audio also available) at National Public Radio about 18th Century science. The title - "No Thank You, We Like Pain" - might give you an idea of how things have changed:
In 1799, a very young chemist — about 21 years old — inhaled a lot of carbon monoxide directly into his lungs, keeled over, was seized by agonizing chest pains, staggered into his garden, got giddy, became nauseous, went to bed, recovered — and then, a few days later, he did it again.
Welcome to the world of 18th century science. Richard Holmes, in his book Age of Wonder, describes how young Humphry Davy went looking for a possible cure for tuberculosis. He tried inhaling very different gases, hoping to improve respiration. In a very un-20th century way, he matter-of-factly experimented on himself, his pets, his friends and even friends of friends.
Finally, on a more serious note, here's a study at PloS ONE, an interactive open-access journal of peer-reviewed science, which shows that researches in the "softer" sciences report more positive outcomes than researchers in the "harder" sciences:
The hypothesis of a Hierarchy of the Sciences with physical sciences at the top, social sciences at the bottom, and biological sciences in-between is nearly 200 years old. This order is intuitive and reflected in many features of academic life, but whether it reflects the “hardness” of scientific research—i.e., the extent to which research questions and results are determined by data and theories as opposed to non-cognitive factors—is controversial. ... If the hierarchy hypothesis is correct, then researchers in “softer” sciences should have fewer constraints to their conscious and unconscious biases, and therefore report more positive outcomes. Results confirmed the predictions at all levels considered: discipline, domain and methodology broadly defined. Controlling for observed differences between pure and applied disciplines, and between papers testing one or several hypotheses, the odds of reporting a positive result were around 5 times higher among papers in the disciplines of Psychology and Psychiatry and Economics and Business compared to Space Science, 2.3 times higher in the domain of social sciences compared to the physical sciences, and 3.4 times higher in studies applying behavioural and social methodologies on people compared to physical and chemical studies on non-biological material. In all comparisons, biological studies had intermediate values.
This is a scholarly article, and I'll admit that I only read the one-paragraph abstract. But I thought it was an interesting example of how science seeks to identify bias - or, more broadly speaking, how science is always on a quest for self-improvement.
Well, I could write a detailed discussion about that - indeed, I'd like to - but that's not the point of this post. I haven't had the time to discuss these articles separately, but I didn't want to let them slide by unmentioned, either. Your results may differ, but I found them all quite interesting.
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