Clear As Glass

It seems that the expression clear as glass doesn't apply to the nature of glass. There is more than a little disagreement over what glass actually is.

"They’re the thickest and gooiest of liquids and the most disordered and structureless of rigid solids," said Peter Harrowell, a professor of chemistry at the University of Sydney in Australia, speaking of glasses, which can be formed from different raw materials. "They sit right at this really profound sort of puzzle."

Philip W. Anderson, a Nobel Prize -winning physicist at Princeton, wrote in 1995: "The deepest and most interesting unsolved problem in solid state theory is probably the theory of the nature of glass and the glass transition."

He added, "This could be the next breakthrough in the coming decade."

Thirteen years later, scientists still disagree, with some vehemence, about the nature of glass.

Peter G. Wolynes, a professor of chemistry at the University of California, San Diego, thinks he essentially solved the glass problem two decades ago based on ideas of what glass would look like if cooled infinitely slowly. "I think we have a very good constructive theory of that these days," Dr. Wolynes said. "Many people tell me this is very contentious. I disagree violently with them."

(I love that quote from Wolynes.) It is a fascinating article. One of the little blurbs that intrigued me was that glass becomes more stable over a (very) long period of time. Sort of like how concrete cures.

Tired And Shagged Out After A Prolonged Squawk

More about Norwegian Blue Parrots of Monty Python fame…turn out there actual used to be some: Norwegian Blue parrot really DID exist - but now they are all 'stiff, bereft of life and ex-parrots'

Dr David Waterhouse, a fossil expert and Python fan, has found that parrots not only lived in Scandinavia 55million years ago, but probably evolved there before spreading into the southern hemisphere.

His discovery was based on a preserved wing bone of a previously unknown species, given the scientific name Mopsitta Tanta - and now nicknamed the Norwegian Blue.

…

Dr Waterhouse, 29, said of Mopsitta Tanta: "Obviously, we were dealing with a bird that is bereft of life, but the tricky bit was establishing it was a parrot."

He was studying for a PhD at the University of Dublin in 2005 when he visited a museum in Jutland and spotted a fossilised 2in-long humerus - appropriately enough, the funny bone - among bird remains which had been found near an open-cast mine.

Research has now confirmed the bone was part of an upper wing from a bird in the parrot family. Although the mine was in Denmark, the birds would also have lived in what is now Norway.

Dr Waterhouse, now assistant curator of natural history at the Norfolk Museums Service, said: "All that remained was a single upper wing bone, but it contained characteristic features that showed it was clearly from a member of the parrot family, about the size of a yellow-crested cockatoo.

"It isn't as unbelievable as you might think that a parrot was found so far north.

"When Mopsitta was alive, most of northern Europe was experiencing a warm period, with a large shallow tropical lagoon covering much of Germany, South-East England and Denmark.

I've got further dialogue going through my head:

"A parrot? In Scandinavia?"

"Well, it probably escaped from a zoo."

"Isn't very likely…."

(As I clearly stated in an earlier post…I'm a bit of a dork.)

This Isn’t Important

As Gaius seems to have gone off someplace (possibly to help OJ Simpson track down the real killer), I feel I should post something here.  Unfortunately, most of my blogging of late has involved calling people names (I know, I know…I should know better.)

I do have something fun for some people.  If you enjoy irony and bitter sarcasm combined with statistics and an academic free for all (and who doesn't?), then you will enjoy Roger Pielke's devastating take down of a scientific methodology challenged colleague. 

It begins:

In his latest essay on my stupidity, climate modeler James Annan made the helpful suggestion that I consult a "a numerate undergraduate to explain it to [me]." So I looked outside my office, where things are quiet out on the quad this time of year, but as luck would have it, I did find a young lady named Megan, who just happened to be majoring in mathematics who agreed to help me overcome my considerable ignorance.

From there things get hysterical.

 O.K., hysterical if you are a bit of a dork.

White Punks Coats On Dope

No, not the old song by The Tubes, rather the results of a somewhat unscientific poll of scientists. It seems some 20% of respondents to an online poll admitted they use "brain boosting" drugs. 

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN)  — One in five respondents to a new survey in the journal Nature say they've used drugs to boost their brain power.

"We were putting our finger in the air to see what our reader response would be. And it was tremendous," said Brendan Maher, an editor with the widely read scientific publication. "What it's suggesting is there are a high percentage of adults using these drugs."

The informal, nonscientific survey, conducted online, polled 1,400 people in 60 countries. Most of the responders, the majority of whom said they worked in biology, physics, medicine or education, reported taking the drugs to improve their concentration. 

An interesting question for reporters covering the next breathless scientific news release would be to ask the scientists involved when they took their last jolt. Things like this tend to diminish the reputations of the entire field of science in general. Because, as the article points out, these drugs can lead to real problems and real addictions. Not to mention the real questioning of results of studies.  

Oddly enough, the poll was taken as a result of an April Fool's joke that turned out to be somewhat less of a laughing matter, according to Nature. 

The US National Institutes of Health is to crack down on scientists 'brain doping' withperformance-enhancing drugs such as Provigil and Ritalin, a press release declared last week. The release, brainchild of evolutionary biologist Jonathan Eisen of the University of California, Davis, turned out to be an April Fools' prank. And the World Anti-Brain Doping Authority website that it linked to was likewise fake. But with a number of co-conspirators spreading rumours about receiving anti-doping affidavits with their first R01 research grants, the ruse no doubt gave pause to a few of the respondents to Nature 's survey on readers' use of cognition-enhancing drugs.

The survey was triggered by a Commentary by behavioural neuroscientists Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir of the University of Cambridge, UK, who had surveyed their colleagues on the use of drugs that purportedly enhance focus and attention (Nature 450, 1157–1159 ; 2007). In the article, the two scientists asked readers whether they would consider “boosting their brain power” with drugs. Spurred by the tremendous response, Nature ran its own informal survey. 1,400 people from 60 countries responded to the online poll.

Could the results have been skewed by the people who were in on the joke? Of course. Does that lessen the negative impact here? Not in the least. 

Science For The Masses

From the Telegraph comes this report on amazingly obvious science. That is to say, science that is so obvious that it should be a crime that research money was diverted to fund the studies.

If you give kids more toys they'll play more

Scientists have recently hit upon an extraordinary method for cutting levels of childhood obesity: give kids toys that make them run about.

The US study concluded that supplying infants in childcare centres with balls, skipping ropes and hula hoops can encourage them to exercise more at playtime. Surely this must have crossed someone's mind before?

The researchers from the University of North Carolina went one step further, however, surmising that the best toys for getting children to run around are non-stationary ones. Whilst climbing frames can help 'motor skills', they don't incite children to charge around with gay abandon as much.

Surely the main conclusion from this study is that some childcare centres need to be given a good kick up the backside for not giving their children the opportunity to goof around with a tennis ball.

These days even zoo animals are given toys to play with so that they remain fit and healthy. And since you can't expect a four-year-old to take themselves off on a five mile jog any more than you can a mongoose, surely the provision of toys is a bit of a no-brainer.

The stories in the article are from the website Null Hypothesis, the Journal of Unlikely Science where you can learn about even more insane wastes of money, read spoofs of science and discover the top ten most deadly vegetables. None of which are Brussels  sprouts, however. It's a fun site.

Blue Roses And Whiskey

Songwriters have used the words 'blue roses' to describes sad, lost love or something impossible. All those lyrics are now obsolete. The Suntory company of Japan, a major whiskey distiller, is branching out. They will begin selling blue roses sometime next year in Japan . The US and Australia are also targeted for the genetically modified flowers at a future date yet to be determined. 

TOKYO (AFP) - Think that red roses are predictable? In Japan, gift-givers soon will also have the option of blue roses.

The Japanese company that created the world's first genetically modified blue roses said Monday it will start selling them next year.

Suntory Ltd., also a major whisky distiller, hopes to sell several hundred thousand blue roses a year, company spokesman Kazumasa Nishizaki said.

"As its price may be a bit high, we are targeting demand for luxurious cut flowers, such as for gifts," he said. The exact price and commercial name for the blue rose have not been decided.

The company is also growing the rose experimentally in Australia and the United States to get approval for sales, but no timing has been set for commercial launches in the two countries.

Here's some information on how the roses were created. What we here at Blue Crab Boulevard can't figure out is why a distiller was even interested in this. 

We'd have thought they'd be more interested in pink elephants.

UPDATE: One of the fun things about blogging is finding the huge amount of knowledge that is out there in the world. Via email, I have been informed - by someone who (as a corporate guest) went on a tour of Suntory's original distillary. The place is a garden spot, apparently. It seems that the founder of the company was a huge fan of flowers and that Suntory has been involved in breeding and modifying flowers for some time. I am also informed that their whiskey is very, very good. Thanks for the info, Terry!

Giant Fraud

On February 2, 1870, the Cardiff Giant was finally revealed as a fraud in court. In fact, both of the fakes were declared fake. The original one and the plaster copy that PT Barnum had been showing - while declaring the original fake to be fake. Confused yet?

The Giant was the creation of a New York tobacconist named George Hull. Hull, an atheist, decided to create the giant after an argument with a fundamentalist minister named Mr. Turk about a passage in Genesis that stated that there were giants who once lived on earth.

The idea of the petrified man did not originate with Hull, however. In 1858 the newspaper Alta California had published a bogus letter that claimed that a prospector had been petrified when he had drunk a liquid within a geode. Some other newspapers had also published stories of supposedly petrified people.

Hull hired men to carve out a 10-feet-long, 4.5 inches block of gypsum in Fort Dodge, Iowa, telling them it was intended for a monument of Abraham Lincoln in New York. He shipped the block to Chicago, where he hired a German stonecutter to carve it into the likeness of a man and swore him to secrecy. Various stains and acids were used to make the giant appear to be old and weather beaten, and the giant's surface was beaten with steel knitting needles embedded in a board to simulate pores. Then Hull transported the giant by rail to the farm of William Newell, his cousin, in November 1868. He had by then spent $2,600 on the hoax.

When the giant had been buried for a year, Newell hired two men, Gideon Emmons and Henry Nichols, ostensibly to dig a well. When they found the Giant, one of them has been attributed to saying "I declare, some old Indian has been buried here!".

Between the time the Cardiff Giant was "discovered" and the revelation that it was a fake, many intelligent people fell for the hoax. A man who watched the odd hoax unfold before his eyes,  Andrew Dickson White, wrote:

The current of belief ran more and more strongly, and soon embraced a large number of really thoughtful people. A week or two after my first visit came a deputation of regents of the State University from Albany, including especially Dr. Woolworth, the secretary, a man of large educational experience, and no less a personage in the scientific world than Dr. James Hall, the State geologist, perhaps the most eminent American paleontologist of that period.

On their arrival at Syracuse in the evening, I met them at their hotel and discussed with them the subject which so interested us all, urging them especially to be cautious and stating that a mistake might prove very injurious to the reputation of the regents, and to the proper standing of scientific men and methods in the state, that if the matter should turn out to be a fraud, and such eminent authorities should be found to have committed themselves to it, there would be a guffaw from one end of the country to the other at the expense of the men intrusted by the State with its scientific and educational interests. To this the gentlemen assented, and next day they went to Cardiff. They came; they saw; and they narrowly escaped being conquered. Luckily they did not give their sanction to the idea that the statue was a petrifaction, but Professor Hall was induced to say: "To all appearance, the statue lay upon the gravel when the deposition of the fine silt or soil began, upon the surface of which the forests have grown for succeeding generations. Altogether it is the most remarkable object brought to light in this country, and, although not dating back to the stone age, is, nevertheless, deserving of the attention of archaeologists. [7]

At no period of my life have I ever been more discouraged as regards the possibility of making right reason prevail among men.

As a refrain to every argument there seemed to go jeering and sneering through my brain Schiller's famous line:

"Against stupidity the gods themselves fight in vain." [8]

There seemed no possibility even of suspending the judgment of the great majority who saw the statue. As a rule, they insisted on believing lt a "petrified giant," and those who did not dwelt on its perfections as an ancient statue. They saw in it a whole catalogue of fine qualities; and one writer went into such extreme ecstatics that he suddenly realized the fact, and ended by saying, "but this is rather too high-flown, so I had better conclude." As a matter of fact, the work was wretchedly defective in proportion and features; in every characteristic of sculpture it showed itself the work simply of an inferior stone-carver.

The Cardiff Giant has been called the greatest hoax in American history. Well, that's probably not true any longer if it ever was. There are lessons here for people who have declared that they "understand the science" of a number of subjects.

The "real" Cardiff giant is on display at the Farmer's Museum in Cooperstown, New York. I have seen it myself. (Photograph here.)

Behind Blue Eyes

No one knows what it's like
To be the bad man
To be the sad man
Behind blue eyes

No one knows what it's like
To be hated
To be fated
To telling only lies
(Pete Townshend, Behind Blue Eyes)

A team of scientists report that they have tracked down the genetic mutation that causes blue eyes in humans. They say that their studies show that everyone with blue eyes can be traced back to a single ancestor who introduced the mutation into the population.

People with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor, according to new research.

A team of scientists has tracked down a genetic mutation that leads to blue eyes. The mutation occurred between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago, so before then, there were no blue eyes.

"Originally, we all had brown eyes," said Hans Eiberg from the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of Copenhagen.

The mutation affected the so-called OCA2 gene, which is involved in the production of melanin, the pigment that gives color to our hair, eyes and skin.

"A genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes resulted in the creation of a 'switch,' which literally 'turned off' the ability to produce brown eyes," Eiberg said.

The genetic switch is located in the gene adjacent to OCA2 and rather than completely turning off the gene, the switch limits its action, which reduces the production of melanin in the iris. In effect, the turned-down switch diluted brown eyes to blue.

If the OCA2 gene had been completely shut down, our hair, eyes and skin would be melanin-less, a condition known as albinism.

Oh sure, but they don't identify who the rascal was, do they? We here at Blue Crab Boulevard believe the culprit behind blue eyes was one Sheldon B. Ogg, a caveman from what is now Germany.

Rocking The Insect World

A new species of beetle has been named to honor a rock and roll icon and his widow.

A new species of beetle that appears as if wearing a tuxedo has been named in honor of the late rock 'n' roll legend Roy Orbison and his widow Barbara.

Entomologist Quentin Wheeler of Arizona State University announced the discovery and naming of the beetle, now dubbed Orectochilus orbisonorum, during a Roy Orbison Tribute Concert on Jan. 25.

The ending of the species name, "orum," denotes it was named after a couple. If the beetle were just named after Roy it would end in "i," and for just Barbara, the name would end in "ae."

Barbara Orbison, who attended the concert along with Orbison's sons Wesley and Roy Kelton Orbison Jr., remarked on her appreciation for the new species name. "I have never seen an honor like that," she said.

To mark the occasion, Wheeler presented Barbara with an original work of art titled “Whirligig." Completed by ASU scientist and artist Charles J. Kazilek, the painting included nine images of a whirligig beetle on cotton watercolor paper.

Well, it certainly is unusual. One wonders when the first album will be in stores.

Well, They Can’t Make ‘Em Fly Yet

But they can make pigs glow in the dark. A fluorescent pig developed by Chinese Scientists has successfully passed the genetically modified genes that cause the fluorescence to its offspring. They now have second generation glowing bacon.

BEIJING - A cloned pig whose genes were altered to make it glow fluorescent green has passed on the trait to its young, a development that could lead to the future breeding of pigs for human transplant organs, a Chinese university reported.

Two of the 11 piglets glow fluorescent green from their snout, trotters, and tongue under ultraviolet light, according to Northeast Agricultural University, located in the city of Harbin.

Their mother was one of three pigs born with the trait in December 2006 after pig embryos were injected with fluorescent green protein.

"Continued development of this technology can be applied to … the production of special pigs for the production of human organs for transplant," Liu Zhonghua, a professor overseeing the breeding program, said in a news release posted Tuesday on the university's Web site.

I'm not sure I follow the logic here. While one has to admit that there are some people who would look better (or at least funnier) with a glowing pig grafted to them, that market seems limited. On the other hand, you wouldn't need a night light.

Gentlemen, We Can Rebuild Him…

…We have the technology. That comes from the old television show The Six Million Dollar Man, of course. But now, the real world has caught up with that television show that went off the air in 1978. Because they can, indeed, rebuild someone. At least the hands.

The cutting edge headquarters of a Scottish firm behind the world’s first commercially available bionic hand was officially opened today.

Government ministers toured Touch Bionic’s plant in Livingston and met the first recipient of the firm’s pioneering i-LIMB hand.

UK Minister of State for Competitiveness Stephen Timms, and Scotland Office Minister David Cairns, went on to officially open the plant.

More than 70 of the hands are now being used by amputees around the world after the product was launched last July.

About half of these are in the US although there are no plans at the moment to make the hand available on the NHS.

They have pictures of the hand in use. Here’s the Touch Bionics website. It is amazing when the real world catches up with science fiction, isn’t it?

Dopplegangers-R-Us

Tales from the multiverse. AFP publishes a story about the theoretical possibilities of so-called parallel universes:

"The idea of multiple universes is more than a fantastic invention — it appears naturally within several scientific theories, and deserves to be taken seriously," said Aurelien Barrau, a French particle physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), hardly a hotbed of flaky science.

"The multiverse is no longer a model, it is a consequence of our models," explained Barrau, who recently published an essay for CERN defending the concept.

There are several competing and overlapping theories about parallel universes, but the most basic is based on the simple, if mind-boggling, idea that if the universe is infinite then logically everything that could possible occur has happened or will happen.

Try this on for size: a copy of you living on a planet and in a solar system like ours is reading these words just as you are. Your lives have been carbon copies up to now, but maybe he or she will keep reading even if you don't, says Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at MIT in Boston, Massachusetts.

The existence of such a doppleganger "does not even assume speculative modern physics, merely that space is infinite and rather uniformly filled with matter as indicated by recent astronomical observations," Tegmark concluded in a study of parallel universes published by Cambridge University.

"Your alter ego is simply a prediction of the so-called concordance model of cosmology," he said.

They tie it in to The Golden Compass, but the concept has been around for years in science fiction and fantasy writing. Robert Heinlein wrote a lot of his later stuff about that exact concept. So have a lot of others. (I can't remember off the top of my head who wrote the science fiction short story about a man going for a walk in the fog and losing his place in the multiverse. The idea that a light shining through fog represented the multitude of possible universes has stuck with me even if the name of the author escapes me at the moment. Was it Larry Niven?) These articles pop up now and again in the media, by the way. Search "parallel universe" on Google. Here's one example from 2003.

Want To Live Longer? Move.

There's an old joke where a mom tells her son (in a letter) that the father had read that most automobile accidents occurred within 25 miles of home. So, the punchline goes, "We're moving." Oddly, a new study indicates that there are certain areas where you are statistically more likely to die younger and other areas where the odds are that you will live longer. Researchers have no clue why this is so.

Mortality, like real estate, can be all about location.

People living in the parts of the Mississippi Delta, Appalachia, the Coastal Plains along the southern East Coast, as well as residents of northern Nevada have the highest mortality rates nationwide.

Alternatively, if you're committed to longevity, your best locational bet is a move to the certain counties in Montana, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, North Dakota and South Dakota, according to a new study comparing mortality rates in counties nationwide.

Sociologist Lynne Cossman of Mississippi State University describes the situation in this month's issue of the American Journal of Public Health.

It's a mystery as to exactly why lifespan is related to where you live, she said.

"There's no easy way to explain, so far, how death is rooted in place," Cossman said. "But, place matters; that's clearly the case."

Cossman wonders if it might be related to access to health care. But that doesn't seem to make sense - it isn't like there is a clinic on every corner in North Dakota. Even if there were, it can be a long way between corners up there. Armed with this study, some sharp entrepreneur will start hyping a retirement village in one of the long-life expectancy areas.

Hmmm. Blue Crab Village. It has a certain ring to it…. Anyone want to buy some stock?

The Light Fantastic

James Randerson, writing in The Guardian, describes a new initiative in Europe to use lasers to try to create a working fusion reactor.

It's a clean source of energy using fuel that can easily be extracted from sea water, and it isn't owned by Saudi Arabia. We're talking about fusion - and a multinational project led by British researchers that aims to use high-powered lasers to produce nuclear fusion, the same physical reaction powering the sun. If they succeed, they could solve the approaching world energy crisis without destroying the environment.

Although the team admits a commercial fusion reactor is still decades away, it believes using lasers to spark fusion shows great promise. The EU has agreed to fund the setup costs for a seven-year research project called HiPER (High Powered laser Energy Research) to build a working demonstration reactor. But preparing for that stage - requiring the collaboration of 11 nations including Germany, France, Canada and Russia - is expected to cost more than €50m (£35m). Building the reactor itself will cost more than €500m.

Money machine

Why such investment? Because if we can control a fusion generator, it will be self-powering, offering abundant excess energy (to convert in turn to electricity) from virtually unlimited fuel. On top of this, its waste products won't contribute to climate change or pose the long-term waste storage problem that fission - our present nuclear generation system - poses. And we desperately need new electricity sources.

But fusion is infamous for its grand claims, massive grant proposals and, so far, limited success. Physicists joke that they've been saying fusion power is 40 years away for the past 40 years. So far it's only been used in the H-bombs exploded in tests, but that was uncontrolled.

Up to now, most attention has been on so-called magnetic fusion (see panel), in which a powerful magnetic jacket brings two different isotopes of hydrogen at enormously high temperatures close enough to fuse. That releases huge amounts of energy. It's been done - but no reactor has been built large enough to generate more energy than is put in via the magnets.

It's an interesting read, but I was a bit surprised at this passage:

Laser fusion involves some mind-numbing science. CLF's laser, called Vulcan, is the most powerful laser in the world: it can focus 500 joules of energy (about the same required to lift 50 apples by 10m) into a laser burst just 40 femtoseconds (40 x 10-15) long - equivalent to one second in a million years. During that period, it's applying 10,000 times more energy than the National Grid generates

I'm not sure how to square that claim with other information. The University of Rochester (New York) has been conducting laser fusion experiments since 1970. I've known about that place for decades, even though I do not follow fusion research closely. Their OMEGA facility is supposed to be operational this year and will be able to focus as much as 40,000 joules of energy from 60 lasers - which calcs out to slightly more than 666 joules per laser. Here's the website for the UofR's Laboratory for Laser Energetics which describes their facility. Unless I'm misreading something, the European project is far, far behind the one at Rochester.

Mummysaur

The Washington Post has an interesting piece on a very unusual dinosaur fossil that appears to be amazingly intact, including fossilized remains of muscle tissue and skin, not just the bare bones, so to speak. It was found by a high school student with a passion for dinosaurs. That student, Tyler Lyson, first marked the spot of the find in 1999 when he was in high school. Now a graduate student in paleontology at Yale, may have discovered a career-making find once all the research papers are written.

A lifelong dinosaur enthusiast, Lyson has been strapping on a backpack and hunting (and finding) dinosaur bones in the arid outback of his home state ever since elementary school. He even started an organization, the Marmarth Research Foundation ( http://www.mrfdigs.com/), in his home town of Marmarth, N.D., to support education and research on dinosaur fossils.

On an expedition in 1999, Lyson noticed some bone fragments at the base of a hill and traced their origin to a point farther up. There he spotted three vertebrae from the tail of a hadrosaur, a common plant eater that traveled in herds and is sometimes described as the cow of the Cretaceous Period. A pretty good find, Lyson thought, but not outstanding. He marked the location in his notes and moved on.

But in 2004, after leading a team of amateur researchers in an excavation that did not pan out, a disappointed Lyson turned his attention again to the vertebrae he had left behind five years before.

"I didn't have very high hopes for the animal," Lyson said. "I figured the excavation would take two or three weeks, I'd have a hadrosaur tail, it would make a nice museum piece, but scientifically it would not be that impressive."

After finding a small piece of fossilized skin, however, Lyson knew he was onto something special. A friend at the dig knew Manning, and within months, Lyson and he had agreed to pursue the project.

Some scientists interviewed for the article are criticizing Lyson and the National Geographic for putting out a documentary of the find before peer reviewed papers have been published. (The critics sound like they are indulging in more than a little helping of sour grapes, though.) Lyson says papers have or are being submitted. They have a slide show over at the Post that is quite interesting.