Earthshaking Science
Since you’re busy and I’m not, I try to survey the arcane world of bleeding-edge research and abstract the few key findings worth your attention. The following are sourced from Science, the publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Science, of which I am a member until one of their editors stumbles onto this website.
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Brown Mustard on Mars
Commenting on the resignation of Alan Stern from NASA in protest of that agency’s cronyism and politicized decision making favoring Mars exploration and JPL: “ ‘Stern wanted to strangle Mars to pay for other things,’ says John Mustard, a planetary scientist at Brown University.”
We attempted to contact Brown’s Mustard but were told he was in Dijon.
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Bacteria Feast on Antibiotics
During my brief stint in the military, we were issued bottles of yellowish insect repellent to use on bivouac, and one day somebody dropped his bottle and it broke. Within 15 minutes, every mosquito, ant, beetle, and hornet for miles around had converged on the puddle in a feeding frenzy.
Now a team from Harvard Medical School and its Biophysics Program has at last caught up with that seminal research performed by the 304th Tank Battalion.
They tested 18 chemicals representing eight major classes of natural and synthetic antibiotics on various types of soil bacteria, some of them closely related to human pathogens. The antibiotics not only didn’t kill the microbes, most of them actually supported the growth of clonal bacteria from each of 11 diverse soils.
Resistant? The bacteria react to antibiotics much as humans react to Snickers bars.
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Space Whiskers
Studying 4.6 billion year old meteorites, formed from the solar accretion disk even before the planets, researchers from the Imperial College of London are finding graphite whiskers. This form of carbon is believed to be present in the interstellar – possibly even intergalactic – dust, where they would absorb light and possibly distort observations from earth of the most distant galaxies. Some theorists believe this could be an alternative explanation for what otherwise appears to be the accelerating expansion of the universe.
Silly Brits. After God created the universe, he showered and shaved – wouldn’t you? — and the graphite whiskers are what’s left.
Why didn’t he clean them up? He did. He washed them down the drain, which is where we live.
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Gamblers No Good at Cards
Psychiatric investigators at the University of Pisa tested groups of subjects on their ability to find the patterns in a special deck of cards – a measure of “executive function.” A group of addicted gamblers proved particularly inept. Not only were they bad, they actually got worse with practice.
Research in Pisa isn’t what it used to be.
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These are WONDERFUL. I especially like the story of your army insecticide and God’s whiskers.
Comment by a2 — May 9, 2008 @ 3:10 pm