FRONT EARS OF SCIENCE
1. Ditzy Daylight Time
Front Ears of Science is very conscientious about answering readers’ questions, even if they’re somebody else’s readers.
Writing to the Times, some lady is complaining about the early shift to daylight saving time. “This morning, my normally cheerful yoga instructor felt grumpy, the women in my tennis game sluggish … Whose idea was it to move daylight savings to early March?”
Whose idea? People who WORK for a living, you twinkie.
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2. “I Hear it’s a Mosquito”
What is it like to be a bat – hearing your world instead of seeing it, flying at high speeds around dangerous obstructions and somehow finding small, moving prey like mosquitoes? What sensations would you be experiencing?
It’s not necessarily just a bunch of clicks.
Bats use echolocation, so the return signals arrive in faster sequence as the detected object nears. Rising frequencies are what we experience as ascending musical notes, so if you’re a bat maybe there’s a symphony playing in your head.
In some ways, the subjective experience is purely arbitrary. The sensation we perceive as “red” or “blue” has no essential connection with the wavelength of light. The brain registers a long wavelength as red; but, subjectively, that could translate as blue or yellow – maybe for some people it does — and it would work just as well.
Richard Dawkins (The Ancestor’s Tale) has speculated that bats hear in color.
Sensations like those we humans experience as different colors could signal, as Dawkins says, “particular qualities of echo, perhaps textures of surfaces on obstacles or prey.”
He mentions this in the context of the star-nosed mole, whose whole experience is that of touch – probing with the sensitive branches of its “star” — and of the duck-billed platypus, who can see but who searches for prey in muddy waters where its vision would be useless. The bill of the platypus has thousands of electrical sensors to detect the movements of shrimp or other small prey (since the actions of their muscles generate small electrical impulses) and pressure sensors to detect movements in the mud or water.
To keep its colors from clashing, when the platypus is using these sensors for hunting, it keeps its eyes shut.
Or is that just to keep from getting mud in its eyes? Having caught what in the heat of the chase felt like a shrimp, a platypus might want to do what you do but a bat can’t — have a look at it before deciding to swallow it.
3. Biogenetic Benjamins
As a force for bleeding-edge, devil-may-care, hypercreative research, Front Ears of Science turns to our needy brethren in the $3 billion California stem cell initiative.
The money was to be raised with bond issues – and some of it was – but now the implosion of credit markets has caused a funding freeze.
Our solution: Lease the old San Francisco Mint for three days. Manipulate the genome of currency designs as they are inseminated into the machinery that makes printing plates. At that formative stage, the embryonic designs are capable of differentiating into any denomination of paper currency, so just tweak their sequencing toward the Benjamin Franklin C-Note.
Around here, billion dollar ideas are a dime a dozen
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4. Less is More
Why are so many people who go to the hospital getting infected with superbugs like MRSA? (That stands for methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus)
Well, let’s see. First they get into the ambulance, and an EMT examines them with a stethoscope. Researchers checking 50 of those stethoscopes in New Jersey found that 16 of them carried MRSA pathogens. All it takes is a simple swab with alcohol, but some of the EMTs could not recall the last time the stethoscope had been cleaned.
As for the hospitals, a year ago the GAO reported that the government currently recommends 1,200 separate practices to prevent infection, 500 of them “strongly recommended.”
By the time a doctor finishes checking the list, you’re dead.
In October, a joint effort by healthcare societies and agencies reduced that list to six key strategies. Michigan hospitals made it even simpler, using tactics developed at Johns Hopkins. It’s a five-step checklist — washing hands, sterile gowns and gloves, protecting the patient with antiseptics, sterile drapes, sterile dressings.
In 18 months, they reduced the median rate of bloodstream infections in Michigan ICUs to zero, saving an estimated 1,500 lives.
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5. Gallic Acid
In a January 22 speech, French President Nicolas Sarkozy lambasted French research as “disastrous.”
Weak universities, he said, led by a finicky central government, are “infantilizing and paralyzing creativity and innovation.” He said French scientists are less productive than their British counterparts … horreurs!
Research association leader Alain Trautmann responded with equal savoir faire: “Sarkozy is a liar.”
At issue is an ongoing effort to restructure French research, giving more autonomy to universities and their scientists – which labor unions for some reason are opposing with threatened strikes.
To which we would like to add an historical perspective:
French Science
Who founded modern chemistry?
In junior high we learned to say,
Lavoisier and Priestley,
Priestley and Lavoisier
The British praised their scientist
with honors from the King and Queen.
The French called theirs a Girondist
and sent him to the guillotine
(Another mob killed Condorcet.
The Enlightenment had seen its day.)
In many arts, the French excel:
in painting, cooking, fashion, dance.
But prudent science, truth to tell,
discovers things outside of France
–from Alan Van Dine’s latest book, If Instead of Apes we had come from Grapes, we wouldn’t just yet be wine.
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6. Oil & Water
According to researchers Peter Gleick and Heather Cooley of the Pacific Institute, bottled water can use up to 2000 times as much energy as tap water.
Just making the bottles uses the equivalent of 50 million barrels of oil a year worldwide, and transporting them takes 32 to 54 million barrels a year in the U.S. alone.
Bottom line: each bottle of water is 15% to 25% oil.
– information source: Science (journal of AAAS), 3/6/09.
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7. Do Ants Think?
Ant researcher Nigel Franks says ants are far from stupid. “They have very sophisticated behaviors. They don’t have language or theory of mind … but some of their actions look like thinking.”
E. O. Wilson, foremost authority on the subject, coined the term “super-organism” for ant and bee colonies and would probably say the colony thinks, whether the ant does or not.
Franks describes how, in selecting a new nest site, scouts introduce other ants to a possible nest in what looks like a sales pitch, using chemical signals and physical touching (schmoozing and backslapping). They measure the size and shape of an interior space – say, a cavity in a tree – by keeping track of how many times they cross the scent of their own trails.
I know he’s right because some of the ants have been surveying my kitchen and pantry, and I can’t wait to get the results. Do you have a pantry? I’ve never been able to find mine, but the ants will.
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What wonderful observations! I must say, though, I love the illustrations of the bat and the patient even more than our Front Ears of Science update.
Comment by Lynn — March 29, 2009 @ 4:43 pm
That’s Barb’s bat, Barb’s ants, and Al’s mummy (as you know, she was in the hospital)
Comment by Al — March 29, 2009 @ 9:18 pm