Monday Reads: Kewl Science Edition
Posted: July 2, 2012 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Big Bank Theory, Kewl science, Leap Second, overuse of antibiotics in food animals, Translucent Ants 45 Comments
Good Morning!
I’m tired of politics. I’m also tired of attracting mad teabot trolls so let’s talk science for awhile!
These translucent Ants eating colored sugar are just about the most surreal thing I’ve seen for awhile. There are more pictures at this link.
Scientist Mohamed Babu from Mysore, India captured beautiful photos of these translucent ants eating a specially colored liquid sugar. Some of the ants would even move between the food resulting in new color combinations in their stomachs.
There’s more information on this at the Daily Mail. I guess you are what you eat.
Scientists aren’t shy when discussing that creator gawds are redundant. This article from an Indian media outlet discusses a Caliifornia conference where scientists provided thoughts on the spontaneous nature of the Big Bang. Naturally, it won’t get play in this country where magical thinking is encouraged and science and education are defunded.
Leading scientists have once again got themselves embroiled in the debate about the existence of God or a god’s involvement in the Big Bang.
During a panel discussion at the SETIcon II conference in Santa Clara, Calif., over the weekend, scientists discussed the Big Bang and whether there was a requirement for some divine power to kick-start the Universe 13.75 billion years ago.
Unsurprisingly, the resounding answer was: No.
“The Big Bang could’ve occurred as a result of just the laws of physics being there,” the Discovery News quoted astrophysicist Alex Filippenko of the University of California, Berkeley as saying.
“With the laws of physics, you can get universes,” he stated.
However, Filippenko, a speaker on the “Did the Big Bang Require a Divine Spark?” panel, was vague on whether or not god (or, indeed, heaven) exists- he merely pointed out that the birth of the Universe didn’t require an intervening omnipotent being to get the whole thing started. The laws of physics, pure and simple, sparked universal creation.
“I don’t think you can use science to either prove or disprove the existence of God,” Filippenko said.
He then meandered into a classic chicken-and-egg argument: “The question, then, is, ‘Why are there laws of physics?’ And you could say, ‘Well, that required a divine creator, who created these laws of physics and the spark that led from the laws of physics to these universes, maybe more than one.’
“The ‘divine spark’ was whatever produced the laws of physics. And I don’t know what produced that divine spark. So let’s just leave it at the laws of physics.”
On the other hand, British astrophysicist and author Stephen Hawking cares little for society’s belief in supernatural beings (or subtlety for that matter).
In his 2010 book, “The Grand Design,” Hawking said, “Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist.”
A “spontaneous Big Bang” is something SETI Institute astronomer Seth Shostak, also a speaker at the SETIcon II panel, agrees with.
“Quantum mechanical fluctuations can produce the cosmos,” said Shostak.
“If you would just, in this room, just twist time and space the right way, you might create an entirely new universe. It’s not clear you could get into that universe, but you would create it.
“So it could be that this universe is merely the science fair project of a kid in another universe. I don’t know how that affects your theological leanings, but it is something to consider,” he asserted.
Here’s an interesting set of research findings from the journal Nature under the title “Pig Out”. It’s on how dangerous the use of antibiotics in farm animals is and how it will adversely impact human health in the near future.
The spread of dangerous bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics is fueled by overuse of the drugs — and not just in people. Farmers around the world routinely feed antibiotics to their animals, not only to prevent and treat infections, but also to make their animals grow faster. This leads to drug-resistant bacteria in the animals, and this resistance can spread to the bacteria that infect us.
The overuse of antibiotics in farm animals is a global issue. Human propensity for trade and travel ensures that resistant bacteria spread easily around the world, so as long as any one country pumps its pigs and poultry full of the drugs, everyone is at risk.
In 1998, the Danish poultry industry took the unusual step of volunteering to stop using antibiotics for the promotion of animal growth. Two years later, the country’s pork farmers did the same. Denmark might be a small country, but it is the world’s largest exporter of pork. And it didn’t stop there, writes Frank Aarestrup in a Comment piece on page 465, Denmark went on to reduce its overall use of antibiotics in livestock by 60%. It achieved this by creating a comprehensive surveillance system to monitor overuse, and limiting the amount of money that vets could make from selling the drugs to farmers.
Many feared that the changes would cripple Denmark’s pork production. Instead, production rose by 50%. “Any country trying to limit the use of antibiotics in livestock can learn from what my colleagues and I did in Denmark, adjusting what worked to local needs,” Aarestrup writes. These are encouraging words, but it is unlikely to be that simple.
The biggest obstacle is likely to be generating the political resolve and public support needed to crack down on the lucrative trade in antibiotics. This was possible in Denmark because there, perhaps uniquely, warnings from the medical community were picked up by the media, creating widespread public awareness of the problems caused by the overuse of antibiotics. People in other countries may not be so engaged, particularly when faced with the inevitable lobbying of the agricultural and veterinary sectors, which make big profits from selling antibiotics.
From Science Magazine and Chinese researchers in anthropology we learn that pottery used for cooking was invented probably 20,000 years ago which is earlier than previously thought.
The invention of pottery introduced fundamental shifts in human subsistence practices and sociosymbolic behaviors. Here, we describe the dating of the early pottery from Xianrendong Cave, Jiangxi Province, China, and the micromorphology of the stratigraphic contexts of the pottery sherds and radiocarbon samples. The radiocarbon ages of the archaeological contexts of the earliest sherds are 20,000 to 19,000 calendar years before the present, 2000 to 3000 years older than other pottery found in East Asia and elsewhere. The occupations in the cave demonstrate that pottery was produced by mobile foragers who hunted and gathered during the Late Glacial Maximum. These vessels may have served as cooking devices. The early date shows that pottery was first made and used 10 millennia or more before the emergence of agriculture.
Ever heard of a ‘Leap Second’? Here’s news on how a bug with the program that adjusts the world’s atomic clocks created problems over the weekend with the many internet sites. Evidently Google was one of the major sites that anticipated the bug. Remember Y2K? Our wobbly, spinning planet just doesn’t parse into our concept of time.
Reddit, Mozilla, and possibly many other web outfits experienced brief technical problems on Saturday evening, when software underpinning their online operations choked on the “leap second” that was added to the world’s atomic clocks.
On Saturday, at midnight Greenwich Mean Time, as June turned into July, the Earth’s official time keepers held their clocks back by a single second in order to keep them in sync with the planet’s daily rotation, and according to reports from across the web, some of the net’s fundamental software platforms — including the Linux operating system and the Java application platform — were unable to cope with the extra second.
Many computing systems use what’s called the Network Time Protocol, or NTP, to keep themselves in sync with the world’s atomic clocks, and when an extra second is added, some just don’t know how to handle it.
The “leap second bug” hit just as the web was recovering from a major outage to Amazon Web Services, an online operation that runs as much as one percent of the internet. Some operations, including Google, saw the leap second coming and prepared for it, but others weren’t so diligent.
So, exactly how closely related are we homo sapiens to the Great Apes? Here’s a great explanation on the genetics behind our common ancestry with our Ape cousins. Do you know we have fused chromosomes that are still separate in other primates? Here’s some fascinating information from the genome project. It’s the kiss of death to “intelligent design” and the “there are holes” in the theory of evolution.
So, I brought the weird science this morning. You need to bring the weird politics and news. What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
peej
Carissa
ecocatwoman
mablue2
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Thanks for the morning science, Kat. Before starting to read, i stared at the photo, thinking those looked like ants but I couldn’t understand why they were multi-colored. Ahhh, reading can be informative.
Hooray for Denmark, now either every other country should get onboard with banning antibiotics or just stop eating animal flesh (I vote for the latter, myself).
Admission – I’m weird. I honestly don’t care how the universe began. I’m in the camp of “we’re here, let’s make the best of it & be the best person we can.” Not denigrating others’ interest in it but, for me at least, what difference does it really make? And, personally, I don’t think one of the purposes of science is to either disprove or prove the existence of a higher power. I long ago realized, though, that I’m almost always out of step with the rest of the world. I blame it on being left-handed.
Thanks for another interesting post.
OT: Update and correction on my son-in-law’s father. Thank you to all of you who questioned when I mentioned the figure of $60,000 ($5,000/month) for his meds. Based on the conversation here, I had my daughter investigate while she was visiting her husband’s family. Well, I found out the truth last night when I picked up my daughter and son-in-law from the airport. I was wrong. The family had it wrong. It was indeed the donut hole. So it is $5,000 in total. These are not sophisticated people, and I guess I should have questioned the figure from the beginning. Anyway, thanks to your help, a huge financial worry has now been lifted from them.
To the discussion at hand, it’s my understanding that we should not be eating cooked food at all, but especially meat. Since I’m a carnivore, this is tough for me to do. But … lately, every time I eat meat, and I eat only organic meat, I feel nauseous, as if I’ve ingested something that is poison to my system. I hate vegetables, so I’m in a bit of a bind, but I think, as a general rule, the less meat, the better. Actually, I think, as we age, the less we eat at all, the better. So much easier said than done.
That’s great news about your son-in-law’s father. Even the $5,000 is shocking, but the donut hole will go away when the ACA finally takes effect.
Most, if not all, private insurance also contain a lifetime maximum in them as well. That also goes away when the ACA takes effect. With the horrendous costs now that’s a keeper.
There is a lot of evidence that humans began cooking earlier than was originally thought (including in this post). I don’t buy the hypothesis that our ancestors ate only raw food. Some scientists even argue that cooking contributed to evolutionary advances.
We evolved to be omnivorous, and humans in different environments adapted to different means of meeting their nutritional needs.
Terrific although as BB stated, 5K still seems steep. Give my best wishes to your son-in-laws father. If I were religious – but I’m not, so I’m sending positive thoughts his way.
Glad to hear that the situation may improve. Hope the treatments go well.
That $5,000 doesn’t surprise me for “doughnut hole” med costs. Glad we will get (sorta) a solution for it.
More and more people with insurance are actually underinsured and don’t have meds covered adequately, or even at all.
We don’t need universal health insurance. We need universal health care. (I know, preaching to the choir.)
Myb mind keeps wandering back to the Romney vacation.
How do you squeeze 30 people, which includes umpteen kids by the way, into a house with only 6 bedrooms?
Which only goes to show how shallow my thinking can get as the dog days of summer roll on.
The article said that some of the 18 grandchildren would be sleeping on couches and the floor. It also mentioned living spaces above the stables. My family used to have reunions at a large house owned by my mom’s older sister and her husband. My grandmother had 6 kids, and all but one had their own children. At the time there were more than 30 grandchildren. The kids all slept in a room above the garage, with one adult as “dorm monitor.”
I actually enjoyed those reunions, but we didn’t have rigid schedules or athletic competitions, and I don’t think the adults met with my grandparents each night to discuss their career and parenting issues.
Think dog on the roof. It’s good to be king.
I wonder if the “leap second” is what caused the WordPress problems yesterday?
Maybe BB, I still had problems with WP late last night/early this morning…strange.
Could be — I read a list of major websites that were affected — the article was probably on cnet.com — I read a bunch of tech articles everyday.
Interesting post on the Democratic and Republican campaign messaging on health care and Romney’s Bain career at The Plum Line this morning.
That post makes sense to me. Maybe I’m missing something but I think campaigning on full repeal is a loser for the GOP with independents.
Especially if you claim that 30 million uninsured Americans “isn’t the issue,” as Mitch McConnell did yesterday.
You may still attract the teabot trolls with any post on science “stuff.”
Those ant pictures are so very Kewl!
I just got online and saw this interesting bit of news:
Romney Invested in Medical-Waste Firm That Disposed of Aborted Fetuses, Government Documents Show | Mother Jones
Makes me think of this song:
Paul Krugman, superb as always… Europe’s Great Illusion
I thought this link about the Texas GOP was something, since it comes from Forbes: The Terrifying Texas GOP Platform – Forbes
It does not mention any thing what so ever that is news to those who read the blog…but it did make me giggle while reading it…all I kept saying over and over was, no shit.
Oh, BTW it is written by a prof of economics at Texas Christian U.
Those people, the Texas Taliban, are absolutely fucking nuts. A bunch of unsalvageables.
yep.
The zombie Apocalypse is upon us: Chinese ‘cannibal’ attack caught on video as drunken bus driver chews off woman’s face – Asia – World – The Independent
What is going on out there? We know it isn’t “bath salts.”
Alternative reality — SciFi — A super secret research group — putting hypnotic suggestion in ads or songs or tv programs. This theory has been in SciFi novels for a long time.
Something strange is happening — perhaps this particular drug is undetectable. If the labs don’t know what to test for — or the drug can mimic a common chemical once it has triggered the behavior???
Great article by Sara Robinson in Salon via AlterNet
Southern values revived
How a brutal strain of conservative American aristocrats have come to rule America
Too scary by half, but seems to be right on the “money”. I for one would welcome Muppet overlords.
I’m glad some one besides me recognizes the plantation mentality. I’ve been using the term for some time. It’s like we’ve said there was a war on women long before the DNC picked up on it.
I thought of you when I read the article. Thought you’d like it 🙂
You were right. I find it fascinating and full of what I’ve experienced as some one raised culturally southern who hates it.
True this:
Wow … this sounds like what Jindal is doing in Louisiana right now.
This explains why rednecks do what they do too. I’ve always been amazed at how many working class whites in the south embrace this. But, it seems the get some kind of benefit from feeling superior to racial minorities. It’s why they get incensed at affirmative action and at the root of why these folks are absolutely obsessed with all things Obama.
That’s probably right but I’ve always wondered why lower economic class rednecks didn’t rebel against the Massa? They would have a lot to gain from it but, I guess, they can’t go against lifetimes of “belief”.
That is something, thanks for the link Ralph.
I know I’m going up against some big names, but thinking that science has anything to say about religion — or vice versa! — shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of science.
Science must use a method, and that requires measurable objects and physical (i.e. “objective” in the philosophical meaning of the word) ways of testing guesses (= “hypotheses”). Those tests have to be repeatable by anyone, and have to yield the same conclusions before the results are considered valid.
Science is concerned with the world of measurable objects. That means it has nothing to say about Love, Truth, Beauty, Justice, or, of course, God. None of those are measurable objects. All the capital-letter-things are felt experiences or concepts.
Religion and science simply don’t address the same parts of existence. In a post called You can’t believe in evolution, I tried to summarize that point by saying science can’t answer cosmic questions about the reason for our existence, and religion can’t cure AIDS.
It really bothers me when people (yes, Dr. Dawkins, I’m looking at you) can’t seem to figure this out, smart as they are. They’re really making the same mistake as the opposition — giving their favorite point of view, science or religion, explanatory powers about the other that it can’t have, by simple logic.
EXCELLENT!!!
There are a group of “scientists” who have been mixing politics and science. These scientists wanted to provide for the politicians “probability” of an event. So these scientists used “scientific wild a$$ guesses” or SWAG…. The politicians than used the casino like guesses by the “scientists” to make policy. These guys ignore the fact that hypothesis must be tested — they ignore the methods and results of the papers they write for politicians.
Too often the scientific counterfeiters are too willing to play politics and give politicians what they want. These faux “scientists” keep their jobs — while the blunt honest real scientists are often silenced or teach in Junior colleges.
Science must use a method, and that requires measurable objects and physical (i.e. “objective” in the philosophical meaning of the word) ways of testing guesses (= “hypotheses”). Those tests have to be repeatable by anyone, and have to yield the same conclusions before the results are considered valid.
Science is concerned with the world of measurable objects. That means it has nothing to say about Love, Truth, Beauty, Justice, or, of course, God. None of those are measurable objects. All the capital-letter-things are felt experiences or concepts.
The first time I encountered this — the state wanted to poison a lake to get rid of one fish species so that trout could be introduced. All the scientific research in peer reviewed journals said that this was a doomed to fail method. I went to the public meeting with a stack of printouts of the journal articles.
Then there are some geologists — who just use SWAG and write papers for the politicians. Most politicians have little or no background in science. The politicians want the scientists to “prove” what the politicians “believe”. There are enough whore “scientists” around who are willing to play the game.
What quixote said.
The comments lately have been exceptional…it is like reading mini-post within a post.
The late lamented Stephen Jay Gould wrote an entire book about this — the non-overlapping domains of Science and Religion.
Makes sense to me. Science stays out of religion, and religion should stay out of science.
The Nation @thenation
Tell us what you want to hear from @JessicaValenti @AnnaHolmes and @aimeett about the future of feminist activism: http://tnat.in/bY4qx
Kaiser Health Tracking Poll: Early Reaction to Supreme Court Decision on the ACA
Seems to be only Teabots that are obsessed with the ACA decision. Every one else is moving on.
I don’t know if any one saw this but AC finally came out. Any one that’s been around him personally knows he’s gay. He doesn’t cover it up but this is an official announcement.
http://insidetv.ew.com/2012/07/02/anderson-cooper-gay/
As always Dak, your post was right on time!
http://news.yahoo.com/higgs-boson-physicists-see-best-proof-yet-god-155311961–abc-news-tech.html
I am SOOOO happy that they found this! I’m sort of an oxymoron in that I am a proud Catholic that doesn’t really believe in some of the hooey that is spewed in my church. I have always felt that God wouldn’t give man the power of reason and then tell man that his reasoning is wrong. You CAN believe in God and yet still believe the laws of science. Higgs Boson will answer so many questions of the universe. I am hoping that it might even help us down the path of travel at the speed of light, thereby unlocking new worlds. With so much out there we DON’T know, this is a great step towards knowing more. This can be an exciting time for all of us!
Hillary 2012
BTW – Batman 3 will be in theaters July 20th. 😀
good to see you Rock…