Monday Reads: Kewl Science Edition

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?