Science

Linkage in Progress

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Today has been another busy one. The Day Jobbe has taken up much of my time, but I did get to look at a small, fully furnished cottage that just might be exactly what I need. I’ll be putting in an application tomorrow. Meanwhile I have a few links for you.

– Issue #3 of Yipe!, the costuming fanzine, is now available.

– Science in My Fiction discusses how to cook pasta on Mars.

– The Florida Family Policy Council of Orlando proves that no lie is too outrageous when it comes to hating gay people.

– And finally, over at SFWA, Nnedi Okorafor tries to decide what it means to be African. Some of what she says is remarkably reminiscent of ridiculous turf wars over who is a “proper” trans person, and indeed who is a “proper” science fiction fan. Identity politics can be dangerous stuff.

Mucho Linkage

~ Cheryl

See, I take the morning off to get my hair done and all sorts of interesting stuff turns up. Here are some brief links.

– Neil has tweeted this, so you have probably all seen it, but some archaeologists working in Turkey have found a temple they believe to be 11,500 years old. That’s 6,000 years before Stonehenge was started. It is so old it predates the invention of pottery.

– Meanwhile archaeologists working on Crete have found a stone hand axe they believe to be 130,000 years old. That’s not so old for such an implement, except that Crete is an island in the middle of the Mediterranean, which leaves us wondering how the heck early humanoids got there.

– Jennifer Ouellette talks about the science of superheroes, and along the way has some interesting things to say about scientific accuracy in Hollywood.

– One of the things that always delights me is how simple mathematical rules can give rise to amazing complexity. Here’s a lovely story about the shapes of the beaks of finches studied by Darwin. (It also explains why we don’t see any “in between” beak shapes.)

– Jeff vanderMeer writes about Margaret Atwood and her interest in science fiction.

– Ekaterina Sedia explains why the outrageous style choices of Lady Gaga and Alexander McQueen are of interest to feminists.

Some Brief Linkage

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Because I’m overloaded yet again (sigh):

– The Economist reports on a fascinating study about differences in the ways in which boys and girls influence each other when learning.

– Theoretical Physicist Sean Carroll talks about how to write time travel stories. (I haven’t listened to this, but as Sean is also known as “the spousal unit” of the awesome Jennifer Ouellette I’m sure he’ll be good.)

– The Guardian on the odd fact that it is OK to be gay in the British army, but not OK to be a gay soccer player.

– John Holbo at Crooked Timber on the ancient Japanese art of paper theater.

Some Linkage

~ Cheryl

Here’s me being lazy again.

– Lavie Tidhar is looking for books by Western authors that have non-Western settings.

– Justine Larbalestier gives me a word for something that happens to me all the time.

– If you are in the Boston area and have an interest in LGBT issues, here’s a talk in Cambridge you might want to attend.

– The Economist discovers that the traditional way of life in Qatar is under threat… from cross-dressing girls.

– Peggy Kolm on bioengineering mer-people.

– Two interesting developments in fusion research (here and here).

– Some rather depressing psychological research that shows how deeply ingrained sexism is in our minds.

Pandoran Biology

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

OK, so we all know that Na’vi are ridiculously anthropomorphic, especially in the context of the rest of their ecosystem. However, that ecosystem is actually very interesting. My guess is that the suits in Hollywood got all bent out of shape about how the audience had to be able to identify with the Na’vi, but couldn’t care less about the animals and plants. So Cameron’s team got to play with real science. Peggy Kolm has a round-up of blog posts about it.

What Did Dinosaurs Sound Like?

~ Cheryl

You may think that, short of a time machine, there’s no way we can answer that question. But perhaps not. A team of scientists based at the University of Florida and Oklahoma State University have been studying the communication sounds made by a wide range of different animals, and they have produced some startling conclusions.

Our results indicate that, for all species, basic features of acoustic communication are primarily controlled by individual metabolism, which in turn varies predictably with body size and temperature. So, when the calls are adjusted for an animal’s size and temperature, they even sound alike.

And that’s true even when comparing creatures with non-vocal means of noise production, such as crickets.

So maybe we can predict what dinosaurs would have sounded like (assuming we can agree on whether they were warm-blooded or not). Amazing stuff, science.

Shades of Identity

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

The latest edition of Christine Burns’ Just Plain Sense podcast series takes a fascinating look at a new exhibition that has opened in London at the Wellcome Collection. Part of The Identity Project, the exhibition looks at eight different people as a means of illustrating different aspects of identity. The people covered include:

  • Samuel Pepys, whose identity is shown to be re-interpreted by the editors of each subsequent edition of his famous diaries;
  • Alec Jeffreys, the inventor of DNA fingerprinting who tried to trace his own ancestry to the notorious Judge Jeffreys and ended up finding ancestors from Mali instead;
  • Claude Cahun, a Jewish-French lesbian artist who ran a campaign of subversion during the Nazi occupation of Jersey; and
  • April Ashley, one the first people to undergo gender reassignment surgery.

I’m certainly going to find time to see the exhibition while it is on. I’ll be interested to see how well it manages to walk the fine line between allowing people to express their identity as they wish and pigeonholing them because of that identity.

From Minnie to Mickey

~ Cheryl

Here’s one that deserves a post of its own. Some scientists in Heidelberg have been doing some fairly awful things to lady mice, but their results are very interesting. The story revolves around a sneaky gene called FOXL2. If you turn it off before birth then the mice’s ovaries do not develop properly, but if you turn it off in adult female mice their ovaries suddenly start pumping out testosterone just like good like testes.

Nature has a good overview of the research. The Independent is somewhat over the top in claiming that this explains everything from bearded ladies to transsexuals, but the paper did have a very good headline while I have shamelessly stolen. Also it is true to say that this is yet another nail in the coffin of the ridiculous idea that everything about one’s sex and gender is fixed from conception by one’s chromosomes.

Possibly the most interesting thing about the research, especially if you are a lesbian or a feminist science fiction writer, is the prospect that the modified ovaries might actually be able to produce sperm. Yes, that’s right, you might be able to take a normal adult woman, tweak the genes in her ovaries, and make her produce sperm. If you could do it without subjecting her to all of that testosterone, so much the better, assuming that she’s happy as a woman. The technique might also one day provide an interesting option for female-to-male transsexuals because they could make their own testosterone.

Brief Linkage

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

I’m busy catching up with all of the Google Reader entries I accumulated while I was traveling. Here are a few highlights.

UK libel laws are so infamous that people with something to hide come here from all over the world to make money from suppressing free speech. Now at last there is a campaign to get something done about this.

Scientists in Sweden claim to be able to “fingerprint” authors based on their pattern of use of words.

The flood that filled the Mediterranean must have been truly awesome to behold. Current estimates suggest the water flowed in at around 300 kph, filling the basin at 10 meters a day, and taking less than two years to complete the job. More detail here. Sadly no mention of Felice Landry’s role on the event.

More on Hormonal Pollutants

~ Cheryl

There’s an article just gone up in The Guardian about the presence of anti-androgens and estrogen-like substances in common household goods. This being science journalism in a popular newspaper I’m a little skeptical, and I’ll try to find the EU report on which it is based. However, this paragraph did catch my eye:

Research has suggested that male foetuses around 8-12 weeks after conception can be effectively demasculinised by exposure to such chemicals.

Just in case anyone needs reminding, our understanding about how the physical and psychological aspects of gender develop is very poor, and if that process is being disrupted it becomes even more important that we move beyond the simplistic, and in many cases cruel, straitjacket of a binary gender system.

A Little Link Salad

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Very briefly:

At the Washington Post Michael Dirda seems much more happy with Transition than Patrick Ness was. Goodness only knows how he finds it “wildly entertaining.”

In The Literary Review of Canada Robert Charles Wilson explains that Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood seems pretty amateurish in places to those who have made a career of writing speculative fiction. There’s some rather subtle snark in there.

The New York Times has a profile of Carolyn Porco, my pick for Ada Lovelace Day.

And finally my good friend THE…. Sodomite Hal Duncan!! has a new column up at BSC Review in which he talks about the founding of The Outer Alliance and why some of us think it is such a good thing.

Big Science Cannot Save Us

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

Ask science fiction fans about global warming and there’s a good chance they’ll start waxing lyrical about massive engineering projects that will Save Us All. We are, after all, used to the idea of terraforming planets so that humans can live on them. Why now terraform our own (deliberately rather than accidentally). Greg Benford is a big advocate of the newly minted discipline of geoengineering.

Well, not to be thought fuddy-duddies, the Royal Society, Britain’s premier science club, launched an investigation. Their report has just been published. Oliver Morton has a summary of it here, and the top finding is, “none of these options in any way takes the place of emissions control.” Sorry Greg. That’s not to say that such methods can’t help, but in the opinion of the Royal Society we still need the economic and political measures that are currently being put in place.

Oli and the Climate Feedback blog have both done round-ups of how the UK press has managed to (mis)understand the report.

Color Me Sceptical

~ Cheryl

Ben Goldacre continues to complain about the poor quality of science journalism in the UK, despite government assurances to the contrary. I’d like to offer a brief observation in the same vein.

This article in today’s Independent suggests from the first couple of paragraphs, that we might soon learn the answer to every dinosaur-mad kid’s must urgent question: what color were they? There you are, with your brand new coloring book full of exciting pictures of T-Rex battling with Triceratops and the like, but you have no idea which crayon to use. Is science coming to the rescue?

Well not quite. There is a warning in paragraph two where the author, Andrew Johnson, talks about “fossilised feathers and fur”. He is right to do so, of course, because that’s what the technique developed at Yale is all about, which is actually quite amazing. And Johnson is right that some dinosaurs did have feathers. But most of them, especially the ones we are most familiar with, had neither feathers nor fur, so the whole breathless air of the article is just a pretense to get more people reading.

I don’t think I would have minded so much if Johnson had been a dumb tabloid journalist who actually thought that T-Rex did have fur (or feathers). But this is so transparent. It seems like Johnson knows what he is doing isn’t right, but doesn’t care, and doesn’t care who knows that he doesn’t care.

Serious Photography

~ Cheryl

I’d like you to contemplate this image (courtesy of the BBC).

Pentacene molecule

Do you know what that is? Chemistry graduates might stand a better chance of recognizing it. It is a single molecule of pentacene, made up of five chained carbon rings. That’s 22 individual carbon atoms you are seeing there. The picture was taken using something called an atomic force microscope. I am seriously impressed. Nice work, IBM Research Zurich. See the BBC article for more details.

Update: Gizmodo has a nice post that compares the photo to a “ball-and-stick” model of the molecule. (hat tip Danjite).

Scientists Create Black Hole

~ Cheryl

Now admittedly it is only a sonic black hole, but the principle is the same: the sound waves inside the hole can’t travel fast enough to get out. Also it needed a Bose-Einstein condensate to build it, so it is serious stuff. Jennifer Ouellette has an introductory post here, and Sean Carroll wonders about the possibility of observing Hawking phonons.

Of course now I’m wondering about getting Dr. Michael Berry to BristolCon…

The Origins of Black Holes

~ Cheryl

Jennifer Ouellette has a great post up at Twisted Physics all about the origins of the idea of black holes. Apparently it can all be traced back to an English scientist called John Michell who, in 1783, wrote a paper about trying to measure the mass of stars. Michell was using Newtonian physics that treats light as particles. A particle of light leaving a star should therefore behave similarly to a ball leaving the Earth – it would need to achieve escape velocity. And Michell then wondered what would happen if the star’s gravitational field was strong enough to prevent any light from leaving.