science big and small

Three crazy things I read before breakfast today:

• a purported "theory of everything" from an assistant professor of molecular biology and microbiology at Case Western Reserve University. A breathless press release titled "Radical theory explains the origin, evolution, and nature of life, challenges conventional wisdom" has been making the rounds, and kicking up some excitement among people who don't read it thoroughly or don't know enough science to spot it as the gibberish it is:
  

  By fitting the gyromodel to facts accumulated over scientific history, Dr. Andrulis confirms the proposed existence of eight laws of nature. One of these, the natural law of unity, decrees that the living cell and any part of the visible universe are irreducible. This law formally establishes that there is one physical reality.

  Another natural law dictates that the atomic and cosmic realms abide by identical organizational constraints. Simply put, atoms in the human body and solar systems in the universe move and behave in the exact same manner.

  For thorough debunking, see Ars Technica, Retration Watch, and PZ Myers. My first guess was that we might have a Sokal here, but instead it looks like a smart guy having a breakdown. May his nervous system recover its equilibrium.

  But the product of Dr. Andrulis's unbalanced brain is not nearly as nutso as two proposals I read today from Republicans:

In the Disney version of The Jungle Book, King Louie famously sings of his desire to master fire:

Now don't try to kid me, mancub
I made a deal with you
What I desire is man's red fire
To make my dream come true
Give me the secret, mancub
Clue me what to do
Give me the power of man's red flower
So I can be like you

Kanzi the bonobo not only shares this fascination with fire, but can use a lighter to start one, putting to rest the myth that the "dumb beasts" fear fire.

I've previously mentioned the evidence that those of us whose ancestral group developed outside Africa, have inherited some percentage of our genome from Neanderthal ancestors. There's more evidence to add to the pile now: a specific region of the X chromosome, which had looked suspicious for almost a decade, has been shown to originate from Neanderthals. The sequence in question was present in people from all over the world except for sub-Saharan Africa.

Saurian Brandy and Romulan Ale may still be lightyears away, but thanks to Australia's 4 Pines Brewing Company, astronauts and cosmonauts may soon be able to enjoy a beer in orbit. (If you don't think that's important, consider that beer might be the beverage that created civilization.)

Their reduced carbonation stout, named "Vostok" in honor of the first manned spacecraft (flown by Yuri Gagarin in 1961), is designed to avoid the gross phenomenon of the free-fall "wet burp", and also to account for changes in the sense of taste brought on by the space environment. But it's also designed to be tasty here dirtside. Sixpacks are available for in selected stores in Australia for around AUD 20. (If any readers down under care to send me a sixer, I'll pay you back...)

I recently mentioned a study showing that dietary intake of fiber from grains was strongly tied to lowered risk of death from cardiovascular, infectious, and respiratory diseases, and also protective against cancer deaths in men. (That intake would have to be mostly from whole grains, since the whole point of refining grains is to remove the fiber-rich bran.) And I mentioned that this was another strike against the "paleo" diet, which strongly discourages consumption of grains, as well as legumes and tubers.

Followers of the paleo fad argue that their diet is optimal because it represents what humans ate before the development of agriculture. But as it happens, for years we've had evidence that consumption of wheat and barley -- and perhaps even grain-flour bread -- goes back at least 23,000 years. (And there are hints that it might go back as far as 105,000 years, but that's still very speculative.)

And more recently, in an analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences researchers from George Washington University and the Smithsonian Institution examined phytoliths (microscopic bits of silica or other minerals from plants) and starch grains found on Neanderthal teeth dating back 36,000 to 46,000 years. Their research shows that these most iconic cavemen (who have been recently shown to be part of our ancestry and not just an evolutionary dead-end, as was argued for some years) were not only eating legumes and grains like barley, but were cooking these carb-rich foods to improve their digestibility. (Full article here, though it may be hit by the copyright cops at some point.)

Yet again, a scientific study shows that if you don't want to die, plant-based nutrition is the way. A study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine shows that intake of dietary fiber -- which comes only from vegetables, fruits, legumes, nuts, seeds, and grains, and is not found in meat, eggs, or dairy products -- was associated with a lowered risk of death from cardiovascular, infectious, and respiratory diseases in both men (24% to 56% lower) and women (34% to 59% lower). Fiber was also found to be protective against cancer in men, though a significant effect was not found in women -- perhaps because men are more likely to die from cancers with a strong dietary link, such as esophageal cancer.

Putting yet another nail in the coffin of the psudeoscientific "paleo" diet fad, the results showed that fiber from grains (discouraged in paleo diets) was most strongly tied to lowered risk.

The study, conducted by the National Institutes of Health and AARP, included more than 388,000 people ages 50 to 71. Diet was self-reported by a questionnaire that asked participants to estimate how often they ate 124 food items. After nine years, more than 31,000 of the participants had died, and national records were used to find out who died and the cause of death.

Risk factors including weight, education level, smoking and health status were accounted for in the statistical analysis, but the protective effect of fiber remained.

People panic as in a matter of weeks, large numbers of dead birds are found in Texas, Austrailia, and Russia, and hundreds of thousands of dead fish are found in California.

Whoops! Sorry, had the Guardian of Forever showing me the wrong year. That was 2007. This year, it's dead birds in Italy, Sweden, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Louisiana, and dead fish in Maryland and dead crabs in England

Mass bird and fish kills are not unprecedented. This is the third year in a row for the English crabs, while the Maryland Department of Environment counts 2,900 mass fish kills between 1984 and 2009. Forteans have have collecting stories of birds falling from the sky for decades.

It's certainly possible -- though I have no evidence either way -- that the frequency is increasing, due to pollution, climate change, and the generally shitty way we're treating our planet's life support systems. And that's a very legitimate concern.

But the current spike in observed mass deaths is partly a result of increased information and reporting. A century ago, the news of such an incident would be a local story. Even just four years ago, many fewer us us were rocketing stories around Facebook and the like. But now, thanks to the web, a dozen dead birds in a small town somewhere can fuel panic around the globe. And then once we're primed to look for them, every incident that would have passed with little mention just months ago becomes Part Of The Pattern. (It's a Law Of Fives sort of thing.)

So let's turn down the end-of-days talk and the deep-conspiracy-theory nonsense, okay? Then maybe we can look with a clear and level head at our impact on the planet. Thanks.

We all need an occasional reminder that, hey, we're living in the future, with computers in our pockets and cyborgs walking the streets -- and a space station orbiting the Earth. This amazing photo by Thierry Legault, showing the ISS transiting the Sun during the recent partial solar eclipse, is a great reminder. That thing that looks like a TIE fighter in front of the Sun? That's the International Space Station. There's people up there, zipping around Sol III at 17,000 mph. That's worth stopping to think about.

You can also see the ISS transiting the Moon in another wonderful photo by Legault.

"It might be noted here, for the benefit of those interested in exact solutions, that there is an alternative formulation of the many-body problem, i.e., how many bodies are required before we have a problem? G.E. Brown points out that this can be answered by a look at history. In eighteenth-century Newtonian mechanics, the three-body problem was insoluble. With the birth of general relativity around 1910 and quantum electrodynamics in 1930, the two- and one-body problems became insoluble. And within modern quantum field theory, the problem of zero bodies (vacuum) is insoluble. So, if we are out after exact solutions, no bodies at all is already too many!" -- Richard D. Mattuck, A Guide to Feynman Diagrams in the Many-Body Problem

If I haven't stated it clearly before, let me do so here: the disaster hype around 2012 is a bunch of muddleheaded nonsense. The Mayans themselves didn't believe that some great disaster was due when their "long count" calendar wraps around; it was just time for a big party, same way 2000 was for us.

And no, there will not be some grand alignment with the center of the galaxy on December 21, 2012: the Milky Way is too blobby for the idea of a visual center to be meaningful, and the winter-solstice sun will never actually eclipse the galaxy's central black hole (which shows up as a point-like radio source) -- it doesn't even make its closest alignment in the sky with that black hole for another 200 years, not that this means anything anyway.

So there's no big deal in 2012. And...it seems that maybe the Mayan calendar doesn't actually wrap around in 2012 after all. A new review of the conversion of the ancient Mayan calendar to our Gregorian one suggests that it may be off by as much as 50 to 100 years. Gerardo Aldana, associate professor at UC Santa Barbara, looked at the arguments anthropologist Floyd Lounsbury made in support of the so-called "GMT constant", and found them wanting, throwing the conversion into doubt.

So it might not wrap around until decades from now -- or it might have already happened decades ago. (Rather than taking this as a debunking, I'll bet that at least one 2012 disaster entrepreneur will try to take advantage of this when the world fails to end in 2012, and start hyping some other date for the apocalypse.)

Now, some folks think that 2012 is a convenient time to think about making a change -- just as with a New Year's resolution, there's actually nothing special about January 1, just a social convention. Fine, great, and wonderful: just don't assign unwarranted supernaturalism to the date.

Me, I'll be turning 42 in 2012, and as a big Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fan that means more to me than any old Mayan calendar. Also, 2012 fits the Law of Fives: 2 + 0 + 1 + 2 = 5, so as a Discordian it's significant. But Mayan prophecy? Astronomical disaster scenarios? Poppycock.