Category: Science

Last weekend when I was doing my first post on Pirates of the Caribbean (go see the movie if you haven’t), I was doing some research on Wikipedia about the origin of the phrase "Dead Man’s Chest." I knew it was from a sea shanty, but I didn’t remember the full lyrics of it.

TURNS OUT IT APPEARS TO BE FROM A SHANTY MADE UP BY ROBERT LOUIS STEPHENSON IN TREASURE ISLAND.

Though it may be based on a real-life event involving Blackbeard the pirate.

That got me to thinking: There have been quite a number of pirates known by the color of their beards, but I couldn’t remember which of them were real and which were fictional. (I’m not much of a pirate expert, I’m afraid.)

I remembered hearing about "Bluebeard," for example (I think in a Scooby-Doo cartoon I saw as a kid or something), but I couldn’t remember if Bluebeard was real or fictional. So I Wikipediaed him.

Turns out he was a fictional aristocrat rather than a pirate.

I also remembered that there was a movie about pirates called Yellowbeard (though I never saw that and suspect I wouldn’t like it).

And there’s a comicbook character called Redbeard.

"Just how far does this go?" I wondered. "There can’t be many more pirate characters with colored facial hair designations."

So I typed in "greenbeard" and, sure enough, there was no such pirate.

BUT THERE WAS A SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT KNOWN AS "THE GREEN BEARD EFFECT."

The basic idea is that there might be sets of genes that cause an organism to have a particular characteristic and to be altruistically disposed to other organisms that share that characteristic, even if they are otherwise unrelated. The gene set would thus promote its own replication apart from a close family connection.

For example, suppose that there were a gene set that caused certain humans to have green beards. Such people might form a kind of mutual defense league.

Supposedly they’ve actually documented the green beard effect in, of all things, red fire ants.

I don’t know if they need to look that far, though.

I don’t want to give away any secrets of the Red Headed League, but I’ve noticed that women who are or who used to be red heads often seek to engage me in what I can only describe as "red-head mutual bonding conversations" (e.g., complimenting my hair color, observing that it’s a darker red on the sides of my head than on the top, telling me about their hair color and things they may have done to maintain or accentuate it). Guys don’t do this, but then guys don’t generally talk much about their hair color in my experience (except to complain about gray).

Being a guy, I don’t have much to say in such conversations, but I’ve been struck by the number of times present and former red heads start them with me, and there’s a definite, positive "Hey, we’re two of a kind" vibe that comes across, even from women old enough to be my grandmother and whose hair is now white.

I also suspect that this effect–if I understand it correctly–is all over the place in biology, even across species.

For example, it’s often been remarked that the reason we find puppies and kittens so cute is that they, like our own offspring, have big heads and big eyes compared to their mature forms. Mammals that have big heads and big eyes in infancy get perceived by us as cute and we want to take care of them, which promotes their survival. They trigger the parenting instinct in us.

There thus may be a set of genes that produce the quality of having a big head and big eyes in infancy and that foster altruism toward those organisms that have this quality, even in other species.

CHARLES FORT was a 19th century gentleman who published books cataloging all kinds of unusual phenomena. . . . X-Files kind of stuff, including strange things falling from the sky.

Like big balls of ice that clearly aren’t hailstones because they don’t come from storms and clearly aren’t ejecta from airplane toilets because . . . well, just because. Okay? (We don’t need to go into the details.)

LIKE THIS ONE THAT RECENTLY FELL IN SOUTH AFRICA.

Turns out these things have (recently acquired) a name and are established enough scientifically now that Charles Fort ought to be pleased.

They’re called

MEGACRYOMETEORITES.

LEARN MORE (WITH PICTURES!)

I normally don’t read Jeff Rense’s site because . . . well, because he’s a nut. I used to find his show interesting because of all the crazy people he would talk to (like on Art Bell’s show, only crazier), but after 9/11 he went off of a deep end that soured me on the whole thing.

I was therefore quite surprised when I was reading Jerry Pournelle’s blog Chaos Manor and saw him make this recommendation:

Go see
http://www.rense.com/general72/size.htm. You’ll be glad you did.

I clicked the link and discovered Jerry was right.

Cool presentation!

BTW, be sure to check out Chaos Manor. Jerry Pournelle’s been blogging since before there were blogs and has a bunch of interesting stuff to say.

Okay, I don’t really have a #2 planned for this series, but you never know.

Here’s what happened:

On my roadtrip to Texas last week, I took along some low-carb food in case I had trouble finding it on the road (in the sense of restaurants; I’m not talking about roadkill!). Among the things I took was a carton of low carb milk that I had opened and didn’t want to go to waste. I could take this because the carton in question had a screw top cap and so wouldn’t leak all over the place.

So, over the next day, I finished the container of low carb milk and tossed it to one side, figuring I’d throw it away the next time I stopped at a motel.

But before I did so, I noticed that something had happened to the milk carton: It had swelled up and now looked like this:
What had caused it to swell up? I wondered.

It couldn’t be the few remaining drops of milk in the carton releasing gasses, I thought. There weren’t enough of them to produce this kind of dramatic swelling.

Then I realized: I’m in an area where the elevations are above 4,000 feet. I bet that’s the reason why the carton bulked up so much.

The air in it from when I finished drinking the milk was put in at a lower altitude and then trapped in there when I sealed the carton.

But the air at that lower elevation was denser and there was more pressure on the outside of the carton from the air surrounding it. Now that I was at a higher elevation, the surrounding air pressure was lower and the carton was expanding due to the pressure of the denser air inside of it.

Or that was my hypothesis.

So I decided to do a little science experiment.

Instead of throwing the carton away, I kept it for another night and looked at it again in Dallas, which has an altitude of less than 500 feet. If my thesis was right then the drop of 3500 feet should cause the carton to de-inflate.

The next night the carton looked like this:


As you can see, it’s un-swelled itself considerably!

In fact, its sides are a bit sucked in now, and this was without opening it or doing anything to release the pressure in it.

In case it’s easier to see the difference, here’s a side-by-side comparison of the two:

So there you have it! Science is all around us–even when you don’t expect it!

There’s also a bit of relevance here to humans: It ain’t just milk cartons that expand or contract based on the air pressures found at different altitudes. Humans do, too. Our respiratory system is largely open since we’re breathing in and out all the time. Unless we’re holding our breath, our lungs won’t swell up or swell down this way based on rapid changes in air pressure, but other systems in our body aren’t so open: Our circulatory system, for example contains a certain volume of blood that is relatively constant and is used to operating at a particular level of pressure, and the fluids in our tissues don’t go in and out of us as quickly as air does when we breathe in and out. So the blood and other fluids in our bodies will be subject to at least some expansion and contraction the way the air in this milk carton was.

I assume that’s at least part of what’s going on when folks experience

ALTITUDE SICKNESS.

Stephen Hawking raised eyebrows recently when he said that Pope John Paul II had said scientists should not inquire into the moment the universe was created, because it was the work of God. It’s thus natural that a reader would write:

I’m somewhat suspect of THIS ARTICLE, specifically when Hawking quotes a dead man, but I thought I’d get your take on what JP2 might have meant when he said:

"It’s OK to study the universe and where it began. But we should not enquire into the beginning itself because that was the moment of creation and the work of God."

I’m not sure I understand the distinction here.

Please elucidate.

I’ll do what I can. We have a problem, though, in that we don’t have the full text remarks of what Hawking said, only the snipped you quoted above from the press. There’s also the problem that Hawking said that JP2 said this at "a cosmology conference at the Vatican" (no date given, making it hard to look up what the pope may have said) and he then joked that "I was glad he didn’t realize I had presented a paper at the conference suggesting how the universe began. I didn’t fancy the thought of being handed over to the Inquisition like Galileo."

In view of the last comment, the whole thing might have been a joke on Hawking’s part that got taken literally. Or it may be that he’s stretching the truth in order to serve the joke or he’s misremembering. He’s certainly not giving a verbatim quotation from the pope, who would not be expected to use the English colloquialism "OK" in an address to cosmologists.

The conference that JP2 addressed may have been THIS ONE, but maybe not. The published version of JP2’s remarks certainly don’t have anything in them like what Hawking reported.

The perplexing statement that we can examine "where" the universe began but not "the beginning itself" suggests that we are dealing with a badly remembered articulation of JP2’s thought, and in the absence of further info from Dr. Hawking or someone coming up with a plausible candidate for the text of the pope’s remarks, I can only speculate on what the pontiff may have been trying to communicate.

But I’m not averse to speculation (as long as it is flagged as such), so here goes: I would conjecture that JP2 encouraged scientists to study the origin of the universe but not to try to force the origin of the universe into a materialistic model that would reduce its existence to purely natural forces, without any Creator. Science must respect its own in-built limits, I conjecture JP2 as communicating, and not presume to preclude the action of the Creator by the theories it proposes. Science must speak to its own realm without trying to settle theological questions, just as theology must speak to its own realm without trying to settle scientific questions.

Or something along those lines.

That’s my guess, anyway.

PRE-PUBLICATION UPDATE: THE CATHOLIC LEAGUE THINKS IT HAS IDENTIFIED WHAT CONFERENCE HAWKING WAS TALKING ABOUT AND THUS WHAT JP2 SAID.

The scientist who led the team that cracked the human genome is set to publish a book detailing an even more shocking discovery:

The existence of God.

Francis Collins was an atheist until he was 27.  He became a believer, in part, due to the influence of C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity.

 

"[Collins’] book, The Language of God, to be published in September, will reopen the age-old debate about the relationship between science and faith. ‘One of the great tragedies of our time is this impression that has been created that science and religion have to be at war,’ said Collins, 56.

"’I don’t see that as necessary at all and I think it is deeply disappointing that the shrill voices that occupy the extremes of this spectrum have dominated the stage for the past 20 years.’

"For Collins, unravelling the human genome did not create a conflict in his mind. Instead, it allowed him to ‘glimpse at the workings of God.’"

GET THE STORY.

Whenever I drive across New Mexico, I’m on the lookout for a little sign by the side of the road unceremoniously announcing "Continental Divide"–a sign like the one on the left (only that one’s actually in North Dakota rather than New Mexico).

Growing up, I had the idea that the continental divide was a the highest mountain ridge on the continent so that it divided the continent into two sides that sloped away to the ocean.

Well, that and it was a John Belushi movie.

But if you go and see the continental divide, you may find that you’re not at a mountain ridge at all. There may not even be a mountain ridge in sight. Where you are may be flat.

That’s the way it looks at the continental divide in New Mexico, and it looks pretty similar at the location in North Dakota.

Even more confusingly, when you’re at the continental divide there can be higher points of land on either side of it, within sight.

What’s the explanation?

The explanation is that the continental divide isn’t a ridge made out of the highest land on the continent. It’s an elevation of land that separates two watersheds, so that rain falling on one side of it will tend to find its way toward one ocean and rain falling on the other side will tend to find its way to another.

That means that the continental divide will tend to be high ground, but it doesn’t all have to be mountainous (it can be in relatiely flat countryside) and it doesn’t have to be the highest thing in the area. There can be higher points on both sides, there just has to be a depression between the higher point and the continental divide so that the flow of water toward the ocean isn’t thwarted.

Now here’s a new twist: There isn’t just one continental divide in North America. There are four (click to enlarge).

The one everybody thinks of as "the Continental Divide" is actually the Great Continental Divide, but there are three others, depending on what body of water a watershed is sloping toward–whether it’s the Pacific Ocean, the Arctic Ocean, the Labrador Sea, the Atlantic Ocean, or the Gulf of Mexico.

I was surprised at how much of the United States is in the watershed leading to the Gulf of Mexico. I’d kind of assumed that water on the east sid of the Great Divide would flow toward the Atlantic, but oh yeah, there’s another bunch of mountains in the way, so it’s going to go down into the Gulf.

Other continents also have continental divides, though they’re not always as clearly demarkable as they are in North America, so GO NORTH AMERICA! We’ve got FOUR, CLEARLY DEMARKABLE divides!

LEARN MORE.

AND MORE.

I don’t know if you’ve ever gone online and listened to some of the ringtones that are available for cell phones these days, but some of them are really annoying.

Like that Crazy Frog thing.

The most obnoxious ringtones seem to be aimed at young people, and I imagine there are a good number of oldsters who would like such tones to simply disappear.

I can’t promise that, but I can announce the creation of a ringtone that most adults can’t hear!

Y’see: As we age, our ears tend to lose sensitivity to high-frequency sounds, and there is now a ringtone, known as "The Mosquito" that is so high that adults generally can’t hear it, while kids can.

So what are the kids doing with it?

Using it to receive cell phone calls and text messages in class without the teacher noticing.

What did you expect?

GET THE STORY.

A reader writes:

I have been trying to find something on line about New Mexico being underwater at one time. I recently visited N.M. and was told exactly that. When I came home I mentioned it to one of the teachers I work with and they didn’t believe me. I looked on line and can find nothing to support my claim…. feeling a little stupid. Help!

You’ll be happy to learn that what you were told in New Mexico is true . . . at least according to the common scientific understanding.

In fact, according to the standard account, this part of the country has been underwater more than once.

To document this, HERE’S A PAGE ON THE GEOLOGICAL HISTORY OF NEW MEXICO (EXCERPTS):

A picture of ancient New Mexico during the Precambrian is one of volcanic activity and mountain building, with periodic episodes of submersion under the sea. . . .

During the Paleozoic, most of the North America was part of a large landmass called Pangaea. The state was covered by a vast shallow sea, from which large deposits of limestone, sandstone and shale accumulated. These limestone beds can now be found in many areas of New Mexico, often containing small marine invertebrate fossils such as brachiopods, crinoids and trilobites. During the later part of the Paleozoic, the ancestral Rocky Mountains formed, uplifting the central and northern part of the state. Toward the southern part of New Mexico, a great barrier reef developed. As the reef was cut off from the sea, the evaporation of the water left deposits of salt, potash and gypsum that can be found today. . . .

In the Mesozoic era . . . the inland sea once again returned and New Mexico was on the western shore of a great shallow ocean covering most of the central United States. . . .

Hope this helps!

You may be tempted to say, "It’s a rainbow." But it’s not an ordinary ranbow. For one thing, it’s not shaped like a bow.

It’s also not a rainbow because it’s not caused by light refracting through moisture droplets. It’s caused by light interacting with ice crystals, and so is a type of ice halo.

In fact, it’s a type of ice halo known as a circumhorizon arc (so named because it’s an arc that appears near the horizon). This type of phenomenon can only occur under certain conditions:

It occurs when sunlight passes through ice crystals in high cirrus clouds. It is one of 15 types of ice halos formed only when the most specific of factors dovetail precisely together.

[The] clouds must be at least 20,000ft high and the ice crystals within them align horizontally instead of their usual vertical position. The sun also needs to be at least 58 degrees above the horizon.

This particular circumhorizon arc appeared Saturday over the Washington-Idaho border and lasted about an hour.

From what I can tell, it also seems to be one of the more spectacular circumhorizon arcs. There are pictures of other ones on the web, but this one was particularly beautiful.

GET THE STORY.
cht to the readre who emailed.

MORE ON ICE HALOS, INCLUDING RARE ONES (WITH PICTURES!)