Category: Science

Man, what a disappointment! With a headline like that I want to see shaky home video footage of local yokels running and screaming while 50-ft. tall snails ooze menacingly down the interstates running through the Everglades.

Okay, so it turns out that the so-called “giant” African land snails are kind of giant, relative to other snails. They’re eight inches long. And there is a reason to avoid them (they carry a parasite that can give you meningitis), but I’m still disappointed. I wanted to see pictures out of a Ray Harryhausen film or something! You just can’t use a headline that juicy if you aren’t going to deliver the goods.

I guess if I want to see giant snails menacing people, I’ll have to go rent The Monster That Challenged The World, which actually only challenged a small part of Southern California near San Diego after errupting from the Salton Sea–an accidentally-created artificial lake less than a hundred years old that nevertheless is home in the movie to giant snails that have been hibernating for millions of years.

An interesting tidbit about real-world snails: My sister is a biologist who works for the government, and one of her former assignments was going out in the field and doing a population survey of the local snail population. She and her team were supposed to collect a particular kind of snail and count how many there were in a zone. The trouble is, the species that they were assigned to count looks very much like another kind of snail that is a PREDATOR. Yes! That’s right! There are predator snails who will hunt down and the other snails that they look like! According to my sister, the predator snails were a real frustration because if you collected one by mistake you’d look down at your collecting pad later and see that there was a slow-motion snail-i-cidal attack underway, with a predator bearing down on one of the grazers at full speed and trying to eat it, which could–like–throw your snail count off or something.

Man, what a disappointment! With a headline like that I want to see shaky home video footage of local yokels running and screaming while 50-ft. tall snails ooze menacingly down the interstates running through the Everglades.

Okay, so it turns out that the so-called “giant” African land snails are kind of giant, relative to other snails. They’re eight inches long. And there is a reason to avoid them (they carry a parasite that can give you meningitis), but I’m still disappointed. I wanted to see pictures out of a Ray Harryhausen film or something! You just can’t use a headline that juicy if you aren’t going to deliver the goods.

I guess if I want to see giant snails menacing people, I’ll have to go rent The Monster That Challenged The World, which actually only challenged a small part of Southern California near San Diego after errupting from the Salton Sea–an accidentally-created artificial lake less than a hundred years old that nevertheless is home in the movie to giant snails that have been hibernating for millions of years.

An interesting tidbit about real-world snails: My sister is a biologist who works for the government, and one of her former assignments was going out in the field and doing a population survey of the local snail population. She and her team were supposed to collect a particular kind of snail and count how many there were in a zone. The trouble is, the species that they were assigned to count looks very much like another kind of snail that is a PREDATOR. Yes! That’s right! There are predator snails who will hunt down and the other snails that they look like! According to my sister, the predator snails were a real frustration because if you collected one by mistake you’d look down at your collecting pad later and see that there was a slow-motion snail-i-cidal attack underway, with a predator bearing down on one of the grazers at full speed and trying to eat it, which could–like–throw your snail count off or something.

Can you see this man wearing Spock ears at a Trek convention?

You might!

He’s a self-confessed sci-fi fan who works for the Vatican. In fact, he’s the Vatican’s “curator of meteorites.” Dr. Guy Consolmagno also recently gave an interview with Astrobiology Magazine in which he discussed all manner of interesting things (and apparently frustrated the less-than-fully-friendly-to-Christianity interviewer who talked to him).

Many folks don’t know it, but the Vatican’s interest in astronomy has continued down to today and the Holy See has a number of astronomers on its payroll. It also maintains an observatory that’s basically in my back yard (well, in the state of Arizona, anyway).

In the interview, Consolmagno talks about the Vatican astronomy program and is refreshingly open about it, and is willing to kick back as good as he gets kicked. A curialista he ain’t. Consider these exchanges:

Interviewer: And why does the Vatican fund this research?

Consolmagno: There’s a political reason. It’s a simple one, that they want the world to know that the Church isn’t afraid of science, that they like science, that science is great, this is our way of seeing how God created the universe, and they want to make as strong a statement as possible that truth doesn’t contradict truth, that if you have faith, then you’re not going to ever be afraid of what science is going to come up with. Because it’s true.

And the one time in history that they screwed up on this, the Galileo affair, the Church was wrong. And we’ve admitted it was wrong. How many times has science abused the Church? How often have you heard a scientist apologize to the Church? . . .

Consolmagno: One of the nice things about being paid by the Vatican is that I don’t have to worry about NASA politics. I don’t have to write grant proposals. I don’t have to find out what’s the flavor of the month this month. I can do anything I want.

Interviewer: You don’t have to worry about Vatican politics?

Consolmagno: Nope. They barely know we exist. My instructions when I arrived there were: do good science, period.

He also seems to know how to have a good time:

Interviewer: What do you hope to get out of being here at the Astrobiology Science Conference?

Consolmagno: Oh, having a good time. And, fundamentally, that’s why we do science, because it’s really enjoyable. . . .

In addition, in some way, I’m waving the Church flag. Just by walking around with this badge that says “Vatican Observatory,” I’m reminding people that, yes, there is indeed a religious aspect, and indeed, an ethical aspect to science.

Consolmagno has a good sense of humor, and it shows in the article. He’s got a number of interesting and thoughtful things to say, including addressing the perennial question of what the Chuch would think if we had proof of extraterrestrial intelligence.

Know what this is? It’s a picture of two galaxies colliding. They’re known as the “Antennae” colliding galaxies (I guess some astronomer thought they look like a bug’s antennae), about 63 million light years away in the constellation Corvus.

Righ now, they don’t look much like galaxies because they are tearing each other apart. That is one of the things that can happen when galaxies collide–if they’re evenly matched. But other things can happen when two galaxies interact if they aren’t so evenly matched. If one is much smaller than the other, it may get torn apart and absorbed by the larger galaxy. Or, if it hits it at the right angle, it may plunge through the larger galaxy, perhaps getting caught in its gravity, looping back, and plunging through several more times.

Now, we live in a big galaxy, as galaxies go. It’s one of the largest galaxies on the block. Together with the Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies, the Milky Way is one of the three largest members of the Local Group (which consists of about 35 galaxies).

The fact our galaxy is so big makes it relatively safe from destructive collisions with other galaxies, but the thought of the Milky Way colliding with other galaxies is still rather scary. But guess what–It’s happened before!

The brightest globular cluster we can see in the Milky Way–known as Omega Centauri–now appears to be the remnant of a galaxy the Milky Way ate for breakfast.

Another galaxy–known as the Sagittarius dwarf–has it hit the Milky Way a number of times and is due to do so again in, oh, the next hundred million years. We’ve already been stripping stars off of it, and it’s likely to end up getting absorbed by us, too.

But we found out last year that the Milky Way is gobbling up another galaxy RIGHT NOW! It’s known as the Canis Major dwarf, and it’s the closest galaxy to us–about 25,000 light years away from the solar system, which makes it closer to us than we are to the center of our galaxy (27,000 ly away). Soon its inhabitants (if any) will be fellow Milky Way-ians . . . just like us.

Message to inhabitants of the Canis Major dwarf: “Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.”

How cool is this!

After years and years of hearing sci-fi shows and movies talk about substances “not found on this planet,” we’ve now discovered one!

Oh, sure, it’s not a strange nucleotide sequence that proves the existence of extraterrestial life. Nor is it some new element from the unexplored outer reaches of the periodic table. In fact, it’s made from two of the most common elements in the universe (iron and silicon), but–and this is the point–it isn’t made on earth.

The new substance is called Hapkeite, after the scientist who first theorized the extraterrestrial process that makes it, Bruce Hapke. As it happens, Hapke is still alive and got to say a big “I told you so!” (Actually, his words to the press were “I told them so.”)

Hapkeite is made by “space weathering” on the lunar surface, a chunk of which containing Hapkeite got blasted into space as a meteor, which fell to earth and became a meteorite.

Cool!

Now if we could just come up with some naquadah.

As I was saying, reporters frequently have next to no understanding of what they’re writing about. This article on nanotechnology by CNN reporter Marsha Walton is a great example. I won’t bore you by pointing out all the problems it has, but consider this section:

Noisy atoms found

Physicists studying nanotech made another serendipitous find: They discovered that atoms make noise.

Atoms are moved from one location to another with a special type of electric current known as a tunneling current. Monitoring the sound of that manipulation reveals a sort of "cry of protest" from the atom.

"That jumping back and forth, between its preferred place and where we are really forcing it to be, turns out to make this noise," Celotta said.

The idea that atoms make protest noises like calves being prodded during a round up is interesting, but it isn’t the literal truth. Remember: We’re talking about the motion of an individual atom, folks, and sound does not exist on that level. Sound is "mechanical radiant energy that is transmitted by longitudinal pressure waves in a material medium (as air) and is the objective cause of hearing" (Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary). One atom by itself cannot make a sound because it is not a medium. Only a bunch of atoms together (like a collection of air molecules) can be a medium.

I suspect that the physicists the reporter was talking to were trying to simply things for her and use the term "noise" metaphorically, referring perhaps to an energy emission from the atom as it is jostled out of place by tunneling current. That emission could be monitored by sensitive equipment, but it isn’t sound in the literal sense. The reporter, apparently not knowing enough to separate metaphor from reality, passed it off to her readers as the literal truth. One more for the "reporter doesn’t understand the subject of the report" file.

I do have to admit that I liked one bit of the story, in which a scientist said:

"Early on, the scanning tunneling microscope was more used like an archeologist’s tool, where you were seeing things for the first time. "It was like Galileo looking up at the stars, but you were looking inward and saying, ‘Boy is that neat; I never imagined that would happen,’ " Celotta said.

"And now we are getting more like mankind tends to be, rearranging it the way we want it," he added.

Cool. I support rearranging things the way we want them. That’s what humans do. Atoms should be pushed out of their comfortable positions and rounded up into configurations that are useful to humans.

Keep movin’, movin’, movin’
Though they’re disapprovin’
Keep them dogies movin’
Rawhide!
Don’t try to understand ’em
Just rope, throw, and brand ’em
Soon we’ll be living high and wide.
My hearts calculatin’
My true love will be waitin’,
Be waitin’ at the end of my ride.
Rawhide!

Actually, the Pirate King is wrong in his guess about who made the leap year decision. The basic decision to have leap year was part of the Julian calendar, which we don’t use any more (though the Eastern Orthodox do use it as their liturgical calendar).

The Julian calendar was instituted by Julius Caesar, but it isn’t accurate enough astronomically. Over the centuries, this inaccuracy compounded until it became intolerable as the Julian calendar got ten days out of synch with the astronomically observable markers.

The result was that Pope Gregory XIII decreed that in 1582 the calendar would be resynchronized to compensate for the Julian date’s inaccuracy and a new rule would be instituted regarding leap years. Now, instead of having a leap year every four years come rain or shine, leap year would be celebrated every four years except in century years (1700, 1800, 1900) unless the century year is divisible by 400 (1600, 2000, 2400). This makes it more complicated, but it also makes the calendar more accurate. The result is the calendar we use today, known as the Gregorian calendar after Pope Gregory XIII.

Catholic countries put the new calendar into use with some grumbling (ordinary folks didn’t like it because landlords might potentially try to scam folks out of more than a week’s rent due to the resynchronization). Many Protestant countries resisted it because of its connection with the pope. England didn’t adopt it until 1752, about a century before Gilbert and Sullivan’s time.

So who was the "person in authority" the Pirate King should have singled out? The British Astronomer Royal was a good guess, but in reality it was a combination of Julius Caesar and Pope Gregory XIII that hammered out the leap year rule.

Now what was all that about the Catholic Church opposing science and astronomy?