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Scientific breakthroughs inspire science fiction. But that door swings both ways, because popular science fiction and its reception also affect scientific research and its reputation, as the general public is more likely to read a science fiction novel or see a movie than to discuss the merits of the latest genetic studies. The most popular science fiction comes from someone who follows science and thinks, “What could possibly go wrong?” The classic example is the group of young educated writers who got together around the time Luigi Galvani was getting publicity for his experiments in animating frog muscles with electricity.
While the group of friends at Lake Geneva imagined the ghoulish possibilities of galvanism, one young woman was so horrified by the idea of reanimating corpses that she subsequently had a dream in which she saw “the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.” This dream inspired her to write a horror story in which a “mad scientist” creates a monster out of dead body parts, a monster that wreaks havoc and kills innocents. The author is Mary Shelley. The story, of course, is Frankenstein. Considered by many to be the first true work of science fiction, it was certainly the world’s first cautionary tale about the perils of science messing around with life.
There are other examples in a post at Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Author Laura H. Kahn wants to encourage scientists to write more fiction, so that stories about science could be more informative, and maybe a little less horrifying. Link -Thanks, Janice!
Movies and television shows always show scientists as being stuffy older folks shrouded in white lab coats, but real scientists look much more like the rest of us than they would have you think. That’s why This Is What A Scientist is so great -it shows real scientists living their everyday lives, looking like regular people. What a great way to counter the stereotypes.
Antdude, if you’ve been waiting for an article to be specifically dedicated to only you, here you go. Of course, even those of you who aren’t insect/human hybrids will be sure to enjoy io9′s fascinating article featuring 10 frightening facts about ants. For example, did you know:
Ants have already survived a mass extinction event
The Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event is thought to have occurred approximately 65 million years ago following an absolutely massive impact event. Widely regarded as the downfall of the dinosaurs (and, incidentally, the rise of mammals), the years following the KT-extinction event are actually believed to have been a time of incredibly rapid speciation and worldwide expansion for ants, marking what researchers Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson call “a rise to ecological dominance.”
Really, there’s a good chance ants will outlive humans as well.
Here’s one of those studies you probably didn’t need science to tell you: guys show off to impress women.
In the experiment, a group of men and women (on the younger side, with an average age of 21) were given the opportunity to donate money to a fund, knowing they would get nothing in return other than the pride of their selflessness. Whether they were watched or not, women donated at the same rate. But men, when watched by women, donated at higher rates. They didn’t donate at higher rates when men watched.
I don’t know about you guys, but I’m sure flabbergasted by this one. Who would have guessed?
Link Via The Jane Dough
No matter how much you think you know, science is always coming up with new findings. Think you are safe from STDs? Think again:
Studies show over 80% of all sexually active adults will contract an STD at some point, although most won’t notice. That’s because 80% of all people who contract one of the 25 varieties of STDs don’t show any symptoms and most don’t even realize they have one. In fact, the American Social Health Association estimates that 80% of sexually active people contract the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) at one point in their life. While those statistics were taken before the HPV vaccine was released, the vaccine only prevents two of the most dangerous strains of the disease, meaning even those vaccinated can still catch one of the many other strains.
While the numbers sound scary, the upside is that most people who contract an STD won’t suffer any negative effects as a result.
That’s just one of a list of ten thing you probably didn’t know that you can learn about at Oddee. Be prepared that this list contains adults-only subject matter, but the images are SFW. Link
Let’s face it, most holidays already marked on your calendar are pretty boring -Valentine’s Day, Easter, Father’s Day…yawn. If you really want to geek up your wall calendar and ensure you celebrate holidays more appropriate to your specific interests, don’t miss io9′s round up of great science holiday including Pi approximation day (July 22) and Hagfish Day (October 17). Of course, since they’re all science related, certain other geek holidays are left out -after all, you can’t miss out on Towel Day.
While your teachers may have spread lies about planetary plates shifting and causing the continents to separate, Dan Meth is brave enough to share the truth with us. Pangaea occurred when the continents were cuddling with one another, but when tensions started to rise and the honeymoon phase ended, the happy group had no choice but to split up.
If you get stung by a jelly fish, don’t ask your friend to pee on you. Similarly, reading in the dark won’t make you go blind. For explanations and more interesting body myths, head over to Life Hacker.
This one’s for all you science studs, because we all know that the sexiest organ in the human body is the brain.
And, while keeping your eyes glued to a textbook doesn’t help your body get into shape, it will work wonders for your self esteem, and someday your pocketbook, if you’re lucky!
So, put on your space themed tie and some blue jeans and show the world how sexy science can be.
Stephen Gaeta (featured previously) is a doctor and an artist. He uses visual humor to illustrate medicine and typography to create art about science. This graphic called Transgenic is composed of the text from the DNA of chromosome 1 of the human gene. It’s a very long code! See the full size version at his site. Link
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Just like humans, when an animal loses a leg or other important body part, a prosthetic can mean the difference between living a normal life and struggling on a day to day basis. Here are ten stories of animals that suffered loss and then learned to live with a new adaptation to their body.
While some people criticize the efforts put into these prosthetics, particularly in species that are not under threat of extinction, it is important to realize that these developments could help save a critical breeding member of an endangered species one day. Additionally, many of these techniques are brand new and by testing them on animals, researchers are developing useful insights to see if they may one day work on humans. If you end up losing a body part and get a bionic replacement twenty years from now, you might just have a cat or dog to thank for your top-of-the-line prosthetic.
Oscar lost his two rear legs in an accident with a combine harvester. After losing so much blood, his owners were told to expect the worst, but even after he survived the ordeal, their vet warned that cats rarely live happy lives with only two legs. Fortunately, he referred Oscars owners, Kate Allen and Mike Nolan to a veterinary surgeon who specializes in state-of-the-art animal medicine.
After looking at Oscar’s situation, Dr. Noel Fitzpatrick agreed to take on the new patient, surgically fitting him with implants that can eventually be attached to prosthetic paws. The surgery makes Oscar a notable kitty as he is the first cat to ever have prosthetic paws.
While the process was a success, Oscar’s paws haven’t yet been perfected for outdoor use. He has been made to be a house cat for the rest of his life, but really…that’s not all that bad now is it, especially when you consider how he was injured in the first place.
The first animal to receive such treatment though was Storm, a Belgian Sheperd, who lost his paw after it became infected with a tumor. The same vet that would later provide Oscar with his bionic paws, Noel Fitzpatrick, was the first to offer this service to any animal and Storm was the perfect candidate. Fitzpatrick says that he hopes his developments can eventually be used to help soldiers returning from Iraq and victims of the July 7th bombings in London.
Earlier this year, Naki’o became the first dog in the world to be fitted with a full set of bionic paws from Orthopets, a leader in the pet prosthetics industry. Far from just helping him walk easier, the paws are so well attached that he can now run and swim just as he did before the accident. Naki’o lost his paws due to severe frostbite after his previous owners abandoned him to fend for himself throughout the freezing winter in Nebraska. Despite the fact that the poor pup had to crawl on his stomach to move, he still found a loving adoptive family who worked tirelessly to raise the money to get Naki’o the prosthetics he desperately needed. Their efforts paid off as Naki’o is now thrilled to have his bionic paws and is eager to run, jump and fetch with his new family.
Science is a field based largely on theory and experimentation, which is why you have to be pretty darn certain you are right if you’re willing to test your ideas on yourself. For example, in the picture above:
In 1929 in the basement of the Eberswaled Hospital in Germany, surgical resident Werner Forssmann inserted a ureteral catheter tube into his elbow, feeding it through a vein up to his heart. He used a mirror as his assistant, since he had restrained his nurse to the operating table. He then took an x-ray of his chest (at left) to determine the catheter had indeed made it to the right atrium.
Learn about more dedicated, and brave, scientists over at Mental Floss.
Sascha Mehlhase built a model of the ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider out of LEGO bricks! It contains around 9,500 bricks and took 33 hours to assemble, in addition to 48 total hours of work just designing it. Read more about and see more pictures at his site. Link -via reddit
Comments Off Ok, maybe it’s not able to solve the cube, but I’m just impressed that it is willing to try. I wonder if octopus and mantis shrimp would have fun playing with Rubik’s cubes together.
From spiders who can live underwater for a whole day at a time to underwater rivers with their own wave systems, it’s simply amazing what can happen below the surface.
If you like your art metaphysical, trippy and full of science fiction style then you’ll love this gallery of retro cover art from Yugoslavian science mag Galaksija. Flickr user Yugodrom has a huge gallery for you to peruse at the link below. They’ll take your mind on a wild ride, no controlled substances required.
Does your tree need a little more intelligence? If so, you might benefit from one (or all) of these great ornaments featuring some of the most famous women from science history.
Link Via The Mary Sue
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From diamond patches to genetic modifications, these might sound like they are merely sci-fi ideas, but they are real. Check out some of the most futuristic cancer cures being tested right now over at Cracked.
Six famous thought experiments explained humorously in a minute each, by David Mitchell of the BBC’s That Mitchell and Webb Look. Produced by The Open University. -via The Daily What
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Wired magazine has an article full of tips for making your life better with science, from untangling your earbuds to dunking cookies in milk. The Muppets are there to lend a little levity, but the science behind these things is all real. This includes the physics of splattering spaghetti sauce on your shirt.
One of the occupational hazards of eating pasta is the way it slings sauce on everything around you—shirts, jacket … dates. Physicists creatively named this the spaghetti effect, the tendency of long flexible strands (like spaghetti) to whip side to side when pulled into a container (like your mouth). It’s a mild annoyance at dinner but a real danger in industrial settings where ropes or chains are rapidly pulled to and fro—or at home, when your metal tape measure goes feral. Fortunately, you can tame the noodle. —Judy Dutton
Instructions for better spaghetti-slurping follow. Link
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You know how when you cut a worm in half you’ll get two worms and how mice love cheese? If you said yes, then actually you don’t know much about these creatures. Cracked recently took a look at common animal myths that are actually totally bogus. How many of these did you still believe before you read the article?
I don’t know about you guys, but I love sour candy. As it turns out though, some of it, especially the WarHeads Sour Spray, is almost as bad for your teeth as pure battery acid. All things in moderation, but if you want your enamel to hang around, you’d better lay off the Spree and sour gummies.
Link Via BoingBoing
If you’ve ever wished your makeup could better incorporate scientific principles, then you might want to check out Sephora’s newest nail polish, one that creates cool 3D effects once you put a magnet over it while it is drying. I’m not big on nail polish, but I’d love to play with this formula. How about you other geek ladies?
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In 2007, science writer Carl Zimmer wondered how common science tattoos were. He said this on his blog, and the response was massive and ongoing. That grew into a completely new blog, and Zimmer became known as the guy who collected science tattoos. Now he has a book of science tattoos called Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed. The New York Times has a slide show featuring some awesome examples from the book. The tattoo shown belongs to a Princeton graduate student in molecular biology. Link -via The Loom
(Image credit: Science Ink by Carl Zimmer/Sterling Publishing)
Everyone knows that kids who play video games all day don’t have time to exercise and thus, often weigh more than kids who do spend time outside. But scientists only recently discovered that gaming teens are more likely to be heavy for another reason as well -those that spend an hour gaming typically eat more afterward than those that don’t.
What the study found is that the teenagers who were playing games eat, on average, 163 calories more than the teenagers who were doing something else. On top of that, the gamers didn’t actually burn any more calories than the control group, so the increased calorie intake wasn’t replaced by the energy spent on all that thumb movement or anything. There were also no biological indicators of stress in these gamers, so that couldn’t explain it either.
What do you guys think the reason for the increased caloric intake was? Do you tend to eat more while gaming?
Link Via Geekosystem
The International Space Station (ISS) occasionally has to boost itself into a higher altitude to counteract the effects of microgravity drag. Recently, the ISS boosted itself about two miles up, and video cameras caught what happened inside to Commander Mike Fossum and Flight Engineers Satoshi Furukawa and Sergei Volkov. The physics of the process are explained at Bad Astronomy Blog. Link -Thanks, Phil!
Scientists sometimes have an experiment in mind that would be unethical, or more likely too dangerous, to ask volunteers to submit to. If the scientist wants to know the answer badly enough, he (these six are all men) may just use himself as the experimental subject, no matter what the danger. You’d have to be pretty curious to inject yourself with a deadly disease like cholera.
Pettenkofer was a late 19th century medical researcher and public health advocate who developed the very first large-scale pure-water system in Munich, Germany. And even though that’s probably very impressive, from now until the day you die, if you remember anything about Pettenkofer, it will be this: Max Josef von Pettenkofer drank a steaming cup of cholera bacteria that he cultured from a patient’s diarrhea bombs.
Yeah, he got sick. But he didn’t get sick enough to die, and Pettenkofer considered that proof of his theory that the cholera bacterium needed a victim who practiced poor sanitation. Of course, one could argue that without poor sanitation, the bacterium wouldn’t be spread, outside of scientists who ingested it on purpose. Anyway, read about Pettenkofer and five other scientists at Cracked. Link
It's a time-honored practice for politicians and educators to wring their hands over how American students have fallen behind in science and technology. Many have pointed out how large class sizes, lackluster teachers, and non-challenging curriculum in elementary and high schools are shortchanging our students and (gasp!) the country's future global competitiveness.
But who's really at fault here? Could the problem actually be on the shoulders of the vaunted American colleges and universities?
Christopher Drew wrote an intriguing article for The New York Times that examine how more and more students are turned off by science at the college level:
... it turns out, middle and high school students are having most of the fun, building their erector sets and dropping eggs into water to test the first law of motion. The excitement quickly fades as students brush up against the reality of what David E. Goldberg, an emeritus engineering professor, calls “the math-science death march.” Freshmen in college wade through a blizzard of calculus, physics and chemistry in lecture halls with hundreds of other students. And then many wash out.
Studies have found that roughly 40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree. That increases to as much as 60 percent when pre-medical students, who typically have the strongest SAT scores and high school science preparation, are included, according to new data from the University of California at Los Angeles. That is twice the combined attrition rate of all other majors.
It's all a matter of the lack of preparation from high school, you say? Actually those who are better students are more likely to drop out of science:
“You’d like to think that since these institutions are getting the best students, the students who go there would have the best chances to succeed,” he says. “But if you take two students who have the same high school grade-point average and SAT scores, and you put one in a highly selective school like Berkeley and the other in a school with lower average scores like Cal State, that Berkeley student is at least 13 percent less likely than the one at Cal State to finish a [Science, Technology, Engineering and Math] degree.”
When it comes to parents on Halloween, there are those that let the kids gorge, those that parcel the candy out, and the parents who steal most of their kid’s candy. If you’re wondering which one dentists suggest, you might be surprised. They suggest it’s better to let the kids go crazy on Halloween night and then cut back their candy consumption rather than letting them eat a couple pieces every day after Halloween. Dentists warn:
Slowly snacking on Halloween candy every few hours, day after day, keeps your teeth bathed in enamel-corroding acid, the byproduct of bacteria feeding on sugar and other carbohydrates in your mouth. This leads to dental caries, or cavities.
So I guess even if you’re a candy stealer, it’s still better to steal it all in one night than stretch your thievery out.
Link Via The Mary Sue
Parasites are raising an army of zombie wasp queens to do their bidding, and it’s a good thing that these parasites aren’t more ambitious, because they’d probably be well on their way to taking over the world by now!
The parasites cause common wasps to believe that they are queens, rejecting their normal caste and acting as self serving loners in wasp society:
Infected P. dominulus — better known as common European paper wasps — reject their genetically preordained roles, abandon their hives and embark on a long, macabre journey during which a few live for a time as queens, albeit murderous queens.
Read on about this fascinating example of parasitic mind control at the Wired link below, and pray these little critters don’t develop a taste for human blood!
