Category: Science

Don’t Stand So Close to Me.

“‘No man is an island,’ said Nicholas A. Christakis, a professor of medicine and medical sociology at Harvard Medical School who helped conduct the research. ‘Something so personal as a person’s emotions can have a collective existence and affect the vast fabric of humanity.’“

Forget H1N1: Psychologists uncover statistical indications that loneliness transmits like a social disease. “Loneliness is not just the property of an individual. It can be transmitted across people — even people you don’t have direct contact with.” Hmmm. Well, that explains grad school, then.

Next Stop, Alderaan.

“‘We are still coming to terms with just how smooth the LHC commissioning is going,’ said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer as the record was announced. ‘It is fantastic.’” Atoms or systems into ruin hurl’d, And now a bubble burst, and now a world…Also in science news, the now armed and fully operational Large Hadron Collider is breaking particle beam records as it warms up for the Big Show, when its handlers will work to recreate the conditions at one billionth of a second after the Big Bang. “Said Heuer: ‘We are continuing to take it step by step, and there is a lot to do before we start [first] physics in 2010. I’m keeping my champagne on ice until then.’” (By way of Dangerous Meta.)

FDR’s Preexisting Condition?

“Is it conceivable that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s doctors knew he had widespread cancer in 1944 and still let him run for his fourth term as president? New research makes this astounding argument — and claims that the physician who supposedly told the truth about Roosevelt’s death in 1970 was in fact continuing the deception he had helped create.” Slate‘s Barron Lerner evaluates new claims that FDR may have suffered — and died — from cancer.

“How plausible is this research? If Roosevelt indeed had a hemianopsia, it suggests a brain mass, and melanoma would be as likely a cause as any…But all of these symptoms have other possible explanations…Perhaps most important, there is no smoking gun: In all of the documents Lomazow and Fettman unearthed, neither Bruenn nor FDR’s other doctors ever used the word cancer. Still, Lomazow and Fettman’s research is of great importance.”

Water, Water Everywhere…

“‘The discovery opens a new chapter in our understanding of the moon,’ the space agency said in a written statement.” It’s official: Data from NASA’s LCROSS impact of a few weeks ago confirms the recent findings of Chandraayan-1: It ain’t Hoth or Rura Penthe, but there is a “significant amount” of water on the moon, like, ice-field size.

“The amount of water they found in the plume was a couple of hundred kilograms in total, but that indicates there is a lot more still lying on the surface. They don’t know how much exactly just yet.” (As we found out recently, the same might also hold true of Mars.)

“‘The full understanding of the LCROSS data may take some time. The data is that rich,’ said Colaprete. ‘Along with the water in Cabeus, there are hints of other intriguing substances. The permanently shadowed regions of the moon are truly cold traps, collecting and preserving material over billions of years.‘” I’m very reminded of James Hogan’s Inherit the Stars right now. Also, it’s probably about time to start taking lunar exploration a bit more seriously again, eh?

A Theory of Justice (and the Dog Park.)

“That traditional view of morality is beginning to show signs of wear and tear. The fact that human morality is different from animal morality — and perhaps more highly developed in some respects — simply does not support the broader claim that animals lack morality; it merely supports the rather banal claim that human beings are different from other animals…Unique human adaptations might be understood as the outer skins of an onion; the inner layers represent a much broader, deeper, and evolutionarily more ancient set of moral capacities shared by many social mammals, and perhaps by other animals and birds as well.“

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, bioethicist Jessica Pierce and biologist Marc Bekoff suggest what apparently agreed-upon rules of canid play teach us about animal morality. (via FmH.) “Although play is fun, it’s also serious business. When animals play, they are constantly working to understand and follow the rules and to communicate their intentions to play fairly.“

The World According to Mij.

“‘This film integrates my life’s achievements,’ he told me. ‘It’s the most complicated stuff anyone’s ever done.” Another time, he said, “If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.’” On the eve of Avatar, the New Yorker‘s Dana Goodyear delivers a long and interesting profile of take-no-guff, autocratic auteur James Cameron. (“A small, loyal band of cast and crew works with him repeatedly; they call the dark side of his personality Mij–Jim backward.“)

The whole thing is definitely worth a read, but this caught me eye further down the piece: “‘We should ultimately have colonies on Mars, for purposes of expanding the footprint of the human race,’ Cameron says. He shares with the Mars Society the opinion that NASA — on whose advisory council he sat for three years — has become too risk-averse. ‘We’ve become cowards, basically,’ he says. ‘As a society, we’re just fat and happy and comfortable and we’ve lost the edge.’” Listen to the King of the World — he’s dead on.

Ardi all the Time.

“‘This is huge. This is the biggest discovery really since the “Lucy” skeleton of the 1970s,’ said Carol Ward, a University of Missouri paleoanthropologist.” Anthropologists uncover and painstakingly recreate a potentially very important skeletal find in the 4.4 million-year-old Ardipithecus ramidus, a.k.a. Ardi. “David Pilbeam, a Harvard paleontologist, noted…’This is an extraordinary achievement, of discovery, recovery, reconstitution, description and analysis, which will keep many others busy for at least another 15 years.’“

“If the scientists who found Ardi are correct, she represents a transitional figure, almost a hybrid — a tree creature who could carry food in her arms as she explored the woodland floor on two legs…’Ardi tells us twice as much as Lucy did. We have hands and feet, a more complete environment, a more complete skeleton, it’s older, it’s more primitive, it shows us the process of transformation from common ancestor to hominid,’ said C. Owen Lovejoy, an anthropologist at Kent State University who was part of the Ardi team.”

Chandraayan’s Tears.

”This will create a considerable stir. It was wholly unexpected,’ said one scientist also involved in Chandrayaan-1. ‘People thought that Chandrayaan was just lagging behind the rest but the science that’s coming out, it’s going to be agenda-setting.’” Well, this definitely changes things if it holds up: India’s first mission to the moon discovers “evidence of large quantities of water on its surface(!)”

“Another lunar scientist familiar with the findings said: ‘This is the most exciting breakthrough in at least a decade. And it will probably change the face of lunar exploration for the next decade.’” NASA comments tomorrow, so be ready to hum a few bars…

Paean to Djarum.

“Anything that doesn’t taste like tobacco, other than menthol, is out. If you thought you could get around the ban by rolling your own cigs with flavored paper, sorry, that’s banned too.” The FDA ban on clove cigarettes goes into effect today. [Official statement.] Somewhere amid the stoops, corridors, and crannies of Adams House, the Djarum-stained ghost of my college self is now that much more disaffected.