A review of A Primate’s Memoir: A Neuroscientist’s Unconventional Life Among the Baboons By Robert Sapolsky.
304 pages. New York: Touchstone, 2002.
Acting nonchalant in front of a baboon is not an art many scientists have to contemplate while going about their jobs. Robert Sapolsky, neuroscientist cum primatologist and long-time professor at Stanford, is faced with that very challenge on most days that he spends in the field with his tribe of baboons in Kenya. Sapolsky took over twelve years to assemble and write the stories that makes up A Primate’s Memoir, and what results is a riveting account of the decidedly unusual setting in which Sapolsky’s science takes place.
A review of Isaac Newton, by James Gleick
191 pages. Vintage Books, $13.95
“Newton was not the first of the age of reason,” wrote economist John Maynard Keynes. “He was the last of the magicians…[H]e looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence.”
Isaac Newton—scientist, theologian, heretic—occupies a unique space in human history. Few others have possessed insight sufficient to comprehend nature from first principles, or the flexibility to invent the tools necessary to formalize their insights. Newton was the last to live in pre-Newtonian times: this is the extent of the changes he wrought, that his very name indicates a shift in understanding. Gottfried Leibniz, scientist and one of Newton’s many nemeses, once remarked to the Queen of Prussia that “taking Mathematicks from the beginning of the world to the time of [Newton], what he had done was much the better half.”
Such a towering figure is too easily occluded by his works, and Newton the human being is frequently forgotten. James Gleick, author of Chaos and The Information, reveals in his superb biography Isaac Newton a man flawed by vanity and superstition, a man who hoarded his secrets and who harbored intense animosity for those who presumed to second-guess his genius. Perhaps most notably, Gleick reveals a Newton in isolation, alone in a scientific landscape largely determined by lesser minds. Isaac Newton was, as Gleick puts it, “born into a world of darkness, obscurity, and magic.”
A review of The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Can’t Solve Our Global Problems, by Henry Petroski
274 pages. Knopf, 2010. $26.95
If would-be pocket-protecting scientists were the kids that received wedgies on the playground and were nearly forced into malnutrition by bullies stealing their lunch money, I wonder what would-be engineers endured in Henry Petroski’s school.
“Engineering can be as much of an assault on the frontiers of knowledge as is science,” asserts Petroski in The Essential Engineer, sounding the battle trumpet of engineering. A professor of civil engineering at Duke University, Petroski’s out to get engineers some respect. He’s tired of bully scientists hogging the spotlight of public esteem and relevance.
I’m lying on my back in the grass—cold, but not too cold. Just enough to cause fingers to numb slightly in fifteen minutes’ time. I hear a couple laughing as they walk somewhere behind me. A tall guy with a beard passes by, looks at me funny. A girl power walks across the courtyard, holding a plastic bag at the end of each arm. I see a jogger with a headband, unicolor in navy blue. I hear cars, trucks, buses, horns, and nineteen seconds of crosswalk beeping roughly every minute and a half.
Above, the bright light of Venus blurs behind a thin cloud layer, off to the right of my view. An almost perfect half moon—a first-quarter moon actually—is pretty much directly overhead, a bit right of center. Off to my left, the illuminated, curving spire of the MIT Chapel shines skyward, pointing to the pale red dot of Mars.
In 1996, when I was seven-and-a-half, approximately sixty miles north of Seattle, I counted bald eagles on the Skagit river. In that one morning, in about two hours, I saw 126 eagles. I know this because I kept count.
For the purpose, my dad had given me a clicker, a small sleek shiny metal device whose entire job was to be a number. The clicker had a satisfactorily cool feel to it and felt dense owing to its durable metal construction. On the right hand side was a silver knob with ridges. Twist the knob, and four centered analog dials with stenciled white Courier New numbers behind a centered crystal display would satisfactorily click-click-click and advance from 0000 to 9999 to reset the clicker. Further up, and closer to the side of the clicker, was a metal lever that looked something like a gas pedal that had been bent out of shape. It stuck out enough from the rest of the clicker that any absentminded flick of the fingers would advance the count by one. On the left hand side you could put your thumb through a rotating metal ring to make sure that the clicker did not fall out of your hand. Hence your number would stay with you, always a palm away at your fingertips.
At the north end of Bog Road in Jackson, Maine, a line of parked cars was slowly growing along the dirty roadside snowbank. Trunks were opened and gently slammed; spotting scopes were unfolded and assembled. Heavily-bundled people with binoculars and cameras crossed the road and congregated at openings in the trees, speaking in hushed, excited voices, peering through tangled branches.
Don and I found a spot next to a big man in a camouflage jacket. He was hunched over his camera tripod, his long zoom lens trained on a distant tree. In that tree I could see a lump, and that lump, I knew, was a Great Gray Owl.
The owl didn’t belong in Maine. It had probably come from the boreal forest of north-central Canada. It was taller but much less heavy than our Great Horned Owls, owing its apparent size to a preponderance of feathers. This particular bird was probably even lighterweight than it should have been. It would never be this far south, nor out in broad daylight, unless it was having trouble finding food.
Just as the ancient Mesopotamian civilization was taking root, a photon began its journey from a dusty cluster of young stars named the Eagle Nebula. That photon, or particle of light, was in for a long haul. For about 6,500 years, it zipped through space without rest, racing towards what turned out to be the Earth.
In 1995, after about 40 quadrillion miles of travel, the photon collided with a mirror in space some 350 miles above the Earth’s surface. It had bumped into the Hubble Space Telescope in orbit around our planet.
The story doesn’t end there: the mirror immediately reflected the photon towards a second mirror, directed it into a silicon chip, where the photon was gobbled up and became no more.
While meandering through cyberspace, you might have come across a video of objects hovering in midair, made to levitate by some strange, invisible force. This bizarre phenomenon is not science fiction but science fact, a strange and wonderful byproduct of the traits of superconductors.
When an electrical current flows through an object, it usually meets some level of resistance. Just as friction slows down a rolling ball, electrical resistance is the force by which a material “pushes back” a current flowing through it. Materials with high resistance (like rubber) don’t conduct electricity very well, whereas those with low resistance (like many metals) allow electricity to pass through them relatively easily. That’s why wires have high-resistance outsides and low-resistance insides. The electric current flows through the metal wire, largely kept contained by the high resistance of the insulation.
A supernova explodes with a violent shockwave, spewing streams of colorfully glowing stardust into empty space. Where there are now floating wisps of rainbow cloud only moments ago was an enormous red star. Though it began its life smaller and more blue-white, in its final gasps for breath the star has become bloated, forced to run on fumes that puff it up to an impossible size. When the star’s fuel has finally run dry, the center of the star succumbs to gravity, collapsing into itself. The shockwave created by the sudden collapse radiates outward, sending the outer remains of the star flying in all directions.
Is your sink full of dirty dishes right now? Mine is. Well, it isn’t full, but it’s got a few items in it I’ve been putting off washing since yesterday. There’s a plate I had pizza on last night, the knife I used to cut the pizza, a fork I used to pick sausages from the pizza when it was too hot to pick up the whole thing, one coffee cup shaped like a cow, and the little grease-catching tray thing from my George Foreman grill—a hold-out I missed during the last Great Kitchen Cleanup of 2012 sometime last week.
I’ll do dishes a couple times a week (on a good week), but almost never right after a meal. I let them build up a little before I give in. I think that’s normal. So normal that physicists even have a term for this practice of hygienic procrastination. They call it entropy. It’s the tendency for disorder to steadily increase in a system, or to think of it a different way, for the amount of useful work to decrease in a system over time. Some say it may eventually bring about an extreme state of critical sluggishness in the universe, when disorder has reached such epic levels that all the bits and pieces we’re made of, all the stars and planets and black holes and galaxies have completely degraded to a state of universal, equally distributed heat and matter. When life as we know it ceases to exist.
Very Large Array
Image: David Finlay, courtesy of NRAO/AUI
When you think of efforts to map the universe, you might picture someone peering through a telescope, Galileo-style, examining specks of brightness in the night sky. That’s one way to do it. But some of the most exciting discoveries of the last century have been made with telescopes that detect invisible radio waves instead of light waves.
It started by accident in 1933, when an employee of Bell Telephone Laboratories named Karl Jansky tried to figure out what was causing all that static during radio calls across the Atlantic. He set up an antenna and found, to everyone’s surprise, that some of the unwanted signals were coming from the center of the Milky Way. In the following decades, radio telescopes detected all sorts of new objects and game-changing cosmic phenomena, from quasars (the high-energy cores of young galaxies) to pulsars (a.k.a. pulsing stars), to actual traces of the Big Bang.
Every ten-year-old boy who’s ever played with Hot Wheels knows something about how stretching space-time affects light waves. Sure, maybe they’re not thinking in those terms, but every time they accelerate their tiny cars and make that sound effect—ssccchheeeww!—they’ve taken the first step toward understanding cosmological redshift.
Their vehicular sound effects demonstrate the doppler effect. Imagine you’re standing on an empty street when a single car appears and drives toward you, its engine purring along at a constant pitch. If you listen closely as the car gets closer to you, you’ll notice its pitch getting higher. For a moment, just as the car passes in front of you, the engine sounds just right, then drops in pitch as the car drives by and off down the street.
Imagine that you are very small. So small that photons of light zoom past, bounce off you, speed you up in the collision. You’re driving a tiny space-ship, in the solar system of a single atom. There is the nucleus—a ball of protons and neutrons the size of a seed—surrounded by an enormous “cloud” of electrons, mostly empty space, which appears to you as big as a football stadium. Your space-ship is an electron, and someone out there in the big world is trying to measure your speed, as you soar through atomic space. This quantum traffic-cop is aiming a speed-gun at you, and he wants to know exactly where you are at this instant, and how fast you’re going. But he discovers, when he tries, that down here in atomic space, motion doesn’t work the way it does in the larger world.
If necessity begets invention, then Nicaraguan nurses should be some of the most creative people around.
The name of the game in rural Latin American health clinics is resource limitation. Basic medical equipment is hard to come by, and electricity is an exception rather than a rule. When items break or run out, doctors and nurses might go for days or weeks without essential supplies. Their only reliable resource is their ability to improvise with what little material they have.
Unfortunately, that very skill goes unnoticed and untapped by most outsiders who try to help. Ninety percent of the medical technology in poor countries is secondhand equipment from the developed world. And eighty percent of that equipment bites the dust within six months at a rough-edged rural facility. When a high-tech medical device stops working, villagers don’t have the training, tools, or materials to fix it, nor do they have the money to replace it.
Six o’clock in the evening of October 18, 2011, was a surreal and frightening time to be a resident of Zanesville, Ohio. The glaring orange lights of roadside construction signs, which usually exhort drivers to buckle up or warn of upcoming roadwork, instead displayed “CAUTION EXOTIC ANIMALS” and “STAY IN VEHICLE.” As the news spread through this community of about 25,000, the 911 calls started coming in.
Operator: 911, what is your emergency? Caller: There’s a lion on Mount Perry Road in Gratiot. Operator: Where at on Mount Perry Road? Caller: It’s about probably a half a mile off of 40, there’s a big horse barn on
the right. I just drove by and it walked out in front of me and was standing
there under the streetlight.
Her name, Hatsune Miku, means “the sound of the future” in Japanese. She made her U.S. debut on July 2, 2011, at the Nokia Theater in Los Angeles, performing for a crowd of more than five thousand. Miku’s concert began in darkness, with hundreds of fans waving blue and green neon glowsticks in time to a thumping beat. Red strobe lights grazed the stage. Above it all, a girlish voice rhythmically chanted “Miku desu”—“I am the future.” Onstage, ten musicians—a guitarist, an electric bassist, a pianist, a drummer, five violinists, and an upright bassist—labored away in strobe-lit anonymity.
HIV budding out of a T-cell
Image: Dr. Tom Folks/NIH
In HIV infection populations of immune system cells are devastated, but researchers have found one immune cell type that survives the onslaught.
These surviving cells prevent inflammation, but they do so by suppressing the immune system. This new finding raises the question of whether their survival during HIV infection helps the body or the attacking virus.
The cells, called T regulators, may be useful because they normally prevent a hyperactive immune system which leads to its exhaustion.
But in the case of HIV infection their role of suppression could be disastrous, if this effect means the immune system causes its own demise by shutting itself down in a time of crisis. Knowing the difference could eventually help develop new HIV treatments, and this will be a central question guiding future research.
Spiders can fend off ants by coating their web with the predators’ own alarm chemical, reports a new study of Singapore spiders and ants.
Only spiders whose webs are thick enough for ants to crawl on seem to use the chemical, suggesting that different spider species may have evolved targeted chemical weaponry.
The insect world is full of mysteries, and spiders and ants were the center of this one. Spider webs are made of silk, a biomaterial whose strength and elasticity make an efficient trap for catching prey. But staying on or near the web makes the spider a sitting duck for potential predators, including wasps as well as ants. Yet ants steer clear of webs.
Spiders are known for the defenses they have evolved for escaping wasps, their main flying predator: “leaf-refuges” for hiding; camouflage silk decorations to make the spider look threatening; “drag-lines” to drop from the web, and the ability to color-shift, as octopi sometimes do in corral reefs. But little was known about spider defenses against ants—or how a particular spider species’ weapons might adapt to its specific predators.
The red-tinted hair and bloated abdomens of these three
young girls in Madagascar are typical signs of kwashiorkor,
a type of malnutrition that occurs when there is not enough
protein in the diet. (Photo by Christopher Golden)
Eating bushmeat decreases incidences of anemia in children, according to a recent study conducted in Madagascar.
Bushmeat, or wildlife meat, is often the most affordable kind of meat in developing countries such as Madagascar, but its supplies are threatened by overhunting and its access is limited by conservation laws.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrated that children who eat less bushmeat are more likely to be iron-deficient and thus have anemia, a condition where the body is low on hemoglobin, an iron-containing molecule found in red blood cells that helps transport oxygen around the body.
Emergency hospital during influenza epidemic
Camp Funston, Kansas
National Museum of Health and Medicine
You’re far more likely to get the flu from breathing in the virus when you’re around someone who has it than you are from touching infected items around your house, say researchers from Great Britain.
Most household materials can’t sustain enough influenza—the virus which causes the common disease we call “the flu”—to infect another person by physical contact after only a few hours. These results confirmed what most scientists suspected: the influenza virus is quite fragile.
To test the survival of the virus on household items, researchers deposited small amounts of influenza on items like light switches, toys, kitchen counters, keyboards, and window glass in a laboratory setting. Then they measured the amount of viable virus (meaning a large enough quantity to lead to an infection) at set times.
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A review of A Primate’s Memoir: A Neuroscientist’s Unconventional Life Among the Baboons By Robert Sapolsky.
