Category Archives: science!

a fine example of a trichobezoar

CNN is currently running a story, “Doctors untangle the strange case of the giant hairball.” The story does have a nice photograph, but it’s not all that informative.

There’s a rather fine example of a [tag]bezoar[/tag] (a [tag]human hairball[/tag]) at the [tag]National Museum of Health and Medicine[/tag], in the Human Body, Human Being exhibit. If you don’t want to make the trip to [tag]Walter Reed[/tag], the Museum has an online exhibit, “Hairballs: Myths and Realities behind some Medical Curiosities.”

Hours of fun for the whole family! (Really).

quantum physics

This week I decided to finally read Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. It’s a bit embarrassing I haven’t read it yet, since the subject matter bridges my fields of study so perfectly.

Not that I have more than a surface understanding of quantum physics, but I’m fascinated all the same. I edited an officemates thesis one year and I have to admit that at one point I’m pretty sure my brain had a fire drill. All of my thoughts marched outside and lined up on the curb and refused to come back inside until the bell rang.

Over at the [tag]WiredScience[/tag] blog Correlations, [tag]Clifford Johnson[/tag] ponders the flaws in our thinking about [tag]quantum mechanics[/tag]. Both the way it’s been taught in the U.S. and the place these concepts hold in the popular imagination.

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Even for science majors at college, it is very common for the parts of physics that deal with quantum mechanics to be taught in a rush at the end of a semester long freshman course as a bit of “modern physics”. This persists to some extent beyond freshman years as well. The whole supposed weirdness of it all is over-emphasized and over-blown in class and also in popular presentations (I always argue with my friend the excellent science writer KC Cole about this – I want people to stop prefacing quantum issues with the word “weird”, while she says “but it is weird”, and I reply “not necessarily”… and so it goes) and so it ends up being perceived as strange, not of this world, and/or totally misused and misapplied (for example by charlatan “new age” film makers and so forth).

The problem is that we all fall into the same trap when teaching about this material. It is always taught as though it were in contrast or in opposition to classical (Newtonian) physics. Way too much time is spent worrying about philosophical implications of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle for example. That and other aspects of the physics would not seem so weird if we had not spent all that time prejudicing the listener with misleading concepts, focusing on entirely irrelevant concepts (given the context) that make them think of electrons and atoms as little billiard balls and so forth. Then we end up with a set of “quantum rules” that seem weird only because we should not have been thinking in terms of billiard balls in the first place. You can see part of the problem in the very name of the Uncertainty Principle. This is just the English translation of something that would have been better translated as the Indeterminacy Principle, referring not to being uncertain about the value of a quantity (the position or momentum of some billiard ball like object), but the fundamental fact that the quantity simply has no meaning in some situations – It cannot be determined. Hence “Indeterminacy”. The billiard ball images we insist on using out of context makes us ask the wrong – meaningless – questions, to which the answers then seem weird. (In several other languages, the Indeterminacy Principle is the common usage.)

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I know that’s a pretty big pull-quote, but I think it’s worth reading and really thinking about and I know not everyone reads the referenced materials they see in blog posts. (Which is a shame because manipulating meaning by eliminating context is so very easy to do, on purpose to serve and agenda or inadvertantly due to haste or carelessness).

Science education is already verging on shambles in this country. Biology and chemistry education at all levels is a battlefield, research dollars in higher education are so tight it’s a wonder scientists don’t kill one another over them. Giving students an incomplete education in physics only compounds these problems. If I’m not careful this will digress into a tirade about the sorry state of math education with a small detour to address so-called Intelligent Design, so I’m just going to let Johnson’s own conclusionary words speak for themselves:

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Something is definitely wrong with the way we teach basic science if the key concepts that underlie so many of the things that affect our lives are considered to be not part of the everyday. I’m not saying that everyone should know all the details, of course, but this stuff is 100 years old and is the foundation of some of our most important industries and the entire modern information age. People should know where all those goodies come from.

As educators, writers, program makers, and journalists, we need to do better.

It was a longer piece, you should go read it. And check out the rest of the Correlations blog while you’re wandering around. Good stuff happening over there.

stinky flowers

Retrospectacle has a nifty post about plants and fungi that use foul odors (to humans) to attract their pollinators.

As I was about to this short and sweet little post, I noticed that in the stinky plant comments someone mentioned loving the smell of diesel fuel. This reminded me that I’d told Sean I would look to see if there was a readily available answer to the question, “Why do some people love the smell of gasoline?”

Which was in itself a digression because that conversation had started out as some artist friends explaining to me why they were upset and offended I’d tried to get them to go to a presentation on a State Department program that buys art to place in US Embassies. I think Sean changed the subject to weird science because I was being obtuse and he had to give me a stern lecture about how this was Imperialism and no self-respecting artist should ever do this. I understand his perspective now, I think.

And let’s face it, weird science is way more fun to contemplate than the fact that you offended everyone you know by suggesting something you thought naively thought was innocent but clearly isn’t. (Sorry, artists!) Learn something new everyday…

Back to the weird science – why do some people love the smell of gasoline? I didn’t find a reason, but I didn’t try very hard. A rather outdated site, basenotes.com, mentions DKmen, a discontinued men’s fragrance with basenotes of suede, tobacco, citrus and fuel resin. I’m guessing the scent didn’t stay on the market long because some people love those smells, others hate them. And some of them, synthetic or real apparently, are migraine triggers.

As I continued my search I got sidetracked reading Neuroscience for Kids well-done teacher’s module OUR CHEMICAL SENSES: 2. TASTE – Experiment: How Taste and Smell Work Together.

Reports from our noses and mouths alert us to pleasure, danger, food and drink in the environment. The complicated processes of smelling and tasting begin when molecules detach from substances and float into noses or are put into mouths. In both cases, the molecules must dissolve in watery mucous in order to bind to and stimulate special cells. These cells transmit messages to brain centers where we perceive odors or tastes, and where we remember people, places, or events associated with these olfactory (smell) and gustatory (taste) sensations.

After I’d finished reading this site, I remembered an entirely different conversation with Sean. I mentioned the elementary school experiment to demonstrate that not everyone is a PTC (phenylthiocarbamide) Taster. He had no earthly idea what I was talking about.

So I looked that up and found a brief article about PTC and natural selection.

A genetic variation seen worldwide in which people either taste or do not taste a bitter, synthetic compound called PTC has been preserved by natural selection, University of Utah and National Institutes of Health researchers have reported.

Phenylthiocarbamide (PTC) is not found in nature, but the ability to taste it correlates strongly with the ability to taste other bitter substances that occur naturally, especially toxins. Eons ago, the ability to discern bitter tastes developed as an evolutionary mechanism to protect early humans from eating poisonous plants.

This has implications beyond historical interest:

People who can taste PTC are less likely to eat cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli, according to Wooding, which could be a problem because these vegetables contain important nutrients. If the ability to discern bitter tastes discourages PTC tasters from eating broccoli, it also may have the advantage of dissuading them from inhaling the acrid smoke of cigarettes. “Among smokers, there seems to be an excess of PTC non-tasters,” Wooding said. “So it seems that PTC tasters are less likely to smoke.”

This led me to some research on PTC that I hadn’t seen before (or forgot about, entirely possible. Mind like a steel sieve and all that), “Independent evolution of bitter-taste sensitivity in humans and chimpanzees” (Nature 440, 930-934 (13 April 2006) | doi:10.1038/nature04655; Received 17 November 2005; Accepted 16 February 2006). You’ll need a subscription or other database access, but the upshot is that humans and chimps evolved the same genetic mechanism, but independently. But you probably figured that out from the title.

Then I got distracted at the BBC’s Ever Wonder About Food? site and all other digressions were forgotten.

"It was like the United Nations of mold, but in cheese!"

That may be a bit melodramatic, but that’s how I explained my find to Roger last night on the phone. And so, while I should be uploading my meager offerings to Dr. Birdcage’s wedding photo pool, I am instead uploading pictures of the scary moldy mystery cheesesque-product that I found in our fridge to flickr.

We never buy stuff like this. We served Indian food at the last party. I don’t know how this came to live with us or why. Or what it wants from me. I’m just guessing it appeared during the party. It’s possible, although admittedly improbable, that it crawled into our house under it’s own power and let itself into the refrigerator. I believe the party scenerio is the more likely of the two.