… or the story of a man working in regenerative medicine giving his 69-year-old brother the finger cells scraped off a pig’s bladder, which facilitated the regrowth of the fingertip he had lost. Watch the BBC videos (a bit graphic), and then answer me this: How long, do you think, before we start using this technology for funtainment?

… and why?

This is no trick question, and there are no wrong choices. (well, there is one that is a bit of a roundabout.) … more tomorrow below … (more…)

disclaimer: this post contains zero euphemisms.

You most probably know that matter is made of atoms, which were thought to be indivisible. You probably know that this is not true — we now know that an atom has a nucleus, which is made of proton(s) and neutron(s), orbited by electron(s). You’ve heard of electrons, right? They’re from the lepton family, which includes muons and neutrinos. These are thought to be fundamental indivisible units of matter. Hadrons (protons, neutrons, etc.) on the other hand, are made of quarks (of which there are six: up, down, top, bottom, and the amusingly named charm and strange.) We, collectively and individually, do not know whether this is the end of the story, or whether there’s more to it. (If you’re a betting man, go for the “more” option.)

One of the big questions (besides whether these particles are essentially fundamental or whether they are composed of other more fundamental units) is why these particles have mass at all, let alone the actual observed masses they have. This, and other really interesting questions could possibly be answered in your lifetime (even if you only have a few years to live) thanks to a huge project ($8 billion) that is set to go online soon — the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN.

There’s been some good reporting on the LHC, including this documentary (49 mins.), and a really good article a couple of weeks ago in the NewYorker (accompanied with a decent slideshow), which I would suggest you start with. I like this quote from CERN’s chief scientific officer, Jos Engelen, addressing concerns that the experiment might create tiny blackholes that would destroy earth:

Among Engelen’s responsibilities is dealing with the frequent calls and letters CERN receives about the possibility that the Large Hadron Collider will destroy the world. When I asked about this, Engelen picked up a Bic pen and placed it in front of me.

“In quantum mechanics, there is a probability that this pen will fall through the table,” he said. “All of a sudden, it will be on the floor. Because it can behave as a wave, it can go through; we call that the ‘tunnel effect.’ If you calculate the probability that this happens, it is not identical to zero. It is a very small probability. But it never happens. I’ve never seen it happen. You have never seen it happen. But to the general public you make a casual remark, ‘It is not identical to zero, it is very small,’ and . . . ” He shrugged.

I am sure (at least some of) you are familiar with TED:

TED (Technology Entertainment Design) … is a forum for revolutionary ideas held annually in Monterey, California and recently, semi-annually in other cities around the world. TED has lived up to its description as a “group of remarkable people that gather to exchange ideas of incalculable value”. Its groundbreaking 20 minute lectures cover an extremely broad set of topics including science, arts, politics, global issues, architecture, music and more.

But I particularly bring it up at this time cause I just came across the TEDConferences google-video user, who has posted lots of really good presentations; for e.g. check out this really interesting talk by physicist David Deutsch on species survival, or this very well done presentation with amazing graphics by professor of international health Hans Rosling titled myths about the developing world, or this extremely entertaining and profoundly moving talk by Sir Ken Robinson about creativity and the education system, as well as presentations by Gladwell, Negroponte, Dawkins, Al Gore, and many others.

If you’re not a streaming-video kind of gal, turns out you can also download the talks (mp3/mp4) from the TED website (there’s an option to watch/listen online on that link as well). Or even better, you can subscribe to the audio or video (sorta weekly) podcasts. If anyone’s watching, let me know if there are particular ones that you (dis)like.

I am a big fan of Sir David Attenborough, and I try to catch his shows on TVO or PBS when I can. I must’ve missed the episode where this amazing sequence played though, cause I would’ve definitely posted it up here. It was rated Sir Attenborough’s number 1 TV moment by BBC viewers. If you haven’t heard (of) Lyrebirds before, you’re in for a treat. Enjoy.

I am astounded to learn that there are 30,484,761 (chemically distinct) organic and inorganic substances currently known to man. (And they’re all indexed here.) I wonder if anyone has put a bound on the number of substances there could ever be.

keywords: substance, another substance, yet another substance, …
mood: aspirant
music: Haydn / Symphony no 48 in C major.

A big chunk of ice (66 sq.km — roughly the size of Manhattan) broke off the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 800 kilometers south of the North Pole, but no one was present to see it in Canada’s remote north. According to the cbc, this happened back in August of 2005, and was only picked up 16 months later. Apparently a researcher was going through satellite photos of the area when she noticed some changes, which tipped her off to the event.

I have two questions; One: How (obsessed,) diligent and systematic do you have to be to catch something like this? and Two: Given that it took that much time to catch it, how many events of this size are we missing?

Just thought I’d let you know what’s on my mind…

The biologist and the philosopher meet up to talk about God, evolution, incest, and of course, ants.

An interesting conversation, indeed. Notwithstanding that I got lost about half-way through despite my numerous tries — lack of appropriate background, maybe. I am going to have to revisit later, but here are two points that I think are worth recording:
1. On the history of philosophy, D.D:

It really is important to know the history of philosophy if you’re going to do philosophy, and the reason is actually very simple. The history of philosophy is a history of very tempting mistakes, and the people that we study in the history of philosophy—Plato and Aristotle and Kant and all the rest—they were not dummies. They were really smart people and they made stunning errors. These are very tempting mistakes. So you really have to learn the history of philosophy if you’re going to do it well. Or you have to learn some of it. Because otherwise you just reinvent the wheel. You end up falling in the same old traps.

2. On evolution; on the rarity of sociality (as a study case for the rarity of creativity), E.W:

Evolutionary theory is unique in all of science in that it’s a theory of things that almost never happen. Every birth in every lineage is a potential speciation event, but almost none of them are. The whole biosphere depends on these things that almost never happen. Mutations are almost never good. But it’s the ones that are advantageous that do all the work. So it’s tempting to ask a question like the one that you’ve just asked about what sociality doesn’t emerge more often. Well, I think they answer may just be, don’t think there is a reason why more of them don’t, because like everything else in evolution, this is a case of something that almost never happens. But when it does, amazing things result, and one should simply get used to the fact that you don’t have to explain why it doesn’t happen. You only have to show the sufficient conditions, and then every now and then they arise.

Considered an indicator of self-awareness, mirror self-recognition (MSR) has long seemed limited to humans and apes. In both phylogeny and human ontogeny, MSR is thought to correlate with higher forms of empathy and altruistic behavior. Apart from humans and apes, dolphins and elephants are also known for such capacities. After the recent discovery of MSR in dolphins (Tursiops truncatus), elephants thus were the next logical candidate species. We exposed three Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) to a large mirror to investigate their responses. Animals that possess MSR typically progress through four stages of behavior when facing a mirror: (i) social responses, (ii) physical inspection (e.g., looking behind the mirror), (iii) repetitive mirror-testing behavior, and (iv) realization of seeing themselves. Visible marks and invisible sham-marks were applied to the elephants’ heads to test whether they would pass the litmus “mark test” for MSR in which an individual spontaneously uses a mirror to touch an otherwise imperceptible mark on its own body. Here, we report a successful MSR elephant study and report striking parallels in the progression of responses to mirrors among apes, dolphins, and elephants. These parallels suggest convergent cognitive evolution most likely related to complex sociality and cooperation.

This is the abstract of a recent paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It’s a big news story, and as always it’s nice to see how reporters play it. Anyhow, this post is just to let you know that you can access three movies of the elephants infront of the mirror from the Supporting Information page (subs. reqrd. (?)). (If you’re really interested, and can’t access them for one reason or another, email me and we’ll find a way.)

a simple cure: (see gif animations below the fold.) (more…)