Sunday Science Book Club, February 15 2009

Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America’s Soul
by Edward Humes
HarperCollins, 2007





It is rare for the world to see born on one day two towering individuals whose imprint on history is strong enough to be noted around the world 200 years later. Abraham Lincoln successfully saw the United States through a near-fatal convulsion, whose early symptoms had been palliated but not cured at the nation’s founding; the after-effects have reached all around the world. Charles Darwin, more than anyone else in the 19th century, put biology on its modern scientific footing, and his ideas play a critical role in the genome sciences at the very forefront of 21st century biology.

We celebrate their achievements this week, but both Lincoln and Darwin have left legacies of divisiveness, and in fact these legacies intertwine. The contours of the rift that initiated the Civil War still shape American politics, from Nixon’s influential Southern Strategy to the Red State-Blue State divide in the 111th Congress. Evolution is a poster child for culture war. It may not be a top issue on the national political agenda, but it is a culture war conflict that penetrates just as deeply and personally than any other, as Edward Humes vividly describes in Monkey Girl, the best book about the nation’s first court trial over Intelligent Design in public schools.

A team of MIT undergraduate students has invented a shock absorber that harnesses energy from small bumps in the road, generating electricity while it smoothes the ride more effectively than conventional shocks. The students hope to initially find customers among companies that operate large fleets of heavy vehicles. They have already drawn interest from the U.S. military and several truck manufacturers.

According to a recent study, diets rich in omega-3 fatty acids protect the liver from damage caused by obesity and the insulin resistance it provokes. This research should give doctors and nutritionists valuable information when recommending and formulating weight-loss diets and help explain why some obese patients are more likely to suffer some complications associated with obesity. Omega-3 fatty acids can be found in canola oil and fish.

To astrobiologists, hot springs hold a great deal of significance.   Many of the most ancient organisms on Earth thrived in and around hydrothermal springs and their modern descendants still do.

If life forms have ever been present on Mars, hot spring deposits would be ideal locations to search for physical or chemical evidence of these organisms and data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) suggesting there might be evidence of ancient springs in the Vernal Crater would be a fine place to look, according to a report in Astrobiology.

Aerosols are fine particles suspended in the atmosphere. Sources of human-generated aerosols include industry, motor vehicles and vegetation burning. Natural sources include volcanoes, dust storms and ocean plankton. Human-generated aerosols have long been known to exert a cooling effect on climate. This has partly masked the warming effect of increasing greenhouse gases. As aerosol pollution is predicted to decrease over the next few decades, unmasking of the greenhouse effect may lead to accelerated global warming.

Research performed in the Center for Biomolecular Science&Engineering (CBSE) at the University of California, Santa Cruz, suggests that mobile repetitive elements--also known as transposons or "jumping genes"--do indeed affect the evolution of gene regulatory networks.

A little more than a year after University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists showed they could turn skin cells back into stem cells, they have pulsating proof that these "induced" stem cells can indeed form the specialized cells that make up heart muscle. 

In a study published  in Circulation Research, the team showed that they were able to grow working heart-muscle cells (cardiomyocytes) from induced pluripotent stem cells, known as iPS cells. 

The heart cells were originally reprogrammed from human skin cells by James Thomson and Junying Yu, two of Kamp's co-authors on the study. 

In all the hype surrounding the Large Hadron Collider during the last few years, it was easy to miss the fact that low energy physics was still accomplishing a lot - and that no one was sure what the LHC could really do because we didn't know what needed discovering.
 
What we think it will do  is based on the success of the indirect approach in science.   Darwin's evolution by natural selection, for example, gained early acceptance because without it nothing much in biology made sense.  Later discoveries including genetics and a detailed fossil record reaffirmed that what makes the most sense can often be true.  

I recently spoke to biological anthropologist Dr. Helen Fisher about her groundbreaking work on the chemical basis of our personality and its influence on who we fall in love with.  As it turns out, science can shed a lot of light on a topic previously dominated by doubt, horoscopes, and what our mama told us.

 “So have you read the book?” asked Fisher.  “What ‘type’ are you?” 

 “Explorer/Negotiator.  Are you sizing me up according to my ‘type’ now?” I teased.

The Brits are always thinking ahead and we could learn a thing or two from them on this side of the pond.   Those cheeky blokes are ditching pricey baubles in favor of if-we-keep-printing-money-we-will-be-Zimbabwe type ways of romancing loved ones this Valentine's Day - that is to say, without throwing out a lot of dough.    

Research from a voice-to-text company over there called SpinVox claims almost two thirds of men (65%) have made huge cuts in spending this Valentines day.   1.6 million even claim they are following in the footsteps of Byron, Keats, and Shakespeare; not just by being poor, struggling lotharios getting by on charm but also by penning their own love poems this February 14th.