Human Rights Law

Scratching my head

By melvin

Maybe it is the nearness of the event we've been anticipating all year - yes, the annual Ig Nobel Awards will be given out on October 2nd - or maybe it's just something in the air - and it turns out there are some unpleasant possibilities there - but for the last few days there seem to be odd science stories - headscratchers - on every side.

Some are  painfully obvious, some absurd, and best of all, some dance on that little thread we've tacked onto our muslin mockup of reality to separate the sublime and the ridiculous. Below are five of my favorites, at least a couple of which seem Ig Nobel-worthy.
From our No, Duh files: Pregnant women with bulimia have more anxiety and depression

Women who have bulimia in pregnancy have more symptoms of anxiety and depression compared to pregnant women without eating disorders.

Right. Next you'll be telling us that veterans with PTSD or gay teenagers in backwards rural areas are unhappier than other people. I've had about enough of all this whining.

Is there any community, anywhere, of which this could not be said? Bisexual community reports need for improvements in mental health services

Stress, perhaps? Like maybe twice as much as other people?

Hold on to your seats, now: US personalities vary by region

The research showed that Americans on the eastern seaboard were "more anxious and impulsive" while westerners were comparatively relaxed.

Someone should alert Woody Allen to this mindbender. Maybe he could even make a movie about it.

For the masochists: A Theory of the Emergence, Persistence, and Expression of Geographic Variation in Psychological Characteristics (31-page pdf give me a fucking break)

According to the authors, I should be moderately "Agreeable," very much open to new ideas, and not at all neurotic. (Zero out of three - thanks for playing.) All because I live on one side of a state line, and never mind that most of my family, whom one would think might have influenced me in my youth, live on the other side.

The illustrations in this article deserve special mention: they are enough to drive anyone mad. Here's a little hint: if you wish to illustrate different quintiles on a color map, next time around don't make three of the colors an identical black. Perhaps someone with some expertise could take a good look at this and find the sweetness; I'm already been done with it.

This is more interesting: Cells from space have unusual makeup (I beg you, no lipstick references, for the love of god.)

A line­age of odd mi­crobes that may have crashed in­to Earth aboard a me­te­or in 2001 seem to con­tain mo­le­cules not found in Earthly cells, two sci­en­tists are re­port­ing.

Wait just a garsh-dang minute, I seem to hear Sarah Palin saying. Are you telling me, in other words, that these extra-terrestrial organisms are alien in some way?

But that is unfair. All that is really wrong here is the headline, the prole packaging. Popularization of science articles is not so easy, and if as Haldane said the world is not just queerer than we suppose but queerer than we can suppose, it will always be much much queerer than we can explain.

As a matter of fact, the tale of these putative extraterrestrials dovetails nicely with two recent earthly discoveries. Taken all together they are enough to make one quite paranoid.

Water Bears Able To Survive Exposure To Vacuum Of Space

Ever since these poor creatures were discovered, people have been trying to find some ordeal they can't survive. Total dessication for ten years? No problem. Many revive just fine. How about surviving the absence of any air? Not a problem for those already dessicated.

How about exposing them to solar radiation? It turns out a fair number survive that too:

The dried-up tardigrades were aboard the FOTON-M3 spacecraft launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) in September 2007 and were exposed to open space conditions - i.e. to vacuum, UV radiation from the sun and cosmic radiation- in a low Earth orbit of around 270km altitude. After their safe return to Earth, it turned out that while most of them survived exposure to vacuum and cosmic rays alone, some had even survived the exposure to the deadly levels of solar UV radiation, which are more than 1000 times higher than on the surface of the Earth. Even more so, the survivors could reproduce fine after their space trip.

If they can survive this close to the sun, interstellar travel shouldn't pose much of a problem for them. What if they were to team up with another hardy little creature, maybe one of the bdelloid rotifers? They have an even more interesting trick up their sleeves - when they dry out, their genome partially disintegrates, along with cell walls and everything else. But here's the trick: when rehydrated, the genome reintegrates, and along the way incorporates whatever foreign DNA happens to be lying around in a spontaneous, naturally-occurring protoplast fusion.

Voilà, it has transformed itself into a different life form with, theoretically, entirely new abilities.

I think our little friends would fit nicely into one of next year's scifi movies, don't you?

Here is the granddaddy of them all, an idea that left me scratching my head for an entire evening: Carbon sequestration via wood burial (Carbon Balance and Management 2008, 3:1 doi:10.1186/1750-0680-3-1) -- (12-page pdf and welcome to Crazytown).

This modest proposal suggests an elegant solution to the problem of locking up carbon: burying huge quantities of wood underground (or underwater). The problem with this idea is that it actually makes perfect sense - if one is focussed narrowly enough on the problem strictly as one of engineering a novel carbon sink within certain cost/benefit constraints.

Coal was formed by the burial of ancient plants in anaerobic conditions such as swamp and peatland. The proposed wood burial method is essentially a first step of a fossil fuel formation process, only drastically accelerated by active human management. It is ironic that the whole climate change problem is caused by the human accelerated release of the fossil fuel carbon pool. Thus it will not be surprising if this method turns out to be the most 'natural' way to undo fossil fuel CO2 emission.

The author proposes building hundreds of new roads into the world's remaining forests with the sole objective of chopping down vast swathes of trees and burying them deep underground, as well as planting new forests for the same purpose. He is at least honest enough to recognize in passing that his plan just might cause a little collateral damage in the form of the destruction of vitually all tropical biodiversity, but it doesn't seem to interrupt his stride.

(Once we've gone to all the trouble of getting at this wood, we don't even lock it up in the form of, what, pianos maybe or houses? I actually saw a defender of the paper remark that houses are liable to catch fire and defeat the purpose. But even undisturbed coal seams can catch fire - there are several burning right now.)

Rather than go into all the problems here, I would suggest you read this paper, which while thought-provoking still has to be my nomination for an Ig Nobel.
   

Full post as published by Never In Our Names on September 22, 2008 (boomark / email).