Category Archives: science

Your Memories Cannot Be Trusted

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I have a memory of being a baby and crawling with a bottle of milk. It was one of those bottles that contains the bag of milk in it, and I was motoring along, sucking hard enough that I created a vaccuum powerful enough to drink the milk while still on the go. I can see it in my mind vividly, and yet it isn’t true.

This memory came from the fact that I have heard this story so many times from my parents, and somewhere along the line I wound up crafting an actual image of my doing this. However, it is in the third person. When I imagine this, I can see a baby crawling around with the bottle, and it looks like I assume I would have looked (my parents weren’t big on taking pictures of me… clearly I was also too ugly for photography), but if it were actually me, my memory would have been in the first person.

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Something Is Akimbo With Our Allergies

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It’s allergy season, and that got me to thinking. Do you remember when you were a kid, and in the school cafeteria you did things like eating peanut butter sandwiches, and nobody carried epinephrine on them for it? Maybe there was one kid in the class who was deathly allergic to bee stings, but that was about it? Do you remember when allergic reactions meant a few itchy hives? Do you remember a time when you didn’t know what gluten was? Something has changed, but we don’t know what it is yet.

My ex-wife is a great case-in-point. If I remember correctly, it started rather discourteously. We were in flagrante delecto, and she said that she felt some burning “down there”. We examined, and it seemed to be red and itchy. Soon after that, contact with a balloon to her face triggered a similar response of redness and itchiness. But it wouldn’t end there. Any contact with latex and things seemed to get worse to the point of that swelling throat and can’t breath thing that we sadly associate with allergies today. And it isn’t just latex. Today, she has the same reaction if she eats anything that was made on the same continent as a nut, and I believe there are many more things that trigger this reaction.

And it doesn’t seem to be allergies.

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Brain Chemistry

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I am not a brain chemist. I’m not even a chemist. In fact, chemistry and I are not friends. We were good, once. I even liked it through gravimetric stochiometry. I thought we’d be friends forever, right up until the words “organic chemistry” got uttered. And then it was off. I hadn’t the patience for the tediousness of chemistry. And then this sweet little thing called biology came by, and I got a new crush.

But that said, I’m no moron. I understand a lot from the popular science perspective, particularly as it relates to my interest in biology. I would not qualify myself as even vaguely knowledgeable in any science at any real depth, you have to study exclusively for a long time to be able to make that claim. No, I’m just a guy who digs biology and finds it fascinating, but does something else for the daily bread.

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Friday’s Planned Rapture

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So once again, the religious folks are certain that the world is about to end. This is not the first time this has happened, of course, and it will not be the last. Why, this web page alone chronicles 44 failed end-of-the-world predictions between 30 and 1920 CE. And that leaves out most of the last century, the turn of the milenium, and every faith that isn’t just Christianity. So many religious traditions teach that an end-of-times is going to happen, and when it does, only those who bought what they were selling would be free and clear.

Me, I’m a science geek. I’m a big fan of things like using a theory to make testable predictions. And that is ultimately what all of these end of the world scenarios are. You take your theory (that there is a God in heaven who divinely inspired a book of absolute or relative truths) and you create a hypothesis for something it suggests. Then, you have to wait and see to determine if the hypothesis was accurate or not. If it isn’t, then you need to figure out whether or not there was an error in the methodology or if in fact the whole thing was just bunk.

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Free Will Hunting

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I think I accidentally blew my head open. I had actually a few days ago started on a piece here about the debate around free will. I’m not a philosopher, but it is something I have been thinking about lately, and I wanted to share my thoughts.

But the trouble was, I talked myself out of my position.

I had wanted to say that I believed that we were free to think for ourselves, that we were not the playthings of the divine, and that we were not merely clumps of chemicals reacting to the various forces in the physical universe. I had wanted to express that that sort of thinking leads to nihilism. I had wanted to express that I felt free will came from the ridiculous power of our amazing brains.

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Queen Of The Fruit Flies

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I just read an interesting bit of news and thought I would share it. It turns out that researcher Masaki Kamakura has isolated a protein within royal jelly that is integral in the formation of queen bees. Royal jelly, aside from being a major fixture in the alt med community, claiming to boost the immune system, lower cholesterol, and help with inflammatory diseases, is made by and for bees. All bee larvae eat it for the first few days of development, but the queen bee gets it all the time.

Kamakura has published a paper in Nature which describes how he isolated the protein in question, and what happened when he gave it to fruit fly larvae. Essentially, the fruit fly got big. Real big. And he was able to evaluate what genetic trigger he was pushing by exposing the larvae to the protein.

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So Science Never Looks At Natural Remedies, Eh?

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That’s one of those great snarking points of the pseudo-scientific community of alternative medicine. Science just doesn’t want to care that natural remedies may have validity. And of course, it’s a patently ridiculous assertion. Science has done a great deal of investigation of natural remedies, and many scientific products are the result of starting with a natural remedy, identifying what it is that makes it effective, and finding a way to synthesize, stabilize, and standardize the parts that work.

Well, earlier this week, Scientific American had a pod cast providing yet another example of their doing just that. The podcast, Manuka Honey Slips Up Some Bacteria discusses the work of some researchers who have found that manuka honey has a lot of very specific benefits that it can offer in terms of bacterial infection. The one that most pricked my eyebrows up was that it appears that manuka honey may have a really significant effect on making MRSA more susceptible to antibiotics. That’s fantastic news, as any serious MRSA infection comes with a very high death rate. So now we have yet another potential (and ZOMG NATURAL!) means to fight what remains a very brutal disease.

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Viral Life On The Enemy’s Payroll

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Viruses are jerks. I mean, deep down, that’s their job. They exist solely to infect us. Some of them are theoretically harmless, while others, left unchecked, spell certain doom. However, there have long been theories put forward about friendly viruses, a concept that makes sense on the surface. What if a virus were capable of actually making us fight off other more harmful diseases? What if a virus were used as a delivery mechanism for something beneficial? Where some minds shine is in making the best of a bad situation, and there are plenty of scientists seeking ways to make happy helpers of our viral enemies.

An article I just read from Discovery Magazine’s 80beats blog shows an example of such a possibility. The article, Viruses Show Promise for Creating Drugs By Doing What They Do Best: Evolving explains the work of some researchers at Harvard who are using viruses to optimize proteins to fight particular conditions. That sounds really strange, but as they point out, this is not new science:
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The Root Of Testimonial Is Testes

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As in balls. Or, as the English put it, bollocks. Testimonial evidence is bollocks.

Okay, I’m oversimplifying. Testimonial evidence is a great starting point for evaluation and critical analysis. If someone says that they had a lump on their hand and they rubbed a Supreme Court Judge’s wig sweat on it three times a day and the lump disappeared, then there may be some reason to try to find out why. It hardly means that we should start treating lumps with wig sweat, ignoring all previous lump treatment modalities. Also, I must apologize for the grossness of that anecdote, and I hope nobody with a lump on their hand actually runs out and starts harassing Supreme Court Judges for access to their wig sweat.

In the alt-med world, testimony is king. We tend to have a certain magical thinking when it comes to alternative medicine, infusing it with a respect for age-old medicinal traditions and cutting edge maverick science that it does not deserve. When people tell you that Saint John’s Wort will cure sinusitis, we instantly believe it could because Saint John’s Wort has a long history of use for lots of things, and is even in some regards backed up by valid science, such as the treatment of depression. However, while saint john’s wort depression triggers a lot of responses on pubmed, saint john’s wort sinusitis does not. For good reason.

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Fake Leaf Is Awesome And Makes Me Think Of Energy

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Scientists have created a fake leaf. I imagine that if I said this to 100 people on the streets of My Home Town, I would probably get at least a handful of people telling me that science is wasting money doing stupid things like inventing leaves when God already invented them, and they work great. Those people couldn’t be more wrong.

An artificial leaf isn’t what you might think. It is a photosynthesis device, and that’s where things get a whole lot more nifty in this story. What scientists built was a cost effective doohickey that uses sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen and create energy. That’s essentially what leaves do, but for the first time, we’re doing it better. By an order of magnitude.

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