Not so really big news after all…

So in late 2010 there was the announcement about arsenic based life – really big news!  Well, not so big news after all.  Multiple studies have now shown that due to mistakes and artifacts of the experiments originally conducted, the results are not correct.  The lake this particular bacteria lives in may be rich in arsenic, but this particular life form has no arsenic in its structure at all and instead just has managed to live in a poisonous environment by scrounging as much phosphorus as it needs to get by.  I suppose in the end if someone shows something that looks too amazing to be true, it probably is until it has been extensively peer reviewed.  I think the fault here was that the original discover really didn’t play devil’s advocate enough with their own results and/or caught got up in the excitement of something really big.

Wouldn’t be the first time this has happened.  Polywater, Cold Fusion, and others – not clear checking of everything was done, or at least, not enough peer review.  Sure, peer review may quickly damp the enthusiasm for what you found out, but I think it’s better to find out something isn’t that good up front than be labeled a fool or sloppy later.  Was the original scientist in question truly sloppy?   I can’t say, but now that enough other evidence has come out, it’s clear to me that when this result was found, some really obvious things (to me anyway, and I’m not even a biochemist) were missed.  The controls of trying to grow in a phosphorus free-media were not done, and better elemental analysis was not done either.

Oh well, not everything can be wondrous.  I suppose in the end this whole story proves that peer review is alive and well.  And indeed, not all the results here are without merit. Certainly figuring out how something like this can live in concentrations of arsenic typically poisonous to life would be an important discovery.  It might even help us figure out how to do bio-remediation of waste sites better, or, if we wish to really think far out – terraforming.  But for now, the results are not clearly favoring arsenic based life.  Durable life yes, arsenic based, no.

Our Very Plausible Future

If you get a chance and have some time to kill, go and listen to this story on NPR (I think it’s 20-30 minutes) about the predictions for 2100 as made by a very high brain power physicist.  In general, I think I agree with the man, except for a few issues.

1) He claims that the early adapters of contacts that act as heads-up displays will be students.  I fully disagree – it will be businessfolk who need to have that information at their fingertips to make better deals faster.  Indeed, that drive to make money will push the adaption of this technology faster than students.  The technology he describes would enable you to completely dominate the competition that doesn’t have it.

2) The bit on recorded memory is really something profound.  Why?   Because if you can truly record a memory and give it to someone else, why stop at using it for learning?   Prof. Kaku should read more science fiction, because recorded memories will be used for more than just quick skill learning.  They will be used for planting memories, crime and punishment, and the ultimate in entertainment, both life-changing and profane.   However, I suspect what works with a mouse won’t translate as easily to humanity, since it could be that each recording of memory must be tailor made to that person and it may not translate to each complex individual mind, as I would bet that everyone’s hippocampus is wired just differently enough such that the memories can’t slip over so easily.

3) Self-driving cars….perhaps, but it will involve a larger cultural shift for this to happen.  If enough people start to hate driving, then this will come to pass.  But if enough people like being in control, then those cars won’t be given up.

4) The portion of the interview on String Field Theory I thought was very well explained, and I think I really like the idea that the mind of God is the symphony of music in the universe in 11 dimensions.

It’s Physics Jim, but not as we know it

Normally as a chemist I don’t follow the high energy / space physics literature very much, but this one caught my eye because it relates to electromagnetic attraction, which at the atomic and sub-atomic level will dictate how atoms bond to one another and how chemistry works.  Apparently, some researchers found that the electromagnetic constant that applies to everything as we know it here on Earth may not apply in other parts of the universe.  Note I say “may not apply”.  What was discovered here is very controversial and is hard to prove, but it could be correct.  So what exactly does that mean?   I’ll tell you, it means that if we do leave the planet we may find all sorts of things way outside our comprehension and survival.  For example, the change could be minor where the strength of hydrogen bonds (essential for life on Earth) are weaker elsewhere, and when you enter those regions of different electromagnetic constant, everything may just stop working and you may completely disintegrate.  Or water is essential to life here, but there due the changes in electromagnetic constants you need a different form of water to survive – either something as odd as D₂O¹⁸ (everything isotopically shifted to heavier weight) or really odd like Li₂S.  If how electrons, protons, and neutrons now all behave differently in how they attract and repel one another, everything changes.  You could even have places where the attraction is so weak that lead is radioactive and spontaneously goes through fission, or so strong where elements heavier than 118 are commonplace and inert.  So if the constant changes, you may have to leave your chemistry knowledge at the door in other parts of the universe because everything just changed.

The universe continues to be a very weird and hostile place.  But maybe that comment made in a SciFi show about solving all problems by just “changing the gravitational constant of the universe” is indeed what makes one god.  Control that constant and you can dictate what is possible and what is impossible.  In effect, the electromagnetic constant dictates how matter behaves and once you dictate that, this determines material properties which in turn determines how everything else exists and interacts with everything else.

I suppose this whole thing could be chocked up to artifacts of the experiment or something else (red/blue shifting, gravitational lenses) where the spectra of the elements imaged was changed thus leading the authors to their conclusions. Ultimately this is a fascinating story if correct and even if not, it’s a very interesting thought exercise about reality as we know it.

I for one welcome our new bacterial overlords….

An interesting study reveals that bacteria can have some mind control effects in mice.  Before you can say “Oh E.Coli!” let’s consider a few things here.  The results are only in mice, and I think the mind control effect could be interpreted in many ways.  For one, it could just be that this specific bacteria lets off biochemical compounds as a byproduct of its life cycle which in turn lead to the effects seen in the mice – calmness and less stress.  So feed the bacteria the right things in the right environment and they excrete the equivalent of mouse prozac rather than something else.  Although if you waned to think of it another way, the bacteria promote a particular type of behavior more likely to propagate them as a species.  Killing off the host too fast is bad, but keeping the host calm and more likely to live, perhaps then you get spread out more.  But that would infer that bacteria have a plan and are sentient.  Uh…wait.  Oh E. Coli!!!!

No, in reality I doubt that the bacteria are really controlling us but instead it speaks to the many potential interactions between our human body and the billions of microorganisms throughout the planet.  Rather, it says that the biochemicals put out by virii and bacteria may lead to all sorts of positive and negative consequences for us.  The interaction could be positive leading to better health, or negative leading to disease.  Or, it may lead to mutations in the genome and out of those billions of interactions, one of those mutations leads to something amazing.  There are reports of monkeys walking upright after recovering from a disease, and supposedly toxoplasmi in cats makes them (and their human owners) act in slightly different ways.  Maybe adopting a cat thousands of years ago led to fighting off the pests killing the grain supply which led to longer life, and maybe one of our ape ancestors starting walking upright and able to do more and reach more due to the walking upright effect.  Just as sex is most likely the way that the genome stays ahead of disease bacteria wiping out an entire species, bacteria interacting with our genome billions and billions of times over the years may induce all sorts of changes for good and bad in us.  If it can influence behavior when the right strain is present, who knows what some other strain will do provided it doesn’t kill the host?   So really I view this as a fortuitous coincidence that these scientists measured, but not one without precedent.  In the end, I suspect once one figures out which strains of bacteria don’t kill the host and let off a beneficial chemical you’ll see more of this as a medical treatment – bacteria to address a particular long-term health issue.  Sure,  this concept would make good science fiction for mind-control due to disease (I Am Legend, 28 Days Later) or to justify zombiedom, but for now, it’s just an interesting biochemical reaction we’re seeing here.  Or so I think my bacterial overlord is telling me.  What’s that?   You want lemon bars ASAFP?   Again?   Cripes, something must be wrong with me since I’m wanting to eat these all the time.  Might also explain the cravings for mustard I get every now and then….

Night of the Living Ant Dead

Well not quite as I’ll explain, but scientists have found more fungii that attacks ants and controls their minds before consuming them.  It’s not quite the zombie approach at hinted at the article.  Instead, once the fungus infects the ant, it controls the ant to leave the nest and set itself up in a way to die and then propagate the fungus in a way that protects the fungus “fruiting body” to enable more infections to occur.  It’s an incredibly elaborate way to propagate a species and quite malevolent in that it always results in the death of the host.  So while not quite zombie ants roaming around, it’s more like an example of a parasite with mind control powers which is equally weird.  What this makes me wonder aloud about is this:  if a fungus can do this to a simple animal like an insect, what does this say about bacterial and viral infections that affect other animals?   Is the potential for mind control there?   What about when one gets fevers that lead to hallucinations and odd behavior?   Is this just the brain shutting down due to disease or is this an example of mind control in effect?  There was the story not too long ago about an monkey that started walking upright after an illness, so was this a result of brain changes brought by the disease, or something else?   It does make one wonder what the role of disease really is on this planet, especially parasitic ones.

There is one comment I’ll make though about this ant zombie article, and that is that I disagree with the scientist at the end of the article.  I say good riddance to this fungus that is likely to die off.  This is an example of a truly parasitic predatory fungus – it only exists to kill and propagate, so while I’m not a pro-formicaite, I don’t see this as a thing that needs to be kept in our ecosystem.  Now if it was taking out fire ants maybe I’d feel differently.

The Scientist: Big-Ass Loser or Societial Savior?

Another opinion on how the US is losing it’s edge in innovation and technology (I’d argue it has already mostly lost it) has me wanting to comment a bit on the role of the Scientist in this country vs. others.

The author of the article is partly right about the perception of scientists in the US vs. the rest of the world.  Scientists in the US are fairly well paid, but for the most part are marginalized when it comes to status and the ability to contribute to society’s decisions.  This is partly due to major backlashes against scientific mistakes against the citizens of the US and the developed world since the 1940s.  If you look at the EU and the US, science and technology is not generally trusted unless it does something fun for you (electronics) or saves your life (medicine).  Look at the rap chemistry has – chemistry and chemicals are treated as evils, sometimes necessary, but the word chemical has a bad connotation.  Anytime you have a field of work set a river on fire (Cuyahoga River in the 70s) you’re going to have this sort perception, and pretty much from that moment on you’re going to have a long road back to trustworthiness.  In the developing world – well it’s a slightly different story but I suspect it will change.  Despite Bhopal and all the current environmental damage in China, these two countries really value science, but the difference here is that the highly educated scientists in these countries go into politics.  In India and China, it’s not the liberal arts majors in charge like it is in the EU and the US, it’s the scientists and engineers.  Maybe with enough more industrial accidents and messes you’ll start to see this backlash against science in India and China, but I doubt it since the engineers and scientists are still in charge in the end.  To my point, countries like India have welcomed scientists from US companies like DuPont, but have shunned others (Dow) that have that history of making chemical messes.  Local-grown scientific talent is respected, honored, and when in politics, obeyed.  Not so in the US.

Going back to a point in the original letter, even if scientists were respected in the US, the point that we need to attract more people into this field to keep up with innovation and technological mastery is not fully correct.  We have plenty of scientists and engineers in the US.  If we didn’t, then there would be zero unemployment in these fields and I can say with certainty that we have plenty of unemployed scientists and engineers in the US.  Why are they unemployed?   Well, some of it is because some of them just are not that good at what they do and they probably need to change professions. Not everyone is an A-string player in all things.  While I may be a good fire scientist (people keep paying me, so I’m assuming I am), don’t ask me to do biochemistry – I’d be a complete loss there.

Another source of US scientist unemployment is because what scientists do is not valued by those who control the purse strings.  When there is a major emphasis on short-term success (what can you do for me now now now) vs. long-term research, development, and creation of new things that solve the REALLY hard problems, there is only patience for the short-term stuff, and most of what science does requires patience, and therefore is not paid for in the US.  Therefore, I would argue that a major change in education for both scientists and non-scientists is needed in the US.  You cannot just teach general chemistry to liberal arts major as a forced course and expect them to have that “well-rounded” education.  They know it’s a worthless course to them as taught (rote memorization) and with that initial perception the damage is forever done.  If you’re going to teach them science, make it a general literacy course and make IT RELEVANT.  Show history majors why a particular scientific change that took 10-15 years to develop affected society.  Show art majors how material changes, optics, and sonics create art and sound.  Show Econ & Business majors how technology investments lead given time to develop turn into industrial processes and profits and how new discoveries can change the entire commodity market.  Once science is valued by society as a whole you’ll find you don’t need more scientists – you’ll have plenty – and those who go into it will know they are valued and will stay in it and produce more.  Everyone is more productive when they are wanted and treated with a modicum of respect.  Until then, in the US the scientist is to be kicked, mistrusted, and used as a scapegoat for the ills of society while our Indian and Chinese competitors, who move these people into positions of power and authority, will progress in science at a much faster clip than the rest of us.

So in the end, it’s not more scientists that are needed, it’s a sea change in how the US thinks about science in general which is needed, and we don’t need to put scientists on pedestals and worship them to do it.  But it will take a long time to change the opinion of science in this country, and by then maybe we can begin to catch up with China and India.

Blackawton bees are smart

Every now and then as a scientist I come across an article that is written in a refreshing manner.  It’s not written in dry scientific English, and it has some real character to it along with interesting science.  some of my favorites include a chemical reaction described as turning “a Guinness brown in color” and a delicate chemical experiment done out in the snow during winter in the 1950s since they needed to keep the whole apparatus cold to get the desired product to form.  And now there is this one – a peer reviewed scientific paper written by British schoolchildren.

According to the article, apparently bees in the British town of Blackawton are fairly smart and can solve puzzles, or at least be trained to do so.  More likely it shows that creatures we believe to be dumb do use that brain they’ve been given to do more than just eat, breathe, and reproduce.  The article here is written by 8-10 year old kids from a public school in Devonshire and while it had some adult guidance (and supposedly funding from a local optometrist) the style of writing is what kids would come up with, and that’s what I enjoyed the most.  Read the experimental (methods) section – I enjoyed that part the best.  You will of course have to download the full article .pdf (free) from the sidebar to read it – I’m only linking to the abstract here.  Science does need to be made accessible to everyone, and I see this peer-reviewed paper as a good example of this and I hope we’ll see more journals publish articles like this.

Really Big News

It’s life Jim, but not as we know it.  No, not silicon based life forms, but something equally weird.  Phosphorus is one of those elements essential to life in the form of Adenosine Triphosphate, which helps with energy storage and usage in every living cell on the planet.  Without it no cell can process energy and live.  Now we have a bacteria discovered which can use Phosphorus and another heavier element right under it on the periodic table.  Arsenic.  That’s right – poison to the rest of us is life-giving to this organism.  Arsenic and Phosphorus are capable of forming similar bond structures so as a chemist I can see how it would work in this discovery, but the atomic radii are really different, and if you’re going to start cramming Arsenic into your biochemical structure you have to change a whole bunch of other things.  The fact that an organism, even as lowly as a bacterium, has done it and lives with this change means something really big.

Life can, and will, evolve in other environments that would kill us.  Just when we think we understand everything we realize how much we really don’t know.  To borrow a line from Jurassic Park:  Life will find a way.

Chemistry – The Hip Science

I view this more as an exercise in scientific literacy rather than something which convinces people to become chemists, but as a Chemist – I really enjoyed this little one.  The Carbon and Hydrogen bonding reminded me of a meme from high school chemistry:  Mr. BrINClHOF.  He was composed of all the elements that only went out with themselves.  Not that there is anything wrong with that mind you.

A Sea Change in Science

A conversation I had with a fellow fire scientist has convinced me that some major changes are coming to science as we know it.  Right now, English is THE language of science and commerce.  It wasn’t always that way.  It used to be that science was in a handful of languages.  Organic chemistry was in German, inorganic and general chemistry was in French, and of course the precursor of Chemistry (Alchemy) was in Latin and Arabic.  For that matter, many natural sciences used to be in Latin, Arabic and Greek before the Renaissance.  But today it’s English.

So my fellow fire scientist got back from a conference in China where he attended the largest fire science conference of his career.  He’s been in this field for 40 years and this was the largest he’s ever been at.  Keep in mind that Fire Science is a niche field of work, and China in one conference has dwarfed what he’s seen in that 40 years of work, even during its heyday in the west during the 60s and 70s.  He’s convinced that there are more fire scientists in China than there is in the entire world today, and not all of them were at the conference.  While English was the language of the speakers at the conference, Chinese was the real language of all the side talks moving new science back and forth.  So MANY scientists talking in a language only they understand.  If this is what you have at a niche science conference, imagine what you have in the fields of biochemistry, petrochemistry, semiconductor science, physics, and really cutting edge stuff like nano-electronics in China.  Starting to feel small yet?

So now we have a nation (China) which is funding science hand over fist and has legions of scientists working.  Okay – I may hear some of you saying that some of that science isn’t of high quality.  And based upon some of the papers I’ve reviewed (including one where I had my own work plagiarized)  I would agree with you.  For now.  The quality of their work is only getting better, and for that matter, I have read equally bad scientific papers published by “1st world” countries lately which makes me believe that science in the west is not as dominant as it once was and is slipping in quality as the chase for dwindling funding is more important than quality work.  So with this many scientists working in Chinese getting constant support that we do not get in the West, I’m beginning to think that English has a limited lifespan for the language of science.  It won’t be gone tomorrow or even in 5-10 years, but it would not surprise me if there are world-class scientific conferences where Chinese is the official language of the conference in 10 years, if not sooner.  From there comes high technology published only in Chinese journals and slowly but surely, English goes away as the main language of science.  Oh sure, I’ve heard that we’re all moving to Chinglish or Hinglish based solely upon the populations of the world and they may be right, but if you control that much scientific funding and have that many scientists speaking in just that language, guess what, you’ll find that the language gravitates to your center of power.  This is why the above languages used to be the languages of science, but as the power went away, so did the language.  Interestingly, as the science went away, so did the power.

We are so damned by that Chinese phrase “may you live in interesting times”.  It’s indeed interesting to watch this stuff unfold and see history in the making, but it’s also depressing to know that you’re on your way to number 2 or less no matter what you do.  At least with our current banana republic of government anyway.  I suppose if Yankee Ingenuity really makes a comeback and we get serious about funding science right then we might hold back the tide, but I’m not hopeful.