Something has been pulling the fake flowers off of our hummingbird feeder. Raccoons are the primary suspect. Hummingbirds don’t seem strong enough, and don’t need to tug at petals to feed. Also, the vandalism occurs overnight. Oh yeah, and there are the incriminating raccoon paw prints all around the feeder. Seemed pretty cut and dry. But then a headline about how “some hummingbirds are flower robbers” caught my eye. Maybe hummingbirds do engage in more than nectar sipping.
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Science and Faith
Science Corner: You’ll Kill More S. aureus with Honey AND Vinegar
Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.
– Men in Black
In the film, Tommy Lee Jones’ Kay wants to make Will Smith’s Jay consider what else he might be wrong about (beyond the existence of aliens). In doing so, Kay reinforces two related ideas: knowledge only ever accumulates, and by extension those who came before us were universally more ignorant. Neither one of those is entirely true (nor is it true that 500 years ago the Earth was widely considered to be flat). Knowledge can be lost. A popular example is concrete; we still have not definitively answered the question of how Roman concrete lasted so much longer than our modern attempts. The original recipes for Damascus steel and Greek fire are also gone even if we may have good hypotheses for what they might have been, and we apparently forgot how to prevent scurvy multiple times. Now, when contemporary antibiotics are losing their utility due increasing resistance, we are rediscovering effective antibacterial treatments from our medieval ancestors.
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Science Corner: Weltraumgötterdämmerung
This summer’s installment of “If you don’t teach your kids theology, Marvel Studios will” comes in the form of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. Sure, it’s not a Scorsesian theological treatise. At times it felt very much like a roller coaster ride–an impression helped along by the fact that just a month ago I was riding an actual Guardians of the Galaxy coaster with filmed story elements featuring the same cast. But every now and again, this technicolor space opera takes a breath between virtuosic cadenzas of violence and Zune tunes for a melodramatic musing. The question weighty enough to pull away from the black hole of bombast: What does a creator owe its creation?
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Science Corner: Seeing Infrared
Telescopes have been troublemakers for centuries. They’ve revealed that the Earth is not the center of the universe, not even the center of the solar system. They showed us our sun was just one of many stars in our galaxy, then showed us our galaxy is just one of many in the universe. They provided the evidence that the universe is expanding, which in turn implied the beginning of the universe in the Big Bang. Now the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is adding wrinkles to our understanding of how those galaxies formed in the wake of the Big Bang.
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Science Corner: Finding the Proteins of Theseus
Last month we mentioned the challenges of studying blue whales in a laboratory setting. If we want to know what a particular gene or protein does in an animal that large, we often have to rely on inference based on what a comparable gene or protein does in an animal we can study more readily like a mouse. And how do we know which protein is comparable–or homologous, to use the more technical term? Typically the search for homologous proteins starts with a sequence similarity scan, a check of an entire library of proteins from various species to see which have a large fraction of the same amino acids at the same locations. That’s straightforward enough when the match is at the level of 80%, but at just 20% similarity, it’s a bigger challenge–until now.
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