It’s been a while since we had some real science news in this space. My favorite recent story is the sequencing of the octopus genome. I’ve shared previously my fascination with ants; octopuses (not octopi, as it turns out, since octopus is Greek, not Latin) are rapidly joining them among my favorites. Did you know that octopus tentacles are capable of independent sensory processing, even if they are severed? The genome sequence reveals a number of interesting genes involved in nerve cell function, including genes not seen in vertebrates. There’s lots to learn there for sure.
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Science Corner: Entertaining Lies and Real Truth
It’s not exactly science news, but this item on the role of fiction in engaging the scientific imagination really caught the eye of this science fiction fan. I’m familiar with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Flatland, both of which encode interesting mathematics questions as narrative, but I had no idea scientific fairy tales were a whole genre. The one with the various chemical elements embodied as fairies sounds particularly fascinating. Knowing how much my daughter and her friends love fairies, perhaps it’s time for that one to make a comeback. [Read more…] about Science Corner: Entertaining Lies and Real Truth
Science Corner: Behold the Brontosaurus
So many of us have had a dinosaur phase at some point, and chances are if you did you learned that the Brontosaurus is a creature that never existed. That factoid is often used to separate the proto-paleontologists from the Flintstones fans. Only now, it turns out that maybe Brontosaurus did warrant a separate classification after all. I wonder how that news will play at my local natural history museum, which already has a history with the Brontosaurus controversy.
Deciding what separates one species from another is a tricky proposition, as I discussed recently as part of a BioLogos conversation on evolution. The challenge is only magnified when you are dealing with a handful of incomplete skeleton fossils instead of a living population. Drawing lines around species may seem like an esoteric enterprise for a select few scientists, but I think it’s important to remember that we are all involved in defining categories all the time, and the boundaries of those categories may be more fluid or more dependent on our own choices than we realize. For example, just 15 minutes of playing Rock Band together is all it takes to make a stranger a friend. And of course, one of the many miracles of Easter is how God reconfigured the boundaries that separated humankind from himself.
Science Corner: Dancing in the Sunshine
The second law of thermodynamics gets trotted out all the time, especially in conversations about evolutionary biology. Less familiar are principles of maximum entropy production, which deal specifically with systems that are not in equilibrium (everything the same temperature). Most of the situations we experience involve differences in temperature, but there’s still a lot to learn about how physics works when temperatures differ (at least partly because the math is more complicated). Which brings us to this study of what carbon nanotubes do to maximize entropy when they aren’t at equilibrium.
Science Corner: Back to the Present
You don’t need a DeLorean to see that this year is going to bring a lot of Back to the Future references and time travel talk. It’s fitting, then, that physicists have actually succeeded in constructing a quantum time machine. Well, sort of. (Isn’t that always the way with quantum physics?) It turns out, one can create subatomic systems under one set of conditions, and they will also behave as if they were under a different set of conditions. The first intuition is probably to imagine doing something slowly as a way to understand how it will work quickly, like a dancer or a martial artist practicing moves at quarter speed to get the motions right. But that’s not what I mean; it’s more like using slow and fast to simulate sweet and salty. [Read more…] about Science Corner: Back to the Present