The New York Times has a scary and intriguing medical detective story.
The ambulance sped up to the red brick federal research hospital on June 13, 2011, and paramedics rushed a gravely ill 43-year-old woman straight to intensive care. She had a rare lung disease and was gasping for breath. And, just hours before, the hospital learned she had been infected with a deadly strain of bacteria resistant to nearly all antibiotics.
The hospital employed the most stringent and severe form of isolation, but soon the bacterium, Klebsiella pneumoniae, was spreading through the hospital. Seventeen patients got it, and six of them died. Had they been infected by the woman? And, if so, how did the bacteria escape strict controls in one of the nation’s most sophisticated hospitals, the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md.?
What followed was a medical detective story that involved the rare use of rapid genetic sequencing to map the entire genome of a bacterium as it spread and to use that information to detect its origins and trace its route.
Sam Kean, in Slate, explains that the number of human chromosomes suggests that modern humanity emerged from a small, inbred population.
Humans have 46 chromosomes. Our closest primate relatives have 48. So where did those extra two disappear to? …
Let’s go back a million years, when most proto-humans had 48 chromosomes, and follow a hypothetical Guy who has 47. Again, a chromosome fused at the tips won’t affect Guy’s day-to-day health. But having an odd number of chromosomes will cripple the viability of his sperm. (If you prefer to think of a female, the same is true of her eggs.)
Say the fusion left Guy with a normal chromosome 12, a normal 13, and a 12-13 hybrid in each cell. During sperm production his body has to divide those three chromosomes into two cells, and there are only a few possible ways to divvy them. There’s {12} & {13, 12-13}, or {13} & {12, 12-13}, or {12, 13} & {12-13}. The first four sperms are either missing a chromosome or have a duplicate, practically a cyanide capsule for an embryo. The last two cases have the proper amount of DNA for a normal child. But only in the sixth case does Guy pass the fusion on. Overall, then, two-thirds of Guy’s children die in the womb, and just one-sixth inherit the fusion. And any Junior with the fusion would then face the same terrible odds trying to reproduce. Not a good recipe for spreading the fusion—and again, that’s still only 47 chromosomes, not 46.
What Guy needs is a Doll with the same two fused chromosomes. Now, the odds of two people with the same fusion meeting might seem infinitesimal. And they would be—except in inbred families, where the chances of finding a cousin or half-sibling with the same fusion don’t round down to zero so easily. What’s more, while the odds of Guy and Doll having a healthy child remain low, every 36th spin of the genetic roulette wheel (because 1/6 x 1/6 = 1/36), the child would inherit both fused chromosomes—giving him 46 total.
And here’s the payoff: Junior and his 46 chromosomes would likely have an easier time having children than his 47-chromosomed parents. Remember that the fusion itself doesn’t ruin you—lots of healthy people have fusions. It’s only reproduction that gets tricky, since fusions can lead to an excess or deficit of DNA in embryos. But because he has an even number of chromosomes, little Junior wouldn’t have any unbalanced sperm cells: Each would have the right amount of DNA to run a human, just packaged differently. As a result, all of his children have a good chance of being healthy. And if his children start having their own children—especially with other relatives with 46 or 47 chromosomes—the fusion could start to spread. …
How did having 46 chromosomes then spread worldwide? It’s possible that having two fewer chromosomes than everyone else gave Guy and Doll’s family a whopping evolutionary advantage, allowing them to out-compete the 48-chromosome sluggards. But probably not. More likely, they happened to be living at a point when the human race nearly got wiped out.
Take your pick for the cause of our near-extinction—ice ages, plagues, Indonesian gigavolcanoes. But humans have far less genetic diversity than most other species, and the most reasonable explanation for this is a genetic bottleneck: a severe reduction in the population of humans in the past, perhaps multiple times. One study suggested that our population, worldwide, might have dropped as low as 40 adults. (The world record for fitting people in a phone booth is 25.) That’s an outlandishly pessimistic guess even among disaster scientists, but it’s common to find estimates of a few thousand adults, below what some minor league baseball teams draw.
“How do you read a two-thousand-year-old manuscript that has been erased, cut up, written on and painted over [i.e., a palimpsest]? With a powerful particle accelerator, of course! Ancient books curator William Noel tells the fascinating story behind the Archimedes palimpsest, a Byzantine prayer book containing previously-unknown original writings from ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes and others.”
A North Korean slur on the intelligence of South Korea’s president led Slate’s Explainer to consult the experts and provide some thoughts on the actual storage capability of the human brain.
Most computational neuroscientists tend to estimate human storage capacity somewhere between 10 terabytes and 100 terabytes, though the full spectrum of guesses ranges from 1 terabyte to 2.5 petabytes. (One terabyte is equal to about 1,000 gigabytes or about 1 million megabytes; a petabyte is about 1,000 terabytes.)
The math behind these estimates is fairly simple. The human brain contains roughly 100 billion neurons. Each of these neurons seems capable of making around 1,000 connections, representing about 1,000 potential synapses, which largely do the work of data storage. Multiply each of these 100 billion neurons by the approximately 1,000 connections it can make, and you get 100 trillion data points, or about 100 terabytes of information.
Since arriving in Virginia, Karen and I have frequently marveled at the Osage orange, a fruit-producing tree not encountered in my native Pennsylvania or in New England where we attended college and resided for decades.
The Osage orange was evidently ill-advisedly imported into Virginia as a decorative tree, and it responds to that hospitality by covering the ground every Fall with enormous bumpy fruits that nothing eats and which simply lie on the ground and rot.
I wondered out loud recently why a tree would bother to produce enormous fruits in great quantity that were inedible. Fruit production, after all, constitutes a system of bribery by members of the botanical kingdom. The tree or bush produces a tasty fruit or berry, and birds and animals consume them and consequently carry away and redistribute the plant’s seeds.
There are all those Osage orange trees busily producing gigantic, but inedible, citrus fruits that nobody wants. Why is this? I wondered. It just seemed very strange.
Happily, Karen found the answer just a few days later, in American Forests.
It turns out the Osage orange fruits, like certain others, used to have customers who liked eating them. Unfortunately, their natural Pleistocene megafauna audience went extinct.
[L]et’s return to the forlorn fruit of the Osage orange. Nothing today eats it. Once it drops from the tree, all of them on a given tree practically in unison, the only way it moves is to roll downhill or float in flood waters. Why would you evolve such an over-engineered, energetically expensive fruit if gravity and water are your only dispersers, and you like to grow on higher ground? You wouldn’t. Unless you expected it to be eaten by mammoths or ground-sloths.
According to my field guide, Osage-orange has a limited natural range in the Red River region of east-central Texas, southeastern Oklahoma, and adjacent Arkansas. Indians used to travel hundreds of miles for the wood, prized as the finest for making bows. Then European settlers planted it widely as living fences, taking advantage of the tree’s ability to spread via shoots from lateral roots. But Osage-orange persisted, and became widely naturalized long after the invention of barbed wire rendered them useless to farmers. The tree can now be found in 39 states and Ontario. If Osage-orange does so well elsewhere, why was it restricted to such a small area?
The answer likely lies in the disappearance of its primary disperser. Without mammoths, groundsloths, and other megafauna to transport its seeds uphill, the range of the species gradually shrank to the Red River region. In fact, fossils tell us that Osage-orange was much more widespread and diverse before the megafaunal extinctions. Back then, Osage-oranges could be found north up to Ontario, and there were seven, not just one, species in the Osage-orange genus, Maclura.
Another anachronistic tree is the Kentucky coffeetree, so named because early Kentucky settlers used its beans as a coffee substitute. Coffeetrees have tough, leathery pods with large, toxic seeds surrounded by a sweet pulp. Water cannot penetrate the thick seed coat to begin germination unless it is abraded or cut. Sounds like mammoth food to me. The natural range of coffeetrees is concentrated in the Midwest, but without its megafauna disperser, it is generally rare and mostly limited to floodplains.
Much the same can be said about the honeylocust, with its sweet seedpods up to 18 inches long. It is more common than coffeetrees, and is found in upland areas because cattle have filled in for the mastodons, camels, or some other dearly departed megamammal with a sweet tooth. The big-fruited pawpaws, persimmons, desert gourds, and wild squash may also have been dispersed more efficiently by recently extinct mammals.
Now when you see an Osage-orange, coffeetree, or honeylocust, you might sense the ghosts of megafauna munching on treats made just for them.
A paper published on Tuesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical Physical & Engineering Sciences may offer the explanation of how Viking mariners a thousand years ago were able to navigate the North Atlantic between Europe and the Old World, traveling great distances by sea in high latitudes in which cloudy weather frequently denied visibility of the sun.
Before the invention of the magnetic compass, navigating with a sundial would have been difficult, particularly on overcast days. Ancient Viking lore suggests that they had a magical tool to find the sun, even when the star was hidden.
Researchers have now discovered the crystal that would have made such a magical apparatus possible. The Vikings could have used a common calcite crystal, called an Icelandic spar, to find the sun in the high latitudes where they would have had to battle long twilights and cloudy skies to navigate. This special “sunstone” could find the direction of the sun even when it was out of view because it plays a trick with the light.
“The Vikings could have discovered this, simply by choosing a transparent crystal and looking through it through a small hole in a screen,” study researcher Guy Ropars wrote in an email to LiveScience. “The understanding of the complete mechanism and the knowledge of the polarization of light is not necessary.”
To use the crystal, the Vikings would have held the stone up to the center of the sky (from their perspective). When sunlight hits the crystal, that light gets polarized and broken into an “ordinary” and an “extraordinary” beam.
On a clear day, the Vikings would have rotated the crystal until the two beams lined up. Since these two beams line up and have the same brightness at only one angle, by noting where the sun is when this happens the Vikings could establish a reference point that could be used even when the sun wasn’t visible.
There are several other types of crystal that have this same property, but they wouldn’t have been too useful because they aren’t as clear or as common, the researchers said. The Icelandic spar that the researchers analyzed is very common along the coasts of Iceland, and is also common today in Brazil and Mexico.
While none of these Icelandic spar crystals has been found in a Viking settlement, one was recently discovered in an Elizabethan shipwreck from 1592 in the English Channel.
Viking navigation from Norway to America in the northern latitudes remains a mystery for physicists, historians and archaeologists. Polarimetric methods using absorbing dichroic crystals as polarizers to detect a hidden Sun direction using the polarized skylight have led to controversies. Indeed, these techniques may lack in sensitivity, especially when the degree of polarization is low. Here, we demonstrate theoretically and experimentally that using the transparent common Iceland spar as a depolarizer, the Vikings could have performed a precise navigation under different conditions. Indeed, when simply rotated, such a birefringent crystal can completely depolarize, at the so-called isotropy point, any partially polarized state of light, allowing us to guess the direction of the Sun. By equalizing the intensities of the ordinary and extraordinary beams at the isotropy point, we show that the Sun direction can be determined easily, thanks to a simple sensitive differential two-image observation. A precision of a few degrees could be reached even under dark crepuscular conditions. The exciting recent discovery of such an Iceland spar in the Alderney Elizabethan ship that sank two centuries before the introduction of the polarization of light in optics may support the use of the calcite crystal for navigation purposes.
Domenico Fetti, Flight to Egypt, circa 1621-1623, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna During the flight to Egypt, the Holy Family passes the bodies of two of the innocents massacred by Herod
Those of us who remember the Climategate scandal of 2009, when Russian Intelligence released damaging emails exchanged between Phil Jones, head of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Center and other principal figures like Penn State’s Michael Mann, will recall Jones promising Mann on July 8, 2004, that he and Kevin Trenberth (of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research) would keep dissenting papers out of the next IPCC report by hook or by crook:
“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
A year earlier one of Phil Jones’ emails addressed to a wider group of colleagues promised a boycott of the Journal Climate Research, guilty of publishing an important paper by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics injurious to the cause of Warmism, if the editor responsible was not replaced.
March 11, 2003 — “I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.â€
The Soon-Baliunas paper is described by Wikipedia as having “reviewed 240 previously published papers and tried to find evidence for temperature anomalies in the last thousand years such as the Medieval warm period and the Little Ice Age. It concluded that ‘Across the world, many records reveal that the 20th century is probably not the warmest or a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium.’ ”
The upshot of the 2003 Climate Research publication of a paper challenging the Warmist Industry consensus was a successful crackdown by Phil Jones and his allies.
Climate Research’s chief editor, Hans von Storch, was persuaded to torpedo the offending paper in the same journal which had published it: The review process had failed. An unworthy paper had been published which did not adequately taken into account opposing arguments. The editorial policy of board editor Chris de Frietas responsible for its publication was insufficiently rigorous.
Storch then announced in the same editorial that he intended to impose a new regime giving himself final say on any paper’s publication. The publisher refused to accept the proposed dictatorship, and Storch and four other editors subsequently resigned in a thorough bloodbath.
Universal denials were issued concerning reports that Messrs. Jones, Mann, and Trenberth had been responsible for all this. Storch publicly denied that the fix had been put in. It was just a case of “a bad paper.”
Fox News identified the new paper’s significance in the world of climate science:
Has a central tenant of global warming just collapsed?
Climate change forecasts have for years predicted that carbon dioxide would trap heat on Earth, and increases in the gas would lead to a planet-wide rise in temperatures, with devastating consequences for the environment.
But long-term data from NASA satellites seems to contradict the predictions dramatically, according to a new study.
“There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans,†said Dr. Roy Spencer, a research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and U.S. science team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer — basically a big thermometer flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite.
“The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show,†he said. The planet isn’t heating up, in other words.
But, what do you know? Instead of another important paper challenging one Anthropogenic Global Warming’s central tenets, we have another case of the editor of the same journal in which the dissenting paper appeared, reversing course, denouncing the recently published paper, and resigning!
Warmist Peter Gleick reports triumphantly in Forbes:
The staggering news today is that the editor of the journal that published the paper has just resigned, with a blistering editorial calling the Spencer and Braswell paper “fundamentally flawed,†with both “fundamental methodological errors†and “false claims.†That editor, Professor Wolfgang Wagner of the Vienna University of Technology in Austria, is a leading international expert in the field of remote sensing. In announcing his resignation, Professor Wagner says “With this step I would also like to personally protest against how the authors and like-minded climate sceptics have much exaggerated the paper’s conclusions in public statements.â€
In his editorial resignation, Professor Wagner says the paper was reviewed by scientific experts that in hindsight had a predetermined bias in their views on climate that led them to miss the serious scientific flaws in the paper, including “ignoring all other observational data sets,†inappropriate influence from the “political views of the authors,†and the fact that comparable studies had already been refuted by the scientific community but were ignored by the authors. He summarizes:
In other words, the problem I see with the paper by Spencer and Braswell is not that it declared a minority view (which was later unfortunately much exaggerated by the public media) but that it essentially ignored the scientific arguments of its opponents. This latter point was missed in the review process, explaining why I perceive this paper to be fundamentally flawed and therefore wrongly accepted by the journal. This regrettably brought me to the decision to resign as Editor-in-Chief―to make clear that the journal Remote Sensing takes the review process very seriously.
Isn’t it amazing? For the second time in under a decade, some feckless scientific journal has published a paper offering conclusions deeply injurious to AGW, and again, in otherwise unprecedented reversals, the journal’s editor has attacked his own journal’s paper ex post facto for alleged lack of rigor and for purportedly failing to do justice to its opponent’s arguments, and resigned.
Presumably, we can look forward momentarily to the next development: the denials by Wolfgang Wagner that Messrs. Jones, Mann, and Trenberth, and the other principals of the Catastrophist Industry had anything to do with any of this.
I would say it is remarkable that, even after their exposure in 2009, the Global Warming gangsters still have the chutzpah, along with the remaining prestige and power, to successfully arrange the strangling in the cradle of significant dissenting publications, smearing their adversaries with accusations of bad science and lack of rigor.
Science quotes, from a lecture given at the 7th World Congress on Mummy Studies, the latest findings concerning Europe’s oldest natural human mummy, found in September 1991 in the Ötztal Alps, near Hauslabjoch on the border between Austria and Italy and usually referred to as Ötzi or the Iceman.
Less than 2 hours before he hiked his last steps in the Tyrolean Alps 5000 years ago, Ötzi the Iceman fueled up on a last meal of ibex meat. That was the conclusion of a talk here last week at the 7th World Congress on Mummy Studies, during which researchers—armed with Ötzi’s newly sequenced genome and a detailed dental analysis—also concluded that the Iceman had brown eyes and probably wasn’t much of a tooth brusher.
The Iceman, discovered in the Italian Alps in 1991 some 5200 years after his death, has been a gold mine of information about Neolithic life, as researchers have extensively studied his gear—copper ax, hide and leather clothing, and accessories—and his body. Previous research on the Iceman’s meals focused on fecal material removed from his bowels. The contents showed that he dined on red deer meat and possibly cereal some 4 hours before his death.
But a team led by microbiologist Frank Maixner of the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman in Bolzano, Italy, recently reexamined computed tomography scans taken in 2005 and spotted, for the first time, the Iceman’s stomach. As the researchers reported at the meeting, the organ had moved upward to an unusual position, and it looked full. When they took a sample of the stomach contents and sequenced the DNA of the animal fibers they found, they discovered that Ötzi, just 30 to 120 minutes before his death, had dined on the meat of an Alpine ibex, an animal that frequents high elevations and whose body parts were once thought to possess medicinal qualities.
The new findings are “cutting edge” says Niels Lynnerup, a specialist in forensic medicine at the University of Copenhagen. “We are now inching our way to the last minutes of the Iceman.”
In a separate presentation, dentist Roger Seiler and anatomist Frank Rühli of the Centre for Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zürich, examined the dental health of the Iceman, who probably died between the age of 35 and 40. Previously, researchers examining radiological images of his teeth discerned no trace of cavities or other dental problems. But the Swiss team created new three-dimensional images of the ancient traveler’s dentition. These showed that the Iceman suffered a blunt force trauma to two teeth—possibly a blow to the mouth—at least several days before his death and was plagued by both periodontal disease and cavities. The cavities, Seiler said in his talk, confirm that the Iceman ate a diet abounding in carbohydrates, such as bread or cereal, and reveal that he possessed a “heavy bacterial dose on these teeth.”
